Interviewer: Something that you alluded to is this rapid growth we’ve seen in both anti-abortion legislation as well as anti-trans legislation with all these different bills against gender-affirming care, especially for trans youth. And we’re seeing these happen simultaneously and it doesn’t feel coincidental. So, do you have any thoughts about why we’re seeing these things happen in tandem?

Dr. Jenna Beckham: Yes. Well, I guess no. No, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I feel I could talk for a really long time about it, but if I’m going to summarize it, there’s sort of two principles I think of as why these attacks are happening. One is, it’s an attempt at control. Controlling people’s autonomy and destiny and their ability to make choices. And that control is particularly impactful and disproportionately affects those communities and those individuals who are already marginalized, and who I truly believe that the people in power want to keep marginalized and keep disenfranchised and take away their power and their ability to make choices for themselves. I think there are other people who are making these decisions who, maybe it’s naive, but I’d like to try to think are not evil or ill-intented at heart. But I think there’s an othering nature of it– a sort of, they’re different, the people who are seeking gender-affirming care and the people who are getting abortions. At least there’s a concept of that, that those, quote-unquote, types of people, are different than the people who are holding office and are in power. And so I think, again, a lot of these people are lacking that human component to it. They may not know a transgender individual. They probably know someone who’s had an abortion because we know the statistics of how frequent it is. But in some ways, as we hear politicians who have been sort of exposed of their partners, their spouses, their children having abortions, they sort of justify it some way, those examples or those instances are different than sort of this picture they try to paint of who are the people who are getting abortions and why they’re making sort of social, moral decisions that they view as poor or inferior to their own choices. And I think, unfortunately, it’s become really popular for the conservative parties and for their constituents. So even if that particular politician, senator, congressman, house of representatives, themselves doesn’t care about it or isn’t that passionate about it, they hear from their conservative base and their constituents that it’s become really, I don’t know, almost sexy to hate trans people and to be against abortion rights and so they get votes and they get support by focusing on these particular… like for example, the anti-trans sports bill, if you look at the statistics in North Carolina of how many trans female athletes, it’s single, maybe double digits. And they spent so much time and energy focusing on that while not expanding Medicaid that affects hundreds of thousands of people in our state.