#transgender healthcare ban

[thesocklesswonder]

Ohio's mental health authority is trying to ban transgender healthcare - esp for people under 21 years of age, BUT they are asking for public input! Hurry, though, as it's only through 5pm local time (US Eastern Standard Time) on January 19th!

Changes to the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services rule, "5122-14-12 | Private Psychiatric Hospital: Program, Specialty Services, and Discharge Planning", are to prohibit any kind of transgender care for those under 21 in a psychiatric hospital. Full document here, but be aware it is to a pdf

The rule includes the text, "Medical services shall not include any of the following: ...the prescribing, administering, or furnishing of any prescription drug or hormone...", which means if someone under 21 enters a private psychiatric hospital and who is already on puberty blockers or hormones, the doctors there would be prohibited from giving them the prescription they already have.

A new proposed rule for the same Ohio department, "5122-26-19 | Gender Transition Care" states the requirements for anyone needing transition care under this department. They are targeting the most vulnerable with these rules: young people who have mental health issues who also need transgender care. Full document here, but be aware it is to a pdf

Included in this rule: A doctor may only provide transgender care after three requirements have been met - a psychiatrist who has experience with the patient's age group must be employed by/contracted with the provider, an endocrinologist who has experience with the age group, and the provider has a comprehensive written plan that includes a detransitioning provision.

It also requires any such patient to have a thorough mental health evaluation and counseling period of at least 6 months prior to any transgender care. It also appears to become part of their medical record.

In addition to a ban on any transition surgeries, even if the patient jumps through all of those hoops, is a curious item that prevents doctors from referring patients out to other doctors that can provide care:

Another thing that made me pause was what seems like a scare tactic:

The terms "orchiectomy" and "penectomy" mean the removal of testicals and penis, respectively. The word "castration" could only be redundant or referring only to chemical castration, which seems to not fit in with gender reassignment surgery (correct me if you know it does fit). "Castration" is a scary word for most people with penises. I think it would likely provoke a knee-jerk response, like, "Oh, no, castration is bad. No castration! Enact these rules to keep people from being castrated!"

⚠️ The time is now to tell the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services what you think about this! ⚠️

The option to comment on these needless restrictions can be found at the link in the first paragraph, but it's just an link that takes you to your email app. You can also just email them directly at MH-SOT-rules@mha.ohio.gov no later than 5 pm EST on Friday, January 19, 2024.

Please reblog to get this message out! We all have a stake in how rules and laws are enacted. They often lead to more in other states/countries. So, even if you don't have a stake in this personally, please make sure others see it.

Why do I care? I don't live in Ohio, but I have friends all over, including Ohio, who need transgender care. You might know someone like that, too.

[b00knerd1o1]

American Politics is a Dumpster Fire.

[genderqueerpositivity]

The Campaign for Southern Equality, in partnership with state and local organizations, is providing rapid response support to the families of youth who are impacted by anti-transgender healthcare bans that are passing across the South. We are providing grants, navigation support, and resources to impacted families as they ensure their children can access the care they need and deserve. We are currently providing support to impacted families in Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina, and we are preparing to work in other states.

Please join us by donating.

We are honored to work on this project in partnership with The TRANS Program, Mississippi Rising, Inclusion TN, and OUT Memphis.

(ID: text reads "Donate to support the Southern Trans Youth Emergency Fund. Fuel our work to provide direct support to trans youth and families impacted by anti-transgender healthcare bans across the south", below this the Campaign for Southern Equality logo and a link to the fund on their website.)

[the-sonic-crew]

Hey Everyone ,:]

It's been a rough day for US citizens, hasn't it?

For the next four years, and possibly longer, things will not be the same for queer people, women, veterans/soldiers, and people of color.

If you aren't sure of exactly what was going to happen to your rights, here is a link to an extremely helpful source. This is more focused on queer and reproductive rights, so here's another that's more focused on what's going to happen to immigrants, PoC, etc.

Here are some links/numbers if you need someone to talk to:

The Trevor Project - A website for queer people and connects them with someone to talk to, they even have a "quick exit" option (esc x3 for computer users) if you need to close the tab quickly.

