Anti-Trans Advocates Are Following the Anti-Abortion Playbook Play for Play

The culture of fear that the anti-abortion movement uses also underlines the anti-queer and anti-transgender movement. Garnet Henderson, Senior Multiplatform Reporter for Rewire News Group and host and producer of ACCESS: A Podcast About Abortion, sits down to talk with us about how these two movements are connected and how anti-rights actors may influence access to gender-affirming care in the near future.

A year since the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, 25 million women of reproductive age now  and more nonbinary and transgender people live in states where the law increases barriers to abortion care. And, across the U.S. this year alone, 583 bills have been introduced in 49 states which are designed to block trans people from receiving healthcare, education, and other basic rights. Harassment and threats against healthcare providers, misinformation and disinformation, and fear-laden rhetoric are all increasingly overlapping elements of the anti-abortion and anti-trans movement. Using these tools, a collection of anti-rights actors are able to influence legislation, spread false information, and impact people’s access to basic healthcare.

Links from this episode

Garnet Henderson on Twitter
Garnet Henderson for Rewire News Group
ACCESS: A Podcast About Abortion
Anti-Trans Activists Are Trying to Scare Gender Care Providers Away
Will Conservatives Use the ‘Crisis Pregnancy Center’ Playbook to Attack Trans People?
New Human Rights Campaign Foundation Report: Online Hate & Real World Violence Are Inextricably Linked
Open Letter by New York Times contributors to New York Times on their coverage of transgender issues

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Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health rights and justice!

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Hey, rePROs! How's everybody doing? I'm your host Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So, this week was kind of fun for me. I got to go into the office one day this week and hang out with Elena, who does our social media. And the two of us sat together and stuffed envelopes sending you y'all your stickers. So, it was really fun to get to spend the afternoon with Elena. They are wonderful and it was just delightful. So, y'all should be getting your stickers soon if you signed up for them, if you signed up for them but didn't send in your address, send me an email and we'll still get you your stickers. So, you can email me at jennie@reprofightback.com. And I will send them out as soon as I get your address. But everybody else, you should be getting them very soon. I had family in town on Sunday. I had a cousin who was in DC for work, so I got to play tourist for the day, which was a lot of fun. I don't get to do that very much anymore, so it was fun to do all the things. And then I got my COVID booster, woot woot! In preparation for- I have a big conference coming up, so be around people, so I wanted to make sure I had my newest booster. Plus, I have more family coming out next month, which is very exciting. Yeah, so, so many things to look forward to. I’m feeling very excited for all the things. Let's see, anything else exciting? Ooh, I got a really cute new planter! I got- it's a disco ball, which I love with a little cute plant I put in it. So, that's making me happy and bringing me joy right now. What is not bringing me joy is Cinder sitting behind me chewing on a wire. So, that's great. Little monsters, they are so problematic. They are lucky they're cute. Let's see here…I think those are like all of my big things. Ooh, I did do the baking. I said I was gonna do, I made an apple crisp last weekend and it was delightful. I need- I still have so many apples left. I've been eating them and still have so many. I think there's gonna be some apple butter in the future that I need to make. But yeah, so my house just smelled like all the fall smells, right? I made an apple crisp, I made some bran muffins and my place just smelled amazing and that made me very, very happy. I love fall. It's like, you know, I keep saying it, y'all, and I'm like a broken record, but fall and winter is, like, perfect baking season and I love all of the seasonal bakes. Plus, I'm from Wisconsin. I love a good crockpot meal and like stews and soups and all of those things, like, they just make me feel really warm and cozy. And, you know, I love spooky season, but I also love cozy season, so, like, all of them together. Yeah. And I've been enjoying all of my spooky reads. I've really leaned into the witchy vibes and reading lots of like, fun witchy books, which has been delightful. I'm just basically leaning into spooky season. It's been fun. Okay, I think with that, let's turn to this week's interview. Y'all don't wanna hear me keep babbling on about fall and my basic girl love for it. It's okay. I understand. I'm very excited for this week's interview. I got to talk to the wonderful Garnet Henderson with Rewire News Group and also the host of the amazing podcast ACCESS: A Podcast About Abortion, which- always make sure to check out Garnet's reporting, but for sure, also make sure you check out her podcast is really wonderful. And with that, let's turn to my interview with Garnet, where we talk about how the anti-trans movement is following the anti-abortion playbook.

