On April 13th, 2023, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey put into effect an emergency order barring trans healthcare in his state. In 2023’s onslaught of trans-hating legislation, this is the first ban of gender affirming care for trans adults. This order is a perfect storm, a convergence of anti-trans hate and medical ableism that leaves trans people throughout the United States vulnerable to violence.
His reasons are the same as most anti-trans bigots with power: to end trans self-determination, criminalize trans people and our families, and advance a campaign that seeks to eliminate us from public life entirely.
Their arguments are drawn directly from The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other powerful opponents of trans freedom.
Like these outlets, AG Bailey and his ilk believe that neurodivergent trans people are not competent. They believe we don’t know what our genders, our bodies, and our minds require.
As Erin Reed tweeted the day the emergency was declared we are “firmly in the ground of targeting trans adults now. They 100% intend to eliminate all of our care entirely. Stockpile your medication and be there for your peers.”
We are two autistic trans and nonbinary Black and brown people enraged by last week’s declaration and the ongoing war on our communities. We understand this is an attempt to ban all gender affirming care for trans adults. We also know that this is Bailey’s attempt to play to the United States’ worst and most hateful elements, as he prepares to run for election to a full-term in 2024.
If this attempt on our lives succeeds, other politicians will repeat this strategy.
AG Bailey even attempts to frame this violent termination of trans healthcare as a form of trans mental health care. The wording of the declaration weaponizes existing ableist sentiments about madness and neurodivergence against trans people.
The emergency declaration effectively bans gender-affirming care for all trans adults and youth without a single vote. It also targets mad and autistic trans and nonbinary adults for exclusion from care.
The emergency declaration insists that any provider who gives trans affirming care to someone with “psychiatric symptoms from existing mental health comorbidities” that have not “been treated and resolved” is a criminal.
This is the first attempt to ban gender-affirming care for trans adults. It is a dangerous escalation of facism. It also displays the ableism and trans hatred that fascism requires.
We have been fighting to live as sick, autistic BIPOC survivors since we were born. We know how to fight. We are not going back.
We know that destroying the fascism that trans bans embody requires a militant anti-ableist analysis. It requires us to understand that ableism underpins all attacks on bodily autonomy.
Hidden within ableism and trans hatred is a fear that our self-determination will erode the medical industrial complex, the patriarchy, and the state.
Trans and nonbinary people’s resistance to gatekeepimg from the MIC mirrors autistic people’s insistence that we are experts on our experience and lives–not cis people, not allistic doctors.
We know we are not a problem to be fixed.
Our assertions of freedom through self determination are terrifying to a state and a Medical Industrial Complex that wants to control our bodies.
If we are seizing our own bodily autonomy, they are less able to control and profit off of us. Free people are hard to control
Any organizing to defeat trans-hating legislation must understand these connections and articulate them if we’re going to win.
Part of why we decided to write this statement was that we’ve seen a lack of understanding and articulation of these connections coming from many who condemned the resolution.
This has to change!
As this progresses, we encourage you to:
- Pay attention. If you do not live in the South or the Midwest, do not think that it’s “just Missouri” or “just Texas.” That is racist, classist, and disrespectful to the legacy of radical organizing work happening in the South and Midwest. These bans can happen anywhere unless we stop them.
- Form coalitions of marginalized bodies. The NoBody is Disposable Coalition, who brought together disabled people, fat people, and elders early in the pandemic, is a good model.
- Continue to build coalitions with reproductive justice workers. They are fighting like hell to defend bodily autonomy. They are pushing back on abortion ban laws. They are working creatively to get people what they need, with or without the law.
- Heed the leadership of autistic and disabled trans BIPOC people
- Use any skill or talent you may have to work against these laws. We all have something to contribute. As Cyree Jarelle Johnson recently wrote “anything worth doing helps end fascism.”
- Become ungovernable. Shut down legislatures where this is happening. Look at Tennesse Two being reinstated when people fucked up shit so hard at the state house and in public. All fascism that was defeated happened because people got loud.
- Be aware of the fascists strategy. This shit doesn’t come out of nowhere. There was a national organizing campaign on the part of far right organizers to target trans people under the rubric of “protecting youth.”
- Use what we have like the element of surprise, creativity, relationships, networks of care, and love. Look at past disabled and allied organizers- from AIDS activists who dumped their ashes on the White House lawn and took over Catholic churches, to disabled protestors who locked down in their wheelchairs, to the K pop stans who jammed Trumpian portals- for inspiration of things you can do. Keep our eyes on where we want to be in four years.
- Learn from our elders how we got hormones and treatment before the modern trans movement.
- Get a fucking passport if you can. Keep an eye out for what states are passing trans refugee asylum laws.
- Get your surgery and scripts as soon as you can. Here is a link to Erin in the Morning’s map of places doing informed consent gender affirming treatment
The lines of united ableism and trans hatred are crystal clear. We must inform ourselves and our communities. We must come together to resist. And we will.
Signed,
Cyree Jarelle Johnson & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
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