New Targets, Old Tactics: How Anti-Trans Health Bans Are Reusing the Anti-Abortion Playbook

Claims that greedy doctors are pressuring and lying to vulnerable patients. Shameless misinformation about fake dangers of care. Complicated laws leaving providers perplexed and wary of offering essential treatment. Threats, harassment, and brazen violence against clinics and patients.Â
For those on the frontlines in the fight for abortion care, these tactics may be ringing a bell: I might as well be reading right from the anti-abortion playbook. But these tactics do just as well to describe efforts to ban health care for trans people.Â
That’s no coincidence. As anti-trans health care bans have spread across the country, their supporters have deliberately modeled their attacks on the strategies that the anti-abortion movement has been finetuning for decades. The similarities are unmistakable—whether they’re targeting youth and Medicaid, demonizing providers, sowing deliberate confusion and fear, or using any number of other tired old tactics. In fact, the policymakers and behind-the-scenes organizations responsible for the sweep of abortion bans are often the exact same ones who have now been cooking up bans on health care for trans people.Â
In a new report (and this handy one-pager), we explore how the anti-trans movement is dusting off the anti-abortion playbook and repurposing it for bans on trans people’s care.Â
It’s not surprising that the anti-trans and anti-abortion movements are mirroring each other’s strategies. At their core, our fights to defend abortion and care for trans people come down to the same values: the belief that we all should have the power to define ourselves and our futures, to decide what happens to our bodies, and live free from gender stereotypes. That vision scares the anti-abortion and anti-trans movements, and that fear is what propels their parallel assaults on our freedoms.Â
It might seem like their shared goals and strategies make them stronger, but the truth is that that’s their ultimate weakness. It opens the door for our own movements to join forces, learn from one another, and work in solidarity, even more than we already do. Because we know that the fate of abortion care and health care for trans people is intertwined: We need to protect both so that we all have the dignity and self-determination we deserve.