"I marvel at the courage of transgender young people today who are sharing themselves with their families and this world despite the toxicity and the hate that too often emanates from the building behind me and from politicians within it."
I don't think it's too much to ask elected Democrats to show 1% of the courage these kids are displaying. Thank you, Rep. McBride for speaking out.
Kinda depressing how more Democrats stood alongside Republicans in denying gender-affirming care to minors than stood alongside Sarah McBride as she delivered her statement. The Dems' failure to support trans people isn't the only reason I stopped being a registered Democrat, but it's definitely a reason.
I once considered myself a "lifelong Democrat"; was even a PC c. 1972-74. But I have since realized the bitter truth -- first proven by the Tonkin Gulf incident -- is that the post-JFK "Democratic" (sic) Party is so corrupted, it is nothing more than the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party. And -- since money not only talks but tyrannizes -- the Democrats will never again will be anything else.
I know what Congresswoman McBride means. I was born in 1944 and by the age of six I knew I was different in a way I didn't have words for back then.
And because I grew up in a context where my family literally had to move out of town because of social isolation when people found out my Dad had divorced my birth mother; where my sister and I spent decades pretending our stepmother was our birth mother; where our Dad took us to the Unitarian Church to hide the fact that he didn't believe in God, I got very good at keeping myself from thinking about the source of my ongoing pain and depression.
It was only in 2008, when I finally was able to come out in public, that I could work for the hormones and gender affirming surgeries I needed. Medical help that made my life measurably better.
Surgeries I played a small part in convincing Medicare and Medicaid to stop denying payment for because I knew other working class transgender people, especially those who weren't born with white skin, didn't have access to the same communities that helped me afford my own surgeries.
And these laws, if passed, will not only take us back to those times, they will make the situation for transgender youth even worse.
Though I'm a hetero male 85 years old and terminally ill, I was politically active until I became too physically disabled to be anything more than just another Marxian gadfly with a keyboard. But my pre-uselessness resume of humanitarian activism dates back to Sputnik-Panic advocacy for the Soviet (actually European) approach to education and a post-military-service Civil Rights Movement involvement effective enough I was thrice targeted by would-be killers, and it extends forward through Occupy and abortion-clinic defense until 2020, so I know a number of people young enough to have children. Some of those children are trans. And the trans children for whom I am most fearful are those who have anti-gun parents, which means they will be utterly defenseless when the pogroms begin.
Thanks so much for posting Congresswoman McBride's statement - it's powerful!
"I marvel at the courage of transgender young people today who are sharing themselves with their families and this world despite the toxicity and the hate that too often emanates from the building behind me and from politicians within it."
I don't think it's too much to ask elected Democrats to show 1% of the courage these kids are displaying. Thank you, Rep. McBride for speaking out.
Kinda depressing how more Democrats stood alongside Republicans in denying gender-affirming care to minors than stood alongside Sarah McBride as she delivered her statement. The Dems' failure to support trans people isn't the only reason I stopped being a registered Democrat, but it's definitely a reason.
I once considered myself a "lifelong Democrat"; was even a PC c. 1972-74. But I have since realized the bitter truth -- first proven by the Tonkin Gulf incident -- is that the post-JFK "Democratic" (sic) Party is so corrupted, it is nothing more than the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party. And -- since money not only talks but tyrannizes -- the Democrats will never again will be anything else.
I know what Congresswoman McBride means. I was born in 1944 and by the age of six I knew I was different in a way I didn't have words for back then.
And because I grew up in a context where my family literally had to move out of town because of social isolation when people found out my Dad had divorced my birth mother; where my sister and I spent decades pretending our stepmother was our birth mother; where our Dad took us to the Unitarian Church to hide the fact that he didn't believe in God, I got very good at keeping myself from thinking about the source of my ongoing pain and depression.
It was only in 2008, when I finally was able to come out in public, that I could work for the hormones and gender affirming surgeries I needed. Medical help that made my life measurably better.
Surgeries I played a small part in convincing Medicare and Medicaid to stop denying payment for because I knew other working class transgender people, especially those who weren't born with white skin, didn't have access to the same communities that helped me afford my own surgeries.
And these laws, if passed, will not only take us back to those times, they will make the situation for transgender youth even worse.
Though I'm a hetero male 85 years old and terminally ill, I was politically active until I became too physically disabled to be anything more than just another Marxian gadfly with a keyboard. But my pre-uselessness resume of humanitarian activism dates back to Sputnik-Panic advocacy for the Soviet (actually European) approach to education and a post-military-service Civil Rights Movement involvement effective enough I was thrice targeted by would-be killers, and it extends forward through Occupy and abortion-clinic defense until 2020, so I know a number of people young enough to have children. Some of those children are trans. And the trans children for whom I am most fearful are those who have anti-gun parents, which means they will be utterly defenseless when the pogroms begin.