“Like any other educational program, school athletic programs should be accessible for everyone regardless of their sex or transgender status. Trans kids play sports for the same reasons their peers do–to learn perseverance, dedication, teamwork, and to simply have fun with their friends,” said Joshua Block, Senior Counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. “Categorically excluding kids from school sports just because they are transgender will only make our schools less safe and more hurtful places for all youth. We believe the lower courts were right to block these discriminatory laws, and we will continue to defend the freedom of all kids to play.”

“Our client just wants to play sports with her friends and peers,” said Lambda Legal Senior Counsel Tara Borelli. “Everyone understands the value of participating in team athletics, for fitness, leadership, socialization, and myriad other benefits. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit last April issued a thoughtful and thorough ruling allowing B.P.J. to continue participating in track events. That well-reasoned decision should stand the test of time, and we stand ready to defend it.”

Earlier this year, efforts to enact a national ban failed in the U.S. Congress. Since 2020, 27 states have banned transgender youth from playing school sports. Many of these bans allow for invasive forms of sex testing that put all female student athletes at risk and open the door for any school official or adult to question and harass young women.

In Florida, a 15-year-old junior varsity volleyball player was the subject of a police investigation after an anonymous accusation, prompting local officials to draft a 500-page report investigating her medical history, body weight, and anatomy. In Utah, a teenage basketball player was accused of being transgender by a member of the state board of education, leading to threats of violence against her and her family, and a teenager in Maine faced a similar attack from a state senator. In May, President Donald Trump bullied a 16-year-old transgender girl for participating in a high school track meet.

Many women athletes have spoken out against bullying and discrimination against transgender student athletes. This includes Billie Jean King, Megan Rapinoe, Dawn Staley, Sue Bird, and Brianna Turner, as well as leading organizations fighting for gender equality in athletics including the Women’s Sports Foundation, the Women’s National Basketball Player’s Association, and the National Women’s Law Center.

The two cases the Supreme Court has agreed to hear include:

• Little v. Hecox, a challenge brought by one transgender and one cisgender student athlete against Idaho’s 2020 ban on transgender athletes and requirements for sex testing
• West Virginia v. B.P.J., a challenge brought by a teenage transgender girl against West Virginia’s 2021 ban on transgender athletic participation

The two cases charge the bans with violating the rights of transgender and cisgender female students under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. In addition, West Virginia v. B.P.J. argues that the bans violate Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs. Federal courts have blocked enforcement of these bans in both lawsuits.

These cases are part of the ACLU’s Joan and Irwin Jacobs Supreme Court Docket.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Transgender health care bans legislate Christian Nationalist view of gender

“The Supreme Court’s ultra-conservative justices are allowing Christian Nationalists and their allies to legislate a narrow, religious view of gender that will harm countless children and families. Not only has the court failed to protect America’s children, but this decision will encourage Christian Nationalists to further restrict any and all health care that doesn’t align with their narrow religious beliefs. LGBTQ+ people, women, religious minorities, the nonreligious and other traditionally marginalized communities are particularly at risk.

“Christian Nationalists have achieved yet another milestone in their decades-long effort to drag our country back in time. We need a national recommitment to church-state separation, which ensures freedom without favor and equality without exception. At Americans United, we will continue to fight for the right of all Americans to live as themselves and believe as they choose, as long as they do not harm others. That includes our gender-nonconforming and transgender family members, coworkers, friends, and neighbors.”

AU joined amicus brief opposing transgender health care ban

Americans United joined Kentucky parents of transgender children and civil rights groups in filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the case involving the Tennessee ban, explaining that transgender health care bans intentionally discriminate against transgender youth by denying them medications that are prescribed for other youth. These laws do not ban these medications for all minors, but only when they are prescribed for transgender minors. As a result of this discriminatory treatment, transgender youth are unable to obtain the only effective treatment for the severe distress caused by gender dysphoria.

AU’s brief was among more than 30 friend-of-the-court briefs in which bioethicists, medical providers, medical historians, family law professors, and additional families in states where care has been banned had urged the Supreme Court to rule against bans on essential medical care for transgender adolescents so that families can make the health care decisions that are best for their children.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Raised in an ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, Rabbi Abby Stein has had a long, painful, beautiful journey to coming out as a transgender woman and becoming a fierce opponent of Zionism and Israel’s Occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Rabbi Stein about her journey, and about the need to simultaneously fight Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the right’s fascist assault on the rights of LGBTQ+ people here in the US.

Guest:

• Rabbi Abby Stein is the tenth-generation descendant of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement. Raised in an ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, Stein came out as a woman in 2015 and now serves as a rabbi for Congregation Kolot Chayeinu, a progressive synagogue. In 2019, she served on the steering committee for the Women’s March in Washington, DC, and she was named by the Jewish Week as one of the “36 Under 36” Jews who are affecting change in the world. She is the author of Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman.

Additional resources:

• Julia Jacobs, The New York Times, “From Hasidic Brooklyn to Off Broadway: The life of a trans rabbi”
• Abby Stein & Lily Greenberg Call, Autostraddle, “We spoke up for Palestine and got kicked out of the White House Pride party”
• Lisa Francois, ACLU, “The human toll of Trump’s anti-trans crusade”

Credits:

• Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
• Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

Janine Jackson interviewed Erin in the Morning‘s Erin Reed about transgender care “questions” for the May 23, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Washington Post (5/11/25)

Janine Jackson: Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos was clear in saying that only certain ideological presuppositions would be acceptable from here on in, when the paper canceled a prepared endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, and canceled a cartoon critical of Donald Trump, and a number of other things. And that sound you heard was many people moving the Washington Post from one place to another in their brains.

But the Post is still the leading daily in the lawmaking place of this country, and what they say has influence on people who have influence. So when the Post editorial board described a report on trans healthcare from the Health and Human Services Department—now headed by Robert F. “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me” Kennedy Jr.—as “thorough and careful,” that was going to have an impact.

The piece, headed “Good Questions About Transgender Care,” really raised deeper questions about corporate news media and their role in the world we have, and the world we need today.

Erin Reed is the journalist and activist behind Erin in the Morning. She joins us now by phone from Gaithersburg, Maryland. Welcome to CounterSpin, Erin Reed.

Erin Reed: Thank you so much for having me on.

Scientific American (5/12/22)

JJ: An idea can be utterly discredited—evidentially, scientifically—but can still have resonance for people who just feel like certain things are true. The Post, well, first they point out that this HHS report is “more than 400 pages, including appendixes,” so you’re supposed to sit up straight. But the message is that the HHS report is a review of the existing literature on best practices around healthcare, and that it’s “careful” and “thorough.”

I feel like when anti-trans media is cartoonish, it’s almost easier to bat away. But when something like this comes from a paper of record, it makes it more difficult. So let me just ask you, what are you making of this Post editorial?

ER: Yeah, so a little bit of background. This HHS report was produced specifically because the science on transgender healthcare has been so clear for so long. There’s been repeated study after study, coming out in the most prestigious journals, showing the positive impact of transgender healthcare on those who need it. And so the HHS report was put out in order to give cover to organizations that want to oppose transgender healthcare.

And that’s what we got with the Washington Post editorial page, where the editorial board basically endorses the report. It goes through the report and says that it’s a great report, essentially, and that it raises great questions about transgender healthcare and more.

Washington Post (5/1/25)

Whenever I read something like that from the Washington Post editorial board, though, and then I see how that same board and how that same paper treats everything else that RFK Jr.’s healthcare team puts out—for instance, vaccines, autism, fluoridation in water and more—there’s this double standard whenever it comes to transgender healthcare. The paper is willing to point out the lack of science behind this particular department’s positions under RFK Jr. for all of these other things, but it seemingly ignores that whenever it comes to transgender people.

JJ: And yet they refer to—they’re scientistic. They say that this report “concurs with other systematic reviews.” They give all the gesturing towards the idea that this is science here—and yet it’s not.

ER: And the report itself was anonymously written. They didn’t release any of the names of the people who worked on the report; however, they left the EXIF data in. And so you could actually see the person who compiled the report, and it was Alex Byrne, is the one who’s on the EXIF data in the PDF.

And what that says is that they’re not using experts here. Alex Byrne is a philosophy major. That’s not somebody who’s ever worked with gender-affirming healthcare, and not somebody who’s ever worked with transgender people.

Erin Reed: “What we have is another example of the relentless pseudoscience coming out of this healthcare department under RFK Jr.”

We are seeing these attacks on transgender healthcare using these mechanisms, like the RFK Jr. healthcare department, trying to dictate what science is by fiat, trying to say that it doesn’t matter what the studies say, it doesn’t matter that all the medical organizations and the people that work with transgender people say that this healthcare is saving lives. We are going to dictate what is science and what is not.

I read the whole 400-page report. I read all of anything that comes out about transgender healthcare, because that’s my job; I’m a journalist covering this topic.

And the report, if you read it, it’s not a scientific document. It’s not something that has new information. It’s not something that studies transgender healthcare, it deadnames historical transgender figures, it calls transgender healthcare a “social contagion.” And it advocates for conversion therapy of transgender people, explicitly so, in many instances.

And so I don’t think that what we have is a good scientific document that raises important questions on transgender healthcare, like the Washington Post editorial board claims. Instead, what we have is another example of the relentless pseudoscience coming out of this healthcare department under RFK Jr.

JJ: Part of that involves relabeling, and you just mentioned conversion therapy. And I think a lot of listeners will say, “Oh, I’ve learned about what that means. It involves telling queer people they’re not queer, they’re mentally ill.” But the Post has something to say about how—or maybe it’s the report itself—how, Oh, no, no, no, this isn’t conversion therapy. What’s going on there?

ER: Yeah, so the original report advocates for something known as “gender exploratory therapy.” And I have done a lot of investigations on this particular modality of therapy that’s being promoted by people on the anti-trans right.

Erin in the Morning (12/20/22)

So gender exploratory therapy, it sounds good. It sounds like something that we want. Like of course, if somebody is transitioning, we would love for them to have a good and open environment to explore their gender identity. And that is what we have right now.

But that’s not what gender exploratory therapy is. Gender exploratory therapy is a very kind-sounding name for a repackaged version of conversion therapy.

Essentially, what this modality of therapy does is, let’s say you’re a transgender youth. You’re 14, 15, 16 years old, and you are considering transitioning. What they will do is, they will take you, and they will try to blame your gender identity on anything other than being trans, repeatedly. They’ll go from thing to thing to thing to thing.

And the important point here is that these therapists will never approve your transition. They will never write a gender-affirming care letter for you. They explicitly won’t do that. If you go to the website of the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association, you’ll find that this group has filed amicus briefs against transgender bathroom usage in schools, or that this group has filed amicus briefs against transgender participation in sports like darts. We see that this is not a neutral sort of modality.

The closest comparison that many of your listeners will probably understand is crisis pregnancy centers, where they’ve used this name “crisis pregnancy centers” to try to say that if you’re seeking an abortion, that this is a good clinic to go to. But if you know anything about crisis pregnancy centers, the way that they work is by delaying abortion until it’s no longer feasible. And that’s the exact same way that GETA works, and that’s what we see being promoted by this report.

JJ: Finally, in terms of media, who we know often or virtually always set things up in a “some say, others differ” framework, they’re quoting the Washington Post editorial and other outlets, acknowledging the place where they say ”critics have been scathing.”—this is the Post—”critics have been scathing about what they see as the report’s biases and shortcomings, but it makes a legitimate case for caution that policymakers need to wrestle with.”

And I would just ask you, finally, to talk about this media idea of somehow the truth is in the middle on issues. And then, also, Oh, all we’re asking for is caution. Who’s against caution? And, additionally, anyone who criticizes it is an activist and an interested party, other than these disinterested scientists and ethicists at the Washington Post.

ER: So I’m actually going to push back slightly and make an even broader point here.

JJ:  Please.

ER: “Both sides” coverage and “the truth is in the middle” coverage and “giving both sides a chance to make their point,” that would be an improvement for what we have right now, with transgender reporting and reporting on transgender healthcare.

JJ:  Absolutely.

Them (3/28/24)

ER: Because, let me tell you, whenever you look at the New York Times, whenever you look at the Washington Post, and the way that transgender healthcare is covered right now, the experts, the transgender people, the transgender journalists like myself, are not given the space to make their points. They’re not given the space to make the case for scientific healthcare, and for good treatment of LGBTQ people and transgender people.

But you’ll see the New York Times publish three-, four-page spreads attacking transgender healthcare, from people who have made it their job to attack transgender people. You’ll see the editorial board at the Washington Post explicitly advocate for a healthcare report done by the RFK Jr. healthcare team, targeting transgender people. And whenever it comes to the transgender people, and whenever it comes to the experts and the medical organizations and the Yale physicians, they’re written off as just activists.

And so this is not even “both sides” reporting. It’s not even “the truth is in the middle” reporting. These papers have taken a position on this, and it’s a position that’s not supported by the science. It’s a position that’s not being practiced, importantly, by the people who are giving out that transgender healthcare, who are treating transgender people, day in, day out, who see these patients and understand the impact that gender-affirming care has on their lives.

So I guess what I’m just really trying to say is, I wish they would platform transgender people. I wish they would platform the doctors. I wish they would platform the medical organizations, but they don’t.

JJ: It feels like you’re telling me what better reporting would look like, yeah?

ER: I’m trying.

JJ: Erin Reed is the journalist and activist behind Erin in the Morning. Thank you so much, Erin Reed, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ER: Of course. Thank you so much for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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In California, the federal government was deep into an investigation of alleged racial discrimination at a school district where, a parent said, students called a Black peer racial slurs and played whipping sounds from their cellphones during a lesson about slavery. Then the U.S. Department of Education in March suddenly closed the California regional outpost of its Office for Civil Rights and fired all its employees there. That investigation and others went silent.

In South Dakota, the OCR abruptly terminated its work with a school district that had agreed to take steps to end discrimination against its Native American students. The same office that helped craft the agreement to treat indigenous students equally made a stunning about-face and decided in March that helping Native American students would discriminate against white students.

During its first 100 days, as the Trump administration has dismantled the Education Department, one of its biggest targets has been the civil rights arm. Now, Education Secretary Linda McMahon is “reorienting” what’s left of it.

Part of that shift has been ordering investigations related to the administration’s priorities, such as ending the participation of transgender girls and women in girls’ and women’s sports. After hearing that a transgender woman from Wagner College in New York competed in a women’s fencing tournament at the University of Maryland last month, the head of the OCR launched a special investigation into both schools and threatened their access to federal funding.

Through internal memos and case data, interviews with more than a dozen current agency attorneys, and public records requests to school districts and other targets of investigations across the country, ProPublica has documented how the Trump administration has radically reshaped the OCR.

Only 57 investigations that found a civil rights violation and led to change at a school or college were completed in March, ProPublica has learned. Only 51 were resolved by finding violations in April. The Biden administration completed as many as 200 investigations a month.

Leadership under President Donald Trump also has made it easier for the OCR to drop discrimination complaints quickly. In March, 91% of cases closed by the office were dismissed without an investigation, and 89% were dismissed outright in April, according to internal case data obtained by ProPublica. Typically, 70% of cases are dismissed because they don’t meet criteria to warrant an investigation.

With more than half of the Education Department’s civil rights offices closed and the division reduced to a fraction of its former staff, families’ pleas for updates and action have gone unheard. One OCR attorney, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, told ProPublica that her caseload went from 60 to 380 as she absorbed cases previously handled by employees who worked in offices that had been closed. Some remaining employees have not been able to access documents, voicemail and email of fired employees.

As with civil rights divisions in other federal agencies that the Trump administration has fundamentally altered, the OCR has worked for decades to uphold constitutional rights against discrimination based on disability, race and gender.

“OCR is the most useless it’s ever been, and it’s the most dangerous it’s ever been. And by useless, I mean unavailable. Unable to do the work,” said Michael Pillera, who until recently was an OCR attorney in Washington, D.C. He is now with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Investigating cases that allege racism, discrimination based on sexual orientation or mistreatment of students with disabilities now requires permission from Trump appointees, according to a memo from OCR leadership. As a result, thousands of discrimination investigations are idled, even ones that were nearing a resolution when Trump took office again.

“I thought we were somewhere, and now we are back to square one because they are closed,” said K.D., the mother of the Black California student who said her daughter has been called racial epithets by her classmates. She emailed the agency more than a month ago to try to get an update on the investigation, but said the agency has not responded. ProPublica is identifying her by initials to protect her child’s privacy. “I never would have imagined that something so essential would go away,” she said.

Education Department spokespeople did not respond to questions and requests for comment sent over several weeks about changes in the civil rights division.

The OCR attorney who said she is working through 380 cases said the job is now “impossible.”

“The people who remain are doing all they can. We’re doing all we can. But it isn’t enough, and it keeps us up at night,” she said.

Another OCR attorney who, like others, asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, said the administration’s new vision for civil rights enforcement has harmed families.

“We were sort of the last bit of hope for them,” he said, “and now they’re calling and emailing and saying, ‘Hey, I thought you all were going to help me.’”

The arduous, grinding work undertaken by OCR attorneys is starkly different from the high-speed investigations that the Education Department announces in press releases every few days.

The OCR, historically one of the government’s largest enforcers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has been known for being a neutral fact-finder. Its investigators followed a process to determine whether complaints from the public met legal criteria for a civil rights claim, then carried out investigations methodically.

We want to better understand how changes at the Office for Civil Rights are affecting students, families and school communities. If you have recently submitted a civil rights complaint or have a pending case, please get in touch.

