Gender-affirming health care is not child abuse. Parents who accept their child’s gender identity are not criminals. No one should be legally obligated to snitch on a kid who has found the courage to become the person they were meant to be.
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas equates “gender-transitioning procedures” with child abuse. In a letter to his state’s Department of Family and Protective Services, he wants parents of trans kids receiving gender-affirming care investigated. He has also mandated that “all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children who may be subject to such abuse, including doctors, nurses, and teachers,” report it or face criminal penalties.
Abbott is traumatizing trans kids, criminalizing their parents, and deputizing teachers and health care workers to drop a dime on their neighbors and community. This is hate codified to terrify.
Abbott’s edict is no more about protecting trans children in Texas from abuse than Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill is meant to defend parental authority in Florida. That state’s execrable Parental Rights in Education bill, which would block teachers from discussing LGBTQ topics deemed “not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students,” passed Thursday in the Republican-controlled House, It’s also expected to sail through that state’s Senate. At least when the bill reaches DeSantis’s desk, what won’t be in it is an amendment that would have required schools to out LGBTQ children to their parents.
Joe Harding, the Florida state representative who sponsored the original bill, claimed in a statement that he withdrew the amendment because “exaggeration and misrepresentation” in the media “was a distraction; all the amendment did was create procedures around how, when and how long information was withheld from parents so that there was a clear process and kids knew what to expect.”
There was no exaggeration or misrepresentation. Harding wanted children to be outed.
I waited until I was 32 years old to come out to my parents. Perhaps I should have done it sooner, but only I could decide when I was stable enough to weather even the worst potential fallout. If a teacher I trusted had outed me to my family, I doubt I would have survived my teens.
The bills and laws targeting the LGBTQ community — especially trans kids — in Florida, Texas, and other states are branding certain sexual orientations and gender identities as deviant. Just as DeSantis seems to be mimicking Russia’s so-called “gay propaganda laws,” which bar children from access to content that portrays LGBTQ people in a positive light, Abbott is ripping a page from the dictator’s how-to guide. In the same vein as his state’s draconian abortion laws, Abbott is using trans kids and their families to cultivate the kind of body policing and “trust no one” paranoia that sustain authoritarianism.
Attacking the LGBTQ community has long been a GOP political tactic. At the 1992 Republican National Convention, failed presidential candidate Pat Buchanan gave one of the most detestable speeches of its time. In a preview of the demagoguery that now defines the GOP, Buchanan railed against Bill Clinton, then the Democratic presidential nominee, and Hillary Clinton, whom he called a practitioner of “radical feminism.”
The agenda the Clintons “would impose on America — abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units — that’s change, all right,” he said. “But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.”
For many Republicans, “God’s country” means despotic white supremacy where democracy and equity have no home. This nation is skidding toward mandatory conversion therapy and indoctrination camps. From the slavery era to Indian boarding schools to the Trump administration’s actions against migrants at the US-Mexican border, using despicable policies to take children away from their parents is nothing new for America, so don’t think it can’t happen again. After all, once it would have been unimaginable that parents could be investigated for supporting their child’s identity.
This is Abbott’s dystopia. If a trans child in Texas is sick or injured, will a parent’s fear of being reported by a doctor or nurse outweigh their child’s need for care? What kind of nation would allow such horrors? This era will be scarred by foul tyrants who care only about appealing to the worst instincts of their political base. LGBTQ children are already susceptible to alarming rates of self-harm and suicidal ideation; hateful legislation can only exacerbate this overlooked epidemic.
Yes, Republicans are waging war, but don’t call it a culture war. It’s a campaign against children’s humanity, an assault on the LGBTQ community’s basic right to exist.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.