How the far-right is turning feminists into fascists
"The Battle Over Gender Therapy "Laura Edwards-Leeper and transgender people" "
ANALYSIS: The terrifying confluence of anti-trans thinkers, American evangelicals, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists and global purveyors of dark money poses a much bigger threat than you might realize
By Jude Ellison S. Doyle • April 1, 2022 2:23 pm EDT
Steve Helber/AP Photo; Getty Images; Elham Numan/Xtra
When I first started asking about the connection between anti-trans politics and the American right wing, my concerns were simple. I’d covered abortion for several years, and some of the tactics being used by organized transphobes—noisy “protests” outside clinics, or doxing and harassing doctors—were similar enough to the “pro-life” movement’s that I expected some groups were working together.
I was right; there was a connection, which I’ve covered already for Xtra .. https://xtramagazine.com/power/anti-abortion-anti-trans-america-211706 .. and other outlets .. https://msmagazine.com/2022/03/30/anti-trans-anti-abortion-laws-doctors-violence/ . What I did not expect was that asking researchers to situate anti-trans activists in the context of the broader right would turn out to be one of the scariest questions I’d ever ask. Every researcher I spoke to told me that the situation on the ground was far worse than I thought. Anti-trans activists had not hitched their wagons to the American right wing. The far right was using transphobia to advance their larger agenda, and that agenda was both more violent and a lot more successful than I knew.
What follows is an attempt to summarize that agenda—although the full picture, comprised as it is of activist splinter groups, bizarre conspiracy theories, social-media hate campaigns and titanic global funding initiatives, is both too complex and too weird to ever fully summarize. It’s a story in which “eco-fascists” infiltrating lesbian folk festivals bump up against anti-Semitic conspiracy bloggers and Vladimir Putin’s global dark money operations; strange enough that it’s hard to take seriously, but very serious, and increasingly dangerous to us all. This is how trans-eliminationist thought became mainstream politics, and it has grave implications, not just for trans people, but for democracy itself.
[wiggly line]
Thus far, I’ve avoided using the fatal acronym: TERF, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist. The reason is that “TERF” no longer means the same thing it did 20 or even 10 years ago. It still indicates a person, probably a white cis woman, whose politics are defined by obsessive transphobia, but the content of that hatred is very different now.
The original TERFs hailed from a specific strain of trans-hostile radical feminism—the kind espoused by certain feminist authors from the 1970s and ’80s, like Janice Raymond, whose 1979 book The Transsexual Empire notoriously called for “morally mandating [trans people] out of existence.” Their political battles were focused on things like condemning strap-ons as a symbol of male dominance or keeping trans women out of the lesbian folk festival MichFest. They were widely mocked, highly unpopular and, even at their peak in the 1980s, exercised almost no political power.
So how did TERFs become a global threat? The answer, according to researcher Ky Schevers, is that they’re not the same people. In the mid-2010s, a small group of activists with fascist sympathies—most of them hailing from the environmentalist group Deep Green Resistance (DGR)—infiltrated the older movement and dragged it to the right, over the objections of some members.
“I was hanging out with these transphobic radical feminists when the right-wing creep happened,” Schevers says. “I know that there’s a whole lot of them that actually feel completely fucked-over.”
Schevers researches TERFs because she used to be one. She’s written extensively about being sucked into a cult-like “detransition” movement .. https://aninjusticemag.com/detransition-as-conversion-therapy-a-survivor-speaks-out-7abd4a9782fa?gi=6d63c58e88b6 .. which convinced young transmasculine people that their dysphoria was caused by misogyny and could only be cured by radical feminism. She has been my most patient guide through the world of organized transphobia, having previously spoken to me about the rise of anti-trans activism targeting doctors and gender clinics; every conversation is a whirlwind of names, dates, times and bizarre blog posts from TERF havens, illuminating the underbelly of an obsessive and increasingly dangerous movement.
