House GOP passes defense bill that targets trans kids

House Republicans muscled through a provision targeting transgender youth on Wednesday as a part of the massive $895 billion defense bill, which now heads to the Senate. 

The bill, known as the National Defense Authorization Act, features real wins like a 14.5% pay raise for junior enlisted service members and a 4.5% pay increase for all other members. However, language taking aim at medical care for transgender youth was also snuck in, causing an uproar among both Democrats and Republicans. 

“[B]lanketly denying health care to people who need it—just because of a biased notion against transgender people—is wrong,” Democratic Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, wrote in a statement posted to X on Tuesday. 

But for once, dissatisfaction with the provision is bipartisan. House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama, told reporters it didn’t make sense to include the ban ahead of Donald Trump’s second term.

“[Trump] is going to stop all these social, cultural issues from being embedded as policies. So my point is, I don’t know why this is in the bill when [on] Jan. 20, it’s a moot point,” he said on Tuesday.

A vote in the Senate will take place next week, with officials expecting the bill to pass.

While the controversial provision is in the headlines this week, an older version of the NDAA included even more dangerous language. 

In June, Republicans attempted to push through other provisions. One sought to roll back the Pentagon’s policy to reimburse costs for military members who travel to get abortions. And another would have stopped Tricare—service members’ source of health insurance—from covering some gender-affirming care for adults. As if their stance on “woke” topics wasn’t enough, Republicans also tried to gut the agency’s diversity efforts.

Thankfully, many of those provisions were later deleted from the bill.

Transgender rights have dominated the conversation on both sides of the aisle over the past few years. 

Despite transgender people making up around 1% of the population, the right uses the topic of trans health care to stoke fear-based votes and peddle bathroom bans across the nation.

Just take a look at our incoming president. The felon-elect spent more than $21 million in the last month of the presidential campaign alone on anti-trans ads focused on their participation in sports, which bathrooms they use, and whether they can serve for their country.

He also scolded former presidential opponent Kamala Harris over gender-affirming care for incarcerated people—a policy he also followed during his first term. 

Despite his campaign of hate, Trump dodged the topic during his interview for Time’s “Person of the Year.”

"I don’t want to get into the bathroom issue. Because it's a very small number of people we're talking about, and it's ripped apart our country, so they'll have to settle whatever the law finally agrees," he said. 

"I am a big believer in the Supreme Court,” he continued, “and I'm going to go by their rulings, and so far, I think their rulings have been rulings that people are going along with, but we're talking about a very small number of people, and we're talking about it, and it gets massive coverage, and it's not a lot of people."

This increasingly hateful rhetoric toward transgender people has sparked hundreds of bills over the past few years targeting this minority’s access to basic human rights.

Most recently, the topic of medical care for transgender youth made it all the way to the Supreme Court, in the case of U.S. v. Skrmetti. That case was argued on Dec. 4, and a decision is pending. 

As Daily Kos has reported, history was made as ACLU’s Chase Strangio—the first openly transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court—challenged Tennessee’s ban on medical care for transgender youth. 

This ban, ACLU spokesperson Gillian Branstetter told Daily Kos, is similar to the push for abortion bans and for stripping away bodily autonomy, or the right to make decisions about one’s own body. 

Ire has grown even on Capitol Hill, as representatives like Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, turn into hate-spewing machines over the presence of a single transgender member of Congress. 

As Daily Kos has extensively covered, a bill—introduced by Mace and backed by GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson—popped up soon after Rep.-elect Sarah McBride of Delaware, who is transgender, made her way to Congress. 

“All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings—such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms—are reserved for individuals of that biological sex,” Johnson said in a statement.

However, McBride shared in a statement that this policy won’t keep her from continuing to fulfill her purpose in D.C.

“I’m not here to fight about bathrooms,” McBride said. “I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families. Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.”