By Evan Urquhart

Only two weeks ago Assigned Media shared a story originally reported by the Salt Lake Tribune about a junior varsity cisgender basketball player who’d been publicly accused by an enraged parent of being trans. Last night a new story in the Salt Lake Tribune, about an entirely different cisgender athlete, shows the escalating violence of the moral panic over transgender participation in sports.

A picture of this student was shared by a far-right state school board member, Natalie Cline, who insinuated she was transgender, which in turn incited threats against the girl from Cline’s follower base. She is now under police protection, and the post has been removed.
 

Anti-trans legislation certainly never represented an attempt to address Republican voters actual concerns. We know because, in poll after poll, even Republicans place trans issues relatively low in their lists of concerns. Trans panic as a wedge issue also hasn’t been electorally successful, as the midterm elections of 2022 and the off year elections in 2023 both showed. So what was the point of making it the top priority and overwhelming obsession of the right? Anti-trans politics had just one thing going for it: Attacks on trans people were what differentiated Ron DeSantis from Donald Trump.

And the Republican establishment really, really wanted Ron DeSantis to beat Donald Trump.

Yesterday, Ron DeSantis ended his campaign for president. However, as recently as the final RNC debate, on December 6, he was still trying to use attacks on trans people to distinguish his campaign. Lying openly, DeSantis claimed that parents of trans kids were “cutting off their genitals” and used the word “mutilation,” referencing procedures that are only available for trans adults.

This desperate performance, in the waning days of a failed presidential campaign, represented the culmination of years of work DeSantis put in as governor of Florida to make his name synonymous with the most extreme anti-trans legislation in the country. During his governorship he pushed for, and got, a full ban on trans children’s healthcare (not genital surgeries but hormone therapy and puberty blockers for kids whose doctors and parents agree that these were necessary steps). He also heavily restricted trans healthcare for adults, censored educational material about LGBTQ+ people for school children K-12, banned trans teachers from explaining their transition to their classes, banned trans people from using appropriate restrooms in public buildings, and even attempted to ban drag performances in the state.

All of that work, just to wind up as an also-ran who dropped out of the race before New Hampshire. It would be funny, except the consequences of attempts by the establishment to anoint him the future of the Republican Party will be felt by the trans community across the country for years, and perhaps decades, to come.

In America today, so much has changed that it might seem ludicrous to say that I fear a return to an environment like the 1950s and ’60s moral panic over homosexuality, with its climate of secrecy and fear, and the central role of the press in driving harassment, humiliation, firings, and sometimes suicides. In parts of the country where LGBTQ+ acceptance is firmly ensconced, there’s likely not much conservatives can do to roll back the tolerant attitudes decades of activism have won. But in other places where extremists have taken over governance, LGBTQ+ life, particularly trans life, seems much more precarious than we might have thought. For example, in Florida, trans teachers are already facing laws restricting what pronouns they can be called at work, and perhaps whether they can teach at all. If such laws drive more and more trans people into the closet, lower public visibility may lead to less social understanding and acceptance, driving a vicious cycle where the consequences of outing grow more dire as time goes on.

“I would think that trans people now, clearly, have the closest experience to what gay people had in the 1960s, in terms of the fear your existence activates in the population, and the cynicism of the right wing in exploiting that,” Kaiser said.

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The practice of press outlets terrorizing gender-nonconforming people over their private lives should have stayed in the past. That it could not only happen in 2023, but even end in suicide, should be a wake-up call for where the far right hopes their attacks on the trans community will go. Copeland hailed from the sort of small Southern town where attitudes about the LGBTQ+ community have changed the least, but attitudes aren’t static. Escalating attacks on the trans community, combined with laws designed to humiliate and stigmatize trans people by taking away the ability to change legal documents, barring trans people from using public restrooms, banning positive depictions of LGBTQ+ people in school libraries, forcing trans teachers to misgender themselves in class—all of these measures seek to drive trans people out of public life in these places. Several Republican candidates for president in 2024 have made these their implicit or explicit nationwide plans, if elected.

When people can’t exist openly in public, their true selves fight to be expressed in private, which leads to double lives marred by shame and fear of being exposed. Those are the toxic conditions some now seek: conditions in which outing can serve as the ultimate punishment for queer existence, threatening people’s social acceptance, their livelihoods, and even their very lives

Two recent papers from York University, from a team led by assistant professor Kinnon MacKinnon, offer a wider sampling. MacKinnon and his team interviewed 28 detransitioners who told them complicated stories of identity evolution, medical complications, and experiences with anti-trans and anti-nonbinary discrimination. Taken together, they suggest ways providers and society as a whole could better support trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people. Spoiler: It’s not by banning care.

Published in PLOS One on Nov. 29, the first paper sought to “qualitatively explore the care experiences and perspectives of individuals who discontinued or reversed their gender transitions.” The second, published in Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity on Nov. 30, took those qualitative findings and attempted to demarcate four discrete subtypes or pathways for detransition.

Of 28 interviewees who answered a call for people in Canada who had shifted or discontinued a transition, 10 were at birth assigned male, and 18 female. They all had negative experiences during their initial transition. But most did not follow the typical sequence that widely shared detransitioner stories follow, of switching genders, then switching back to identifying as cis. A clear majority, 60 percent, had shifted from a binary trans identity when they began transitioning into a nonbinary identity at the time of the interview. By contrast, only six identified as female or a woman, and none identified as male or a man.