Trans rights

File under "Paywalled but pertinent."

The Harris campaign chose not to respond to the Trump ads — not even to point out, as the Lincoln Project did, that trans health care for prisoners (including surgery) was the policy of Trump’s Bureau of Prisons during his first term. In campaign rallies, Harris’s litany of “freedoms” invariably ended with gay rights (“The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride”). It never once included trans rights. The same was true for Democratic candidates down the ballot. Before McBride was banned from the Capitol bathrooms, she was excluded from the Democratic National Convention stage.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called the  Capitol trans bathroom ban dangerous for “all women and girls” because “all it does is allow these Republicans to go around and bully any woman who isn’t wearing a skirt because she might not look woman enough.” That’s a lot like someone in 1955 objecting to Jim Crow laws because some white people might get mistaken for Black people. AOC didn’t mention McBride or civil rights.

Trans people have become untouchables.

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If it sounds like I’m terrified, I am — as are many trans Americans and their families. In recent years there has been an escalation in the number of anti-trans bills introduced in Republican state houses (669 bills in 2024). Most are targeting trans minors, taking away bathrooms, sports, books, forcibly outing them, outlawing “crossdressing,” greenlighting hate speech, criminalizing any mention of gender identity, and criminalizing their parents, doctors and counselors. As Trump has vowed, and as the state of Oklahoma has done, they’re not going to stop with children.

But what terrifies me most doesn’t just concern trans people. I’ll pose my fear as a question: What percentage of the German population was Jewish at the time of Hitler’s rise? The answer — 0.75% — is lower than most people guess.

The Nazi party gaslit a nation into thinking that a group comprising 0.75% of its population was a threat that could “poison” its culture, seize its economy and needed to be stopped. During the 1930s, before Germany’s “final solution” to “the Jewish problem,” more than 400 anti-Jewish decrees and regulations were issued by national, regional and municipal officials, gradually eliminating Jews from public life, employment, education, culture, travel, hospital care and turning them into outcasts.

My happy but plain vanilla life stands in contrast to the lurid rhetoric and terrifying intentions of Governor Greg Abbott, his allies in the state Legislature, and Republican lawmakers across the country, as well as the goals of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s extremist blueprint for America’s future. Friends out of state urge me to leave Texas, which is where I have always lived. They fear for my safety. Some trans people I know refuse even to travel through Texas.

Their fears are not unwarranted. What I’ve found, however, is that even in rural Texas the average person couldn’t care less about my gender. Most Texans who know me and hear my story are supportive, wherever they happen to lie on the political spectrum. They may not understand it, but they accept it and move on. Those who do shun, hate, or fear seem, in my view, to be either insecure in their own identity or to be captured by merchants of fear in right-wing media.

Trans people endure constant psychic strain as we make our spaces and serve our communities while lawmakers plot our extinction. But the staged uproar over our supposed effrontery has less to do with reality than with our antagonists’ covert aims and unexamined anxieties. Someone I know recently suggested that trans people bring hate upon our own heads by always seeking attention and affirmation. The prosaic truth is that we simply want to exist.

This is just heartbreaking. And this was two years ago!

As some states become increasingly hostile to transgender youth, families are weighing a difficult decision of whether to leave their schools, jobs and communities behind to flee to a state with greater LGBTQ protections.

Q. It wasn’t just Trumpism. Some Democratic voices say it’s time to move beyond the issue of trans rights in areas like sports, which affect very few people.

A. You could say that about the Jews, Black people or Haitians, or any very vulnerable minority. Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?

