Trans rights

On Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order drastically limiting public service workers’ ability to obtain student loan forgiveness. Under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, workers at government agencies and 501(c)(3) nonprofits are eligible for loan forgiveness after 10 years of service. But Trump's order threatens to strip that benefit—specifically targeting employees at organizations that support transgender rights or diversity initiatives. If enforced, the order could have sweeping consequences, cutting off loan relief for workers at countless nonprofits, civil rights organizations, hospitals, and schools across the country.

“The prior administration abused the PSLF Program through a waiver process, using taxpayer funds to pay off loans for employees still years away from the statutorily required number of payments. Moreover, instead of alleviating worker shortages in necessary occupations, the PSLF Program has misdirected tax dollars into activist organizations that not only fail to serve the public interest, but actually harm our national security and American values, sometimes through criminal means,” says the order.

Organizations that would be barred from the order include what the order calls “subsidization of illegal activities, including illegal immigration, human smuggling, child trafficking, pervasive damage to public property, and disruption of the public order, which threaten the security and stability of the United States.” Further down in the order, this includes organizations that support “child abuse, including the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children or the trafficking of children to so-called transgender sanctuary States for purposes of emancipation from their lawful parents, in violation of applicable law” as well as organizations that are “engaging in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination.”

Both of these are common administration euphemisms for supporting transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Peter is co-host of the If Books Could Kill podcast, which I highly recommend.

 The percentage of Republican men who believe that women should return to their traditional roles in society has jumped from 28 to 48%. Among Republican women, the increase is from 23 to 37%. This has happened in the span of two years. As alarming as this is, it’s important to ask yourself: what do you think happened here? Do you think that Republican voters, organically and of their own volition, drastically shifted their fundamental perceptions of women’s role in society? Of course not. They are being influenced by messaging from conservative elites, who themselves are radicalizing on issues of race and gender.

This dynamic is often obvious. YouGov polling shows Republican support for higher tariffs at 51%, with just 5% supporting lower tariffs. A year ago those numbers were 38 and 20%, respectively. Again, what happened? Did they all read the same economics textbook? Or did they follow the lead of Donald Trump, who made higher tariffs a central campaign issue?

Democrats tend to miss this. When Kamala Harris lost, several prominent Democrats said the party had strayed too far from the public on trans issues. Gavin Newsom, speaking on his new podcast to his guest Charlie Kirk (Jesus Christ) repeated the talking point just this week. But just a few years ago the savvy political wisdom was that Republican anti-trans efforts had overstepped, alienating voters. Republicans, though, weren’t cowed by public opinion. Rather than retreat, they went on the offensive, seeking to reshape the public debate. And they did, leveraging inflection points like women’s sports to galvanize their base and push liberals into a defensive posture.

If you’re a political party, your goal is not just to know where voters stand, but to know how to move them. Instead, Democratic operatives seem content to reduce their platform to a focus-grouped ephemera, drifting whichever way the political winds blow it. 

I don't know about this. Treating people with respect ought not depend on identifying some anatomical feature. Situating that feature in the brain does not make it any better.

For those who question the slogan “Trans Women are Women,” the science provides a compelling answer. Gender identity is deeply rooted in brain development, and transgender women have been shown to possess brain structures that align more closely with cisgender women than cisgender men. The term “woman” is not just about chromosomes or reproductive capacity; it is a social and neurological identity shaped by a complex interplay of biology, psychology, and lived experience.

When TERFs or gender-critical individuals ask, “What is a woman?” the most accurate response is, “A woman is someone who identifies and experiences themselves as a woman, and this identity is supported by both social and biological science. Brain studies show that transgender women have neurological patterns that differ from cisgender men and align more closely with cisgender women. To reduce womanhood to mere reproductive function ignores the complexity of human identity and the science behind gender.”

The conversation didn’t stop there. Charlie Kirk quickly pivoted to other transgender issues, bringing up Vice President Kamala Harris’ support for incarcerated transgender people. Newsom agreed that the Kamala is for they/them ads were politically damaging, calling them "devastating." When asked about transgender incarcerated people, Newsom responded, "This was even more challenging… because this is issues of people who are incarcerated getting taxpayer-funded gender reassignment… that is a 90/10 [issue]," referring to how he believes such policies poll. He also appeared frustrated that Harris "was in the video and expressed support."

At the close of the podcast, Charlie Kirk shifted the discussion to transgender healthcare, stating, "I encourage you to learn about the butchery that is happening under chemical castration in this state. The American people are overwhelmingly against it." Newsom responded, "Yeah. I think we have to be more sensitized to that."

