LOS ANGELES, CA, February 6—Despite the steady downpour, hundreds of workers rallied outside of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) to demand that the hospital bosses reinstate the life-saving transgender services they have provided for decades. Recognizing the necessity to oppose these blatant attacks on our transgender siblings, a healthcare worker and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member organized coworkers and colleagues to join the planning meeting and support the rally. Though the fightback is in the beginning stages, the issue has sparked more antiracist organizing. We’ve already begun to build relationships with Black workers, providing essential HIV care to our class. Recently, we created a separate chat so that we can specifically to begin having political discussions on how we can advance our work, fighting for our class.While a step in the right direction, workers need to go beyond demanding these bosses give us crumbs back, and unite with their working class family to smash capitalism and bring communism to healthcare and the world!
Hospital bosses hide their racism and sexism behind Trump’s
We have created a new chat of mostly Black healthcare providers discussing not just Trump’s attacks but also exposing the dangerous role of liberals. The CHLA bosses claim they are simply complying with President Donald Trump’s executive order of stopping the use of puberty blockers, hormones and other gender-affirming care for youth. However, the liberal Democratic Party California Attorney General Rob Bonta already said that the executive order did not give them any basis to yank federal funding and cautioned that these cuts are a form of discrimination. According to healthcare workers from CHLA, these cuts were not solely done in response to Trump. They have been part of increased scrutiny over their services by the CHLA bosses, who are now using Trump’s order as an excuse to cut out this essential care.
This protest was organized by the medical resident’s union CIR(SEIU) and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Many healthcare workers, and the impacted children and families, showed up in solidarity. Nevertheless, while DSA city council members Hugo Soto Martinez and Ysabel Jurado joined the rally in support, they sat on a body that voted to increase the police budget (already half of the entire L.A. city budget) by an additional $1 billion. While they did vote no on the budget increase, their dead reliance on the bosses’ state did nothing to alter the reality that working class Black, Latin, and transgender workers are faced with increased rates of racist and sexist police terror and incarceration. Moreover, the Democrats only care about trans “rights” insofar as it leads to more bodies in their military as cannon fodder in their plans for future imperialist wars!
Workers chanted, “Protect trans kids!” and hoisted signs that said, “Gender-affirming Care Saves Lives.” Currently, many of the original comrade’s colleagues work for agencies that have NOT supported the ban on trans healthcare. However, if there are changes to the rules for the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which are a major source of healthcare funding for our patients, then things may change for the worse quickly.
In L.A., we stand on the shoulders of previous organizers. From the trans workers who clashed with the LAPD KKKops outside of Cooper’s Donuts in 1959, or like the anti-police brutality protest, nearly 58 years ago to the day, at the Black Cat Tavern, when the entire working class is united against our common enemy, the capitalist class, we cannot be stopped! We’re just getting started but this struggle is one more brick in the layers of class struggle towards communist victory. Join us!J
Washington D.C.
WASHINGTON, D.C., February 2—“We’re all we’ve got, we’re all we need” rang out as 200 angry protesters marched to Children’s National Medical Center (CNMC), demanding that it continue to offer gender-affirming care to trans children. Instead of defying President Donald Trump’s fascist call to end trans care, CNMC issued this statement: “Children’s National is currently pausing all puberty blockers and hormone therapy prescriptions for transgender youth patients, per the guidelines in the Executive Order issued by the White House this week.” D.C. area and Baltimore residents organized and marched within 48 hours to condemn CNMC’s abusive announcement!
MAGA fascism strikes healthcare
Trump and his billionaire MAGA backers are trashing health care broadly, slashing Medicaid, putting Medicare on the table, shutting down HIV treatment and education by the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. and in Africa, and backing state restrictions on both surgical and medical abortions. The attack on trans care for children is just the beginning, the camel’s nose under the tent. This flagrant attack on the working class is designed to reduce government spending, terrify workers and students, intensify racist conditions, and put more money in the hands of the billionaire ruling class.
Our bold action was a powerful grassroot-organized action initiated by Baltimore residents who had been protecting libraries and programs featuring LGBTQ messages. The march was led by a friend of the Baltimore West Wednesday Coalition (in which Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members participate) that has held weekly police brutality protests for over 10 years (CHALLENGE, March 29). A PLP member documented the CNMC protest for social media sites to help spread the struggle.
Meanwhile, the lying hospital administrators, lackeys of ruling class financiers all, told hospital workers that we were a MAGA rally that they should ignore! Such disinformation and efforts to minimize the extent of the residents’ anger are part of the hospital’s playbook to defuse solidarity of hospital workers with their patients.
Hospital bosses also pushing anti-immigrant racism
The battle is broader, not just in the D.C.-Baltimore corridor, and not only in health care. Hospitals are refusing to defend patients who are undocumented immigrants. New York University Hospital and Johns Hopkins Hospital administrations have explicitly told doctors and staff not to hide their patients from ICE and not even tell patients when ICE stormtroopers have come onsite. But hospital workers and med students are pushing back and hatching resistance approaches in hospitals to defend all workers needing health care, documented or not!
The storm of the working class is beginning to gather. PLP is fanning the flames of revolt and will lead the way to communist revolution and a system where the needs of all workers of all races, genders, and nationalities are fully met and capitalism abolished for all time.
