Trans rights

In 2015, when I first started learning about the health and well-being of trans people, I knew very little. I went on a journey of discovery, and what I discovered wasn’t good. I was shocked, appalled, and disgusted by what I was reading, hearing, and later, experiencing. Trans people – including youth – in the UK were being harassed, bullied, victimised, shunned, picked on, and discriminated against. That was by people working in my profession – healthcare workers, nurses, doctors, and psychologists – who had formed an unhealthy relationship with these patients and this significant patient group.

In 2016, the Women and Equalities Commission found, and I quote, “The NHS is letting down trans people, with too much evidence of an approach that can be said to be discriminatory and in breach of the Equality Act.”

Back then, it was so bad I assumed that once we recognised the real issues that were present that things could and would start to get better. But they haven’t.

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It’s confounding to see individuals who have historically fought for equal rights, including people of colour, individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds, and women, now participating in denying trans people their rights to recognition, acceptance, and healthcare.

But the final blow came when the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the Minister for Health, acting jointly, made an emergency order to start on June 3, 2024 to restrict the prescribing and supply of puberty blockers to under 18s. The order was made to “avoid serious danger to health”.

So, while experts across the world publish evidence-based guidelines to make puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones more accessible to trans youth, the UK government ignores medics and imposes bans. This will not avoid serious danger to health, it will cause serious danger to health, and it will cause death.

It has been clear for some time that this general election, when it came, would see Conservative politicians attempt to whip up a storm around sex and gender. Targeting poorly understood minorities is standard play for the party when it’s in trouble, and lately it has been drawing heavily on the tactics of the US evangelical right, which has found transphobia a useful tool through which to start radicalising people. Kemi Badenoch’s latest move, however, isn’t just transphobic – it’s unworkable.

Of course, the right has always hankered after the days when ‘men were real men and women were real women’. It’s not for nothing that Rishi Sunak chooses to pose on the exercise machines he rarely uses while Liz Truss prefers to sit beneath a tree in a walled garden wearing a dress that makes her look like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale. Faced with fictive claims about schools teaching there are 72 genders, and other such nonsense, one can understand why the average person might feel a bit confused and might long for the simplicity of the past. But sex was never simple. It just looks that way through a veil of ignorance – and when laws are based on ignorance, they don’t work.

TL;DR: QueerAF has confirmed that leaked guidance seen by the Good Law Project is in use by NHS England. It reveals the 6000+ children currently on the waiting list for the new Children And Young People’s Gender Service are being invited to have their mental health assessed. At these assessments children and their families will be advised to stop gender-affirming treatments, and that if they continue without “appropriate care” they could face safeguarding referrals. It could result in young people being forced to medically detransition.

This is straight out of the Project 2025 template.

A completed draft Texas Republican Party platform refers to homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” gender-affirming care as “child abuse,” and Drag Queen Story Hour as “predatory sexual behavior.” The platform has been voted on by state party delegates and will be formally adopted on Wednesday after a final vote count.

The list of state party priorities calls for an end to legal same-sex marriages, same-sex parenting, all LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination laws, all transgender rights — including gender-affirming care for children and adults — a ban on LGBTQ+ content in schools and libraries, the defunding of all diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and legal protections for anyone who discriminates against queer people based on “religious or moral beliefs.”

Furthermore, the Texas GOP platform calls for a complete end to all of the following: pornography, federal welfare programs, minimum wage laws, mandatory sick or family leave policies, net neutrality, removal of Confederate monuments, pro-immigrant sanctuary cities, public education of undocumented children, no-fault divorce, non-abstinence sex education, abortion, birthright citizenship, professorial tenure in colleges and universities, cannabis legalization, anti-climate change legislation, contact tracing for the tracking of communicable diseases, federal regulations ensuring safe farm food production, and U.S. participation in the United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

This year alone, nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in state legislatures nationwide. Last year, more than 75 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were signed into law, prompting the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization, to declare a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States.

Previous Data for Progress polling of the LGBTQ+ community has found that many LGBTQ+ Americans feel unsafe in their communities and that a majority of transgender adults report a low sense of belonging in U.S. society, while less than half feel comfortable expressing themselves in their local community.

