Good morning. I will be live tweeting the #MTLeg House Judiciary hearings of HB112 and HB113, the anti-trans bills. All the content warnings because it is going to be deeply upsetting. Link for the hearings here:

More info on the context here:

More info on the bills here:

Committee chair begins by noting that the bills are "controversial" and there will be a lot of feelings. #MTLeg

These hearings are going to go very long. I will stick around as long as I can. #MTLeg

I think this is a critically important piece and that we should continue to add more and more nuance to this conversation. I would share that I don't think despair is necessarily linked to determinist and binary notions of gender.

When we think about criminalizing care for trans youth - which is what states are currently trying to do - the efforts are intimately connected to codifying notions of irreversibility and constraining bodily self-determination.

This is why we see bills both criminalize care for trans youth while permitting surgical intervention on intersex infants to "normalize" their bodies in alignment with binary constructions of sexed difference.

Many of the newly introduced state bills also mandate disclosure by school staff to parents and guardians of any trans or questioning young person thus chilling the ability of young people to safely explore their identities and bodies.

Despair is tied not only to forcibly having treatment cutoff and the state criminalizing transition but also in losing self-determination. Many young people who are accessing medical care do not (and will not) have binary identities.