Trans rights

In December, five years later than promised, the Tories finally delivered draft, non-statutory guidance for schools on “gender questioning children”. It provoked criticism and concerns from all sides, and is open for consultation until March. But whatever its final form, one aspect of the guidance has gone largely unnoticed.

The document doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about this government’s hostile stance on trans identities, inclusion and rights; but, unfortunately, what it does do is further solidify in official documentation and language the politicised phrase “gender identity ideology”. The government is attempting to bring into the mainstream this contested term, a creation of rightwing sex and gender conservatism that dates back to the 1990s, and which forms a key part of renewed attacks against the LGBTQ+ community.

As used in this context, the phrase “gender identity ideology” is actually nothing to do with gender, as in masculinity and femininity, and how this shapes our identities. Instead, it is used to imply that trans, transgender and gender non-conforming identities are a new fad, and that the longstanding social justice movement for trans rights is really a recent conspiracy of nefarious elites.

The use of terms such as “gender identity ideology”, “gender identity” and “social transition” serve to obscure the ideology of gender that members of this government, like all sex and gender conservatives, merrily adhere to themselves, and enforce on us all. Gender ideology is real, but it wasn’t invented by trans men or trans women, and it doesn’t just apply to trans or transgender people. The real gender ideology is the binary sex and gender system that requires all of us to be either male-masculine-heterosexual or female-feminine-heterosexual; and which attaches harsh penalties to those who deviate from this script. Almost all of us will have been socialised on to pink or blue paths from birth, if not by our immediate family, then by the books, TV, toys, clothes and adverts that surrounded us in wider society. This socially prescribed gender informs our gender identity.

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.

[…] 

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

The achievement is a rare one. Chess.com reports that there are only 846 active WIMs globally, a small fraction of the millions of chess players worldwide. Established in 1950, this title recognizes the accomplishments of women in the game. While women are equally capable as men in intellectual and skill-based pursuits like chess, the women’s category aims to encourage female participation in a sport where women are significantly underrepresented. Women often face challenges due to sexism, differences in monetary support, training, and participation in a predominantly male-dominated field.

The achievement also comes after a significant controversy in FIDE. In August of 2023, FIDE announced that under new rules, transgender women had “no right to participate” in women’s chess. Instead, the organization would evaluate trans participation in a process that could take up to 2 years, and all transgender players would have a “transgender” mark in their files. Likewise, trans players could only compete with updated legal identification documents - a major problem given that many political bodies have removed the ability of transgender people to update their identification. It was later revealed that the change was pushed, in part, by anti-trans conservative influencer Riley Gaines in the United States.

Plenty of arch invective here worthy of a Taibbi Vampire Squid Award:

It would be foolish and exhausting to speculate on the role that Times editor-in-chief Joseph Kahn (Harvard '87, Harvard M.A. '90) played in pushing this story; there is nothing to do but speculate, there. Power works in different ways, and if Ackman–style public meltdowns are the loudest and most overt expression of that work, and Rufo's store-brand Rasputin act are the most obviously motivated, they are not the only ones. There is also the Times' understanding of itself as the author of the discourse, and all that ostentatious invisibility—the decisions about what is and is not a story, or what is and is not up for debate, that only show up in the negative.

You already know how that works; we are soaking in it. Someone at the institution decides that there is or ought to be, say, a debate about the safety or advisability of trans health care where no such debate actually exists, and then the debate is manufactured to suit that sense—in and through stories about that debate. And then, at some point down the line, some laws are promulgated that reflect that debate's terms. 

When Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine banned trans health care in his state last week, he did not do it by signing a heavy-handed law passed through his state's legislature. He vetoed that, and then effectively did the same thing in a way that reflected all the deep and vexing complexities and risks that the Times has repeatedly insisted exist. He mandated a process that would force people seeking that care to navigate a series of onerous administrative requirements, and to compel the services of an endocrinologist, and a bioethicist, and a mental health specialist—to make sure that care is not given too fast. "It needs to be lengthy," DeWine said of the counseling component, "and it needs to be comprehensive."

