Month: April 2021

LACKING ISSUES PEOPLE CARE ABOUT, THE GOP DECLARES WAR ON TRANS KIDS

Pity the poor Republicans. While a Democratic administration showers the country with vaccinations and stimulus checks, the GOP has been madly searching for an issue that might capture the hearts and minds of the American electorate.  

Hark, they think they found one: beating up on transgender kids.

So far this year, Republican lawmakers have introduced at least 117 bills in 33 state legislatures targeting the transgender community. The vast majority of them are aimed at adolescents. Arkansas just passed a law prohibiting medical professionals from providing gender-affirming health care for trans kids.  Similar bills have been introduced in 19 other states.  These are the same Republican wizards who tout liberty and the right to choose when it comes to wearing facemasks in a deadly pandemic. Their legislation slams the door on the liberty of parents and doctors to choose a course of treatment for transgender children.

Now comes Florida, always a contender in the arena of brazen legislative obnoxiousness. The state’s Republican-controlled House passed a measure that not only prohibits trans girls from playing girl sports, but also requires student athletes to undergo genitalia inspections in case of a “gender challenge.” 

This is political child abuse. It’s a repugnant assault on vulnerable kids who are struggling to be accepted for who they are, genitalia notwithstanding.  No need to take my word for it. All of the applicable professional organizations have unequivocally expressed their abhorrence with these bills:  American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, among many others.   

The people pushing this vile agenda have only one objective: to light a fire under the GOP’s far right base. This is being produced by the same folks who used the fear of gay marriage to turn out conservative Republican voters in 2004.  Remember that ditsy trope of “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve?”   

Turns out that Adam and Steve have been happily married for close to a decade, and there isn’t a locust in sight. So the party with no economic, environmental or health care plan, had to find another marginal group for the cultural warriors to take on.  Enter the transgender adolescents.

“This is the wedge issue that will bring suburban women back to the polls and increase their support for Republicans,” Penny Nance, one of the leaders of the anti-trans campaign, told Politico. “Republicans would be foolish not to lean into it.”

In what moral universe is it acceptable to inflict children with untold trauma and pain in order to raise campaign funds and win votes? Nance and her merry band of trans smashers are so singularly focused on the Machiavellian politics of their movement that they don’t, even for a minute, see the kids they are hurting. 

They recognize neither their humanity nor their fragility. Instead, they are using these young transgender folks as nothing more than pawns in their game. And as symbols of a “woke, leftist agenda” devoted to disrupting the natural order of life by turning boys into girls, and girls into boys. As their posters declare, “God made only two sexes: male and female.”  And neither the twain shall meet.

On the contrary, that twain has been meeting quite regularly for hundreds of years. Ancient Greek mythology is filled with references to female souls in male bodies.  The Roman poet, Ovid, wrote about a man named Tiresias who became a woman. An 18th century French politician, the Chevalier d’Eon, spent the first half of her life as a man and the second half as a woman. In this country, records document the lives of transgender people going back to the 1600s. 

This latest anti-trans mishegas is aimed at what pollsters (here and here) describe as a shrinking subset of conservatives who take personal offense with others who are substantially different than themselves. Over the decades, this is the cohort that opposed racial integration, affirmative action, immigration and marriage equality. Now they are gunning for transgender kids, convinced that gender transitioning is just another crazy phase some teens are going through, like lip piercings or playing Fortnite.

There isn’t room in this space to cite the voluminous medical evidence that establishes, beyond any reasonable doubt, that this is not a trend. (If you want to dig deeper, you can do so here, here, here and here.)

A small sampling:

  • Gender dysphoria, is a medically recognized diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association. It refers to a “marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and their assigned gender, lasting at least six months.”  There are specific procedures and tests involved in reaching that diagnosis.
  • Puberty blocking medication can be prescribed to delay physical body changes associated with adolescence, allowing a patient time to decide if they want to transition. If they do make that decision, in consultation with parents and physicians, they can begin taking hormone therapy at the age of 16 or later. (These treatments would become illegal under Republican legislation.)
  • One study reported that 50 percent of untreated trans kids have seriously contemplated suicide. Another found that more than 50 percent of transgender males and 30 percent of trans females actually attempted to kill themselves. Many succeeded. The administration of puberty blockers and/or hormone treatments substantially reduced suicide attempts. 

That’s the empirical approach to grasping this issue. There is another route, one centered more in the heart than in the brain. While we may be initially shocked, unsettled and confused when our nephew becomes our niece, it’s not about us. It’s about her. We don’t need to fully and immediately understand. We just need to keep on loving our niece, accepting her decision and supporting her on her own terms. That path will lead her to more happiness, authenticity and opportunity for a life well lived.

If only the Republicans don’t screw it up.

