Cretinous and disgraceful

Kevin Drum's shtick is tamping down excessive anxiety among his comrades on the loosely liberal side of the political spectrum. But not on this topic; he's disgusted by the stupidity and cruelty of too many of his credulous fellow citizens. The damage to young humans must take precedence.

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Moral panics like this one generally produce nothing but misery and oppression, and the campaign against gender-affirming care is headed down the same road. It's one thing to display some caution toward procedures that haven't been heavily studied and still have unknown consequences—this is happening in some European countries—but it's quite another to ban them altogether out of bigotry and ignorance. That's what the militant zealots in Alabama are doing, along with their militant zealots in two dozen other states.

In the absence of strong evidence in either direction, decisions like these should generally be left up to the patient, their doctor, and their parents. They're the ones best able to make case-by-case judgments. At most, given the current state of our knowledge, states might be justified in mandating a few guardrails (counseling, time restrictions, etc.). But that's it. Banning gender affirming care entirely for minors—the only age at which certain procedures can be done—is nothing more than jumping on the bandwagon of never-ending ugliness that has broken out in the Republican Party in the age of Trump. It's cretinous and disgraceful.

Witch hunts seem to be a recurrent theme of U.S. life. The 1980s saw the great Satanic Panic which inspired terrified parents to dig under daycare centers searching for hidden tunnels where ritual abuse was practiced. Eventually, after childcare workers were put on trial and many cases collapsed, that alluring madness faded. A few people spent many years in prison for "crimes" that have been understood never to have happened. Might the attractiveness of the theory have had something to do with the enormous increase during that decade in the proportion of women with children working outside the home and so the increase in daycare facilities?

Today we live amid a gender-fluidity panic. Beating up on trans kids, trans-curious kids, and their parents is in vogue. How many victims will be left in the wake of ignorant fears, weaponized by Republican political gain?