Transphobia

Since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives last January, GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill have quietly added a wave of amendments to "must-pass" government funding bills that would ban federal money from being used for gender transition procedures such as hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery.

These riders vary widely in their scope and effect. Some target government health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Others would revoke insurance coverage for transgender government employees. Still others would bar federal funding for any institution that "promotes transgenderism".

Taken together, though, they would drastically curtail trans people’s access to medical care that advocates routinely describe as critical to their flourishing – much as the 1977 Hyde Amendment restricted abortion access in the wake of Roe v Wade.

I am pornography. Granted, it's not necessarily the first thing you'd notice about me. That is to say, I am not the subject of pornography, but the thing itself, 24/7. It's jolly tiring, I can tell you.

The prominence of pornography in Project 2025 is no mistake, of course; it’s absolutely core to the authors’ agenda for Trump. The attack on porn is inseparable from the attacks on abortion and contraception, on marriage equality and trans rights, and of course on drag queens and library books—all of which, they believe, threaten the straight, married family as the natural bedrock of society. All of these threats, to them, constitute pornography. By calling on the president to outlaw porn, they’re calling for the eradication of all these imagined enemies of the family.

Though Project 2025 does not define “pornography,” their concern clearly extends beyond porn itself. Pornography, according to the Mandate, is responsible for the “normalization” of non-normative gender expression and identity among young people—what the right often calls “gender ideology.” Pornography could be anything that contributes to that purported normalization. “Pornography,” Roberts continues, is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.” And how should it be outlawed? “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” Project 2025 is not targeting “pornography” as something that’s harmful to children per se, but rather redefining anything concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children as pornography. 

The US Bill of Rights? That's pornography. Have you seen what's in it? Can you imagine how exposure to that sort of thing might harm children?

The posts seen by TBIJ show Bayswater parents discussing how their treatment of their trans children has led to them being reported to social services.

One posted that a school counsellor made a referral because “my [child] is fearful living in our home, we have refused to buy [them] certain (boys) clothes and we restrained [them]”. A subsequent post noted the child was “not concerned that Mum and Dad have been referred to social services”.

Members are aware that some of their behaviour is considered abuse. One user posted a link to an article about anti-LGBTQ+ domestic abuse, with the caption: “Examples include monitoring interaction with friends. Imagine it also includes refusal to affirm.”

Another parent sarcastically responded “Yes, we are abusive!”, with the original commenter retorting: “One day, they may thank us for that ‘abuse’”.

[…]

Many Bayswater parents restrict their children’s internet access. “I knew the Internet was a major factor [in my child’s gender identity] so I (famously) drowned [their] iPhone in a jug of salty sugar water whilst [they were] in the shower one day,” posted one parent.

A suggested website blocklist on the forum includes LGBTQ+ charities like Mermaids and Stonewall, websites that sell binders, and even Childline, the NSPCC’s counselling service. 

Heartbreaking and terrifying.

“An amendment to the Schools Bill is being discussed in Parliament tomorrow,” read the post on an online forum run by the Bayswater Support Group, which describes itself as the UK’s only support organisation run by and for parents of trans children and young people.

“If passed it will allow greater transparency about what is being taught in schools. We have been contacted for a short piece of evidence,” the mother said. “Does anyone have the experience of their autistic child identifying as trans following learning about it at school? Ideally a situation where the school went onto transition the child.”

The following day, on 30 June 2022, during a parliamentary debate about relationships, sex and health education (RSHE), the Conservative MP Miriam Cates argued that learning about trans identities was damaging to children.

“One parent of a 15-year-old with a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome said she discovered that without her knowledge, her [child’s] school had started the process of socially transitioning her child, and has continued to do so despite the mother’s objections,” said Cates, who is standing again for her seat Penistone and Stockbridge, in South Yorkshire, in the upcoming election.

The story Cates told the House of Commons closely mirrored the request posted on Bayswater’s private channel on Discord, an online message board. She even named the group during the debate, saying it had reported “a surge” of parents contacting Bayswater after their children learned about trans people at school.

[…]

Bayswater’s public concern about children’s safety strikes a marked contrast to posts on its Discord channel, where parents wrote of being reported to social services over “restraining” their child and called a shelter for LGBTQ+ abuse survivors “a church for the gender faithful”. A post on the forum recommended blocking children’s access to the website for Childline, the NSPCC’s counselling service.

