President Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced at a Dec. 18th press conference, proposed new regulations that would essentially impose a nationwide ban on gender-affirming care for transgender young people, even in states where it is still legal.
One of the measures would prohibit hospitals that provide gender affirming care to youth under the age of 18 from receiving Medicaid and Medicare funds. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for youth, and about half of U.S. states now ban medication and surgery for transgender youth.
While Kennedy claimed “gender-affirming care has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people,” the American Academy of Pediatrics responded by declaring these proposed restrictions are a “baseless intrusion into the patient-physician relationship.” A coalition of 19 Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C. filed a lawsuit against the federal health agency arguing that RFK Jr.’s anti-trans regulations are unlawful and a government overreach. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Parker Molloy, a media critic, cultural commentator and publisher of “The Present Age” Substack newsletter. Here Molloy, a trans person herself, talks about the harm these new restrictions will cause, and the culture war political weaponization of trans issues employed by the Donald Trump and the Republican party.
PARKER MOLLOY: It’s important to understand where the federal government is coming from on this. And when they talk about adverse outcomes and things like that, they basically mean you might end up being trans. If you want to understand where it’s going, listen to what they actually said at that press conference. You had Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill up there saying, “Men are men. Men can never become women. Women are women. Women can never become men. At the root of the evils we face, such as the blurring of the lines between sexes and radical social agendas is a hatred for nature as God designed it.” He’s not talking about children there. He’s talking about the existence of trans people, period. And that’s the foundation of the worldview. Trans people don’t exist. There’s no good faith debate happening here about what the protocol should be or whether the care works.
They’ve rejected the premise entirely. They don’t believe that there are people for whom this care could possibly be beneficial because they don’t believe trans people are real. So when people ask, “Will they come for adults next?” That’s something that comes up a lot. The answer is that they already are. The reconciliation bill earlier this year included language banning Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care for adults, not just minors. It got stripped out, but they keep trying. As it concerns what gender-affirming care means, people think surgery. Surgery is extraordinarily rare and would only be for late teens, people in their late teens. What this would prevent, this rule would prevent hospitals and other affected providers from being able to prescribe hormones, which older teens can start hormone replacement therapy. And for younger teens, there’s puberty blockers and those would also become impossible to prescribe anymore.
And what’s really kind of frustrating about all of this and how this is going is that Republicans have spent years talking about parental rights. Parents should decide what books their kids read, parents should control what their kids learn in school. But when parents working with their kids and their doctors decide that gender-affirming care is appropriate, they want to send the government in to step in. Suddenly the parents should face prison time.
SCOTT HARRIS: Parker, I wanted to ask you, why do you think this trans issue that’s been weaponized by Republicans and conservatives in recent elections, why has it been so effective? I was astonished to learn that in the closing days of the 2024 presidential election, most of the funds of the Trump campaign were dedicated to anti-trans ad on TV. When I heard that, I said, “Who’s the audience for this? ” I mean, do they think that’s the number one issue for Americans?