988 - Basically the 911 for mental health issues (US, Canada, Hawaii only, other options below)

741741 - Similar to 988, but only text based. (US only)

116 123- UK crisis line

13 11 14 - Australia crisis line

Right now, we're answering any and all asks asap regarding comfort for the election <3

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The first openly transgender state representative in Montana history is facing either censure or outright expulsion, after she said Republicans would have “blood on their hands” for passing a ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

Rep. Zooey Zephyr was sworn in just three months ago after winning a Missoula-based seat in November. GOP leaders have refused to recognize her in floor debates until she apologizes for the comment. On Monday, supporters rallied on the steps of the state Capitol, and chants of “Let her speak!” shut down proceedings in the House for nearly a half-hour, as Zephyr hoisted her microphone above her head.

On Tuesday, Zephyr tweeted a letter she received from leaders in the Republican-controlled chamber declaring their intention to bring a motion “with respect to the conduct of Representative Zooey Zephyr.”

The House will “determine if [Zephyr]’s conduct on the Floor of the House on April 24, 2023 violated the rules, collective rights, safety, dignity, integrity, or decorum of the House of Representatives, and if so, whether to impose disciplinary consequences for those actions,” according to the letter sent to Zephyr. The House will meet Wednesday afternoon.

“I have been informed that during tomorrow’s floor session there will be a motion to either censure or expel me,” Zephyr said in a Tuesday tweet. “I’ve also been told I’ll get a chance to speak. I will do as I have always done—rise on behalf of my constituents, in defense of my community, & for democracy itself.”

Zephyr’s clash with the GOP began last week when she made the comment during a floor debate on the transition care ban. Since then, Republicans have refused to let her participate in floor debates entirely, even when she’s requested to speak last week, the far-right Montana Freedom Caucus demanded Zephyr’s immediate censure while misgendering her in their statement.

The move to silence Zephyr has been met with fierce protests. On Monday, supporters rallied on the steps of the state Capitol, and chants of “Let her speak!” shut down proceedings in the House for nearly a half-hour, as Zephyr hoisted her microphone above her head.

Riot cops who were called to the chamber arrested seven protesters. Republicans claimed that the protests had turned violent, though the protesters were charged only with criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor. In the letter, Republican leaders said the House gallery, where Montana citizens are able to watch proceedings, will be closed Wednesday during the debate on whether to punish Zephyr.

“It’s not enough for them to get the harmful bills through,” Zephyr told reporters Monday. “When someone stands up and calls out their bills for the harm they cause, for the deaths they cause, they want silence. And we will not be complicit in our eradication.”

Montana House Speaker Matt Regier said in a statement Tuesday that “the choice not to follow House rules is one that Rep. Zephyr has made.”

“The only person silencing Rep. Zephyr is Rep. Zephyr. The Montana House will not be bullied,” Regier said.

Tensions have escalated in state legislatures such as Montana’s this year, as Republicans across the country have used simple rules violations as a pretext to crack down on dissent.

Earlier this month, the Tennessee House of Representatives expelled two young Black lawmakers, Rep. Justin Pearson of Memphis and Rep. Justin Jones of Nashville, and nearly expelled a third white lawmaker from Knoxville, after the trio protested for gun law reforms in the wake of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville in March.

The move, however, backfired spectacularly. Pearson and Jones became national figures overnight, they were quickly re-appointed to the seats they’d been expelled from, and both are expected to run in special elections to determine a replacement for, well, themselves. They met with President Joe Biden at the White House earlier this week.

Tennessee Republicans have also drawn increased scrutiny to themselves, after expelling Jones and Pearson for bringing “disorder and dishonor” to the legislature; a member of the leadership abruptly resigned last week after a complaint that he’d sexually harassed an intern became public, and the Speaker of the Tennessee House, Cameron Sexton, has faced new questions about whether he really resides in his district.

On Tuesday, Pearson offered his support to Zephyr in a tweet.

