Inside the shadowy right wing groups working to destroy our freedoms
First they came for the trans people
Republicans have been waging an unprecedented attack against the LGBTQ+ community and specifically trans people as a whole. Red state after red state are enacting draconian laws that limit life-saving gender affirming care for youth, and in the case of Missouri even ADULTS are affected. The pace of this lawmaking is relentless and they all have one goal in mind: to increase Evangelical voter turnout in order to win the election in 2024.
A demagogue is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as:
a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power
And what are Republicans doing today other than using popular prejudices and false claims about the trans community in order to gain power? And gaining power over this country is the PRECISE goal of Evangelical Christianity, a peculiar American flavor of Christianity that bears no resemblance to the Christianity of the Bible.
“Dominionism” has been a political movement in America for the past 40 years, since Ronald Reagan threw open the doors of the Republican Party and invited the Evangelical Christians to break bread with them.
Dominion theology, also known as dominionism, is a group of Christian political ideologies that seek to institute a nation that is governed by Christians and based on their understandings of Biblical law.
In other words, the goal of the dominionists is to throw out the Constitution and turn America into a Christian theocracy where the Evangelicals will be the only group with rights and the rest of us will be required to bow down before them.
Wilhoit’s Law states:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
And we are seeing this law play out perfectly today. Time and time again we have witnessed white Conservatives literally get away with murder as long as the victims are black or Democrats. Conservatives will literally vote for a man who is the VERY DEFINITION of an adulterer AND a rapist as long as he’s a Republican. People often joke “It’s Ok If You’re A Republican” (IOKIYAR) but this is exactly the nation they wish to build, where Conservative Christians get away with murder and the rest of us can be arrested on false or trumped-up pretenses.
The modern GOP has no answers for many of the most important challenges America faces today, and rather than modernizing, adapting, as all institutions must in a time of change, the GOP has decided to fight the future by rigging the system to remain in power while the country and its people drift from their narrow grasp.
More than half of transgender and nonbinary kids have considered suicide, according to a 2021 survey by the Trevor Project, and 93 percent say they worry about state laws denying transgender people access to gender-affirming medical care. This treatment approach—which typically includes puberty blockers for pubescent children, cross-sex hormones for teenagers or adults, and, almost exclusively for adults, surgeries—represents a broad medical agreement that such care can be crucial for supporting trans kids’ wellbeing. Gender-affirming care is supported by the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychiatric Association, the Endocrine Society, and other major medical organizations. And studies have found that it is associated with better mental health outcomes over both short and longer-term periods.
This is the very essence of fascism.
Leaked emails give away the game
In March the progressive website Mother Jones got its hands on a trove of emails that give away the Republican game. These emails were written in 2019 by South Dakota Republican state Rep. Fred Deutsch to 18 anti-trans doctors, legislators, and lawyers as he was writing an Orwellian bill known as the Vulnerable Child Protection Act (VCPA) that would make it a felony for doctors to provide much needed gender-affirming treatment of children under the age of 16 in South Dakota.
In 2019, Deutsch tweeted that he would try to criminalize doctors who followed the Endocrine Society’s clinical practice guidelines for treating people with gender dysphoria. He would later claim the idea for such a law had come from “children I saw on Twitter” who told him to read Reddit forums about detransitioning. By that summer, Deutsch had quietly assembled a group of advisers, including people who had once identified as trans only to reverse course and deny that anyone is truly transgender. They helped him workshop legislative language, supporting materials, and proponent testimony.
The leaked emails show the degree to which these national anti-trans activists shaped Deutsch’s oppressive legislation, a version of which was signed into law in South Dakota last February, and the tactics, alliances, and goals of a movement that has sought to foist their agenda on a national scale.
“These are groups who we know are not interested in the best-practice care for trans kids,” says Cathryn Oakley, state legislative director and senior counsel for the Human Rights Campaign. “These bills are coming from national organizations whose purpose is to harm LGBTQ people.”
The leaked emails reveal how Deutsch’s proposal helped proponents of the national movement to restrict gender-affirming care establish a playbook for their now-common attacks.
The first email Rep. Deutsch sent to these groups indicates their intention to keep this information hidden from view.
“I have no doubt this will be an uphill battle when we get to session. As always, please do not share this with the media. The longer we can fly under the radar the better.”
