Last summer, James Hohmann sat down with transgender activist Gavin Grimm after he won a six-year legal battle that validated his right to use the boys’ bathroom at his Virginia high school. The Supreme Court declined to hear the school district’s appeal to Grimm’s victory before the circuit court. It was a watershed moment in the struggle for trans rights.
But the past few months have shown that struggle continues. Houston-based Texas Children’s Hospital, the largest pediatric hospital in America, has announced it will stop prescribing gender-affirming hormone therapies. The hospital says the policy is necessary because of an order from Gov. Greg Abbott (R) directing Texas’s child welfare agency to investigate reports of children receiving gender-affirming care. And last month, Texas’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, wrote a legal opinion labeling gender-affirming treatments as “child abuse.” He claims that puberty blockers and hormone therapies are effectively castration.
Both Abbott and Paxton face reelection campaigns, and their strategists believe opposing transgender rights will help them politically. That’s so often the case with these kinds of culture-war crusades. Against that backdrop, we felt the interview with Grimm was freshly relevant.
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RSSLast summer, James Hohmann sat down with transgender activist Gavin Grimm after he won a six-year legal battle that validated his right to use the boys’ bathroom at his Virginia high school. The Supreme Court declined to hear the school district’s appeal to Grimm’s victory before the circuit court. It was a watershed moment in the struggle for trans rights.
But the past few months have shown that struggle continues. Houston-based Texas Children’s Hospital, the largest pediatric hospital in America, has announced it will stop prescribing gender-affirming hormone therapies. The hospital says the policy is necessary because of an order from Gov. Greg Abbott (R) directing Texas’s child welfare agency to investigate reports of children receiving gender-affirming care. And last month, Texas’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, wrote a legal opinion labeling gender-affirming treatments as “child abuse.” He claims that puberty blockers and hormone therapies are effectively castration.
Both Abbott and Paxton face reelection campaigns, and their strategists believe opposing transgender rights will help them politically. That’s so often the case with these kinds of culture-war crusades. Against that backdrop, we felt the interview with Grimm was freshly relevant.
