House Passes It 216 - 211 — Arrests WILL Take Place!
Legislation that would criminalize gender transition treatments for minors, such as surgery and hormone supply, and punish providers with up to ten years in federal prison was approved by a divided House on Wednesday.
On a vote of 216 to 211, the bill—which civil rights organizations claimed was among the most extreme anti-trans legislation ever considered by Congress—was approved nearly entirely along party lines.
It is unlikely to be taken up by the Senate, where it would require a bipartisan alliance to move forward. However, the ultraconservative Republican majority and President Trump’s priorities were reflected in its discussion and passage in the House.
Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia pushed it through the House after she demanded earlier this month that Speaker Mike Johnson bring her bill to the floor in exchange for her backing of the defense policy measure she was otherwise threatening to sabotage.
According to Greene, the legislation fulfilled one of Trump’s major campaign pledges, and Congress must take action to formalize his executive order banning gender-affirming medical procedures.
“Most Americans agree that kids just need to grow up before they do anything radical, like a mastectomy on a 15-year-old girl,” she said on Wednesday on the House floor, pointing at a poster board of a child who had undergone such a surgery.
Greene has recently gained odd new respect from some Democrats for disagreeing with the president on a number of issues. She abruptly announced last month that she was leaving Congress one year before the end of her term.
“If a child believes they’re a unicorn, do adults take their word for it as well?” Greene said, adding that in electing Trump in 2024, the American people voted to end gender transition treatments.
Republican Representative Barry Moore of Alabama claimed that Democrats were indoctrinating children by falsely framing gender-affirming procedures as necessary.
“It is not lifesaving care,” he said. “It is child abuse.”
In response, Democrats claimed that proponents of the bill were attempting to replace medicine with ideology by focusing on a small and vulnerable group of trans youth. They claimed that by threatening parents with jail time, the law violated their rights and gave politicians the authority to make extremely private decisions for families.
“Does anyone believe that the Freedom Caucus and President Trump love America’s children more than their parents do?” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland.
California Democratic Rep. Mark Takano said the surgeries on minors that Greene described were extremely rare.
What the bill would really do, he said, is ban “safe and effective medications for an entire group of people.”
Takano said that the bill would not make children safe and that it would “interfere with parental choice and open private medical data up to investigation.”
A second anti-trans bill, also supported by Greene, that would prohibit Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care for trans youth is scheduled to be voted on by the House later this week.
The first openly transgender lawmaker to serve in Congress, Rep. Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware, claimed before Wednesday’s vote that Republicans were “obsessed” with transgender people and were concentrating on a “misunderstood and vulnerable 1 percent of the population” rather than taking any action to safeguard Americans’ health care.
“They think more about trans people than trans people think about trans people,” McBride said, speaking to reporters on the steps of the Capitol. “They are consumed with this and they are extreme on it.”
Three Democrats and four Republicans voted across party lines. Democrats Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, both from Texas, and Don Davis of North Carolina voted for the measure.
Republicans Gabe Evans of Colorado, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Mike Lawler of New York, and Mike Kennedy of Utah voted against it.
"""My husband brought his mistress to our daughter’s wedding—and then asked me to give her my seat beside him.
"""My husband brought his mistress to our daughter’s wedding—and then asked me to give her my seat beside him. For a few seconds, I honestly thought I was looking at the wrong table, because my name card had vanished and Melissa’s was sitting exactly where mine had been on every seating chart. She wore a pale blue silk dress, lifted her champagne as if she belonged there, and avoided my eyes when I stopped beside the chair. David stood up, pointed to an empty seat at the next table, and quietly said, “For tonight, why don’t you sit over there?”
I had spent fourteen months helping our daughter, Emily, plan that wedding, from dress fittings and florist meetings to late-night calls over napkins and seating charts. That morning, while I fastened the pearl buttons on her gown, she made me promise I would enjoy the day and not let anything between her father and me touch it. I meant that promise, because whatever was left of my marriage, I would not make my daughter’s wedding the battlefield where it died. But David had apparently made a different plan, and he expected me to cooperate with it in silence.
When I asked what Melissa was doing there, David’s face showed guilt for only a second before he hid it behind irritation. He acted as though I were creating the problem simply by noticing that his mistress was seated at the family table in the place reserved for the bride’s mother. Then Melissa looked at me and said, “Honey, today really isn’t the day to make Emily uncomfortable.” I almost laughed, because the woman who had been sleeping with my husband for nearly a year was now warning me not to embarrass my own daughter.
I could feel people settling into nearby seats, laughing and talking, unaware that my marriage was being quietly rearranged in front of them. David kept his voice low and told me we should not “do this here,” as if the humiliation belonged to me because I refused to disappear politely. I looked at the empty chair he had chosen for me between a cousin and someone from the groom’s side, and I realized something colder than anger. This was not spontaneous; he had thought about where Melissa would sit, and he had assumed I would move.
For twenty-eight years, I had been the woman who adjusted, explained, forgave, and made excuses when David forgot anniversaries, missed dinners, or put work ahead of family. When he became distant, I learned to expect less instead of asking for more, and somewhere along the way he mistook that patience for permission. Even now, part of me considered taking the other chair, smiling for photographs, swallowing the humiliation, and telling myself it was all for Emily. I actually reached for the chair because protecting my daughter still mattered more to me than winning a public fight.
Then I heard one word behind me: “Mom?” Emily was walking toward us in her wedding dress, still glowing from the ceremony, and at first she looked confused rather than angry. Her eyes moved from me, to the empty chair, to Melissa, then back to the family table where she had personally placed me months ago. David quickly stepped in and announced that he had “rearranged a few things,” as if changing the bride’s seating chart without permission were no more serious than moving a centerpiece.
Emily asked why I was not sitting in my seat, and David casually pointed to the neighboring table and said I would be sitting “right there.” Her smile disappeared, and her eyes dropped to the place card in front of Melissa. I watched my daughter’s expression go completely still as she picked up that card and turned it over in her hand. In that instant, I understood the worst part: Emily had not approved this, and David had brought his mistress into our daughter’s wedding believing he could force everyone to accept what he wanted once it was already done.
What Emily did not know was that six months earlier, I had discovered David’s affair through a message that appeared on his phone while he was in the shower. Melissa had written, “I hate pretending I don’t miss you when she’s around,” followed by another message asking whether Friday was still theirs. When I confronted him, David spent eleven minutes calling me paranoid, insecure, dramatic, suspicious, and unfair before I repeated Melissa’s words exactly. The silence that followed ended our marriage long before either of us ever said the word divorce.
We had kept the details quiet because Emily was planning her wedding, and I refused to turn her happiest season into a crisis about us. David told me he was “confused,” that what he had with Melissa was “more complicated than an affair,” and that he needed time before making decisions. I agreed only that Emily’s wedding came first, so we slept in separate rooms, spoke carefully, and tried to appear functional while our marriage quietly collapsed. I believed David understood that one day required restraint, but he had apparently used that silence to prepare something else.
Three weeks before the wedding, he had casually asked whether Emily had finalized the family table and whether every seat had been assigned. At the time, I thought it was harmless conversation, but standing there with Melissa’s card in my daughter’s hand, I finally understood why he had asked. He had been checking whether there would be room, and when there was not, he simply removed me. Emily looked up at her father and asked, very quietly, “Where is Mom’s place card?”—and for the first time that night, David had no easy answer.
…FULL STORY IN THE COMMENT 👇👇👇"" "
