Trans rights

The French Society of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetology (SFEDP) recently commissioned its own version of the Cass Review, and this study reached almost the exact opposite conclusions of Cass […]

Upon reading both the Cass Review and the SFEDP Review, what immediately jumps out is the very different tone of each—Cass takes a tone that feels skeptical to the point of excess, offering mysteriously curt phrasing, statements rife with implications of harm or conspiracy by mainstream providers, and an overall sense of invalidation. By contrast, the SFEDP Review reads like a scientific paper—its language is straightforward and sterile, and there is none of the innuendo of Cass. Reading both side by side feels almost like traveling from a land of paranoia and conspiracy into levelheaded reality.

These basic differences in language imply very different approaches to working with trans minors—gender-affirming vs gender-critical.

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Perhaps nowhere is the difference between the Cass Review and the SFEDP Review more clear than here: Cass bemoans the lack of good evidence and recommends generating it, whereas SFEDP declares that it is ready to follow the science by supporting minors in their transition. One cannot help but suspect that even if further research is conducted, in another 20 years another Cass will come along and demand another round of research into trans youth.

One idea that Tennessee has floated — that sex-based laws related to biological sex difference are shielded from scrutiny — is particularly pernicious. As I have shown in research, this has never been the court’s approach. And for good reason. Throughout the history of sex discrimination, hiding bias behind biology has been a common tactic. Many sex-based lines that have been challenged in the court — from a male-only university admissions policy to rules distinguishing mothers and fathers when it comes to the citizenship of their children — have been couched in terms of physical sex differences. Upon examination, the court has acknowledged that sex stereotypes and not biological differences drive these laws. Without requiring that courts take a close look at all sex-based laws, we make it far too easy to legislate on sexual prejudice.

Just as important as addressing women’s subordination, equal protection has been a key tool in striking down laws that confine not just women, but men, to traditional roles and expectations. Equal protection has been used to invalidate laws that exclude men from caregiving or that require anyone to conform their behavior or appearance to sex-based conventions. In doing so, the doctrine helps to free all of us from limiting sex stereotypes.

Seen this way, it is not hard to appreciate that the law at issue here strikes at the heart of sex equality. The Tennessee law — and trans discrimination more generally — is not only about discrimination against trans people, but about ensuring that we all keep in our gender lanes. As Prelogar explained, the law here is “one that prohibits inconsistency with sex,” requiring that children born as boys and girls “look and live like boys and girls.” Tennessee’s argument would call into question the longstanding freedom we all enjoy to live our lives as we wish, regardless of sex.

A typically incandescently brilliant barnstormer from Abigail.

There is a clash going on in Britain between two fundamentally irreconcilable ideologies.

The NHS, DHSC, and many other official institutions like courts view transition as a response to a medical problem they call ‘gender dysphoria’ or ‘gender incongruence.’ From this starting point it seems appropriate that trans people have to get permission to transition: transness is a medical matter with inherent risks that ought to be controlled by “specialists.” Sometimes those specialists delay or deny permission, but that’s just part of the job. It also makes sense to ask which treatments are “most effective at treating dysphoria” and explore alternative treatments through trials, reviews, consultations, etc. I call this view ‘Pathologization.’

According to Pathologization, past treatments like electric shocks simply failed to alleviate patients’ dysphoria. These days we have more effective methods, and one day we might discover a cheap way of treating it without transition- a silver bullet conversion therapy. Doctors and managers will determine when and whether adjustments to the system are needed. Ideally they’ll engage with trans people in “stakeholder groups” but if those groups don’t get what they want that’s not a dealbreaker. Patients who suffer or die waiting are unfortunate but hey, the NHS can’t save everyone.

On the other hand, the view of an increasing number- especially young people and trans people ourselves- is that transition is a bit like pregnancy. It’s a process that may require professional assistance to bring to the happiest possible conclusion (whether completion or termination), and for this reason it is appropriate and necessary that the NHS is involved. But whether, how, and when to do it should be up to you. From this starting point there should be as few obstacles as possible: the role of doctors and managers is to facilitate and advise but never delay or deny. Prompt, reliable access to transition is a civil rights matter.

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It is vital to realise that organisations can embody an ideology even if nobody working in them believes it. I think sometimes when people hear “Organisation X is institutionally discriminatory” they interpret that as “The leaders of Organisation X are bad people.” For example;

“The Metropolitan police are institutionally racist.”

“I’ve met some police officers and they’re lovely!”

This is a mistake. To say that an organisation is institutionally discriminatory makes no comment on the character of its employees, merely the pattern of its outputs. Not everyone who controls trans healthcare is a frothing bigot; again, I have no animosity towards Colonel Korn or his colleagues. My issue is with the outputs of the system they manage.