In further emails the groups pushed Deutsch to make the bill MORE restrictive. Vernadette Broyles, the president and general counsel of a Georgia-based law firm Child & Parental Rights Campaign, urged him to raise the age threshold to 18. Broyles, who is also affiliated with the conservative Christian legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), warned that other religious-right groups might not support the bill if “you start by giving away 16 and 17-year olds right from the outset.”
Others, including Andre Van Mol—a member of a fringe, conservative doctors group that calls itself the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds)—raised concerns that the bill as written might backfire by accidentally blocking health care providers from “attempting to change…a child’s perception of their sex” when kids identify as transgender. Deutsch agreed to rewrite the section.
At the time there was no precedence for such bills and the VCPA failed in South Dakota’s Senate after doctors showed up and protested the bill, stating they should not be sent to prison for providing care that follows scientific and medical consensus.
“Please do not say that the South Dakota effort failed!!” Margaret Clarke, general counsel for the Alabama branch of the Phyllis Schlafly–founded Eagle Forum, replied. “You successfully inspired, encouraged and counseled numerous VCAP [sic] efforts around the country. You established the ideal witness list that we are all still following in our individual states…And, most importantly you connected us all to each other. This is just the beginning.”
This is just the beginning
And indeed Deutsch’s effort to criminalize doctors providing gender-affirming care was just the beginning. The VCPA became the template by which 18 other Republican-led states wrote bills criminalizing the treatment of gender dysphoria in children.
The organizations exchanging emails with Deutsch and his other collaborators aren’t shy about their agenda. Several—including ACPeds, Eagle Forum, and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations—are listed as partners in a campaign dubbed the “Promise to America’s Children.” Co-led by ADF, the Heritage Foundation (a major conservative think tank also represented in the emails), and the Christian nationalist lobbying group Family Policy Alliance, the campaign pushes anti-LGBTQ legislation, claiming that the government and media are imposing “explicit, sexual content” on children—meaning information about sexual orientation, gender identity, and abortion. The president of the American Principles Project, a member of the coalition, recently told the New York Times that his group’s goal is to eliminate all transition care, starting with children because that’s “where the consensus is.”
“It was like Deutsch assembled a team of Navy SEALs—we were all trained killers in a specialty,” says Elisa Rae Shupe, a retired US Army soldier who became a vocal anti-trans advocate and participated in Deutsch’s working group after detransitioning. Shupe has since retransitioned, disavowed much of her old activism, and shared her copies of the working group’s emails with reporters. Religious-right rhetoric about wanting to help children with gender dysphoria is “just a front for what they do behind the scenes,” she says. “It’s like they want to do as much damage to the trans community as they can.”
Richard Mast of Liberty Counsel separately advised the group to avoid saying the words transgender, cisgender, or non-binary. “Using them surrenders the language,” Mast wrote. “If the other side’s language frames the debate, we lose.”
Even as Deutsch’s original bill failed, variations of the Vulnerable Child Protection Act were already being introduced in at least 9 states beyond South Dakota. In part, that was thanks to the efforts of people on the team, who were pushing the bill they’d workshopped with Deutsch behind the scenes to other Republican legislators.
However in February 2023 South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem signed a version of Deutsch’s bill. The new law strips licenses from doctors who provide minors with gender-affirming care, and requires health care providers to gradually cut off puberty blockers and hormones for any kids they are already treating. That provision is expected to force some South Dakota teens to medically detransition by the end of 2023.
“We hope they become weapons in the hands of many warriors!”
The emails illustrate just how long some major figures in the anti-trans movement have been incubating political attacks on transgender health care. For instance, Broyles—who today represents Jamie Reed, the former caseworker who has made controversial, high-profile claims against a Missouri gender clinic—was working in 2020 with ACPeds executive director Michelle Cretella and retired American Principles Project senior fellow Jane Robbins to compile a packet of lobbying materials in support of Vulnerable Child Protection Act bills, including a guide targeted at parents. “Please share these with your legislators and feel free disseminate them as widely as possible with allies,” Broyles wrote on January 9, 2020. “We hope they become weapons in the hands of many warriors!”
If this information makes you as angry as it does for me please consider sharing it to your networks. The more people understand where this is all coming from the better chance we have in fighting back. As you can plainly see, Republicans are LITERALLY trying to erase the entire trans community and deny our existence by criminalizing desperately needed care for trans people.
Remember: knowledge is power.