In Texas, bill SB1646 would make it illegal for parents to support their trans children. Merely consenting to a doctor’s prescription of puberty blockers would be child abuse and cause to remove the child from their parents.

As writer Cassie Celeste put it on Twitter:

We’ve gone from “just asking questions” to this in six fucking months. Listen to us when we tell you what the consequences of platforming transphobic thought are going to be.

Here’s a good round-up of where this hatred is coming from and why it’s getting worse, with journalists proposing solutions to “the trans question” in chilling echoes of history.

“The queers are coming for your children” is the oldest anti-gay slur, but it’s alive and well not just in Texan courtrooms but in Scottish political discourse. Alex Salmond’s Alba Party caused online uproar over the weekend when it falsely claimed that LGBT+ organisations want to reduce the age of consent to 10 years old. The allegations are completely untrue but have been echoed by the usual hateful groups such as the LGB Alliance and For Women Scot.

It was good to see the widespread revulsion, but the very same people have been making equally vile allegations about trans people and trans-supportive charities for three years now and nobody seemed to have a problem with that. Quite the opposite: they have been repeatedly platformed and amplified by our press, politicians and media personalities.

This is how you can go from “just asking questions” to legalised hatred.