“Voices across the country continue to rise for justice and expose the anti-democratic behavior of people in Republican led states,” Pearson said. “We will not let our democracy die without fighting for every voice. We are in this fight from Memphis to Montana!”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Aja Romero at Vox:

With mere days left on the 2024 political campaign trail, you might have noticed the Trump camp has increasingly turned to scapegoating familiar targets, including immigrants, the press, and women. It has also increasingly doubled down on attacks on trans people.

A recent report by ABC News revealed that nearly a third of recent campaign funds — or $21 million, per ABC’s report — for television advertising has been spent on transphobic messaging from the Trump campaign and various conservative political groups. The independent journalist collective the Bulwark pushed the total even higher, to $40 million poured into transphobic advertising within the last five weeks. The ads, paid for by the Trump campaign, use a litany of transphobic coding, including photoshopping Kamala Harris to appear as though she’s posing beside a nonbinary person in a mustache and a dress, despite plenty of evidence that this strategy is a turn-off for voters. “Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports,” one ad declares. All three ads attack Harris for supporting gender-affirmative care for trans prisoners, including surgery where medically necessary. “Kamala is for they/them,” each ad concludes. “President Trump is for you.”

Given that trans people make up barely half of 1 percent of the US adult population and that trans-related issues are low on the priority list of most voters, many might find it baffling that Trump has focused so much of his attention on singling out trans people. Indeed, two different media research groups, the left-leaning Data for Progress and video marketing firm Ground Media, working in partnership with GLAAD, each released studies last week finding that the ads had no real impact on voter decision-making and instead alienated many viewers, even among Republicans, who felt they were “mean-spirited.” So then why do them? Well, there’s “winning” in terms of appealing to voters, and then there’s “winning” in terms of determining the conversation. Keeping the focus on trans people — Harris’s actual policy proposals do almost nothing to advance the status of trans citizens — fires up a certain base and crowds out other discussion.

[...]

In other words, these ads help to reinforce the idea of a common enemy. They are continuing — which is to say winning, in a very real sense — the larger ongoing culture war against queer and trans people. The willingness of Trump and his supporters to invest in these ads arguably indicates that even if Harris wins the election, marginalized communities in red states will still be under threat from Trump supporters and from growing legal restrictions on those regions. But trans people aren’t isolated targets. They are scapegoats in the historical sense — canaries in the coal mine for the growing march of fascism in the US. That puts all of us in danger. Trump centering transphobia in his campaign strategy is not new. It’s the culmination of a decade-long conservative political strategy of weaponizing anti-trans messaging to undermine and reverse what was a broad cultural shift toward LGBTQ equality.

[...]

As the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage took effect, conservative groups turned away from targeting queer people to instead target trans people in a “divide and conquer” strategy, as a conservative organizer named Meg Kilgannon summarized in a 2017 Family Research Council panel: “For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile,” she told the assembly. “If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.”

To do this, conservatives joined forces with unlikely allies, including “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” to drum up antagonistic sentiments against trans people. Right-wingers spread alarmism, rolling out dozens of anti-trans bathroom laws across the nation, then using them to introduce other transphobic ideas into local conservative platforms, all of them coming straight out of the moral panic playbook. These tactics didn’t directly address the sociocultural progress that trans people were making; instead, they cultivated a new wave of unfounded fear and alarmism about trans people themselves.

And the propaganda has only gotten more effective over time. Where transphobic bathroom bills mostly failed a decade ago, they’re now coming back into fashion; last week, Odessa, Texas, passed a bathroom bill that offers a $10,000 bounty paid to anyone who spies a trans person using the “wrong” bathroom.

The core elements we see used to attack and oppress trans people in the US in 2024 aren’t really about trans people; we’ve seen these same fearmongering tropes weaponized against numerous marginalized groups throughout history. They serve a greater political purpose — not just to demonize one specific group of people but to reinforce an in-group mentality that can then be deployed against all enemies. These attacks are a political cudgel.

Donald Trump’s anti-Kamala Harris ads bashing trans people are all about demonizing trans people.

