And on Monday, Texas Children’s Hospital decided to stop providing hormone therapies for transgender children, in response to recent developments in the state.
The news out of Florida and Texas exemplifies a much larger pattern.
“Right-wing movements appeal to an enormous anxiety people have that their worlds are falling apart and that gender and critical race theory have this enormously destructive power,” they said.
The legislation could create a chilling effect and essentially “erase entire chapters of history, literature and critical health information in schools,” Amit Paley and Joe Saunders wrote in February for CNN Opinion.
It’s all in service to his presidential ambitions,” said Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, a civil rights organization dedicated to ending discrimination against the state’s LGBTQ population.
“His desire to cling to this narrow slice of the electorate that decides Republican presidential primaries blocks out the sun for anything else,” she said.
“Prohibiting gender-affirming care, like puberty blockers, or barring transgender-inclusive athletic teams imposes real and devastating risks on transgender youths,” the University of Oregon political scientist Alison Gash recently wrote for The Conversation.
“We’re talking about kids who already feel themselves to be very different, who are trying to come to terms with their embodiment and their lived sense of who they are and what their gender might be,” Butler said.
It might look like broad solidarity across multiple categories of marginalized groups.
“There can be a failure to connect to a much wider retrenchment of civil rights,” Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic and a former attorney at the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, told CNN.
“Historically, that hasn’t always been the case,” she said, referring to how, down through the decades, marginalized groups have often been confronted with periods of gain and retrenchment.