Hi Garnet, thank you so much for being here!

Garnet: Hi, thank you for having me.

Jennie: Before we get talking, do you wanna take a quick second and introduce yourself and include your pronouns?

Garnet: Sure. My name is Garnet Henderson. My pronouns are she/her. I'm the senior multi-platform reporter at Rewire Newsgroup, and I'm also the host and producer of ACCESS: A Podcast About Abortion.

Jennie: And y'all, if you aren't already checking out Garnet's podcast, you definitely need to check out her podcast. I mean, her reporting, too, but, like, also her podcast.

Garnet: Thank you.

Jennie: Okay. So, I'm really excited to talk to you today because we're gonna talk about the anti-trans movement and how they're basically the anti-abortion movement. It's a big overlap.

Garnet: Yeah. Such a big overlap, really, the Venn diagram is the circle. There are some, you know, a few different players in there, but so many of the same players, they're really functionally the same movement.

Jennie: And in that vein, they're using a lot of the same tactics. So, maybe we'll start with legislative tactics. Like, how are they replicating the anti-abortion movement's legislative strategy?

Garnet: Absolutely. I mean, we see them chipping away at the types of care that trans people can access without...well, I was about to say without outlawing it outright, but that's not actually true because they have gone straight to outlying gender-affirming care for children outright in many states. And they're really using this panic over the idea of parents' rights and the idea that these quote-unquote evil doctors are mutilating children and doing things to them that could never be changed or reversed when in fact that isn't true. You know, gender affirming care for kids most often just consists of puberty blockers and then sometimes hormones. And so, I would say that the rhetoric we're seeing about the doctors being bad and evil is extremely similar to anti-abortion rhetoric around abortion providers. What is a little bit different is that we also see a lot of rhetoric around trans people in this moment, I would say, you know, the whole groomer thing as though they're trying to recruit or convert kids, that I think is a bit different from anything we've seen around abortion. More of that moral panic around the people who are seeking the care. Whereas most of the time the anti-abortion movement is at least sort of careful to make it seem like they're not attacking pregnant people, even though of course they are. But yeah, we just see a lot of laws being put in place that make it much more difficult for trans people and especially trans kids to access care. And really, they're moving in a very similar way to what they did to limit access to abortion, but they're just moving a lot faster, partly I think because they have that template from the anti-abortion success, right? Legislative success. And also, I think because they're capitalizing on the real fear that a lot of conservative figures are creating around queer and trans people right now.

Jennie: Yeah, it really strikes me as like doing also that the, like, chipping away, but again, like you said, there are places where it's already gone so far. But also doing the, like, taking a little bit where it seems reasonable or, like, where you can create confusion and then, "okay, we've already got this now. Like what's the next step?" And sometimes they've jumped really far and gone to the like full-out ban, but there's just been like trying to just create that discomfort and the acceptance of regulating it, which is really kind of how a lot of the anti-abortion stuff started. And even kind of doing the like, "okay, well then let's go big. And then like, oh, okay, we'll be reasonable and do a smaller bit.

Garnet: Absolutely. And I think that's a huge part of the reason why they're starting with kids and banning gender-affirming care for kids. We, of course, see that in abortion as well with parental involvement laws. And those, you know, even in a lot of states that have relatively liberal abortion policy, a lot of those states still have parental involvement laws. Colorado being perhaps one of the most significant examples of that right now, right? Because Colorado is one of very few states that has no gestational age limit on abortion. That's extremely rare in the United States, but they have a parental involvement law. So, it's really not a utopia of abortion access the way some people would like to present it to be. And they've made so many pro-abortion strides in Colorado recently. Why isn't there a serious discussion about repealing that parental involvement law? Of course, advocates are trying, right? But yeah, I would say like mainstream liberal democrats in Colorado are not talking about that. And why? It's because that's something that's so easy for conservatives to stoke fear and panic about, right? Is "oh my God, protect the children, think of the children." And so, I think that is why we've seen them pursue so aggressively bans on gender-affirming care for minors. But a lot of those same lawmakers and special interest groups that are drafting that legislation are already talking about banning gender-affirming care for adults. Some of those laws have provisions that do affect adults and maybe most significantly what we're also seeing is hospitals start to really back off from providing care in certain ways, again, the same way they did with abortion. So, there have been several instances where after bans on gender affirming care for minors went into effect, hospitals just either stopped providing gender-affirming care or canceled all appointments to kind of reevaluate. And those things affected all of their patients, not just the kids.