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The vast majority of investigations were based on discrimination complaints from students and families, and a large share of those were related to disability discrimination. The inquiries typically took months and, in complex cases, years. The lengthy investigations sometimes were a source of criticism. The agency didn’t share details of the investigations until they were completed, and the agreements often involved federal oversight going forward.

Investigations being publicized now have largely bypassed the agency’s civil rights attorneys, according to Education Department employees. McMahon and OCR head Craig Trainor created what amounts to a shadow division.

The Trump administration has ordered more than a dozen investigations in the past three months on its own, not initiated by an outside complainant. These “directed investigations” are typically rare; there were none during President Joseph Biden’s administration.

The investigations have targeted schools with transgender athletes, gender-neutral bathrooms and initiatives that the administration views as discriminatory to white students. OCR attorneys told ProPublica they’ve been given prewritten letters, which they’ve reluctantly signed, to send to targets of these investigations. Some letters describe transgender girls as “biological males,” which is ideologically pointed language that OCR attorneys say they’ve never used before.

“They’re blowing through past precedents, past practices, best practices,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led OCR under former Presidents Barack Obama and Biden and departed the office in January. “And they’re not even attempting to appear like neutral arbiters of the law.”

In a first, McMahon and Trainor created ways to divert complaints and investigations away from the OCR’s legal experts entirely. The administration made an “End DEI” portal that bypasses the traditional online complaint system and seeks only grievances about diversity, equity and inclusion in schools. Unlike the regular complaint system, the diversity portal submissions are not routed to OCR staff.

“We have no idea where that portal goes, who it goes to, how they review the cases. No idea,” said the attorney who said he struggles with being unable to help families. “That avoids us interfering with the games they’re trying to play, if they silo off the real civil rights lawyers.”

McMahon then announced a “Title IX Special Investigations Team” last month to work with the Department of Justice and appointed Trainor to it. It launches its own investigations into schools that include transgender girls in athletics.

In an internal memo to the new team that was obtained by ProPublica, Trainor defined the special team’s purpose: “To effectively and efficiently address the increasing volume of Title IX single-sex sports/spaces cases, expedite those investigations and resolutions, and collaborate seamlessly with DOJ to conclude investigations that go to DOJ for enforcement.”

There’s no indication that more complaints related to transgender students are coming from the public, according to internal case data. Last month, in what appears to be the first case assigned to the Title IX team, the group notified the University of Maryland and Wagner College that it would investigate each school. The investigation began after Fox News and other media reported about a fencing tournament at the University of Maryland in which a transgender player from Wagner competed. Trainor signed the notification letters himself, a departure from Lhamon’s practice.

A Wagner College spokesperson declined to comment. A University of Maryland spokesperson declined to comment about the investigation but said the tournament, while on the university’s campus, was run by USA Fencing.

The public used to be able to see what the OCR was investigating. But an online database that is supposed to list all investigations underway hasn’t been updated since Trump took office.

At that time, about 12,000 pending investigations were listed. Among them were two related to a family’s complaints that their California school district discriminated against students with disabilities, including by barricading them inside what it called a “reset” room. But then the OCR closed its California office and fired its employees.

“All work came to a halt. They stopped responding. Nothing was being done to stop the practice and protect kids,” Genevieve Goldstone, the parent of the Del Mar Union School District student who filed the disability discrimination complaint, said in an interview. “My federal complaints were meant to protect more kids and stop the abuses in the district.”

The district said it could not comment on the pending investigation but said it participated in more than a dozen interviews with an OCR attorney. It also said it conducted its own review of the allegations and determined that they were unsubstantiated.

OCR attorneys say they have been repeatedly blindsided by public announcements about policy changes and investigations. To find out what Trainor and McMahon have launched on their behalf, they check the Education Department’s website daily for press releases.

Those statements sometimes quote Trainor preemptively saying a school “appears to violate” civil rights law. The attorneys worry they will have no choice, despite what their investigations uncover, but to find against schools that have already been excoriated by the department publicly.

For example, in a press release announcing an investigation into a transgender athlete participating in girls’ track and field in Portland Public Schools in Oregon, Trainor said, “We will not allow the Portland Public Schools District or any other educational entity that receives federal funds to trample on the antidiscrimination protections that women and girls are guaranteed under law.”

A third current OCR attorney, who asked not to be named for fear of losing her job, said the administration is misinterpreting civil rights law. “It’s subverting our office, or weaponizing it in these ways, without following our process,” she said.

Conservative groups with complaints about diversity or transgender students have been able to file complaints directly with Trainor and get quick results — another norm-breaking way to operate outside of the OCR’s protocol.

America First Legal, a group founded by Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller that considers itself the “answer to the ACLU,” emailed Trainor a few days after Trump’s “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” executive order. The order directs schools to stop teaching about or supporting diversity, equity and gender identity.

“AFL respectfully requests that the Department of Education open investigations into the following public-school districts in Northern Virginia for continuing violations of Title IX,” the letter read, listing five districts that have policies welcoming to transgender students.

Senior leadership in Washington opened the cases the following week. America First issued a press release headlined “VICTORY.” The group declined to comment further.

Remaking the OCR isn’t just about increasing caseloads and reordering political priorities. The Trump administration now is taking steps to roll back OCR’s previous civil rights work.

Last month, Trump issued an executive order that directs all federal agencies, including the Education Department, to stop enforcing cases involving policies that disproportionately affect certain groups — for example, when Black students are disciplined more harshly than white students for the same infractions or when students with disabilities are suspended more than any other group even though they represent a small percentage of student enrollment.

Trump’s order requires the agencies to “assess all pending investigations, lawsuits, and consent judgements” that consider disproportionate discipline and “take appropriate action.” Complaints made to the OCR that students were unfairly disciplined could be thrown out; existing enforcement actions or monitoring of schools that had disciplined students disproportionately could be revoked.

The OCR under Trainor did this in Rapid City, South Dakota — even before the executive order. About a year ago, the office had signed an agreement with Rapid City Area Schools after an investigation found that the district’s Native American students were disciplined far more harshly than white ones. They also were kept from enrolling in advanced courses.

The OCR said that when speaking with an investigator, the superintendent of schools at the time said that Native American students in her district had higher truancy rates because they operated on what she termed “Indian Time.” She said, too, that they don’t value education, according to the investigation’s findings.

The former superintendent, Nicole Swigart, denied saying any of that.

“I recognize those comments are horrendous,” Swigart said in an interview with ProPublica. She noted that the OCR investigation was opened in 2010 and that she first spoke to an investigator in 2022. “I’m not lying when I say I didn’t say it. I didn’t say it, and I don’t know where it came from.”

In the agreement with the OCR, the district promised to examine its practices and make things right; the OCR would monitor its progress. The district also brought in a new superintendent.

But last month, the OCR abruptly terminated that agreement, based on its differing interpretation of civil rights law. The OCR’s new view is that equity and diversity efforts discriminate against white students. It was, in the view of agency attorneys, the most severe breach of the OCR’s mission and methods to date. There was no public announcement.

“Native students in Rapid City just lost a layer of protection,” the Lakota People’s Law Project announced on Facebook. “Native students are still being pushed out of classrooms and denied opportunities.”

Darren Thompson, who is Ojibwe, said the OCR’s decision to abandon the agreement was “another cycle of the federal government failing to uphold its promises.”

“And this time, they are partisan, political,” said Thompson, who works for the nonprofit Sacred Defense Fund affiliated with the Lakota group in Rapid City.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the school district said it has completed much of the work — including broader access to educational opportunities and an improved behavior tracking process — and plans to continue it even without federal oversight. But it also said this week that under the OCR’s new directives, “we must shift our approach.” The district did not elaborate on what will change.

It’s unclear whether the OCR has ended agreements with other districts or colleges. Education Department spokespeople did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

Some subjects of the OCR’s new directives and investigations have capitulated. A school district in Tumwater, Washington, that Trainor targeted for allowing a transgender basketball player from an opposing team to compete responded by voting to support the state athletic association excluding trans players altogether.

But some are pushing back.

Denver Public Schools was the first target of one of Trainor’s “directed investigations” in late January — over the existence of one all-gender, multistall bathroom on one floor of a Denver high school. According to communication obtained by ProPublica through public records requests, the district called out the OCR for “continuing to take a different approach with this case without explanation, a case with no complainant who is awaiting any form of relief or remedy.”

Kristin Bailey, a Denver Public Schools attorney, wrote to an OCR supervisor that the way the investigation is being handled “appears to be retaliatory.”

Since February, at least half a dozen lawsuits have been filed to try to stop the dismantling of the Education Department and its civil rights functions — among them, suits by Democratic state attorneys general and from the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers. A recent suit by the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates on behalf of children and their parents — all of whom have pending complaints alleging discrimination — claims they’re suffering from the OCR’s “abandonment” of its core mission.

The NAACP also sued the department, McMahon and Trainor, citing the “End DEI” portal and seeking a halt to such anti-diversity efforts. And the Victim Rights Law Center, representing students and parents, sued to try to restore what has been cut from the OCR so the agency can fulfill its mandate. It noted that under McMahon and Trainor, “cherry-picked investigations appear to be the only matters the Department is currently pursuing.” Those lawsuits are pending. The government has argued in the NAACP lawsuit that the group lacks standing, and in the other it has not filed a response.

Several OCR attorneys told ProPublica that they hope these groups and school districts continue to push back. In the meantime, they said, they will continue to try to work on behalf of the public to uphold the nation’s civil rights laws.

“I have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, helping the people I can help, and keep my eye on the long game,” said a fourth OCR attorney. “Hopefully we’re still here and can help rebuild in the future.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Wisconsin Watch. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In 2022, after living as a boy and going by a new name for several years, a 15-year-old from Madison, Wisconsin, wanted to make it official. Like most teenagers, he dreamed of getting his driver’s license, and his family wanted his government identification to reflect who he really was.

But Wisconsin law has a caveat: He would have to publish his old, feminine name and new name in the local newspaper for three weeks — essentially announcing to the world that he is transgender.

In many instances, if he had committed a crime, the law would afford him privacy as a minor. But not as a transgender teenager changing his name.

His parents worry the public notice now poses a risk as President Donald Trump has attacked transgender rights, asserted that U.S. policy recognizes only two sexes and described efforts to support transgender people as “child abuse.” The publication requirements endanger the community, lawyers working with trans people say, by creating a de facto dataset of likely transgender people that vigilantes and even the government could use for firing, harassment or violence.

Transgender people are over four times more likely to be victims of violence, research shows. Most transgender people and their families agreed to be interviewed for this story only if they weren’t named, citing safety concerns.

“Publication requirements really leave folks open and vulnerable to discrimination and to harassment more than they already are,” said Arli Christian, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “It can put people at risk of violence and blatant discrimination simply because of who they are.”

Wisconsin’s legal process stems from a 167-year-old law, one of many statutes across the country that Christian said were intended to keep people from escaping debts or criminal records. Changing one’s name through marriage is a separate process that does not require publication in a paper.

Although the right to change one’s legal name exists in every state, the effort and risk required to exercise it vary. Less than half of states require people to publicize their name changes in some or all cases, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank that tracks voting and LGBTQ+ rights.

Wisconsin law grants confidentiality only if a person can prove it’s more likely than not that publication “could endanger” them. But the statute does not define what that means. For years, some judges interpreted that to include psychological abuse or bullying, or they accepted statistics documenting discrimination and violence against transgender people nationwide.

In 2023, however, a state appeals court set a stricter standard after a trans teenager was denied a confidential name change in Brown County, home to Green Bay. The teen said he had endured years of bullying, in which peers called him slurs and beat him up. Court records show the Brown County judge asserted that publishing the teen’s name wouldn’t expose him to further harm because his harassers already knew he was transgender.

The teen argued that a public process would create a record available to people he met in the future. While the appeals court conceded a “reasonable judge” could agree, it found the Brown County judge had not improperly exercised her discretion in denying the request. Crucially, the appeals court determined that “endanger” meant only physical harm. The case wasn’t appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The combination of Wisconsin’s public requirement, the restrictive ruling and the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies has dissuaded at least one person from going through with a name change.

J.J Koechell, a 20-year-old LGBTQ+ advocate from suburban Milwaukee, tried to change his name in November but decided against it after a judge denied his request for confidentiality, ordering him to publish his change in the local paper and create a public court record if he wanted to proceed.

“That’s already dangerous,” Koechell said of a public process, “given our political atmosphere, with an administration that’s trying to erase trans people from existence completely, or saying that they don’t exist, or that there’s something wrong with them.”

At the end of March, Wisconsin Democrats announced plans to introduce a bill that would eliminate the publication requirement for transgender people, so long as they can prove they’re not avoiding debt or a criminal record. Republicans, who control the Legislature, will decide whether it will receive a hearing or vote.

There has been a push in some states to make it easier and safer for transgender people to update their legal documents. Michigan and Illinois laws removing publication requirements took effect earlier this year. And a California lawmaker introduced a bill that would retroactively seal all transition-related court records.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, did not respond to emails and a phone call to his office seeking comment. Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica sought comment from four other Republican leaders in the Assembly and Senate. Of the two whose offices responded, a staffer for Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August, R-Walworth, said, “It doesn’t look like something we’d consider a priority,” and a staffer for Senate Assistant Majority Leader Dan Feyen, R-Fond du Lac, said he was not available for comment.

Asked about the safety concerns people raised, a White House spokesperson said, “President Trump has vowed to defend women from gender ideology extremism and restore biological truth to the Federal government.”

Wisconsin’s law requires a transgender person to publish the details of their identity to change their name whether they are an adult or a child. The notice requirement makes no distinction based on age.

This is less privacy than the legal system typically affords young people, confirmed Cary Bloodworth, who directs a family law clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Bloodworth said both child welfare and juvenile courts tend to keep records confidential for a number of reasons, including that what happens in a person’s youth will follow them for a lifetime.

“I certainly think having a higher level of privacy for kids is a good thing,” Bloodworth said, adding that she thinks the publication requirement is unnecessary for people of any age.

A mom living near the Wisconsin-Illinois border whose 11-year-old daughter recently went through the name-change process said these proceedings should automatically be private for children.

“The fact that we still have to fight to get something as simple as a confidential name change for a minor who is obviously not running away from criminal or debt charges is just so frustrating and overwhelming,” she said.

The judge deciding their case seemed reluctant to grant confidentiality at first, questioning whether her daughter was being threatened physically, she said. The judge granted the confidential change. But the family remains shaken.

“We live just in constant terror of the wrong person finding out that we have an 11-year-old trans child,” she said. “All it takes is one wrong person getting that information, and what we could end up going through, becoming a target, is horrifying.”

Right before the pandemic, a teenager told her parents she was transgender. She spent much of that first year of her transition at home, attending virtual school like the rest of her peers in the Madison school district. She came out to only a few friends and wanted to keep her gender identity private, so she kept her camera off and skipped her high school graduation.

When she decided to legally change her name, the prospect of publicizing her transition terrified her, according to her mom.

“I explained to her that it’s in tiny, tiny print, and it’s in some page of the paper that no one is going to read,” her mom said. “But it felt to her like she was just standing out there in public with a ‘TRANS’ sign on her.”

While fewer people read physical newspapers these days, much of their content gets published online and is easily searchable. The court case, too, becomes a public record that is stored online and sometimes aggregated by other websites that show up at the top of search results.

The parents of the then-15-year-old boy who changed his name before getting his driver’s license discovered that happened to their son. When anyone — say, a prospective employer — searches the young man’s name, one of the first results shows his old name and outs him as trans.

“This is what somebody would use as their first judgment of him,” his mom said. “We certainly don’t want that to be something that people would use to rule him out for a job, or whatever it is he might be doing.”

Like many other states, Wisconsin does not have laws that ban discrimination against transgender people in credit and lending practices or in public spaces like stores, restaurants, parks, doctor’s offices and hotels. However, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, issued an executive order in 2019 banning transgender discrimination in state employment, contracting and public services.

After Trump took office again and began issuing executive orders attacking trans rights, the boy’s family started to investigate how they could retroactively seal the court records related to the name change. It wouldn’t change what was in the newspaper, but it could help them remove the online records. The court records also contain sensitive information like their home address that someone could use to harass them.

A friend who was a retired attorney helped their son craft an affidavit describing his experiences. His mom read from it during an interview. “‘Because of recent political events, I fear violence —’” she said before breaking off. “Oh God, I hate even reading this. ‘I fear violence, harassment, retribution because of my status as a transgender person.’”

Her son, who is now 18, shared a statement over email.

“At this moment in time I’m probably more scared about being a trans person than I ever have been before, with the public record if you have my first and last name you can easily find my deadname and therefore find out I’m trans,” he said. “I would love to say that I feel safe and valued in our society but unfortunately I can’t, at times I feel that my personhood is being stripped away under this government.”

Anne Daugherty-Leiter, who has guided transgender clients and their families through the name-change process as board president of Trans Law Help Wisconsin, said where a person lives in Wisconsin, and therefore what court they must petition, affects their likelihood of getting a confidential change.

Confidentiality is important, she said, because of how the state handles changes to birth certificates. Wisconsin birth certificates that are issued through a confidential name change show only the new name. But if a person has to announce their name change publicly, birth certificates are amended to list both the person’s old and new names. Any time the person has to use that document, at the DMV or while getting a loan, it outs them, she said.

Koechell, a trans man and LGBTQ+ activist, was unwilling to go through with the name-change process after being denied confidentiality by a judge late last year.

