‘Kentucky is moving backwards.’ GOP’s transgender obsession will hurt all of us. | Opinion

“Anything can happen,” Sen. Damon Thayer told reporters on Thursday morning. It was the last day for bills to be heard in the General Assembly in a state that faces perennial poverty, child abuse, two major disasters, affordable housing, low labor participation and a drug scourge but has spent most of the time and energy of its 2023 session on the issue of transgender children.

He was right. After spending most of Wednesday getting to a compromise on a bill targeting transgender children that would have pacified most people, the GOP’s growing extreme wing pulled a supersonic fast one, adding the extreme version of the bill to Senate Bill 150, which quickly, in legislative time, passed the House and Senate. The new bill did not include any language about mental health counseling, which is good, but banned all medication, including a section that requires the tapering off of medication a child might be currently on, which is very, very bad.

The senators who on Wednesday brokered a humane deal on the bill didn’t care enough to make it a floor fight on Thursday.

The process was terrible. But frankly, the process is always terrible when a majority tries to get what it wants. The Democrats pulled plenty of fast ones when they were in charge, too.

What was new this session was the level of passion. So much passion and heartbreak, so many eloquent speeches about love and acceptance and anxiety and suicide. So many speeches about medical expertise. None of it mattered. All that mattered was outlawing healthcare for transgender children because that’s the rule for GOP lawmakers all over the country, and Kentucky has to check the box, too.

Chris Hartman, director of the Fairness Campaign, who had spent untold hours fighting the transgender bills, broke into shouting on Thursday. “You will have spent more time debating transgender children and their rights and their parents’ rights to obtain the life-saving medical care that they need than childhood poverty, than housing insecurity, than disaster relief, in this session combined.”

How do you sit through a committee hearing where crying children actually beg you not to do something? How do you face your colleague who begs you not to engage in the kind of discrimination that contributed to the suicide of her son? I guess they don’t care because they don’t have to. They have all the votes.

One of the most telling moments came in the House debate on Thursday afternoon when Rep. David Meade, the sponsor of the new Frankenstein bill, admitted he didn’t know how many gender surgeries had been performed in Kentucky or how many transgender children there are here.

Where will this get us as a state? Republicans will get a pat on the head at their Heritage Foundation conventions, and maybe it will help them in their districts, but those are now so gerrymandered it may not even matter. They will use it to try to hurt Gov. Beshear in the election, although anyone who thinks transgenderism is bad wasn’t going to vote for him in the first place.

With so much passion, we forget about pragmatism. If anyone bothered to look past the flames, they’d see a state where more teachers will leave the profession because they don’t want to fool with whether a book about Ruby Bridges, the little girl who integrated the New Orleans schools, will get them in trouble. Doctors and nurses won’t stay in Kentucky because they don’t want to risk losing their licenses over a child who might ask for help with gender dysphoria. Companies won’t locate here because the free markets have convinced them that anti-LGBTQ laws are bad for business. Just ask the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce.

Smart kids will leave because they don’t want to be from a state that hates queer people. As Rep. Josie Raymond said “we’re going to lose our kids to suicide or to migration, and not just the trans ones either. We’re going to lose the cis-gender ones who say Kentucky is moving backwards fast ...I’m out.”

And Kentucky will continue to get poorer, sicker and dumber.

Kentucky is most certainly moving backwards, back to some strange vision of a time when people of color knew their place, women stayed silent, gay people stayed in the closet and there was no such thing as gender identity. That’s all I could figure as I watched the impassive faces of Republicans even as crying children begged them not to pass the bill.

Conservatives don’t always lose culture wars. Look at abortion. And so maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene’s vision will come to pass, a country of states separated by education, healthcare and prosperity. Or maybe the fighters will keep on fighting. Certainly, in the past few weeks, most Kentucky lawmakers have met more eloquent, impassioned trans kids than they’ve ever seen in their lives. Maybe, like former conservative Republican Rep. Jerry Miller, they can be convinced that transgender kids are not a threat, that they deserve to live their lives.

They convinced Republicans like Rep. Killian Timoney and Sen. Danny Carroll, who took courageous stands in voting against the bill.

Carroll said even if puberty blockers could save one child, “what does it hurt? When will we get past all the radicalism, when we will sit down and talk about the people in all this? We’ve got to come together at some point and stop this craziness and start talking.”

Or maybe they can stop fixating on them long enough to remember that if you really wanted to protect children, you’d make sure fewer of them live in poverty. That’s where one in five Kentucky kids are, the sixth worst rate in the nation.

If only we could see some passion about that.

The national suicide prevention hotline has recently been changed to a three-digit suicide and crisis hotline. It is available 24/7 and can be reached by dialing 988. More information can be found at 988lifeline.org. Any young LGBTQ person can call The Trevor Project’s 24-hour crisis hotline at 1-866-488-7386, and transgender people of any age can call the Trans Lifeline at 877-565-8860.