[queerlyvictorian]

HAPPY PRIDE TO ANYONE WHO SEES THIS 🌈 MAKE SURE TO BE AS QUEER YOU FUCKING WANT THIS MONTH 🌈 AS LONG YOU STAY SAFE 🌈 YOU MATTER BECAUSE YOU EXIST 🌈 I LOVE EACH AND EVERYONE OF YOU FOR ALL THAT YOU ARE 🌈 THIS WORLD SIMPLY NEEDS QUEER PEOPLE 🌈 ALWAYS HAS, ALWAYS WILL 🌈🌈🌈

[margaretthatchersdead]

Can we please stop acting like intersex people are being caught in the crossfire and not actively targeted? They’re not being misidentified as trans or accidentally hurt, they’re an oppressed group that faces harm because they are intersex. It’s not a case of them getting looped in with trans people, it’s a case of people hating both trans people and intersex people.

[yetanothertransgirl]

psa for trans people in the uk (and I believe also europe), a new private non-profit provider of gender affirming care has just launched:

https://anne.health

basically their goal is to take over what GenderGP is doing, but doing it properly (i.e. no AI treatment decisions) while also providing pre-med care for trans kids, support for people self medding, and other stuff

not to mention the fact that they're exploiting a loophole to allow prescribing puberty blockers to trans kids! https://inews.co.uk/news/mermaids-ceo-clinic-avoid-ban-puberty-blockers-children-3179213

this might not help anyone, but I just wanted to put it out there as some good trans news amongst all the negatives that have been happening recently

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[genderqueerpositivity]

South Carolina just released a new law that goes beyond trans youth and instead would ban transgender people up to the age of 21 from receiving gender affirming care. It would criminalize doctors from providing gender affirming care for trans youth as well. It doesn’t stop there though. The bill would also ban informed consent hormone therapy, the most common form of hormone therapy for all transgender adults, and would require psychiatrists to sign off on gender affirming care - a model of care that has been outdated since the 1990s. It bans public funds for gender affirming care. It bans comprehensive health programs from encouraging transition for trans students. Lastly, it forces teachers to out students who they even suspect are trans to their parents. This is an absolutely devastating bill, and if it is allowed to go through, it would dramatically harm many trans youth in the state.

[ftm-radio]

hey guys. got some pretty nasty news about more bullshit the bigots are up to and it's frustrating and upsetting but we can't let them do this without fighting back.

The link below will take you to resist.bot for other ways you can use it to send a pre-written message to your officials (texting was very easy & quick, wasn't confusing at all), but if you can do more than that please, please do.

Make phone calls, make a lot of noise, make sure the folks involved in this know we will not be pleased with them if they let this pass.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

It was a mundane, unanimously supported bill on liquor taxation that saw state Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh take to the mic on the Nebraska Legislature floor last week. She offered her support, then spent the next three days discussing everything but the bill, including her favorite Girl Scout cookies, Omaha’s best doughnuts and the plot of the animated movie “Madagascar.”

She also spent that time railing against an unrelated bill that would outlaw gender-affirming therapies for those 18 and younger. It was the advancement of that bill out of committee that led Cavanaugh to promise three weeks ago to filibuster every bill that comes before the Legislature this year — even the ones she supports.

“If this Legislature collectively decides that legislating hate against children is our priority, then I am going to make it painful — painful for everyone,” the Omaha married mother of three said. “I will burn the session to the ground over this bill.”

True to her word, Cavanaugh has slowed the business of passing laws to a crawl by introducing amendment after amendment to every bill that makes it to the state Senate floor and taking up all eight debate hours allowed by the rules — even during the week she was suffering from strep throat. Wednesday marks the halfway point of this year’s 90-day session, and not a single bill will have passed thanks to Cavanaugh’s relentless filibustering.

Clerk of the Legislature Brandon Metzler said a delay like this has happened only a couple of times in the past 10 years.

“But what is really uncommon is the lack of bills that have advanced,” Metzler said. “Usually, we’re a lot further along the line than we’re seeing now.”

In fact, only 26 bills have advanced from the first of three rounds of debate required to pass a bill in Nebraska. There would normally be two to three times that number by mid-March, Metzler said. In the last three weeks since Cavanaugh began her bill blockade, only three bills have advanced.