Kirk continued, "Youth should be off limits, you might be right on deportations, I know I’m right on this," to which Newsom simply acknowledged, "Yeah." Kirk then cited the Cass Report—a widely criticized and legally discredited review used to justify bans on transgender healthcare in the UK—as evidence that gender-affirming care for youth should be prohibited. Newsom offered no pushback, replying, "I’m not an expert on this, but I appreciate your broader [point]."

Newsom’s invitation and capitulation to Charlie Kirk on his podcast will alarm LGBTQ+ advocates. Kirk has a well-documented history of extremist rhetoric and hostility toward the LGBTQ+ community. In a 2023 video, he stated, “These people are sick… I blame the decline of American men. Someone should have just ‘took care of it’ the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and 60s, but as you have testosterone rates going down and men acting like women, well…”—seemingly advocating for violence against transgender people. Kirk has also repeatedly used the slur "tr*nny" and has encouraged its normalization. He once called transgender people “a throbbing middle finger to god.” In the last election cycle, TPUSA’s PAC, which he leads, spent millions on anti-transgender ads, making his presence on Newsom’s platform all the more striking.

A grounding in the queer history of the legal system in the United Kingdom reveals striking parallels between the moral panic leading to the enactment of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, and the current moment’s discourse surrounding the inclusion of transgender people in social spaces and their potential right to self-identification of gender in law. Through use of moral panic theory, this article examines and contextualizes the historical forces at play in the formation of laws around queer and trans lives in the UK, and in particular the instrumentalization of fears over the safety of children and cisgender women. The article also provides a practical example of the influence of the trans moral panic on law reform, by evaluating the debate surrounding the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill 2022. It concludes that there is no ‘gender crisis’ in the UK, but there are powerful social forces at work to stoke a moral panic and, in doing so, stigmatize and alienate trans people in a similar manner to the stigmatization of homosexuality as an illegitimate way of life under Section 28.

Racism is foundational to reproductive control, and the United States eugenics movement shared and inspired much of the Nazi philosophy of “racial hygiene” that sought to maintain the dominance and “purity” of the white race. Today’s conservative reproductive agenda is little more than racial hygiene’s modern iteration.

Transgender people pose a grave threat to this agenda, because they resist the idea that women are defined by an innate female essence rooted in reproductive biology, and that being mothers is, therefore, their nature and destiny. If someone born with ovaries and a uterus can escape the call of motherhood and if someone born without can be a woman, the white supremacist message falls apart. If gender is “just a feeling,” as some conservatives put it, then how can we say that women’s purpose is to bear and raise children? If people can “mess with” their reproductive organs, how can reproduction be the pinnacle of human life? Gender-affirming care poses a challenge to the reproductive imperative. It must be suppressed to sustain white supremacy, or, in the words of Conservative Political Action Conference speaker Michael Knowles: “For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”

By rigidly policing gender norms and sexuality, anti-trans legislation reinforces the message that the proper and natural role of women is to bear children within a nuclear, heterosexual marriage. That is why the same bills that would ban gender-affirming care expressly allow nonconsensual surgeries on intersex newborns, because those interventions reinforce rather than undermine gender essentialism.

To white conservatives, womanhood is rooted in the reproductive body, and its achievement is motherhood. That message, in turn, serves to encourage reproduction with the aim of maintaining white demographic dominance. In other words, transphobia is a by-product of misogyny, which is a corollary of white supremacy. Anti-trans laws trace their roots back to racism.

More Americans now say they favor or strongly favor laws and policies that:

• Ban health care professionals from providing care related to gender transitions for minors (up 10 percentage points)
• Require trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex at birth (up 8 points)
• Require trans people to use public bathrooms that match their sex at birth (up 8 points)
• Make it illegal for public school districts to teach about gender identity in elementary schools (up 6 points)

At the same time, fewer Americans now express support for laws and policies that:

• Protect trans people from discrimination (down 8 points since 2022)
• Require health insurance companies to cover medical care for gender transitions (down 5 points)
   

The 85-year-old self-described conservative had been invited by his grandson to a public hearing on a Republican-authored bill that would ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth in the state. He decided to make the short drive from his home in Milwaukee. 

[…]

For hours, Jones listened to the stories of kids who wanted to transition and said it seemed like “their brain was tearing them apart.” He now believes the decision to receive gender-affirming care should involve a child, a qualified doctor and a parent — not lawmakers. He likened the issue to lawmakers banning doctors from providing abortions.

