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During an interview that aired on Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump responded to a question about the war in Iran by launching into a bigoted rant against transgender people.
The New York Post’s Miranda Devine conducted the interview, asking the president for his response to people who have suggested that he was coerced or manipulated into starting the war by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as some media reports have indicated.
“What do you say to people who claim that Bibi Netanyahu ‘tricked’ you into going into Iran?” Devine asked.
Trump responded by disparaging his critics as being against U.S. interests. “They’re just, you know, the enemy,” he said.
Trump then delved into name-calling, describing his political opponents as “dumocrats,” his new preferred insult to refer to members of the Democratic Party. He followed this by launching into a transphobic rant.
“These are people who don’t know what they’re doing,” Trump said of people criticizing his decision to start an unauthorized war. “They want men to play in women’s sports…they want transgender for everybody, surgery, they want transgender mutilization of our children.”
“He tricked me? I’m the one who started it,” Trump said, taking full ownership of the war in Iran.
Allison Chapman, project fellow on Gender Justice & Health Equity at Lawyers for Good Government, responded to Trump’s comments.
“Sure, ‘transgender for everyone’ and ‘transgender mutilization of our children’ are ‘just words’ — just inflammatory, othering, and in the case of ‘mutilization,’ imaginary words unfounded in fact, used to shift Americans’ focus away from Trump’s unlawful and endless military action in Iran, toward scapegoating an already marginalized group of people he was elected to represent,” Chapman told Truthout. “His words here are exactly why court after court rules that there is strong evidence of animus fueled legal attacks against transgender people.”
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Trump’s assertion that children are receiving surgery as part of their gender-affirming care is highly misleading. Such surgeries are generally reserved for adults, and on the rare occasion that older teenagers are permitted to undergo gender-affirming surgery, it is after rigorous discussions involving their guardians, therapists, and medical doctors, who have determined it is necessary.
“In all cases, gender-affirming surgeries are only performed after multiple discussions with both mental health providers and physicians (including endocrinologists and/or surgeons), to determine if surgery is the appropriate course of action,” an Associated Press fact check pointed out.
Indeed, gender-affirming surgery is used to treat cisgender youth far more often than transgender kids, yet regulations and attempts to restrict care by several states and the federal government almost exclusively focus on the latter group.
Several medical organizations have stated that gender-affirming care — including care for trans youth — is not only safe but oftentimes life-saving.
Legal restrictions seeking to ban or limit gender-affirming care “are a baseless intrusion into the patient-physician relationship,” American Academy of Pediatrics President Susan J. Kressly said in December. “Patients, their families, and their physicians — not politicians or government officials — should be the ones to make decisions together about what care is best for them.”
This week, a group of transgender youth and their families filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to block a federal criminal subpoena by prosecutors in Texas against a hospital in New York, seeking to obtain medical records of trans child patients.
“This is deeply personal, private information that belongs to these patients and these parents,” said Karen Loewy, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, who represents the patients.
“It’s really the providers they’re going after, and that is what we worry about. If there are no people left to provide this care, then it’s gone,” one parent of a trans child involved in the suit said.
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