“We have shifted this conversation so incredibly far in the direction of restrictions on trans people’s autonomy and rights in a way that was completely unfathomable to many of us even just three or four years ago,” said Chase Strangio, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Legislation in Oklahoma and South Carolina would make it a felony to provide hormonal or surgical transition treatment to transgender people younger than 26 — an uncharted incursion into adults’ health care. Other bills in both states, and in Kansas and Mississippi, would ban such care up to age 21. And bills in more than a dozen states would ban it for minors, which Arkansas was the first to do in 2021, against the consensus of major medical organizations.

A bill in Mississippi — declaring that “separate is not inherently unequal,” an allusion to Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling in which the Supreme Court upheld segregation — would define sex as immutably set at birth, denying transgender identities under state law. A measure in West Virginia would define “any transvestite and/or transgender exposure, performances or display” as obscene, potentially outlawing transgender people’s presence around children.

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But the bills arriving in legislatures show a movement expanding beyond what it pitched itself as.

The 25-year-olds who would be unable to receive transition care in Oklahoma and South Carolina are not, after all, children. An Arizona bill would ban drag shows on Sunday mornings whether or not minors were around. (The lawmakers who introduced those bills did not respond to requests for comment.)

Matt Sharp, senior counsel and state government relations national director for the Alliance Defending Freedom, said his group believed “gender ideology attacks the truth that every person is either male or female.”

And Mr. Schilling, of the American Principles Project, confirmed that his organization’s long-term goal was to eliminate transition care. The initial focus on children, he said, was a matter of “going where the consensus is.”

Cathryn Oakley, the state legislative director and senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, said the bills disproved the notion that protecting children had ever been the motivation.

“Under His wings,” one lobbyist wrote in an email. “The Devil never sleeps,” another person sent in an email chain about the distinction between gender and sex. “I pray for the 2nd coming more and more.”

These missives are part of a trove of leaked emails between South Dakota GOP Rep. Fred Deutsch, anti-trans lobbyists, and other state lawmakers about anti-trans policies that are filled with language so deeply religious that, at times, the communications read like scripts from The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s the language, one expert told VICE News, of Christian nationalists who believe they’re engaging in a holy war.

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“Know that many have prayed and are praying for you this day. Do not back down, nor should you be afraid. Know that the Lord is with you. The children of South Dakota belong to him. He is jealous over them. Let his jealousies be spoken forth in the House of Representatives of South Dakota today so that his children would be made safe. Know you are HIS representative today. Do not be afraid. Stand firm in what is right,” wrote Vernadette Broyles, a lawyer and president of the Georgia-based Children and Parental Rights Campaign, which mobilizes against “gender ideology,” in 2020.

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“It is the language of Christian nationalism,” Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University focusing on apocalyptic religion and political violence. “It is the language of people who very much believe they are doing God’s will, and it is the language of people who very much believe that they are engaged in a holy war.”

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“Stopping the existence of transgender people and the acceptance of trans people in the public sphere is to them some sort of religious imperative,” Lecaque told VICE News.“It’s particularly fascinating that this group that has all this money, control in state legislatures, control of the house, they had a presidency, is acting like somehow they are David in the struggle.”

None of this is particularly surprising, and none of it is new. Today’s Christian nationalists believe that America is an inherently holy, Christian land, and that it’s their duty to restore God’s kingdom in order for Jesus to return. Part of this means that they think the country’s laws, policies and cultural institutions should reflect evangelical Christian values, VICE News previously reported. As a result, contentious cultural and political issues, like drag queen story hours and “critical race theory” are perceived as Satanic. Indeed, the Devil came up in the leaked emails.

See also.

Even in LGBTQ-friendly states like New York, transgender Americans are what estate attorney Elizabeth Schwartz politely calls “concerned” or “alarmed,” but she knows it’s much more than that. “I don’t want to sound like I’m downplaying it or making it sound milquetoast,” Schwartz said. “My inbox has been blowing up with people who are absolutely freaked out.”

Schwartz, who is based in Miami, has been working nonstop the past two months to help clients complete name and gender-marker changes, healthcare proxies, powers of attorney, wills, trusts and confirmatory adoptions. “If you’re married and have a child and both parents are on the birth certificate, there shouldn’t be a question of who the parents are, but this is a belt-and-suspenders kind of situation,” Schwartz said, meaning you have to double up protections. 

“The selectivity about whom the Fourteenth Amendment ought to apply to is stunning,” said Khiara M. Bridges, professor at University of California at Berkeley School of Law. “It’s not demanded by the text of the Constitution at all. Instead, these are political choices that are being made, and they’re elevating certain individuals’ rights.”

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The recent Supreme Court arguments about Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for adolescents underscored the selectivity in who gets to exercise Fourteenth Amendment rights. The conservative position in U.S. v. Skrmetti is that while parents typically get to argue a due process right to direct their children’s upbringing, that right does not extend to parenting that affirms their transgender child’s identity. Trans adolescents can’t access medical care that is legal for their cisgender peers, and Republicans claim this is a regulation, not discrimination based on sex. Under this interpretation, even trans and nonbinary adults could continue to see their rights diminished.

