LGBTQIA+

The central goal of much anti-transgender rhetoric is to make cisgender people believe that their interests and trans people’s interests cannot be met at the same time. It’s not just the accusation that trans people are different or weird or creepy; it’s that our rights, our healthcare, and our well-being must come at the expense of your well-being. As the infamous ad from Trump’s reelection campaign put it, transphobes want cis people to think that someone who cares about “they/them” could never be for “us.” It fits neatly into the central thesis of Trumpism—that someone else’s suffering will be your gain. It also feeds into the portrayal of the Democratic Party as feckless, effete, and obsessed with the abstractions of identity.

For any politician facing them, there are two ways of handling these attacks: by promising to care less about trans people or by promising to care more about everyone. If you are not responsive to the needs and interests of a broad coalition of working people, you can be more easily caricatured as dedicated to the interests of some nefarious (and often racialized) other. But if you do have a compelling vision for how to improve all people’s lives, the fact that not all of those people are the same carries less weight. It is true that many Americans would rather starve than share a table with someone they view as less deserving or too deviant from their own experience. But it’s especially true if all that’s on the menu is scraps.

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I am exhausted with begging for help and pleading for others to recognize transgender people’s humanity. I’m also exhausted with the shallow brand of identity politics removed from the material concerns of most people–including trans people–adopted by the mainstream of the Democratic Party in the 2010s when it seemed a useful wedge against progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As Judith Butler told El País earlier this year, “Identity is a great start for making connections and becoming part of larger communities. But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandon our interdependent ties.”

It is exactly those interdependent ties that Mamdani won on and that our political future depends on. The politics of forced scarcity being sold by Trump and seemingly bought into by many Democrats is a myth deeply ingrained in our politics, our communities, and our culture. Rewriting it is not simply the work of rhetoric, talking points, and being open to disagreement. It’s also the work of changing how people experience politics to begin with, and showing them their freedom and dignity need not come at the expense of someone else’s. And what I see in Mamdani’s campaign is not only a promise of solidarity with a marginalized group I happen to be a member of. What I see is a promise that nobody will have to do that work alone.

Queensland’s controversial ban on puberty blockers and other hormone therapies is unlawful because of a failure to properly consult health executives on a decision affected by political interference, a court has heard.

The supreme court in Brisbane on Wednesday heard the ban should be overturned as part of a legal challenge launched by the mother of a transgender child. The mother cannot be identified for legal reasons.

Her lawyers told the court that Queensland Health’s director general, Dr David Rosengren, was required by law to consult with the executive of any service affected “in developing a health service directive” before he issued the order, banning such transgender hormone therapies for new patients aged under 18, on 28 January.

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On the day the directive was issued, the state’s health executives were called to a Microsoft Teams meeting at 10am for consultation on the decision, which lasted 22 minutes.

At the same time as that meeting, Nicholls was announcing the decision at a press conference, the court was told.

Mark Steele KC, representing the mother, said Rosengren had signed off on publishing the health service directive an hour earlier and had repeatedly urged staff to ensure it was published at 10.30am.

The directive was published at 11.06am.

Steele told the court that Rosengren must have done so to line up with the end of Nicholls’ press conference.

“That can’t be genuine consultation if it’s just a fait accompli,” Steele told the court.

In 1987, the Medical Journal of Australia published a paper titled Gender-disordered children: does inpatient treatment help? by Robert Kosky, then director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Services in Western Australia.

It described eight children, all under 12, who were hospitalised at Stubbs Terrace between 1975 and 1980 for what the paper called "gender identity disorder".

The children were separated from their families and treated for months at a time. The paper argued their "cross-gender behaviours" were the result of inappropriate family dynamics — and suggested the hospital program corrected them.

When Anja Ravine, a trans youth health researcher at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, came across it decades later, she was alarmed.

"It's implicit that they were expecting gender identity to return to what was expected. So that is really within the definition of conversion therapy."

Efforts to suppress or change a person's gender identity or sexuality, often referred to as "conversion therapy", are now illegal in most parts of Australia.

"We know now that people who've been exposed to this actually carry long-term psychological scars. It's very harmful," Dr Ravine said.

Despite being nearly 40 years old, the Kosky paper is regularly cited by opponents of gender-affirming care in submissions to lawmakers, courts and medical regulators around the world.

Even in Australia, the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, has written a clinical guide on how doctors should care for gender diverse youth that also cites the paper.

Dr Ravine said that the study being used is "deeply troubling".

In the UK one can barely turn the page of a newspaper without coming across some article written about transgender people. Such articles rarely tend to be trans‐supportive. Sensational stories about trans women invading women's spaces, appropriating female “sex‐based rights”, and trans women dominating women's sports can be found in print, online, and on television. What is happening in the UK is somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, the country has strong protections for trans people, but, on the other, hostility toward trans people is becoming more common. We seek to find out why. By using an online survey of UK residents, we found that anti‐transgender views tended to be held most strongly by those people who scored highly on a scale of authoritarianism. What these results mean in a country currently in the grip of an anti‐trans moral panic has yet to be fully determined.

There’s a story about being trans that you’ve definitely heard, whether you’re cis or trans: such-and-so loudly protested that they were a girl from their youngest days—three or four or five. She—because The Story is always and exclusively about trans women, isn’t it?—played dress-up with Mom’s clothes and high heels, always knew she’d been born in the wrong body, fought for transition from as soon as they knew it existed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The Story is so pervasive, so overwhelming that its mere existence keeps many of us from even imagining that we might be trans until we’re well into our lives. Even then, it’s held over our heads through every step of our transitions. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” “But you like beer and trucks and building things!” “But there were no signs!”

