These kids are 15, 16, 17 and their state is saying that they're wrong.

Their existence is wrong.

And I don't know what that does to the psyche of a 16-year-old to have your state

basically say that who you are and what you're doing is illegal.

Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

Well, as we've been covering on the show and a bit here on the podcast,

it's been fascinating not to mention kind of disturbing, even horrifying to watch the priorities

of the Republican Party post January 6th and post the election because obviously they can't set the agenda

at the national level because they don't control either House of Congress or White House,

but they do control a lot of state legislatures.

There's two dozen states or maybe a little fewer than that

that where they have both houses of the state legislature and the governorship

and so they can set the agenda.

And basically like the two big agenda items for Republican state governments are changing voting laws

by and large making it harder to vote, knocking people off voter rolls,

reducing the amount of hours the polls are open as they didn't Iowa,

the infamous Georgia bill, which made it a criminal infraction to give water to people online to vote, etc.

So that's one bucket of things and the other are legislating and regulating trans children

in two specific ways.

One, a real obsession with transports, barring trans students from participating in sports,

and trans healthcare, healthcare, basically barring, making either more difficult

or in some cases just explicitly criminalizing what's come to be known as gender

...