TERFs were always “terrible people,” Schevers told me, but the groups she first encountered did have some familiarity with feminist thought—and most thought of themselves as progressive or leftist. Then came DGR, with a whole different set of prior assumptions.
DGR members were what Schevers calls “eco-fascists”; they argued for violent action that would cause a mass die-off of humanity in order to save the environment. They initially recruited from anarchist and environmental groups. According to a timeline put together by researcher Lee Leveille .. https://healthliberationnow.com/2021/07/05/the-mechanisms-of-tanon-where-it-came-from/ , DGR fractured in 2012 due to a series of controversies involving the transphobia of its founders, Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen. In 2013, Earth First! joined with DGR co-founder Aric McBay .. https://www.aricmcbay.org/2013/05/14/dgr-and-transphobia/ .. in denouncing them.
-- “It’s a grim irony that, by insisting on a ‘feminism’ without any trans women in it, TERFs have wound up constructing the tool by which fascists aim to destroy feminism altogether.” --
It was also in 2013 that Keith founded the “radical feminist” organization Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF.
“Lierre Keith began to turn her attention more towards old-school TERFs,” Schevers says. “[She] had people at the last MichFest trying to recruit people. WoLF had their own little camp set up. So they started recruiting among transphobic feminists and lesbians, and then once Trump got elected, and the Christian Right and all these other groups got more powerful and more bold, that’s when they started making the [right-wing] alliances.”
After Donald Trump’s election, WoLF pivoted hard to the right. Co-founder Kara Dansky appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonightto rail against the trans agenda, and in 2017, the organization filed a joint amicus brief with the conservative Family Policy Alliance .. https://familypolicyalliance.com/issues/tag/womens-liberation-front/ .. to “[oppose] the effort to open girls’ locker rooms and showers to boys who say they identify as girls—and vice versa.” These new alliances effectively brought the TERFs into the American right wing. It also brought them into power.
“When you look at who’s calling themselves a ‘GC feminist’ [gender critical feminist] these days, their version of ‘radical feminism’ is WoLF’s,” Schevers says. “They’re not really reading a lot of Janice Raymond.”
One need not weep for the original-flavour TERFs, whose intentions towards trans women, in particular, were always genocidal; Raymond, explicitly, said that her goal was for trans people to no longer exist. Yet, in 1979, that hatred was much less potent than it is today. TERFism was one pocket of a relatively powerless movement which did not have the reach nor backing of the broader right wing. Yet, as a pre-existing hate group “on the left,” TERFs were incredibly easy for fascists to infiltrate and absorb.
A 2020 article from Radix Journal, a far-right publication founded by the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, lays out a strategy for doing just that. In the article, entitled “The TERF to Dissident Right Pipeline .. https://t.co/RkPOEyvUW0 ,” author Kat S. notes that TERFs’ insistence on “biological sex” as an immutable binary—all “men” depraved and violent, all “women” fragile victims—may make it easier to convince them of other biological hierarchies. Their insistence on seeing trans women as “violent men,” in particular, can be weaponized against men of colour and turned into overt white supremacy. “It doesn’t take any thinking woman long to see exactly which men are committing violent crime and the majority of partner violence, and race realism is a natural next step.”
Ultimately, the article reasons, it should be easy to convince TERFs that supporting the rights of “biological women” means rejecting “the mid-to-late 20th century Jewish-led feminist theory,” particularly the “corporate slavery” of work outside the home, in favour of accepting their biologically ordained role as wives and mothers. “A pro family, pro natalist movement requires some degree of female participation,” Kat S. writes, “and reframing the patriarchy paradigm is essential.” Ultimately, TERFs must be led to see patriarchy as “a system where men’s urges and strengths are allowed to flourish and channeled into healthy outlets, and women are protected and respected for their material reality and the gifts our unique biology affords.”
