How They Lie: Trump's Executive Orders

I particularly liked "countless."

An unsourced photo from Vancouver, British Columbia.

Just a bit ago Wonkette published my piece on Trump’s executive order calling trans health care “mutilation.” It’s a horror show, and the tactics they’re proposing are designed to coerce doctors into giving up treating trans patients in order to avoid the costs of investigation, the bad press of any prosecution, and the costs, including potentially jail time, of any conviction.

But that piece was about what the order does, the specifics of what Trump is commanding the government to do to trans people. What it doesn’t address are the embedded lies that form the premises of the argument for why trans health care is bad and should be banned. I’ve been meaning to start a series tackling how different groups package and sell their lies, getting the media to treat them as credible, getting so many media consumers to treat them as truth. There’s no better document to start with than this one.

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So they lied in this document, did they?

Oh, just a bit. In addition to obvious lies such as calling the delay of puberty “mutilation,” Trump also told some other whoppers, like these:

[T]hese vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications

Okay, technically true because of the use of the word “may” and we can’t be sure there will never be an individual whose bills don’t increase, on average medical bills are almost certain to decrease any time a pregnancy is prevented, and trans health care, whatever else it does, often decreases fertility or prevents pregnancies entirely.

Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated

Again, no. The NHS-sponsored Cass Review of trans health care in the UK looked at over 3300 patient records and found fewer than ten who regretted receiving care. Fewer than ten. Unless no one in the Trump administration ever learned count all their toes on both feet, “countless” is a gigantic lie. So, okay, Trump probably can’t count that high, but more than half of his lawyers can.

[Trans people] are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization

LOL. You’re not “trapped” into sterilization if you volunteer.

The Big Lie

The executive order relies on cis normativity to communicate body horror that simply does not exist when trans care is provided to the right people at their own request in a patient-centered, patient-empowered context. Even to the extent that regret might eventually develop, remember that the Cass Review, as hostile as it was to trans people and our health care, failed to turn up even ten people “trapped” with unwanted lifelong medical complications. The executive order uses the existence of the tiniest handful of people to justify the use of the word “often,” which it cannot. “Often” is simply a lie.

But it is not the big lie, the biggest lie. Cis children access gender-affirming surgeries far more often than trans children, but the same surgical techniques and the same hormones banned for cis children and experimental and harmful are not banned for those cis kids.

Is this because Trump cares more deeply for the risks to trans health than the health of cis children? Of course not.

Look again at the language of the ExO — maiming, mutilating, trapping. It’s all predicated on the idea that the outcome is bad. We don’t refer to face lifts as “maiming” or an appendectomy as “mutilation.”

At the heart of the entire effort is the bigoted assumption that to be trans is itself a failure, an ugliness, a mutilation of the spirit even when the body is untouched. This is the mother of all anti-trans lies that Trump and his ilk seek to promote. More than anything, they wish trans people to believe themselves deficient, misshapen, and broken, the very lies that kill our spirits and turn us against ourselves.

Trans people are everything we need to be. We are beautiful. And in those times when we are able to set aside the lies, we can become whole.

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Crip Dyke also writes for the delightfully cussmouthed Wonkette!

Who knew trans writers are allowed over 600 followers on BlueSky. It might actually be illegal for you to try to join in.