Jennie: That leads me, I think, perfectly into the next area that I think we're seeing a lot is like the replication of the harassment against providers. We're seeing that coming into the anti-trans space as well when we've been very familiar with it in the anti-abortion space.

Garnet: Absolutely. And again, that's a really effective anti-abortion tactic, right? It makes patients afraid to seek care. It makes providers afraid that they'll be murdered for doing their jobs because at least 11 people have been murdered by anti-abortion extremists in the United States. And so, you know, that leads a lot of providers to stop performing care, a lot of clinics to have to shut down or be unable to open in the first place because of all of the harassment and threats that they're inundated with. And so, the same is starting to happen to providers of gender-affirming care. I think a lot of people are probably aware of some of the protests that have happened outside of hospitals. And what's interesting about that is that typically when we're talking about protests against abortion care, we're not seeing protests outside of hospitals. But that's because in most cases, hospitals already completely backed off of providing abortion care, right? Or they only provide, you know, a tiny number of abortions compared to the volume that most clinics are doing. So, clinics, abortion clinics have been siloed out away from the rest of the medical system and that has made them a real target for harassment. So interestingly, when it comes to gender affirming care in a lot of communities, children's hospitals are really the best place that trans people can go for gender-affirming care, because that's where there are interdisciplinary teams that are experts at caring for trans people. So, in a lot of cases, even trans adults are getting care at children's hospitals because they have these gender care clinics and it's those hospital-based clinics that have really been targets for harassment. That's not to say that no private practices or freestanding clinics have experienced harassment, but just a lot of the most egregious instances of harassment we've seen have been directed at children's hospitals and in at least one or two cases that has led hospitals to stop providing gender-affirming care or at least really limit the services they provide. And in many more cases, it has led hospitals to kind of take their services under the radar, so to remove information from their websites about what types of care they provide and other things like that, which is really sad because it's so difficult to seek gender-affirming care already in this country. You know, another thing we have in place in many states for abortion is forced delays or mandatory waiting periods. And honestly, people looking for gender affirming care already have that because there are so few places in a lot of states that they can seek care that there's a built-in waiting period 'cause it just takes so long to get seen by a doctor. And so, to introduce any new barrier, even if it's just removing information from the website, that further delays trans people from being able to seek the healthcare that they need. And it also shows them again that their care is really stigmatized and that the hospital where they're seeking care isn't willing to stand up for them, which I think sends a really cruel message to trans people.

Jennie: And it feels like giving the anti-trans side, like, wins, right? Like, and then as you've seen with the anti-abortion movement, like, that's never enough, right? They're gonna keep pushing it harder and going for other bigger bites of the pie to try and get bigger wins. So, I mean, there's not really appeasing when it comes to this kind of thing.