It’s a grim irony that, by insisting on a “feminism” without any trans women in it, TERFs have wound up constructing the tool by which fascists aim to destroy feminism altogether. Still, it’s not news that online Nazis have crazy ideas. Could this actually work? To talk about that, we have to pull back and look at the global picture.
[wiggly line]
TERFs and organized anti-trans groups are only one part of the global right-wing struggle against so-called “gender ideology”: roughly, the confluence of abortion rights, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights, with trans people seeming to inspire particular fury.
That struggle is well-organized, well-funded and global. A 2021 report .. https://www.epfweb.org/sites/default/files/2021-08/Tip%20of%20the%20Iceberg%20August%202021%20Final.pdf .. from the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF) found that, between 2009 and 2018, Europe had received USD$707.2 million in “anti-gender funding.” (Again, this comprises initiatives against abortion and LGBTQ2S+ rights more broadly, as well as anti-trans funding; to the opponents of “gender ideology,” they’re all the same thing.)Outside of Europe itself, there were two countries pouring money into the campaign: the United States and Russia.
American anti-gender funding comes largely from the Christian right: the EPF report lists donors like the Heritage Foundation, the American Center for Law and Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom, who are also highly active in anti-abortion and anti-trans politics at home. The Alliance Defending Freedom, for instance, has been credited with creating the legislative templates to inundate U.S. state legislatures with a barrage of transphobic sports bans .. https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-arizona-republic/20210701/281977495602806 .
Russian involvement is harder to figure out, not least because that money is often run through “laundromats” intended to disguise its associations. The EPF argues that, for Putin, anti-LGBTQ+ measures are not only desirable in themselves (Russia’s treatment of queers is famously horrific .. https://www.gq.com/story/being-gay-in-russia?printable=true ) but also as a means to destabilize the globe. Specifically, Russia has a habit of boosting “far-right, populist political parties with an explicitly disruptive agenda." If otherwise functioning democracies can be torn apart over civil rights, that creates chaos, which ultimately benefits Russia. Certainly, the United States was weakened by the Trump years, arguably the most successful example of this strategy .. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56423536 .
The Deep Green Resistance member who’s had the biggest influence on the “gender critical” movement is a woman named Jennifer Bilek, whose author biography calls her an “investigative journalist, artist and concerned citizen” (read: blogger), and whose 2018 article for the Federalist, “Who Are the Rich, White Men Institutionalizing Transgender Ideology? .. https://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology/ ,” tilted organized transphobia firmly into the realm of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
In that article, Bilek puts forth the basics of her staggeringly bizarre worldview: a cabal of “transhumanist billionaires”—wealthy individuals supposedly devoted to helping humanity transcend its status as an organic species, like hedge fund tycoon George Soros, philanthropists Warren and Peter Buffett and wealthy trans women Martine Rothblatt and Jennifer Pritzker (yes, this paragraph gets crazier as you go)—has infiltrated the gay community and taken over the “medical industrial complex,” creating a predatory gender industry that convinces cis people they need to transition, with the ultimate goal of normalizing “body dissociation” and extreme body modifications, putting Google chips in our heads and (I swear to God) enslaving the human race by merging man with machine .. https://twitter.com/christapeterso/status/1366490228073009152 .
Bilek’s theories inspire mockery whenever someone coughs them up on social media .. https://twitter.com/JasonSCampbell/status/1488898695806525450 —and they should; they’re incredibly silly—but the trope of a sinister moneyed elite plotting the destruction of humanity from the shadows is a familiar from Nazi propaganda. Nearly all of the billionaires on Bilek’s list are, as Schevers points out, “Jewish, transfeminine or gay.”
“One thing that it’s crucial to understand about the far right, the extreme right, the Nazi guys, is the way that they obsessively see absolutely fucking everything as a Jewish plot,” says author and hate researcher Talia Lavin, author of Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. “And the existence of trans people is a huge one.”