In this new report, Data for Progress surveyed 873 LGBTQ+ adults, including an oversample of transgender adults, nationally using web panel respondents. The findings emphasize the negative impacts of recent anti-LGBTQ+ policies and rhetoric on LGBTQ+ people’s lives, including a worse quality of life and mental health, experiences of discrimination and harassment, and difficulties accessing health care. Additionally, the findings point to the importance of having access to LGBTQ+ representation in media and LGBTQ+-affirming online spaces and resources, particularly for young people.

In February 2023, the paper received two separate open letters: one from a coalition of 150+ organizations and leaders, including GLAAD, and a separate letter signed by hundreds of Times contributors that criticized the outlet's contributions to a deadly anti-LGBTQ culture war. The newspaper attempted to conflate both efforts, dismissing all criticisms of its coverage as merely “protests organized by advocacy groups.”

Between February 15, 2023, when those letters were separately delivered to the Times, and February 15, 2024, the Times published at least 65 articles that mentioned U.S. anti-trans legislation in either their headline or lead paragraphs. We counted how often the paper quoted openly trans or gender-nonconforming sources, cited anti-trans misinformation or talking points without context or adequate fact-checking, and accurately represented the records of anti-trans figures mentioned in its stories. Our findings:

• 66% of the articles did not quote even one trans or gender-nonconforming person.
• 18% of the articles quoted misinformation from anti-trans activists without adequate fact-checking or additional context.
• 6 articles obscured the anti-trans background of sources, erasing histories of extremist rhetoric or actions.
   

The poll, surveying registered voters in South Carolina, posed the question: "If parents are already involved in the decision-making process, do you believe the government should or should not intervene in LGBTQ gender-affirming health care decisions concerning individuals under the age of 18?" It found that 71% of the state's registered voters believe the government should not intervene in such gender-affirming health care decisions. Opposition to government intervention was substantial across all political affiliations: 67% of Republicans, 70% of independents, and 80% of Democrats were opposed.

For a special edition of Downstream IRL, Ash Sarkar is joined by philosopher, author, and one of the world's most cited academics, Judith Butler. Their new book, 'Who’s Afraid of Gender' charts how a transphobic moral panic morphed into an all-our war on so-called ‘gender ideology’. Together, Ash and Judith explore how Britain became TERF island, the limits of self-identification, and what really defines a woman.

The project’s star success story was a young man named Kirk Andrew Murphy, who had been caught by his father posing in the kitchen in a long T-shirt saying, “Isn’t my dress pretty?” In a 1974 paper research assistant George Rekers and Lovaas described Kirk at age five as “‘swishing’ around the home and clinic, fully dressed as a woman with a long dress, wig, nail polish, high screechy voice, [and] slovenly seductive eyes.” At home, Kirk’s father exchanged his son’s red tokens for beatings with a belt, with Rekers’s approval. Eventually, Kirk’s brother Mark started hiding the red tokens to save Kirk from the abuse.

After 60 sessions in the lab, Kirk was declared cured of sissy-boy syndrome. The psychologists noted that after the treatment, the little boy was no longer upset when his hair was mussed and was eager to go on camping trips with his father. Rekers eventually published nearly 20 papers on his client’s alleged metamorphosis, becoming one of the world’s leading proponents of conversion therapy in the process.

Then in 2003, at age 38, after a series of unsuccessful relationships with women, Kirk died by suicide. His sister Maris told Anderson Cooper on CNN that his treatment at U.C.L.A. “left Kirk just totally stricken with the belief that he was broken, that he was different from everybody else.”

The American Psychological Association and 61 other health care providers’ organizations signed a letter in 2021 denouncing the validity of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) as a clinical diagnosis. And a steadily growing body of scientific evidence demonstrates that it does not reflect transgender adolescents’ experiences and that “social contagion” is not causing more young people to seek gender-affirming care. Still, the concept continues to be used to justify anti-trans legislation across the U.S.

“To even say it’s a hypothesis at this point, based on the paucity of research on this, I think is a real stretch,” says Eli Coleman, former president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Coleman helped create the organization’s most recent standards of care for trans people, which endorse and explain the evidence for forms of gender-affirming care.