Garnet: Absolutely. And you know, the human rights campaign put out a really interesting report that found that so many of these instances of in-person harassment and threats, because a lot of these gender clinics have also received bomb threats and things of that nature that forced them to evacuate and have these big investigations, right? Again, making everyone feel really unsafe and further delaying care. And in this report, the human rights campaign really found that real-life harassment and threats and violence is often driven by online hate campaigns, often initiated by conservative pundits like Matt Walsh and in particular the account lives of TikTok, on Twitter or now X. And so, really what we're seeing when it comes to trans care—and actually I would say in so many other areas of American society right now—is we actually have a very small group of extremists who are driving a really disproportionate amount of hate, which I think again, is partly because of that climate of fear that those same people have created. But also, it is partly the nature of social media that when they post disinformation about clinics that are supposedly doing horrible things to children that they are not doing, that spreads like wildfire and it gets people really fired up. And there's always gonna be somebody out there who's willing to take that to a really extreme place. And so, we've seen that so long with the anti-abortion movement where they use this incredibly violent rhetoric to inflame those more radical members of their movement. And then when there is an act of violence, they get to say, "oh, well we didn't tell anybody to do that." Right? "We didn't tell anyone to bomb a clinic" or "we didn't tell anyone to murder that abortion provider." But they absolutely did. They just didn't do it explicitly, right? They did it through their whole approach to messaging and through their rhetoric. And so, that really honestly, is something that I fear that we will see happen is an act of extreme violence against providers of gender-affirming care. And then, all of these same people will be able to say, "well, I never told anybody to do that." Right?

Jennie: I think just to get an idea of the scope of the- like, only a very small amount of people are driving this. This is, like, an unrelated but not completely unrelated topic- was a couple weeks ago it was Banned Books Week, and they were talking about how 60% of all banned books challenges could be traced back to 11 people. Just that is how small this whole movement is. It's a small group doing a lot of work that is very loud and causing so much chaos.

Garnet: Absolutely. That was totally one of the things that I had on my mind when I said that. And I also do just wanna note that trans people, especially Black trans women, already face violence in real life. And that's a phenomenon that predates this current moment. And so again, we're really seeing this small group of conservative pundits and influencers and influencers capitalize on that existing stigma and fear of trans people. In particular, the way a certain type of cis man feels that it's threatening to his masculinity should he feel any sense of attraction toward a trans woman, right? And so, they use that kind of fear and stigma and hatred and just really fan those flames and get it to spread a lot more widely. And you know, again, especially all the rhetoric about the children, protect the children and parents' rights, I think that kind of thing very effectively draws in people who otherwise would not be as inclined to jump on this bandwagon. I think we see that, I mean, in so many areas of society...like I said, we see it in abortion...but we also see, in general, I would say with the far right right now, there's just a lot of panic. There's the whole groomer thing. There's also all these conspiracy theories about pedophile rings perpetuated by the same people who by the way, do not care about real life survivors of sexual violence at all. Clearly, it's just a talking point and an approach that they've found works really well for them.

Jennie: Well, I feel like that means very obviously and perfectly into the next bucket of things that we're seeing that are very similar and that's misinformation. So much misinformation everywhere.

Garnet: Absolutely. Dis- and misinformation have been a huge tool of the anti-abortion movement. We see that in the way that phrases like "late-term abortion" and "partial birth abortion" have made their way into so many people's vocabularies when those are not medical terms they were invented to stigmatize abortion. And look at how effective that has been. Lots of people use them and they don't even know that. And so, I'll also just clarify that disinformation is intentional, right? That's when somebody spreads bad information with the intent to cause harm or to manipulate you in some way. Misinformation is bad information that may or may not be intentional. So, often what we see in situations like this is: it starts as disinformation, right? It starts with your Matt Walshes of the world intentionally saying false things to inflame people. And then people repeat that, not knowing that it's bad information or not always knowing that it's bad information. So, we see the same thing happening with gender-affirming care. Again, all of this stuff about the supposed mutilation of children. And you know, another example of that, again, targeted at kids is all of this panic around trans kids. And particularly, it's trans girls playing sports in general, but especially youth sports. There, they also just throw in some misogyny, right? Capitalizing on misogyny. This idea that cis women are helpless. We are inherently weak. We can't protect ourselves. We need somebody else to protect us from trans people, whether it's to make sure our sports are fair or that our bathrooms are safe. Again, zero concern for the actual risks of sexual violence that exist in the world, right? And so yeah, we just see very intentional spreading of this completely false information. And again, with social media that really just allows this stuff to spread like wildfire. And so, I think we're seeing a lot of people adopting these ideas about gender-affirming care, where maybe they are willing to say, "well, you know, maybe kids should wait until they're 18." Whereas maybe a year or two ago they might not have said that. They might not have ever even thought about it, right? But all you really need is a seed planted and then it's very easy for someone unknowingly in a lot of cases to be converted to this ultra-conservative worldview.

