It is all about votes and campaign donations not about our health. It is about scoring points with the electorate.South Carolina Republicans back trans youth health care ban despite pushback from parents, doctors
AP News
By James Pollard
January 10, 2024Pleas from transgender children’s pediatricians and parents to keep allowing such kids to receive hormone therapies failed to stop Republican lawmakers from advancing a ban on those treatments to the South Carolina House floor on Wednesday.
The GOP-led Medical, Military, Public and Municipal Affairs Committee voted to advance the bill within the first two days of the 2024 legislative session. At least 22 states have enacted similar restrictions amid recent Republican-led crackdowns on transgender medical care, bathroom usage and sports participation.
The speedy movement underscores South Carolina House Republicans’ prioritization of the conservative issue at the outset of an election year that will pit incumbents against primary challengers from the right.
The bill would bar health professionals from performing gender transition surgery, prescribing puberty-blocking drugs and overseeing hormone therapy for anyone under 18 years old. It also prevents Medicaid from covering such care for anyone under the age of 26.
Matt Sharp, senior counsel for a national Christian conservative advocacy group called the Alliance Defending Freedom, appeared virtually as the lone public testifier supporting the bill. Sharp, an out-of-state lawyer, claimed that children susceptible to “peer pressure” might experience irreversible negative consequences later in life if “experimental procedures” are allowed to continue.
In addition to banning gender transition surgery, puberty-blocking drugs and hormone therapies for minors, the bill would forbid school employees from withholding knowledge of a student’s transgender identity from their legal guardians. Opponents decried this provision as “forced outing” that would place vulnerable children from unloving households at risk of homelessness and domestic abuse. Democrats said the move would overburden teachers who aren’t trained to recognize gender dysphoria.
The Republicans just don’t care what happens to us.
And South Carolina is not the only state that are on a pogrom to stamp us out. In another AP article,
By ANDREW DEMILLO and HANNAH SCHOENBAUMJanuary 11, 2024
Republican-led state legislatures are considering a new round of bills restricting medical care for transgender youths — and in some cases, adults — returning to the issue the year after a wave of high-profile bills became law and sparked lawsuits.
As legislatures begin their work for the year, lawmakers in several states have proposed enacting or strengthening restrictions on puberty-blocking drugs and hormone treatments for minors. Bills to govern the pronouns kids can use at school, which sports teams students can play on, and the bathrooms they can use are back, as well, along with efforts to restrict drag performances and some books and school curriculums.
LGBTQ+ advocates say that most of the states inclined to pass bans on gender-affirming care have done so, and that they now expect them to build on those restrictions and expand them to include adults. With legislatures in most states up for election this year, transgender youths and their families worry about again being targeted by conservatives using them as a wedge issue.
That is all we are for them a means to get votes! They don’t care about our lives!
Then moseying along to West Virginia we find another anti trans bill which is totally draconian! Take your blood pressure meds first.
West Virginia Bill Could Ban All Transgender People From Schools
The new bill classifies transgender people as “obscene matter.”
TNR
By Tori Otten/
January 11, 2024A West Virginia Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would classify transgender people as “obscene matter” and ban them from getting within 2,500 feet of a school.
Senate Bill 197, which was introduced Wednesday, prohibits obscene matter from being within 2,500 feet of a public school building or facility. Obscene materials are defined as something that is sexually explicit “in a patently offensive way” or something that “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
[…]
Besides the obvious transphobia of the bill, which dehumanizes trans people by classifying them as “materials,” the measure would also dramatically increase the criminalization of trans people. Obscenity laws are hard to enforce, because definitions of obscenity still largely come down to individual interpretation. As a result, there will likely be more reports of obscenity, made by people who are either more conservative or just nervous about accidentally breaking the law.
Besides the obvious transphobia of the bill, which dehumanizes trans people by classifying them as “materials,” the measure would also dramatically increase the criminalization of trans people. Obscenity laws are hard to enforce, because definitions of obscenity still largely come down to individual interpretation. As a result, there will likely be more reports of obscenity, made by people who are either more conservative or just nervous about accidentally breaking the law.
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