The next bathroom bill

You can see it coming from here.

The Texas House LGBTQ Caucus is counting on Democrats flipping the Republican-held House to keep another possible ‘bathroom bill’ off the table during the 2021 legislative session.

Texas Republicans last week rallied around a child custody case of a Dallas 7-year-old whose mother says is transgender, pledging to intervene against children’s gender transition. Members of the caucus, who fought the controversial “Chick-fil-A bill”, said flipping the House will be key to winning the brewing battle over the care of transgender children.

“The only way we’re going to avoid that is by flipping the House,” Rep. Celia Israel, D-Austin, said at a caucus town hall at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs. “We are nine seats away from controlling the flow of legislation in the House so that we don’t feed that beast anymore.”

[…]

Rep. Julie Johnson, a freshman Dallas Democrat, said the government has no right to intervene in the “personal decision” for children to transition. The child lives in Johnson’s district.

She agreed that winning the House is the best strategy to combat bills such as the one promised by Rep. Matt Krause to ban puberty blockers for children to transition. Johnson noted that the Fort Worth Republican also authored the “Chick-fil-A bill” banning governments from taking “adverse action” against someone based on affiliation to a religious organization.

LGBTQ advocates say the law, which gained traction after San Antonio’s city council booted Chick-fil-A from its airport for its donations to Christian organizations that oppose expanding LGBTQ rights, gives a license to discriminate.

“He’s going to be filing those bills, so hopefully if Democrats are in charge those bills won’t get a hearing,” Johnson said.

See here for the background. I agree with Reps. Israel and Johnson, and I daresay Republicans also believe that whether a bill targeting trans kids gets a House hearing or not depends very much on which party has a majority. There’s not really anything else to say at this time, so let me encourage you to read this Twitter thread, and reflect on the fact that Greg Abbott et al would consider that man to be an abusive parent.

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2 Responses to The next bathroom bill

  1. Jason Hochman says:

    I read the Twitter thread, and that man is a bit misguided, to say the least. There is scant evidence that encouraging young children to “transition” is a good idea. When my sister was little, she had toy ponies and wanted to be a horse. My parents are smart, and didn’t buy her a saddle to wear and start researching a diet of oats and hay. But they let her crawl around and whinny. When my sister was born, I wanted my own baby, and my parents bought me a doll, with red hair, just like my sister. I went around with my mother and carried my baby, too. My parents didn’t start going crazy and transitioning me. In fact, if a man is going to be a father, he needs to participate in child rearing.

    People used to be smarter. We have an age of consent, and young children are not considered competent to be sexually active with a partner, yet we are going to believe that they understand gender and sexuality so well that they know they are the wrong gender?

    The drugs used to delay puberty are not FDA approved for that purpose. They can have serious side effects. Giving them to a child is going to warp the child and cause the child to want to transition. Again, their is scant long term evidence about the outcomes of this practice–delaying puberty really got started in just the last ten years or so.

    The gender “non binary” movement is ridiculous. They argue that gender is a “spectrum,” if so, we are all “non binary” and the non binary folks are not a special victim class. We are all on a spectrum, and we can all move on the spectrum. I can find men more masculine and less masculine than I. Maybe the special people are balanced at the exact midpoint of the spectrum, but if for example this weekend, they spend all day watching football, or wear something pink, they could be tipped right off that midpoint. The fact is, that there are women who watch sports who are still women, there are men who do flower arranging who are still men. If your daughter wants to play with Tonka trucks or your son loves his home ec class at school, they are normal. If you consider yourself non binary, I hope that it makes you happy, and wish you the best, but you’re wrong.

    Also the argument that some animals change their sex or are naturally hermaphroditic. That’s true but these animals are invertebrates, perhaps a few amphibians, too, but no mammals or birds. So how much do you have in common with a flatworm? So yes, pushing gender change on your kid is irresponsible. Let them dress how they want, women have been cross dressing for years now (used to be that women wore dresses not pants), let them play with the toys and games they enjoy, but don’t poison their minds and bodies with the idea of transition and hormone blockers. The idea of a sex change is a myth anyway–it’s just cosmetic–nobody born a man is going to get pregnant, ever. It’s science folks.

  2. C.L. says:

    #TimothyLearyStringOfConsciousness, that was.

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