Now that she’s unlikely to be considered for Donald Trump’s potential vice president, Marjorie Taylor Greene has decided to move on to other things to annoyingly yap on about. Her latest ambition? Making sure children under the age of 18 are not allowed any gender-affirming care ⏤ under the guise of “protecting innocence.” What a hero! Greene recently shared a video of herself on X wherein she talked to a room of women about gender, pronouns, and female sports. She admitted to not knowing how many genders there are ⏤ because “there are new ones every day” ⏤ and pointed out that “pronouns are so important that you can get fired” for not using the right ones. Once again, this is a stretch of the truth. You can get fired for “intentionally and repeatedly using the wrong name and pronouns to refer to a transgender person,” because that’s harassment and creates a hostile working environment. You’re not going to get fired if you accidentally misgender someone and then simply respect them.
But you know Marj ⏤ she rarely says anything intelligent, and many times when she’s busy running her mouth, it’s to disrespect someone or thirstily praise the former Cheeto-in-Chief, who doesn’t seem to want anything to do with her. As her video shows, things in Greene’s world are too complicated if you have to actually be mindful of how to refer to another person. Unlike most other humans, she is unable ⏤ or perhaps unwilling ⏤ to differentiate between the pronouns he, she, or they, and wrongly behaves as though the rest of society can’t, either. This brings us to her Protect Children’s Innocence Act, a bill that would “place restrictions on the provision of gender affirming care. Gender affirming care includes performing surgery, administering medication, or performing other procedures for the purpose of changing the body of an individual to correspond to a sex that differs from the individual’s biological sex.” The bill died the first time it was presented in Congress, so Greene reintroduced it in September, at which point it stalled again.
Is this actually going to become a law? One hopes not. Given that Greene is an obnoxious rabble-rouser who wants attention and doesn’t really care about anything but getting it, this is likely another desperate ploy to get people to vote for one-term, twice-impeached Trump. She’s not “protecting children.” She’s using them to wage a dumb culture war that only serves to further divide the United States, something her crumbling party is hell-bent on continuing despite Trump’s chances of reelection shrinking by the second. There’s no substance to the bill, and Greene doesn’t even seem to understand what gender-affirming care is or how it works (shocker). This idea that children are being “mutilated” against their will is simply false, but then again, so are most things Greene says.
Gender-affirming care is “designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity” when it differentiates with their assigned gender. It starts with a dignosis of gender dysphoria, which is a defined medical condition. Symptoms include the desire for the sex characteristics of another gender and the “significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning,” meaning the individuals have difficult lives and want to feel better about themselves. Youths who suffer from this medical condition are much more likely to experience depression, emotional distress, bullying, violence, and are much more likely to consider self-harm. Transgender youths are three times more likely to commit suicide than cisgender youths. That’s why gender-affirming care exists ⏤ not to mutilate kids, but to help them feel better about themselves so they can be their authentic selves and live happy lives.
Greene also seems confused about how care works. Treatment includes counseling, resources to help change an outward appearance (like how to put on makeup), and even speech therapy. There’s hair removal treatment as well as breast binding or padding or genital tucking. There are puberty blockers and hormones. This is all under parental supervision and the care of a doctor. You can’t just walk into a doctor’s office and get it; there are stringent guidelines and many steps involved. Greene’s inability to grasp that transgender kids are actual human beings is insane to those of us with hearts and souls, but not as unfathomable as the fact that her bill aims to make this type of treatment illegal. If that were to happen, and the federal government outlawed gender-affirming care, countless children’s lives would become infinitely harder and potentially even be put in danger.
It’s very simple: gender-affirming care exists so that these children can live comfortable lives and be happy. That is their right. That is the right of every American ⏤ to be happy and comfortable in their own skin. There are plenty of ways to actually help children, and marginalizing an entire population because gender identity is “confusing” is not one of them. Do you know what the number one leading cause of death for U.S. children and teens is? Guns. Firearm fatalities are up 87% since 2011. What if, instead of going after doctors who are trying to help children stay alive, Greene went after gun manufacturers or tried to pass a law to make it harder for bad people to get guns so children aren’t put in harm’s way? What if, instead of telling Christian women how to behave ⏤ like she has any leg to stand on in that department ⏤ she actually sat down, closed her mouth, and did her job? If only Marj cared enough to even ponder this revolutionary concept, let alone make it happen.