Koechell lives in Waukesha County, a Republican stronghold where multiple schools have enacted policies critics have called anti-LGBTQ+.

In a letter to the judge, Koechell wrote that people had sent him multiple threats and posted his family members’ addresses online, all for “being an advocate and being transgender openly in my community.”

“I do not want to publish my deadname for people to use against me,” he said in an interview, using a term common among transgender people to refer to their birth names. “I don’t see a reason why people who are not particularly fond of me wouldn’t show up at a hearing like that and try and cause trouble.”

Court records show the judge denied Koechell’s confidentiality request and his request to reconsider. The judge’s order referred to Koechell, a trans man with a masculine voice and beard, as “she” and “her.”

Koechell decided the public process wasn’t worth the risk. But it’s hard, he said, to move through life with his old identification.

“When I go to a new doctor or new appointment or something, then that’s the name on my chart, and then I get called that in a waiting room full of people, and it’s super uncomfortable. I just want to disappear,” Koechell said. “Then eventually, I have to correct the doctors, and I’m like, ‘Hey, just to let you know, I don’t go by that name. This is not who I am.’”

Data from the latest U.S. Transgender Survey found that 22% of people who had to show an ID that did not match their identity experienced some form of negative consequence, including verbal harassment, discrimination or physical violence.

If the U.S. Senate passes the SAVE Act, which would require voters to prove citizenship with a passport or birth certificate, those consequences could include disenfranchisement. Transgender people who can’t change the name on their birth certificate or passport would be ineligible to vote, according to the liberal think tank Center for American Progress.

U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican and chief sponsor of the bill, has said the legislation directs states to create a process for citizens with a “name discrepancy” to register. “No one will be unable to vote because of a name change,” he said.

After Trump won in November, Trace Schlax, a 40-year-old IT project manager, decided to expedite changing his gender marker on his passport, figuring he could update his name later in state court.

“It matters,” Schlax said. He loves to travel but has encountered extra scrutiny from airport security with outdated documents. “I get comments from TSA when I go through to travel domestically, about my hair, about how I look. I get extra pat-downs."

He sent his application in early December and crossed his fingers. He received it back in February, rejected. By that time, Trump had issued an executive order banning trans people from changing the gender markers on their passports.

Schlax decided to continue updating what records he could, like his birth certificate and driver’s license. He worries about having conflicting documents. Will he get accused of fraud? Will he have trouble flying?

But in the end, he decided it was still important to change his name and update his license to improve his day-to-day experience.

And he decided to go about it publicly. It felt less painful, he said, to accept the risks rather than detail his personal, traumatic experiences to a judge only to have them decide he hadn’t endured sufficient danger.

“Me changing my name and my gender marker affects absolutely no one but me,” said Schlax, who has a court date to change his name in late April. “Why does this have to be so hard? Why do I have to prove myself so hard?”

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch.

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On a Monday last month, after a conservative Maine legislator expressed outrage on Facebook about a transgender girl winning a high school pole vaulting event, the hammer of the federal government began to swing.

By Friday of that week, Feb. 21, President Donald Trump singled out Maine’s governor during a White House event and threatened to cut off the state’s federal funding. “See you in court,” Gov. Janet Mills shot back.

Then came a barrage of investigations and threats: The U.S. Department of Education opened inquiries into the Maine Department of Education and the student’s school district, alleging they had violated federal civil rights law. The same day, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services targeted the Maine Education Department, too, as well as the state’s university system.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture then launched an investigation into the university system; and on Tuesday, the university said the USDA had halted funding as the agency investigates “prospective” civil rights violations, records show.

The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter that “Maine should be on notice” that the agency was poised to sue. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration even pulled $4.5 million for marine research, but it didn’t touch the 33 other grantees who get similar funding.

Then last week, the Social Security Administration briefly became the sixth federal agency to target Maine, canceling contracts that allowed hospitals to automatically report births and funeral homes to report deaths.

Although the Social Security contracts were reinstated, and the state may reapply for the marine research funding, the moves had already wreaked havoc.

Now, more federal agencies are pressing down on Maine than there are transgender girls competing in girls’ sports in the state. Only two transgender girls are competing this school year, according to the Maine Principals’ Association.

“The president is trying to crush the opposition. He’s trying to crush Maine,” said David Webbert, a longtime civil rights attorney in Maine. To Webbert, it’s as if Trump is saying: “‘Maine believes in transgender rights? Well, you’re going to see what happens to you.’”

Some view Maine as a test case for how the Trump administration may try to force its policies on states, regardless of existing state laws. In public comments, residents have invoked the state’s motto to rally Mainers: “Dirigo,” Latin for “I lead.”

“It’s Maine now, but what state is it going to be next? This is not just a Maine issue, but Maine spoke up. So right now, it’s, ‘Let’s make an example out of Maine,’” said Kris Pitts, executive co-director of the nonprofit MaineTransNet.

State officials, thrust into the spotlight, have been trying to avoid becoming more of a target, carefully choosing their words and declining interviews with reporters. And Mills hasn’t challenged Trump again publicly on this issue.

There are signs the administration is preparing to force other states to follow the president’s directives: The DOJ recently sent letters to California and Minnesota threatening to sue those states if they don’t ban transgender girls from athletics.

The Trump administration also is taking a multiagency approach with Columbia University. On Friday, several federal agencies canceled a combined $400 million in grants and contracts because, the administration alleged, the university was not sufficiently combatting antisemitism.

The press release announcing the multimillion-dollar punishment contained a caution for noncompliant institutions: “Doing business with the Federal Government is a privilege.”

Nearly everything about the blitz of investigations in Maine, including how they’re being carried out, is not ordinary.

Federal agencies that don’t usually enforce civil rights laws in schools launched inquiries. HHS, for instance, usually focuses on health care access for people with disabilities or language translation, and there’s no evidence it’s conducted an investigation of Maine in the past 20 years.

Not only did it dive into Maine’s policies on transgender athletes, it reached a conclusion with unprecedented speed.

Investigations like this typically take months, if not years, according to a review of federal investigation data and records by ProPublica and the Bangor Daily News. But just one business day after announcing the investigation, the federal agency decided the Maine Department of Education wasn’t giving girls equal opportunities and had violated Title IX “by allowing male athletes to compete against female athletes,” according to a letter from HHS to the state.

It sent that finding to the general inbox at the Maine attorney general’s office after interviewing no one from that office, the Education Department, governor’s office or officials from two high schools cited in the letter for allowing transgender athletes to compete against girls, according to those agencies and schools.

The Maine attorney general’s office pointed out that the letter cited an incorrect sum of federal funding that flows to the state. Legal experts also viewed its interpretation of Title IX as problematic. Trump’s Feb. 5 “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order asserted that transgender girls can’t play girls’ sports under that federal law. But Title IX has never required schools to exclude them, and Trump’s order can’t rewrite federal law, said Deborah Brake, a professor at University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

“The president can put out an executive order saying anything he wants,” Brake said, but “there has never been a court decision interpreting Title IX to require the exclusion of transgender girls from girls’ sports.”

The president is trying to crush the opposition. He’s trying to crush Maine.

In a statement, the agency reiterated that Maine could lose federal funding if it didn’t comply with its position. “HHS will investigate and enforce Title IX to the full extent permitted by law to uphold fairness, safety, dignity, and biological truth in women’s and girls’ educational athletic opportunities. Men have no place in women’s sports,” it said.

The USDA investigation of the University of Maine, launched on a Saturday, the day after Mills’ exchange with Trump, also is unusual. In announcing the investigation, the department said $100 million to the university was at risk because of the state’s “blatant disregard” of Trump’s order; a university system spokesperson said that amount reflected multiple years of funding.

Then came a series of questions, according to records obtained by the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica. At 10:50 a.m. the following Tuesday, a USDA official sent a University of Maine official 10 yes-or-no questions about its transgender athlete policies — and gave her 1 hour, 10 minutes to respond. The officials agreed to discuss the questions over a Zoom call, and, about five hours after that call, the USDA sent a list of follow-up questions. The agency wanted those answers by 1 p.m. the following day.

Sherron Jernigan, a USDA civil rights director for the animal and plant inspection service, sent the questions:

“Does the University of Maine System provide sex-separated toilet, locker room, and shower facilities for male student athletes and female student athletes?” The university answered “yes.”

“Does the University of Maine System permit a biological male to participate in individual or team contact sports with biological females?” The university answered “no.”

The university’s Title IX coordinator told the USDA that none of the seven universities within the system has transgender athletes participating in NCAA-sanctioned sports. (Of the more than 500,000 students who compete on NCAA teams across the country, fewer than 10 are transgender, the league’s president recently told a U.S. Senate panel.)

In her response to follow-up questions, Liz Lavoie, the university’s Title IX coordinator, added that the USDA had not given the university “any explanation as to the basis or scope of its inquiry, or the steps in the process.”

“Further, we have been given mere hours to respond to both sets of questions and we are responding in good faith but find the approach concerning given the lack of official service and the informal nature that the questions and interview have been presented,” Lavoie wrote.

The USDA did not issue any findings after the questioning, but the agency already is taking action. On Tuesday, the university said the USDA had frozen funding that could affect research on everything from the contamination of Maine farms by forever chemicals to the sustainability of Maine’s lobster industry. Last fiscal year, the USDA awarded nearly $30 million to the University of Maine.

A USDA spokesperson said the agency would not comment on a pending investigation.

Webbert, the civil rights attorney, called the federal government’s inquiries “a show.”

“It’s a political move dressed up, very barely, with a legal process, but it’s a fake legal process. So it is very concerning because they’re not even trying to make it look like it’s due process,” he said. “It reeks of pure politics.”

Doing business with the Federal Government is a privilege.

The federal government has made no effort to hide the ideological perspective that its various inquiries are seeking to enforce in Maine and the rest of the county, according to documents obtained by ProPublica and the Bangor Daily News. In announcing its action in Maine, HHS said it wanted to “restore biological truth to the federal government” and in its findings cited an article from OutKick, a Fox-owned conservative news site with a mission of “exposing the destructive nature of ‘woke’ activism.”

Meanwhile, the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education — which does have a mandate to investigate gender-based discrimination in schools and, with more than 500 people, dwarfs most of the nation’s civil rights enforcement divisions — seemed to conclude that Maine was violating Title IX before it finished investigating.

The press release announcing the launch of the investigation quoted the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor: “It is shameful that Governor Mills refuses to stand with women and girls. Her rejection of the antidiscrimination obligations that Maine voluntarily accepted when it agreed to receive federal taxpayer dollars is unlawful.”

Trainor linked to “credible local reporting” around the pole vaulter in his letter to Maine officials announcing the civil rights investigation. The report came from the Maine Wire, an online outlet founded by a conservative think tank based in the state. The office hasn’t made contact with Maine since it notified state agencies of its investigation, according to the Maine agencies.

The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Maine’s governor never believed her state would receive an impartial investigation. “I imagine that the outcome of this politically directed investigation is all but predetermined,” Mills said in a statement after the Education Department investigation began. She has since declined to discuss her view of Maine’s transgender athlete policy.

But she has reiterated that Trump legally can’t force the state to violate its own law, the Maine Human Rights Act, which prevents discrimination based on gender identity.

Mainers aren’t sure what this full-court press will mean for their state; keeping up with it is hard enough. State Sen. Joe Rafferty, a Democrat who co-chairs the Legislature’s committee on education and cultural affairs, expressed disbelief when a reporter informed him that HHS’ investigation only lasted four days. He wasn’t aware it had officially started.

“That is why I think part of this is a mirage,” he said of the various investigations. The eventual resolution, he said, is more likely to be settled in a courtroom.

Indeed, HHS referred its finding to the DOJ, which can sue Maine to remove its federal funding. (The health agency also expanded its investigation last week to include the Maine Principals’ Association and the Maine high school where the pole vaulter is a student, according to the agency.) The results of that lawsuit could have significant implications, said Brake, the law professor. Not once since Congress enacted Title IX in 1972 has the DOJ ever cut off funding for a violation.

All the federal attention has been unsettling to some Mainers, welcomed by others who don’t want transgender girls playing girls’ sports and disruptive to the 625-student Greely High School, which the transgender pole vaulter attends.

“It’s just upsetting to everybody at school to be the center of attention and focus. It’s unnerving to go to school and the school is surrounded by police and reporters on every corner,” Gia Drew, who leads a statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy group called EqualityMaine, said of what she’s hearing from the community. “It’s hard to focus on a calculus test when your friends are under attack. It affects not just trans people but everyone who is part of a school system.”

After state Rep. Laurel Libby, a Republican from Auburn, singled out the student on her Facebook page and brought Trump’s attention to Maine, parents in the school district planned to show support by displaying signs and handing out treats before classes began, said state Rep. Christina Mitchell, a Democrat who represents Cumberland, home to Greely High School. She’s also a school board member in the district.

But there were television trucks and a police presence surrounding the school, so parents decided not to add to the commotion.

The Bangor Daily News and ProPublica reached out to the family of the student athlete but received no response. Mitchell said other students, including the transgender student’s teammates and competitors, are supportive of her. “Nobody was making a fuss,” she said.

And many in Maine don’t want a fuss. Even as Mills’ response to Trump made some proud — you can now buy “See you in court” T-shirts — others recognized that it launched Maine into the nation’s consciousness. “You watch it and feel like: ‘Oh, all eyes will be here. This will be something big,’” said Pitts, with MaineTransNet.

Libby and other Republican lawmakers have welcomed the chance to amplify their viewpoint that allowing transgender girls in sports is unsafe and discriminates against girls. Another Republican lawmaker introduced a bill to the Legislature to require transgender athletes to compete on teams matching the gender they were assigned at birth.

“All of the accomplishments of women over the years are being erased by men masquerading as women, erasing us from the history books,” Libby said in a weekly address from Maine House Republicans.

While Libby has been censured by Democrats who control the Maine House for her initial Facebook post about the pole vaulter, she has continued to make appearances on right-wing media to urge the governor to stop supporting the right of transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports. On Tuesday, she filed a lawsuit in Maine District Court against the state’s House speaker over the censure, accusing him of stripping her voting rights “in retaliation for protected speech on a highly important and hotly debated matter of public concern,” according to the complaint. Her party has rallied around her and her cause.

“Allowing biological boys to compete with our girls, is not only unpopular, and unfair, but it is also illegal,” Republican House Minority Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham of Winter Harbor said in a written statement. “Governor Mills should abandon this indefensible position and uphold Title IX protections for our girls.”

Maine institutions being targeted by the federal government have continued to follow state law. And at a regularly scheduled school board meeting at Greely High School on Thursday night, the board president pledged the district’s “unwavering support” of all students.

Mitchell said that Maine may be the federal government’s target now, but other states could be next.

“I think you have to stand up to it. Whatever you think is right, you have to stand up for it, because, if you don’t, it’ll just keep going and spread to other places,” Mitchell said. “We’re a small state, but if you give an inch, you know?”

Eli Hager contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

if you've understandably been under a rock, know that our great leader just hurled a long weird bilious speech to what's left of Congress. He vowed to forge "the freest (and) most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of this earth” by lying about everything, making up amazing achievements and reviling Democrats, veterans, migrants, workers, Canada, Mexico, health care, safety nets, Stacey Abrams and a woke government that spent $8 million "making mice transgender." "This is real," he said. Uh huh.

During the Fuehrer's hallucinatory litany of boasts, shams and grievances - after modestly declaring he was "saved by God to make America great again" - the lies came fast and inane. He lied about migrants, "asylums," autism, Panama, tariffs, Jan. 6, military recruitment, dead 100-year-olds getting Social Security, the price of eggs, the "Green New Scam," "weaponized government," "illegal alien hotel rooms," the "billions" DOGE is illegally "saving" that's likely millions, along with its devastation. No more "waste fraud and abuse - the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over." Dems: "LOL." Biden "didn't just open our borders, he flew illegal aliens over them" until "beautiful" Aurora and Springfield "buckled under the weight of migrant occupation "LIKE NOBODYS EVER SEEN." But now he is ushering in "the great liberation of America." Behind him, two smarmy, smirking, Christo-fascist ghouls ate it up. Before him, a gilded room of lickspittles cheered, stood, shouted in grateful excitement. Natalie Portman in Revenge of the Sith: "So this is how liberty dies...with thunderous applause."

Still, little King Donnie had sads: Seeing mean Democrats before him, he realized there is "nothing I can say to make (them) smile or applaud these astronomical achievements." Instead, they sought an apt response to the horror. Many didn't attend; some wore pink in solidarity, held signs that read "False" and "Musk Steals"; New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury stood holding a sign that read, “This Is Not Normal” until some GOP creep ripped it from her hands and tore it up. Several Dems turned their backs and/or walked out, backs of shirts reading, "No Kings Live Here." Asked what she'd say to Trump, Jasmine Crockett suggested, "Stop being Putin’s ho." Most visibly, Texas Rep. Al Green, who "understood the assignment," shook his furious cane and yelled "No Mandate" until he was forcibly removed - exquisitely just as Trump brayed he'd restored free speech, thank God almighty, free at last. The world, aghast, took note: A French Senator said, "Washington has become Nero’s court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers... We are at war with a dictator backed by a traitor."

