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As those efforts have grown — nearly exclusively led by Republicans — they have superseded both abortion rights and same-sex marriage as the go-to social issue among conservatives in the lead-up to the November elections.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.
