GOP trying to eliminate trans people [View all]

[Hermit-The-Prog]

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. ]