It’s not about “protecting the children.” Anti-trans bills now increasingly target adults

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I feel like my post yesterday on the Florida GOP’s crusade against trans kids didn’t fully capture the insidiousness of the legislation known as HB1421, which was passed out of the state house’s Healthcare Regulation subcommittee yesterday on a party-line vote.

The bill not only targets trans youth, banning gender-affirming care for minors and “allow[ing] parents who oppose transition to take custody of their children from affirming parents in violation of judges orders,” as activist and writer Erin Reed notes in her Substack newsletter. It also takes aim at adults. It’s worded so broadly, as I pointed out yesterday that it could ban treatment for breast and prostate cancer.

And importantly, as Reed writes, the bill also

outright bans even private insurances from covering gender affirming care for any transgender person: …Even if a company wanted to support their transgender employees medical care, they would be forbidden by the state of Florida from doing so. This would effectively price out many transgender people from obtaining many forms of gender affirming care.

This sort of care can cost tens of thousands of dollars, not the kind of financial burden that most individuals can bear.

As Reed explains, this provision makes clear

that attacks on transgender people are not about “protecting children,” but rather about “eradicating transgenderism” as Michael Knowles put it in his recent infamous CPAC speech.

And this is not the only legislation out there targeting trans adults. As Vice documents in a piece on the new front in the GOP’s war on trans people, bills across the country restrict trans adults in various nefarious ways.

Tennessee is also trying to block insurance providers from covering gender-affirming care, while other states are explicitly trying to ban care for some adults altogether. Earlier this year Oklahoma became the first state to propose a gender-affirming care ban for people under 26, and Kansas is proposing a trans healthcare ban for people under 21. South Carolina is also attempting to ban people under 21 from accessing gender-affirming care, and would prohibit the use of public funds to cover treatment.

Earlier this month, Texas introduced its own bill that could criminalize doctors who provide gender-affirming care for people under 26. The same bill prohibits insurance companies from covering gender-affirming care for the same age group.

The writing is on the fucking wall. As Vice reports, there have been nearly 500 anti-trans bills introduced already across the country, and ten states have passed bans on gender-affirming care for trans youth. We can expect a lot more bills explicitly targeting adults to come. It’s never been about “the children.” It’s always been about eliminating trans people from public life, which some have called cultural genocide.

That, unfortunately, is not hyperbole.

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