On Friday, numerous conservative accounts and news sources promoted headlines that the "American College of Pediatricians" had issued a statement against transgender care. A video accompanied the announcement featuring Dr. Jill Simons, who, wearing a white lab coat, states that there must be an end to "social affirmation, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones" for transgender youth. Despite the official-looking attire and name, the organization's name serves to mislead observers into thinking they are the much larger American Academy of Pediatrics, which represents tens of thousands of pediatricians. In reality, the ACP is a hyper-conservative Christian group of doctors created in 2002 to oppose gay parenting.

[…]

The American College of Pediatricians has been hugely influential in the promotion of anti-trans policy in the United States, relying in part to its misleading name. Members of the organization testify in state houses and courtrooms across the United States, misleading legislators into thinking they are the much larger American Academy of Pediatrics, the professional society that represents 67,000 pediatricians in the United States. 

In February 2023, the paper received two separate open letters: one from a coalition of 150+ organizations and leaders, including GLAAD, and a separate letter signed by hundreds of Times contributors that criticized the outlet's contributions to a deadly anti-LGBTQ culture war. The newspaper attempted to conflate both efforts, dismissing all criticisms of its coverage as merely “protests organized by advocacy groups.”

Between February 15, 2023, when those letters were separately delivered to the Times, and February 15, 2024, the Times published at least 65 articles that mentioned U.S. anti-trans legislation in either their headline or lead paragraphs. We counted how often the paper quoted openly trans or gender-nonconforming sources, cited anti-trans misinformation or talking points without context or adequate fact-checking, and accurately represented the records of anti-trans figures mentioned in its stories. Our findings:

• 66% of the articles did not quote even one trans or gender-nonconforming person.
• 18% of the articles quoted misinformation from anti-trans activists without adequate fact-checking or additional context.
• 6 articles obscured the anti-trans background of sources, erasing histories of extremist rhetoric or actions.
   

On Wednesday, J.K. Rowling implicitly denied that transgender individuals were targeted and that books about them were burned in Nazi Germany. This assertion contradicts abundant evidence that transgender people were among the first targeted by the Nazis' rise to power in Germany. This culminated in the looting of the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute of Sexology and the infamous burning of the initial decades of transgender healthcare research, as well as the internment, forced detransition, and murder of transgender citizens. When confronted with numerous scholarly sources, she instead linked to another thread that labeled the first transgender patient a "troubled male.”

The claims emerged after Rowling argued that doctors providing gender affirming care to transgender youth should face prison time. She also advocated for imprisoning leaders of Stonewall and Mermaids, charities serving transgender and queer individuals. Recently, the author has adopted more extreme positions regarding transgender people, including describing a prominent transgender woman and journalist in the United Kingdom as "A man…cosplaying."

The lettuce lady, reborn as Joe McCarthy:

Truss, who announced her resignation as prime minister after just 44 days in office in 2022, addressed an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), at the National Harbor, in Maryland, on Wednesday (21 February). 

[…]

Truss, who earlier this week “took delight” in revealing the cover for the US version of her book, Ten Years to Save the West, told the audience that she ran for Number 10 because “Britain wasn’t growing” and the “state wasn’t delivering”.

She went on to say: “I wanted to cut taxes, reduce the administrative state, take back control as people talked about in the Brexit referendum. What I did face was a huge establishment backlash and a lot of it actually came from the state itself.

“People are joining the civil service who are essentially activists,’ she then claimed. “They might be trans activists, they might be environmental extremists but they are now having a voice within the civil service in a way I don’t think was true 30 or 40 years ago.

For a special edition of Downstream IRL, Ash Sarkar is joined by philosopher, author, and one of the world's most cited academics, Judith Butler. Their new book, 'Who’s Afraid of Gender' charts how a transphobic moral panic morphed into an all-our war on so-called ‘gender ideology’. Together, Ash and Judith explore how Britain became TERF island, the limits of self-identification, and what really defines a woman.

Paul’s opinion column is far from the first Times piece to be cited in anti-trans legislation. In April 2023, Missouri announced an emergency order imposing new restrictions on gender-affirming care for people of all ages, citing a New York Times piece about gender-affirming care that was widely criticized as biased and inaccurate. (The emergency rule was later withdrawn.) Lawmakers in Texas and Alabama have also cited the Times’ coverage in support of proposed anti-trans legislation.

“There is such a direct pipeline from these New York Times pieces to the ways in which these laws are being defended in court and then ultimately upheld,” Strangio said in their video. “The risk of harm to trans people from these pieces is not theoretical.”