Queering the News of 9/28
Approaching a shutdown, budget held up over anti-trans riders
Nearing a government shutdown at the end of the month, the Trump administration is attempting to push through anti-trans healthcare provisions as part of the budget reconciliation. Posting on TruthSocial, Trump admitted to refusing a meeting with Senate Democrats unless they bent to the request.
“[Democrats] are threatening to shut down the Government of the United States unless they can have over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens (A monumental cost!), force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors [...] allow men to play in women’s sports, and essentially create Transgender operations for everybody,” Trump wrote in the post.
The set provisions include things like banning federal funding to any hospital or medical facility that provides gender-affirming care at any age, regardless of what the funding was for, stripping Medicaid, Medicare, and federal employee coverage for transgender Americans who need gender-affirming care, forcing trans women into men’s prisons, and prohibiting any gender affirming surgeries in federally owned or leased facilities.
This is a larger test of the Democratic Party’s commitment to LGBTQ+ and, more specifically, trans people. They have the numbers to filibuster the bill until the provisions are stripped, but that would essentially lead to a government shutdown.
“There is nothing about this moment and the need to fund the federal government that has anything to do with any issue other than the health of the American people,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries said. Trump’s statement, he added, “related to issues that have nothing to do with the spending bill that is before the Congress and the need to try to avoid a government shutdown — nothing to do with transgender issues or any of the other wild things from the standpoint of what actually is under discussion in the context of this meeting.”
Earlier this month, 17 Democrats crossed party lines to push through a Defense Budget bill with similar anti-trans riders.
A bill of this magnitude would cripple trans healthcare across the country.