Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis decided to celebrate Pride Month by having the state Health Department ask the board that regulates physicians in the state to basically ban gender-affirming health care for trans people under the age of 18. The DeSantis administration is also seeking to ban Medicaid coverage for trans folks of any age—including adults—who need gender-affirming care like puberty blockers, surgeries, and hormonal therapy, as reported by NBC News.
It’s not an exaggeration to describe this as violence. Trans folks of all ages (and all incomes) deserve safe, age-appropriate, gender-affirming health care from trusted medical professionals when they are comfortable receiving it. Gender-affirming care is life-saving care. It is not optional. Like all health care, it is a human right. So, of course, conservatives want to take it away.
RELATED: Ohio Republicans want trans girls to have genital exams in order to play sports
If the Medicaid change goes into effect, it would negatively impact the lives of at least 9,000 trans folks in the state, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
Vivian Topping, director of advocacy and civic engagement at the Equality Federation, and Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights
And where is this coming from? In short, the state Agency for Health Care Administration dropped a report of more than 40 pages of easily combatted anti-trans drivel on Thursday. The report claims gender-affirming care is essentially both ineffective and under-researched, neither of which is true.
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Among other lies in the report, it suggests there are high rates of “detransition” for trans youth, which is not true. It also claims no evidence supports gender-affirming care being positive for trans youth, which is also not true. It also suggests social transitions for children (like name and pronoun changes) are not helpful for trans kids, which is again, patently untrue.
Clearly, it’s not hard to debunk the bad pseudoscience cited in the report, and it’s also not hard to see this as an attack on low-income trans folks.
In terms of trans youth, Joseph Ladapo, who serves as the surgeon general for the state of Florida, put in the request to the Florida Board of Medicine for the ban on gender-affirming care for minors, also on Thursday. So, two terrible and related but technically different attacks on trans folks in the state.
None of this is surprising coming from the DeSantis administration—DeSantis has, as Daily Kos covered at length, already signed into law the infamous Don’t Say Gay bill, as well as anti-trans sports legislation. (DeSantis actually signed that discriminatory sports legislation into law on the first day of Pride Month 2021, so it appears he gets a special kick out of it.)
Also sad? Florida wouldn’t even be alone in trying to stop low-income trans folks from accessing gender-affirming care. In fact, it would join Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, and Missouri in explicitly excluding gender-affirming trans health care coverage for Medicaid recipients.
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