Mississippi Today
‘What are we doing?’: Protesters say legislative focus on anti-trans bill misplaced amid health care crisis
‘What are we doing?': Protesters say legislative focus on anti-trans bill misplaced amid health care crisis
Trans kids, supportive parents and activists from across Mississippi gathered on the south-facing steps of the Capitol on Wednesday to rally against a bill that would ban gender-affirming medical care for trans minors.
More than 50 people attended the protest against House Bill 1125, called the “Regulate Experimental Procedures for Adolescents Act,” holding colorful signs and wearing the pink, blue and white trans pride flags draped on their shoulders.
Some trans kids who attended, like Theodore Milnor, a 15-year-old freshman at Tougaloo Early College High School, had excused absences from school. Milnor's counselor gave him one condition: To write a report on the protest and present it to the whole school for kids who couldn't go.
Before the protest started, Milnor turned to a family friend, Tifani Keith, who'd come with him because his parents couldn't get off work. He said he was anxious.
“We're in a very safe and loving place right now,” Keith told him as they walked up the Capitol steps.
Inside the building, conservative lawmakers have fast-tracked HB 1125 without consulting trans kids or providers of gender-affirming care, an evidence-based form of treatment that is supported by every major medical association in the U.S. If the bill passes, providers could lose their license if they continue to treat trans kids, and anyone who “aids and abets” gender-affirming care for trans kids could be sued for damages for up to 30 years, in a provision modeled off a Texas anti-abortion bill.
“It is infantilizing, unfair, discriminatory and frankly unconstitutional,” said McKenna Raney-Gray, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi's LGBTQ Justice Project. “This is the kind of thing the ACLU was designed to fight against.”
The bill has yet to pass the Senate but it is backed by a powerful coalition of lawmakers, including Gov. Tate Reeves who has indicated he'll sign it.
“The fact is that we set age restrictions on driving a car and on getting a tattoo,” Reeves said during his State of the State address. “We don't let 11-year-olds enter an R-rated movie alone, yet some would have us believe that we should push permanent, body-altering surgeries on them at such a young age.”
Other lawmakers have likened gender-affirming care to child abuse and called the bill a measure to protect kids. But at the rally, speakers said the bill will do the exact opposite: by denying trans kids the opportunity to transition, they say HB 1125 will increase the risk of suicide among a population that is already disproportionately vulnerable to mental illness. Nationally, trans youth attempt suicide at a rate more than four times their cisgender peers due to social stigma and discrimination. Research has repeatedly shown that gender-affirming care significantly boosts the chances that trans kids will live to see adulthood.
READ MORE: What to know about gender-affirming care in Mississippi
Some of the trans kids who attended, like Milnor, have not started gender-affirming care but still view the bill as an attack on their rights.
“This bill is not about health care in my point of view,” he said. “I feel it is more about ostracizing trans people.”
Gender-affirming care is already difficult to obtain in Mississippi. There is likely only one clinic in the state that offers gender-affirming care, with parental consent, to 16- and 17-year-old trans teenagers. The number of kids in the state who have prescriptions to hormones or puberty blockers — treatment that is reversible — could likely fit in a whole classroom, according to in-state providers of gender-affirming care.
In speeches, House lawmakers like Rep. Nick Bain, R-Corinth, a co-sponsor of the bill, could not name a single instance of trans kids undergoing surgery in Mississippi. There is no clinic in Mississippi that offers gender-confirmation surgery to trans kids, according to providers.
“Believe me, the gentleman from Corinth did not come up with this idea one afternoon in the duck hunt,” said Clint Faulkner, a father who drove up from Sumrall with his child to attend the rally. “He got a call from a special interest group. … That's what bothers me.”
Multiple speakers asked, rhetorically, why lawmakers are prioritizing HB 1125 instead of other health care issues in Mississippi, like the rural hospital crisis or the worsening rate of maternal mortality, one of the highest in America.
“My question, as always, is this,” said Lance Presley, a reverend at Broadmeadow United Methodist Church in Jackson. “Why is it that every time folks in this building start talking about protecting our children, it's never about making sure that our children in this state have adequate nutrition, it's never about making sure that the kids in this state live past childhood?”
“Why is it always – when they talk about protecting children – why is it always about hurting the kids who are already hurting most,” he continued.
Ashley Moore, the mother of a trans child, echoed Presley's point.
“What are we doing?” she said. “We rank last in so many things, and we're trying to take away our children's rights? Gender-affirming care is evidence-based. Everybody seems to be overlooking that.”
Moore said that she was so scared to speak out against the bill she was shaking, but that, “I am even more terrified of what will happen to my child and my family if this is passed.”
Leviathan Myers-Rowell, a 16-year-old high school junior, talked about what it's like to be a trans kid in Mississippi, an experience he said lawmakers don't understand. He quoted a comment that Sen. Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, made in a Senate committee claiming that parents are forcing gender-affirming care on trans kids.
“This is horrifying to me because it just isn't true,” Myers-Rowell said. “There are no parents out there who actually want to choose the gender assignment of their children … the reality is being trans is hard, and nobody chooses this.”
After speeches finished, protesters marched two blocks to the Governor's Mansion, waving flags and chanting “protect trans youth.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1917
May 5, 1917
Eugene Jacques Bullard became the first Black American combat pilot.
After the near lynching of his father and hearing that Great Britain lacked such racism, the 12-year-old Georgia native stowed away on a ship headed for Scotland. From there, he moved to Liverpool, England, where he handled odd jobs before becoming a boxer, traveling across Europe before he settled in Paris.
“It seems to me that the French democracy influenced the minds of both White and Black Americans there and helped us all to act like brothers as near as possible,” he said. “It convinced me, too, that God really did create all men equal, and it was easy to live that way.”
