Q Toon: Trans Exit Hotline

We watch a lot of Ovation TV in our house, to the point where there are some program episodes we can identify within the first five seconds. My better half says he knows which commercials are going to be shown during which commercial break.

A commercial that seems to be replacing the one for buying gold offers a "hotline" to get people out of solar collector contracts, pretty much like those firms offering help getting out of timeshares. I didn't even know dissatisfaction with solar energy was a thing; when I tried googling for news about it, all that came up was a report that quoted only talk radio hosts.

So anyway, that was the inspiration for this week's Q Syndicate cartoon. Donald Commodus Trump made the weird boast in panel #1 during a campaign appearance over the weekend for Lindsey Graham's sister, Darline, in South Carolina. I've quoted him verbatim, except for adding the word transgender from earlier in his diatribe.

You can tell it's the way he talks, because I wouldn't have come up with that "Nobody ever heard about it" sentence myself. It's superfluous and doesn't quite make sense; it's just Trump again boasting his strange belief that his stable genius brain discerns all sorts of things no other human being is capable of ever having conceived before.

Now, I will concede that gender reassignment surgery isn't for everybody, so it is possible that a handful of people who thought it would solve all their problems come to realize that it didn't. It's up to them and their health care professionals to decide whether to pause, halt, or reverse their transition; no responsible physician would consult with the Absolutely Corrupt President of the United States for his Rx.

There is a reason, however, that nobody ever heard about the hospitals kowtowing to Trump's order to perform reverse transgender surgery — which, for the sake of brevity, I will hereinafter call "snart surgery." (Surely nobody has ever heard about it.)

Top snart surgery would be based on traditional breast augmentation/reduction procedures; I imagine that bottom snart surgery isn't absolutely impossible, either. I doubt, however, that it would be 100% effective, and I'm absolutely certain that even if Trump were able to order snart surgery done on you, neither he nor his Republican Congress are ever gonna foot the bill. 

This Week's Sneak Peek

There's a part in this week's cartoon for a shady medical person; I ruled out RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz because the cartoon didn't need to be about them specifically. I thought of The Simpsons' Dr. Nick, but I used him once before. No reason to keep using someone else's character.

Another possibility was to give the character the head of a duck — you know, because he's a quack, get it? Get it? Get it?

I settled for giving him vaguely duckbill lips.

Rx Against COVID Memory Fog

Senator Randy Paul (R-KY) led a star chamber hearing this week aimed at trapping Dr. Anthony Fauci into somehow committing perjury. Even if only about the color of his tie. 

So today's Graphical History Tour offers a little reminder of what the world was going through a mere six years ago.

March, 2020

We first heard of this novel virus as a problem in far-off China and aboard cruise ships. The Trump Administration responded by trying to quarantine cruise ship passengers, naming Vice President Mike Pence in charge of addressing the health threat, and calling communicable disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci out of retirement for his expertise.

March, 2020

In the days between my drawing this cartoon and its publication anywhere, hairdressers — and just about every other public service industry — were closing up their shops. The nation hunkered down, stopping first to empty store shelves of toilet paper.

April, 2020

Within the first weeks, everybody was working from home except doctors, nurses, emergency responders, and grocery store employees. Schools tried to figure out how to teach students remotely. Senior citizen homes closed their doors to visitors. Afternoon and late night chat shows shut down immediately; the halting of other television and movie production would take a while to affect viewers. Major League Baseball played to empty stadiums.

Meanwhile, bodies piled up in makeshift morgues.

March, 2020

We didn't know much about the corona virus, which was all that much scarier for everyone. What little we were learning did not inspire confidence: it could spread through the air, the body had no natural defense against it, and any vaccine or cure was yet to be found.

Donald Trump soon discovered that by going on live television to brief the nation about the pandemic, he could command the media's undivided attention. It did not matter at all whether he had the slightest idea what he was talking about; he could just make any shit up as long as it fed his bottomless ego to be on TV.

He even boasted about getting bigger ratings than the Superbowl.

March, 2020

We didn't see much any more of Vice President Pence, supposedly the nation's COVID Czar. I guess he went back to his previous job as the president's golf caddy and Ambassador to Televangelistan.

For his part, Trump promised that the pandemic would be over by Easter, then by Mothers' Day, then by Flag Day, then by summer. Operating without a medical license, he prescribed disinfectant, horse deworming medicine, and shining bright light up one's rectum — none of which treatments had any basis in scientific fact.