So what begins as irresponsible, ideological, but plausibly deniable discourse shows up down the line as policy. It's rarely quite as easy to see as it is in this instance, when irresponsible, ideological, plausibly deniable discourse is the policy. The debate can only ever continue; the resolution will arrive without any visible fingerprints, as a story about something that just happened.

On Friday, December 29, Ohio governor Mike DeWine announced a ban on gender-affirming surgeries for transgender minors as well as new restrictions on clinics providing gender-affirming care to adults. But you wouldn’t know it from the headlines, most of which simply describe Gov. DeWine’s veto of HB 68 as a victory for trans youth.

“You have to go the way your blood beats,” James Baldwin said in an interview. “If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.” Belatedly, I’m coming to grips with this. My attempts to cope with gender dissonance have consumed much of my life, taking hours away from each day, isolating me from loved ones, alienating me from my body, leading to bouts of depression, ideations of suicide, and alcohol abuse. It doesn’t go away. In middle age, I’m forced to recognize that nothing short of being who I am will resolve my profound inner conflict. The word “transition” is terrifying but, however catastrophic the process of coming out may be, I’ll not be much good to those I love if I’m burned out, incapacitated, or dead.

Knowledge is power. If I had simply known more, I would have been spared some suffering. The idea that I’ve been converted by the “gender cult” is preposterous. My starting point was my own experience, going back years before I could even articulate it. I simply was what I now call “transgender.” My brain and flesh and bones told me so. And peace could never be mine until I had uncovered its nature and found a way to live with it.

The many bills trying to prevent youth from learning about trans identity trouble me deeply. They seek to condemn another generation to the deathly dysphoria that has burdened me in the belief that people like me are misbegotten or perverted, and that state-imposed ignorance can prevent children from turning out like us.

In the American political landscape there is some very good news… and some lingering bad news for the transgender community. Yet another election cycle has proven that campaigning against the trans community is a loser for Republicans. While there is a ton of confusion and prejudice against transgender people, the public doesn’t consider this issue important enough to vote for Republicans (especially when Republicans are taking their rights away, as with abortion).

As in 2022, the elections in 2023 proved that anti-trans rhetoric didn’t help Republicans win anything. Transphobia was a loser in the campaign to unseat Governor Andy Beshear, it was a loser in the campaign for the Virginia state legislature, and it was a loser in many of the local school board races where it was front and center.

That’s the good news, and it is very good news. As a transgender man in Virginia, I would never downplay that because it impacted my life directly, making it very unlikely that new restrictions on my medication will come to Virginia.

The bad news, of course, is that nothing has changed yet in the states where legislation targeting trans people made the most headway. We’ve seen bans and restrictions on transition medicine (including for adults in some places), schools banning books with LGBTQ+ characters, and laws removing the ability of trans people to update their documents to reflect their transitions. In addition to these bad laws there are ongoing efforts to use lawsuits against providers of transgender healthcare to drive providers out of the field and make obtaining treatment more difficult for everyone, even in blue states.

The LGBTQ movement—first the campaigners for gay and lesbian rights, and now for transgender rights—deserve credit for shaking up our thinking. They’ve made a compelling case that most of the old beliefs about gender were arbitrary taboos, trapping people in lives that confined them and made them miserable. Just as we’ve rejected stereotypes about how women or people of color were “meant” to live, we’re now confronting these stereotypes in turn.

However, every step forward provokes a backlash from those who benefit—or seek to benefit—from oppression. The Catholic church (and, sad to say, Richard Dawkins) are clinging to the notion that all the old beliefs about gender were fine as they were and nothing needs to be questioned or changed. They continue to insist that people should be compelled into roles determined at birth, with no regard for what those people want for themselves.

“I want to be clear. Trans kids aren’t considering or attempting suicide because of who they are, but because of who we are in this building right now,” he said.

“The authors of this garbage are responsible for trans suicides, for trans attempted suicides. It isn’t the kids and their identities. It’s a society in which actual adults sit down in a room and put pen to paper to try to codify their hatred to try to mask their intolerance as concern and to cover their ignorance with a thin veneer of junk science.”