As if our identities were written in the stars, to be foretold by blind seers in a Greek tragedy. 

The Story is profoundly toxic to the foundations of trans existence at every level. […] The Story demands that extremely young children invent language to describe a thing that their parents don’t even know exists.

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The real problem with The Story is more nuanced. Not having the words to describe a feeling you’re feeling doesn’t mean you don’t feel it—but also—not having those words dramatically changes your understanding of the feeling itself.

In the days since [Charlie Kirk's] killing, the US right wing has fallen over itself to blame trans people or, as Alex Jones put it to his almost 5 million followers, “the tranny death cult”. Similar formulations can be found across social media. Trans people are terrorists, a death cult, like the Taliban, need to be socially ostracised and banned from transitioning. And we all know there is only one type of trans person most of these people are imagining when they call for us to be electroshocked, shunned, and – let’s be real – beaten and killed. And that’s trans women.

It's over. There and here in the UK. Today I doubt I will see another progressive measure (either in legislation or healthcare policy) put in place for trans people in my lifetime. Who knows what may yet be taken away. In the UK, the terf campaign groups make their goals quite clear: they would like transition banned before the age of 25 and for trans women to be compelled to carry male government ID in all contexts. Once the EHRC guidance banning us from all women’s groups and spaces across society is in place, they intend to sue organisations and service providers that don’t exclude us. Right now, I think it’s best to assume all these things are a likely prospect in the next ten years.

In the community itself there’s been a definite shift in the way we speak about the future. The middle-class trans micro-economy that boomed in the 2010s: Pride month corporate sponsorship, jobs at LGBT charities, DEI talks and panels, diversity modelling and ad campaigns, progressive theatre, educational books about being trans etc, which some of us used to make a living, has gone. A friend and I used to riff on the old Susan Stryker joke that as a trans woman you must commodify yourself one way or another: it’s either escorting or the diversity and inclusion panel. The friend (a sex worker) always said she found more dignity (and better money) in the former.

The Australian Christian Lobby has sent an election mail out in Victoria, spreading transphobia and trying to discredit The Greens.

Residents of the City of Yarra and Moreland City Councils contacted QNews after they received transphobic election material.

It arrived in their letterbox the day after Trans Day of Visibility.

The pamphlet from the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) was titled: “Male and Female Matter”.

It states that the Greens are “experimenting with biology at your expense”.

“Male and female matter, The Greens don’t agree,” the pamphlet read.

Siting that “while you wait for urgent medical care, The Greens want to use your tax dollars for free gender transition surgeries”.

The pamphlet also says that the Greens wish to put more gender clinics in hospitals while emergency departments are in crisis.

The Republican Party thought it could ride the tiger of the Christian Right: instead, that movement swallowed the party whole. There a presidential candidate’s victory could depend on their success at gaining the Christian Right leaders’ endorsement. The news released on Sunday that Coalition candidates submitted a Christian principles statement to the Australian Christian Lobby’s (ACL) voter advice site signals they are making the same dangerous gamble.

The ACL is not lobbying for the traditional Australian definition of Christian, which leans more to the “live and let live”. Rather, this is an organisation committed to coercive, American style Christianity. It has been listed as a “hate group”. Rumours in Pentecostal circles that the ACL is encouraging its leaders to undertake training from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a radical right American organisation that has argued for the “state-sanctioned sterilisation of trans people” need to be addressed. That body also works towards the (re)criminalising of homosexuality and stripping of access to reproductive healthcare. The ACL and the ADFwere both at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London in February, with the ADF’s Kristen Waggoner listed as a speaker. Many Coalition politicians are on the ARC’s advisory board and attended that conference.

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The statement concludes with a transphobic commitment to the “biological fact” that there are only two sexes. The Coalition’s statement deviates from the extreme position represented in Trump’s second government only by allowing that intersex biology exists. This grade school understanding of human biology, let alone psychology, is reductive and wrong. It also flags the continued misuse of trans people as the first targeted outsider in an ugly politics that prioritises the insider identity against a chosen mutual enemy.

Because of course it does.

Most of the UK challenges appear to come from individuals or small groups, unlike in the US, where 72% of demands to censor books last year were brought forward by organised groups, according to the American Library Association earlier this week.

However, evidence suggests that the work of US action groups is reaching UK libraries too. Alison Hicks, an associate professor in library and information studies at UCL, interviewed 10 UK-based school librarians who had experienced book challenges. One “spoke of finding propaganda from one of these groups left on her desk”, while another “was directly targeted by one of these groups”. Respondents “also spoke of being trolled by US pressure groups on social media, for example when responding to free book giveaways”.

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Censorship by pupils in UK schools, including “vandalising library material, annotating library books with racist and homophobic slurs”, and damaging posters and displays was identified in Hicks’ study, which she wrote about in the spring issue of the SLA’s journal, The School Librarian. Such censorship “is not something I have seen in the US”, she said.

The types of books targeted may also differ. “Almost all the UK attacks reported in my study centred on LGBTQ+ materials, while US attacks appear to target material related to race, ethnicity and social justice as well as LGBTQ+ issues,” said Hicks.

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.