As 2023 draws to an inglorious end, some news came through on Friday that gave me an unexpected jolt of hope. I have spent much of the year watching in horror and trying to document a relentless legal assault on queer and trans people. About 20 states have passed laws limiting access to gender-affirming care for transgender and non-binary people, and several have banned transgender and non-binary people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
So it was shocking — in a good way, for once — to hear these words from Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, as he vetoed a bill that would have banned puberty blockers and hormones and gender-affirming surgeries for trans and non-binary minors in Ohio. and prevented trans girls and women from participating in sports as their chosen gender:
“If House Bill 68 were to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, the government, knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most — the parents,” DeWine said in prepared remarks. . . “Parents make decisions about the most precious thing in their lives, their child, and none of us, none of us, should underestimate the weight and difficulty of those decisions.”
DeWine, in placing his opposition to the bill on the chosen battleground of far-right activists — parental rights — was using an idiom that is both deeply familiar to me and yet has all but disappeared from our national political discourse: that of a mainstream, Midwestern Republican . It's a voice I know well because it's a voice I've heard all my life from my Republican grandparents in the Midwest.
I didn't agree with all of their beliefs, especially as I got older. But I understood where they were coming from. My grandfather, a combatant in the Pacific Theater in World War II, believed that a strong military was essential to American security. My grandmother was a nurse and believed that science, medicine and innovation made America stronger. They made sure their children and grandchildren went to college — education was a critical element of their philosophy of self-reliance. And above all, they believed that government should be small and stay out of people's lives as much as humanly possible. This latter belief, in individual freedom and individual responsibility, was the foundation of their politics.
And so I'm not surprised that the defeats keep coming for anti-transgender activists. At the polls, far-right candidates in swing states tried to win over voters with vulgar messages about children undergoing gruesome surgeries and being pumped full of unnecessary drugs. But to match after matchthe tactic failed.
Legally, the verdict was more mixed, which is not surprising given how politically polarized the judiciary has become. This week a a federal judge in Idaho issued a preliminary injunction that the ban on transgender care for minors could not be enforced because it violated children's 14th Amendment rights and that “parents should have the right to make the most fundamental decisions about how to care for their children.” The state is expected to appeal the decision.
In June, federal court prevented the ban of Arkansas on gender-affirming care for minors. “The evidence showed that the prohibited medical treatment improves the mental health and well-being of patients,” the decision said, “and that, by prohibiting it, the State undermined the interests it claims to advance” in protecting children and protection of medicine. morality. In 2021, Asa Hutchinson, then governor, had vetoed the ban on similar grounds to DeWine, but the Arkansas Legislature overrode his veto. (Ohio's legislature also has a Republican supermajority and may decide to override DeWine's veto.)
In other states, such as Texas and Missouri, courts have allowed bans to take effectforcing families to make very difficult decisions about whether to travel to receive care or switch to a different state. The issue looks set to reach the Supreme Court soon. The ACLU asked the Supreme Court to hear his appeal in Tennessee's denial of care on behalf of a 15-year-old transgender girl. Given how quickly and decisively the court moved to gut abortion rights, it seems highly likely that the conservative supermajority could choose to severely limit access to transgender health care for children or even adults.
But maybe not. After all, the overturning of Roe has deeply upset the country, unleashing a backlash that has brought unexpected victories to Democrats and abortion rights advocates. Ohio voters overwhelmingly chose to enshrine the right to terminate a pregnancy in the state Constitution.
That's why I think DeWine's veto speaks to a much bigger truth: Americans simply don't want the government making decisions about families' private medical care. Polls on abortion a wide range of opinions about the morality of terminating a pregnancy at various points until viability, but one thing is clear: A large majority of Americans believe that the decision to have an abortion is not the government's business.
The rapidly changing norms around gender make many people's heads spin, and I understand how unsettling that can be. Gender is one of the most basic building blocks of identity, and although the many variations of gender have been with us for millennia, the way these changes are experienced feels, to some people, like a huge lifestyle disruption. them. Even among people who consider themselves liberal or progressive, there is a sense that gender-affirming care has become too easily accessible and impressionable children are making life-changing decisions based on social media trends.
The fact that even liberal European countries are curtailing care for transgender children is curtailing some media coverage of transgender care in the United States has drawn an unacceptable line. But this is one misleading perception. No democracy in Europe has been banned, let alone criminalized, care, as many states in the United States have done. What has happened is that under increasing pressure from the right, politicians in some countries have begun to limit access to certain kinds of treatments for children through their socialized health systems, in which the government pays for care and always sets limits on types available. In these systems, budget considerations have always determined how many people will be able to access treatments. But private care remains legal and mostly accessible to those who can afford it.
Republicans are passing draconian laws in the states where they have total control, laws that could potentially lead to parents accused of child abuse to support their transgender children or threaten doctors who treat transgender children with criminal convictions. These statutes have no analogue in free Europe, but they have powerful resonances laws in Russia, which increasingly criminalizes every aspect of queer life. These extreme policies have no place in any democratic society.
Which brings me back to my midwestern Republican grandparents, Goldwater and Reagan partisans to their core. My grandfather died long before Donald Trump ran for president, and 2016 was the first presidential election in which my grandmother did not vote for the Republican nominee. But he didn't vote for Hillary Clinton, choosing another candidate he declined to name. Like many Republicans, she didn't really like Clinton, and one of the big reasons was her lifelong opposition to government health care. She didn't want government bureaucrats coming between her and her doctors, she told me.
I think many, many Americans agree with that sentiment. Trans people are no different. They don't want government bureaucrats in their private business.
“I've said for years that trans people are a priority for our enemies and an afterthought for our friends,” Gillian Branstetter, a trans strategist at the ACLU, told me. “I've made it my business to try to help people understand that trans rights are human rights, not just because trans people are human people, but because the rights we're fighting for are based on really fundamental democratic principles like individualism and individualism. self-determination.”
These are core American values, but 2024 is an election year, and even though transphobia has proven to be a loser at the ballot box, many Republicans are sure to beat that drum anyway. Mike DeWine makes me hope that some Republicans will remember what was once a founding principle of their party and embrace the simple plain truth of my ancestors: Keep the government out of my life and let me be free to live as I do choose.
