The news out of Florida and Texas exemplifies a larger conservative trend

On Mar 10, 2022

Cruel. Really, that’s the only way to describe many conservatives’ determination to pick fights with LGBTQ Americans, and with transgender children in particular.

And on Monday, Texas Children’s Hospital decided to stop providing hormone therapies for transgender children, in response to recent developments in the state. In February, prompted by a legal opinion released by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter directing state agencies to conduct investigations into gender-affirming care for transgender youths as “child abuse.”

Even if these attacks don’t succeed in the long run, they’re already taking a psychological toll on LGBTQ Americans and their families.

For instance, while neither Paxton’s opinion nor Abbott’s letter is legally binding, both have terrified some parents. One mother in Dallas told CNN’s Alisha Ebrahimji that she intends to move to California because she wants her 6-year-old transgender daughter to “be somewhere where there are actually laws in the books that protect her instead of trying to erase her.”

Florida isn't the only state pushing legislation that could be harmful to LGBTQ students

And as Emmett Schelling, the executive director of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, put it to NPR, “The state leadership has said, ‘We would rather see dead children … instead of happy, loved, supported, thriving trans kids that are alive and well.'”

The news out of Florida and Texas exemplifies a much larger pattern. Many conservative parents, school board officials and legislators across the US appear to be working overtime to undermine the rights and status of LGBTQ Americans, as seen in recent months in the dizzying number of challenges to books about sexual identity and the surging wave of anti-transgender legislation.

Together, these attacks, which leverage the language of care and love as a vehicle for hate, threaten to scale back hard-won LGBTQ protections.

‘There’s a fantasy going on’

The movement against LGBTQ Americans is part of a broader assault on attempts to acknowledge and understand the experiences of marginalized groups.

The attacks on teaching about sexual orientation and gender are similar to the attacks on teaching so-called “critical race theory.” Conservative groups that oppose instruction about such topics allege that students are being indoctrinated, recruited or, to use an especially loaded term, “groomed,” even though teaching about a topic is hardly the same as asking someone to take a stand or change their identity.

“There’s a fantasy going on that children are being indoctrinated,” the UC Berkeley philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler told CNN. “Parents and communities want to exercise forms of censorship to stop their children from knowing about how the world is being organized and how different people are living their lives.”

Butler, the author of the 1990 book “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” added that this urge to police and restrict the topics of classroom instruction stems, at least in part, from many conservatives’ belief that their entire existence is in danger.

“Right-wing movements appeal to an enormous anxiety people have that their worlds are falling apart and that gender and critical race theory…

The news out of Florida and Texas exemplifies a larger conservative trend

‘There’s a fantasy going on’

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