April, 2020

When Kim Jong Il, Supreme Leader of North Korea, disappeared from public view for several weeks, there was speculation that he might be dead (he isn't). When dark humor is all a cartoonist has to offer, well, the darker the better.

May, 2020

Despite reports of COVID tearing through church choirs before The Shutdown, it didn't take long for the religious right to complain against social distancing. Not being allowed to pack the pews severely impacted the health of brick and mortar evangelists' bank balances, so Trump told the nation to reopen all the churches.

December, 2020

2020 dragged on. Every time we thought there was an end in sight, COVID cases spiked again. 

October, 2020

After a few months, the television networks decided against giving Donald Trump free air time to tout quack cures and predict COVID's miraculous disappearance, and Trump gave up taking a daily position behind the podium where he might be asked uncomfortable questions. Dr. Fauci became the public face of the government's response to the pandemic, delivering a frank, honest, and un-sugar-coated medical advice.

July, 2020

But by summer, the trolls and conspiracy mongers of the internet, egged on by Fox Noise and the rest of right-wing media, were hard at work promoting their own hare-brained fantasies about where the virus came from. Conservatism being opposed to anything associated with promoting the common good, they complained loudly that masks and social distancing infringed on individual rights.

September, 2020

They came up with the idea of publishing "face mask exemption cards," although the things carried no legal, scientific, medical, or practical authority. One was supposed to present the card at any office or business that had a policy mandating the wearing of masks, as if the business had some obligation to honor the card.

July, 2020

Until vaccines were finally developed roughly a year after the virus was first identified, the rest of us had to manufacture our own defenses.

Q Toon: Kennedy-nial of Care

During Donald Joffrey Trump's first term, I drew a cartoon about his transphobic policies that suggested that he was only pursuing them to satisfy his supporters on the religious right. They are hardly a factor in his second term, so I have to conclude that his persecution of the transgender community is central to his psyche.

Somewhere along the line, there's a girl in his past who turned out to have a little something extra downstairs, and the experience haunts him like Freddy Krueger.

Trump has found a kindred spirit in Robert Felcher Kennedy. The erstwhile environmentalist readily forsook advocacy for renewable energy and fuel efficiency in favor of feels-based health care.

Don't like pills and needles? You're in luck. Newly revised Health & Human Services protocols recommend against vaccines in favor of poultices, whale blubber, and burning some parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. 

Suffering from gender dysphoria? You're in luck, too. Kennedy and the Republican establishment have declared that it doesn't exist any more. If you're unhappy looking in the mirror, botox, lip injections, and rhinoplasty are all hunky-dory, but everything below the chin has gotta stay just as God made it.

And they have ways of making you get used to it.

The ban takes the form of two new proposed rules from Medicaid and Medicare. The first prohibits doctors and hospitals from receiving federal Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care provided to transgender patients younger than age 18. Medicaid is the health care program that covers low-income Americans.

The second rule blocks all Medicaid and Medicare funding for any services at hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care. Virtually every hospital in the country takes Medicare, which covers older Americans and the disabled. Because hospitals rely on Medicare, the rule would have a wide-ranging effect.

Supporters and opponents of transgender rights agree that, taken together, the forthcoming hospital rules could make access to pediatric gender-affirming care across the country extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Even non-chemical, non-surgical approaches are verboten. The Trump Food & Drug Administration has sent warning letters to companies that manufacture and sell chest binders, used by transgender men and some nonbinary people to flatten their chests. The FDA charges that the companies failed to register their products as Class I medical devices with the FDA, in violation of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.  “Failure to adequately address this matter may result in regulatory action being initiated by the FDA without further notice. These actions include, but are not limited to, seizure and injunction.”

I don't imagine that the FDA is going to send that same letter to the makers and sellers of girdles and brassieres.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary claimed that the brands were guilty of “illegal marketing of breast binders for children, for the purposes of treating gender dysphoria.”....

Makary did not cite evidence that any of the brands market their binders to children; Them found no such marketing copy supporting Makary’s claim on the brands’ websites. Conservatives have claimed for years that discussions of gender identity alone are harmful to children, and their rhetoric has escalated over time; during the HHS press conference, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz falsely claimed that trans youth regularly receive vaginoplasties and phalloplasties costing up to $150,000; in fact, the vast majority of gender-affirming surgeries performed on minors are breast reduction procedures offered to cisgender boys.

The House has also passed bills this month making it a crime to provide gender-affirming care to transgender minors and prohibiting Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care for youth. Neither bill has much chance of passing the Senate unless tucked into other must-pass legislation ― such as the next temporary government funding bill.

