Last week the Governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, vetoed state bill HB1570 which denied gender affirming health care to minors, even with parental permission. The legislature promptly overrode his veto and that law is now on the books in Arkansas.
The Governor, who is a Republican, described the bill as a major over-reach of the state into the private lives and medical needs of Arkansas citizens. Gender affirming health care includes not just gender-affirming surgery, but also hormone and speech therapy, and primary and psychiatric care as well. The denial of health care is simply cruel.
The current legal assault on voting rights is broadly reported and appropriately so. However, there are also 28 states in which anti-Trans legislation is moving forward, most designed to prevent trans young people from participating in sports.
Like the attempts to roll-back voting rights, these bills are solutions in search of a problem. Their supporters have not been able to point to examples where trans youth have tried to join sports teams. These bills are one more attempt to use the Trans community, and the bodies of trans individuals, to fuel fear and to profit politically.
Please note that the focus of these bills is most often on trans-girls. Trans-boys are less threatening, at least on the playing fields. Gender stereotyping and the gender binary permeate this conservative effort.
First Unitarian will accompany the Trans community, just as we accompany the BIPOC community, adding our voice to the chorus of voices singing a song of inclusion, with a lyric of power and possibility.
Some individuals have multiple identities that are being targeted. More importantly, there is only a single culture that we are attempting to change. It is manifested in assaults on particular communities, in particular ways. The culture, however, is unitary.
Racism, sexism, transphobia all attempt to maintain a narrow group of persons as powerful, with agency, and to disempower everyone else. All of these assaults are designed to keep us “tightly bound” to a system of power and privilege that diminishes most of us.
Some members of our community have one or more of these identities and the church supports them individually. Our accompaniment is of these entire communities. All of us are at the side of all of them. All of us work for a hopeful future in which each of us can get free.
If you want to hear a clear but hopeful discussion of the anti-Trans legislation, I commend this CBS News interview with activist Raquel Willis (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1z8Ga_x0is).
Willis closes the interview with a call to welcome the ‘windows of opportunity” that Trans-activism can open, onto a world with less restriction on all of us as we liberate ourselves to be who we are.
May that be so.
Blessings,
Bill