Lavin cites the 1933 burning of Magnus Hirschfeld’s archives: Hirschfeld, a German Jewish doctor, was a groundbreaking and remarkably sympathetic researcher of transgender identity; his was the first clinic in the world to provide gender-affirming surgery. Then the Nazis burned his work, leaving a hole in history.
To trans people, this looks like proof of erasure. But to a Nazi, Lavin says, it means something different: the presence of a Jewish doctor indicates that “[the] existence of trans people was invented by people like Hirschfeld in order to undermine white masculinity and destroy the white family.”
-- “I spoke to researchers in multiple countries for this piece and all of them agreed that anti-trans activists were becoming increasingly comfortable with presenting their arguments in a white supremacist framework.” --
I spoke to researchers in multiple countries for this piece and all of them agreed that anti-trans activists were becoming increasingly comfortable with presenting their arguments in a white supremacist framework, presenting transition care as an attack on white fertility and white birth rates specifically. Sometimes, this is subtle: Irreversible Damage, a 2020 book in which author Abigail Shrier portrays youth transition as an imminent threat to the fertility of “our daughters,” infamously uses a cover illustration of a young white girl with her uterus scooped out of her body.
[INSERT: conix, Maybe you should not claim knowledge about a subject when your primary source for posts on the topic is the NYPost. And, if that's not revealing enough about your interest in the topic you have ignored virtually every post to you questing your positions. For example: conix, New Book “Irreversible Damage” Is Full of Misinformation https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170669548]
At the extremes, things get more overt. Alix Aharon, the “GenderMapper” organizer who has led the charge against Planned Parenthood as the “apex of the trans lobby,” also insists transition is only a threat to white children; “Black youth are not transitioning .. https://archive.ph/1lt4f ,” she writes.
This obsessive focus on white fertility is of a piece with fascist propaganda about being overrun or replaced by people of colour. “There is a growing body of propaganda about ‘white genocide,’”
[Why alt-right trolls shouted down Donald Trump Jr. "Trump’s Latest Dinner Guest: Nick Fuentes, White Supremacist" [...]A group of alt-right and “dissident right” activists have joined forces with neo-Nazis and others on the far-right fringes to attack conservatives who they feel aren’t true conservatives, both online and in person. [...]Sunday, for instance, members of this group heckled Donald Trump Jr. at an event in California. And conservative speakers have been beset by the “groypers” at events in Texas, Tennessee and Arizona as well. p - This group, which calls itself the “groyper army” — “groyper” being a reference to a meme of Pepe the Frog, itself a meme overtaken by the alt-right — purports to be supporting “traditional values” within conservatism, like immigration restrictionism. And it argues that relatively mainstream conservative student groups like Turning Point USA need to be confronted because they are shutting down “socially conservative Christians and supporters of President Trump’s agenda” and promoting “degeneracy” by having gay speakers. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170543296]
says Mallory Moore of the U.K.-based Trans Safety Network. “We queer and trans people, and feminists for that matter, are refusing to do our national duty to breed.”
Schevers says that the conspiratorial thinking that dominates TERF circles easily extends to incorporate other civil rights movements—whereas trans people might be framed as a plan to weaken the white race through “sexual degeneracy,” movements like Black Lives Matter are suspected of being unwitting tools of the trans.
“They’re talking about Black Lives Matter [being] co-opted by the trans lobby,” she says. “Again, it’s very similar to Nazi propaganda. ‘This Jewish elite has captured this Black civil rights movement and it’s actually just an attack on white people.’”
At this point, “transphobia” no longer seems like an adequate description of the problem. “Transphobia” implies hating trans people. Believing that the existence of trans people is a Jewish plot to destroy the white race by lowering white AFAB people’s fertility is, to be crude, a whole new level of fucked up.
