I’m sure you all are by now annoyed and familiar with the story of Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown student who has been attacked over the last week by Rush Limbaugh and the rest of Wingnuttia for daring to speak out in support of contraception, which up to approximately twelve seconds ago, was one of the least controversial subjects in the United States. If not, she has a Wikipedia entry now! I hadn’t written about it much, because meh, but Thers picked up on the latest annoying, predictable development in this story, and it’s subject matter dear to my heart, namely the fact that the fights for reproductive rights and LGBT rights [and hell, most other things which make life better for people who aren’t rich white Christian dudes] are the same fight. So this will be one of my “I told you so” posts.

You see, apparently Sandra Fluke wrote a paper [a woman! with a vagina! writing a paper! that wingnuts don’t like!] a while back which stated her support for private insurance not only covering contraception, but also treatment for transgender people, all the way up to gender reassignment surgery. In a sane world, this would not be controversial, as transgender people are real and recognized by the medical community, and they’re pretty much in agreement on the proper ways to go about treating them.

Not for wingnuts. First off, just click on this Memeorandum link to all the wingnuts now gnashing their chompers saying “How dare she?!”

And here is, um, some wingnut, losing his mind on the issue:

Sandra Fluke is being sold by the left as something she’s not. Namely a random co-ed from Georgetown law who found herself mixed up in the latest front of the culture war who was simply looking to make sure needy women had access to birth control. That, of course, is not the case.

As many have already uncovered Sandra Fluke she is, in reality, a 30 year old long time liberal activist who enrolled at Georgetown with the express purpose of fighting for the school to pay for students’ birth control. She has been pushing for mandated coverage of contraceptives at Georgetown for at least three years according to the Washington Post.

However, as I discovered today, birth control is not all that Ms. Fluke believes private health insurance must cover. She also, apparently, believes that it is discrimination deserving of legal action if “gender reassignment” surgeries are not covered by employer provided health insurance. She makes these views clear in an article she co-edited with Karen Hu in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law.

As Thers said, OMIGOD. Woman have opinion on two things and write them down!

Here’s another ‘un:

[I]magine Fluke trying to defend this language about “heterosexist” policies in a public hearing, with Republican members of the committee questioning her about whether religious institutions (or private businesses, or taxpayers) should also be required to foot the bill for “gender reassignment.”
Congratulations, America: You’ve been scammed!

UPDATE: Dan Collins at The Conservatory points out that the Obama administration is already providing illegal immigrants with “hormone treatments for transgendered people.”

Of course, this only makes sense. We wouldn’t want these foreign transpeople to go back to wherever they (illegally) came from and say that they’d been the victims of American “heterosexism,” would we? Then President Obama would have to issue another apology to the foreigners we had victimized.

Haw haw haw, wingnut attempt to make joke!

If you are truly bored with your existence, click around all the other Memeorandum articles featuring wingnuts screeching basically the same thing over and over, but if you have things to do, the takeaway is, again, simple: it’s all the same fight.

Here’s what Thers says at the end of his post, along the same lines, but funnier than I have the energy to do right now:

Are they deliberately trying to prove feminists and queer theorists right about everything? If so, well played. I guess.

Wait’ll they find out she dislikes racism. Then she’ll be totes exposed as an Anti-American Faith-Hating Fraud.

Totes.