All of which will be worth remembering every time Republicans try to tell you that they are not the party of big, obtrusive, over-regulating government.

P.S.: Merry Christmas, and Happy Miscellaneous Holidays!

Q Toon: Scoff Drops

Leo and Max, my heteropolitical homosexual couple, are back. And they have a dog!

Earlier this month, the CDC website under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Felcher Kennedy Jr. began promoting the unfounded fantasy that vaccines cause autism. Turning 180 degrees from its previous position, the U.S. public health agency's now purports, "The claim 'vaccines do not cause autism' is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism."

RFK and a cottage industry of flat-earthers and alien abductees have been promoting a link between vaccines (the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine in particular, but not exclusively) based on a 1998 study which has long since and many times been discredited. The Lancet, which had published it, formally retracted its claims in 2010. Ten of its 13 authors had earlier done likewise. Its primary author, Andrew Wakefield, has since been stripped of his medical license in his native Britain for falsifying timelines and misrepresenting the case histories of his study's subjects.

But the present U.S. kakistocracy has replaced medical professionals at HHS and the CDC with unqualified bamboozlers whose main qualifications are that they claim know where Elvis lives and recommend sugar-loaded gum for patients who brush their teeth. Having brain worms, a history of drug abuse, and a penchant for cringeworthy love "poetry" is a plus.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has issued a statement criticizing the CDC's new language:

It is important to point out that the 2012 Institute of Medicine report assessing adverse effects of vaccines and cited by the CDC, found that very few health problems are caused by or clearly associated with vaccines. Further, based on our body of work on this topic and the overwhelming scientific consensus, we support the statement that vaccines do not cause autism.

There is a substantial body of work, including expert reports from the National Academies, dating back decades analyzing data and providing guidance on the important question of childhood vaccine safety.  That work has affirmed that childhood vaccines are safe for the general population with long-established benefits of preventing illness and averting death.

For a second opinion, the American Medical Association concurs:

"Vaccination is essential to protect individuals and communities from preventable diseases, making it a fundamental element of public health. The AMA is deeply concerned that perpetuating misleading claims on vaccines will lead to further confusion, distrust, and ultimately, dangerous consequences for individuals and public health.”

And from the American Association of Pediatrics:

 “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website has been changed to promote false information suggesting vaccines cause autism. Since 1998, independent researchers across seven countries have conducted more than 40 high-quality studies involving over 5.6 million people. The conclusion is clear and unambiguous: There’s no link between vaccines and autism. Anyone repeating this harmful myth is misinformed or intentionally trying to mislead parents. 

"We call on the CDC to stop wasting government resources to amplify false claims that sow doubt in one of the best tools we have to keep children healthy and thriving: routine immunizations. The American Academy of Pediatrics stands with members of the autism community who have asked for support in stopping this rumor from spreading any further.”

Q Toon: Surrender Data

I could get into the debate over whether the Wicked Witch of the West was calling for Dorothy to surrender, or demanding that her friends surrender her, but here's the thing: Elphaba forgot the comma. Case closed.

Anyway, today's cartoon is about Attorney General Pam Bondi subpoenaing detailed information on minors who receive transgender therapy, including names and Social Security numbers of patients.

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced in a statement July 9 that the department had sent more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics that provide [gender-affirming] care. The request represented an elevation in President Donald Trump’s administration’s effort to halt the medical treatment for transgender youth, even in states where it’s legal.

Bondi said the requests were part of investigations into “healthcare fraud, false statements, and more.” No charges have been announced so far, but the probes have had a chilling impact on the availability of care.

Specifics of the requests were not made public until a court filing in a separate lawsuit this week.

Court filings last month revealed that at least one of the subpoenas, sent to Children's Hospital of  Philadelphia, ran 18 pages long listing detailed patient documentation demanded by the Absolutely Corrupt Trump regime, HIPAA be damned. “It turns doctor-patient confidentiality into government surveillance,” said Jennifer Levi, GLAD Law’s senior director of Transgender and Queer Rights.

Republican state Attorneys General are sticking their noses into the confidential patient data of transgender minors, too. An appeals court this week overturned a lower court ruling and allowed Missouri's Attorney General to subpoena records of 1,165 patients of the Washington University Transgender Center in St. Louis.

On the other side of the political divide, Democratic Attorneys General from fourteen states and the District of Columbia have filed a lawsuit against the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime to block Attorney General Bondi from seizing transgender youths' confidential patient records, charging, "The administration has explicitly threatened civil and criminal prosecution of providers of this care and launched criminal investigations into children’s hospitals."

