LGBTQIA+

While it may be tempting to put all the blame on Trump or the Republicans or Project 2025 (and they deserve the lion’s share), to do so would be to ignore decades of choices, missed opportunities, and betrayals within the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement that, read together, show how and why transgender people find themselves so vulnerable to political scapegoating and attacks today.

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Jessica Xavier—founder of the transgender lobbying group It’s Time, America!—proposed addressing these tensions in relation to conversion therapy by focusing on how the tie that truly binds LGBTQ+ people together is not sexuality but gender variance. “We talk about gender variance when men take jobs as nurses [and] when men have long hair,” she said, to explain why the pivot away from morality toward gender variance was necessary. If you extend this view, you quickly realize that engaging in same-sex sexual relationships is in itself a defiance of gender norms, much like career and grooming choices. Xavier elaborated her perspective: “If we frame this as a larger societal pressure that reaches to straight people … If we all realize that we’re fighting the same enemy in different ways, that language has more implications for society: It’s gender.” Gender and sexuality are impossible to tease apart, and those connections affect everybody who has ever worried that maybe they aren’t “man enough” or “a good woman.” Attacks on transgender people are toothless in a social world where everybody is freed from strict gender norms. But such freedom also makes it harder to control populations, which might explain why political power grabs usually feature some aspect of suppressing gender expression.

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Over time, focusing on sexuality, relationships, and families headed by same-sex partners meant that gender essentially fell off the “LGBT” agenda—until suddenly it became the right’s primary target. As a result, transgender people are now vulnerable to political attacks for many reasons, not least of which is the missed opportunity over those many decades to educate the public about gender norms and gender variance. It’s safe to say that this history might also be why those in power can behave as though the group doesn’t have the backing of a critical mass of supporters or influential allies—because of this legacy of negligence by the larger movement, frankly, they don’t.

Clearly, the resistance to addressing gender head-on earlier in our history has had a broader impact on how LGBTQ+ politics are understood today. In particular, the failure to center gender and the ideas about masculinity and femininity that affect us all (not just LGBTQ+ people) has meant that coalitions with other groups were over before they began. These include most obviously organizations fighting for reproductive rights and gender equity, as well as others focused on bodily autonomy, such as activists looking to preserve the right to asylum, provide food and shelter to poor and homeless people, and end mass incarceration.

The Department of Justice and the Department of Education have joined forces to create a Title IX Special Investigations Team, targeting “the pernicious effects of gender ideology in school programs and activities,” as per an April 4 press release.

Enacted by Congress in 1972, Title IX was meant to protect students at all levels from discrimination “on the basis of sex.” Traditionally, it’s been used to combat sex-based violence, harassment, and discrimination within federally-funded academic institutions. At least 21 state attorneys general have also explicitly stated that Title IX protections include trans people.

Under the Trump regime, however, Title IX has taken on a new role. It’s become a tool for harassing trans students, or students merely suspected of being trans, especially if those students are athletes.

“Protecting women and women’s sports is a key priority for this Department of Justice,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi, a Trump appointee, in a press release announcing the new effort.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is also standing at the helm. The ex-World Wrestling Entertainment CEO has a messy, decades-long history tainted by reports implicating her in child sex abuse and steroid scandals at the WWE.

Just putting this here until it's superseded by something even more ridiculous.

In an interview Sunday on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures, Alabama Senator and former football coach Tommy Tuberville claimed that “entire men’s teams… women’s teams are turning trans.” Tuberville previously served as the primary sponsor of a national transgender sports ban, which was defeated in the U.S. Senate earlier this year. The senator offered no evidence for his incendiary claim, and to date, there is no documented instance of “entire teams” identifying as transgender. His remarks follow a string of increasingly exaggerated claims from Republicans and President Trump about the presence of transgender people in sports and schools.

“Entire men’s teams across this country now that are turning trans… women’s teams that are turning trans. That’s going to be a situation now where it is going to pick up speed, because these woke globalists are pushing these kids to say, ‘if you can’t compete in men’s sports, let’s just transition to say you’re a woman and participate in women’s sports.’ It is dead wrong, and we’ve got to stand up against it, but the Democrats… they’re all in of keeping this situation going in the wrong direction,” Tuberville said. The host offered no pushback, nodding and replying “yeah” during the segment, failing to fact-check the baseless claims.

I don't usually even read, much less recommend, anything paywalled, but this makes some important points:

“Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan said in 1967, in his inaugural address as governor of California. Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, approvingly quotes the speech in his foreword to Project 2025, the conservative think tank’s blueprint for the Trump administration. Roberts writes that the plan has four goals for protecting its vision of freedom: restoring the family “as the centerpiece of American life”; dismantling the federal bureaucracy; defending U.S. “sovereignty, borders, and bounty”; and securing “our God-given individual rights to live freely.”

