New Republic Melissa Gira Grant
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/melissa-gira-grant>/March 31, 2021
The Republican Disinformation Campaign Behind Arkansas’s Vile
Anti-Trans Law
Even before the vote was called, the bill’s supporters were given
the floor to cast doubt on trans peoples’ lives.
Activists and their supporters rally in support of trans people on the
steps of New York's City Hall
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
When young trans people and their allies testified in the Arkansas state
legislature over the last weeks, it seemed clear that this was not
supposed to be a debate. Rumba Yambú, the director of Intransitive, a
group led by trans people in Arkansas, said people with the
Christian-right group Family Research Council, or FRC, seemed to
dominate the agenda. “They were present at every committee meeting,”
Yambú recalled when we spoke by phone this week. Even when there were
more people speaking against the anti-trans legislation than in favor of
it, they said, legislative committees still voted with the anti-trans
rights side.
This week, Arkansas became the first state in the country to ban
gender-affirming health care for young trans people. The bill prevents
medical professionals from providingsuch care
<https://www.metroweekly.com/2021/03/arkansas-committee-passes-bill-banning-trans-youth-from-accessing-gender-affirming-health-care/>by
making it punishable with disciplinary and civil actions, along with
barring federal funding and requiring private insurers to deny coverage.
If the state’s Republican governorsigns
<https://www.wmcactionnews5.com/2021/03/30/mid-south-states-pass-controversial-bills-impacting-transgender-community/>the
bill, trans youth will beforced
<https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/arkansas-passes-bill-ban-gender-affirming-care-trans-youth-n1262412>to
stop treatment theyhadalready obtained, while others will be denied care
going forward. Legislators can’t entirely stop people from seeking out
what they need to transition, though; like attempts to ban abortion,
these bans have only made it more difficult, and more stigmatized. Even
before votes were cast, that outcome was playing out in the legislative
process itself: Trans people in Arkansas were essentially treated as a
disruptive presence to be managed and marginalized, while opponents were
given the floor to cast doubt on trans peoples’ lives.
In hearings, opponents of trans rights mixed graphic language—the bill’s
sponsor, Representative Robin Lundstrom,referred
<https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2021/03/22/womens-medical-rights-and-transgender-chiildren-take-a-beating-in-senate-committee>to
transition-related care as “mutilation”—with appeals to protect
children. (Thebill
<https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/Bills/FTPDocument?path=%2FBills%2F2021R%2FPublic%2FHB1570.pdf>is
officially called the “Arkansas Save Adolescents From Experimentation
Act.”) Trans people and their supporters wereadvised
<https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2021/03/22/womens-medical-rights-and-transgender-chiildren-take-a-beating-in-senate-committee>by
one hearing’s conveners that if their testimony exceeded two minutes,
they could be removed from the chamber. One representative pointed out
that this unfairly granted far more time to the bill’s supporters, and
when he tried to get the opponents a few minutes more to speak, his
motion lost. The supporters had 45 minutes to call on their own experts
in an attempt to discredit current standards of gender-affirming care,
like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, which are
alreadyrecognized
<https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/1/29/21083505/transgender-kids-legislation-puberty-blockers>as
safe, medically necessary, and potentially life-saving.
“We need to correct the record,”said
<https://sg001-harmony.sliq.net/00284/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrowserV2/20210322/-1/21395?gefdesc=&startposition=20210322150603>Dr.
Michele Hutchinson in one recenthearing
<https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/Calendars/Agenda?id=48166430&committee=430&agenda=4306&date=3%2F22%2F2021>,
“because the folks that spoke before got an awful lot of time to tell
you a lot of inaccuracies.” She went on to cite the standards of care
for trans youth, which are recognized by theAmerican Academy of
Pediatrics
<https://www.healthychildren.org/English/news/Pages/Support-for-Transgender-and-Gender-Diverse-Children-and-Adolescents.aspx>,
theAmerican Psychiatric Association
<https://www.psychiatry.org/File%20Library/About-APA/Organization-Documents-Policies/Policies/Position-Transgender-Gender-Diverse-Youth.pdf>,
and thePediatric Endocrine Society
<https://pedsendo.org/patient-resource/transgender-care/>, among others.
But underneath her appeals to the evidence, Dr. Hutchinson was upset,
and she said so. “I’m doing everything I can to maintain my sanity here
… just after this bill passed the house, these kids heard about it. I’ve
had multiple kids in our emergency room because of an attempted suicide.
Just in the last week.” If this bill passes, shesaid
<https://www.facebook.com/18982436812/videos/5196886130386694?__cft__%5B0%5D=AZVrrkoaO5hSZKihY1ELG8triWUzD7OcaaFW445sIIVSpQxcL65U5T_hlGjRqMmuHEpt_w6If_L9D9wh4D-WQ29C_IehFC7H5BK4vk1HrJWTTfYluTR3i2sYEGTCcDjgw3OlRgK28dG23NPf-Gjlo9Ys>,
children will die. “And I will call you guys every single time one does.”
