by Wayne Besen • March 30, 2023 • Politics • Comments (0) • 561

TWO Slams Kentucky’s Anti-Trans Persecution Law for Mandating Medical Malpractice and Running Roughshod Over Parent’s Rights

Right Wing Shamelessly Exploits Tennessee Shooting

Delray Beach, FL – Truth Wins Out condemned a new, unconstitutional Kentucky law that openly persecutes transgender people and treats them as second-class citizens. The law restricts how the state’s medical professionals and education system treat transgender youth. In overriding Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto, Republicans played politics with peoples’ lives and revealed the hollowness of their misleading claims of supporting parents’ rights and protecting students.

“Kentucky’s new law mandates malpractice and demands that doctors abandon their oath to do no harm,” said Truth Wins Out Executive Director Wayne Besen. “This is a full-blown attack on parent’s rights that arrogantly strips families of the ability to protect their own children and provide their kids with the finest medical care. The law stigmatizes students, elevates lies over learning, demands ignorance over education and chooses religious indoctrination over scientific observation.”

The Washington Post reports that the law, “bans access to gender-affirming health care for trans children, restricts which bathrooms and lockers they use, prohibits discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, and allows teachers to use students’ birth names and pronouns against their wishes.

“We are denying families, their physicians and their therapists their right to make medically informed decisions,” said state Sen. Karen Berg (D). She noted that the bill was introduced just weeks after her own trans son killed himself. “To say this is a bill protecting children is completely disingenuous. And to call this a parents’ right bill is an absolutely despicable affront to me personally.”

Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear warned the new law could lead to an increase in youth suicide. “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God and Senate Bill 150 will endanger the children of Kentucky.”

More than 470 pieces of anti-LGBTQ legislation have been introduced this year, including more than 190 bills that are specifically anti-trans, according to the Human Rights Campaign. At least 38 transgender people were killed last year and 50 were slain in 2021, according to HRC’s tracking. National statistics show almost half of trans teens experienced suicidal thoughts, and that more than a third try to kill themselves.

Meanwhile, right wing extremists are shamelessly exploiting the horrific shooting at a Nashville Christian school that killed 6 people to scapegoat the transgender community. The Washington Post reports: “The shooter’s gender identity and motive remain unclear: police initially said the shooter Audrey Hale was a 28-year-old woman, and then later said Hale was transgender, citing a social media profile in which Hale used masculine pronouns. The Post has not yet confirmed how Hale identified.”

“Conservatives are scapegoating the transgender community to deflect from their abject failure on stopping gun violence, servility to the NRA, key role in proliferating guns, silence in the face of tragedy and sabotage of legislative solutions.”

• Since 2006, 96 percent of 340 mass killings involving a single shooter were committed by men, according to a Washington Post analysis of a database maintained by Northeastern University, the Associated Press and USA Today.

• Transgender people are four times more likely than cisgender people to be the victims of crimes including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.

• A recent Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll of transgender and nonbinary adults found that 1 in 4 trans adults say they have been physically attacked because of their gender identity, gender expression or sexual identity, and more than 6 in 10 (64 percent) say they have been verbally attacked.

“Blaming the transgender community for the actions of one individual is an unfair, self-serving narrative and a vivid example of right-wing hypocrisy,” said Besen. “Conservatives claim to hate identity politics, but this is a perverse form of identity politics driven by Conservative Correctness. It is strictly identifying and categorizing people for the purpose of targeting them for persecution, hate and discrimination.”

Truth Wins Out educates the world on the harm caused by destructive “ex-gay” conversion programs, while fighting to eliminate anti-LGBTQ prejudice and discrimination. We believe that genuine freedom and contentment derive from authenticity and living one’s truth.

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