Project 2025 has proved to be a good road map for understanding the first months of Donald Trump’s second term, but most of the focus has been on efforts to dismantle the federal government as we know it. The effort to restore traditional families has been less prominent so far, but it could reshape the everyday lives of all Americans in fundamental ways.

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In this vision, men are breadwinners and women are mothers. “Without women, there are no children, and society cannot continue,” Max Primorac writes in his chapter on USAID, where he served in the first Trump administration. (Primorac calls for ridding the agency of “woke” politics and using it as an instrument of U.S. policy, but not the complete shutdown Trump has attempted.) Jonathan Berry writes that the Department of Labor, where he previously worked, would “commit to honest study of the challenges for women in the world of professional work” and seek to “understand the true causes of earnings gaps between men and women.” (This sounds a lot like research predetermined to reach an outcome backing the traditional family.) The Labor Department would produce monthly data on “the state of the American family and its economic welfare,” and the Education Department would provide student data sorted by family structure. Severino suggests that the government either pay parents (most likely mothers) to offset the cost of caring for children, or pay for in-­home care from family members; he opposes universal day care, which many on the right see as encouraging women to work rather than stay home with kids.

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Right-wing leaders have made attacks on trans people and nontraditional expressions of gender a cornerstone of right-wing politics over the past few years. They have spread disinformation about trans people and panicked over the prospect of children adopting different gender identities or names at school. What is the reason for so much fear? Transgender people make up less than 2 percent of the population, and their presence in society doesn’t evidently harm other people. Project 2025’s pro-­family orientation helps explain why the right considers them such a threat. A worldview that sees gender roles as strictly delineated and immutable cannot acknowledge the existence of trans people or anything else that contemplates an alternative to a total separation between what it means to be male and what it means to be female.

Trump has not yet made stricter abortion policies a focus in his new term. Though he has boasted about appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he seems wary of pushing further, for fear of political backlash. Project 2025 has no such qualms. Severino recommends withdrawing FDA approval for abortion drugs, banning their prescription via telehealth, and using 1873’s Comstock Act to prohibit their mailing. He also recommends a strong federal surveillance program over abortion at the state level. Project 2025 also calls for the return of abstinence-only education and the criminalization of pornography.

With a little imagination, we can glimpse the America that Project 2025 proposes. It is an avowedly Christian nation, but following a very specific, narrow strain of Christianity. In many ways, it resembles the 1950s. While fathers work, mothers stay at home with larger families. At school, students learn old-­fashioned values and lessons. Abortion is illegal, vaccines are voluntary, and the state is minimally involved in health care. The government is slow to police racial discrimination in all but its most blatant expressions. Trans and LGBTQ people exist—­they always have—­but are encouraged to remain closeted. It is a vision that suggests Reagan was right: Freedom ­really is a fragile thing.

During oral arguments in the Supreme Court case United States v. Skrmetti last December, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked then-Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar whether there has been a history of discrimination against transgender people. The answer seemed obvious. Anti-trans discrimination is well-documented. At least for trans people, the instinctive response to Justice Barrett’s question is, “Look around.”

But what Justice Barrett was asking specifically, is whether there is a history of de jure—meaning explicit, government sanctioned—discrimination against transgender people. “At least as far as I can think of, we don't have a history of de jure, or that I know of, we don't have a history of de jure discrimination against transgender people, right?” Justice Barrett asked.

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As legal historian Kate Redburn has documented, throughout the twentieth century, local ordinances across the country threatened people who defied gender norms with prosecution and even prison sentences. Some even required people whose appearances did not match their sex assignment to wear badges visibly declaring their birth sex—a precursor to President Donald Trump’s own policy for transgender passport holders. These laws, in essence, made it a crime to be trans in public and equated trans existence with deviance in ways that legitimized decades of public and private discrimination.

Decades of criminalization harmed trans communities who were forced to the margins of society. Generations of trans elders died prematurely because of this history, which also now fuels the insidious myth that transgender people are “new.” The irony is that in order to avoid further discrimination, we must convince the Court that this discrimination occurred in the first place—and that it still occurs today. 

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Let’s say the Supreme Court decides that transgender people have not suffered a sufficiently long or sufficiently clear history of discrimination to warrant heightened scrutiny. That would set a chilling precedent for when the government decides to target a small and politically unpopular group for discrimination.

We are getting dangerously close to making it a crime to exist as a transgender person in the United States. If that does not trigger scrutiny by the courts, then what will it signal to government leaders who are looking for groups of people to blame for social, political, and economic conditions?

As Justice Sotomayor noted at the Skrmetti arguments, “When you're 1% of the population, or less, [it’s] very hard to see how the democratic process is going to protect you.” That is abundantly clear right now.