Yet these ideas are reaching the mainstream, laundered through a sympathetic commentariat that scrubs off their far-right associations. For instance, as researcher Christa Peterson has documented .. https://twitter.com/christapeterso/status/1416599964214448130?lang=en , Helen Joyce’s recent book Trans repeats Bilek’s “Jewish billionaires” theory without citing her by name. Joyce was then reviewed by anti-trans commentator Jesse Singal in the New York Times, and Singal—while calling Joyce’s book “an intelligent, thorough rejoinder to an idea that has swept across much of the liberal world seemingly overnight”—neglected to mention Jewish billionaires at all. Dig two inches down, and you’ll find the Nazis, but on the surface, it looks like reasonable “debate.”
It’s a debate that trans people are losing. Which brings us to the grimmest part of all this: how fascist plans for eliminating trans people have become part of the American mainstream.
The far-right takeover of the Republican party has not been painless; #NeverTrump conservatives feel that overt white supremacists make them look bad, and hate group members think that “moderate” conservatives are sell-outs. Still, transphobia has provided a point of penetration where the far right and mainstream conservatives are united. Rhetoric that was once the exclusive province of the far right has come to dominate mainstream U.S. debates around anti-trans or anti-LGBTQ2S+ legislation. Witness how fertility rates and questions of “sterilizing” children come to dominate any discussion of youth transition. In Florida, the state’s notorious “Don’t Say Gay” bill was framed by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ spokesperson as an “anti-grooming bill .. https://xtramagazine.com/power/politics/grooming-narratives-return-anti-lgbtq2s-campaigns-219791,” and all opponents were cast as pedophiles.
---- [ KYRSTEN SINEMA DITCHING THE DEMOCRATS DOESN’T MEAN THE PARTY IS DONE WITH HER [...]The idea that somehow both parties are toxic is the falsest of false equivalencies. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170687593 -- Florida Republican who sponsored ‘Don’t Say Gay’ resigns after federal indictment "We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse" [...]TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Republican state Rep. Joe Harding resigned from office one day after a federal grand jury indictment against him was unsealed alleging he defrauded a federal pandemic-related small business loan program. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170668071 -- Sex Educators Are Not ‘Grooming’ Your Kids—but Conservatives Want to Incite Fear Anyway https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170510981] ----
“When they say ‘pedophile,’ they mean someone who shouldn’t be allowed to live,” Lavin says. “The quote-unquote ‘deep state’ of QAnon is engaged in pedophilia. The Democratic Party is engaged in mass pedophilia. The default rhetorical move for [the far right] is ‘everyone is a pedophile and pedophiles should be killed.’”
Slowly but surely, the idea that trans people are inherently a predatory threat to (white) children gains traction—and the will to dispose of the threat follows.
“That’s what I mean when I say ‘annihilatory rhetoric,’” Lavin says. “Like, ‘this is to protect parents and children.’ As if queer people, trans people, aren’t ‘parents’ and ‘children.’ They fall outside the remit of the Volk.”
[Wiggly line]
Here is where I pull back, dizzied, and admit something that sounds paranoid even as I say it: this agenda is, clearly, already genocidal where trans people are concerned, but it also seems likely to escalate and find new targets.“Anti-gender” activism already includes attacks on abortion, women’s rights and the rights of cis queer people, all of which are being rolled back in the United States. The seething hatred of non-white and Jewish people which provides the subtext for these movements must, sooner or later, become their text. I’m frightened for myself, but I’m more frightened because the longer I look at this, the more I concur with gender theorist Judith Butler that trans people might not be the point of anti-trans fascism at all; we are simply the most popular means by which facists “concoct a world of multiple imminent threats .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2021/oct/23/judith-butler-gender-ideology-backlash .. to make the case for authoritarian rule and censorship.”
I keep going back to my conversation with Lavin about the Hirschfeld archives. Burning them was one of the first things the Nazis did, but it certainly isn’t what we remember them for. The fact that trans people make an easy first target doesn’t mean we will be the last or even the most important ones. The longer I look at all this, the more information I assemble, the more my mind drifts back to that long-ago fire.