“These threats have no basis in law. No federal law prohibits, much less criminalizes, the provision or receipt of gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents,” the attorneys general argued.

Will Democrats shut down the government if Republicans slip a provision changing that into the must-pass budget bill on Tuesday? Stay tuned.

Q Toon: Sic Transit Veritas

I figured it was time to put out a back-to-school cartoon this week.

With the new semester, the ham-fisted drive to impose the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime's fascist agenda on academia will certainly resume. Some of our most respected universities, fearful of losing government research grants and tuition assistance, have already bent the knee to the Mar-a-Lago Mussolini, whose demands will only increase and get worse.

Has your board or regents shuttered your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness office? Good. Now scuttle your environmental studies program, drop your epidemiology research, and cancel your unAmerican foreign language courses. Clear your history and literature curricula with the Ministry of Truth Social, and while you're at it, His Excellency Donald The First Of His Name would appreciate an honorary degree. One or two of those Distinguished Chair Things in his name would be nice, too. Gilded, naturally.

I suspect, however, that college students being young and idealistic will not knuckle under to Trump's brand of authoritarianism as readily as their elders. Last year's protests against genocide of Palestinians are likely to resume — or perhaps the spark will be ICE abduction of the cafeteria ladies, or the arrest of a tenured professor who had the temerity to suggest that slavery was racist, or a transgender athlete being whisked off to reeducation camp.

My fear is that sooner or later, as red-state National Guard troops are called in to restore rightthink and order, some campus will witness a repeat of Kent State.

I'm referring, my matriculating friends, not to the university, but to a tragedy your professors may be too young to remember. Look it up before your library and the internet get expurgated: it can happen here.

Q Toon: Attention Get Her

Rosie O'Donnell, whom I haven't cartooned since she had her own talk show, once upon a time said something nasty about Donald Joffrey Trump — and probably true, whatever it was — setting off a celebrity feud with the thin-skinned whiny snowflake.

The rest of the world has forgotten their feud, but petty tyrant Trump nurses a grudge like it's Baby Jesus. So when he somehow convinced a majority of U.S. voters to return him to the office he had not been able to hold onto by force, promising to wreak vengeance upon all his enemies, perceived, imagined, immigrant and transgender, Ms. O'Donnell decided it was time to take her wife and their genderqueer child and hie them to the Emerald Isle.

That was months ago, which didn't stop Trump from taking to his social media app (which I refuse to call by its very misleading preferred noun), foaming at the mouse that he will issue a presidential proclamation stripping O'Donnell of her U.S. citizenship. 

I had completely finished drawing this cartoon and cleaned my pens when I checked my own phone and learned that Little Lord Trump le Roi had added to his list of presidential priorities unrenaming the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians. Because as far as he's concerned, they're genetically Redskins and Indians, and they had better not get caught using Commanders and Guardians rest rooms if they want funding for their new stadiums.

Fortunately, Photoshop means I didn't have to try drawing over half a bottle's worth of Whiteout.

The additional distractions Mr. Stable Genius has come up with after my Monday morning cartoon deadline — teasing irrefutable proof of Barack Obama's sedatious impudistry, releasing J. Edgar Hoover's files on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., sending cabinet members to tour Alcatraz, gloating over CBS cancelling The Late Show with or without Stephen Colbert — and wait, I need a whole new paragraph for this next one —

promising “We will have reduced drug prices by 1,000%, by eleven hundred, twelve hundred, thirteen hundred, fourteen hundred, 700, 600,” which means that drug companies will pay customers huge sums of money to take their products, which Trump will achieve by threatening to ban the import and sale of Volkswagens, BMWs, Volvos, and Lamborghinis —

— all that will have to wait for another day. By which time he will have declared covfefe a vegetable, accused Hillary Clinton of masterminding Hurricane Katrina, named son Barron permanent Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and babbled obsessively to the Prime Minister of Iceland about Arnold Palmer's penis.

Q Toon: Parental Rights and Wrongs

The Supreme Court wrapped up its work for the litigation season at the end of June, its 6-to-3 right-wing supermajority handing down a thoroughly predictable series of rulings in support of Trumpster goodthink.

Of interest and disappointment to the LGBTQ+ community, the Court ruled in Mahmoud v. Taylor in favor of a group of parents who demanded to exempt their children from exposure to LGBTQ+ history and literature. The Muslim, Ukrainian Orthodox, and Catholic litigants had sued the Montgomery County, Maryland, school board to provide alternative curricula for their children. 