Tariffs, one of his fave words, often came up in connection with the fictional "trillions and trillions" they'll bring in - from China, Brazil, India, the EU, everyone - "making America rich again and great again - it's happening." Also, of course, stocks are plunging, a "little disturbance" the six-time-bankrupted financial wizard is "ok with" as we the paycheck-to-paycheck people ride it out. "The stock market is crashing and prices are rising,' said Rep. Eric Swalwell for the win. "This guy has gone to the Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, and a UFC fight. He should go to the fucking supermarket and see what people are spending to feed themselves." Right behind tariffs in the MAGA popularity hierarchy came othering - migrants, DEI, transgender- with his sacred vow, "Our country will be ‘woke’ no longer." Whew. No more Mom For Liberty lawsuits (dismissed) charging her kid's school “secretly socially transitioned" her child. And the kicker - thank you Jesus! - no more $8 million in taxpayers' money spent by woke feds "making mice transgender and other gender-bending social experiments."

To be clear: We suspect that transgender mice are really, ultimately why Al Gore invented an unforgiving, unforgetting, occasionally insanely entertaining Internet. Why else would we need it? (Besides dog videos). So welcome, bienvenue to the giddy meme fest that exploded after Trump spewed out his delicious new fever dream about woke battalions of scientists creating teams of secret boy mice playing soccer against teams of unknowing girl mice and always winning which is so unfair, much like Jack Smith, so no wonder the American Empire is crumbling. But even after a day of extensive punditry and analysis and speculation, still nobody has any fucking clue what Mr. Dementia-Combined-With-Idiocy is talking about. Some think he's been hearing about (not reading) some of the frenzied, paranoid ramblings of right-wing media about scientists working overtime to create a Woke/Trans/ Brave New World. Or maybe he caught a phobic itch from Nancy Mace's bathroom trans hysteria, or a February hearing exploring the hysteria...sorry, concerns.

Some suggest he confused three NIH projects - total cost $477,121 - administering female homones to monkeys to study its effect on immune systems after research showed trans women are 50 times more likely to get HIV. Or similar experiments on mice by the University of Pennsylvania's Transgenic and Chimeric Mouse Facility to test effects of hormone therapy on breast cancer, fertility, asthma, bone health, reproduction and endocrine systems. Or mixing up transgender with transgenic, what you get when researchers inject foreign DNA into lab animals to see how their cells mutate, much like humans infected with cancer and other diseases. Or he's such a bigot every time he sees trans at the start of a word his first impulse is to demonize. Whatever: There are no sex-change operations on mice. "The very notion of a "transgender mouse" is completely ridiculous," notes Dr. Jeremy Faust. "Mice can't tell you their gender. They don't know their pronouns. They are mice." Bottom line: "We want to fund science, not cut it. Trump and his allies don’t seem to have any idea what science is or why it matters."

Meanwhile, the fallout and chaos goes on. Though Trump blathered about America's "warriors who shed their blood on fields of battle," DOGE wants to cut up to 80,000 employees from Veterans Affairs; one furious lawmaker/veteran: "I don't ever want to hear 'thank you for your service' from that draft-dodging coward again." He's already backtracking on his "very dumb trade war," with a proposed exemption for U.S. automakers and a bizarre pivot trying to make it into a drug war. He's facing at least 96 lawsuits - from farmers, Quakers, immigrants, Alaska USAID, FBI agents - and the DOJ is running out of lawyers to take them. He's already losing court cases - he's been ordered to reinstate 6,000 USDA workers, and even SCOTUS just ruled against him, saying he can't freeze USAID payments. The UK hates his "vile" VP, deeming him a clown, dunce, knob, and little man deserving of "a smack in the ear," and Hamilton is the latest show to cancel at the Kennedy Center because "he took away our national arts center from all of us" and nobody wants to go to his fucking fascist party.

Or, evidently, hear him blather on for almost two hours. Polls showed viewership hit a record low, compared to both other presidents' SOTU speeches from the last two decades and even his own previous blatherings. The next day, somewhat defensively - we know Trump hates being laughed at more than almost anything, even trans or black people - the White House issued a press release angrily refuting "the Fake News losers at CNN" who dared to fact check any of his 7,628 lies, especially the infamous transgender mice one. "Yes, Biden Spent Millions On Transgender Animal Experiments," they shouted from their alternative-reality bubble, listing fragments of financial reports packed with medical terms they zoomed right past to conclude - big leap here - "President Trump was right (as usual)." Good try, but many were unconvinced. "White House Scared of Trans Mouse," ran a headline. "I support the 149-year-old transgender mice in their fight against Trump," declared one loyal netizen.From another, "I found the transgender mouse they spent $8 million on. And she's fabulous."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

President Trump has signed a number of anti-trans executive orders in the first month of his second term. He has attempted to ban trans women from sports, declared that there are only two sexes, and placed restrictions on gender-affirming care for trans youth. Trump continues to target trans people with hateful rhetoric, leaving trans people uncertain of their futures. “The Trump administration has declared war on trans people,” Imara Jones, founder and CEO of TransLash Media and host of its investigative podcast, The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, tells Democracy Now!

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The most recent episode of this in my life came when a friend read the chapter in my new book about the trans debate and told me that I was advocating “a mistaken position of ‘biological essentialism,’ that biological sex is absolute,” and denying the “evidence of ‘gender as a spectrum.’”

It’s common in these debates for people to use the terms sex (a matter of biology) and gender (a matter of social norms) in confused and confusing ways. More on that later. Let’s start with the comment about essentialism, which many people assume to be a very bad thing, even if they don’t define it clearly.

Here’s how I have been writing about this for the past decade, since my first article on transgenderism:

There are two human sexes, along with a very small percentage of people born intersex, with what are now called DSDs (differences of sexual development). Human reproduction requires male and female gametes, sperm and ova. Gamete size (sperm are small, ova are big) is a coherent marker of one’s role in reproduction, and hence of one’s sex. When it comes to reproduction there is no third sex, nor is sex on a spectrum. If that’s essentialism, then basic biology is essentialist.

Discussion of gender takes us out of biology and into the many different ways that societies have developed norms and roles for male and female, creating expectations and/or demands for behavior based on definitions of masculinity and femininity.

That all seems pretty clear to me, but not to everyone. So, let me try an analogy to age.

I am 66 years old, and I am unambiguously male. I was born in July 1958, and I do not have a DSD condition.

Neither of those statements is essentialist. They are descriptions of observable realities, using objective categories (years since my birth, and my potential role in human reproduction). I will never be younger than I am today, and I will never produce ova nor have the physiology that makes bearing a child possible. (Yes, I know that not all females can or will bear children, but at issue is the way male and female physiology determine one’s potential role.)

Essentializing age or sex involves assertions that certain activities are inappropriate or impossible for me because of my age or sex. For example, someone telling me “you can’t lift that heavy box because you are too old” would be invoking age essentialism. I may not be able to lift the box, but that would be a question of my strength, which can’t be read directly from my age. Someone telling me “you shouldn’t take care of infants because men can’t be nurturing” would be invoking sex essentialism. I may not be good with infants, but that would be a question of my temperament, which can’t be read directly from my sex.

When people make assumptions about capacities based solely on age, we call it ageism. When people make assumptions about capacities based solely on sex, we call it sexism.

Sexist claims about the alleged limitations and deficiencies of women, long used by men to keep women subordinated to male needs and desires, are so common that feminists coined the term gender to distinguish social norms from biology. Sex is a stable biological category, and gender is a social category that varies depending on time and place.

A few obvious points about this analogy: Sex is a binary, male or female, with a very small rate of anomalies described as DSDs, while age is a continuous variable with an upper limit somewhere beyond 100 (the oldest known person to date died at 122). Depending on time and place, there are various stereotypes for different ages, just as there are various stereotypes for male and female, but there is no analogous term for gender in descriptions of age that I’m aware of.

An important caveat: This analysis does not deny that the differences between young and old or male and female sometimes can be relevant.

At 66, I cannot do strenuous physical labor for as long as I could when I was 16. The physical realities of aging mean that I have less stamina. Many capacities, such as memory, change over time, though not in ways that can be predicted in every individual. But patterns can be identified. One could describe the average loss of stamina and changes in memory retrieval in people as they age, though individual capacities will vary.

As a male, there are obvious things I do not have the capacity to do, including menstruation, gestation of a fetus, and lactation to feed an infant. That is not controversial (or shouldn’t be). But what of other possible patterns of difference between male and female that are not so obvious?

The physiological differences in reproductive organs and hormones between male and female bodies are not trivial—reproduction is central to any organism—which raises a reasonable question: Given the obvious differences, could there also be discernable differences in intellectual, psychological, or moral attributes between male and female humans that are attributable to biology? That is, could male and female humans think, feel, or make judgments differently not just because of socialization but because of physiological differences? Is there a pattern in these human traits that would allow us to say that, on average, male and female humans are likely to differ in ways that are relevant to how we organize a society? These questions are about patterns and averages; there’s no reason to think that every male would differ from every female in the same ways.

Most advocates of patriarchy (that is, institutionalized male dominance) assume that those differences are significant, which conveniently leads to such conclusions as men are “natural” leaders because they have various traits and abilities (perhaps certain types of intelligence and greater assertiveness) that women lack. Feminists reject those patriarchal claims but vary on the underlying question—some reject the possibility of any differences beyond reproduction and basic physiology, while some are open to the question.

I’m open to the question, but I don’t think we have the research tools that allow us to make definitive assessments about intellectual, psychological, or moral differences between males and females. These are interesting and relevant questions but that doesn’t mean we have the capacity to answer them. Given thousands of years of institutionalized male dominance, we should be careful not to assume such differences always exist, but it is plausible that they might. It is neither sexist nor essentialist to wonder about the question.

Whatever one thinks of my analysis here, nothing I have argued is essentialist, unless acknowledging basic biology is essentialism. Accepting biology is crucial not only to bring greater clarity to the political debate but also to help us improve the treatment of people who experience gender dysphoria. A postmodern-inflected rejection of basic biology doesn’t help anyone deal successfully with that emotional distress.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Jensen.

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The U.S. Department of Education told employees late Friday that it will end all programs, contracts and policies that “fail to affirm the reality of biological sex,” carrying out President Donald Trump’s vow to restrict transgender rights.

The broad language in the email did not specify which programs or policies would be impacted, or how many schools or students might be affected. But the order appears designed to target programs that in recent years supported transgender students — school-based mental health services and support for homeless students, for example.

“These corrective measures will include thorough review and subsequent termination of Departmental programs, contracts, policies, outward-facing media, regulations, and internal practices,” according to the email sent to department employees and obtained by ProPublica.

A spokesperson for the Education Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The email, which was unsigned and sent from “ED Internal Communications,” also takes aim at employee programs at the Education Department. Employees across the federal government already have been instructed to remove preferred pronouns from their email signatures.

“Employee resource groups that promote gender ideology and do not affirm the reality of biological sex cannot meet on government property or take place during official work hours,” the email said.

It’s not clear what resource groups the email is referencing or whether they exist.

The Trump administration has curbed transgender rights in other federal agencies; it has barred transgender people from serving in the military, reinstating a policy from Trump’s first term, and in federal prisons it has tried to move transgender women to male facilities, an effort a judge has blocked.

The sweeping directive outlined in Friday’s Education Department email follows two recent executive orders targeting “gender ideology.” The first, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” ordered federal agencies to scrub references to transgender people from documents, rules and policies. The department appears to have complied with the order by, for example, removing resources like tips for schools on how to support homeless LGBTQ+ youth.

Another executive order issued this week, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” barred transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports at school. The Education Department on Thursday announced investigations into two universities and an athletic association related to transgender athletes and the institutions’ alleged violations of Title IX, a federal law that is part of the Civil Rights Act and prohibits sex-based discrimination in education. The same day, the NCAA reacted by barring athletes who were identified as male at birth from playing women’s sports.

The email sent to employees Friday afternoon stated: “The deliberate subjugation of women and girls by means of gender ideology — whether in intimate spaces, weaponized language, or American classrooms — negated the civil rights of biological females and fostered distrust of our federal institutions.”

Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, is still awaiting confirmation.

She is co-founder with her husband of World Wrestling Entertainment and chair of the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit that has campaigned against transgender rights in schools.

Even without McMahon, like-minded colleagues already are working in the department, including several staff members from her conservative think tank. The bio of newly appointed Deputy General Counsel Candice Jackson, for instance, touts her experience “challenging the harmful effects of the concept of ‘gender identity’ in laws and policies in schools.”

Schools have experienced whiplash in recent years as presidents imposed — and then removed — protections for transgender youth.

Under President Barack Obama in 2016, the department issued guidance to schools that the federal Title IX law protects the right of transgender students to use restrooms and locker rooms at school that match their gender identities.

Schools “must not treat a transgender student differently from the way it treats other students of the same gender identity,” the letter said.

Trump rescinded that guidance after he came into office in 2017, though the letter remained on the Education Department’s website. The Biden administration took the position in 2021 that transgender students deserved protection from discrimination under Title IX and publicized resources for schools and the LGBTQ+ students they serve.

Now that Trump is back in office again, many of those resource documents appear to have been wiped off the department’s website.

“President Trump is being the bully-in-chief. This administration wants to outlaw kindness and common decency in schools and make it illegal for teachers to call their students by the name they want to be called,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the executive director of Advocates for Trans Equality, in a statement about the administration’s “Defending Women” executive order.

Trump’s vision in his second administration includes dismantling the Education Department altogether. It’s unclear if there’s a legal pathway to do so, but already the administration has placed more than 50 department employees on administrative leave who appear to be associated with diversity, equity or inclusion efforts.

Concerns have mounted at the Education Department all week. Members of Elon Musk’s team reportedly have accessed sensitive department data, and some members of Congress went to department headquarters to question the team but were denied access. Responding to the social media posts of one representative who was blocked from the building, Musk posted on X: “No such department exists in the federal government.”

We are continuing to report on the U.S. Department of Education. Are you a former or current Education Department employee? Are you a student or school employee impacted by changes at the department? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201. Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen.

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The post Democratic bill aims to stop Trump-Musk power grab; AG Bonta acts to protect transgender and undocumented students from Trump executive orders – February 4, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

• Supreme Court weighs constitutionality of Tennessee’s ban on gender affirming care for minors.
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• San Diego nurse claims she was fired for her pro-Palestinian activism.

The post SCOTUS weighs challenge to Tennessee’s ban on transgender health care for minors; California AG vows to protect immigrants against Trump’s pledge for ‘mass deportations’ – December 4, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

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After a federal appeals court ruled this week that transgender people are legally entitled to the same access to medically necessary health care as everyone else, the immediate reaction of the states of North Carolina and West Virginia was to vow to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The immediate reaction of Hann Henson, an employee of a North Carolina school district who’d spent years struggling to access gender-affirming care, was to break into tears. Last year, ProPublica wrote about his tumultuous journey seeking medical support in his gender transition while living in a state with a long history of discrimination against transgender people.

“Having something that you know is going to help you feel better, is going to help you feel whole, and having it constantly dangled above your head is just dehumanizing,” he said.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Virginia, ruled that the two states violated federal law by banning coverage of certain treatments for transgender people but allowing it for others. These cases were the first of their kind to reach a federal appeals court and the decision could influence states and courts in other parts of the country.

For years, transgender people have argued in court that the North Carolina state employee health plan and West Virginia Medicaid program discriminated against them by refusing to cover certain treatments when they are prescribed for transgender people. The court’s majority agreed with this argument, in line with previous district court rulings, highlighting that West Virginia’s Medicaid program “covers mastectomies to treat cancer, but not to treat gender dysphoria.”

Henson found out about the lawsuit in 2022 soon after he started his job as a communications specialist for a North Carolina school district. He realized he was sprinting against a clock, with the state under a court order to cover gender-affirming care while the legal fight was underway. He scheduled what he hoped would be his last major surgery for November 2023, two months after the appeals court heard oral arguments on the case.

But as he got closer to the date, he realized he had to delay the surgery due to a stomach ulcer. He said the looming court decision was all he could think about for months. He even considered trying to go ahead with the procedure despite his poor health. He finally got the surgery in late March.

Dale Folwell, the state treasurer and a named defendant, used the lawsuit in his campaign for governor. (He lost the Republican primary in March.) He maintained in interviews and court documents that the state health plan should have the authority to determine which employee benefits are covered. He reiterated those comments in a statement this week: “Untethered to the reality of the Plan’s fiscal situation, the majority opinion opens the way for any dissatisfied individual to override the Plan’s reasoned and responsible decisions and drive the Plan towards collapse.”

Henson will need a follow-up surgery in five months, a common part of the process. He said he now feels a sense of relief knowing the appeals court decision ensures that he likely won’t lose access to his care at a critical time. But he worries about other transgender people seeking services and imagines them refreshing a court website compulsively just like he did.

For now, the ruling protects access to gender-affirming care for transgender people on both states’ health plans. The decision would apply to any federal court cases brought in other states in the 4th Circuit: South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland. The 11th Circuit is currently considering two similar cases out of Georgia and Florida.

All the active judges on the court heard oral arguments in the case in September. In their ruling Monday, eight of the 14, almost all of whom were appointed by Democratic presidents, ruled in favor of the transgender plaintiffs. “In addition to discriminating on the basis of gender identity, the exclusions discriminate on the basis of sex,” wrote Judge Roger Gregory, who was initially appointed by President Bill Clinton and confirmed under the George W. Bush administration.

The states argued that gender-affirming care cost too much and was medically ineffective, so they were justified in not covering it. The court’s majority opinion dismissed both arguments as lacking support. Evidence shows covering the care would likely cost states very little, and major medical associations support broad access to gender-affirming care, citing evidence that prohibiting it can harm transgender people’s mental and physical health.

