Let’s Discuss the Deadly Stakes in the HHS’s Proposed Trans Healthcare Ban

First off, a solid “E” for effort in the rebranding attempt. (Slow clap.) “Transgender Ideology” or “Woke Gender Ideology” has become passe, apparently, so back to the focus groups it goes. We have a new pseudoscientific marketing term to contend with, dubbed: “Gender Rejection Procedures.”

This new attempt to insert a buzzword into the public lexicon was released by RFK Jr.’s Health and Human Services on December 19. Its accompanying regulatory rules, however, are unfortunately harder to laugh off. The published rules dictate that hospitals discovered providing treatment for gender dysphoria in minors will lose medicaid grants, which will put hospitals in the rather impossible position of refusing to provide life saving care and bending the knee to the regime or lose funds covering 50% or more of their operating costs.

In the world constructed by RFK Jr. and his cadre of like-minded people we’re now forced to call “medical professionals,” a puberty blocker is a dangerous and irreversible medical intervention, while doctors operating within their fields of expertise and at reputable institutions say otherwise. (The HHS said its study was peer reviewed. They did not say the peer review concluded the study was garbage.) Puberty blockers are regularly used on cis children with precocious puberty with no ill effects. If you wish to stop delaying puberty, you need only stop taking the pill and puberty will resume. Procedure reversed!

Much harder to reverse is the disfigurement an unwilling child will endure from an undesired puberty. In the same way that having a human take hormone replacement pills that give them the desired outcome is hard to reverse (and is a treatment never given to minors without extremely careful consideration by them, doctors, and their guardians), forcing their body to change in ways they don’t want will cause a man to grow up with breasts (and the resulting scarring if he chooses to remove them) or a woman to grow up with a man’s voice. If we invited our cis readers to imagine a karaoke office party from the perspective of a trans woman who grew up under Trump, or Keir Starmer (AKA Queer Harmer), an unbidden chuckle might be your first response.

We’d appreciate a deeper consideration of what a life under those conditions is like. Or, what a child imagining that life would imagine.

Congresswoman Sarah McBride, the first openly trans member of Congress, responded to the trans care ban thusly: “I get it’s hard to understand what it feels like to be trans. I get that it is hard to understand what it feels like to be me. I get that it’s hard to understand this care and understand the need for it. But one of the things that gets so lost in this conversation is that the transgender adults of today were kids once. I was a kid once. I didn’t have the courage to come out until I was 21, but it’s a fact I have known about myself for my entire life. I didn’t have the courage to come out until I was 21, and that means 21 years of pain, 21 years of unwavering homesickness that only went away when I was able to get the care that I needed. And my biggest regret in life is that I never had a childhood without that pain.”

Many of those hurtful childhoods will never become adulthoods, thanks to the vicious pain imposed on them by this regime. Those that do survive without timely care face the choice of being crushed into a tiny, suffocating box for the convenience of those around them, or authenticity, and potential vulnerability to the whims of a callous society trained to hate them.

There is, of course, the hidden, third option: to challenge our fallacious notions of binary gender and build a freer, more loving society of people who feel at ease with the full spectrum of human experience, rather than narrow definitions of woman and man based on ideals and pedestals. With strong, tall cis women who can punch a person’s lights out in the boxing ring, AND feel at ease going to the public bathroom, and all the poles and gradients that exist apart from that, where a tiring daily art project in front of your bathroom mirror is something you elect to do, rather than be coerced into. (One goal at a time, perhaps…)

At least, it’s clear which two choices the regime, and others on this planet who cling for dear life to myths of black and white wish to foist upon trans people: exhausting conformity, or painful visibility. A visible scapegoat is easier to corral, provoke, incriminate, and isolate for a conforming populace to have their myriad, otherwise valid anxieties misdirected against. Since fascism needs them to function, a scapegoat that can blend in is anathema to fascism’s goals.

If not for trans people, do it for the cis ladies on HRT. (Yes, gender affirming care is for cis people too!) Menopause is a pain in the butt, and everywhere else. Avoid at all costs. Protect gender affirming care!

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