The thing is, fire always spreads. Look around you and see what’s already burning.
Jude Ellison S. Doyle
More From This Contributor Jude Ellison S. Doyle is a journalist, opinion writer, and the author of two books, including Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power (Melville House, 2019) and Trainwreck: The Women We Love To Hate, Mock and Fear... and Why (Melville House, 2016). They live in upstate New York.
Judge Sides With Families Fighting Florida’s Ban on Gender Care for Minors
"The Battle Over Gender Therapy "Laura Edwards-Leeper and transgender people""
Related: Florida Gov. DeSantis signs bill to limit discussion of race [...] DeSantis’ focus on culture war issues involving race, gender and the coronavirus have made him one of the most popular Republican politicians in the country and a likely 2024 presidential candidate. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172063848
A federal judge wrote that the plaintiffs suing to block the new law are “likely to prevail on their claim that the prohibition is unconstitutional.”
Demonstrators protested new restrictions at a state medical regulatory board meeting in November. Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Lake Buena Vista Sentinel, via Associated Press
By Rick Rojas and Azeen Ghorayshi June 6, 2023
A federal judge in Florida issued a scathing assessment on Tuesday of the state’s ban on gender transition care for minors, asserting in a ruling that the families with transgender children who sued the state are “likely to prevail on their claim that the prohibition is unconstitutional.”
Judge Robert L. Hinkle of Federal District Court in Tallahassee ruled specifically that three transgender children can be prescribed puberty blockers despite the new state law, which also adds new hurdles for adults who seek similar care.
But as legal challenges have been mounted to new restrictions on transition care that have been enacted across the country, Judge Hinkle’s ruling exemplifies the kind of chilly reception that the bans may receive from judges.
“Gender identity is real,” Judge Hinkle wrote, adding that “proper treatment” can include mental health therapy followed by puberty blockers and hormone treatments. “Florida has adopted a statute and rules that prohibit these treatments even when medically appropriate.”
The judge issued a preliminary injunction in response to an emergency request by the families of the three children. They and others had sued the state of Florida in March over an administrative ban on gender transition care for minors, and then widened their suit to take in the new law after Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed it May 17.
The plaintiffs had urged Judge Hinkle specifically to block one part of the law that bars doctors and nurses from prescribing or administering transition-related medication to children, and another part that exposes medical providers to criminal liability and professional discipline for doing so.
The injunction granted by Judge Hinkle does not apply to other aspects of the far-reaching legislation, which also bars gender-transition surgery for minors, alters child custody statutes to treat transition care as equivalent to child abuse, and forbids the use of state funds to pay for transition care.
The Anti-Trans Push in America .. [links inside] ..
* In Louisiana: Lawmakers advanced legislation that would ban hormone treatments, puberty blockers and surgeries for young people.
* In Florida: In a scathing assessment of Florida’s ban on gender-transition care for minors, a federal judge ruled that three transgender children whose families sued the state over the law can be prescribed puberty blockers forbidden by the legislation.
* In Texas: Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, signed a bill to ban hormone and puberty blocking treatments, as well as surgeries, for transgender minors.
* In Tennessee: A federal judge ruled that a law in Tennessee aimed at restricting drag shows was unconstitutional. The legislation had caused concerns among L.G.B.T.Q. rights supporters about its implications for transgender, nonbinary and other gender-nonconforming people.
Even so, the judge wrote dismissively of the arguments offered by the state, calling them “a laundry list of purported justifications for the statute and rules” that were “largely pretextual and, in any event, do not call for a different result.”
Concerning the state’s claim that professional associations that endorsed gender transition care had done so for political reasons, the judge wrote: “If ever a pot called a kettle black, it is here. The statute and the rules were an exercise in politics, not good medicine.”
Lawyers for the plaintiffs’ families interpreted the ruling on Tuesday as possibly extending to other transgender minors throughout the state.
