America's Dads Decided Transgender Girls Were a Bigger Threat to Their Daughters Than Abortion Bans

Donald Trump gave America's parents a perfect & perfectly ridiculous excuse to sell their daughters out by voting for him.

Photo by lauren lulu taylor on Unsplash

Here’s my big question today three and a half weeks after a majority of fathers in America voted for Donald Trump.

Why were so many of them motivated to ‘protect’ their ‘precious’ daughters from mythical trans girls invading their sports teams? BUT NOT to protect them from dying from very real American abortion bans?

In a neighborhood not far from mine, almost every lawn displayed a ‘Save Girls Sports’ signs along with Trump 2024 signs. I still drive by it often and prior to the election those signs filled with me with dread. Did they portend that Trump’s vilification of trans people was working?

That he had made the existence of a tiny number of trans people a more compelling election issue for voters - especially men - than his plans to give tax cuts to billionaires and to abolish the Affordable Care Act, gut Social security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans benefits?

Yeah, it worked.

Instead of American dads ( and many moms) being outraged that their daughters were facing a very real future as second class citizens with no control over their own bodies, they were panicking that some imaginary teen boy would claim he was a girl, so he could take over their daughter’s playing fields and get into their change rooms.

As if.

As if any insecure teenage boy ( and yes, all teen boys and girls are wracked with insecurity) would want to risk the mockery of his peers so he could play on a ‘girls team’.

If that had EVER happened once in this country, the Trump campaign would have had the video footage of the ‘girls sports’ game, and they would have blasted it all over the news.

The reality check is that only 1.4 % of American teens identify as transgender. THAT’S about 300,000 teens ages 13 to 17. If half of those who identify as transgender are trans girls, then there are 150,000 trans girl teens all across the United States, out of a total population of 25.8 million 12 to 17year-olds.

And not every one of those aprox 150,000 trans girls even wants to play on a high school sports team.

What do you think the chances are of the ‘indignant’ fathers in the neighborhood nearby to me encountering a real life trans girl trying out for one of their daughter’s sports teams?

How about - ZERO!

Yet the idea of ‘Saving Girls Sports’ gave many American fathers and mothers the excuse they needed to sell out their daughter’s reproductive freedom and elect a convicted sexual abuser and admitted pussy- grabber to the White House again.

They chose to willfully ignore the very real truth that at least five young healthy women have now been documented to have died thanks to the extreme abortion bans in Texas and Georgia.

There are probably many more. We just don’t know about them yet.

So I ask, how do you think the fathers of Nevaeh Crain, 18, Josseli Barnica, 28 and Porsha Ngumezi, 35 feel after their beloved daughters died while miscarrying babies in Texas, that they very much wanted?

All three women died needlessly after being refused what until 2021 had been normal and routine care for their miscarriages. All three were turned away or forced to wait for up to 40 hours by major Texas hospitals while they bled out or sepsis infections raged throughout their bodies.

These women are the collateral damage of the Texas law which bans abortions from conception and which threatens doctors in the state with 99 year prison sentences if they provide an abortion, except to save a mother’s life.

A lethal problem is that Texas lawmakers who pride themselves on being “pro life”, know nothing about medicine. They have refused to listen to OBGYNs who tell them that miscarrying women sometimes desperately require D & C’s (Dilation & Curettage) procedures to empty the contents of their miscarrying uteruses, in order to stop the bleeding and infections which will kill them.

Thanks to the total ignorance and zealotry of these Texas Republican legislators, doctors in the state are now are terrified that doing D&Cs will be misconstrued as ending viable pregnancies and therefore potentially seen as prosecutable abortions.

The Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton is a proud right wing extremist who’s already threatened to criminally charge doctors and hospitals with providing an abortion. It sure seems like he’s itching to make an example out of some well -meaning doctor acting in the best interests of their patient.

Yet failure to provide a D&C, can kill women quickly as it did in the cases of Nevaeh, Josseli and Porsha. Doctors can’t tell with magical precision when a woman is close enough to death to qualify for a D&C.

Nevaeh, just 18, died less than 24 hours after feeling unwell at her own baby shower where she was excited to open gifts for the baby girl she was thrilled to be having with her longterm boyfriend.

Josseli and Porsha died suddenly as their anguished husbands despaired over doctors delaying and delaying lifesaving treatment.