The Nebraska bill and another that would ban trans people from using bathrooms and locker rooms or playing on sports teams that don’t align with the gender listed on their birth certificates are among roughly 150 bills targeting transgender people that have been introduced in state legislatures this year. Bans on gender-affirming care for minors have already been enacted this year in some Republican-led states, including South Dakota and Utah, and Republican Governors in Tennessee and Mississippi are expected to sign similar bans into law. And Arkansas and Alabama have bans that were temporarily blocked by federal judges.

Cavanaugh’s effort has drawn the gratitude of the LGBTQ community, said Abbi Swatsworth, executive director of LGBTQ advocacy group OutNebraska. The organization has been encouraging members and others to inundate state lawmakers with calls and emails to support Cavanaugh’s effort and oppose bills targeting transgender people.

“We really see it as a heroic effort,” Swatsworth said of the filibuster. “It is extremely meaningful when an ally does more than pay lip service to allyship. She really is leading this charge.”

Both Cavanaugh and the conservative Omaha lawmaker who introduced the trans bill, state Sen. Kathleen Kauth, said they’re seeking to protect children. Cavanaugh cited a 2021 survey by The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention efforts among LGBTQ youth, that found that 58% of transgender and nonbinary youth in Nebraska seriously considered suicide in the previous year, and more than 1 in 5 reported that they had attempted it.

“This is a bill that attacks trans children,” Cavanaugh said. “It is legislating hate. It is legislating meanness. The children of Nebraska deserve to have somebody stand up and fight for them.”

Kauth said she’s trying to protect children from undertaking gender-affirming treatments that they might later regret as adults. She has characterized treatments such as hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery as medically unproven and potentially dangerous in the long term — although the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association all support gender-affirming care for youths.

Cavanaugh and other lawmakers who support her filibuster effort “don’t want to acknowledge the support I have for this bill,” Kauth said.

“We should be allowed to debate this,” she said. “What this is doing is taking the ball and going home.”

Nebraska’s unique single-chamber Legislature is officially nonpartisan, but it is dominated by members who are registered Republicans. Although bills can win approval with a simple majority in the 49-seat body, it takes 33 votes to overcome a filibuster. The Legislature is currently made up of 32 registered Republicans and 17 registered Democrats, but the slim margin means that the defection of a single Democrat could allow Republicans to pass whatever laws they want.

Democrats have had some success in using filibusters, which burn valuable time from the session, delay votes on other issues and force lawmakers to work longer days. Last year, conservative lawmakers were unable to overcome Democratic filibusters to pass an abortion ban or a law that would have allowed people to carry concealed guns without a permit.

Cavanaugh said she has taken a page from the playbook of Ernie Chambers — a left-leaning former legislator from Omaha who was the longest-serving lawmaker in state history. He mastered the use of the filibuster to try to tank bills he opposed and force support for bills he backed.

“But I’m not aware of anyone carrying out a filibuster to this extent,” Cavanaugh said. “I know it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating for me. But there is a way to put an end to — just put a stop to this hateful bill.”

Chambers praised Cavanaugh’s “perseverance, gumption and stamina to fight as hard as she can using the rules” to stand up for the marginalized, adding, “I would be right there fighting with her if I were still there.”

Speaker John Arch has taken steps to try to speed the process, such as sometimes scheduling the Legislature to work through lunch to tick off another hour on the debate clock. And he noted that the Legislature will soon be moving to all-day debate once committee hearings on bills come to an end later this month.

But even with frustration growing over the hobbled process, the Republican speaker defended Cavanaugh’s use of the filibuster.

“The rules allow her to do this, and those rules are there to protect the voice of the minority,” Arch said. “We may find that we’re passing fewer bills, but the bills we do pass will be bigger bills we care about.”

Chambers said this is a sign that Cavanaugh’s efforts are working. Typically, the Speaker will step in and seek to postpone the bill causing the delay to allow more pressing legislation such as tax cuts or budget items to move forward.