The dispute stems from the county school board’s 2022 approval of books featuring LGBTQ+ characters for use in its language-arts curriculum. One book, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, tells the story of a little girl’s reaction to her uncle’s same-sex wedding; another book, Pride Puppy, describes a puppy that becomes lost during a Pride parade. 

The county initially allowed parents to excuse their children from instruction using the LGBTQ-themed storybooks. When the county removed that option in 2023, several parents went to federal court.

Writing for the majority, Dubya-appointed Justice Samuel Alito “what the parents seek here is not the right to micromanage the public school curriculum, but rather to have their children opt out of a particular educational requirement that burdens their well-established right ‘to direct ‘the religious upbringing’ of their children.’”

Clinton nominee Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, countered that the Court's grant of a parental right to veto LGBTQ+-positive public school curriculum materials on religious grounds could mean that “books on evolution and interfaith marriage, and history may be next.”

It's easy to imagine that today's Court majority would have no problem with that.

Meanwhile, the Supremes declined to rule whether parental rights exist outside of their religious rights. In U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Court ruled Tennessee's SB1 (the number indicating it was the state senate's most urgent business this session) banning medical care for transgender minors, even against the wishes of patient, parents, and medical professionals.

No, parents: you and your transgender child have no say in the child's health care. That is up to the State. No opt-out for you.

The plaintiffs had tried to argue that Skrmetti was about gender discrimination: e.g., a minor the state identifies as male could be prescribed hormone blockers, but a minor the state identifies as female cannot. Chief Justice John Roberts rejected that argument, because the second patient is being discriminated against for being transgender, not for being female, and that's okay.

Influence of Skrmetti has already begun to spread to other transgender concerns. The Seventh Circuit vacated its prior rulin g against anti-trans bathroom policies in public schools. The Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits have been instructed to review two decisions involving Medicaid exclusions for gender-affirming medical care, one involving public teachers health insurance plans, and one involving birth certificate policies.

If nobody can come up with a religious liberty argument in favor of transgender medical care, health insurance coverage, and lavatory use, perhaps, my cartoon character suggests, someone could at least raise a faith-based objection to the State mandating who The Lord Your God is.

But I suspect the theocrats on the Court would find some excuse to find reason to infringe that particular religious exercise.

Q Toon: Healther Skelter

Faced with such a blizzard of wanton destruction from the Corrupt Trump Regime, it’s easy to miss the individual losses as they continually pile up. Today’s cartoon highlights the deep cuts in federal funding for health and safety programs under the reckless authority of one Mr. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Kennedy came to the Cabinet of Total Incompetence by virtue of his embrace of anti-vaccine quackery (although faced with a thoroughly predictable epidemic of measles out of Texas, he has reluctantly come out in favor of letting parents who haven't succumbed to anti-vax hysteria get their children vaccinated, while leaving the anti-vaxxers free to spread the disease far and wide).

Of particular concern to the LGBTQ+ community are cuts already made to HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs.

The “reductions in force” last week at the CDC gutted branches responsible for a slew of prevention services: Expert guidance on preventing infant infections, a national at-home testing program, long-running surveys to follow people living with and at risk for HIV, statistical analysis to estimate national HIV incidence, and guidelines on how to use HIV prevention drugs or PrEP, including a powerful new medicine likely to be approved this summer.

STAT has also learned that funds have been suspended for the HIV Prevention Trials Network and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, the two most prominent networks for testing prevention drugs and vaccines. Funds have also been suspended for the AIDS Clinical Trial Group, a nearly 40-year-old system that has been responsible for key breakthroughs dating back to the first effective AIDS drug, AZT. All three have been waiting on money that were supposed to be sent out in February. 

Another AIDS Clinical Trial Group study testing four interventions to prevent HIV in Black men who have sex with men in the South, a particularly vulnerable group, was also slashed. The ACTG announced that for lack of funds, it has paused enrollment for all of its studies but one.

HHS cuts are negatively affecting plenty of other department responsibilities as well, from Alzheimer's, to child welfare, Meals on Wheels, mental health, lead abatement, and more. My Dad serves on the local Board of Health here, which is one of many having to deal with deep cuts to COVID response funding.

When Kennedy was interviewed by CBS News's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Jonathan LaPook, this week, the HHS Secretary pleaded ignorance of specific cuts he had theoretically overseen.

LaPook provided Kennedy with an example of a $750,000 University of Michigan grant focused on adolescent diabetes, which was eliminated.
"I didn't know that, and that's something that we'll look at," Kennedy said. He added that he could not speak to if it should be considered a DOGE cut.

