LGBTQIA+

Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.

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These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person's legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female.

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So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.

A new code of practice has said that organisations offering single-sex services and spaces must exclude Trans+ people from them, or no longer label them as ‘single-sex’.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the UK's equality watchdog, laid the Code of Practice before Parliament this Thursday, May 21st. It sets out that single-sex spaces, from toilets to changing rooms, must be served on the basis of what it calls 'biological sex', based on people's sex assigned at birth. It will come into practice after 40 days, if it is not opposed.

The code makes it clear that this is the case even if someone has a Gender Recognition Certificate that changes their legal sex. It sets out that this should now be considered their 'certified sex', instead of their 'biological sex', and that single-sex provisions must be delivered in accordance with 'biological sex'.

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In almost all instances, it recommends creating 'third spaces' for Trans+ people to use, setting out that though people should use single sex services based on their 'biological sex', if Trans+ people are perceived to be another gender, it may be proportionate to deny them access to these too.

For example, it sets out that if a trans man is perceived to be a man, they could be denied entry to the women's toilets, even though their sex assigned at birth is female. It describes this as "a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim" because "other service users could reasonably object to his presence".

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Although this guidance is not as bad as it could have been, this is horrific news for not only Trans+ people, but the whole LGBTQIA+ community. The Trans+ community are scared, angry and fearful about what it could mean.

Trans+ Solidarity Alliance says this code will become Labour's legacy, haunting them much like Section 28 did the Conservatives. Trans Actual have warned that this will impact everyone in the LGBTQIA+ community.

It will act as a blank cheque for anyone who wants to further narrow what men and women should look like, which will lead to increasingly polarised gender policing in bathrooms, changing rooms and spaces up and down the country.

"It was designed in the early 1960s by Frank Robert Wake, a psychology professor with Carleton University," Fodey explains. "The Canadian government paid to send Dr. Wake to the United States to study detection devices that were used there at the time. After about a year of research, Dr. Wake returned to Canada and used his findings to create the 'Special Project' as it was officially known. A sergeant with the RCMP later coined it 'the fruit machine,' and the name stuck."

The machine itself was dismantled long ago, but it "looked like something resembling a dentist chair in front of a camera mounted on a pulley," says Fodey.

"Men would be subjected to lewd images and photographs would be taken of their pupils in response to the various images," Fodey says. "The thinking was that if one's pupils enlarged at the sight of a naked man, this would indicate same sex attraction. It was, in a word, ridiculous."

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When Fodey first started researching the film, she was shocked this had even happened — and how long it continued (it began in the 1950s and wasn't eliminated until — seriously — the early 1990s). But as her work continued, what surprised her most was how this went far beyond people losing their jobs.

"In fact, for many, losing their jobs was the least of what they endured directly because of this campaign," she says. "Poverty, homelessness, having to go back in the closet, substance abuse, gay aversion therapy, sexual assaults, and for some — suicide. The consequences of this campaign, as one of our survivors captures perfectly in the film, was a scenario from a horror story."

I wish I could say I thought these concerns were overblown:

The law orders the Director of the Kansas Department of Revenue (which oversees the granting of driver’s licenses) to identify all people granted a driver’s license (or other ID) with a gender marker that does not correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth, a stipulation that applies almost exclusively to trans people.

It then orders that these licenses be invalidated, ordering the bearers to surrender their old licenses, at which time they will be provided a new license that has the wrong gender marker.

There is no part of that which isn't concerning.

Firstly, it requires the government to make a list of all people to whom this would apply to. Since the requirements are meant to only include a hated minority group, the government is essentially making a list of those which it views as its internal enemies.

Second, it required that the affected IDs be invalidated. This leaves those trans people who previously had safe IDs with no means of accurately representing themselves.

Since the primary means of identification for most Americans is their driver’s license, this would also mean taking away their legal right to drive a car, which is required for most daily tasks. Being able to drive is also a requirement for many jobs, and having a valid driver’s license is a requirement for many types of public services.

Third, the affected trans people would be forced to surrender their now invalidated IDs as a means of obtaining new ones. This serves to remove from circulation any existing IDs that do not misgender the trans people in question.

Lastly, these trans people will be provided with new IDs whose sex markers are based on what they were assigned at birth, rather than what their body (or appearance) would suggest today.

To an outside observer viewing such an ID seeing a person that appears to be one sex/gender, but whose ID marks them as the opposite is a dead giveaway that the person is trans. From there, they are marked out as different from the general population, and can then be treated differently based on whatever prejudices the reader sees fit or whatever discriminatory laws are relevant.

On Monday, Mississippi enrolled an anti-trans bill that will ban driver's license gender marker changes for transgender people across the state. The bill, which now awaits Republican Gov. Tate Reeves' signature, requires that all Mississippi driver's licenses reflect the holder's sex assigned at birth and explicitly states that court orders recognizing a gender change "shall have no effect" on license issuance. It is the latest in a wave of extreme anti-transgender identification document bans in recent months, following Kansas's decision in February to invalidate transgender people's driver's licenses overnight with no grace period—a story we at EITM broke. Though the Mississippi bill does not retroactively invalidate existing licenses the way Kansas did, any transgender Mississippian whose license comes up for renewal will be forced to carry identification that does not match their identity, should the governor sign it.

