TransPreacher

So far this year, 560 anti-transgender bills have been proposed across the United States.

Many of these bills focus on denying gender affirming care to youth. Despite extremely high rates of suicide amongst trans youth, and endorsement of these practices from medical, psychological, and pediatric associations, these bills seek to prevent access to hormone replacement therapy and even block counseling for gender dysphoria.

While many of these laws have been passed at state governments, courts have stopped these dangerous laws from going in to place on the basis of unconstitutionality.

But yesterday, the 6th Circuit Court overturned a lower court ruling that Tennessee’s prohibition on gender-affirming care was unconstitutional. This ruling allows a ban on transgender care to go back into effect in Tennessee.
As horrible as this ruling is, the legal precedent created by it is even more dangerous. The judges involved cited the Supreme Court Dobbs abortion case nine times and stated that medical treatment is not protected because transgender care is not “deeply rooted in this country’s history and tradition.”

First of all, transgender people have existed as long as humanity, longer than our country’s history and tradition.

But setting that erasure aside for a second, with this precedent, what kind of practices are “deeply rooted in this country’s history and tradition” and what are not?

Many fundamental rights we recognize today, such as privacy, access to contraception, interracial and same-sex marriage, are not deeply ingrained in American history.

Conversely, practices like the usurpation of indigenous lands, school segregation, and Jim Crow laws are deeply embedded in our past. This could result in significant backtracking on numerous rights under this reasoning – transgender rights appear to be next on the chopping block if this rationale holds up.

This ruling and Dobbs violate a principle much older than our country’s history and tradition. They violate the autonomy over our own bodies given to us by our Creator.

Our bodies are not wards of the state, with access to healthcare limited by political control.

Our bodies, our vulnerable bodies, our transbodies, are a gift from God. We are queerfully and wonderfully made. We reflect the beauty and diversity of God’s creation. Our bodies are good. As are the bodies of women, siblings of color, native bodies, and so many others crying out to survive.

Rulings like this one from yesterday, and Dobbs, deny our divinity, trample upon the image of God within us, and threaten our existence.

So let us be seen and heard, for we are the people crying out in the wilderness, the children of the great I AM.