The LGBTQ movement has acted as the most consequential factor in the policy debate on education in Florida. Now, a local school board candidate has made the controversial remarks that doctors who treat transgender children should be lynched.
Lancaster, the conservative school board candidate in Santa Rosa County, Florida, stated, "These doctors that are going along with mutilating these children and prescribing hormone blockers to these kids, in my opinion, they should be hanging from the nearest tree," and was met with applause.
The school board member then aligned herself with very popular conservative talking points like banning Critical Race Theory in public schools, and standing against, "social engineering." This has led some to believe this is the general opinion of all Republicans in the Florida legislature.
It is true that Florida Republicans in recent years have pushed to keep LGBTQ rhetoric out of the education system through legislation like the Parental Rights in Education bill. However, the comments are being condemned by notable Republicans in Florida.
State Rep. Alex Andrade (R-2) stated that Ms. Lancaster, "shouldn’t have referenced lynching." While calling the use of the word lynching, "inappropriate," Andrade further added, "that doesn’t change the fact that these procedures on children should be illegal in Florida. Doctors shouldn’t be prescribing puberty blockers to children, and they definitely shouldn’t be performing irreversible surgeries on them."
Just last month, the DeSantis administration moved forward with the proposal that has since denied Medicaid coverage for transgender medical treatments. The state Agency for Health Care Administration, which runs most of the Medicaid program, published a proposed rule and set a July 8 hearing on the issue. National and state legal and LGBTQ-advocacy groups have vowed to fight the proposal.
Chloe Cole, a teenage girl from California who also is a former transgender came to Florida to testify against the, "medicalization of minors," a piece of rhetoric that Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has since adopted. Cole detailed in her testimony that not only did she not know the full extent of what she was doing, but also increased her chances of contracting certain diseases, like cancer.
All in all, Republicans seem to be sticking to their guns on denying transgender medical treatment to minors, regardless of the word choice used by School Board member Lancaster.