CONGRESSIONAL ABDICATION NEEDS TO END, AND SO DOES THE FILIBUSTER

With the stroke of a pen, Joe Biden made many of us smile again.  The Muslim ban is gone. The Paris climate accord is back. The DREAMers are saved from deportation. Transgender Americans are welcomed back into the military. What a euphoric breath of fresh air after a four-year bout of Trump derangement syndrome! 

The trouble with euphoria, of course, is that it’s a temporary condition. As the late poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote, “. . .even in heaven they don’t sing all the time.”  Although some of Biden’s sweet songs will keep playing for at least the next three years and nine months, at some point the music will stop, and the magic pen will be in the hands of a new president. 

Therein lies our problem. The structure of our government has become so flawed and broken that we have come to accept these massive bi-polar waves of transformation every four years. A Republican senate stonewalled Barak Obama, so he turned to executive orders to deal with immigration, climate change and human rights.  Donald Trump molded his presidency around undoing everything Obama did.  Then along comes Joe to undo what Trump did. 

The last thing the authors of our Constitution wanted was a government run by executive edict.  They’d had enough of the monarchy stuff. They saw Congress as the strongest of the three branches, and vested it with the power to enact laws through deliberation.  The president would then execute those laws.  It was the founders’ way of eliminating policy limbo, of protecting us from the vertigo of a revolving door of presidential fiat. 

And presidential fiat is precisely what we have now.  Congress, particularly the Senate, has abdicated it’s role of lawmaking. One study, for example, found that Congress has spent only a few days over the past five years even talking about the pressing issue of immigration, with no resolution.  The record is similar on other critical issues.  As a result, the president has become a one-person legislature.

The United States Senate was once touted as the world’s greatest deliberative body. Sadly, it has morphed into a dysfunctional morass. Gone are the days of scintillating debate and creative problem-solving. In their place is a dreary, vacuous rhetoric on an intellectual par with a dismissive schoolyard taunt.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says Democrats will do whatever they have to in order to pass legislation on gun control, voting rights and infrastructure, even if it means eliminating the filibuster. That’s the rule requiring 60 votes in the 100-member chamber to pass most measures.

Comes now Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who needs to gain only one GOP senate seat in the next election to retake the majority. After hissing at Schumer’s quest to pass a liberal agenda on the heels of blowing up the filibuster, McConnell went into full toxic na-na-na-na-boo-boo mode.  If Democrats kill the filibuster, McConnell said his party, once it regains majority status, will “ram through” sweeping abortion restrictions, a hardening of the U.S.-Mexico border, nation-wide anti-union laws, defunding of Planned Parenthood and expansion of gun rights. Some of us are old enough to remember when Republican leaders designed legislative agendas based on well thought out policy concepts, rather than their value as weaponry.

We probably shouldn’t have been surprised to hear McConnell trot out the cold war trope of mutual assured destruction. In his mind, the Democrats passing voting rights protections by a one-vote majority, is a nuclear bomb, and must be met with a commensurate warhead of, say,  draconian abortion restrictions.  The strategy, of course, is to leave both sides so afraid of their opponent’s agenda that neither push the nuclear button. (See the Cuban Missile Crisis.)

At least so far, mutual assured destruction has protected us from the apocalypse by creating an absence of nuclear war.  The problem with transporting that strategy into the legislative arena, however, is that we end up with an absence of legislation.  And that is precisely the dysfunctional mess we have been in for some time.  The filibuster rule has so paralyzed the Senate that it no longer even attempts to deal with the pressing issues of the day.  

The Democrats need to call McConnell’s bluff. Drop the damn nuclear bomb already. Blow up the filibuster, pass strong voting rights protections, along with gun safety, immigration reform and a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage.   Let the legislative process play out the way the founders intended and the Constitution provides. 

Lawmaking was placed in the hands of Congress principally because legislators are ultimately accountable to the people in their districts or states. By sizeable majorities, those people support Row v. Wade, union rights and sensible gun laws, and oppose anti-immigration policies and defunding Planned Parenthood. If Republicans regain control of the Senate, they would be quickly throwing it away by enacting McConnell’s punitive agenda. Call his bluff. Even if he carries out his threat, voters will have an opportunity to respond in the next election.  Either way is better than a paralyzed Congress and the revolving door of executive orders.

During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison described the Senate as a “necessary fence” to protect “the people against their rulers.”  In this aspirational vision, deliberation, shared thoughts and healthy give-and-take before a simple majority vote would serve democracy far better than the king-like whims of a president.   Unfortunately, the Senate subsequently stumbled its way into paralysis, first through the filibuster rule, and more recently by a hyper partisanship centered on playing to the party base. 

Madison’s fence is sorely needed today, more than ever. It will not be easy to get there. But all journeys begin with a single step. 

It’s time to take that first step by killing the filibuster, and returning the Senate to majority rule.  

EPILOGUE:  Out of total disrespect for the timing of this post, Senator Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, just announced that he will never vote to kill or weaken the filibuster. To quote a former president: “Sad.”   In politics, however, “never” can have a fairly short life. (See “Read my lips: No new taxes.”)