Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) raged against what she called the “criminal” action of a transgender college student getting top surgery while disabled.
Micah Leroy is a University of Minnesota student who has gotten some attention on Instagram as he documents his transition on social media. Leroy also has cerebral palsy (CP), a movement disorder that commonly affects the muscles and the skeletal system, makes eating more difficult, and can affect a person’s spoken language abilities. Cognitive issues are possible with CP, but many people with CP don’t have problems with cognition.
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Greene, who has threatened to beat up McBride, lobbed baseless accusations at her while sharing her deadname on X.
Leroy’s videos show that he uses a wheelchair for mobility and has trouble communicating with spoken language but he can communicate fine with written language and with the help of a speech-generating device.
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He posted about getting top surgery last month.
“Hey everyone, I am one week post-op!” he wrote in a December 28 post. “I am starting to be really annoyed with the binder since I haven’t taken it off yet. But I’m mostly back to normal. Bye!”
Yesterday, he posted a video shirtless, something a lot of transmasculine people do on social media to show off their chests after top surgery.
Despite understanding none of this, a sitting member of Congress attacked him.
Anti-trans activist Oli London — who used to be trans and had surgery to appear more like a “Korean girl” — posted a couple of videos from Leroy’s account without any of their accompanying text. London said that “doctors cut off the breasts of [a] disabled woman with cerebral palsy to turn her TRANS,” misgendering Leroy.
London’s implication was that Leroy, an adult college student who had been on testosterone for over a year and had been posting to social media about his upcoming surgery for months on Instagram, didn’t have the capability of advocating for his own medical care. London then said that Leroy is “wheelchair bound with cerebral palsy” to imply that he couldn’t make the decision on his own.
Greene shared London’s post and added: “This is criminal! What doctor did this? What hospital allowed this? Who paid for this?”
There is no indication that any laws were broken here.
“I am making my own decisions,” Leroy told the Daily Mail. “I am my own legal guardian. And people don’t understand that.”
He said that he was glad that his videos created a reaction on the right.
“I want to blow up the internet because I want to help other people who are trans and disabled know that it’s okay,” he said. “I want people to keep their minds open and not be bigots. People with disabilities are able to do whatever they f**king want.”
The infantilization of disabled people involves “treating individuals as if they were infants or children, regardless of their age or cognitive abilities,” according to neuroscience student Hari Srinivasan in an article in Psychology Today.
“I am left to walk away feeling I am worth less than the ant crawling on the ground near my feet,” Srinivasan wrote about being treated like a child in public because of his disability. “Disabled autistics like me face these types of microaggressions every day from all manner of folk. This cognitive dissonance between our capability and how society treats us affects our mental health and hinders our personal development and potential for growth.”
Greene is one of the most anti-trans politicians in the United States. She has introduced legislation to ban gender-affirming care for transgender teens with a bill that would also make it harder for transgender adults to access gender-affirming care.
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