Trans rights

Around the world, gender-restrictive actors are organising to suppress gender-equality in schools. ALIGN’s review of the latest evidence reveals that anti-gender backlash in education is taking place from contexts as diverse as Afghanistan, Chile, Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, South Africa, Uganda, the US.

This ALIGN Report focuses on the activities of gender-restrictive actors and organisations who seek to promote a narrow vision of gender relations through the education system. The research shows that their influence is expanding efforts to entrench patriarchal social norms and a binary view of gender, and gaining ground across the globe.

Common aims and tactics include: to remove comprehensive sexuality education from schools, restrict girls access to learning, reinforce patriarchal gender stereotypes in textbooks and reject gender-inclusive policies in school environments. These groups are sustained by deep financial networks which drive effective strategies to amplify misinformation, provoke parental protests, and impose traditional family values.

You'll need a box of tissues or three.

As I’ve written before, it’s hard to imagine a world in which this onslaught of restrictions and censorship remains exclusively focused on the small minority of people who call themselves transgender. Among Musk, Trump, and all their failsons, anti-transgender animus is a patriarchal desire for control and purity paired with misogynistic and racial dreams of a white and masculine re-ascendancy, the dawning of a walled-in golden age free of alien influences, deviant impulses, or human empathy. Those of us who reject our gender assignment are convenient scapegoats, vulnerable to misrepresentation and public shaming. But ultimately the rules we break are broken by all people to one extent or another, and the tighter those rules are enforced—by Trump or those he can successfully deputize as snitches, informants, and recruits—the more people will captured in their dragnet. 

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The essentialist definitions provided by the Trump administration for “sex,” “man,” and “woman” are an effort to suggest they have no concern or regard for the categories of behavior and aesthetics that might come to mind when you hear the word “gender”—as one White House official unconvincingly told a reporter last week, “I don’t think anyone’s trying to do a dress code or anything like that.” But sex is not simply what’s between your legs and gender is not simply what you wear. The physical characteristics we associate with “male” and “female” are themselves broad, malleable, and overlapping. Particularly in the age of transvestigators—when the gender identity of women of color, in particular, is challenged if they fall outside the thin, European, and white ideal—such a judgment is clearly aimed at nothing as abstract as an “ideology” but against people and their deviant, literally non-binary bodies.

They do so not only out of an individualized hatred against a clearly labeled sexual minority but in defense of a faux-naturalized ideal, a vision of perfect manhood and womanhood born of nature yet clearly nonexistent without a police state enforcing it. This is why, as I wrote when a CPAC speaker called for “eradicating transgenderism from public life entirely,” the gender war is a forever war. They likely know this mythical ideal is beyond their reach. But by demonizing those who fall furthest from it—or, as trans people do, challenge the very notion of its inevitability—they can justify a permanent state of fear and persecution. 

In this instance and this instance only, let’s take Michael Knowles at his word. Shortly after telling a roaring crowd he’d like to “eradicate transgenderism from public life entirely,” he began threatening legal action against media outlets that characterized his demand as aimed at transgender people.

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Trump unveiled last month a sweeping plan to “end left-wing gender insanity,” ranging from bans on gender-affirming care, a Constitutional amendment legally defining “sex” and implicitly defining “transgender” out of existence, and the establishment of an accreditation agency that will require teachers to provide students a “positive education about the nuclear family” and threaten prosecution against any who refuse. Combined with the 2023 state legislative session thus far, defeating this “transgenderism” is no slight project, requiring a lot of persecution, censorship, and punishment aimed at controlling behavior and speech which flouts the anti-gender right’s standards for how good boys and girls are supposed to conduct themselves.

In truth, however, even this totalizing approach to gender nonconformity is still too narrow. As Knowles himself has acknowledged, the focus of conservatism’s construction of cisgender, heterosexual gender identities must be far more ambitious than simply taking the country back to the relatively recent time period when a frequently bipartisan consensus enforced transgender people’s absence from public life; the first mistake was, in his telling, failing to sufficiently oppose second wave feminism. 

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The vagueness and ubiquity of gender norms leaves this project with no certain end point or rubric for victory. While transgender people flout more of these rules than cisgender people—revealing them for the construct they are—most people break them in one way or another, and even our elimination (were such a thing even possible) wouldn’t suffice. We are all gender non-conforming in ways big or small, ranging from our relationship to reproductive labor and capitalism to how we present ourselves to the world. A campaign enforcing gender conformity, then, will expand well past the relatively small fraction of the population that calls themselves “transgender.” Labeling the anti-gender right as genocidal against trans people is, believe it or not, letting them off too easy. 