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The bill is the latest in a growing wave of anti-transgender identification document laws. In February, Kansas went further than any state before it, invalidating transgender people's driver's licenses overnight and sending letters demanding their immediate surrender—leaving many scrambling and unable to get to work, pick up their children, and navigate daily life with suddenly invalid IDs. Though Mississippi's bill does not contain those instant revocation provisions, the effect will be the same over time: as licenses come up for renewal, transgender Mississippians will be forced to carry documents that out them. According to the Movement Advancement Project, seven states already do not allow transgender people to update the gender marker on their driver's license. If Gov. Reeves signs SB 2322, Mississippi will become the eighth.

There's video of Roberts saying all this, if anybody needs an emetic:

"But where there continues to be disagreement is on what you do with adults. At Heritage, we believe that so-called transgender surgery is bad for anybody because of what you saw in Rhode Island yesterday," said Roberts, referencing a domestic violence shooting at a Rhode Island ice rink the day before. "There does seem to be a mounting body of evidence that suggests a correlation between that surgery at any age, mental health issues, and increasingly, although we're running the numbers on this at Heritage, acts of violence. We have to come to grips with that as a society, in a way that transcends left versus right, because this really is about the human condition." "How do you address this, though?" replied host Patrick Bet-David. "You outlaw it," Roberts responded.

Then, when asked if transgender adults should have their medication taken away, Roberts endorsed the idea, stating, "We like that idea, too. One of the reasons is that we not only work in coalitions, but we often work toward an ultimate goal via incremental steps—sometimes people will call us radical incrementalists. We're willing to take a quarter of the enchilada if we can keep working there. So if that's the kind of thing that policymakers can agree on left and right, Heritage would be fully supportive of that, knowing that ultimately we have an ideal position that would be much stronger than that."

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One thing is clear: gender-affirming care bans have never been about science, despite attempts by far-right organizations to launder their lobbying efforts through pseudoscientific hate groups and overseas "reviews." Rather, it’s always been about hate. That much is made clear by the openly-stated agenda of a billionaire-funded political machine that has always been working towards one goal: the elimination of transgender people from public life. The only thing that has changed is that they are now saying it out loud.

Remember when Roberts voiced support for self-avowed Nazi Nick Fuentes and the respectable mainstream media cried with one voice "He's gone too far! This is the beginning of the end of the MAGA coalition!"?

Nope. They're only getting louder and more brazen.

The real gender ideologues at work:

Aiv Puglielli, the Greens’ equality spokesperson, on Wednesday moved a motion calling on the upper house’s legal and social issues committee to investigate the scale of such crimes, as well as the state’s current response and support available to victims.

It follows what Puglielli described as a “disturbing” and “terrifying” series of attacks targeting gay and bisexual men across several states and territories since 2024. In some instances, videos of the attacks have been recorded and posted on social media.

As of October 2024, 35 people had been arrested in relation to such incidents, Victoria police confirmed in a statement to Guardian Australia.

Police said the alleged offenders – most aged between 13 and 20 – had used fake profiles on dating apps to lure their victims.

“The victims are then allegedly assaulted, robbed, threatened and subjected to homophobic comments,” a police spokesperson said.

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During the June 2025 sentencing of a 19-year-old Victorian man who met and assaulted two people after speaking to them on the gay dating app Grindr, the court heard he admitted to police he had been inspired by vigilante-style videos he had seen on TikTok.

Puglielli said the inquiry would examine how influencers sharing far-right, misogynistic and homophobic “alpha male” content operate online, and how to protect young people from their messaging.

He alleged some perpetrators, often very young men, had been “groomed and radicalised by far-right manosphere influencers”.

Dannie Dai, lead author of the report, said the hope is that the study "will help policymakers understand how gender-affirming surgery is being used by both cisgender and TGD people," as "health policy should be driven by facts" rather than partisan or religious views on sex and gender.

“Our findings highlight a bitter irony: that by banning gender-affirming care for only TGD people, these bills are targeting a group that in reality accounts for the minority of gender-affirming care use and for whom gender-affirming care has been most clearly shown to be lifesaving," Dai said. 

This is an interesting overview, though obviously quite dated:

The fetal brain develops during the intrauterine period in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed or organized into our brain structures when we are still in the womb. However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in extreme cases in trans-sexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain. There is no indication that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation. 

This is so, so important to read in full. For me to be told that a critically important part of my identity is reducible to my sexuality — an embarrassingly marginal part of my life — is not merely insulting but ridiculous. To tell children that not merely what they have, but what they are, is a fetish and that therefore they are for all practical purposes not allowed to even discuss it until they turn eighteen is murderous cruelty. Post-egg-crack, I don't know what I would have done if I'd not been able to establish friendships online with other trans women my age who had similar life trajectories.

Queer identity is one of being born into a secret society that you as a member have to discover as rite of induction. If you fail, misery tends to visit you again and again, without having a good explanation for it, dissatisfaction, and shame from an unknown source.

In this light, the push to #AgeVerification for social media and internet access is especially awful. With "queer" being equated to sex stuff exclusively, queerness is effectively banned in the era of life where teens are supposed to discover love, and have first, clumsy experiences. But while the cishets generally experience queerness from porn and get their fingers sticky to what they view as fetish, it is so much more. Especially for trans kids, research on who and what they are is postponed to a time when devastating damage is already taking place, and a lot of it in fact irreversible, or a huge effort and cost to correct.