Three Democrats crossed party lines yesterday to vote for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greenes (R-GA) bill to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth, and the party needs to kick them out. Reps. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Vincente Gonzalez Jr (D-TX), and Don Davis (D-NC) all voted alongside 213 Republicans yesterday to pass Greenes anti-trans bill. If they had not voted for it, it would not have passed.Yes, Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) is generally right that the party needs to be a big tent and allow some ideological diversity. But there are some lines that should not be crossed, and this is one of them. Related Everything is grooming now except for actually grooming children The bill is extreme. It makes it a crime to provide safe and effective health care to trans youth (and only to trans youth! The same procedures for cis youth are exempted in Greenes bill), punishable with up to 10 years imprisonment. This includes the parents of trans kids, who are only trying to do whats best for their kids, who happen to be the target of a five-year moral panic that gripped the GOP so that they could get people to stop talking about the failures of the presidents first term and his attempt to overthrow the federal government on January 6, 2021.All the reasons to support Greenes bill are terrible. There are the pseudoscientific reasons that you can read about on social media, like the idea that puberty blockers arent reversible (they are), that most trans kids change their minds (they dont), or that puberty blockers destroy trans kids health (they dont). Dive deeper every day Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues Subscribe to our Newsletter today All the major medical professional organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, and the American Medical Association support gender-affirming care as the standard of care, but people like Greene will still tell people to do your own research if they bring up the fact that real researchers who spend their lives studying the subject support gender-affirming care.And what kind of research is someone with no background in science supposed to do from their home? At best, the research theyll do will be orders of magnitude less rigorous than what those scientific bodies already did, and they probably wont even do that. Instead, what right-wingers mean when they say do your own research is watch this YouTube video made by someone who knows nothing or share this garbage Facebook meme. Thats how little these people know about what real scientific research looks like. Its no coincidence that Greene introduced this bill and is also a major opponent of vaccines. She has no respect for scientists, which gives her license to believe whatever she wants, facts be damned. Who cares how many lives are lost, right? The Democratic Party should stay away from that arrogant and harmful mentality.Perhaps the most anti-scientific belief these people buy into is the idea that a teacher or a parent or whoever else can turn a kid transgender by reading them a book or letting them play with the wrong genders toys.Thats just dumb. That is not how it works. We need to make fun of people who believe silly ideas like this and mock them out of polite society. The next set of reasons people support these kinds of bans is basically conspiracy theories. Parents are forcing their kids to be transgender because its in fashion or Doctors just want to make money off trans kids so they force all these medical treatments on them or Teachers and Democrats want kids to turn transgender because of the woke. Kids could not possibly be saying that theyre transgender in the face of an extremely transphobic society because thats what they are. No, it has to be a conspiracy of some kind!This is a purposeful lack of trust in people in positions of authority that makes running a society hard. We tell scientists, etc., that they have to achieve certain goals, and when they try, we dont just criticize the results; we deny that they should even have had the power to do their jobs in the first place.Parents, teachers, doctors, researchers all of these people are wrong not because they are working with different information than the rest of us. No, they are bad people who want to hurt children because theyre bad. Thats it. Again, this is the meat and potatoes of the anti-vaccine movement. In order to get people to believe in pseudoscientific lies, they have to convince them to stop listening to the actual experts, and to do that, they need to paint them as evil-doers. And quite literally. Many anti-trans activists have made it no secret that they believe that demons and the devil are behind any support for trans rights.Democrats should be working with people who have different belief systems, but there has to be a common basis of understanding the world and a respect for peoples humanity. People who think that public health officials who support trans kids are literally demons need to be excluded. They cannot be reached. And the party should not be lending them support.Greenes bill is also a multi-pronged assault on the partys fundamental values. It restricts peoples access to health care. And real health care, not supplements that conservatives sell on their podcasts. Thats a big deal for Democrats and should be a line in the sand: Patients should have control of their own bodies, and their doctors and parents can help them make those decisions without government interference. Its also an affront to free speech and expression. The same people who are against gender-affirming care are also against letting trans people dress and identify and act as they want to. To borrow an expression, the right hates trans people for their freedom, because they defy societys expectations of their sex in a profound way. Democrats are the party of personal freedom when it comes to social issues, and that should mean something.Last, this bill is an attack on a vulnerable minority because they are a vulnerable minority, and Democrats are the party of fighting oppression. Gender-affirming care has been around for a long time. Kids have been getting puberty blockers for decades. And mainstream Republicans never really cared until 2021. Even conservative Christians were mad that the 2020 Republican Party didnt care about taking away rights from trans kids. It took the GOPs losses in that election for the party to realize it could use trans people as a political pawn to win votes. And the only reason there was even a vote for Greenes bill yesterday was political haggling. Republicans could have put this bill up for a vote all year if they really believed in it, but instead only did so in exchange for support for a military funding bill.At the very least, Democratic leadership needs to realize that Cuellars, Gonzalezs, and Davis disloyalty to the party gave Republicans a political win.I would not have written this column about most other LGBTQ+ issues because there can be some reasonable debate on them. For example, I fully support LGBTQ+ inclusive antidiscrimination legislation. I could also imagine a situation where someone else disagrees with how a specific law is written, without their values being so different from mine that we couldnt work together on anything.But not here. Kids need health care, and Marjorie Taylor Greene should get exactly zero say in what kind of care doctors across the country provide. There is no redeeming value to Greenes bill. Democrats need to take action.Subscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.