Jennie: And I think it would do a disservice not to talk about the like giant elephant in the room for passing along some of this misinformation is, like, some publications that you may trust-

Garnet: Absolutely.

Jennie: -to be really good. And, like, the New York Times has been particularly bad on its reporting around trans issues and having very unhelpful information.

Garnet: Yeah, they've been absolutely terrible. I am a member of the Freelance Solidarity Project of the National Writers Union. Even though I'm a staff reporter now at Rewire, I'm still a member of that Freelance Writer's Union because I think the work that we do is really important. And one of the things that we did do this year was organize a letter that was written by people who contribute to the New York Times, who work for them. And we first had contributors and staff of the New York Times sign onto the letter and only then did we open it up to more people. So, the letter was shared really widely. It ended up with thousands of journalists signing on in support, criticizing the way the Times has covered trans people and the debate around their care and their participation in public life in the United States 'cause that really is what we're talking about. And because we're journalists, the letter included specific examples. It was not general. It included very specific examples of things we think they've done that are wrong. And the fact that New York Times reporting is being used to encourage the passage of anti-trans legislation. And we were really disappointed in the Times' response to that. GLADD delivered a letter to them on the same day. And so, the Times has actually never responded to the letter that came from journalists. They've only responded to the GLADD letter and they conflated the two and dismissed us as an advocacy group. And so, I think it's very interesting that not only is the New York Times being widely criticized, they have refused to respond to criticism from journalists, from people in their own field about their coverage on trans people.

Jennie: Yeah. It just felt like we would've been missing something if we didn't- I know it seems like a little bit of a detour to talk about the New York Times, but it is a really big problem right now and it needed the space to talk about it for a minute.

Garnet: Yeah, I think it's really important.

Jennie: Okay, so one of the things you brought up in a recent article that—like, again, shame on me, I hadn't thought of and probably should have thought of—but do we need to start to worry about seeing anti-trans- some version of crisis pregnancy centers?

Garnet: I think we do. It was something that several of my sources when I was working on my recent article about harassment of providers of gender-affirming care, several of my sources brought up that possibility. A lot of the people that I spoke with also either currently provide abortion care or have provided abortion care. You know, there's a lot of overlap. There are some doctors who are, like, endocrinologists for example, and maybe never would've been involved in the provision of abortion care. But there are a lot of family medicine physicians and OBGYNs—people who are trained in abortion care who now also provide gender affirming care. Many people will know that there are a lot of abortion clinics that provide gender-affirming care, right? So, a lot of the people I spoke with are very much in both of these spaces and it was something that many of them brought up. And it was something that I'd already been thinking about because I spend a lot of time thinking and reporting about crisis pregnancy centers and what they're doing. And you know, you already brought up misinformation and that is pretty much the entire purpose of a crisis pregnancy center, right? Is to confuse and delay people who are seeking abortion and to spread dangerous, in many cases, misinformation about abortion. Whether they're spreading misinformation about the safety of abortion, the availability of abortion, the quote-unquote "abortion pill reversal" that they advertise that is-

Jennie: Ugh.

Garnet: -not real or safe. And so again, because of the tremendous amount of overlap between these movements, I had been thinking, well, are they just going to do the same thing to trans people? And you know, a lot of my sources brought up that same point. So, I decided to write about it a little bit. Many people I know go to crisis pregnancy centers because they need an ultrasound. So, many people are duped by them. They don't know that they're going into an anti-abortion center. However, I've spoken to many people who do know, but they are pregnant. And either they want that confirmed or they know they're gonna have to get an abortion and they think, or sorry, they know they're gonna have to get an ultrasound in order to have an abortion, and they're worried about how much it's gonna cost. So, they go to that crisis pregnancy center because it advertises free ultrasounds, not knowing by the way that they almost certainly are getting a non-diagnostic ultrasound, and that the clinic will have to do it again. That's an important thing for people to know in states that require ultrasounds before an abortion, the clinic has to do it. You can't bring them an ultrasound from anywhere else and just give that to them, right? They have to do it. They have to confirm the results of the ultrasound. So—important to know. But anyway, that's a huge way that they get people in the door. And so, why wouldn't anti-trans groups either set up their own CPC type clinics or why wouldn't existing CPCs start to do this and advertise things that trans people might need to access gender-affirming care? You know, in a lot of situations, trans people, especially if they wanna get a gender-affirming surgery, they need a letter from a medical provider saying that they have been evaluated and they meet certain criteria. Why wouldn't a CPC-style clinic start advertising that to get trans people in the door? Because, you know, once CPCs have abortion seekers in the door, they then tell them horrible and false things about abortion. They often make them watch these really disturbing videos, right? And they could do exactly the same thing to trans people or to parents of trans kids who are looking for help for their kids—get them in the door with a false promise and then subject them to horrible stigmatizing misinformation while they're there.

