Gender-Affirming Care Is to Democrats as Gun Control Is to Republicans

This is it.

On December 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza gunned down 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, including 20 first graders between six and seven years old.

By then, we’d already endured dozens of school shootings—though we don’t know the exact number. That’s because, as we came to consider gun violence a matter of public health, the National Rifle Association successfully lobbied the government not to fund any projects related to gun control. Though the 1996 Dickey Amendment didn’t explicitly forbid collecting data on shootings, it certainly manifested that way.

If we didn’t know how many people were getting hurt by guns, we couldn’t argue that our gun policies were the problem. Or, as the NRA likes to say: guns don’t kill people; people kill people.

I remember my mother calling me after the horror of Sandy Hook, and how I just said: “I can’t talk right now.” I had a baby and a toddler, was trying to work, and absolutely would not entertain images of gunned-down first-graders. (Sorry, mom. Love you.) But in the back of my mind, I thought: this has got to be it. This has got to be the moment that the Republicans relent, and pass some sane gun control legislation.

Instead, a week after the massacre, NRA president Wayne LaPierre gave a press conference that exhausted the last bloom of optimism from my cold, dead hope.

“Politicians pass laws for Gun-Free School Zones. They issue press releases bragging about them. They post signs advertising them,” LaPierre said. “And in so doing, they tell every insane killer in America that schools are their safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.”

That’s right: the solution to school shootings was more guns in schools. He blamed the “press and political class” for being “consumed by fear and hatred of the NRA and America’s gun owners,” which led to these repeated mass shootings.

Could any statement be more cynical, and more sinister?

Well, maybe.

I’ll nominate one: “Would you rather have a living trans kid or a dead cis child?”

Or how about: “Feminist and queer affect theory offers tools to explore how affective experiences are shaped by cultural, social, and political forces. This framework provides a useful lens for understanding the persistence of negative feelings throughout and beyond gender transition, challenging the dominant view of GAMT as a linear, teleological process aimed at achieving alignment between one’s gender identity and body, ultimately leading to a coherent sense of self. This prevailing narrative is shaped by the expectation that transition should lead to improvement, implying that each step in the transition process mitigates negative feelings, ultimately “curing” gender dysphoria and improving the well-being of the TGD individual.” Per Dutch clinicians, including some of the early pioneers who claimed what we now call gender-affirming care evaporated gender dysphoria.

Or maybe this: “Gender-affirming care is medically necessary care that can be life-saving for transgender youth”—brought to you by the ACLU.

These statements include threatening a parent with their child’s suicide—often by the clinicians treating the kids—in order to pressure them to affirm; prominent gender clinicians arguing that the treatments shouldn’t make a child better; and advocacy groups insisting that the research backs the treatments.

There have been so many moments in the past three years when I thought: this is it. Systematic reviews showing no solid evidence of benefits, yet plenty suggestion of risk. Detransitioners who had breasts removed as young as twelve years old. Actual scandals, with WPATH suppressing evidence. Chase Strangio admitting that the suicide risk was not real.

I knew that my fellow liberals wouldn’t see the light until The New York Times trained it on them. But this year, we even saw real live journalism on this issue!

Still, we—Democrats, liberals, the left—have proven ourselves to be as stubborn about trans kids as Republicans are about guns. New York City’s mayor-elect is setting aside millions of dollars for the interventions that are not life-saving, evidence-based, or medically necessary. Even the centrist Democrats who won national office in the last election couldn’t bring themselves to say, “We support your right to express yourself however you please, but biological sex is real and our policies must be based on it.”

Much as the Republicans blamed the press and and political class for not allowing guns to be the solution to gun violence—and mum’s the word about reform after our latest round of shootings—my side blames conservatives for politicizing the issue. I argue that the statements I collected above show we’re guilty of that sin. We insist that the solution to detransitioners is more access to gender medicine, and that no matter how much low-quality research is churned out, what we need is more research.

What we need is to pivot. What we need is a new narrative. What we need is to be the big tent again, that welcomes diverse perspectives, elevates science above politics, and values the pursuit of truth. When can we finally say: this is it?