“I think you’re going to start to see some of that happen,” Chambers said. “I think if (Cavanaugh) has the physical stamina, she can do it. I don’t think she shoots blanks.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jasper Scherer at Texas Tribune:

State Rep. Shawn Thierry, a Houston Democrat who was defeated in her primary earlier this year, announced Friday she is switching to the Republican Party.

Thierry was ousted by primary challenger Lauren Ashley Simmons in the May runoff after she sided with Republicans last year on a handful of bills opposed by the LGBTQ+ community, including a measure barring gender-transitioning care for minors. She delivered an emotional speech from the House floor explaining why she broke with her party, remarks that went viral. In a statement, Thierry said she switched parties because the Democratic Party “has veered so far left, so deep into the progressive abyss, that it now champions policies that I cannot, in good conscience, support.” “I am leaving the left because the left has abandoned Democrats who feel betrayed by a party that has lost its way, lost its commitment to hard working families,” Thierry said. Thierry was announced earlier this month as the director of political strategy for the U.S. wing of Genspect, an international anti-trans policy group. Founded in 2021 by an Irish psychotherapist, the group is part of a broader network of organizations that oppose gender-transitioning care for minors, and its members have testified in favor of bills across the world that would ban or limit the practice.

The partisan balance in the lower chamber now stands at 87 Republicans and 63 Democrats. Thierry’s term will expire before the Legislature reconvenes in Austin for its next regular session in January, however, and Simmons is heavily favored to win the solidly Democratic seat in November. A number of prominent Houston Democrats lined up behind Simmons for her primary challenge, including some of Thierry’s current and former colleagues in the Texas House — an unusually public show of repudiation from an incumbent’s own party. Thierry countered with her own slate of endorsements from Black church leaders and a handful of Democratic lawmakers. Thierry also broke ranks from her party to support a GOP bill aimed at removing sexually explicit books from school libraries, a designation critics feared would be used to target LGBTQ+ literature. She also voted for a bill requiring transgender college athletes to play on teams that align with their sex assigned at birth.

[...] Aside from her break on LGBTQ+ issues, however, Thierry has consistently sided with the Democratic Party on high-profile issues during her four terms in office. She voted against Texas Republicans' boundary-testing immigration measure last year, Senate Bill 4, that lets any law enforcement officer arrest someone suspected of illegally crossing the border. She has also opposed GOP legislation banning abortion and enacting a private school voucher system, and in 2021 she joined other House Democrats who fled the state in a bid to block a Republican bill overhauling the state's elections.

Texas State Rep. Shawn Thierry, who lost in the Democratic primary runoff to Lauren Ashley Simmons, has formally flipped to Republican from Democratic. Thierry took a job at anti-trans organization Genspect to serve as its director of political strategy.

Thierry got in hot water for voting in favor of bills banning gender-affirming care for trans minors, trans sports participation matching their gender identity instead of the gender assigned at birth, and a book ban bill aimed at LGBTQ+ content.

On other issues, however, she voted with the majority of Democrats.

See Also:

Dallas Voice: Anti-LGBTQ state Rep. Shawn Thierry leaves Democratic Party

HuffPost: Texas State Rep. Shawn Thierry Switches To GOP After Losing Democratic Primary

[riptidethegimpgs]

Kansas City is protecting trans rights even though Missouri is banning those rights. Even if Missouri stops Kansas City from protecting trans people it shows that the community cares about the trans people in it. It shows us that we can fight back against these bans on gender-affirming care, sports, bathrooms, etc. We can fight back as a community just like Kansas City. Other cities should follow Kansas Cities lead. Cities should make it known that they care about the whole community and not just the cisgender people in it. Cities in states that have not banned trans health care should make sure that they are prepared to fight back against state laws that would ban trans healthcare if or when they happen. Cities in states that have already banned trans healthcare amongst other things make sure trans people know your community does not care about people being trans and wants people to be able get the healthcare they need and deserve to be able to get. Cities should fight back against laws that take away trans rights.

We will not comply with these bans against our existence. We will fight back against these bans against our rights. Thank you Kansas City for giving me hope that we can fight back. https://www.kcur.org/news/2023-05-11/kansas-city-transgender-safe-haven-gender-affirming-care-missouri-laws