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The experience of defying gender norms for amusement, convenience, or survival is a universal one even as specific populations are forced to do so more frequently and punished more harshly for it. Thus, a war against gender nonconformity holds all the promise for the authoritarian personality as a “war on terror,” a “war on drugs,” or a “war on crime”—an endless excuse for policing, surveillance, censorship, and violence.

Republicans for years have tried to legislate their personal beliefs about life beginning at conception. They’ve introduced versions of a bill called the Life at Conception Act 13 times since 2011. These efforts have almost certainly influenced the “conception” language in Trump’s latest executive action.

Dr. Richard Bribiescas, an anthropology professor at Yale University and the president of the Human Biology Association, said the order’s definitions of “sex” and “gender” ignore all kinds of variations that take place in human development.

“Woman/man, boy/girl are gender identities that do not necessarily align with biological characteristics of sex,” he said in an email. “Genders are components of human variation that are influenced by culture, identity, and many other non-biological factors. To illustrate the difference between sex and gender, we can talk about male/female chimpanzees (our closest evolutionary relative) but it would be non-sensical to discuss chimpanzee women, men, boys or girls.”

Trump’s definitions of “female” and “male” are also flawed, said Bribiescas, because he is tying them to something called “anisogamy” in biology, or the observation that females of some species, including humans, tend to produce larger gametes (the reproductive cells that come from germ cells) compared to males.

Anisogamy is not a universal rule in biology, he said. But Trump’s executive order defines females as people belonging to the sex that produces “the large reproductive cell” and males belonging to the sex that produces “the small reproductive cell.”

The size of a person’s gametes is “just one characteristic among many (ie., genetic, hormonal, developmental, physical) that is used to describe sex,” Bribiescas said. “Clearly, this order is not fully informed by current biological science.”

In short:

The Queensland government has announced a review into the evidence for stage one and two hormone therapies for children with gender dysphoria.

While the review is underway, a pause will be placed on new patients under the age of 18 from receiving hormone therapy in the state's health system.

What's next?

Health Minister Tim Nicholls says the pause will remain in effect until the government considers and acts on the outcomes of the review.

[last updated 23/01/25]

Wednesday 10 April 2024 saw the long-awaited publication of the final report of the Cass Review. This report was commissioned by NHS England, and provides a review of evidence plus recommendations regarding gender identity services for children and young people.

On publication, the Cass Review’s findings and recommendations were welcomed by the majority of UK media outlets, NHS England, the Editor-in-Chief of medical journal the BMJ, conversion therapy proponents such as SEGM, Sex Matters and Transgender Trend, plus spokespeople for the Conservative and Labour parties, who promised to ensure it will be “fully implemented”.

Conversely, the Review has been extensively criticised by trans community organisations, medical practitioners, plus scholars working in fields including transgender medicine, epidemiology, neuroscience, psychology, women’s studies, feminist theory, and gender studies. They have highlighted problems with the Cass Review that include substandard and inconsistent use of evidence, non-evidenced claims, unethical recommendations, overt prejudice, pathologisation, and the intentional exclusion of service users and trans healthcare experts from the Review process.

This post provides a round-up of links to written commentary and evidence regarding problems with the Cass Review, plus quotes pulled from each. In light of these, I believe that it would be extremely harmful to implement the Review’s findings in full. 

I have had the notable displeasure of witnessing the evolution of anti-trans bills and the relentless attacks on transgender rights over the past five years. For much of that time, Republicans, buoyed by anti-trans organizations funded by billionaires and amplified by media outlets like The New York Times, have operated under the guise that their efforts were not “anti-trans.” Instead, they claimed to be “just asking questions,” “questioning the science,” or “engaging in a debate” about transgender people—as if these debates were somehow divorced from the rampant anti-trans animus that is undeniably pervasive in those circles.

They never truly were, of course, but to gain a foothold in American politics, they maintained a façade of concern for the welfare of transgender people. This is why, when reading the original Arkansas trans care ban, you won’t find overt charges that transgender people are lesser human beings who deserve to be erased in the purpose section. Instead, you’ll encounter pseudo-scientific statements like “the risks of gender transition procedures far outweigh any benefits” and “the majority come to identify with their biological sex.” Both are demonstrably false, but carefully crafted to carry a veneer of scientific credibility—providing a shield against accusations that such bans are rooted in hatred toward transgender people.

