Conservatives are using trans issues to wage war on disability
This piece first appeared in our weekly newsletter, The Fallout.
There’s an inherent duality to the conservative legal movement’s targeted attacks on trans kids. The conservative legal movement is obsessed with transgender people because they view them as an existential danger to the state. Rice, the Tennessee Solicitor-General, argued this position to the Supreme Court last December in United States V. Skrmetti while defending Tennessee’s ban on gender affirming care for minors. In an exchange with Justice Elena Kagan, Rice described those advocating for life-saving gender affirming health care as seeking “a substantive right to engage in nonconforming behavior.”
That’s the legalese way of saying that being trans is a threat to the civil order. According to conservatives, being trans makes you an enemy of state. It’s an outrageous and potentially-genocidal world view.
Then there is the truth that the attacks on the lives and rights of transgender people is a precursor to the attacks on the lives and rights of other politically-vulnerable groups. Consider, for instance, the current battle over the Biden Administration’s decision to expand Section 504 under the Rehabilitation Act. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act is a federal law which, among other things prohibits discrimination towards people with disabilities when it comes to programs that receive federal funds, such as public education. Under the Biden administration, Section 504’s definition of disability was expanded to include gender dysphoria, a move designed to target some of the discrimination transgender students face in public schools while also recognizing the underlying medical condition that required accommodation.
Naturally, conservatives hated it.
In response, 17 states sued to block the expanded definition from taking effect. The lawsuit, while ostensibly aimed at the inclusion of gender-dysphoria under Section 504, seeks more than just to strike trans student protections. These 17 states have asked a federal judge appointed by Trump in Texas to completely strike Section 504 from the law. If Judge Kernodle accepts the ruling, states will no longer have to accommodate disabled students in public schools. The threat that this lawsuit poses to the disability community, public education and our civic institutions in general cannot be overstated. They claim that the lawsuit is likely to be dropped due to a change of administration, as Trump will abandon Biden’s expanded disability definition. Second, and more deceptively, they claim 504 accommodations for disabled students were never under threat and that the lawsuit was
always only about targeting trans students.This is a bold-face lie. The lawsuit asks for the court to throw out 504 as a whole because conservative legal movements saw this as an opportunity to attack trans rights and disabilities rights at once. The conservatives took advantage of it.
The lawsuit has been temporarily halted, but if Trump’s administration reverses Biden’s rule as expected then they may decide to drop the case. The conservative attacks on the disabled community will not end there.
