The Cowardice of the South Dakota GOP

I published a long investigative piece on Thursday about how the transgender movement — buoyed by the resources, lobbying, and political influence of a major health-care company — has overrun deep-red South Dakota. One of the most damning findings was just how complicit the South Dakota GOP, which has enjoyed supermajorities in the state legislature for decades, has been in this campaign. Dozens of anti-gender ideology bills have been killed by Republican leadership in the state over the course of the past few years:

Bills that have failed to make it out of the legislature include the expansion of conscience rights for medical practitioners (HB 1247); the prohibition on sex-change surgeries and drugs for children (HB 1057); a ban on changing one’s sex on birth certificates (HB 1076); a bill requiring teachers to inform parents when students express feelings of gender dysphoria (SB 88); mandated reporting of the number of human embryos destroyed in medical facilities (HB 1248); a requirement that students use bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their sex (HB 1005); and the establishment of the “fundamental” parental right “to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education and care of a child” (HB 1246). As of February 2021, there had also been seven failed attempts “by South Dakota lawmakers to prevent transgender athletes from competing,” the ACLU said in a press release at the time.

I just want to briefly flag something my colleague Madeleine Kearns — one of the conservative movement’s preeminent chroniclers of gender ideology’s growing power and influence — wrote on the topic back in early 2020. Maddy’s piece was brought to my attention after I published mine, and it’s an excellent, in-depth exploration of how yet another conservative effort to fight the transgender craze failed in South Dakota, with the help of the Republican legislature — and the backing of Sanford Health, the major health-care lobby that played a central role in this saga:

The Vulnerable Child Protection Act, introduced in the South Dakota House of Representatives by Republican Fred Deutsch, would deter doctors from experimenting on gender-confused minors with hormones and surgeries by forcing them to consider the long-term consequences — if not for their patients, then for themselves. It passed the House of Representatives by a 46–23 vote last month and was later amended to remove criminal penalties for doctors, inserting a civil cause of action instead. It was a significant bill, not only in the context of South Dakota but nationwide, as part of the coordinated resistance to medical experiments on gender-confused children.

But it was killed in the state senate’s Health and Human Services Committee — the legislative body where, as I noted in my piece, “bills on youth sex changes, birth-certificate gender changes, embryo-reporting, and another bill concerning medical conscience rights [also] all died over the course of the past few years.” Maddy writes:

As reported by my colleague Tobias Hoonhout, this week Republican senators Duhamel, Rusch, Steinhauer, and Soholt of the Health and Human Services Committee all joined the 5–2 majority that effectively killed a bill designed to make it easier for gender-confused minors to attain financial compensation later in life — should they realize, before age 38, that the doctors who stunted their puberty, destroyed their fertility, and permanently impaired their sexual function had failed to meet the acceptable standards of (what are we calling it these days?) health care.

Listening to the two-and-a-half-hour hearing, as those pathetically useless Republicans did (and as you, too, can do here), it is impossible to come to any other conclusion: When faced with one of the greatest scandals in modern medicine, Republican officials stuck their fat heads between their legs and — well, you know what.

South Dakotans are, by polling, one of the most conservative populations in the country. But with stories such as these, one has to wonder if their elected lawmakers are really representing their interests. Since my piece was published, I’ve been inundated with emails and messages from South Dakotans saying they simply weren’t aware that this was happening at all. A couple examples (posted on Twitter, so I’m not sharing any information that isn’t already public):

I think the Mount Rushmore State is long overdue for a political shake-up.