The judges who signed the three dissenting opinions were all appointed by Republican presidents. “In the majority’s haste to champion plaintiffs’ cause, today’s result oversteps the bounds of the law,” Judge Julius Richardson, a President Donald Trump appointee, wrote in the principal dissent. “The majority asserts that the challenged exclusions use medical diagnosis as a proxy for transgender persons, despite the complete lack of evidence for this claim.”

North Carolina and West Virginia are planning to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to press releases from each state. “We are confident in the merits of our case: that this is a flawed decision and states have wide discretion to determine what procedures their programs can cover based on cost and other concerns,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a statement.

It remains to be seen how and whether other states and insurance companies with restrictive policies for covering gender-affirming care will act in response to the opinion.

“It should serve as a cautionary tale not just to states that implement state health plans and Medicaid programs but also to private insurers,” said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan with Lambda Legal, which represented the transgender plaintiffs in North Carolina and West Virginia. “I would hope that this serves as a determining factor in the adoption of any bad policies as an inspiration to get rid of policies that currently exist.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Aliyya Swaby.

The post Transgender Students Are Unprotected in School appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Lai, who is also known as Xiran, was hauled in for questioning while transiting Hong Kong International Airport en route from Shanghai to Toronto in May 2023, and later handed a 15-month jail term for "forging" her travel documents at a secret trial with no lawyer present, according to her supporters.

As is Hong Kong's policy for trans inmates, she served her sentence at the Siu Lam Psychiatric Centre, a psychiatric detention center, and was released early for good behavior on March 2.

But instead of being released, Lai was immediately transferred to the Castle Peak Bay Immigration Detention Centre, sparking fears among her supporters and rights groups that she will be sent back to China, according to the X account @FreeLaiKe.

If she is forcibly repatriated, Lai will be "at grave risk of persecution," Amnesty International has warned.

"The Hong Kong authorities must urgently clarify Lai Ke’s pending immigration status," Amnesty International's China Director Sarah Brooks said in a statement dated March 1. "As she is due to be released after serving her sentence, authorities must free her without conditions and allow her to travel onwards to a destination feasible for her."

"In any event, the authorities must allow Lai Ke to legally challenge any deportation order following her release after serving her sentence," Brooks said.

Mistreated in detention

Lai’s supporters say that she had been a vocal advocate for trans rights back in China alongside her partner Cai Xia, who was detained by the Chinese authorities in June 2023 in connection with her activism and her transgender identity, and accused of "organizing obscene activities."

The Lai Ke (Xiran) Global Concern Group, which has been actively posting about her situation on Twitter and Instagram, said Lai had also been mistreated while in detention in Hong Kong, saying guards deprived her of her hormone medication, put her in solitary for a week calling her an "alien," and forced her to cut her hair short.

The group said Lai had suffered physically and psychologically after being deprived of her hormone replacement therapy for two months, despite having the medication in her luggage. 

"Throughout her detention, Lai Ke repeatedly requested access to hormone medication, only to have these requests denied on various pretexts," it said in a statement dated Feb. 27.

"As a result, Lai Ke was forced to cease hormone replacement therapy medication for nearly two months, leading to severe physical and psychological repercussions, including instances of self-harm," it said.

Her parents weren't informed of her whereabouts until July 19, 2023, and the authorities initially claimed that there was no record of Lai having entered Hong Kong, the group claimed in the statement, which RFA was unable to verify independently.

It accused the Hong Kong authorities of "complicity" in the Chinese government's persecution of trans people.

The group also posted a letter handwritten by Lai in classical Chinese, an archaic form of the written language used by premodern writers, in which she complains about her treatment.

It said earlier attempts by Lai to write about her experiences in the detention center were censored by detention center authorities.

'Time is of the essence'

According to Amnesty International, Lai is vulnerable to repatriation under Hong Kong immigration law, because she isn't a resident of the city.

“Time is of the essence to prevent Lai Ke from being unlawfully deported to mainland China, where she would be at grave risk of serious human rights violations – including arbitrary detention, unfair trial, and even torture and other ill-treatment – due to both her transgender identity and her activism,” Brooks said.  

“To return her given these risks would be an abandonment of Hong Kong’s obligations under international law," she said.

Amnesty International said it has documented systematic oppression and discrimination of transgender people in China, as well as large-scale censorship in recent years leading to the closure of online lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex groups and social media accounts.

It said police in China have repeatedly arrested, detained and imprisoned human rights defenders of all kinds using "unjustified, broadly defined and vaguely worded charges."

Hong Kong Catholic priest and rights activist Franco Mella said that trans inmates are typically held in Siu Lam Psychiatric Centre, but that the final decision over whether to continue hormone treatment lies with the center's doctor.

"Any medications need to be discussed with the doctor -- who can approve them but can also not approve them," Mella said. "It's the doctor's decision."

He said it was unclear how long Lai might be held at the Castle Peak detention center.

"Once you go in there, there's no way of knowing when you'll be released," he said.

Crackdowns on LGBTQ+ community

LGBTQ+ activism is all but extinct in China, where the ruling Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has cracked down on anyone displaying the rainbow flag in public, members of China's LGBTQ+ community told Radio Free Asia in interviews in January.

In August 2023, Chinese officials removed an LGBTQ+ anthem titled "Rainbow" by Taiwanese pop star A-Mei from her set list from a concert earlier this month in Beijing, while security guards forced fans turning up for the gig to remove clothing and other paraphernalia bearing the rainbow symbol before going in, according to media reports.

A month after that crackdown, authorities in the central Chinese city of Changsha removed the song "Womxnly" – which commemorates a Taiwanese teenager who was found dead in a school toilet after being bullied by classmates for his "feminine" appearance – from the set list of Taiwanese pop star Jolin Tsai, after it became an anthem for the island's lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual and questioning community.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chi Chun Lee for RFA Cantonese.

The following is a statement from Transgender Law Center’s Executive Director Shelby Chestnut:

The reckless ruling today in 303 Creative reminds us of the importance of building and leaning on community in moments of immense difficulty - today we are in solidarity with our family, chosen family, friends, co-workers, and the vast majority of people in this country who believe all of us deserve dignity and respect. No exceptions.

The history of this country, specifically the moments that have inspired movements and ignited hope, remind us that when businesses feel like they can deny goods and services based on the color of our skin, who we love, where we were born, there have always been people who fought back. No matter our race, genders, who we love, the money in our pocket, we are better together, and we are better when all of us live in a world that is created around our highest values, not fear or hatred.

This decision will have immediate consequences, especially given the actions divisive politicians have taken across the country to control us and put us in boxes by denying us access to medical care, abortions, and access to a robust public education system that teaches the full history of this country.

It is not surprising that as some politicians try to further separate us from the lessons of the past by attempting to control what we learn in school, SCOTUS attempts to erase race conscious admissions to higher education. They are trying to erase the history of shared struggle that has pushed lawmakers and the courts to inscribe in law our values of dignity and respect for all. We will not forget how we have fought together in the past and won and are in solidarity with students, both in K-12 and higher education, because we all belong. Our responsibility is to ensure the laws in this country catch up to what we know is true: the future belongs to us.

Our history demands that we remember that divisions upheld in the highest courts will be challenged in the streets, during elections, in schools, everywhere people are able to gather and talk about what and who represents them and what and who does not.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

This story is part of a series that explores how school board meetings across the country are fomenting conflicts and controversies that have led to violence and arrests. Are you interested in a virtual event on this topic? Let us know here.

An image of a shooting target — with two bullet holes to the head and five scattered around the chest — serves as a warning to visitors who climb the brick steps and pass the American flag to reach Eric Jensen’s front door.

“If you can read this you’re in range,” the sign says. Another warning, posted near the doorbell, states: “No Solicitation. … This property charges $50 per minute to listen to any vaccine/medical advice.” He ordered that one in 2021, after mobile units offering COVID-19 vaccines began riding through his community outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

For years, Jensen had been looking for a way to voice his many grievances, related not just to masks and vaccines but to “transgender bullshit” and library books “trying to convert kids to gay” and other perceived dangers he says his five younger children face in the public school system. (The 65-year-old retiree has four other children who are adults.) Then he found a place where he could finally be heard.

“You gotta start from the bottom and work yourself up,” Jensen said, not long after he reluctantly opened his front door last November. “I mean, you can’t just go to your governors and try to make a difference. So you start at the bottom, and the bottom is school boards.”

He had intended to wage a campaign against the school board to bring about change. Instead, his efforts got him arrested.

At first he was hesitant to talk about what happened in the lead-up to the February 2022 incident. In the weeks after the arrest, he didn’t comment in any of the news stories that covered it.

Then, as the months wore on and his charges were dropped, he realized that standing up to authorities wasn’t going to lead to any sort of punishment: “I thought, ‘Holy shit, I didn’t have to go through a whole lot of aggravation there.’” He said that, walking away from the ordeal, he felt emboldened.

ProPublica identified 59 people arrested or charged over an 18-month period as a result of turmoil at school board meetings across the country. In the coming weeks, ProPublica will continue to publish stories about how that unrest has played out in various communities and upended once-staid school board meetings.

In the dozens of incidents ProPublica examined, some of which involved threats and violence, only one person who disrupted a meeting was given a jail sentence: a college student protesting in support of transgender rights. By contrast, almost all of the other individuals, including Jensen, railed against the adoption of mask mandates, the teaching of “divisive concepts” concerning racial inequality and the availability of books with LGBTQ+ themes in school libraries. Also like Jensen, the vast majority of people arrested or charged faced few consequences.

Jensen didn’t come up with the idea to target the school board on his own. He’d volunteered to help two women connected to the state chapter of a national group that was rapidly gaining followers through social media sites and YouTube channels promoting the convoluted QAnon conspiracy theory.

Jensen, a solid, gray-haired man with piercing blue eyes, retired about five years ago, though his wife still works as a custodian at the elementary school. He’d been a project manager for a metal building manufacturer that transferred him to North Carolina from Ohio. Prior to that, he and his family owned a campground for three decades.

He described how, several years ago, he made the decision to abandon mainstream media. He said it used to be that “I was always watching the news. But once I found out how much they lie, you have to get back into alternative media to find out the actual truth.” He said he has since become convinced that John F. Kennedy Jr. is alive, Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates are dead, and the COVID-19 vaccine is actually a “death shot.” Echoing a debunked claim, he explained his belief that the vaccine changes your DNA in a way that allows those who patented the modified genetic sequence to “own” you, which is part of an effort to kill people off and depopulate the planet. “I’ve seen it many times, where they’ve got plastic caskets lined up,” he said. “There must be a million of them sitting there in lots waiting for these people to die.”

In January of 2022, shortly after he became interested in what he saw as threats posed by school boards, he logged onto the messaging service Telegram. “I started putting feelers out, trying to find, you know, groups that were involved with it and see what they were doing,” he said.

A Telegram group called North Carolina Bonds for the Win seemed like the right fit. The national Bonds for the Win movement had been gaining steam, promoting its mission to force school districts to drop so-called unconstitutional practices including COVID-19 safety protocols and the distribution of alleged “obscene materials” to minors. To accomplish its goal, its followers would serve local school boards with reams of paperwork outlining an intent to sue their districts’ surety bond (or risk-management plan) providers. The movement, dubbed “paper terrorism” by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, aims to force school districts into “compliance” to avoid losing federal funding.

The tactic was already being tested in North Carolina’s largest school district, where earlier that January a mother had crossed a security barrier to serve the Wake County school board with papers, warning, “You’ve violated your oath of office.” Another local report described how police turned off lights in an attempt to clear people out of an Iredell-Statesville school board meeting. The people yelled, “You’ve been served!” to the school board members and told police they wouldn’t leave unless they were arrested.

“And that’s when I found these ladies.” Jensen said of the two women leading efforts in his school district for North Carolina Bonds for the Win.

On Feb. 22, 2022, Jensen arrived at the lobby of the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school board meeting and met the women, Deborah Tuttle and Regina Garner, face-to-face for the first time. They handed him a cardboard box of paperwork, which he understood to be “explanations about how they [district officials] were going to get sued against their bonds” for teaching critical race theory — an academic framework sometimes taught at the college level and above that examines U.S. history through the lens of racism — and allowing books containing “profanity” in schools. He also said the documents included proof that masks don’t work.

Tuttle and Garner did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

Just minutes into the meeting, the school board chairperson watched with curiosity and a dose of trepidation as a man with a huge box took a seat a few rows back. She texted the board members sitting next to her, alerting them to the man. They, too, wanted to know what was in the box.

“He was just staring at us, and we were a little worried for our safety,” chairperson Deanna Kaplan recalled.

Both Garner and Tuttle signed up to address the board during the public-comment period. Garner complained about the district’s failure to uphold the Constitution and accused school officials of practicing medicine without a license and violating child abuse laws. Then Tuttle stepped up. “There’s a lot more violations that she didn’t get to, but you can read those for yourself when we serve you your letters of intent,” she told the board.

As the women spoke, Kaplan grew more uneasy about the man with the box. “Then,” she said, “he started charging at us.”

As Jensen, clutching the box, neared the superintendent, school security officers grabbed him and pulled him out of the meeting room. In the adjacent hallway, he strained against the three men it took to hold him down.

“You work for me!” Jensen repeatedly yelled as security guards tried to shackle his wrists and ankles. His deep voice echoed from the hallway into the meeting room, where some attendees began screaming and board members sat in disbelief as they watched the mounting chaos.

As the board hastily called for an impromptu recess, one man yelled: “Commie cowards!”

“Commie bitch!” yelled another.

“If you walk out, you’re walking away from your job!” Tuttle yelled from the podium.

“There was somebody in the audience that was yelling, ‘The patriots are coming.’ I mean, it was just like a zoo. It was crazy,” Kaplan recalled. “The board members were concerned for our safety.”

Two months after his arrest, Jensen came to court prepared to represent himself on misdemeanor counts of trespass and resisting a public officer. He said he carried a folder with some notes he’d made and a printout of the Constitution. As the judge entered the courtroom, Jensen said, he proudly refused to comply with the order, “All rise.”

“That puts that judge above you,” Jensen later explained. “And that judge is not above you. He’s below you. Or she’s below you.”

Jensen said his refusal to stand angered the bailiff. He also said that before he could even open his folder of evidence, the judge dismissed his case.

Court records show Jensen received a voluntary dismissal. Prosecutors have not responded to requests for comment. A court clerk said that the slew of misdemeanor dismissals that day may have resulted from the court’s attempt to clear a pandemic backlog.

Regarding the judge and the courthouse staff, Jensen said: “I didn't allow them to boss me around.” As for the security guards who arrested him, he said he’s now considering filing assault charges against one of them “because he grabbed me and threw me down for no reason.”

He described how, overall, the experience left him feeling empowered, although he was disappointed that the movement that inspired his efforts had fizzled.

“The ladies that I was with, they pretty much dropped it,” he said, adding that their decision “kind of threw me, because they weren’t going to fight for it.” Garner ended up running for a seat on the school board, but she was unsuccessful.

Jensen did face one consequence: He said he was banned from school property for any purpose other than to pick up and drop off his children. “But that’s it,” he said. A spokesperson for the Winston-Salem Forsyth County school district confirmed the ban but declined to detail the terms of it, citing legal concerns. He said the bans typically last a year. “In general, the letters outline situations when principals can grant permission for the person to come on campus. They, however, must ask and be granted that permission by school administrators.”

Jensen admitted during the conversation in November that he hasn’t exactly complied with the ban: When he showed up for his youngest daughter’s elementary school graduation last spring, a neighbor called school security on him. But, he said, school officials let him stay. (The district spokesperson said Jensen was allowed to attend the graduation “in an effort to reduce stress and embarrassment for his student and on the condition that he maintained appropriate behavior.”) Jensen also said he’s not that worried about what would happen if he violated the ban again.

He’s since declined to speak further about his experiences or be photographed for this story.

“One of these days, I’m tempted to just walk in and allow them to throw me out or arrest me or whatever, because they have no right to do it,” Jensen said, not long before closing his door. “So we’ll see what shakes out if I do.”

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Nicole Carr.

More than 180 contributors to the New York Times wrote a letter to Times leadership earlier this year (2/15/23), raising “serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non⁠binary and gender-nonconforming people.” LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD (2/15/23) made similar arguments in a separate letter.

Both letters highlighted a few particular articles and writers, but described an overall pattern of, in the GLAAD letter’s words, “repeatedly platform[ing] cisgender (non-transgender) people spreading inaccurate and harmful misinformation.”

A FAIR critique (6/23/22) of a New York Times story on trans healthcare.

Many critics, including FAIR (e.g., 6/23/22, 12/16/22), have offered detailed critiques of many of these pieces and writers. This study seeks to document the Times‘ bias in numbers by comparing it to its closest competitor: the Washington Post.

Both elite papers have a national audience and closely cover national political stories—which puts the right’s campaign to criminalize transness very much in their line. And both have a recent history of ceding the framework of their trans coverage to the right wing, as a political football rather than an attack on trans people’s right to bodily autonomy and self-determination (FAIR.org, 5/6/21).

But looking at a full year of front-page coverage from the two papers reveals that, while both papers still need to do a much better job of including trans and nonbinary sources, the Post has given trans issues significantly more attention than the Times, and with an approach largely focused on the right-wing political campaign against trans people. The Times, meanwhile, used its front-page coverage primarily to wonder whether trans people’s rights and access to healthcare have gone too far.