[…]

We have a pernicious history of misogyny, which is being celebrated in the person of Trump. Guilty of sexual crimes, he has done more than any other American person to demean and degrade women as a class. The people who say, “Oh, I don’t like that part of his behavior, but I’m going to vote for him anyway because of the economy,” they’re admitting that they are willing to live with that misogyny and look away from his sexual violence. The more people who say that they can “live with” racism and misogyny in a candidate, even if they’re not enthusiastic racists, the more the enthusiastic racists and the fascists become stronger. I see a kind of restoration fantasy at play in many right-wing movements in the U.S. People want to go back to the idea of being a white country or the idea of the patriarchal family, the principle that marriages are for heterosexuals. I call it a nostalgic fury for an impossible past. Those in the grip of that fury are effectively saying: “I don’t like the complexity of this world, and all these people speaking all these languages. I’m fearful that my family will become destroyed by gender ideology.” As a consequence of that, they’re furiously turning against some of the most vulnerable people in this country, stripping of them of rights as they fear that the same will be done to them.

One of the principles upon which provision of puberty blockers to young trans people was made was Gillick competence – the law that says that young people over the age of 12 can be individually assessed by medical professionals to determine whether or not they’re competent to make medical decisions for themselves. This was hard fought for by feminist campaigners back in the 1980s and it led to the passing of the Age Of Legal Capacity Act in Scotland in 1991. It’s a principle of particular importance when it comes to reproductive healthcare, as it helps young people to access the services they need even if, for instance, they feel unsafe discussing them with their parents. As such, it helps to protect them from abuse and to get used to the idea that they have ownership of their bodies, which is important as they grow up and negotiate boundaries in romantic and social relationships.

By overriding Gillick competence where trans people are concerned, Streeting has created a risk that it will be ignored in other cases too. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. He seems shaky on the concept of medical consent more generally, as demonstrated by his suggestion that obese unemployed people should be given the weight loss drug Ozempic to improve their health and get them back into work. Although his initial comments on this, which provoked a public outcry, were quickly followed by assurances that it would not be compulsory, concern remains about the vulnerability of people who depend on the state for support, especially those who are disabled, who make up a significant part of the obese population. Like most drugs, Ozempic has side effects and is not appropriate for everyone.

For transgender Americans looking for help or protection from the Biden administration in its dying days, Raquel Willis has a stark assessment.

"Unfortunately, the signals coming from our government right now, under a Democratic president, are telling us that we’re essentially on our own," the 33-year-old activist tells The Independent.

[…]

What does Willis think of the standard Democrat line that the GOP’s war on trans is only a "distraction" from the "real issues"? Willis pauses and considers her words carefully before answering.

"In this moment, it is not enough to simply call anti-trans attacks from Republicans a distraction," she says. "Perhaps if this was 2015, 2016… there might be an argument.

"But lives have already been targeted and changed by these efforts. So we are beyond that point, and we can’t confront discrimination with inaction."

The Harris campaign, she adds, set a "horrible example" by declining to respond to the GOP’s late-election blitz of anti-trans TV ads, on which the party is estimated to have spent at least $215m.

"That was a loss before the election even happened," says Willis.

"If the Democratic Party wants to claim to be representative of progress and of the Left, it cannot leave communities on the chopping block, because it will continue to lose if it does so."

For the last few years, the GOP has coalesced around an idea that would short-circuit essentially all trans health care in America: banning federal funds from going to businesses that provide health care specific to changing one’s sex or gender identity, including hormones and surgeries. It would essentially signal to the private sector that if it wants federal dollars, it needs to stay away from sex- or gender-affirming care, and bow down to right-wing pundits who aim to, in their own words, “eradicate” and “erase” this form of health care. 

[…]

Bans like these can lead to the private sector discontinuing behaviors altogether — and once they are in place, they are hard to get rid of: The Hyde Amendment, enacted in the 1970s, led to most abortions no longer being performed in hospitals, and is continually renewed each year. 

Medical groups and civil rights advocates in D.C. tell Rolling Stone they believe that if a Hyde-level ban on federal funding were enacted, many hospitals will simply prioritize federal dollars over continuing this highly specialized form of medical care. So much medicine is performed through hospital systems and universities that this could mean ending access for many.  

