U.S. Rep. Mary Miller (R-Oakland) showed her transphobia again while questioning Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra for the House Committee on Education Labor on Nov. 29.
Miller has repeatedly shown anti-LGBTQ attitudes in the two years she’s been in office. After saying “Hitler was right about one thing” on her very first day in Jan. 2021, she shared a transphobic story about transgender girls in sports in May. In July of that same year, she hosted rabidly anti-LGBTQ U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene at a fundraiser. That October, she was a cosigner of a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona that said allowing trans students in school sports put children at risk of sexual assault.
She was re-elected to Congress in 2022 with 74% of the vote. Her district covers large swaths of east-central and southern Illinois.
In 2022 already, she claimed the Biden administration was “encouraging children to take chemical castration drugs and undergo surgeries.” Finally, in October of this year, she was a co-sponsor of a federal “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Congress.
This time, she tried to get Becerra to say that taxpayer money was being used to pay for surgeries on children. In her questioning, she claimed that the Biden administration encouraged children to take “dangerous chemicals and have sex-change operations that permanently end their ability to ever have children.”
The only drugs ever used with trans youth are puberty blockers which have been found to be safe by the American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics for gender affirming care. And no children are undergoing “sex change” surgery that removes the ability to have children later in life.
According to a transcript from the right-wing Daily Caller, Becerra restated the administration’s official position: “Gender affirming care is a supportive form of healthcare. It consists of an array of services that may include medical, surgical, mental healthand non-medical services for transgender and nonbinary people. Gender-affirming care is patient-centered and treats individuals holistically, aligning their outward, physical traits with their gender identity.”
When she asked how puberty blockers were reversed, he said she should talk to actual health care providers who provide gender affirming care.
She noted that Medicaid and Medicare will cover gender-affirming care. However, she listed procedures such as facial feminization, chest reconstruction and laser hair removal that are done only on adults. She continued to lie saying that doctors were being forced to perform surgeries without parental consent (they’re not).
Despite her claims, Becerra never said that taxpayer money was being used for surgeries on children. He did reaffirm the administration’s commitment to protect access to gender-affirming care.
Miller repeated the same disproven claims from many of the most extreme right-wing activists, including Awake Illinois.
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