GOP trying to eliminate trans people

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Whose body? The GOP wants total control.

South Dakota May Criminalize Lifesaving Healthcare for Trans Youth in Latest Attack on LGBTQ Rights

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It’s the third bill targeting trans youth introduced in South Dakota this year alone and one of more than 25 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced around the country. We speak with Chase Strangio, deputy director for transgender justice with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, and the award-winning director Yance Ford, who became the first openly transgender director nominated for an Academy Award for his film “Strong Island” in 2018. “It never ceases to amaze me how determined people are to erase trans people — even when they’re children,” Ford says.

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AMY GOODMAN: And I want to get to that, the other legislation. But first, Chase Strangio, in 2016, you wrote a piece on the ACLU’s blog titled “If I Were a Student in South Dakota, Chances Are I Would Not Survive into Adulthood.” You talked about suicidality. Can you give us the figures on trans youth taking their own lives?

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, no, it’s staggering. And I wrote that piece in 2016 because South Dakota was in the exact same position, considering a bill to bar trans young people from accessing the restroom consistent with who they are. And we’re talking about a community that has documented rates of suicidality that are close to 50%. And those documented rates are directly tied to discrimination that people face in every aspect of life. And when you have government officials with the most power in the state telling young people that they either don’t exist or that they shouldn’t, we know that that exacerbates the rates of suicide.

And what we do also know is that when young people are given access to the very medication that is being criminalized by this bill, those suicide rates drop to being comparable to nontransgender peers. And so, we have lawmakers equipped with information about how young people can either live or die, and they are choosing, quite clearly, the path of increasing the likelihood that our communities suffer serious harm, including early death. And, you know, I think about myself as a young person, and I struggled so much, but I didn’t have lawmakers telling me that my care should be criminalized. Now we’re in a context where that’s what lawmakers are saying to the youth who are watching. And we know that they are hurting because of it.

[ Emphasis added. More transcript, with video, at link above. ]

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1. intervention by Child Protective Services ...

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about the legislation that is being introduced around the country right now, the anti-trans legislation?

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah. So, the bill in South Dakota is typical of one of two bills that we’re seeing this year that have been introduced in over a dozen states. The bills are both the bills targeting young people through the criminalization or other bans on access to healthcare, including bills that propose intervening through Child Protective Services for parents who support their trans young people. So, imagine how important it is to have parental support. We’re actually seeing proposals to make that support itself potentially a reason to remove a child from a home. So that is another way that we’re talking about incredibly dangerous interventions in the survival of trans young people.

And the second type of bill that we’re also seeing in about eight or nine states are bills that would bar trans athletes from participating in scholastic athletics consistent with who they are. And those bills, like so many bills we’ve seen in the past, are fundamentally connected to controlling the bodies of all people. For example, some of these bills talk about how if any girl is “disputed” as a girl, they have to bring in medical documentation of their internal and external reproductive organs, their chromosomes and their naturally occurring hormone levels. I mean, that is going to be an unbelievable amount of the policing of the bodies of all young women and girls. And so, we’re talking about legislation that will have a sweeping impact across the country, not just on trans young people, but on any young person who doesn’t fit very specific norms of gender. And this is just the beginning of session, so I expect we’re going to see a lot more.

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2. Oh wont somebody please think of the children?

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3. Unfortunately, they are ...

GOPers want to start indoctrination early. It appears that the only ones to be tolerated in their Putinesque America are white males with proper beliefs.

[ooky]

4. Right wing disdain for human rights is amazing. They would rather take them to church

and beat it out of them. Really nice folks. Another example of the party of less government's "less government intrusion". Old white men who know more than the medical community. The same old white men who believe they are going to fly away in "The Rapture".

I cannot stand these self righteous people.

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5. RW want to force 'proper' religion, race, gender

RWNJ see government as a means to enforce conformity to RW beliefs, rather than as a means to enable people to aspire to individual beliefs.