I know there's a ton of bad news coming from a lot of various states these days, but I want to gently push back on a narrative that I see developing. It is the idea that the powers that be in various states are testing draconian legislation that targets trans kids, and then they roll it out to others.
I recognize that this is so that overworked and overwhelmed people who are like well, I don't live in Tennessee* and I'm not trans, won't push it to the pile of terrible things that don't happen to affect me. I get it. I am working on my own local electeds and trying to push them to do things, and don't always have the bandwidth to figure out what support folks in other places need right now.
But, just like there is no way to legislate abortion without essentially legislating every pregnancy, you cannot legislate trans bodies and not affect cis bodies. You can not.
We've already seen this with things like the Olympics, where cisgender athletes who fall outside the designated hormone values are subjected to physicals that include inspections of their genitals, and then a public announcement that they are deemed abnormal and unable to compete without altering their bodies.
You cannot say that people can't have plastic surgery to change their bodies, and not impact people who are recovering from cancer treatments where parts of their bodies were removed.
You cannot legislate who gets to take hormones or be on hormone blockers without also affecting people who are cancer patients, experiencing early onset puberty, and menopause.
Basically any time we legislate bodies, who, and how they get to be, and where they get to be, it involves all of us.
*Not picking on Tennessee, just one example right now.