“This [incoming] administration would be interested in denying them health care and, if not criminalizing them, certainly banishing them from public spaces,” Bridges said. One conservative group says it will pursue a ban on federal insurance covering affirming treatments, akin to the Hyde Amendment for abortion.

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As far as immigrants are concerned, President-elect Trump has also said he wants to end birthright citizenship and start a mass deportation program, which would necessarily rope in U.S. citizens. While citizenship for people born on U.S. soil is written verbatim into the Fourteenth Amendment, conservatives have previewed an argument to gut it.

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Bridges said this country’s history of mass deportations is rife with evidence that legal residents will be caught up in the dragnet. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens with Mexican ancestry were deported during the Great Depression under President Herbert Hoover. (His slogan was “American jobs for real Americans.”) President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1950s deportation regime also wrongly removed American citizens of Mexican descent.

“This wasn’t about undocumentedness, and this wasn’t about immigrants. This was about non-whiteness,” Bridges said. Under Trump 2.0, she said, the U.S. would once again be removing people from the U.S. because they are not white. “We’re talking about building camps, right? That’s where we are.” 

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The groups of people whose Fourteenth Amendment rights to be recognized as full humans are under attack from Republicans are deeply connected to one another. “It’s an error to read these things separate from one another,” Bridges said, adding that the obsession with mass deportations is connected to the desire to end birthright citizenship, which are both tied to wanting to revert to traditional gender and family norms, and that’s linked to the interest in giving rights to fertilized eggs. “All of these things are part of the same project,” she said. “This is about whiteness and patriarchy. It’s about creating the U.S. as a nation for white men.” 

File under "Paywalled but pertinent."

The Harris campaign chose not to respond to the Trump ads — not even to point out, as the Lincoln Project did, that trans health care for prisoners (including surgery) was the policy of Trump’s Bureau of Prisons during his first term. In campaign rallies, Harris’s litany of “freedoms” invariably ended with gay rights (“The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride”). It never once included trans rights. The same was true for Democratic candidates down the ballot. Before McBride was banned from the Capitol bathrooms, she was excluded from the Democratic National Convention stage.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called the  Capitol trans bathroom ban dangerous for “all women and girls” because “all it does is allow these Republicans to go around and bully any woman who isn’t wearing a skirt because she might not look woman enough.” That’s a lot like someone in 1955 objecting to Jim Crow laws because some white people might get mistaken for Black people. AOC didn’t mention McBride or civil rights.

Trans people have become untouchables.

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If it sounds like I’m terrified, I am — as are many trans Americans and their families. In recent years there has been an escalation in the number of anti-trans bills introduced in Republican state houses (669 bills in 2024). Most are targeting trans minors, taking away bathrooms, sports, books, forcibly outing them, outlawing “crossdressing,” greenlighting hate speech, criminalizing any mention of gender identity, and criminalizing their parents, doctors and counselors. As Trump has vowed, and as the state of Oklahoma has done, they’re not going to stop with children.

But what terrifies me most doesn’t just concern trans people. I’ll pose my fear as a question: What percentage of the German population was Jewish at the time of Hitler’s rise? The answer — 0.75% — is lower than most people guess.

The Nazi party gaslit a nation into thinking that a group comprising 0.75% of its population was a threat that could “poison” its culture, seize its economy and needed to be stopped. During the 1930s, before Germany’s “final solution” to “the Jewish problem,” more than 400 anti-Jewish decrees and regulations were issued by national, regional and municipal officials, gradually eliminating Jews from public life, employment, education, culture, travel, hospital care and turning them into outcasts.

My happy but plain vanilla life stands in contrast to the lurid rhetoric and terrifying intentions of Governor Greg Abbott, his allies in the state Legislature, and Republican lawmakers across the country, as well as the goals of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s extremist blueprint for America’s future. Friends out of state urge me to leave Texas, which is where I have always lived. They fear for my safety. Some trans people I know refuse even to travel through Texas.

Their fears are not unwarranted. What I’ve found, however, is that even in rural Texas the average person couldn’t care less about my gender. Most Texans who know me and hear my story are supportive, wherever they happen to lie on the political spectrum. They may not understand it, but they accept it and move on. Those who do shun, hate, or fear seem, in my view, to be either insecure in their own identity or to be captured by merchants of fear in right-wing media.

Trans people endure constant psychic strain as we make our spaces and serve our communities while lawmakers plot our extinction. But the staged uproar over our supposed effrontery has less to do with reality than with our antagonists’ covert aims and unexamined anxieties. Someone I know recently suggested that trans people bring hate upon our own heads by always seeking attention and affirmation. The prosaic truth is that we simply want to exist.

This is just heartbreaking. And this was two years ago!

As some states become increasingly hostile to transgender youth, families are weighing a difficult decision of whether to leave their schools, jobs and communities behind to flee to a state with greater LGBTQ protections.