Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is demanding to know which doctor and hospital performed top surgery on a transgender college student, calling it 'criminal' after an anti-trans activist stripped his own social media posts of context and implied he was incapable of consenting because he's disabled.
From an Instagram Post to a Congressional Outburst
Leroy, who uses a wheelchair and communicates with the help of a speech-generating device, has spent months posting about his gender-affirming care to his account, @disabled_trans_boy. Last month he shared that he was one week post-op: "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." This week he posted shirtless, the way many transmasculine people do after top surgery, to show his healed chest.
Oli London, who once transitioned to appear more like a Korean pop star before detransitioning and becoming a prominent anti-trans commentator, reposted the videos with none of that context. London claimed doctors had "cut off the breasts of a disabled woman with cerebral palsy to turn her TRANS," describing Leroy as "wheelchair bound" to suggest he couldn't have made the decision on his own. Greene shared the post and escalated it into a demand for accountability against medical providers who, by every available account, followed a patient's own wishes.
A Voice the Backlash Tried to Erase
Leroy pushed back directly. "I am making my own decisions," he told the Daily Mail. "I am my own legal guardian. And people don't understand that."
People with disabilities are able to do whatever they f**king want.
Micah Leroy
Cerebral palsy affects muscle control and can make spoken communication difficult, but it doesn't inherently affect cognition, and Leroy has been writing publicly and clearly about his own care for months. Disability advocates call the assumption otherwise a textbook case of infantilization, the treatment of disabled adults as incapable of the judgment routinely granted to everyone else. Neuroscience student Hari Srinivasan described the toll of that treatment in Psychology Today.
I am left to walk away feeling I am worth less than the ant crawling on the ground near my feet.
Hari Srinivasan
The Bigger Picture
This wasn't a one-off flare-up. Disability rights advocates have long warned that anti-trans policy relies on a specific move: casting disabled people as incapable of recognizing or acting on their own gender identity, then using that manufactured incapacity to justify restricting care for everyone. Treating disabled people as presumptively unable to consent isn't just insulting, it potentially runs afoul of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, all of which protect disabled people's right to make their own medical decisions. Recent litigation has even targeted the federal disability protections that make those arguments stick.
Greene has built a legislative record around restricting transition care, including a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for trans teens and make it harder for trans adults to get it too. Seen against that backdrop, her reaction to Leroy looks less like a one-off outburst and more like a preview of the argument disabled trans people can expect to keep facing: that their own testimony about their own bodies doesn't count.
Leroy, for his part, says he's fine with the attention. "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."
Source: LGBTQ Nation
Cover photo: U.S. House of Representatives, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
