This piece first appeared in our weekly newsletter, The Fallout.

There’s an inherent duality to the conservative legal movement’s targeted attacks on trans kids. First is the reality that conservatives are obsessed with transgender folks because they see being trans as an existential threat to state power. It’s the position Tennessee Solicitor General Rice argued last December to the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti when defending Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. In an exchange with Justice Elena Kagan, Rice described those advocating for life-saving gender affirming health care as seeking “a substantive right to engage in nonconforming behavior.”

That’s the legalese way of saying that being trans is a threat to the civil order. In other words, if you are trans, according to conservatives, then you are inherently an enemy of the state. It’s an outrageous and potentially-genocidal world view.

Then there is the truth that the attacks on the lives and rights of transgender people is a precursor to the attacks on the lives and rights of other politically-vulnerable groups. Take, for example, the current fight over the Biden administration’s move to expand Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Section 504 is a federal law that, among other things, prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in programs, like public education, that receive federal funding. Under the Biden administration, Section 504’s definition of disability was expanded to include gender dysphoria, a move designed to target some of the discrimination transgender students face in public schools while also recognizing the underlying medical condition that required accommodation.

Naturally, conservatives hated it.

In response, 17 states sued to block the expanded definition from taking effect. And while the lawsuit ostensibly targets the inclusion of gender dysphoria as disability to accommodate under Section 504, the lawsuit itself seeks to do much more than strike protections for trans students. Those 17 states are asking a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas to strike 504 entirely. If Judge Kernodle agrees, then states would no longer be required to accommodate students’ disabilities in public schools. It’s impossible to overstate the threat this lawsuit plays to the disability community, to public education, and to our civic institutions generally.

In response to the mounting public outcry around this lawsuit, some Republican attorneys general are starting to backtrack and run damage control with two principle claims. First, they say that a change in administration likely means the lawsuit will get dropped as Trump abandons Biden’s expanded definition of disability. Second, and more deceptively, they claim 504 accommodations for disabled students were never under threat and that the lawsuit was always only about targeting trans students.

This is a bold-face lie. The lawsuit itself asks the court to strike 504 in its entirety because the conservative legal movement saw an opportunity to attack both trans rights and disability rights in one move. And they took it.

The case has been put on pause temporarily, and if the Trump administration does what’s expected and reverses the Biden-era rule then conservatives may drop this lawsuit entirely. But that won’t be the end of conservatives’ attacks on the disability community—not by a long-shot.