When World War I began, he was too young to fight for his adopted country, so he and other American expatriates joined the French Foreign Legion. Through a series of battles, he was wounded, and doctors believed he would never walk again.
No longer able to serve in the infantry, an American friend bet him $2,000 that he could not get into aviation. Taking on the challenge, he earned his “wings” and began fighting for the French Aéronautique Militaire.
He addressed racism with words on his plane, “All Blood Runs Red,” and he nicknamed himself, “The Black Swallow of Death.”
On his flights, he reportedly took along a Rhesus monkey named “Jimmy.” He tried to join the U.S. Air Service, only to be turned away because he was Black. He became one of France's most decorated war heroes, earning the French Legion of Honor.
After the war he bought a Paris nightclub, where Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong performed and eventually helped French officials ferret out Nazi sympathizers. After World War II ended, he moved to Harlem, but his widespread fame never followed him back to the U.S.
In 1960, when French President Charles de Gaulle visited, he told government officials that he wanted to see his old friend, Bullard. No one in the government knew where Bullard was, and the FBI finally found him in an unexpected place — working as an elevator operator at the Rockefeller Center in New York City.
After de Gaulle's visit, he appeared on “The Today Show,” which was shot in the same building where he worked.
Upon his death from cancer in 1961, he was buried with honors in the French War Veterans' section of the Flushing Cemetery in Queens, New York.
A sculpture of Bullard can be viewed in the Smithsonian National Space and Air Museum in Washington, D.C., a statue of him can be found outside the Museum of Aviation, and an exhibit on him can be seen inside the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, which posthumously gave him the rank of a second lieutenant. He is loosely portrayed in the 2006 film, “Flyboys.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A seat at table for Democrats might have gotten Medicaid expansion across the finish line
The Mississippi Capitol is 171,000 square feet, granted a massive structure, but when it comes to communication between the two legislative chambers that occupy the building, it might as well be as big as the cosmos.
Such was the case in recent days during the intense and often combustible process that eventually led to the death of Medicaid expansion and with that the loss of the opportunity to provide health care for 200,000 working poor Mississippians with the federal government paying the bulk of the cost.
Democrats in the state House came under intense pressure and criticism for blocking a Medicaid expansion compromise reached by Republican House and Senate negotiators.
First of all, it would be disingenuous to argue that Democrats, who compose less than one-third of the membership of either chamber, blocked any proposal. Truth be known, Republicans should be able to pass anything they want without a solitary Democratic vote.
But on this particular issue, the Republican legislative leadership who finally decided that Medicaid expansion would be good for the state needed the votes of the minority party, which incidentally had been working for 10 years to pass Medicaid expansion. The reason their votes were needed is that many Republicans, despite the wishes of their leaders, still oppose Medicaid expansion.
The breakdown in the process could be attributed to the decision of the two presiding officers, House Speaker Jason White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann in the Senate, not to appoint a single Democrat to the all-important conference committee.
Conference committees are formed of three senators and three House members who work out the differences between the two chambers on a bill. Considering that Democratic votes were needed in both chambers to pass Medicaid expansion, and considering Democrats had been working on the issue for a decade while Republicans blocked it, it would have made sense that they had a seat at the table in the final negotiations process.
One Democrat from each chamber on the conference committee could not have altered the outcome of the negotiations. But the two Democrats could have provided input on what their fellow legislative Democrats would accept and vote for.
In the eyes of the Democrats, the compromise reached without their voice being heard was unworkable and would not have resulted in Medicaid expansion.
The Republican compromise said Medicaid would not be expanded until the federal government provided a waiver mandating those on Medicaid expansion were working. Similar work requirement requests by other states have been denied. Under the compromise, if the work requirement was rejected by federal officials, Medicaid expansion would not occur in Mississippi.
After voicing strong objections to the work requirement, House Minority Leader Rep. Robert Johnson, recognizing the Senate would not budge from the work requirement, offered a compromise. The Johnson compromise to the compromise was to remove a provision mandating the state apply annually with federal officials for the work requirement.
Instead, under Johnson's proposal, state Medicaid officials would be mandated to apply just once for the work requirement. If it was rejected, Medicaid expansion would not occur, but hopefully that would compel the Legislature to take up the issue of the work requirement and perhaps remove it.
“We just want the Legislature to come back and have a conversation next year if the federal government doesn't approve the work requirement. It's as simple as that,” Johnson said.
Senate leaders agreed that Johnson's proposal was a simple ask and something they might consider.
But Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, said he never heard Johnson's proposal until late in the process — too late in the process, as it turned out.
Speaker Jason White, R-West, also said he never heard the proposal, though Johnson said he repeatedly discussed it with House leaders. He certainly was relaying the information to the media during the final hectic days before Medicaid expansion died.
And perhaps if Johnson or one of his Democratic colleagues had been on the conference committee, that information would have been heard by the right legislative people and perhaps Medicaid expansion would not have died.
After all, a conference room or an office where negotiators are meeting to hammer out a compromise is much smaller than the massive state Capitol, where communications often get lost in the cosmos.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1884
May 4, 1884
Crusading journalist Ida B. Wells, an African-American native of Holly Springs, Mississippi, was riding a train from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, where she worked as a teacher, when a white railroad conductor ordered her to move to another car. She refused.
When the conductor grabbed her by the arm, “I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand,” she wrote.
The conductor got help from others, who dragged her off the train.
In response, she sued the railroad, saying the company forced Black Americans to ride in “separate but unequal” coaches. A local judge agreed, awarding her $500 in damages.
But the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed that ruling three years later. The decision upended her belief in the court system.
“I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed it, give us justice,” she said. “I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them.”
Wells knew about caring for others. At age 16, she raised her younger siblings after her parents and a brother died in a yellow fever epidemic. She became a teacher to support her family.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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