As they have in states across the country, Republicans have used debates
over anti-trans legislation to flood communities with misinformation and
panic about trans people’s lives. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves
signed an anti-trans sports bill in March; announcing the new law,
hesaid
<https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-mississippi-discrimination-gender-identity-tate-reeves-9dfa2829f12e5f7efbb1653aaf468941>President
Biden’s affirmation of the rights of trans people, in his opinion,
“encourages transgenderism amongst our young people.” This week, a bill
similar to the Arkansas law targeting transition-related care
wasintroduced <https://legis.la.gov/legis/BillInfo.aspx?i=240140>in the
Louisiana state legislature–one targeting trans athleteshad
<https://www.nola.com/gambit/news/the_latest/article_055bbda0-5f37-11ea-b87e-03c0c98dbc73.html>already
been introduced. And in South Dakota, Governor Kristi Noemsigned
<https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/30/politics/south-dakota-transgender-sports-kristi-noem/index.html>executive
orders effectively banning trans women and girls from women’s sports
after Republican backlash when she vetoed a similar bill.
Thiswave
<https://www.aclu.org/legislation-affecting-lgbt-rights-across-country>of
bills,reported
<https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/1/29/21083505/transgender-kids-legislation-puberty-blockers>Katelyn
Burns, has grown “directly from the social media disinformation
campaign” concerning a custody battle over a trans girl in Texas whose
parents disagreed about the validity of her gender identity. The point
of such campaigns isn’t merely to pass laws that would intensify
anti-trans discrimination, whether that’s in education or health care or
across the board. Rather, they are used to transform the attention trans
rights have won in recent years into something just shy of a conspiracy
theory: one in which trans athletes are dominatingsports
<https://newrepublic.com/article/161425/trans-student-athletes-white-supremacy-mothers>and
in which young trans people can get care on demand from parents and
doctors, all under the influence of “trans activists”—adult outsiders.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Folks get surprised that there are trans people in Arkansas,”
Intransitive Director Yambú told me this week. “Or forget that we are
here. And here’s these legislators coming out and saying, not only are
they here, but they are dangerous.”
In hearings in Arkansas’s trans youth health care ban over the last
month, legislators supporting the billmocked
<https://hl.nwaonline.com/news/2021/mar/14/transgender-restriction-bills-move-ahead-in-state/>trans
youth at the same time as its sponsor claimed to want to protect them.
One cited the Bible to describe trans and gender nonconforming people as
an “abomination,” another compared trans kids to children who pretend to
be animals. In truth, this comports with other rhetoric painting trans
kids as in need of rescue from themselves. “You can’t do this to
children,” Arkansas State Representative Robin Lundstromsaid
<https://www.tonyperkins.com/get.cfm?i=LR21C18>on a recent episode of
the Family Research Council podcast. The opposition, she said, was
“aggressive” and “vicious” and didn’t understand that she just wanted to
protect children. (She thanked supporters like the anti-abortion,
anti-LGBT groupFamily Council
<https://familycouncil.org/?page_id=1047>in Arkansas, whose
presidentcalled <https://familycouncil.org/?p=19058>the trans-rights
movement “a cultural trainwreck.”)
The pretense that this bill was meant to help children falls away when
you look at the coordinated messaging from the Family Research Council.
As Yambú described, members of FRC like Joseph Backholm, a senior fellow
and anti-LGBTQ rights activist, came to Arkansas to testify. In apolicy
brief <https://www.frc.org/safeact>on the trans youth health care ban in
Arkansas, FRC instructs supporters to adopt a few key tactics: that
“‘Gender transition’ is an experiment” and not treatment, that “The
government should not force taxpayers to fund it,” and that young people
are harmed by it. These are not original talking points; in a sense, FRC
has just adopted their anti-abortion claims to use against trans people.
The points can each be refuted, but the bigger picture they paint is
just as important. That is, FRC and their allies against trans rights
know that throwing up blocks to someone’s self-determination, casting
doubt on their own capacity to know themselves, is a powerful way to
render someone less than a person, less deserving of rights. If that
doesn’t work, then cast them as predatory. So when Backholmclaims
<https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3AEb-rJqgTwwMJ%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Farktimes.com%2Farkansas-blog%2F2021%2F03%2F09%2Fhouse-committee-approves-ban-gender-transition-services-for-minors+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us>,
as he did at a hearing, that a phenomenon called “transgenderism” is
motivated by profit-seeking clinics, targeting “thousands of children”
who will later “look at themselves with regret,” that’s what he
isinvoking
<https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/mar/10/panel-backs-ban-on-gender-transition-steps-for/>,
the right’scampaigns
<https://newrepublic.com/article/161740/equality-act-lgbtq-rights-culture-war>of
misinformation and imagined conspiracies about children at risk. Yet
children, in truth, are being used to fuel these adults’ agenda of
discrimination and exclusion. As one witness who identified as a member
of the trans community and who needed access to trans health care told
the legislators, “I point my finger at you and call this what it truly
is: propaganda, fearmongering, and oppression … [it] will cause
children’s death.”
“This act implies that young transgender people are not actually trans,
and rather, are mentally ill,” testified Willow Breshears, the founder
of the Young Transwomen’s Project. She told legislators that she had
been on hormone replacement therapy since she was thirteen, and if she
had not been, she may not be alive today. “Health care is a human right,
so it is beyond me that any legislator would legalize discrimination in
health care, especially for children—’cause bottom line,
these/are/children.”
Melissa Gira Grant
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/melissa-gira-grant>@melissagira
<https://twitter.com/melissagira>
Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at/The New Republic/and the author
of/Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work./
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