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: AG Stands for Almira Gulch

Impeached Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton isn't going to let a little thing like his state's borders stop him from going after transgender kids and their families.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is requesting medical records of Texas youth who have received gender-affirming care from a Georgia telehealth clinic, marking at least the second time he’s sought such records from providers in another state.

The clinic, QueerMed, confirmed on Friday morning that they received the request. QueerMed said it stopped servicing youth in Texas after the state banned transition-related care last year. The clinic’s founder said the attorney general requested information about patients dating back to Jan. 1, 2022, before the ban took effect.

The clinic said that Paxton asked for private information about Texas residents who were provided with telehealth care in Texas before the ban, and residents provided with care outside of Texas after the ban. The request, they said, nearly mirrors one the attorney general sent to Seattle Children’s Hospital last year.

Paxton asked Seattle Children’s for a variety of patient information, including the number of Texas children they have treated, medications prescribed to children, the children’s diagnoses and the name of Texas laboratories where tests for youth are administered.

In response to that request, known as a civil investigative demand, Seattle Children’s sued the Texas Office of the Attorney General in December.

QueerMed confirmed that Paxton sent his request to them on Nov. 17, the same day that Seattle Children’s received the similar demand for documents. QueerMed received the request Dec. 7, due to mail delays. Its receipt of the letter was first reported by The Houston Chronicle on Friday morning.

I'm going to level with you here: I'm mighty sick and tired of having to come up with new things to say about Republicans' psychotic vendetta against transgender citizens. You think you're tired of hearing about Taylor Swift showing up at every Kansas City Chiefs game? Puh-leeze. Republicans launched this crusade over a decade ago, and now it's everywhere you look.

They started by frightening their impressionable minions with fanciful tales of hairy, brutish men in dresses lurking in women's bathrooms. Then they moved on to keeping transgender girls out of locker rooms, out of pools, out of sports. Now they're attacking transgender people's rights to vote, to work, to drive, to cross state lines, to be called by their own names. Above all, they keep passing laws to criminalize transgender persons' health care.

And yet it's those whiny MAGA snowflakes who think they're the ones someone is trying to "erase."

This Week's Sneak Peek

They made me get my flying monkeys again...

Q Toon: I'll Get You, My Pretty

By now, you are probably well aware that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Idiocracy) last week responded to a colleague's transgender rights flag across the hall from her office by posting a sign reading "There are two genders: male and female. Respect the science."

If you really want to respect the science, you have to acknowledge that reality is not as simple as that. I'm no biologist; but someone who is attempted to explain the possible and existing complications in a Twitter thread a couple years ago. For example,

Turns out there is only ONE GENE on the Y chromosome that really matters to sex. It’s called the SRY gene. During human embryonic development the SRY protein turns on male-associated genes. Having an SRY gene makes you “genetically male”. But is this “biological sex”?

Sometimes that SRY gene pops off the Y chromosome and over to an X chromosome. Surprise! So now you’ve got an X with an SRY and a Y without an SRY. What does this mean?
A Y with no SRY means physically you’re female, chromosomally you’re male (XY) and genetically you’re female (no SRY). An X with an SRY means you’re physically male, chromsomally female (XX) and genetically male (SRY). But biological sex is simple! There must be another answer...

Most of what I know about biology comes from BBC nature programs, so genes and chromosomes are beyond what I could ever hope to explain. I also have no idea what it's like to feel that your gender doesn't match your genitalia. 

Heck, I couldn't tell you why I write and draw with my left hand yet shave and use silverware with my right. Maybe some L2R protein leapt from one chromosome to another somewhere along the line. It is what it is and thank God I don't need surgery or hormones to make me fit someone else's ideas of who or what I am.

So Biologist Tweeter Rebecca Helm can have the last word today.

[P]lease be kind, respect people’s right to tell you who they are, and remember that you don’t have all the answers. Again: biology is complicated. Kindness and respect don’t have to be.

