All of these anti-trans bills being pushed across the country come from the brain of Michael Farris, who's a parental rights absolutist *except* when it comes to LGBTQ parents or LGBTQ kids. Then he's good with the state stepping in and stripping parents of rights.

Some years back when Russia was trying to pass a bill stripping LGBTQ parents of parental rights and taking away their children, someone I know tried to get him to condemn it since absolute parental rights are his thing. He refused to do so.

Instead, he attempted to argue that it's child abuse for parents *not* to send their LGBTQ children to conversion therapy. That's literally the only thing he's ever been willing to call child abuse worthy of state intervention. Not doing conversion therapy.

I don't think I'm being alarmist to say that if we don't stop this now, it's only a matter of time before they go on to a next step of taking custody away from parents who affirm their LGBTQ children and allow their trans kids to socially transition.

Anti-trans talking points are already framing parents who affirm their trans children and allow them to socially transition, or to take blockers when they reach puberty, as abusive and mutilating their kids. Case in point, Liz Bruenig implying a supporting parent is a pedophile.

And again, the strategy is spearheaded by Mike Farris, the guy who's other hobbyhorse besides homeschooling and anti-LGBTQ legislation is parental rights. This isn't an unintended consequence, his bills banning kids from hormone blockers are intentionally limiting parental rights

Farris knows that criminalizing giving trans kids hormone blockers is massively infringing on parental rights to raise their children as they see fit, but his parental rights group was one of the orgs pushing for bills to force schools to out kids for gender nonconformity.

When I went to Tallahassee last year in the before time, a representative from Farris' Parental Rights dot org group was there to speak in favor of the less stringent version of NC's bill, which thankfully failed in Florida last year.

They're using the guise of parental rights to strip affirming parents of their rights to allow their kids to be gender nonconforming or to affirm their trans child's gender.

Don't forget either that while Farris isn't a particularly good attorney, he is skilled at playing a political long game. This is the guy who convinced a bunch of left leaning orgs to support RFRA, just to get the law on the books for cases like Hobby Lobby decades later.

And the other prong of this is that Alliance Defending Freedom's Blackstone Fellowship for top conservative law students exists to put their people in the pipeline as future judges. Amy Coney Barrett was affiliated with that program as an instructor.

The Blackstone Fellowship is trying to succeed where the Federalist Society failed, and to get reliably religious right votes at every level of the judiciary, so that all of these theocratic bills get upheld as constitutional.