That all changed yesterday. President Trump, in justifying his transgender military ban, leaned on a new argument for why such an action restricting the rights of transgender people was necessary: that transgender people are lesser human beings, dishonorable liars, and worse.

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This marks a chilling and undeniable shift. The attacks on transgender people are no longer cloaked in the faux respectability of “evidence,” “science,” or “protecting kids.” They never truly were, but now even the pretense has been abandoned. The thin veneer provided by New York Times op-eds, SEGM’s pseudo-scientific “reviews,” and the disingenuous claims of debate is no longer required. Instead, the justification is laid bare in black and white: transgender people are “dishonorable,” “liars,” “false.” The language is stark, deliberate, and unmistakable—it dehumanizes us. This is the very rhetoric historically used to justify atrocity.

So how would anyone know whether an embryo belongs to a sex that produces eggs or sperm at conception?

Anti-abortion rhetoric defines conception as happening at fertilization. [The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading US authority on reproductive health, defines “conception” as happening when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus.] We’re not even a multicelled embryo yet at fertilization. At that moment, does an embryo have sexed chromosomes? Yes. Are they knowable with our current technology? No. In IVF, for people who do pre-implantation genetic testing, we typically wait until at least day three, if not day five, until the sex chromosomes are even measurable. And is it a point at which the embryo is even producing gametes? No. That’s still months away.

But the executive order says these definitions should be used to determine which sex marker should go on a passport or whether a prisoner should be incarcerated in a men’s or a women’s prison.

This is what’s so stupid about it, but also what’s so dangerous. What is the enforcement plan? Are we going to test people’s gonads to see what type of gametes they produce? Because if the obsession is at the level of gametes, the tests are much more invasive than a sex chromosome test.

Nor will there be an actual way to logically enforce it, because it’s an illogical order. I think what will happen is it will be basically about punishing people in the worst way possible, treating people as poorly as possible, and creating as much discord and mayhem as possible.

This is mostly going to be around one sex category: the female sex category. They will only be doing this toward anybody who might fall into the woman category or might self-report as being in the woman category. I think Trump, in whatever terrible language is available to him, is trying to control women and control people he perceives to be in the woman category. A lot of this is keeping the category of women “pure”—and also, obviously, about doing immense harm to trans people.

There’s also a very racial, white supremacist thing going on here with this “defending women.” It’s a very old idea—it appears in travelogues, early writings of Europeans, as well as in the United States when they started encountering North American Indigenous folks, and the way that they thought about enslaved peoples. There was this belief that in the “lower races,” men and women were less different, and that in the “higher races,” there were more differences between women and men. This was about saying men and women are differentiated, clear, nonoverlapping categories because that makes us a more evolved people.

Do No Harm presents itself as a grassroots association of doctors against gender-affirming care and diversity efforts in the medical profession. The group, which was founded in 2022, does not disclose its donors. But newly disclosed tax filings provided to HuffPost by Accountable.US, a progressive watchdog, show that the Concord Fund, the funding arm of Leo’s network, donated $750,000 in 2022 to Do No Harm Action, the group’s official lobbying effort.

Do No Harm also received more than $1.4 million from a nonprofit, the Project on Fair Representation, run by conservative activist Edward Blum, new records show. Blum, a conservative activist who helped engineer two Supreme Court cases that struck down affirmative action and major sections of the Voting Rights Act, is now a Do No Harm board member.

HuffPost previously revealed that Do No Harm received $1 million in seed funding from Joseph Edelman, a billionaire hedge fund CEO, and his wife, Suzy Edelman, who has said she considers “transgenderism” “a fiction designed to destroy.”

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The medley of conservative groups channeling money to Do No Harm underscores the growing belief on the right that attacking trans rights is “a political winner.”

The scale of the contributions also helps illuminate how Do No Harm became a successful influence operation so soon after its launch. Last year, the group deployed lobbyists to more than a half-dozen states to advocate for restrictions on gender-affirming care, and at least two states passed laws using its model legislative language. In Montana, Do No Harm provided the blueprint for a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, which sparked furious local protests. 

“It just made the worst of the worst people here more bold in their bigotry, and that trickles down to our kids,” Darcy Saffer, the parent of two transgender nonbinary children in Bozeman, Montana, told HuffPost last year. The law is blocked while the Montana Supreme Court weighs whether it is unconstitutional.