Then how about the fathers of Georgian women Amber Thurman, 28 and Candi Miller, 41? Do you think they are celebrating that other American dads ‘Saved Girls Sports’ by electing Donald Trump and supposedly keeping trans girls off high school sports teams?

Was that a worthy tradeoff for the preventable deaths of their daughters who lost their lives to raging sepsis infections when their incomplete abortions went untreated thanks to Georgia’s 6 week abortion ban?

It’s true that so far we only have completed documentation on the deaths of these five women even though an NBC News investigation of federal public health data found that Texas’s maternal mortality rate has soared by 56% since it’s first abortion ban went into effect in 2021.

Nationwide maternal mortality is also up 11%, no doubt because of the addition of another 20 states which later introduced abortion bans. Texas, had a full year head start on the rest of the country when it came to introducing a ban with it’s Senate Bill 8 ( SB8) law, effective Sept 1,2021.

However, the hypocrisy of “pro life” Republican politicians went through the roof in these past couple weeks after Georgia’s state’s public health commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey announced that it had dismissed all the members of its Maternal Mortality Committee, (MMRC), which had been founded in 2013.

Her excuse was that a member of the committee had leaked information about Amber Thurman and Candi Miller’s deaths to ProPublica, the news site which revealed the abortion law -related circumstances of their deaths.

But wait, wasn’t that the whole point of their Maternal Mortality Committee - to investigate why Georgia women died during pregnancy and to be transparent to the public about their work?

It says this right on the Georgia Department of Health website: “The Georgia Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC) identifies maternal deaths occurring during or within a year of the end of a pregnancy and reviews each case to determine pregnancy-relatedness, causes, and contributing factors, and to make recommendations for interventions to reduce future deaths. This multidisciplinary committee is comprised of physicians, nurses, public health workers and epidemiologists”.

Shouldn’t Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and public health commissioner Dr Kathleen Toomey be apoplectic that pregnant women are dying in their state because doctors are afraid to treat them?

Shouldn’t that be their pro-life position - how to save pregnant women’s lives? Not to be furious that the public has learned that women have died as a result of the states’ six week abortion ban?

So furious that they have essentially shut down their Maternal Mortality Review Board?

That would be logical but anti abortion zealots aren’t logical.

Republican anti abortion lawmakers were warned that abortion bans would kill women. Now women are dying and instead of changing their cruel abortion ban laws, they want to hide their deaths .

Texas has just announced that the state is doing the same thing - refusing to investigate whether more pregnant women have died in their state as a result of the two abortion bans that are in place.

The leaders of the state’s Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee have announced that they won’t be reviewing any more pregnancy -related deaths from the years 2022 and 2023.

Their excuse is that they want “to be more contemporary” ie look at more recent deaths.

Their announcement - just coincidentally, I’m sure - came just days after news about Porsha Ngumezi losing her life during a miscarriage had made national headlines.

In other words, “ See no evil, Hear no evil” about any women who died in 2022 and 2023 thanks to the state’s draconian abortion bans even though Porsha, 35, and a mom of two young sons died on June 11, 2023.

Texas Republicans sure don’t want you to know about any more Porshas.

It kind of reminds me of when Donald Trump was president, the Covid epidemic was spreading and he was telling the country that it would just ”disappear”.

He was dead set against testing to see if more people were infected, tweeting : “Cases, Cases, Cases! If we didn’t test so much and so successfully, we would have very few cases.”

Following Trump’s logic, if the Georgia and Texas maternal mortality review boards don’t examine the pregnancy -related deaths of women in their states, then “voila”, abortion bans don’t kill women.

Got it?

Trump -voting dads of America, as long as news is suppressed about the unfortunate daughters who succumbed to deaths resulting from abortion bans, then your daughters will be safe.

You don’t have to worry if your own daughters have young children like Josseli, Candi, Amber and Porsha that would be left motherless.

Don’t worry if Donald Trump follows through on his Project 2025 plans to withdraw the very safe abortion pill mifepristone from the market nationwide and enforces the 1873 Comstock Act so surgical abortion instruments can’t be transported across state lines.

No need to be concerned at all that Trump’s actions will thus effectively ban abortion and the use of lifesaving D&Cs for miscarriages throughout the entire country.

As a dad you don’t have to fear that every pregnancy your daughters and granddaughters now have, could be lethal.

After all, you did your ‘Girl Dad’ job. Trump-voting dads you saved your daughters

from a much bigger threat than death - you have saved them from the infinitesimal possibility that a transgender girl might try out for one of their sports teams.