Q Toon: Ice Bucket List

Between the time I drew this cartoon and it had a chance to appear in print, somebody turned the idea into an internet meme featuring any female bête noire. Randy Bish went for the same idea, too. I have to assert that I like my execution of it better. I may be somewhat biased.

Daryl Cagle calls this phenomenon of one idea striking multiple cartoonists a "yahtzee," and the only reason more cartoonists haven't drawn this cartoon this week is that there happens to be so much more to be outraged about right now. If this had been your typical no-news August, there would have been more of these.

The MGM version of "The Wizard of Oz" turned 75 on Sunday, and has been a source of ideas for just about every editorial cartoonist who grew up with the movie -- drawing politicians lamenting "if I only had a brain" (or courage, or a heart) or depicting some wicked so-and-so sending out flying monkeys or drawing "Surrender (fill in the blank)" in the sky, or being exposed as Toto pulls back the Wizard's curtain. It's also the go-to reference for any cartoon having anything to do with the state of Kansas. Or not being there any more.

Dick Locher hit the bulls-eye with a February, 1979 cartoon depicting President Jimmy Carter being scolded by Dorothy for being a very bad man for not fulfilling his promises, and responding despondently, "I'm not a very bad man, I'm just a very bad Wizard!" It was such a good cartoon that Locher has drawn it again and again. Well, it's firmly his idea now, so nobody else gets to draw it.

This is at least the third time I've drawn from the Wizard of Oz inkwell. It's a cultural reference everyone can understand; and since I hardly ever get out to see new movies, I'm left to draw about old ones.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Yesterday was the 75th anniversary of the release of a film starring a bunch of these little buggers.

Oh, I guess there were a couple of gay icons involved in the production, too.

Q toon: Surrender, Dorothy

This week's cartoon concerns a case in Kansas involving a lesbian couple who advertised on Craigslist for a sperm donor so that they could conceive a child in 2009. William Marotta responded to the ad posted by Jennifer Schreiner and Angela Bauer.

The [sperm] donation was given under a written agreement that Marotta would not have parental rights and so not be considered the father of the child or liable for child support. However, when Schreiner and Bauer ran into money difficulties in 2012 an application for child support was made to the Department of Children and Families (DFC)...
In the state of Kansas when a child support claim is filed, the DFC is legally bound to find the biological father and petition him to pay. Kansas state is therefore seeking to have Marotta declared the father of the child and made financially responsible for her welfare, irrespective of the previous contract made between Marotta, Schreiner and Bauer.

Part of the problem legally is that Schreiner and Bauer's daughter was conceived at their home, rather than with a medical doctor acting as middle man.

The Topeka couple initially tried to obtain a specimen from a cryobank in Chicago, Bauer said, but ran into trouble with their family practitioner. The doctor refused to sign a release stating the couple capable of raising a child, she said. ... 

The women decided to inseminate Schreiner at their home, Bauer said, partly because of their previous awkward encounter with the doctor, but primarily because they wanted the act to be more personal.

The couple had no idea home insemination would have any bearings on parenting rights of the child, Bauer said.

Apparently, there is legal precedent that had a medical practitioner inseminated Ms. Schreiner via artificial insemination methods, Mr. Marotta would not be financially responsible for the resulting child -- at least in the state of California (even if they had had sexual relations before!).

In Steven S. v. Deborah D. (2005), a California appellate court held that the sperm provider was a donor with no parental status because the child was conceived by artificial insemination performed by a physician.  The donor argued that he and the mother had attempted to conceive by sexual intercourse prior to this insemination and that the mother acknowledged him and the father and allowed him to celebrate the child’s birth.  Nonetheless, the court concluded that the statute was clear and provision of the semen to a physician extinguished his potential rights as a father.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to conceive!

Q Toon: Security Measures

There is an old saying that any two separate items constitute an editorial cartoon.

This week, I try for three.