Jennie: I'm just thinking listening to all this thinking of how we talked about these various buckets, but, like, they're really interactive—and not even like a feedback loop because it's all meshed together—but the disinformation fuels the harassment and the harassment could fuel the gender-affirming care clinic to, like, have to split off at some point. Like, I can definitely see that in the future where you have, like, abortion-clinic style, like, gender-affirming care clinics have to split off. And then you see the legislative end coming back in there, right? And you start getting, like, whatever the gender affirming care version of trap laws are, I'm sure could be very similar, right? Like, things that are designed to put them out of business. Like, I just see this all as this like self-reinforcing disaster to prevent people from getting life-saving healthcare.

Garnet: Absolutely. And it's a great point you make about, you know, the potential for the gender-affirming care version of trap laws. Of course, we have seen several states go straight to the bans, right? They're not messing around with that. But again, I can see in a lot of more, you know, quote-unquote "purple states" where perhaps you're not gonna get an outright ban on gender-affirming care. We could see some trap law type of situations that either add additional delays for people seeking care or make it really difficult for providers to offer certain types of care, especially surgeries. And that is another thing that is really concerning about the fact that gender-affirming care clinics could also be siloed away from the rest of the medical system the way abortion clinics have. Because if you're a trans person and primarily what you need is a prescription—you need puberty blockers, you need hormones—you can get that via telemedicine, you can get that from a doctor in really any type of facility. But if you need surgery, you cannot get that just anywhere, right? So, that's something that's a little bit different from abortion because in the vast majority of cases, an abortion can be provided just fine in a physician's office type of setting, right? And one of the major types of trap laws is laws that require clinics to meet the standards for ambulatory surgery centers, which for the vast majority of abortion care is not necessary. But when we're talking about gender-affirming surgery, we are actually talking about surgery that needs to happen in a hospital or an outpatient surgery center. And really most of the time a hospital. A lot of these surgeries really take quite a long time to recover from. Patients need physical therapy, other things that you get when you have surgery in a hospital. And so, that is something I'm really keeping an eye on as well, because if hospitals keep backing off, there are lots of types of care that people are simply not gonna be able to offer in a freestanding clinic type of setting.

Jennie: And I guess that makes me think of one of the other areas we've seen targeted with abortion and, like, thinking of seeing this harassment at hospitals. It makes me worry about targeting like admitting privileges, right? Like, a lot of people don't quite understand how admitting privileges work.

Garnet: Mm-hmm.

Jennie: Like, a hospital doesn't just hand them out willy-nilly. You have to get approved for them. So, this could be an area where hospitals decide they don't wanna deal with it, which you've seen a lot with abortion or- a little separate, like, especially if you're talking about surgeries that will have to be done at the hospital, but if you're talking about- like, Garnet was just talking about ones that are just doing like puberty blockers and stuff. They're not sending enough patients to the hospital to qualify for admitting privileges. Like, I could see that as another area that I would start to worry about.

