The Republican-led Florida House last week passed some of the most extreme anti-trans legislation to move through the far-right chamber to date. Media attention focused on a measure that would ban trans people from carrying accurate driver’s licenses by requiring state IDs to list only the gender assigned to a person at birth. The proposal has been dubbed the “trans erasure bill.”

That same piece of legislation, House Bill 1639, would also mandate a series of pernicious measures relating to private health insurance coverage. These aspects of the proposed law have garnered fewer headlines, but the impact could be far-reaching: They risk raising the cost of health insurance for everyone in the state.

Cisgender people are not the key concern here. The anti-trans legislation is most vile, of course, for its explicit intent to render public life and necessary health care ever more inaccessible for trans people.

Yet the fact that a Republican agenda for trans erasure means doing damage to the wider health care system is a reminder that control over gender-nonconforming people requires control over everyone.

The trans erasure bill mandates that all private health insurance plans, for every Floridian, cover what is commonly described as “conversion therapy” — a dangerous pseudoscientific approach to changing someone’s sexual preferences or gender identity. The bill doesn’t call it that, of course, but with a little translation of........

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