By Nina Heller, CQ-Roll Call WASHINGTON — Doctors and advocates say efforts to ban gender-affirming care and the often inaccurate language lawmakers use to do it exploits most Americans’ relative unfamiliarity with transgender people to push a political agenda. As those efforts have grown — nearly exclusively led by Republicans — they have superseded both abortion rights and same-sex marriage as the go-to social issue among conservatives in the lead-up to the November elections. The attacks have had an impact.
Kellan Baker, the executive director of Whitman-Walker Institute, a D.C.-based health clinic specializing in LGBTQ+ health care, said that basing these attacks on falsehoods helps craft the narrative of transgender people as a “boogeyman” in order to scare people.
“There’s less than 1 percent of the U.S. population that is transgender, which means that many people don’t know a transgender person personally, or even if they do, they maybe don’t know that much about what medical care for transgender people looks like,” Baker said.
“And so it’s very easy to project this kind of false image of a boogeyman, to have this kind of nightmare scenario that’s not real.” Most major medical and mental health associations in the United States, including the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association, say gender-affirming care, which includes a wide range of services including hormone therapy and .