Marjorie Taylor Greene’s plan to legislate queer youth into the ground involves prison, defunding, $250K fines, and keeping everyone uninformed

Of all the public figures who have directly or indirectly dubbed themselves a disciple of Trumpism, none stand out quite like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has recklessly injected herself into most every political-adjacent space in hopes that it gets Marjorie-Taylor-Greene’d beyond repair.

Some of her more recent antics involved taking aim at Indigenous People’s Day and suggesting that Jan. 6 would have been much worse if she had been pulling the strings (which, even if that was the worst joke of all time, is not a thing you ever say in a position like that). But now, perhaps in a bid to appeal to an audience that she already has a lock on anyway, Greene has publicized her plans to increase the loss of young queer lives over the next few fiscal quarters.

If you’re unfamiliar with gender affirming-care (and most people are), you may take a glance at these propositions and think that Greene is being none too radical here. If so, allow me — a person who has gone through gender affirming-care and is alive because of it — to walk you through what makes Greene’s bill so dangerous. The “Protect Children’s Innocence Act” decrees that any person who knowingly performs or has performed gender-affirming care on a minor will be charged with a Class C Felony (10-25 years in prison or a maximum $250,000 fine), and will be ineligible for visas or admittance into the United States in the event that they’re an undocumented immigrant.

These laws are preying upon the notion that children are getting pumped full of hormones the moment they express a thought that’s not in line with the social expectations of the sex that they were born at. This is not even close to the actual administrative nuances of gender-affirming medical treatment. I was 20 years old when I sought to medically transition, and was required to have an appointment with a psychologist (who cleared me), after which my care provider (who will not be named) still wouldn’t provide me with hormones despite me being of sound mind. Had I not enlisted the support of an unnamed advocate, I probably never would have gotten them and would subsequently be helping to fertilize what I hope would be a very beautiful tree today.

This is all to say that getting hormones for the purpose of transitioning medically is the 13th, 14th, and 15th Labor of Hercules all at once, and there is nobody rounding up children en masse to put them through hormone therapy. If there was, then that is of course reprehensible and they should be punished for such a thing.

But here’s the other thing: Greene does not specify what gender-affirming care means in the context of her bill. The World Health Organization defines it as any social, psychological, behavioral, and medical interventions designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity. In other words, this “gender-affirming care” that Greene wants to put people in prison for could be something as simple as counseling sessions that allow youth to safely explore their emotions, questions, and fears relating to their gender identity. Without such support, you run the risk of fostering a wide environment of fear in regards to gender identity and queerness as a whole. This is precisely what Greene wants.

This brings us to Greene’s two other points on the bill, which involve prohibiting taxpayer-funded gender-affirming care and prohibiting schools from providing information on gender-affirming care. It doesn’t take a genius to discern that she doesn’t intend to find an alternate method of funding for gender-affirming care, so all that first decree does is render gender-affirming care even less accessible across the board. This is only compounded by the second decree, which prohibits the simple act of education on gender identity and the options that are available for safely and measuredly exploring that.

Education on the topic of gender and gender identity, of course, comes long before gender-affirming care enters any sort of equation, if it even does at all. Indeed, how can youth be expected to make informed decisions about their relationship to gender if you don’t even allow education on the topic? How can they figure out if their fears/struggles are rooted in their relationship to gender identity? Just as importantly, how can they figure out if they’re rooted in something else entirely?

So make no mistake, folks: Marjorie Taylor Greene has absolutely zero interest in “protecting children’s innocence.” This bill is absolutely, positively only concerned with making sure that queer youth never get the chance to grow up into queer adults, whether that means stripping them of the education they need to understand themselves, gouging the price and accessibility of gender-affirming care to the moon, and marking all those who could possibly help them as felons. She doesn’t care whether they’re miserable or dead ⏤ she just wants queerness out of her sight.