Pride is just a week away, and what better way for the Trump administration to commemorate it than by unleashing a series of attacks on the LGBTQ community?
The administration, which is little more than a wholly owned subsidiary of the religious right, already has a dreadful track record. But in the past few weeks, Trump and his cronies have gone out of their way to make things even worse, if that’s possible.
The latest salvo came Friday, when the administration took steps to make life (and health) worse for transgender people. In a gratuitous attack on the health of trans Americans, the administration is seeking to roll back medical protections that have been in place since 2016. Under regulations instituted by the Obama administration, health care providers aren’t allowed to discriminate against patients on the basis of gender identity. The regulation specified that gender identity included “internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female, and which may be different from an individual’s sex assigned at birth.”
Rather than protect trans patients, the Trump administration prefers to coddle transphobic health care providers. By removing the regulation, doctors will be able to deny patients treatments if they’re offended by who their patients are.
The administration floated the proposal last month, but tellingly decided to announce the move on a Friday before a long holiday weekend — the tried-and-true method of burying bad news.
Of course, why settle for one attack, when you can have lots more? This past week, Trump also decided that it was perfectly fine to throw trans people out of homeless shelters. This move was another sop to conservative evangelicals who seem to believe that Christ really only wanted to help the right people.
But wait! There’s more!
The administration is putting the final touches on a plan to repeal another Obama-era policy. The current policy bans agencies from preventing same-sex parents from adopting or fostering children. Agencies that discriminate haven’t been eligible for federal funding, but the Trump administration plans to change that and start paying agencies to discriminate.
All of this comes on the heels of the administration’s opposition to the Equality Act, the bill that would guarantee federal nondiscrimination protections; the House passed it last week. Plus, in the kind of cruelty that’s become an administration hallmark, Trump has been refusing citizenship to children born abroad to same-sex couples.
The hate list is long and it’s far from complete. Virtually any attack on LGBTQ rights that the religious right can think up is going to be on the Trump administration’s wish list. No doubt Trump will think of even more things to add to the list to dampen Pride even more.