Anti-LGBTQ+ narratives are deployed by extremist groups with contrasting ideologies, from Jihadis to right-wing extremists and QAnon to Incels (involuntary celibates). Using these different movements as case studies, this article highlights the convergence of ideologically conflicting extremist organizations around antiqueer sentiment. Given the enhanced vulnerability of LGBTQ+ populations, fueled by politically charged rhetoric, this article makes an appeal for more research to explore and analyze narratives through a scholarly lens and link queer issues to current debates in the study of terrorism and political violence. Research should focus on the experiences of queer populations within conflicts abroad and experiences of domestic extremism in the United States. Without adequate attention given to the experiences of LGBTQ+ victims, it is impossible to develop protocols for trauma-informed care for vulnerable populations.

The report is more interesting than this abstract sounds:

The present report is submitted to the Human Rights Council pursuant to Council resolutions 32/2 and 41/18. The Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, analyses the current state of international human rights law in relation to the recognition of gender and gender identity and expression, in connection with the struggle against violence and discrimination in its different forms. The present report and the report to the General Assembly at its seventy-sixth session complement each other. Annex 1 contains a description of activities that have taken place since May 2020, and annex 2 provides an outline of the report to the General Assembly.

Karla Jay remembers joining the second night of street protests during the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City. For her, and for so many other LGBTQ+ people, something had shifted: People were angry. They didn’t want things to go back to normal — because normal meant police raids. Normal meant living underground. It meant hiding who they were at their jobs and from their families. They wanted a radical change.  

Radical change meant organizing. Jay joined a meeting with the Gay Liberation Front, which would become the incubator for the modern LGBTQ+ political movement and proliferate in chapters across the country. At those meetings, she remembers discussing what freedom could look like. Holding hands with a lover while walking down the street, without fear of getting beaten up, one person said. Another said they’d like to get married. At the time, those dreams seemed impossible.

Jay, now 78, is worried that history will repeat itself. She’s worried that LGBTQ+ people will be put in the dark again by the draconian policies of a second Trump administration. 

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“We have forgotten that the laws are written to protect property and not to protect people. They’re written to protect White men and their property, and historically, women and children were their property,” she said. “To expect justice from people who write laws to protect themselves has been a fundamental error of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans community.” 

Intersex advocates say that they have been shut out of the conversations about gender and health in the United States and that the January 28 executive order has far-reaching consequences for intersex kids, not just because it allows dangerous surgeries to continue.

“None of the EOs mention intersex people specifically — they are systematically scrubbing mentions of intersex people from government websites,” the intersex rights group interACT wrote  in an email to community members.

Several hospitals and doctors have complied with Trump’s order, announcing in recent weeks that they have halted gender-affirming care, though some have resumed care based on ongoing litigation. In some cases, those same health centers that have stopped gender-affirming care have also largely continued to perform controversial sex-altering operations in the form of intersex pediatric surgeries, according to interACT.

Intersex advocates say that juxtaposition lays bare the hypocrisy of the order and those following it. It’s been “striking” to see those same health providers continue non-consensual intersex surgeries, said Sylvan Fraser Anthony, legal and policy director for interACT.

“Hospitals have been so reluctant — flat out refusing or taking years before issuing some partial policy about whether they’re going to be changing practices related to these non-consensual surgeries on intersex children,” Anthony said. “They’ve taken years, if not decades, to review those [policies] and most have not been responsive at all to calls to review and update their standards and their practices for intersex children to respect their bodily autonomy. Whereas they’re responding within a matter of days and weeks to this executive order when no one is making them — rushing to make policy moves that harm trans patients.”

Utterly brilliant What she said:

A question that tormented me when I first discovered I’m trans was why I didn’t realize it until I was 45 years old. From what I see on Reddit, that question torments many late bloomers who don’t figure this out until well into adulthood. The pop-culture narrative says that trans people are supposed to have always known, right?

Well, I didn’t, and yet I was also definitely trans.

The torment only increased as I reflected back over my life, discovering one sign after another of my feminine identity. Some of them quite blatant. Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I realize? Was I just stupid? A clueless idiot, bumbling my way through life?

That explanation was not dismissed so easily: it aligned with many of the messages I’d been given about myself over the years. Further, I often felt like a clueless, bumbling idiot because I just didn’t understand how boys work or how to emulate what they were doing. So maybe that was the answer.

It took years, but ultimately I came to realize that I was asking the wrong question. I shouldn’t have wondered why I didn’t know sooner. Rather, I should have been asking “what stopped me from knowing sooner?” 

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Everyone else gets to play “be yourself,” while we play “fit in or die”. What we need is a disguise. A mask made of carefully-constructed persona that matches the expectations created by our gendered bodies. The better we build this disguise, the better we fit in, the less punishment we receive. The less danger of exile we face.

So, without even noticing that we’re doing it, we pull back from engaging with people. We observe more and do less, trying to figure out the unwritten rules. We over-think the heck out of every situation before we try anything, working out our best guess as to how we’re supposed to behave.