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Transphobia In Black Robes [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-06-21

One definition of a punching bag is a person serving as an object of abuse.

One of the right’s favorite punching bags is the LGBTQ community, and none of them have been hit harder than transgender individuals.

Our four-time indicted, twice-impeached, sexual assaulter, tax fraudster, insurrection inspirer, wannabe fascist dictator, convicted felon, Russian puppet, President Donald Trump has declared war on transgender people and their rights.

As the New York Times explained, “hostility to transgender rights have played a central role” in Trump’s last presidential campaign.

His executive orders have included directing agencies to take steps to curtail surgeries, hormone therapy, and other gender transition care for youths under 19, withdrawing federal support for transition care, and banning transgender troops from military service, the Times said.

What did I miss? You’re considered an adult and can join the military at 18, but you can’t receive medical treatment of your choice until you’re 19?

What the Times calls “the Trump administration’s fierce assaults on transgender rights” has been joined by some Republican-controlled states. That led us to the U.S. Supreme Court, where this week that corrupt bunch ruled 6-3 to uphold Tennessee’s ban on transgender care for minors.

Don’t let them fool you, Republicans have drummed up all this transgender hatred with just one goal in mind: political expediency. The GOP has long figured out that when your destructive pro-rich, anti-poor-and-middle-class, anti-environmental agenda isn’t popular with the majority of citizens, then you’d better find something to distract them from how much you’re trying to screw them over.

That’s where their trumped-up culture wars come in. In this case it’s something to enflame the Christian community -- which has shown itself to be disproportionately enthralled with other people’s sexuality and what they do in their bedrooms -- parents gullible enough to believe that having a transgender student in their child’s classroom or hearing the word transgender before they’re 21 years old will lead them to the same fate, and the general haters of anyone who isn’t just like them.

The Tennessee law was enacted in 2023 and prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, offering hormone therapy, or performing surgery to treat gender dysphoria, which is the psychological distress caused by incongruence between experienced gender and that assigned at birth.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dissenting opinion from the court’s three liberal justices, “If left untreated, gender dysphoria can lead to severe anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, self-harm, and suicidality.”

Leave it to those libs to be concerned about the actual human beings who’ll be affected by this decision.

Writing for the court’s conservative block, Chief Justice John Roberts said these questions should be resolved by “the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process.”

Sure, it’d be nice if we had a functioning Congress that didn’t include a party that’s built its brand on hating these people. It’d be great if we didn’t have gerrymandered states where lawmakers get to pick their voters, not the other way around. It’d be keen if we actually had proportionate representation in both chambers of Congress, instead of just the House of Representatives.

But that’s the hand we’ve dealt ourselves.

The Times’ story goes into the technical legal aspects of the decision. I don’t know much about the law, but I do know lawyers and judges can usually twist it to say whatever they want it to say. This Supreme Court has shown that to be the case.

Here’s something else I know, no law should keep people from being who they are, as long as they aren’t hurting other people, and no law should control individuals’ medical decisions, including parents when it comes to transgender children.

This isn’t some easy decision, like whether to wear the blue polo shirt or the red polo shirt to school today. These are life-changing, often gut-wrenching calls. That makes it all the more heinous that the right has decided to butt into them in search of a political advantage.

Tennessee lawmakers said the treatments had not been adequately examined in long-term medical studies and posed dangers to minors who lacked the maturity to make informed judgements. Systematic reviews commissioned by international health bodies have consistently found that both the evidence of benefits and the evidence of potential harm from the treatments is weak, the Times reported.

While the published medical evidence in support of transgender care is limited, many clinicians who provide it say it can be beneficial and even lifesaving, the Times said

We’re not talking about voodoo medicine here. These are accepted medical procedures. In other words, like with all types of treatment, it’s something the patient, or the parents in the case of children, should get to decide. Not the government. Not the church. Not the courts.

You can read the Times story here.

***

Something really interesting in the Times story was that Democrats have struggled to respond, as polls indicate broad discomfort on transgender issues, particularly when minors are involved.

That’s understandable. These are kids. We all should want what’s best for them.

But let’s try on a position that the Democrats can maybe use when talking to the center-right and swing voters they need to win over. A discussion usually works better than a lecture.

Why not just say we understand some things make some people uncomfortable, but everyone deserves the right to make decisions about their bodies and their lifestyles, as long as they don’t try to push these decisions onto others.

The LGBTQ community are people a lot like you. They simply want to live happy, fruitful lives and mind their own business. Why can’t we just leave them alone and give them the respect we’d expect from anyone else? Why can’t we coexist with them without demonizing them? What have they done to deserve to be treated so badly?

The answer to that question is nothing, no more than people who are heterosexual or live their entire lives as the gender they were designated at birth. If you stop to think about it, we’ve got more in common then we have in differences. And we really are all aspiring for the same things, the same future, the same lives for our children.

As long as the right can use hate of the “other” – immigrants, foreigners, the LGBTQ community – to divide us, they’ll always be able to screw us over to help the rich and corporations.

You really don’t have to love your neighbor. We’ll all be better off if in most cases we at least like our neighbor. The problems come when we hate our neighbor.

And it’s the Republicans who are rooting for the last of those three choices because they think it’ll be a winner for them and their rich donors.

Don’t let them win.

***

Thank you for reading my post. You can see my other writings on my blog: Musings of a Nobody. Also, please check out our newsletter: Musings of a Nobody — The Newsletter and our video blog: Musings of a Nobody — The Podcast. Please share and subscribe for free to all or some if you’d like.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/6/21/2329291/-Transphobia-In-Black-Robes?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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