[…]

Jones said a 14-year-old transgender teen — one of the youngest speakers who advocated for their right to go on hormones — helped to change his perspective at the hearing. In their testimony, they shared that they had recently contemplated suicide.

“I started to listen to this kid, and it wasn’t some kind of whim or something like that. This kid was actually suffering,” Jones said. “And I thought to myself, nobody has to do that. You’re only a kid.”

The GOP-controlled committee voted to advance the bill. Republican lawmakers in the Assembly passed it last week.

“Children are not allowed to get tattoos, sign contracts, get married, or smoke — so why would we allow them to physically change their gender?” Rep. Tyler August, R-Walworth, said in a statement.

Jones had a different take.

“All of these kids, they deserve a chance to see where they belong,” he said.

There are two significant problems with using gametes to define sex. First, no one checks gametes at the moment of sex assignment, let alone at conception (when they don’t yet exist). They are not observable. To base sex assignment on gametes is therefore to rely on an imperceptible dimension of sex when observation remains the principal way sex is assigned. Second, most biologists agree that neither biological determinism nor biological reductionism provides an adequate account of sex determination and development. As the Society for the Study of Evolution explains in a letter published on 5 February, the ‘scientific consensus’ defines sex in humans as a ‘biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex.’ They remind us that ‘sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.’ Interplay, interaction, co-construction are concepts widely used in the biological sciences. And, in turn, the biological sciences have made considerable contributions to gender theory, where Anne Fausto-Sterling, for example, has long argued that biology interacts with cultural and historical processes to produce different ways of naming and living gender.

The language of ‘immutability’ belongs more properly to a natural law tradition in which male and female kinds are established by divine will and so belong to a version of creationism. They are immutable features of the human, as Pope Francis has affirmed. Trump speaks in the name of science, but the cameo appearance of the gamete theory notwithstanding, he does so effectively to insist that God decreed the immutable character of the two sexes, and that he, Trump, is decreeing it once more, either to echo the word of God, or to represent his own word as the word of God. Religious doctrine cannot serve as the basis for scientific research or state policy. But that what is happening in this executive order.

[…]

When authoritarians promise a return to an imaginary past, they stoke a furious nostalgia in those who have no better way to understand what is actually undermining their sense of a durable and meaningful future. We find this in the discourse of the AfD in Germany, the Fratelli d’Italia, Bolsonaro’s followers in Brazil, Trump, Orbán and Putin. But we also see the anti-gender animus among centrists hoping to recruit support from the right in order to stay in power. When diversity, equity and inclusion become ‘threats’ to the order of society, progressive politics in general is held responsible for every social ill. The result, as we have seen in recent years, can be that popular support ushers in authoritarian powers who promise to strip rights from the most vulnerable people in the name of saving the nation, the natural order, the family, society, or civilisation itself. Ideals of constitutional democracy and political freedom are regarded as dispensable in the course of such campaigns, since the preservation of the nation must be put before all else: it is a matter of self-defence.

In the early 1950s, a moral panic over gay people swept across America. LGBTQ+ individuals were cast as threats—vulnerable to blackmail, labeled “deviant sex perverts,” and accused of colluding with communist governments. Senator Joseph McCarthy, infamous for the Red Scare, pressured President Eisenhower into signing an executive order purging LGBTQ+ people from government service. With that signature, the campaign escalated rapidly—up to 10,000 federal employees were fired or forced to resign during what became known as the Lavender Scare, a far less taught but even more devastating purge than the Red Scare. The episode remains a lasting stain on U.S. history. And now, it appears we are witnessing its revival: 100 intelligence officials were just fired for participating in an LGBTQ+ support group chat—an internal network not unlike employee resource groups (ERGs) at most companies.

The firings stem from out-of-context chat logs leaked by far-right commentator Chris Rufo on Monday. Sources tell Erin in the Morning that the chat functioned as an ERG-adjacent LGBTQ+ safe space, where participants discussed topics like gender-affirming surgery, hormone therapy, workplace LGBTQ+ policies, and broader queer issues. Rufo, however, framed these conversations as evidence of misconduct, claiming that “NSA, CIA, and DIA employees discuss genital castration” and alleging discussions of “fetishes, kink, and sex.” To Rufo and his audience, merely talking about being transgender and the realities of transition is enough to be labeled “fetish” content.

Eisenhower and McCarthy would have killed for such an easily accessible list of LGBTQ+ federal employees—and the flimsy pretext to purge them.

Within a day of the chat logs’ release, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that all participants in the “obscene, pornographic, and sexually explicit” chatroom would be terminated.