TW: discussions of Kavanaugh, abortion, and sexual violence. #### A. Uniqueness - A memo obtained by the NYT on October 23rd 2018, from the Department of Health and Human Services indicates that the department is considering defining transgender individuals out of existence by writing a legal definition for sex under Title IX. The change in the memo hasn’t been adopted, and the DHHS appears to be waivering on implementing. DHHS’s definition of “sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with”.- Memo urges other departments such as Labor, Education, and Justice to follow in their lead in order to adopt a consistent consensus. - Legislative changes and rollbacks on the brink in the status quo. Now is a make or break moment for the Department. The new definition of sex has been internally proposed, according to the new memo but has not taken affect, demonstrating that the decision-makers are waivering..- According to the NYT from May 2018, Alex Azar, the head of the HHS is a Trump appointee that differs from his predecessors in his desire to write new legislation, not just rollback previous legal regulations. #### B. Links- Plan passes, increasingly legitimacy for the Department of Health and Human Services.(Healthcare)- (Health Research)- (Family/Social)- (Abortion)- Plan accrues political capital: Democrats support expansions of healthcare and social benefits, meaning that the DHHS becomes the vehicle for populist and socialist-democratic politics, which creates a masking effect that ignores the flawed and violence implementation and enforcement of policies by the state - Cross apply uniqueness point 3, the DHHS is the current political mechanism for which federal healthcare policies get deployed within the US. This means that since that plan passes through the mechanism of the USFG it will always be passed by and through the DHHS. - This puts the aff in a double bind, either A. they pass the plan through the DHHS so they link or B. they don’t which means they have no solvency for the 1AC because they have articulated that only a federal program is able to solve and the DHHS is the only federal health mechanism that has the ability to do the plan. - Additionally, through the plan the DHHS is able to accumulate political capital which means that since that institution will now be viewed as a locus for which democratic socialist and dem policy can be passed through it sutures all labor movements that are part in parcel to such mechanism to be necessarily transphobic. - This continues the legacy of labor movements that have not only framed trans folks out of being considered as part of the working class, but additionally as bodies who are always already ‘bourgeoisie’ because aesthetic presentation is such a large part of our subjective existence. This means not only is the 1AC an act of transphobic violence but sustain the multiplication of it into the future. #### C. Internal Links- HHS has massive oversight in the status quo as it is the department in charge of the “health and wellbeing of all Americans,” Definition would eradicate federal recognition of estimated 1.4 million Americans, key to getting healthcare and other government benefits. - Implements Medicare, Medicaid, and children’s health insurance programs- Provides funding for a variety of agencies including but not limited to the Center for Disease Control, HIPAA & health rights. - Implements and oversees all social welfare programs such as programs for differently abled individuals, sexual violence, abuse and shelter programs, child & foster care, food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and adoption programs. - Increase in DHHS legitimacy reinforces structural violence and erasure against queer & intersex individualsThe codification of this memo means that trans and intersex bodies are framed not only as ‘unnatural’ because they are at odds with the project of Gender but also legally non-existent. This means this erasure extends to legal mechanisms like the census which then kills the possibility of further research and reform for issues of youth homelessness, HIV/AIDs, drug usage, hate crimes. - Foster care, child support, children’s health insurance, sexual violence, domestic abuse shelters etc follow new DHHS guidelines which makes queer youth homeless, denies life saving medical/counseling resources, increase rate of sexual violence within queer communities. This is only magnified for queer people of color, according to HRW ⅔ of trans women of color reported being sexually assaulted and being refused after care/restorative justice. - Broadly, HHS legitimacy, under the guise of a broader democrat or socialist mandate is able to subtly rollback protections for the most marginalized individuals and or privatize these practices, expanding the non-profit industrial complex that reintrenches the logic of neoliberalism. DHHS will work to undermine any new healthcare policy implementation with its authority of implementation and definition, such as an an ability to define what is considered under “essential benefits.” Look to how the Trump administration made efforts to undermine the ACA through attempts at decreasing enrollment and reducing web access even if they couldn’t overturn Obamacare. - Alex Azar, head of DHHS, opposes abortion rights and considers it under the DHHS mandate to protect the “unborn.” and will enact massive abortion restrictions by classifying abortions as not medical necessary nor beneficial to women who receive them, referencing Kavanaugh’s dissent in June Medical Services v. Rebekah Gee. - Increased DHHS legitimacy means DoL, DoE, and DoJ likely to adopt its definition of sex, multiplying impact magnitude #### D. Impacts- Queer overkill- Coherency: The eradication of queerness operates not as merely a project of marginalization, but rather pure eradication. This is due to the fact that all those bodies that have been marked as queer fall outside of the project of coherency for cisheteronormativity. This results in overkill, in which because difference is inherently a threat to projects of coherency all queer bodies must be eradicated in order to secure the purity of the ‘future.’ - Youth: Cross apply internal link point 1B, In terms of the DHHS this would hit queer youth the hardest which acts as an impact magnifier. Specifically, according to Jasbir Puar the purposeful targeting of youth in marginalized populations is done in order to communicate to those populations that there is no room for them in the way in which the future is being materialized. This leads to a reality in which you constantly internalize a reality that does not want you to survive and thus imports upon the death drive as the only possible mechanism for resolution of such pain. - O/W on reversibility: This outweighs on reversibility because queer overkill that seeks to create a reality in which queer folks never exist utilize mechanisms like the legal system which are thought to be the arbiter of truth in order to justify the ‘truthness’ of the non-existence of queerness. This not only operates as a justification for violence against us, but also for the perpetual exclusion of queer people of color from their specific subjectivities. - Structural ViolenceSexual Violence: This reinforces the patriarchal condition in which the violence that is always already justified against women is never framed as legible and thus never has the possibility of taking action against or engaging in transformative practices to heal. This forwards women as bodies who operate as nothing but objects to be targeted by society for sexualized violence. - Unsafe Abortions: rollbacks for abortion and stricter roadblocks increase informal and at-home abortions. According to the National Institute of Health study of 2016, over 68,000 people die from informal abortion practices every single year while over 5 million face long term health complications. The plan makes conditions especially worse for people of color who can give birth because they are already refused key reproductive car en masse. Specifically, due to antiblack barriers to education and contraception black people who can give birth are generally at a much higher need of safe abortions. For example, according to La’Tasha D. Mayes cis black women only constitute 11% of the population of Philly but 31% of all deaths related to carrying to term an unsafe baby.- Antiblackness: This means that this operates as an independent antiblackness impact because the 1AC creates an environment in which black bodies who can give birth are constructed as worthy of nothing but death vis a vis disinvestment from reproductive care. Cross apply the overkill framing, this outweighs and controls the direction of the impacts of the 1AC. - Structural Impacts come first.Probability- ProximityTheory and Frameworks: