A little panicked about the situation for the trans folks in Florida
Hello friends. Personally I’m okay, but I’ve been bummed out by anti-trans stuff. Florida passed a law recently whose effect will be to forcibly detransition most of their 100,000 person trans population (that amounts to one in every fourteen trans adults). I’ve attached a graphic that explains the details:
Losing access to HRT is guaranteed to make trans people feel extremely depressed / helpless / suicidal. Personally, I feel so helpless to help. I have some spare estrogen and would send it to people in need–I am sure that’ll become a thing eventually. I have a former college housemate who’s a US congressman, and I emailed him to ask what could be done, and he said that if the dems can get a senate and house majority and a dem president, they can pass the Equality Act, which will make it illegal to discriminate against trans people in medical care. I was like won’t the Republicans filibuster, and he said all US senators except Sinema and Manchin are committed to filibuster reform, and those two aren’t likely to remain in office after 2024 (of course that makes keeping a Dem majority harder). This isn’t really a “write your congressman” situation: the Democratic House passed the Equality Act in its last session, and the Senate seems committed to passing it too if they can get fifty votes for filibuster reform. It really is as simple as Dems = good and Republicans = bad.
At the same time, the Dems aren’t exactly sounding the alarm about this (or abortion rights, for that matter). They seem content to try and win on this electorally. But right now, with the Presidency, they could try and use the administrative state to secure peoples’ right to get their hormones.
And in practice, the Republicans could also do the same thing, win the house and Presidency and ban trans care nationally–there is no question that they’ll try, if they can. It’s scary.
Obviously, if people can buy cocaine on the black market, trans people will be able to buy estrogen and testosterone. But the law essentially criminalizes our existence. It’s pretty scary. I also feel a responsibility as one of the few trans people with, you know, money. I’ve been donating to trans people who’re doing the organizing and legal work that we need, in particular the Transgender Law Center and Spektrum. I have no idea if these are effective orgs, but what else is there to do? Whenever I go on Twitter, there’s just so much panic, but, honestly, it’s life raft time. Get out while you can; not just out of Florida, but have a foot out of the US entirely. The only thing is, a lot of European countries have gone backwards on trans care recently, so it’s not totally clear where to go. For trans people a lot is riding on this election: a Democratic win means four more years of the blue states being a sanctuary. A Republican victory means a lot more insecurity. Even if they don’t pass nationwide legislation, they’re perfectly capable of using the regulatory state to make medical transitioning difficult or impossible.
Personally, it feels like if Joe doesn’t win, I’ll be headed out of the country soon after.
Just got to wait and see what happens, I suppose. I’m really not anxious all the time. Given the circumstances I more closely resemble the frog slowing boiling to death rather than the crabs pulling each other down as they try to scramble out of the pot. Of course I’d much rather be the super-smart octopus that reaches out of the pot and turns down the heat and then strangles the chef, but nobody has turned that into a proverb yet.
