As I write this, the President of the United States of America is busy posting about how hot he thinks Sydney Sweeney is and that Taylor Swift is “NO LONGER HOT.” Just a reminder that these are very normal times.
Speaking of social media, I was put in Bluesky jail for 24 hours for a post about RFK Jr. in which I may have reacted badly to the news that RFK Jr. thought cancer screenings were like, woke, or something. I’ve had cancer twice. My twin sister has had cancer twice. Cancer killed my father. (Between the three of us, by the way, there are four different kinds of cancer. Cancérmon GO! champs, over here.) So, yeah, I may have taken that a little personally. Also I think it’s morally neutral at worst for a person who has had cancer to wish cancer upon another person if said person actually has a tremendous amount of power over cancer screening recommendations.
I also called him “an absolute piece of shit” and I stand by that. To appoint and confirm someone with his ignorance and hubris to head the Department of Health and Human Services is tantamount to declaring war on the entire country. An outside enemy could only wish to wield that much harm. And we have Republicans to thank for that.
Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda so far has netted us beef tallow fries and Mexican Coke, anti-vax conspiracies, HIV/AIDS denialism and the erasure of transgender people. Oh, and the great idea to roll back preventative cancer screenings. So, yeah, fuck this guy.
The fact is, the United States is in a health care crisis. We have been for a very long time. Forever, really. We are a very sick country in every sense of the word.
For one thing, we don’t have universal health care even though we could afford it (remember, government budgets are moral documents, not just a string of numbers. What we value, which is supposed to be reflected by the people we represent, is what we decide to pay for). Instead, we let people go bankrupt and/or die for the crime of getting a disease. And that system works A-OK for the people in D.C. (who all have very good health care coverage that we pay for, by the way).
In the United States, who gets health care and what kind of health care they get is an indicator of who is valued. Who deserves to live, essentially. And the majority of Americans do not fall under the category of “valued.”
Women? No. Undocumented immigrants? No. Incarcerated people? No. Transgender people? No. Poor people? Hell, no.
That’s why we have nationwide debates about health care for these specific groups of people. Granted those debates aren’t usually framed as “Who deserves to live and who should fuck off and die,” but that’s exactly what they are. And you will never guess which side the “pro-life” party is on.
Obviously a major target of the FOAD party (aka the GOP) is transgender people. That is why healthcare for transgender people is the focus of so much debate right now. The arguments over transgender healthcare are disingenuous at best, diabolical at worst. When someone is arguing that gender-affirming care is not healthcare and thus transgender people do not need it, they are arguing that transgender people should not exist. It is wild to me how easy it is to see this whole debate as a rhetorical exercise and not about who is actually human.
Think about it. When we’re arguing over the definition of “healthcare,” we aren’t just arguing about semantics. Narrowly defining healthcare is another way to dehumanize people. So let me be clear: Gender-affirming care is healthcare. Abortion is healthcare. Addiction treatment is healthcare. Mental health treatment is healthcare. HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment is healthcare.
Recently attorneys general from across the country filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration’s anti-trans healthcare orders, according to independent journalist Erin Reed, who heads up the “Erin in the Morning” Substack channel.
The complaint points out that no federal law exists to ban transgender healthcare and that the orders “create “an atmosphere of fear and intimidation experienced by transgender individuals, their families and caregivers and the medical professionals who seek only to provide necessary, lawful care to their patients.”
The complaint continues, “No federal law prohibits, much less criminalizes, the provision or receipt of gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents. In fact, federal healthcare programs have reimbursed the provision of such care for years.”
What the result of this lawsuit will be I do not know. But I do know that it’s about damn time Democrats in power stood up for transgender people. I want to see more of it. A lot more. You can read the full complaint and see the list of states involved at on.ny.gov/46DrX9V.
