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We Must Raise Our Voices Against the Attacks on Trans Care

The Gender Liberation Movement’s Raquel Willis says trans youth “are our future” and that new HHS rules amount to a national ban on gender-affirming care for young people.

Raquel Willis, co-founder of the Gender Liberation Movement, is arrested along with two dozen other activists and parents outside of the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters on Tuesday.

Rather than do something, anything, about the abysmal state of healthcare in the United States, the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services has doubled down on its attacks against trans youth, their families, and the web of providers who work to ensure young people can live comfortably and fully in their truths. Of course it’s not just HHS. Last summer, the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court ruled that it isn’t discriminatory to discriminate against trans youth. But HHS has the ability to take that bigoted opinion even further by barring institutions from providing gender-affirming care as a condition of their participation in Medicare and Medicaid. The same condition would apply to Children’s Health Insurance Program funding. In other words, these proposed rules would affect nearly all, if not all, hospitals. 

Yet, there hasn’t been much coverage about them. In this dizzying era of “flood the zone” tactics, our basic freedoms are pitted against one another. We deserve more, and young people certainly deserve better.

Led by the Gender Liberation Movement, 50 parents and activists, including members of ACT UP NY and ACT UP Pittsburgh, protested outside of HHS on Tuesday, on the final day of the public comment period of the rules, to make it known that “trans youth are no debate.” Organizers held a sign that read, “HANDS OFF OUR ‘MONES,” while blockading the entrance of HHS, before 25 people were taken into custody, first by Department of Homeland Security agents before being handed over to the Metropolitan Police Department. The parents and activists were held for 12 hours, and some were denied food and phone calls or experienced mistreatment because of their race or gender identity, Raquel Willis, co-founder of the........

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