It's therefore hard to put any stock in any claims that Medicaid and Medicare will be spared debilitating cuts to workforce and services. Republicans from top to bottom dislike any program that does not directly benefit people who aren't their billionaire sugar daddies.

✍

I'm still working on how to capture RFK Jr. in caricature. For now, I trust that the little brain worm sticking out of his ear suffices in lieu of a text label.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I had to undergo a routine colonoscopy last week. The procedure itself isn't so bad; they drug you so that you don't remember any of it.

The worst part, of course, is having to chug a gallon of this stuff called GoLytely that makes you completely clean out your bowels. By the gallon. You can flavor the jug, but I don't recommend it. I added lime flavoring to it my first time, and it put me off anything lime flavored for months afterward. Personally, I recommend taking a few drops of honey, but only when the GoLytely aftertaste is making it a challenge to keep quaffing the stuff on schedule.

The second worst part, this time, was having three nurses take turns poking holes in my hands and arms in search of a vein. My procedure was scheduled in the mid afternoon, by which time I was thoroughly dehydrated. My husband, a recently retired nurse, could only watch and offer suggestions, which can only have been frustrating for him. He's generally one to step in and take over, not sit by and advise.

The third worst part was trying not to listen to the patient in the next partition, separated only by a curtain as thin as a bedsheet. She was the patient ahead of me, and she was adamant that she not receive any transfusions of "vaccinated blood." Seriously.

Her nurse tried telling her that the hospital doesn't separate donated blood according to vaccination status, but Mrs. Virginia Pureblood insisted that she had had her GP put on her chart that she didn't want any vaccinated blood polluting her purity of essence, and she had made sure that they noted that at the intake desk, too.

I wouldn't be surprised if she had ordered a testing kit from the MyPillow guy to make sure they weren't sneaking vaccines into her GoLytely. (Trust me: nothing in that stuff is staying in your body long enough to vaccinate you against anything.)

One hopes that she hasn't convinced some Republican wingnut in the state legislature or Congress to author a bill mandating separation of vaccinated and vaccine-free blood supplies. Heck, what are the chances that it's not already the law someplace where Drawl is the Official State Language?

Q Toon: Just Say No-hio

In that week between Christmas and New Year's when nobody pays attention to such things, Ohio's Republican legislature sent their Republican Governor a bill outlawing gender-affirming care for transgender youth. The bill also bans transgender athletes from participating in school sports.

Governor Mike DeWine vetoed the bill, but kudos from the LGBTQ+ community were short-lived. DeWine issued instead an executive order instructing the Ohio departments of Health and of Mental Health to implement a 120-day ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors and to require that an endocrinologist and psychiatrist must prepare a "detransition plan" before patients of any age can receive gender-affirming care.

As I’m sure the state of Ohio requires for all other forms of corrective surgery.

On January 10, the Ohio House overrode DeWine's veto anyway, and the state's Senate is likely to do the same when it convenes on January 24.

Well, you know what those Republicans always say. They're from the government, and they're here to help.

Ask Your Governor If It's Right For You

Much of the debate over Florida's new anti-transgender legislation involved their prohibition of transition treatment for youth. Now that those Republican bills have been signed into law, Floridians are discovering that they attack adults' health care, too: 

Lucas, 26, lost his access to treatment when the Orlando clinic that prescribed him hormone replacement therapy stopped providing gender-affirming care altogether. The couple also worries about staying in a state that this year enacted several other bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community. ...

The new law that bans gender-affirming care for minors also mandates that adult patients seeking trans health care sign an informed consent form. It also requires a physician to oversee any health care related to transitioning, and for people to see that doctor in person. Those rules have proven particularly onerous because many people received care from nurse practitioners and used telehealth. The law also made it a crime to violate the new requirements.

Another new law that allows doctors and pharmacists to refuse to treat transgender people further limits their options. ...

At least 19 states have now enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. But restrictions on adults haven't been part of the conversation in most places. Missouri’s attorney general tried to impose a rule in that state, but it was pulled back.

Florida is “the proving ground of what they can get away with,” Dunn said. [Lana Dunn, chief operating officer of SPEKTRUM Health Inc.]

The increased burden on transgender adults is not a bug of the new laws, but a feature. 

For the moment, a federal court has issued an injunction against the part of the law prohibiting the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors; but DeSantis's Florida is sure to appeal the case all the way to the Republican-stacked Supreme Court. Once Alito, Thomas, and the Trumply Trio have overruled Judge Robert Hinkle, carbon copies of the Florida law are sure to be rushed through other red state legislatures like the flu in a kindergarten.