Garnet: Absolutely. And I think this didn't make it into the article just for space because that's how one of my greatest challenges always with everything I write is I usually have far more information than I can actually include in an article that people will want to read. [laughs] But I spoke with a gender affirming care provider named Adam Bonnington in San Francisco. He's an OBGYN. So, he is someone who used to be an abortion provider and then really transitioned into specializing in gender-affirming care, surgery specifically. So, he's actually not prescribing hormones, he's exclusively doing genital reconstructive surgeries for trans people. And his practice faced a lot of harassment after being the subject of an article in the Daily Wire, which is why I spoke with him. That's, you know, Ben Shapiro's publication, which Matt Walsh also writes for. And they have really, by the way, they go into hysterics about gender-affirming care on that website, like every day. They're very freaked out about it. So, Adam told me...and he practices in San Francisco, so he is in at least what we tend to think of as one of the bluest states and one of the bluest cities in the bluest states, right? And in particular, San Francisco has long been a place where trans people could get better healthcare than they could in most other places right in the country. And he told me...so, he's part of an independent practice that again is completely focused on surgical care. So, they have admitting privileges with a couple of different hospitals. And he said that they actually had to jump through more hoops than usual to get admitting privileges there. And they got kind of a bullshit excuse, which was like, "oh, you know, it's because we have to manage the flow of traffic, make sure we don't have too many patients on this floor" or something like that, blah, blah blah. But they were subject to certain requirements that other doctors—who were doing surgeries just as complex—were not. So, if that is already happening...because that wasn't like this year, right? That was a couple years ago. So, if that was already happening in San Francisco of all places, just think about what's probably already happening in so many other states. It's probably already a struggle. And I also heard from a lot of providers that it's becoming a struggle to get malpractice insurance for providers of gender-affirming care, which has also been an issue in some cases for abortion providers.

Jennie: Didn't even think of it. And now I'm also starting to think, God, now it's like this cascade of all the terribles of like pharmacy refusals. I'm sure it's been happening, but I feel like it's not been in the forefront of my mind just, ugh, so many things.

Garnet: Yeah. Especially if it gets more difficult for people to get their gender or sex marker changed on their ID because that is a very obvious flag to a pharmacist, right? Of what your prescription is for if they see the prescription and the M or the F on your file or your id. And so, I definitely also heard from people I spoke with for the article that a lot of their patients are rushing to get that kind of stuff done faster than they had planned because they're worried about exactly that kind of thing.

Jennie: Okay, that's, like, enough terrible. Like, we've definitely...that's enough. Let's change now to wrap up with like what can we do? Like, what can we do right now to fight back?

Garnet: I think it's really important for everyone who cares about trans people to be really loud and proud about that and to make sure that you aren't afraid to speak up when you hear somebody saying something about trans people that is not true. I think that's important anytime, but especially right now. Trans people are, from what we know—which- there probably are a lot more trans people than we know—but from what we know, they're a very small subset of the population, right? And they are because of the stigma and fear that is being created by the right wing right now, they're taking up a hugely outsized portion of the public conversation right now. I mean, you just would think that, like, half of all people in America are trans the way conservatives are talking about it, which is not true, right? And so, I think if we're gonna be having that conversation, it's very important for people who care about trans people want them to be safe and simply be able to be, to say that and to stand up to people who are spreading misinformation and saying things that aren't true. I think there are often opportunities to donate to various mutual aid funds or to individual people's GoFundMe when they need care. So, if you've got some extra cash, I think that's always a really nice thing you can do. And of course, if you live in a state where any kind of ban on gender-affirming care is being considered, then you can call your lawmakers and tell them that you oppose that. You can show up to testify in person if you live close enough to your state legislature. I think that's also an opportunity that's available to a lot of people that they don't realize is that you can actually show up to the state legislature and tell them what you think. And so, I would definitely encourage people to do that. Jennie: Okay, so I just got- my Internet's being wonky, so I think we're just gonna like that's a great place to end. Garnet, thank you so much for being here. As always, a sheer joy to talk to you.

Garnet: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Jennie.

Jennie: Okay y'all, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Garnet, as always sheer joy to talk to her. And I will see y'all next week! [music outro] If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jennie@reprosfightback.com or you can find us on social media. We're at @RePROsFightBack on Facebook and Twitter or @reprosfb on Instagram. If you love our podcast and wanna make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you wanna make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at reprofightback.com. Thanks all!