Throughout the recent fascist/GOP quest to "protect" children they don't care about, and women's sports they don't watch, trans people have warned that the war on gender affirming care applied to everyone and represented an attempt to literally eliminate trans people from public life, perhaps even existence itself. In response, Very Serious PeopleTM who are also covert transphobes, have insisted that this position is alarmist and we couldn't possibly know cryptofascist lawmaker's ultimate intentions. Well maybe, they should simply ask Republicans? In a late January story that wasn't widely reported in mainstream media, it turns out that GOP lawmakers from Michigan and Ohio met on Twitter spaces and more or less gave the game away entirely:
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/ohio-michigan-republicans-in-released
"After this exchange, Representative Shriver continued by arguing adults consenting to gender-affirming care should not be allowed, going as far as to compare it to consent for "self-mutilation" and "euthanasia." He then repeated, "we have to be looking at the endgame simultaneously, maybe even using that to move the window to say that this isn't just wrong 0-18, it's wrong for everyone and we shouldn't be allowing that to happen."
Representative Click confirmed the plan, stating, “ We have to take one bite at a time, do it incrementally.”
The conversation did not stop there. Prisha Mosley, an anti-trans detransitioner and right-wing political figure, lauded the discussion, "I did want to say that I've kind of been waiting for a state or a representative or anyone to be brave enough to address that... you cannot consent to a lie. Most of these doctors are straight up lying about the effects and saying it'll magically cure every bad feeling you've ever had and that you can magically change sex."
At the end of the conversation, Representative Schriver states that they should "ban this for all people," to which Representative Paquette responds, "We’ll chat offline about all this good stuff."
Folks, I dunno how many times we have to go over this but the plain truth is that whenever fascists who support child labor and want to make poor kids go hungry tell you they're doing something "to protect children" you need to immediately recognize that this is a lie, and start looking for the bigger picture being concealed behind that rhetoric. The reactionary Pig Empire Right could not make it any clearer that what they're after here is the persecution and ultimate elimination of trans people - and denying gender affirming care recognized as necessary and even life-saving by virtually every qualified medical body in the so-called Western world is absolutely part of that strategy. These nazis mean to end us; trans folks know it, and if cis people were being honest, they'd admit they know it too.