“The court addressed the specific question in front of it, but also issued a very strong ruling that says the bans are unlikely to survive constitutional scrutiny,” said Jennifer Levi, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and the senior director of transgender rights at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders.
She noted that Judge Hinkle’s 44-page ruling drew conclusions far beyond the scope of the three families in the case.“The power of the ruling is to make clear that the law is unconstitutional,” she said.
The Florida Department of Health declined to comment on the ruling, citing the continuing litigation.
The legislation codifies policies adopted last year by the Florida Board of Medicine and Board of Osteopathic Medicine — whose members are appointed by the governor — that banned hormone treatments for people under 18 unless they were already receiving such care. Judge Hinkle’s order also temporarily blocked those rules as they pertain to the three plaintiffs.
The law also includes penalties for doctors who violate it, including prison terms of up to five years. It goes beyond similar legislation in other states by adding new restrictions for adults receiving transition care, including requirements that consent forms be signed and prescriptions for hormone treatments be obtained in person instead of through a telemedicine appointment.
Under the new law, only doctors are allowed to prescribe transition-related medication; nurse practitioners and physician assistants, who have been providing the treatments for many patients, can no longer do so. Those provisions were not blocked by the judge’s order, and remain in effect.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has said he thought it was wrong to provide gender transition care to minors. Nicole Craine for The New York Times
More than a dozen states have adopted bans .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/upshot/trans-laws-republicans-states.html .. or other restrictions on transition-related care for children and teenagers in the past year. Proponents say the bans protect children from medical treatments they see as harmful and unproven. But that stance defies much of the medical establishment, which views the care as medically necessary and beneficial for some children who have gender dysphoria.
Opponents of the Florida law say it stands out for being “particularly meanspirited,” as the Human Rights Campaign described it.
Lawyers for the families argued that the law threatened to cause irreparable harm, because parents would be “deprived of their fundamental right to make medical decisions for their children” and the children themselves would “suffer a cascade of mental and physical injuries” from being denied care.
[Deprive parents of a fundamental right to make medical decisions for their children - this is a law pushed for and signed by a member of the freedom loving party. Freedom for us to place bans to restrict the freedom of those who don't agree with our restrictive culture view.]
After the bill was passed, Planned Parenthood warned patients that it would suspend providing gender transition care in its Florida clinics until mid-June, so that it could develop new consent forms for adults receiving the care and change its practices to comply with the new law. Other clinics that relied on nurse practitioners to provide care have stopped prescribing it indefinitely.
Before he signed the legislation, Mr. DeSantis, who has since announced a presidential bid, criticized puberty blockers and other forms of gender transition care for children. “That is wrong, and we’re glad that we put a stop to that in the state of Florida,” he said.
“It is wrong to be sexualizing these kids,” he added. “It’s wrong to have gender ideology and telling kids that they may have been born in the wrong body.”
The legislation was part of an avalanche of measures focused on L.G.B.T.Q. people that Florida’s Republican-controlled State Legislature passed during its annual session.
Lawmakers advanced bills that require public school employees to call students by the pronouns matching the gender on their birth certificate, no matter the child’s preference; that make it a misdemeanor to use restrooms in public buildings that do not correspondent to the person’s gender at birth; and that punish businesses that admit minors to “adult live performances,” including drag shows.
Now that a preliminary injunction has been issued, the plaintiffs’ legal challenge to the law will move forward.
It remains unclear how bans on gender transition care for minors will ultimately fare in the courts. One indication could be imminent: A judge is expected to rule soon on a lawsuit to overturn legislation passed in Arkansas in 2021 that was the first to forbid medical treatments for children and teenagers seeking gender transitions.
Rick Rojas is a national correspondent covering the American South. He has been a staff reporter for The Times since 2014. @RaR
Azeen Ghorayshi covers the intersection of sex, gender and science for The Times.