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Who Is Mad At Joe Biden Today? It is Big Trans.
Wonkette recently reported how the New York Times was just asking questions about, “Does Joe Biden support hacking up our precious tiny schoolchildren?” And just over a week ago President Joe Biden put out a statement saying “Of course we do not support hacking up our schoolchildren, who are precious. And tiny.” Which, okay, but the statement went on to take the bait from the Times and add that the administration also does not support surgical healthcare for trans minors when treating gender dysphoria.
This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson quickly responded, saying, “Health care decisions for young people belong between a patient, their family, and their health care provider. Trans youth are no exception.” Since then, the situation has only gotten worse.
Over the weekend Montana state rep Zooey Zephyr collected signatures from 11 other out trans and/or non-binary state legislators on an open letter calling for
… an unequivocal signal that President Biden and his administration will oppose any attempt to ban puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and surgery for transgender youth, that it will reject any policy that discriminates against transgender Americans, and that it will follow medical best practices as set out in WPATH when it comes to allowing care for transgender people.
The problem for the trans community and the White House is that such an unequivocal signal is unlikely at best. Just two weeks ago, at the same time the Times was racing towards publishing that Old Joe was all in on harming children, the Supreme Court announced it was taking up the case of United States v. Skrmetti. In that case, the Biden Department of Justice intervened to protect gender-related care for trans and non-binary youth only insofar as it relates to non-surgical interventions. This appears from multiple actions to be the line of defense Biden has drawn.
To be clear, this is a much easier line to hold against the current anti-trans onslaught in which literally half of all states have passed a ban on gender-related care for trans and gender-nonconforming youth. It’s not a difficult position to justify in a world in which there are real worriees that courts might leverage irrational fears of targeting children for surgical genital mutilation to end all trans-related health care.
The twelve legislators who signed the open letter to Biden surely understand this. There are oftentimes important conversations to be had about the benefits of harm reduction versus eradication. We here at yr Wonkette are all in on burning cis-sexism to the ground, but we are not all in on throwing actual real live people under the bus so that one day our world can be perfect.
Needle exchanges and safe injection sites aren’t in conflict with the goal of ending addiction. Likewise bringing US v. Skrmetti to defend some trans healthcare is not inherently an attack on other aspects of care, such as surgery. The problem for Biden isn’t that he’s pursuing harm reduction while trans advocates are pushing for eradication of cis-sexism. The problem is Biden is keeping alive a debate which is as harmful to trans people as the debate of “Is Biden old?” is to Joe’s own reelection campaign. Even taking the most pro-trans position possible in the debate over, “Do trans people have a right to care?” is harmful. Doing so implicitly concedes that there is no right, because rights are not debated: they are enforced.
Wonkette’s new, official favorite dead lawyer (because I have made it so with my unlimited power) is Charles Hamilton Houston. Houston is known as The Man Who Killed Jim Crow for crafting a strategy in which he progressively dismantled the underlying assumptions of Plessy v. Ferguson, before his protege, Thurgood Marshall, finally demolished the remaining, foundation-less edifice in Brown v. Board of Education (Topeka, Kansas). Houston’s campaign fought limited and specific battles, one at a time, in a manner similar to Biden’s targeted efforts in US v. Skrmetti. This is not a bad thing. We can even see how well picking one’s battles worked in opposing racism. What Houston very importantly did not do was make public statements along the way announcing his opposition to the integration of elementary schools. This is the mistake the White House has made.
The Times, hostile as ever to progressive causes, set a trap for Biden and, as competent as he has been in other areas, he jumped right in. There is no scenario in which his administration wins favorable national coverage for his nuanced, moral stand on the health care of trans children. This was an issue in which the best thing for kids was also the smartest political choice: just say nothing. Where for a day there was an article about the staffers to an assistant secretary communicating three years ago with the health professionals then-updating recommendations for medical treatment, now there are multiple stories about the White House itself, none of them good. Trans advocates are calling attention to Biden’s betrayal of the promise to “always” have the backs of bullied gender outsiders, right wing outlets are making hay selling theocrats the almost entirely false story of how Biden supports transing their kids with radical, untested, experimental, irreversible drugs, and CNN, WaPo and the Times can all legitimately (for once) crow about Biden’s latest political misstep.
No one wins here. Trans people want (and deserve!) a statement taking back Biden’s opposition to rational, effective healthcare including surgical healthcare — that by the way is used much more by cis kids, who have been told by precisely zero states that they cannot have boob jobs or chest reconstruction. But releasing such a statement at this point can only hurt Biden’s reelection campaign, which threatens not only democracy, but also every trans person ever, should Trump be returned to power.
It’s not at all clear how any of this ends well, so we at yr Wonkette will continue to hope for better access to care for all trans people, old and young — and pregnant people and babies and indigenous folks and, fuck it, let’s just say everybody — and for Biden to quit the malarkey and learn the age-old lesson my great grandma was fond of repeating over Neapolitan ice cream: “If you can’t say something nice, shut your fucking mouth.”
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