Front-page frequency

FAIR examined all front-page stories at the New York Times and Washington Post that centered on transgender and nonbinary people, and the politics and events engulfing them, from April 2022 through March 2023. While not capturing the entirety of a paper’s coverage of an issue, front-page coverage reveals both how important editors believe an issue to be and which angles of that story they believe to be most newsworthy. The Post put trans-centered stories on its front page 22 times during that year-long period; at the Times, trans issues were deemed front-page news only nine times.

Likewise, the Post ran more front-page stories that were primarily about other issues but mentioned the word “transgender,” with 54 to the Times‘ 30. This suggests that not only did the Post take trans-focused stories to be more newsworthy than the Times, it also is paying closer attention to the way trans rights weave into other stories, such as the larger web of right-wing strategies of scapegoating and censorship.

(The Times did finally publish an article on its front page analyzing the increasing centrality of trans issues to the GOP, after the study period—4/16/23.)

Quantity of coverage doesn’t necessarily translate to quality of coverage; after all, a previous FAIR study (5/5/22) found right-wing Breitbart covering trans issues more than either centrist paper, but in a way that didn’t even pretend to treat its subjects with respect.

However, the distinction between the Post and the Times on front-page trans coverage is also one of quality, with the Post—while still problematic at times—clearly coming out on top.

GOP-friendly framing

The New York Times headline (1/23/23) framed trans students’ right to privacy as a “clash” between parents and schools—rather than centering the people most directly concerned.

Republicans have introduced more than 500 anti-trans bills in 49 states, 63 of which have passed to date this year. They target such rights as trans people’s right to healthcare, to use the bathroom appropriate to their gender identity, to compete in school sports, to be free from discrimination, and to protect their privacy if they are not out to their parents.

These relentless attacks, dressed up in the language of “grooming,” “parents’ rights” and “protecting girls,” demonize and directly harm trans people, particularly trans youth, who already face staggeringly high rates of attempted suicide and homelessness. According to 2022 surveys by the Trevor Project, nearly one in five trans and nonbinary youth have attempted suicide, and 35–39% of trans and nonbinary youth have experienced homelessness and housing instability.

The New York Times, though, has decided that the news about trans issues that’s worthy of the front page is not, primarily, the massive right-wing anti-trans political push and its impact on those it targets, but whether trans people are receiving too many rights, and accessing too much medical care, too quickly.

The Times‘ headlines tell much of the story:

• “Much Debate but Little Dialogue on Transgender Female Athletes” (5/29/22)
• “Number of Youths Who Identify as Transgender Doubles in US” (6/11/22)
• “Pressing Pause on Puberty” (11/22/22)
• “Parents and Schools Clash on Gender Identity” (1/23/23)

Only two of the paper’s nine front-page headlines (“Swimming Body Bars Most Transgender Women,” 6/20/22; “Roe’s Reversal Stokes Attacks on Gay Rights,” 7/23/22) even began to hint at the dire situation faced by trans people today as a result of the war waged against them by the far right. Even these fell woefully short, with the second of the two not even naming trans people. Neither headlined the perspectives of trans people in the United States or those fighting alongside them.

In contrast, the Post‘s front page abounded with such stories—fourteen of the 22 headlines referenced political or physical anti-trans attacks, and ten centered the personal experiences or perspectives of trans people and their allies. “She Just Wants to Play” (9/1/22, about a trans athlete), “Virginia Restricts Rights of Transgender Students” (9/18/22) and “For Trans CPS Worker, Texas Order Was a Test of the Soul” (9/25/22) all appeared on the paper’s prime real estate in a single month.

The third story explained how Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents of trans children for potential “child abuse.” Defending its order in court, the state offered a prominent New York Times article by Emily Bazelon (6/15/22; see FAIR.org, 6/23/22) as evidence that gender-affirming care for trans youth is controversial among medical providers. (It is not.)

That same month, the Times‘ only front-page trans-focused story, “Breast Removal Surgery on Rise for Trans Teens” (9/26/22), worried whether too many trans youth were able to access gender-affirming care. Not once has the Times put the Texas directive story on its front page—or mentioned its own role in the story anywhere in the paper.

Beyond the headlines

When you move past the headlines, the contrasts between the papers persist.

The Times‘ September piece on gender-affirming surgery devoted several paragraphs to people who came to regret having had the surgery. In reality, such experiences are highly uncommon–it’s far more common for trans people to want surgery and be unable to access it than it is for someone to access it and later regret it. A recent systematic review of 27 studies found the prevalence of regret was only 1%; the most recent National Center for Transgender Equality survey (2016) found that more than half of trans people who sought coverage for gender-affirming surgery in the previous year were denied.

Yet “detransitioners” are held up by the anti-trans movement as a key reason to drastically limit or halt all access to gender-affirming care. Offering them a prominent place in such a piece—and not highlighting any trans people who wanted surgery and were unable to access it—skews readers’ perceptions of the most pressing issues surrounding such care.

In the first Times front-page article appearing during the study period (5/29/22), reporter Michael Powell began by describing members of Princeton University’s women’s swim team who “spoke of collective frustration edging into anger” about a record-breaking trans swimmer on a competing team. Powell closed the piece with another cisgender source who found Thomas’s participation not “fair.”

In between, Powell set up the debate over trans participation in college sports:

The battle over whether to let female transgender athletes compete in women’s elite sports has reached an angry pitch, a collision of competing principles: the hard-fought-for right of women to compete in high school, college and pro sports versus a swelling movement to allow transgender athletes to compete in their chosen gender identities.

This is a distinctly right-wing framing, pitting the trans movement against women’s rights rather than recognizing that both trans people and cisgender women face widespread discrimination, in sports and beyond, based on their gender (and that trans women are women). Characterizing women’s right to compete in sports as “hard-fought-for,” in contrast to trans gender identities as “chosen,” suggests that those identities themselves are not hard-fought-for, but simply a whim—or even, as anti-trans sources often argue or imply, a way of skirting those Title IX protections.

Two-thirds of trans youth featured in this New York Times story (11/14/22) stopped puberty-blocking treatment; in a medical study, 1.6% of patients receiving such treatment did so.

Powell’s other front-page piece about trans issues, “Vanishing Word in the Abortion Debate: Women” (6/9/22), offered the same transgender-versus-women framing, this time pitting “allies and activists for transgender people” against “feminists.”

Or take the article “Pressing Pause on Puberty” (11/14/22), which ran online under the more revealing headline, “They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?” The investigation was so lengthy it spilled across three pages after the jump, incorporating 18 quoted sources. Only one was a transgender youth happy with her gender-affirming care. Three youths who had undergone treatment with puberty blockers in total were profiled (one anonymously and quoting only her parents); two of those three experienced negative side effects that caused them to stop treatment, and one later detransitioned.

That setup alone suggests far more danger and dissatisfaction with puberty blockers (and youth transition in general) than actually exists: A recent study (Journal of Sexual Medicine, 1/26/23) found that of 882 youth who received puberty blockers at a Dutch clinic between 1997 and 2018, only 14 discontinued treatment. That’s 1.6%, compared to the Times article’s 67%. The misleading methods and inaccurate science in the piece, which was quickly spread approvingly by right-wing media, were lambasted at length by trans medical experts.

The Times, maliciously or ignorantly, published that piece during Trans Awareness Week.

Five days later, a gunman walked into LGBTQ venue Club Q in Colorado Springs and opened fire, killing five—including two trans people—and injuring many more. While the shooting made the Times‘ front page (11/21/22, 11/22/22), the word “transgender” was only mentioned incidentally both times, no identifiably trans or nonbinary people were quoted, and neither story brought up the heated political campaign against trans and queer people that served as a backdrop to the shooting.

A shift in perspective

In total, six of the Times‘ nine front-page articles about trans issues wove narratives of transition being risky, likely to be regretted, or prematurely forced onto unwitting youth (9/26/22, 11/22/22, 1/23/23), and/or of trans people threatening others’ rights, such as those of cisgender women and parents (5/29/22, 6/9/22, 7/21/22, 1/23/23). These six articles also consumed far more space in the paper than the other three, averaging 2,826 words versus 1,636, suggesting which kinds of stories about trans people the paper believes are most worthy of deep investigation.

Most of the Post‘s front-page coverage, in contrast, avoided anti-trans framings—with two noteworthy exceptions. The first article in the study period, “In Lessons on Sexuality, the Right Sees ‘Grooming'” (4/9/22), was the focus of a FAIR Action Alert (4/12/22) for its egregious both-sidesing of a story in which the bigoted “side” was given the more prominent platform. As FAIR wrote:

Writers Hannah Natanson and Moriah Balingit (4/5/22) spent the first 12 paragraphs of their article describing and quoting the right-wing claims that teachers talking about gender identity or sexual orientation—and those who support them—”want children primed for sexual abuse.”…

Of those most directly impacted by the bills, no LGBTQ students and only one openly LGBTQ educator were quoted.

The Post did not publicly acknowledge the criticism, but its next front-page trans story, “Grooming Claims Part of Anti-LGBTQ Push in GOP” (4/21/22), revisited the same story with a different reporter and a different framing. Colby Itkowitz began with a Democratic state senator denouncing Republican “grooming” claims, and characterized those claims as “baseless tropes” in the reporter’s own voice in the third paragraph. Itkowitz explained:

The efforts ahead of the midterm elections are intended to rile up the GOP base and fill the coffers of its candidates, without offering evidence that any Democrat had committed a repugnant crime.

Several GOP sources were quoted making anti-LGBTQ claims, but the Post‘s presentation of them made clear they were false, “audacious,” trafficking in conspiracy theories, or “intended to denigrate transgender or nonbinary people.”

Later, an article about whether schools should be required to out transgender students to their parents, “Schools Face ‘High-Wire Act’ When Kids Say They’re Trans” (7/26/22), framed the story in a somewhat similar way to the Times‘ version (1/23/23), pitting trans students’ rights against parents’ rights. But the Post article opened and closed with a trans youth’s perspective, where the Times piece bookended its article from the view of a parent upset with their trans child’s school for not outing the child to them. The Times piece closed:

“The school is telling me that I have to jump on the bandwagon and be completely supportive,” Mrs. Bradshaw said. “There is only so much and so far that I’m willing to go right now and I would hope that, as a parent, that would be my decision.”

Few trans sources

One area where the Post still falls far short is in sourcing. Only 35 of their 243 sources (14%) in these front-page stories about trans issues were trans or nonbinary themselves. The Times did slightly better on this front, as 22 of its 116 sources (19%) were identifiably trans or nonbinary.

Yet, as described above, the Times also included three people who regretted their decision and detransitioned, offering a misleading picture of actual rates of such experiences.

No people who had detransitioned were featured in Post front-page stories during the study time period. (The Post did feature a person describing regrets over their transition on its op-ed page—4/11/22. Both papers have featured multiple anti-trans perspectives on their opinion pages over the past year, none so frequently as new Times columnist Pamela Paul, who pushed anti-trans narratives in no fewer than six columns during the study period.)

The Post also included 36 (15%) representatives of advocacy organizations fighting for LGBTQ rights (eight of whom were also trans or nonbinary themselves). At the Times, there were nine (8%) representatives of LGBTQ advocacy organizations (two of whom were trans).

The Post and Times featured similar percentages of family members of trans youth, with 17 (7%) at the Post and nine (8%) at the Times. But this category served very different purposes at the two papers.

Six of those nine family members featured by the Times expressed concerns, doubts or disapproval of their child’s transition, or of how it was handled by gender-affirming doctors or schools. In contrast, only two of the Post‘s 17 family members expressed such concerns, both in a single story (7/26/22) about school policies on whether schools should out trans youth to their parents. In the Post, the majority of family members talked about government attacks on their children, such as the push by Texas to take trans children away from their parents (9/25/22), or legislation to ban gender-affirming healthcare in Missouri (3/1/23) and Kentucky (3/26/23).

Many parents of trans and nonbinary kids have misgivings about their child’s gender identity. Indeed, less than a third of trans and nonbinary kids find their home gender-affirming, according to the 2022 Trevor Project survey—and the survey also found that those without strong support at home report suicide rates significantly higher than those with that support. When reporting on trans youth and the political and cultural attacks on them, it’s important for reporters to remember whose concerns ought to be at the center of the story.

Speaking for themselves

Despite the Post‘s coverage overall being much less problematic than the Times, this isn’t the first time FAIR has found the Post failing to give trans people the right to speak for themselves. When Texas issued a directive insisting that families with trans kids be investigated for potential “child abuse,” FAIR (5/22/22) found that while the Post ran more stories on it than the Times, its percentage of trans sources (8%) was not only far lower than the Times (27%), it was even lower than that of Breitbart (11%), and tied with the right-wing Daily Caller.

A year earlier, a FAIR analysis (5/16/21) of Post and Times coverage of trans youth likewise found both papers failed to center trans kids, declining to give them (and other trans people) a voice in coverage directly about them.

The Washington Post (3/23/23) noted that its survey found that “the vast majority of trans adults say they were happier than before they transitioned.”

While trans people have come under such vitriolic attack that it would be understandable if many—especially trans youth—would not want to be publicly interviewed by a national newspaper, it’s still critically important that journalists make every effort to let trans people speak for themselves in stories that focus on trans lives and rights, and the Post needs to do better.

The last two front-page pieces of the study period offered a hopeful sign. These two came from a new “Trans in America” series prominently featured on the Post‘s Gender and Identity webpage, built off of a survey (3/22/23) the paper conducted with health polling firm KFF. Post social issues editor Annys Shin (3/23/23) explained the project:

Since January, state legislators have introduced more than 200 bills that seek to limit transgender rights, whether it is access to gender-affirming care, what children can learn about transgender identity in schools or whether trans girls can play sports.

In this atmosphere of intense polarization around transgender rights, the Washington Post and KFF set out to hear what transgender Americans had to say, on topics ranging from their experiences as children in school to navigating the workplace, the doctor’s office and family relationships as adults. The resulting Post/KFF Trans Survey, which also includes responses from cisgender Americans on trans-related restrictions, is the largest nongovernmental survey of US trans adults to rely on random sampling methods.

This is how responsible journalism is conducted: Take a pressing political issue, identify who is most impacted, and listen to—and amplify—their perspectives. The first article of the series, “In Survey, Most Say Life Is Better After Transition” (3/24/23), featured six sources, all of them trans. The piece described in detail the discrimination and harassment trans people face, and also the relief that transition brings: “Yet most trans adults say transitioning has made them more satisfied with their lives.” It’s a take that was virtually nowhere to be found on the Times front page during the entire year.

It’s up to the Post now to make sure it continues to center trans voices in its coverage of the attacks on their lives. (The paper’s most recent front-page article on trans issues shows that’s far from inevitable—see Present Age, 5/8/23.)

Impact of activism?

Recent New York Times coverage of trans issues (e.g., 4/16/23) has included the political context that has often been missing.

In response to the letters about its anti-trans coverage, Times leadership forcefully denied any wrongdoing and attempted to silence their critics, threatening retaliation for speaking out against the paper (FAIR.org, 2/17/23).

Yet perhaps the letters did have an impact, as the paper also published three front-page stories on trans rights and politics after the conclusion of the study period, all of which avoided the “just asking questions” approach criticized by the letter-writers: “Conflict Over Transgender Care Brings Statehouse to a Standstill” (4/1/23), “Trans Athletes Facing Limits in Biden Plan” (4/7/23) and “How Transgender Issues Became a New Rallying Cry for the Right” (4/16/23).

As this study shows, such coverage is markedly different from what the Times has been publishing on its front page for the past year. That coverage has systematically underplayed the story of the right-wing assault on trans people, and centered anti-trans framings and perspectives. This has directly fed into the anti-trans panic and the state repression of trans rights and lives, with some laws and directives explicitly referencing Times reporting to support their claims (GLAAD, 4/19/23).

While the Times has been “just asking questions” about trans people on its front page, trans and nonbinary people and the families who support them have seen their lives being torn apart by the steady march of backlash across the country.

Research assistance: Kat Sewon Oh, Conor Smyth

Note: Article dates referenced are print dates. Web version dates (and headlines) often differ.

The post NYT’s Anti-Trans Bias—by the Numbers appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

More than 450 North Carolina healthcare professionals in recent days have signed an open letter condemning a proposed state ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth, legislation the signatories decried as a "dangerous governmental intrusion into the practice of medicine."

"As North Carolina healthcare professionals deeply committed to protecting our patients and preserving the trusting and informed relationship between patient and provider, we adamantly oppose any bans or restrictions on access to and provision of lifesaving, gender-affirming care," the doctors, nurses, therapists, and other medical professionals wrote in the letter to state lawmakers.

Among the anti-LGBTQ+ bills recently introduced in North Carolina's Republican-led Legislature is the so-called Youth Health Protection Act, which if passed will ban doctors from providing hormone treatments, puberty blockers, and other gender-affirming care. Violators would lose their medical licenses and be fined $1,000.

The letter continues:

Any legislation restricting or banning lifesaving care represents dangerous governmental intrusion into the practice of medicine and will be detrimental to the health of transgender and gender-diverse North Carolinians, including youth. The decision of whether and when to seek gender-affirming care, which can include mental and physical health interventions, is personal and involves careful consideration by each patient and their family, along with guidance from their medical providers. These decisions should not be made by politicians or the government. This extreme intrusion will not only disrupt the patient-provider relationship, but will discourage talented healthcare providers from staying and providing all manner of healthcare within North Carolina.

