DeSantis Goes After Drag, A Gay Vampire Reboot, and More: This Week in Queer News – Them
Florida in particular is cementing itself as the reigning champion of transphobia in the states, because of what’s coming in August. This ain’t a drill: Florida’s Department of Health will be meeting on August 5th, 8AM EST, at the Ft. Lauderdale Airport Marriot Hotel, in order to attempt to ban all gender-affirming care whether for children or adults, but mostly children, in Florida. They will attempt to do this by submitting the “evidence” their medical board has assembled (or commissioned).
On the subject of that evidence, we should talk about its quality (or lack thereof), as it attempts to dismiss US federal guidance on the subject by claiming that evidence lacks quality, an argument which would have more weight if the science they describe as “low quality” wasn’t leagues better than the evidence they themselves rely upon.
Their “evidence” has been exhaustively reviewed, both by independent trans activists (see here and here), and more professionally by Yale Law Review, who have written a document and submitted a formal letter to Florida over the issue, in collaboration with Yale’s School of Medicine, University of Texas, and University of Alabama-Birmingham.
We will provide a bare-bones summary of the objections to Florida’s evidence here:
Florida Health cites sources that have no scientific merit by authors whose alleged expertise has been disregarded by federal courts. Apart from relying on outright pseudoscience, Florida Health commissioned input from controversial anti-trans sexologist James Cantor, who admitted in a deposition that he has no relevant expertise for trans youth. Further, the report Cantor submitted to Florida is near-identical to that which he gave to said federal court, a testimony for which he was apparently paid and for which a known hate group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, claims credit.
Florida also has in evidence a document by Quentin van Meter, president of a religious group calling itself the American College of Pediatricians, which opposes same-sex marriage, and advocates conversion therapy. Quentin is barred as an expert witness in at least one court, and his Florida document is also near-identical to a paid court testimony. This is all without pointing out the pseudoscientific and debunked claims regarding rapid-onset gender dysphoria that Cantor parrots, which have been thoroughly debunked and disregarded by relevant disciplines.
The report also highlights that, if Florida Health’s standards for “quality” were universally held, virtually no existing common medical treatments would be available. They specifically highlight that cholesterol-lowering drugs and routine surgeries such as mammograms would have to be banned under the standards for quality Florida sets for trans-supportive research.
The Law Review also points out that the proposed policies are flat-out unconstitutional and discriminatory. This should go without saying.
These are the bare-bone points of the report, but you absolutely should read the whole thing. We cannot quite encapsulate here just how sketchy Florida’s manufactured evidence base is. Read it, and remember, because they’re meeting over this next Friday.
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.