A Government Against Us.

 As I wrote this morning I don’t like reporting articles like these…

“A death sentence”: Trans Texas teen plots his future as proposed ban on hormone therapy progresses

As Texas House members could soon vote to ban transition-related care for minors, many lives are in limbo, and trans kids like 16-year-old Randell are grappling with difficult decisions.

Texas Tribune 

By Alex Nguyen

May 1, 2023

Randell and his family are bracing for the worst-case scenario.

Over the past few months, the 16-year-old North Texas boy has watched Senate Bill 14 — which would bar transgender youth like himself from receiving puberty blockers and hormone therapy — sail through the Senate and a House committee. The legislation would also ban transition-related surgeries, but they are rarely performed on kids. And on Tuesday, the bill could be up for a key vote in the lower chamber, where the legislation has more than enough support to pass.

“I am a really happy kid, and I have a really positive outlook on life,” said Randell, who is usually quick to laugh. “That would push me past my breaking point.”

That legislative progress means Texas, which has among the country’s biggest trans youth populations, is on the brink of joining over a dozen other states in banning transition-related care for minors — treatment medical groups and LGBTQ advocates say is vital for a portion of the youth population at high risk for depression and suicide.

“The last appointment we went to, the endocrinologist didn’t start with, ‘Hey, how’s your medicine going?’” said Kay, Randell’s mother. “They started with, ‘The government’s probably going to shut down the clinic. Where will you go for your next appointment?’”

At the moment, Randell hasn’t completely worked out what he’ll do next, though he is lining up options.

This is spreading across the country, from one Republican state to another just like COVID did and it is creating havoc just like the plague it did.

U.S. Facing Growing Extremism in Denying Care to Transgender People: Report

A recent report has found that transgender people’s gender-affirming care is in peril at an alarmingly high rate.

The Advocate

By Christopher Wiggins

April 30 2023

In a report released earlier this month, Movement Advancement Project (MAP) highlights the growing number, scope, and severity of bills that aim to prevent transgender individuals from receiving gender-affirming care.

MAP’s “LGBTQ Policy Spotlight: Bans on Medical Care for Transgender People” is the most comprehensive analysis of the efforts to limit or ban medical care for transgender youth and adults, according to the organization.

On Friday, Montana became the nation’s first state to restrict gender-affirming medical care.

MAP examined more than 250 bills introduced over the last several years that threaten the rights of transgender patients to receive medical care. In addition, several anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been passed in the past year, and these measures are part of a more comprehensive climate of record-breaking anti-LGBTQ+ activities.

MAP reports that state legislators have introduced over 650 bills aimed at attacking LGBTQ+ people this year, including more than 125 bills limiting the rights of transgender people to receive health care.

The report highlights the extreme measures taken by these bills.

It seems like the states are trying to outdo each other in who can come up with the most oppressive legislation.

The president has stepped into the fray on our behalf!

Politico wrote last year that,

Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday instructing HHS to deny federal funding to programs that offer discredited conversion therapy and to draft guidance for states to improve transgender and broader LGBTQ health care practices. The order also directs health officials to bolster access and care in the foster system, where disparities leave LGBTQ youth especially vulnerable.

“Right now, there are young people sitting in their bedroom, doors closed, silent, scrolling through social media, staring at the ceiling, wondering if they’ll ever be loved, ever have a family, ever be accepted by their own families,” Biden said at a White House event to sign the order.

Biden continued to turn around family rhetoric that some conservatives have used to raise concerns about minors seeking gender-affirming care: “I don’t have to tell you about the ultra-MAGA agenda attacking families and our freedoms.”

And let us not forget who president Biden appointed as Assistant Health Secretary, Rachel Levine.

Biden administration files suit against Tennessee ban on lifesaving care for transgender youth

The Hill

By Stephen Neukam

April 26, 2023

The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Tennessee’s recently-signed law that bans gender-affirming care for minors, alleging the law violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) signed the bill banning the care last month, making it just one of a number of Republican-led states that have taken similar action. The Biden administration is challenging the law in federal court. The DOJ called the Tennessee measure a “ law that denies necessary medical care to youth based solely on who they are.”

“The complaint alleges that SB 1’s ban on providing certain medically necessary care to transgender minors violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause,” the DOJ said in a release on Wednesday.

The DOJ argued the law violates the equal protection clause because it prohibits transgender youth from accessing some “medically necessary” care while allowing others access to the same or similar care. 

“No person should be denied access to necessary medical care just because of their transgender status,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

But it will still have to make it by the Trump hand-picked Supreme Court.

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Life for us is hard and is social media making it worst for us?

When Social Media Presents Only an ‘Unlivable Life’

Twitter’s suppression of trans joy can kill, at the precise moment we need to be strong.

Wired

By Katherine Alejandra Cross

April 17, 2023

THERE ARE TIMES when I wonder whether I’m in denial about the perilous state of trans rights; I find my attention snapping from a lovely dinner with my polycule, most of whom are trans, to the screaming Mouth of Sauron that is social media’s endless shouting about how me and my people are all going to die. It can feel convincing; the evidence piles up with every legislative filing, from coast to coast. It’s a bleak picture made up of far more than unkind words.

In the US, we’ve watched legislators criminalize trans children and rob them of gender-affirming health care, ban us from public accommodation, and threaten the health care of transgender adults, all while angry men with guns are dispatched to any public library where a drag queen is reading to kids. Combine this with the call from the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) to “eradicate transgenderism,” a veiled demand that every trans person should detransition or submit to some as-yet-undisclosed punishment, and it’s not the most cheerful environment in which one goes about her day as a trans woman—or for any trans person.

[…]

SOCIOLOGIST LAUREL WESTBROOK calls this state of unending terror, this sense of infinite vulnerability and futility, “an unlivable life.” They analyze trans activist materials from 1990 to 2009, the long dawn of the transgender rights movement, and argue that activists’ hyperfocus on extravagantly gruesome murders—like the killings of Brandon Teena and Gwen Araujo—taught a generation of trans people that our lives were permanently endangered and unlivable. The attendant minimization of joy, Westbrook argues, leaves transgender people terrified—and, worse, “these narratives do not push people to stand up against the violence so much as run away and hide.”

You might have noticed that I have cut back on using the word “h**e” because it seems that I get censored when I use the word “h**e” to describe the “h**e” that is being directed towards us so I have been using “animosity” in place of using the word “h**e.” I got my hand slapped a couple of times.

This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content as outlined in Blogger’s Community Guidelines.

Kind of ironic isn’t it? You get censored for writing about an article about the animosity that is being directed at us.

It’s what makes Gillian Branstetter clear-eyed about this politically perilous moment. “I’ve spoken to the families who’ve been targeted by [government] agencies. I have listened to parents beg for their children’s lives in Federal court. I stare into the abyss of the current political situation every. Single. Day. I am not ignorant to what we face. But that’s only made it more urgent that we are being clear and holistic in our practice.” Because our lives are worth living—and that story needs to be told, algorithms, irony, and doomerism be hanged.