"We applaud healthcare providers for taking a stand for trans youth and the LGBTQ+ community. Their voices are a powerful force against the hateful attacks on trans kids," Kendra Johnson, executive director at the advocacy group Equality NC, said in a statement praising the letter. "Legislators need to stay out of our private lives and let healthcare providers do their jobs."

Allison Scott, director of impact and innovation at the Campaign for Southern Equality, said that "we're grateful to see this overwhelming chorus of medical providers calling this legislation out for what it is—extreme overreach of government into private citizens' medical care, with no concern for facts or medical best practices."

"North Carolina's leading medical experts are demanding that lawmakers listen to their concerns, and accepted medical best practices, before rushing through this dangerous anti-LGBTQ+ agenda," Scott added.

The American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics are among the many medical groups supporting gender-affirming care for minors. A study published last year by the University of Washington found that youth who received such healthcare were 73% less likely to experience suicidality and 60% less likely to suffer from depression than minors who did not get care.

Yet GOP-led state legislatures in 2023 have already introduced more than 100 bills aimed at banning or severely limiting gender-affirming healthcare for minors, according to the ACLU, and more than a dozen states have passed laws outlawing such care.

"Each time our legislators propose laws targeting our LGBTQ+ community, they hurt our family and thousands of other families," Sarah Eyssen, a North Carolina mother of a transgender daughter, wrote in a recent Charlotte Observer opinion piece. "These bills communicate to everyone that it's okay to treat members of the LGBTQ+ community differently. It's okay to discriminate, even against a child."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

The ACLU of Montana and legal partners on Monday filed a lawsuit on behalf of state Rep. Zooey Zephyr and her constituents, challenging Republicans' censure of the legislator, who called out her GOP colleagues for their new ban on lifesaving gender-affirming healthcare for youth.

"This is an action for emergency declaratory and injunctive relief against defendants arising out of their unconstitutional censure and retaliatory silencing of Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a member of the Montana House of Representatives who engaged in constitutionally protected speech," says the complaint, filed in state court against House Speaker Matt Regier (R-4) and Bradley Murfitt, the chamber's sergeant at arms.

"House leadership explicitly and directly targeted me and my district because I dared to give voice to the values and needs of transgender people like myself."

"As a result of the censure, Rep. Zephyr—elected to represent 11,000 constituents in House District 100—is physically barred from entering the Montana State Capitol and cannot engage in speech and debate on important matters of public concern," the complaint continues, arguing that the move deprives her "constituents of the right to full representation in their government."

Zephyr, Montana's only transgender legislator, said in a statement Monday that "this effort by House leadership to silence me and my constituents is a disturbing and terrifying affront to democracy itself."

"House leadership explicitly and directly targeted me and my district because I dared to give voice to the values and needs of transgender people like myself," she declared. "By doing so, they've denied me my own rights under the Constitution and, more importantly, the rights of my constituents to just representation in their own government. The Montana state House is the people's House, not Speaker Regier's, and I'm determined to defend the right of the people to have their voices heard."

\u201cI'm suing.\n\nThe recent actions violate my 1st amendment rights, as well as the rights of my 11,000 constituents to representation.\n\nMontana's State House is the people\u2019s House, not Speaker Regier\u2019s, and I\u2019m determined to defend the right of the people to have their voices heard.\u201d

— Rep. Zooey Zephyr (@Rep. Zooey Zephyr) 1682953191

While Republicans who voted to censure Zephyr last week claimed it was in response to a protest by her supporters in the House gallery that they accused her of encouraging, Regier refused to recognize Zephyr on the chamber's floor after she told legislators they would have "blood on their hands" if they backed Senate Bill 99, the ban on gender-affirming care for minors that GOP Gov. Greg Gianforte signed into law on Friday.

Echoing Zephyr's warning to state lawmakers last month, Anna Wong, a resident of Montana House District 100 and a named party in the suit, stressed that "suicide amongst transgender youth is not imaginary."

"It is not a game and it is not a political foil. It is real. It is heartbreaking. And it is the responsibility of my representative to speak out against bills promoting it," Wong continued. "I expected Rep. Zephyr to oppose, and her comments leading to expulsion from the House floor, which I have listened to, seem incredibly measured and muted compared to the severity of the situation."

Dean Chou, a fellow district resident and party to the suit, said that "I feel alienated and disenfranchised to have my representative expelled from debate."

"Rep. Zephyr is my representative on all issues—not just those that directly impact or target transgender Montanans," added Chou. "I believe Rep. Zephyr has done an effective job advocating for my interests and my rights on all issues, and I want Rep. Zephyr to continue to do so."

\u201cThursday, Republicans moved several bills out of my committees, preventing me from representing my constituents not only on the floor, but in committee.\n\nThe (D) vice-chair of Judiciary called out their actions.\n\nThe next day, Republicans scheduled new hearings in my committees.\u201d

— Rep. Zooey Zephyr (@Rep. Zooey Zephyr) 1682947183

Since Zephyr was barred from entering the chamber last week, multiple study bills awaiting votes in committees on which she sits were sent to another panel or the House floor, and legislators are set to debate amendments to the state budget this week.

"Rep. Zephyr was elected by the people of her district after running on the very principles she is now being punished for defending," said ACLU of Montana legal director Alex Rate. "In his craven pursuit to deny transgender youth and their families the healthcare they need, Speaker Regier has unfairly, unjustly, and unconstitutionally silenced those voters by silencing their representative."

"His actions are a direct threat to the bedrock principles that uphold our entire democracy, and we welcome the privilege of defending the people of Montana's 100th House District from this desperate and autocratic effort to silence them," Rate added.

The ACLU of Montana, the national ACLU, and Lambda Legal have also promised to take legal action against S.B. 99, saying in a joint statement earlier this year that "Montana lawmakers seem hellbent on joining the growing roster of states determined to jeopardize the health and lives of transgender youth, in direct opposition to the overwhelming body of scientific and medical evidence supporting this care as appropriate and necessary."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Weeks after Montana Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte's son called on him to veto a bill to ban gender-affirming healthcare for minors, the governor signed the legislation into law Friday, making Montana the 11th stateth state in the past three months to enact full or partial bans on transition surgery, hormonal treatment, and puberty blockers for youths.

Gianforte's son, David, is nonbinary and uses he and they pronouns. He appealed to his father in a meeting in March as the bill was moving through the Republican-controlled legislature, telling him the ban "would significantly directly affect a number of my friends."

"I would like to make the argument that these bills are immoral, unjust, and frankly a violation of human rights," David said.

Despite the meeting, the governor signed Senate Bill 99 into law on Friday.

David told The Montana Free Press on Wednesday that his father is "concerned about his career" and is "aware that being able to stay in the position of governor is dependent on him staying in favor of the Republican Party."

The law has been at the center of state House Republicans' silencing of Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D-100) in recent days. Speaker Matt Regier (R-4) refused to recognize her on the House floor after Zephyr, the state's first transgender lawmaker, told Republicans they would have "blood on their hands" if they backed S.B. 99. Earlier this week, the GOP majority voted to bar Zephyr from the House floor until the end of the legislative session.

Zephyr was greeted with cheers from her constituents and supporters in Missoula on Friday evening as transgender and nonbinary Montanans and their allies rallied against the gender-affirming care ban and other anti-LGBTQ+ legislation.

"It's clear that anti-trans policies do not align with Montana's values," Zephyr told The New York Times Friday. "We are a state that cares for its community. There are trans people through every community in this state."

The ACLU of Montana has said it will file a legal challenge against the gender-affirming healthcare ban.

Access to transition care has been linked to a sharp decrease in the rate of suicidal ideation and depression among transgender youths, and is strongly supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics as well as other health associations.

Gianforte also signed a bill this week that will make it harder for public school students to be disciplined for misgendering nonbinary or transgender classmates.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• Kansas Republican lawmakers override Governor’s veto of transgender bathroom bill
• Texas Ag Commissioner promulgates employee dress code targeting transgender workers
• Biden Administration announces new migrant border policies
• Senator Patty Murray reintroduces ambitious child care legislation
• Berkeley says it will pursue electrification plans despite court setback on natural gas hookups

Image by KPFA Reporter Gil Martel: Berkeley City Councilmember Kate Harrison

The post Kansas Republicans override Governor’s veto of nation’s most sweeping transgender bathroom bill; Former Vice President Mike Pence testifies to grand jury on attempts to overturn 2020 election; Berkeley vows to pursue electrification despite court ruling against natural gas ban: The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – April 27, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Transgender and gender nonconforming people are the apparent target of a new dress code recently mandated by the head of the Texas Department of Agriculture and exposed by a genderqueer journalist this week.

Texas Observer digital editor Kit O'Connell obtained an April 13 "dress code and grooming" memo to agency employees from Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) Commissioner Sid Miller, who was an adviser to former President Donald Trump.

"Employees are expected to comply with this dress code in a manner consistent with their biological gender," the memo states, conflating sex and gender.

While "Western apparel" is acceptable attire for women, "no excessive cleavage" can be shown and "skirts should be within four inches of the knees."

Grooming standards include "no unnatural neon or fluorescent hair colors," and "no nose, lip, or other facial piercings."

Violators will be sent home to change; repeat offenders could face further sanction and termination.

"The policy, which is primarily aimed at office workers, would force trans employees back into the closet by forbidding them from expressing their identity," O'Connell wrote. "But even cisgender people who wear gender-neutral clothing—such as women who favor men's formalwear—could conceivably be caught up in the new restrictions."

"The freedom to dress according to one's gender identity is vital to the mental health and happiness of trans and nonbinary people," they explained. "Clothing is an important part of the "social transition" process, which—along with other changes like using new pronouns—allows a trans person to be themselves in public."

Brian Klosterboer, an attorney with the ACLU of Texas, toldThe Texas Tribune that the dress violates the First Amendment's right to free expression and the equal protection clause, as well as Title VII's prohibition of employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

"State agencies should be focused on doing their jobs and not discriminating against their own employees and trying to make political statements through their agency regulations," he said. "There is no important governmental interest that this can meet."

Explaining that TDA personnel are often seen wearing cowboy hats and boots, one department employee interviewed by O'Connell—who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation—said that "my eye was drawn to the lines about Western wear being encouraged."

"Then, another employee alerted me and said, 'Hey did you see the line in the first paragraph?'" the employee added, referring to the memo's "biological gender" language.

The new TDA dress code comes amid a wave of Republican-led attacks on LGBTQ+ people at the federal and state level. The ACLU is tracking 469 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in state legislatures, while laws banning gender-affirming healthcare, transgender students from competing on sports teams or using restrooms matching their gender identity, and drag shows have been passed in more than 20 states.

In Texas—which has advanced bills to ban trans student-athletes and gender-affirming care—Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ordered Child Protective Services to investigate parents of trans kids for child abuse, a policy blocked by multiple state courts. Abbott also staunchly opposes diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in state agencies.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• Montana House Republicans bar transgender Democrat Zooey Zephyr from House floor for rest of the legislative session
• House Republicans pass bill to raise the debt limit in exchange for deep spending cuts President Biden won’t approve
• Former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll weeps as she recounts her alleged rape by Donald Trump to a New York jury
• Transit advocates unveil five billion dollar package to save public transit systems facing insolvency — or deep cuts
• Oakland Education Association authorizes a strike — while a state lawmaker proposes a 50% hike in teacher and staff salaries statewide
• Biden Administration files legal brief appealing lower court ruling striking down abortion drug mifepristone

Image: Zooey Zephyr from website of National Democratic Training Committee

The post Montana House bars transgender lawmaker from House floor for remainder of legislative session; House Republicans narrowly approve bill to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for deep cuts; Oakland Education Association authorizes a strike: The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – April 26, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

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Treatments are expensive, difficult to obtain and can require years of fighting unwilling doctors, red tape and familial disapproval. 

In recent months, a difficult process has become even harder, according to Chinese trans women who spoke to RFA. In December, the Chinese government banned on onlines sale of cyproterone acetate, a widely used antiandrogen drug, and estradiol, a widely used estrogen drug. 

The drugs are used in hormone therapies for a range of issues like prostate cancer and menopause. Both are needed for people who were born male to transition to female.

The government says the restriction was part of a process to add new safeguards to China’s relatively free-wheeling online drug market. But the ban is creating another problem for trans Chinese women: Many can’t find access to medicine through legitimate channels at all, driving them deeper into a black market where they are vulnerable to being scammed.

The situation has compounded a mental health crisis already gripping the community, leading to a rise in the number of suicides, trans women, known colloquially as “medicine girls,” told RFA.

As one of them, “Mel”, put it: "There's no way to survive. We can't survive. People are dying every day.” 

Already difficult 

It took Mel three years from the moment she walked through the doors of the hospital to obtain a certificate of diagnosis to begin the transition process to actually acquire it at 23. Without the approval of her immediate family, she had to travel overseas to have gender-confirming surgery. 

Mel, like other trans activists quoted in this story, requested to be identified by a pseudonym to protect herself from abuse and potential questioning by the Chinese police.

Being a transgender woman in China poses challenges in almost every aspect of life, she said – from discrimination in school and work, to the hardship of the physiological transition itself.

Treatments are expensive, and the process is costly in other ways. After Mel changed the gender on her ID card, the money for her social security, medical insurance and housing provident fund were removed. She needed to borrow money in order to make up for the loss.

But Mel’s hardships are less stark than those faced by other Chinese transgender women, she said – most are not even able to complete the transition process and have to rely on smuggled medications purchased online.

But since December, “the [new drug] policy directly blocked the way, leaving no way out,” Mel said.

Sales ban

Some transgender activists who spoke to RFA said they believe the new restrictions, which were imposed by the National Medical Products Administration, specifically target transgender people, while others speculated that they may be related to China's efforts to reverse its population decline by encouraging childbirth. 

Five other drugs that were banned alongside cyproterone acetate and estradiol are either contraceptives or abortion pills. 

Chinese authorities have not explained their reasoning behind the changes in any detail, as often happens with policy shifts in the country. In the documents accompanying the ban, the NMPA stated that the listed drugs are "high-risk" and are prohibited in order to "ensure the public to take drugs safely."

In 2021, Chinese media reported on a mother who discovered that her 15-year-old son was secretly purchasing and injecting hormone drugs to attempt gender transition, believing that he had been "lured by bad people" from the "medicine girl" online chat room. 

Local police set up a special investigation team after the mother reported her son. 

Regardless of the intent, the trans community has been deeply affected by the tighter controls on online sales.

Trans activists told RFA they have observed an increase in suicides since the ban’s implementation, and pleas for help have emerged in online chat rooms and social media posts where transgender women find support.

"There has been a marked increase in cases [of suicide], far more than in previous years during the same time period," said “Hanlianyi,” a trans activist who provides shelter and other forms of assistance to transgender women in China.

Greater acceptance, but hardships remain

In some ways, China has become a more accepting place for transgender people. There is a greater awareness of the issues they face, and even sympathetic stories from the country’s controlled media outlets. 

There is no official data from the government on the number of transgender people in China. 

In a 2014 article published in The Lancet medical journal, five Chinese surgeons estimated that there were approximately 400,000 transgender men and women in the country and suggested that less than 800 patients have been treated in the past 30 years.

In 2018, doctors at Peking University Third Hospital opened a transgender treatment clinic, followed in 2021 by Children's Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai.

But trans people say they still face widespread discrimination, as trans people do in other countries, including the United States.

In China, students with gender dysphoria can be suspended for being non-gender conforming, and trans adults have a hard time finding work. Trans people say they are routinely subjected to police and online surveillance due in part to the government’s suspicion of minority groups.

Nearly 93% of the respondents to the National Transgender Health Survey Report, released by the advocacy group, Beijing LGBT+, in 2021, said they had attempted to obtain a diagnosis related to gender dysphoria in China reported varying degrees of difficulty.

Researchers found a higher rate of suicide attempts, anxiety and depression levels, and psychological stress in the transgender community versus the general population. Among the survey respondents, 71.7% were found to be at risk of depression.

The mental health issues registered in the survey have been made worse, trans women told RFA, by the online drug sale ban.

‘Please help’

Trans women find support through platforms including QQ and on Twitter and Telegram, which are banned in China but still accessible with a VPN.

RFA learned of the crisis sparked by the online drug sales ban through social media accounts and online pleas for help. 

“Emergency!!! I know someone from the (transgender) community who has been off Androcur for 5 days and can't find candy,” a Jan. 23 Twitter post from a transgender woman said. “It's very urgent ... please help.”

Androcur, an antiandrogen medicine produced by Bayer, is illegal to import but is sometimes smuggled into the country. The nickname “candy” refers to androgen blockers and estrogen pills in general. 

(RFA is not disclosing the account handle as these accounts can be subject to reprisals, such as being scrutinized by police surveillance.)

People with prescriptions theoretically can still purchase their medicine in pharmacies, but trans women say they often face resistance when doing so. Some pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions for female hormone drugs – which are used in a variety of endocrine treatments – if the purchaser’s ID card refers to them as male, sources said. 

Many trans people also prefer the privacy of online purchases where there is less risk of having to endure humiliating encounters with pharmacists or other customers.

Dubious drug merchants

With little alternative, transgender women in China are turning to questionable online sellers that claim to have smuggled drugs from overseas, despite the ban. 

“Mika,” a transgender woman who has undergone gender reassignment surgery but still relies on estrogen, said online dealers charge around 300-400 yuan ($43-57) per box for Androcur, which can last for a little over a month.

