Unlikely Bedfellows: Red State Legislators & Blue State Parents Battling The Transgender Narrative
By Tina Traster
You would think a liberal, left-leaning New Yorker would reflexively reject a handful of Red States’ efforts to make it illegal for minors to receive gender-affirming medication or surgery. You would think that interference in making choices about one’s body would make a pro abortion liberated female angry and want to protest. You would think that someone who’s done her best over the course of her career as a journalist and at times an activist would view such political moves as catering to a constituency that thrives on culture wars that feed off of a parochial world view.
Counter to everything that seems obvious, this liberal, left-leaning, blue-state female journalist and activist is also a mother who has been forced to reckon with the issue first-hand and finds herself weirdly aligned with Red State thinking on medical intervention for children.
Even though Red states and their evangelical base are trying to squelch the rights of transgender people because it fits in with their culture wars narrative, and admittedly that’s hard to cotton to, parents including the liberal left who are worried about their children are paying attention.
Opposition to these measures are met with resistance from the American Civil Liberties Union and transactivists who repeatedly recite the simple trope: Allow youth to transition by way of puberty blockers when they’re young or via cross-sex hormones and eventually top and/or bottom surgeries or they’ll kill themselves.
Put like that, it seems unfathomable any parent would not briskly walk, no run, to the pharmaceutical dispensary with their gender dysphoric youth and get them started on hormone treatment. But what thousands of parents know — blue and red states alike — is that putting children or teens on hormones changes the course of their natural biological life, is not an easy decision, and that much research remains to be done despite the same tired claim that denying dysphoric children will be harmful.
Medical experts have warned that the medication could lead to lower bone density and might hamper bone growth, and the drugs used are controversial — but that’s often mentioned in the mainstream press as an afterthought.
A paper in 2018 from the American Psychiatric Association said there was “significant and longstanding medical and psychiatric literature demonstrating clear benefits of medical and surgical interventions” for transgender people. I can agree with that, provided we are talking about a slim percentage of the population, and presumably people who are old enough to truly know their own minds and to understand the implications of making lifelong decisions that include a lifetime of medication as well as loss of fertility. What we should question is how this applies to clusters of children and teens in “friend groups” who are declaring themselves trans all at once and finding encouragement in schools and in their communities to move toward medicalization.
Everyone who is seemingly on the right side of human rights and the right side of history associates this issue with hard-fought battles won by the LBG community. I understand that. Transgender rights have been adroitly piggy-backed on this long-simmering movement and so it is easy to sweep up blue staters and liberal thinkers. This is a no-brainer if you’re on the outside looking in. If it’s not your child who you perceive to be in danger’s way.
The transactivists have an answer for this. These children, they say, receive counseling. Puberty blockers are reversable. Most states require parental consent. And the favorite: “You’d rather have a live son than a dead daughter.”
Scores of parents who have accepted their gay children, who would be the first to protest antigay rights or march to protect abortion rights, are caught up in their own dysphoria. Having always disdained any undermining of basic human rights, they find themselves aligned with a strange bedfellow.
What unites them with us is not necessarily shared philosophical beliefs but rather a primal parenting instinct that says “no, my daughter is not trans. No, my son is not trans.” A belief that what’s undermining or unsettling their child is not necessarily gender dysphoria but a host of underlying social and emotional issues as well as other psychological comorbidities. What these parents have in common is a common experience. They know their children. They believe and are listening to their inner voice of skepticism and doubt. They feel lost and adrift and helpless as they find themselves up against a tsunami of resistance when it comes to trying to help their child without being accused of being transphobic or trying to “pray away” the affliction.
They point to the growing population of “desisters” and “detransitioners” who are eager to warn a generation that’s gripped with gender fluidity about the mistakes they’ve made and must live with.
They say “please, just please listen to us.” Because they feel no one will.
And no matter how left-leaning, blue-state liberal they may be, they find themselves aware of proposed legislation that would slow down medical interference for teens who believe they might be trans — legislation that is wrapped in a culture war bow.
So they’re watching Arkansas and Alabama and Tennessee — states considering such measures.
The Arkansas legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill that would make it illegal for transgender minors to receive gender-affirming but Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas has vetoed the bill. The Arkansas State Legislature has overriden the veto.
Supporters of the bill say it would protect young people from undergoing irreversible medical treatments, and alas that is what makes unlikely allies of Red State lawmakers and Blue State liberal, post-hippy, Rainbow flag waving, artsy, eco-conscious, blue-as-the-ocean parents who simply want to yank their children away from the edge of the cliff and will use any hook that’s available.