[…]

“I think if they had to make the choice of, ‘Do we provide this care and potentially have to close our doors to everybody,’ they probably won’t do it,” says Asa Radix, head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. “It’s very disturbing. Legislation like this — even if it hasn’t passed — creates an environment where people are incredibly afraid. This is the type of issue where people actually feel suicidal. Are we going to see folks dying by suicide because potentially of laws like this being passed?”

[…]

Right now many in the LGBTQ+ advocacy community, as well as some Democratic lawmakers and staff, are quietly terrified the party might let Republicans enact it anyway, should they be forced to choose between funding the government or allowing the medical system to continue to provide this care unabated. 

At a minimum, anxious Democrats and advocates believe that party leaders will capitulate on trans health care coverage in federal funding negotiations on the margins, allowing language that bans government-backed insurance plans from covering these services. 

This conflict is actually playing out before Trump has taken office or the GOP controls the Senate. Democrats just this week compromised on a military authorization bill that will ban TRICARE and other Defense Department health plans from covering care for servicemembers’ trans children.

Erin Reed, a transgender rights activist and writer, tells Rolling Stone that it’s an absurd distinction. There is no difference between a ban on “transgenderism” and an attack on transgender people, she says: “They are one and the same, and there’s no separation between them.”

[…] 

 “I called to ban transgenderism entirely … They said that I was calling for the extermination of transgender people. They said I was calling for a genocide … One, I don’t know how you could have a genocide of transgender people because genocide refers to genes, it refers to genetics, it refers to biology,” Knowles said, ahistorically.

“Nobody is calling to exterminate anybody, because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category — it’s not a legitimate category of being,” Knowles continued. “There are people who think that they are the wrong sex, but they are mistaken. They’re laboring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion.” 

Carl Charles, a senior attorney at the LGBTQ rights group Lambda Legal, noted that Knowles’ goals are clear, even as he muddles the meaning of his words. “At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if by using the inflammatory term ‘eradicate’ Mr. Knowles specifically meant trans people should be killed. What does matter is the reality of what he is saying and the impact it is having and will have at this particular moment in history,” Charles says. “He is advocating that trans people should not be free to live their lives with dignity and autonomy like Mr. Knowles presumably does —  instead, they should be relegated to non-existence: carrying on in secret and shame and living a lie for the rest of their days, which, he must realize, will mean some trans people opt not to do.” 

Slimy git.

Streeting acknowledged that the decision would not be welcomed by everyone but sought to reassure young trans people. He had met many of them since taking up his post in July, he said, and listened to their concerns, fears and anxieties.

In a message directly to them, and referencing having come out as gay, he said: “I know it’s not easy being a trans kid in our country today, the trans community is at the wrong end of all of the statistics for mental ill health, self-harm and suicide.

“I can’t pretend to know what that’s like, but I do know what it’s like to feel you have to bury a secret about yourself, to be afraid of who you are, to be bullied for it and then to experience the liberating experience of coming out.

“I know it won’t feel like it based on the decisions I’m taking today, but I really do care about this and so does this government. I am determined to improve the quality of care and access to healthcare for all trans people.”

Decisions were being taken “based on the evidence and advice of clinicians, not politics or political pressure”, he added.

The BBC has published an article by Deborah Cohen on the NHS puberty blocker trial that is due to begin in 2025. In this article, Cohen quotes a member of conversion therapy activist parent organisation Bayswater Support Group as a neutral source.

The article is heavily weighted with those opposing trans healthcare for children and young people. It quotes WPATH, yet all of the other medical opinions are from those opposing the use of hormonal treatments. The section on parent opinions includes an academic whose research involves parents of young trans people, but no quotes from supportive parents themselves.

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Bayswater Support Group are a conversion therapy parent group operating under the guise of a support group for parents of trans children. The organisation's internal forums were exposed earlier this year which uncovered evidence of parents preventing their children from accessing Childline, mental health resources and rape crisis centres for fear of those services affirming their children's gender identity. Parents in the forum openly admitted to destroying or damaging their children's belongings, such as accessories and clothing, behaviour that constitutes domestic abuse. Bayswater support group still link to a DIY conversion therapy manual on their website.