This is only one front in the right-wingers' full-bore assault on the LGBTQ+ community, so I expect more and worse to come as they test "what they can get away with."

✍

P.S.: Any guesses as to which person around that breakfast table might be transgender?

Be That As It May

Today's Saturday rummage through the archives should perhaps belong before last Saturday's, since I'm starting off here with the last cartoon I drew for the Parkside Ranger before the 1983 summer break; but I'll move on to later years when summer breaks were not an issue.

I've got no unifying theme to the cartoons this week, so join me on a hopscotch tour taking us hither, yon, and points unknown.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., May 5, 1983

I don't believe that I got the original of this cartoon back from the Ranger, so I've lifted this from their on-line archives. I notice that I had not written the Ranger's name on the cartoon, so perhaps I drew the cartoon I led off with last week in case the editors wanted to run it in the May 12 edition. (They ran a post-graduate cartoon I had drawn in April instead.)

At issue in the cartoon is Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. The imp in the corner (possibly the last time I used him in a cartoon) is referring to Lebanon's various ethnic and religious camps fighting to control other sectors of the country: Druze, Christian, and Palestinian, and within them, splinter groups. The Syrian government of Assad carved off a sector twice as large as the one taken by Israel.

Seated at the table is Lebanon's President Amine Gemayel, who had came to office in place of his assassinated elder brother Bachir in September of 1982. Leaning in through the window is Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin — a caricature I wouldn't be able to get away with today. But seriously: the man looked like an antisemitic cartoon come to life.

May, 1993

This local issue cartoon from May, 1993, speaks to me now because we happen to be going through yet another hospital merger where my Better Half works. These mergers are advertised as improving cost efficiencies, and we've noticed how it works: if Acceptional Health Corp. offers its employees more paid days off than Adepture Medical Inc. does, and Adepture contributes more to its employees' 401-Ks than Acceptional does, Acceptional-Adepture employees will end up with the lesser number of paid days off and the lower 401-K contribution. 

The front page of the May 20, 1993 Racine Journal-Times headlined reports of a move by All Saints Medical Center (itself a then-recent merger of St. Luke's and St. Mary's Hospitals) intention to buy up Racine Medical Clinic and Kurten Medical Clinic. The proposed merger would result in a practical health care monopoly in Racine, which had some doctors concerned, according to a sidebar article. 

Another sidebar, and a subsequent editorial, complained that the legally required public notice had appeared not in the local paper, but in the Milwaukee Sentinel. A spokesperson for All Saints explained that "Our customers aren't all from Racine." The paper further alleged that a rash of hospital merger activity in Wisconsin was timed to beat a state law set to take effect on July 1 submitting mergers and major equipment purchases to review by a public panel.

The Journal Times didn't run my cartoon this time. The All Saints monopoly issue would eventually become moot anyway when Aurora Health Care moved into town. Both have been involved in mergers since then, albeit not with each other. Yet.

And Racine still has hospital facilities in and around town, unlike some communities where absentee vulture capitalists shut down the hospitals they've bought in order to finance further mergers and acquisitions elsewhere.

May, 2003

Speaking of cartoons that didn't get published: I've scanned this one in grayscale to show how close I was to finishing it before I gave up on it.

Why did I stop drawing? Because just about every political cartoonist and late night comedian was doing some variation on the same joke about Saddam Hussein's belligerently grandiose spokesman, whom we called "Baghdad Bob." Al-Sahhaf confidently predicted the crushing defeat of U.S.-led invading forces all the while that they advanced with only nominal opposition toward the Iraq capital.

Of course, we already had Beltway Bobs of our own. Our troops weren't exactly greeted as liberators. Nor did the war pay for itself.

Q Syndicate, May, 2003

If you weren't bothered by cartoon stereotypes in my caricature of an Israeli Prime Minister, perhaps you will also enjoy some mafia stereotypes, too. 

What can I say? In our household, we watch "Some Like It Hot" and "Key Largo" whenever they show up on Turner Classic Movies.

I have since learned that "youse" is plural. My bad.

Q Syndicate, May, 2013

Taking some time off to travel to a family wedding in May of 2013, I drew only three cartoons that month.

Since immigration reform is again (or rather, still) in the news these days, I'll choose this one drawn for Q Syndicate. LGBTQ+ activists had hopes of convincing the Senate to include a provision in that year's immigration reform bill to grant citizenship to same-sex foreign spouses of U.S. citizens — just like different-sex couples, including a recent First Lady, enjoy.

Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) supported such a provision, but couldn't get it through his committee. Democrats, even those sympathetic to LGBTQ+ couples' rights, realized that there was zero chance of the Republican House accepting the provision.

They might as well have included citizenship for Grindr hook-ups. The Senate passed the "Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013" in June, but Republicans in the House never took up the measure at all, once again preventing the government from solving our immigration problems.

Instead, Republicans kept immigration as an issue they have continued to bitch and whine about ever since. 

Flying a planeload of migrants to Martha's Vineyard is so much easier than responsible governance, you know.

Beshear's Veto

A perennial complaint against editorial cartoonists is that we never have anything nice to say.

So I hope someone out there will appreciate my offering a reprieve from all the cartoons about bloody classrooms, Putin and Xi standing over dead Ukraine, banks crumbling, and David with his DeSantis hanging out.

I'm paraphrasing Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear in this week's cartoon before quoting him directly in the last half of the dialogue. After vetoing the Republican legislature's bill outlawing all gender-affirming therapy for minors regardless of parental and professional medical judgment, Beshear told reporters, 

“At the end of the day, this is about my belief — and, I think, the belief of the majority of Kentuckians — that parents should get to make important medical decisions about their children, not big government."

The vetoed bill, hastily passed at the close of the legislative session, does more than tread on families' personal medical decisions. As outlined by the Human Rights Campaign, the 

• Ban gender affirming care: The bill will prohibit transgender youth from accessing best practice, age-appropriate medical care – care delivered after careful consultation with the young person’s parents and doctors. It would also force doctors to detransition transgender youth who have been receiving – and thriving – under their care plan.
• Force teachers to disclose confidential conversations they’ve had with students about their sexual orientation or gender identity to the student’s parents, even if that would put the student in danger at home: This bill will make it more difficult for LGBTQ+ students to seek assistance from trusted adults in school, and could put children in real danger if they are not safe being out at home. The bill also requires teachers and students be allowed to misgender their own pupils and classmates, and prohibits schools from recommending or requiring any policies on pronoun use.
• Ban transgender students from using school restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity.

The first and third provisions listed above were added with minimal notice at the last minute to a bill which originally dealt only with the material in that second bullet point. That allowed the bill to pass through the statehouse's education committee rather than one concerned with health care.

The legislature's bill is a deliberate slap in the face to one of their own members, grieving the suicide of her transgender son just this past December.

"My child is dead, but I have parents from all over the Commonwealth and literally all over the country coming up to me, writing to me, calling me — look, these children exist," [Sen. Karen] Berg tells TODAY.com. "These children have all always existed. They're just asking for a space to be. If I can't use my own life learnings to protect other people, and what am I doing here? What's my purpose?

"I cannot bring my child back," she adds. "But I can help other families. I can."

The Republican General Assembly has already overriden Governor Beshear's veto, and the state Senate is sure to follow.

But I give Mr. Beshear his due for standing up for principle.

And shame on the assholes passing these mean-spirited bills in state after state after state after state after state after state after state after state after state after state after state after state after — well, perhaps you get the idea.

Q Toon: Above All, D'Oh!

While liberals (and not only a few conservatives) were celebrating the defeat of Trumpism at the ballot box last week, right-wingers were able to celebrate the triumph of Trumpism in the courts.

Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk struck down a Biden administration ruling that LGBTQ+ patients were covered under Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) protections against discrimination. The Obama administration had also stipulated these protections for LGBTQ+ patients, only to have them erased by the corrupt Trump administration.

Kacsmaryk's ruling came in a case brought by a pair of doctors — medical professionals, mind you — who think providing professional medical care to transgender patients is icky; and so, backed by a right-wing legal activist group looking for any way to destroy the Affordable Care Act, they went to court.

Now, if you're a transgender person, and you're looking for a doctor, you probably shouldn't go to a doctor who personally objects to treating transgender people. It's highly unlikely that such a doctor has bothered to learn anything about the medical needs peculiar to transgender patients. You might as well ask your ophthalmologist to perform root canal surgery.

But we're talking about Texas here: home to vast, wide open spaces sparsely populated by people who think that Ted Cruz is a marvelous senator. You may not have a lot of choices when looking for a doctor there.

Texas, moreover, is ruled by a Republican Party from Governor Abbott on down who are determined to make health care for transgender persons a crime; so even if you've had a country doctor who is considerate and caring (they call that "woke" in these parts), the best she can do is refer you to someplace out of state. 

If the statehouse hasn't already made that illegal, too.