If You Read the G.O.P.’s Anti-Trans Policies, You’ll See What It Really Wants
About this episode
The episode examines the wave of anti-transgender legislation in the United States, focusing on Texas Governor Greg Abbott's directive treating gender-affirming care for minors as child abuse. Branstetter, a communications strategist with the ACLU's Women's Rights and LGBTQ & HIV projects, describes how the directive weaponized child-welfare investigations and mandatory reporting against supportive families, and explains that care for minors is individualized — counseling, puberty blockers, hormones, with surgery rare. She argues denying care worsens dysphoria, depression and suicidality, and contends that bills reaching adults and carve-outs permitting nonconsensual surgery on intersex infants reveal a broader project of enforcing rigid binary gender norms. She traces the movement from North Carolina's bathroom bill and corporate backlash through Bostock v. Clayton County to DeSantis's feud with Disney, and closes by finding hope in the growing openness and online community of trans people.