But as the demand rises, more scammers are disguising themselves as drug merchants to con people out of money, only to send fake pills or nothing at all.

The consequences for trans women can be deadly. One of Hanlianyi’s friends took her own life after paying about 1,200 yuan ($172) for drugs that were never delivered, she said. 

"Being cheated is often the last straw that breaks the camel's back," she said.

The trans women RFA spoke with said various strategies are passed around online in response to the drug ban, including taking veterinary hormone pills that are easier to acquire or trying to purchase the raw materials and fashion a facsimile of the medicine themselves. 

In October “Hilda,” a transgender woman, started to use her own body as a lab to make a gel containing estradiol.

"I have achieved self-sufficiency and can also help some people," she told RFA.

Hilda said she knew about 10 other transgender women who began to make their own drugs between November and February. 

Extreme responses

The obstacles trangender women face have led some to take action even more extreme, including self-castration, according to the women who spoke to RFA, news reports and social media posts. 

“Felicity,” a transgender activist who grew up in China but now lives overseas, said before the recent online sales ban a woman live-streamed the process in a group chat, prompting a frantic online effort to send help to stem the bleeding.

Chinese media have also reported some transgender women in the country have operated on themselves or others. 

In one case, a transgender woman helped another with surgery after having successfully removed her own testicles; in another, an individual was sentenced for illegally practicing medicine without proper qualifications. 

"If a time comes when candy becomes completely unavailable, going abroad is not an option, and black market surgery in China is out of reach, I will provide a guide on self-castration,” a Feb. 11 tweet from a transgender woman said. “So, fret not, there is always a solution, right?" 

In an Apr. 20 tweet, the woman said she had performed the self-castration and included a photograph of her on a bloody bed with surgical instruments nearby. But she added that she had almost died during the procedure and warned transgender women not to follow suit.

Activists Felicity and Hanlianyi told RFA that they fear the online sales ban will lead to more incidents of self-castration.

‘We can’t survive’

Previously, Mel said she has turned down interview requests from foreign journalists because she believed the Chinese government would address the problems. 

Now, she’s begun to speak out.

She and her friends recently created a webpage to raise awareness of the consequences of the online sales ban, which is now in its fifth month.

It includes references to instances of transgender women being targeted by police and a running tally of people whom Mel says have taken their own lives since the start of the year. 

The last count, posted on the page a month ago, was 91.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Mary Zhao for RFA.

Chants of "Let her speak!" rang out in the Montana House on Monday afternoon as constituents and supporters of state Rep. Zooey Zephyr demanded that the Republican Party end its silencing of the transgender lawmaker over an impassioned defense of nonbinary and transgender children she gave last week.

For the third day in a row, state House Speaker Matt Regier (R-4) refused to let Zephyr (D-100) participate in a debate on legislation, this time regarding whether students should be permitted to use the names and pronouns of their choosing at school without parental consent.

After House Minority Leader Kim Abbott (D-83) called on Regier to allow Zephyr to speak about the bill, 63 members voted against the motion, sparking outrage from the advocates who had assembled in the gallery above the House floor after making a nearly two-hour trip from Missoula to support the first-term lawmaker.

As the Democrats supporters demanded that the leadership "let her speak," leaders cut the sound and video feed to the floor while Zephyr held up a nonfunctional microphone, symbolizing the Republicans' decision to silence her since she accused them of having "blood on their hands" last week for supporting a ban on gender-affirming healthcare last week. The legislation, which Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte has said he will sign, is one of hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ bills making its way through state legislatures.

Zephyr's comments were made last Tuesday and were cited later that day as the Montana Freedom Caucus' reason for demanding the House censure the Democrat, in a statement in which the group also misgendered Zephyr.

Regier has said he is refusing to recognize Zephyr on the House floor until she apologizes for her remarks in order "to protect the dignity and integrity" of the chamber.

Zephyr has stood by her comments, which referred to the fact that gender-affirming medical care has been linked to sharply reduced rates of suicidal ideation and depression among transgender youths.

"I was sent here to speak on behalf of my constituents and to speak on behalf of my community. It's the promise I made when I got elected and it's a promise that I will continue to keep every single day," Zephyr told reporters before entering the chamber on Monday.

Seven protesters were arrested after being escorted from the House gallery, including some by force.

The Helena Independent Record filmed the arrests, in which police officers were seen pushing the protesters and telling them to "move back" and "stop resisting."

The Montana Freedom Caucus called the demonstration an "insurrection" and again urged "disciplinary action" against Zephyr for inciting violence at the House. Zephyr has not been censured thus far.

Republicans have indicated that they will not back down from their demand that Zephyr apologize.

The standoff comes a month after two Democratic state lawmakers were expelled from the Tennessee state House—and later reinstated by local councils—for taking part in a protest demanding gun control following a school shooting in Nashville.

Abbott toldThe Washington Post that the protest on Monday was "an incredible statement in support of the trans, nonbinary, and Two Spirit community—and against the Republican agenda that would strip our neighbors of their basic rights, dignity, and humanity."

"Today we saw Montanans show up and engage in the democratic process, and some of those Montanans were arrested," she said.

Zephyr left the House floor after her supporters were arrested "to show support for those who were arrested defending democracy," she said on social media.

The seven protesters were booked and released from a county detention center.

The House is scheduled to convene again Tuesday afternoon.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

When my son was born last spring, I found myself in a strange world, one in which parents—particularly moms—are expected to be perfect and completely in control of every detail of a child's life. Whether it's buying the most non-toxic diapers or deciding on the best baby-feeding philosophies, each with their own line of products, there is an obsessive culture of consumerist perfection about raising a child. Somehow, amidst an increasingly unstable social context, mothers are expected to ensure a child's every moment is crafted with the expertise of a veteran Montessori preschool teacher, a pediatrician, and a consumer product expert all in one. At the back of our minds we know we can't be all these things, but we still try.

In part, it's just marketing. Momfluencers, social media companies, and corporations profit by fueling our parenting anxieties—we've been convinced that if we just consume the right products, our children will grow into little geniuses who never feel pain. And perhaps it's also a coping strategy: It's all too human that, when confronted with massive systemic crises like a pandemic or climate change, parents might turn inward and focus on the things we (think we) can control. Maybe if we buy the right toys or say the gentlest–yet firmest–words, we can shield our kids from the broken world.

I don't mean to disparage the anxiety new parents have over everyday choices. I too have spent too much time on the internet "researching" which sippy cup to buy. I too have wondered if I'm buying the "right" toys. (Spoiler: My son prefers playing with bits of cardboard and my husband's sneakers over virtually any toy.) And I'm not suggesting we neglect our babies and let them scrounge for food while we pursue loftier causes.

It's painful to admit that the decisions of the powerful may shape our children's lives even more than we can. But it's true. And it's why I view activism as part of my job as a parent.

But the time and energy so many of us put into seeking to control every moment and product in our kids' lives is not proportional to the real impact on our children. It doesn't matter if I feed my toddler organic snacks now if in 15 years the climate crisis wipes out our global food system. An Instagrammable play area won't shield my children from the trauma of a society in which school shootings have become a new normal. And even if I become the most perfect mom in the universe, that won't protect my baby from a crumbling social contract or a loss of their civil rights.

To really help our kids, there is a better way for parents to spend our limited extra energy and resources: activism. As individuals, we can't control much about our children's futures. But if we join together with other parents and exercise our collective power, we stand a better chance of ensuring our kids–and all kids–can survive and thrive. It's painful to admit that the decisions of the powerful may shape our children's lives even more than we can. But it's true. And it's why I view activism as part of my job as a parent.

Our children are under assault from all directions. The powerful refuse to divest from fossil fuels, even while young people watch their futures' disappear. Trans children can't access medical care. Teens can't get reproductive care. School children can't read stories with Black and LGBTQ characters. Hate crimes against Black, Queer, Muslim, and Jewish people are escalating. State and local governments are defunding public schools. Children have to walk into school each morning wondering if a gunman might kill them or their friends. In every way, our kids need us to fight for them.

If it sounds overwhelming to confront societal crises on top of the regular demands of parenting, that's because it is. But it's even more overwhelming for our children, who can only be insulated for so long before the fractured world comes crashing in. And when it does, what could be more reassuring than seeing their parents fighting for them? We owe our kids whatever extra time and energy we have—whether it's five minutes or five hours—to work to dismantle the systems that hurt us all.

The good news is you can actually do activism with your kids in ways that are enriching rather than burdensome. The group I work with, Climate Families NYC, plans kid-friendly protests replete with song, costumes, bubbles, and chalk. Our children love doing activism together, and when they hear about climate change in school or on the news, instead of feeling scared, they know they are part of the movement fighting back. Through meetings, playdates, and even direct actions outside Wall Street firms, we've built a community of mutual support.

Imagine if a million moms—and parents and caregivers (because this responsibility should be a shared one)—found an expectation to let go of and instead put the time, energy, and resources they gained into activism. Imagine the world we could build.

Years ago, I asked a close friend who had just had a baby if he felt different now that he was a parent. He said yes, what felt different was that now he was always a little afraid. Love for a child is carrying fear with you every day. But we have a choice of what to do with that fear—let corporations prey on us and our anxieties, siloed in our homes as we desperately try to be perfect, or channel our fears into action and community for the world our children deserve.

No one can do everything, but almost everyone can do something. Find your passion, find your people, and jump in. Like parenting, activism is never perfect, but it's what our kids, and we, really need.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Liat Olenick.

Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr said ahead of a scheduled legislative session in the state House on Friday that she is "ready to speak" on behalf her constituents, but Republican leaders have given no indication that they'll allow her to do so after silencing her this week in retaliation for comments she made about transgender rights.

State House Speaker Matt Regier (R-4) has refused to acknowledge Zephyr (D-100), the state's only transgender lawmaker, on Thursday when she tried to speak during a debate about a bill that would include binary definitions of "male" and "female" in the state code, and other legislation unrelated to the rights of transgender and nonbinary people.

The Republicans' refusal to allow Zephyr to speak on the House floor follows her comments made on Tuesday about a bill that would ban gender-affirming health care for transgender youths.

"If you are denying gender-affirming care and forcing a trans child to go through puberty, that is tantamount to torture, and this body should be ashamed," said Zephyr. "If you vote yes on this bill, I hope the next time you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands."

Soon after, the right-wing Montana Freedom Caucus wrote a letter to the Legislature—posted on Twitter along with a message that misgendered Zephyr—calling for the lawmaker to be censured for using "inappropriate and uncalled-for language" during the debate, unless she issued a formal apology.

Zephyr has refused to do so, saying in a statement that the Republicans' goal is not securing an apology, but "silence as they take away the rights of queer and trans Montanans."

"The Montana GOP has pushed over a dozen anti-trans bills this year—targeting our art forms, our stories, our healthcare, and our very existence," said Zephyr. "It is particularly troubling that the moment they were confronted with the impact their legislation has, they chose to silence the only trans woman elected to public office in Montana as opposed to doing the right thing and voting down this harmful legislation."

"My light is on and I am ready to speak," she added.

When he refused to acknowledge Zephyr on Thursday, Regier said he was doing so "to protect the dignity and integrity" of the legislative body.

All 32 Democratic House members rose in solidarity with Zephyr on Thursday, and groups including the Montana American Indian Caucus and the Missoula County Democrats have expressed support for her.

House Republicans, said the Missoula County Democrats, are "silencing not only the voice of Rep. Zephyr, but also the voices of roughly 11,000 Montanans in House District 100."

Bolstering her statement that Republicans have "blood on their hands," Zephyr on Tuesday shared a letter state lawmakers received last month from an emergency physician who treated a transgender teenager who said the GOP's opposition to gender-affirming healthcare such as puberty blockers, hormonal treatment, and surgery had contributed to their suicidal ideation.

"Every yes vote on a discriminatory bill targeting transgender Montanans contributed to this child being driven to the point of wanting to kill themselves," the doctor wrote.

As Zephyr noted in her remarks on Tuesday, access to gender-affirming treatment for youths suffering from gender dysphoria is strongly supported by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, and other medical organizations—and cutting access to such treatment is linked to far higher rates of suicide and depression among transgender and nonbinary teens.

"When there are bills targeting the LGBTQ community, I stand up to defend my community," Zephyr told the Associated Press Friday. "And I choose my words with clarity and precision and I spoke to the real harms that these bills bring."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

• House Republicans approve bill banning transgender athletes in most women’s or girl’s school sports
• Julie Su’s nomination to serve as Labor Secretary faces opposition from Republicans and big business — and maybe some Democrats
• Attorney John Burris files federal civil rights lawsuit against Antioch and its police department
• Attorney Generals in 17 states want a recall of Kia and Hyundai cars because they’re too easy to steal

The post House Republicans vote to ban transgender students from women’s and girl’s school sports; Labor Secretary nominee Julie Su faces Republican opposition at confirmation hearing; Federal civil rights lawsuit filed against Antioch and its police department: The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – April 20, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Transgender rights advocates in Florida on Tuesday chose a new method of getting their anti-bigotry message across to Florida Republicans—dropping dozens of pairs of underwear on the heads of lawmakers who were at the state House debating three bills aimed at removing transgender and nonbinary people from public life.

The underwear was emblazoned with messages including, "Leave my genitals alone" and "Fascism has no place in Florida, stop trans genocide," and was thrown into the chamber from a balcony as Republicans spoke in favor of H.B. 1421, which would ban gender-affirming care for minors; H.B. 1521, which would require transgender people to use public bathrooms that correspond to their sex assigned at birth, and S.B. 1438, which would prohibit drag performances in the presence of children.

The Republicans' support for the legislation transformed the Florida House into what Rep. Michele Rayner-Goolsby (D-62) called a "thunderdome of hate."

"You're... stripping [trans people] of their legal right to be recognized as the identity they live in every day," she told Republicans in the House.

Rights activists representing Women's Voices Southwest Florida demanded that the Republicans hear their message, dropping the underwear on the heads of several GOP lawmakers including state Rep. Rachel Plakon (R-36), the lead sponsor of H.B. 1521.

\u201cToday, Floridians with @wvswfl protested Republicans\u2019 creepy obsession with people\u2019s genitals and dumped underwear on their heads as they debated several anti-trans bills. One fell directly on the bill sponsor @RachelPlakon\u2019s head \ud83d\ude02\u201d

— Thomas Kennedy (@Thomas Kennedy) 1681861867

Rep. Spencer Roach (R-76) posted a photo of one pair of underwear that denounced "trans genocide," calling the rights advocates "radical trans-activists."

\u201cToday the radical trans-activists showered legislators with underwear. They were removed from the gallery and I believe some were arrested.\u201d

— SpencerRoach (@SpencerRoach) 1681847766

"How can this dude post this, and only be focused on the underwear?!" said one nonbinary critic. "He is literally openly saying he DOES NOT CARE about trans people killing themselves. Get this man out of office, Florida."

One study from the University of Washington showed in 2022 that gender-affirming care can reduce suicide risk for transgender and nonbinary youths by 73%.

Earlier this month, Florida Rep. Webster Barnaby (R-27) used words including "demons" and "mutants" to describe transgender people, comparing the community to "the X-Men movies or Marvel Comics."

In response, Rep. Angie Nixon (D-14) noted during the debate on Tuesday that the X-Men characters "were created as an ode to civil rights leaders that were being attacked, who wanted to fight for equity, diversity, and inclusion," and proposed an amendment to the drag show ban legislation that would exempt performers dressed as the X-Men.

The amendment was shot down by the GOP as "not worthy" of debate and, like more than a dozen amendments proposed by Democrats to the bills, was not added to the legislation.

The debate and protest took place as Republican-controlled legislatures across the country adopt bans on gender-affirming healthcare for minors as well as adults.

Ten states in the past three months have passed laws prohibiting puberty blockers, transition surgery, and hormonal treatment for people under age 18. In Missouri, an order set to take effect on April 27 will impose severe restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors as well as adults, requiring at least three years of medical documentation of gender dysphoria.

The Florida state House is set to vote on the three pieces of legislation on Wednesday.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

That's one of the key findings of a new poll released Monday by Data for Progress which showed that "72% of Democrats, 65% of Independents, and 55% of Republicans think that there is 'too much legislation' aimed at limiting the rights of transgender and gay people in America."

Citing nearly 430 separate bills that have moved or are moving through state legislatures this year, the survey found that the large majority of U.S. voters believe the Republican Party is using such proposals as a "wedge issue" to sow division or gain political advantage.

Writing on the poll's results, Data for Progress pollsters Erin Thomas, Grace Adcox, Lew Blank, and Isa Alomran argue in a blog post that the Democratic Party as a whole "should be doing more to advocate for queer and trans people" in the face of such relentless and widespread attacks by the GOP.

"Political leaders should not hesitate to call out Republicans on their manipulative political tactics," the trio writes. "Furthermore, they should use their platform to make the country more aware of queer people and queer issues."

The poll specifically asked respondents this question and 56% of likely Democratic voters said the party should be doing more while 63% of Independent or third-party voters agreed.

Another thing made clear in the poll is that Republicans are losing the narrative war at a national level with voters even as their state-level assault on trans and gay rights runs at full steam.

According to the survey, 57% of likely voters overall agree "that transgender identities occur naturally when free societies permit individuals to identify outside of societal norms, whereas only 33 percent view transgender identities as a 'woke' invention."

In their conclusion, Thomas, Adcox, and Blank say that GOP lawmakers approving "anti-LGBTQ+ legislation are out of step with the American electorate," while the majority of likely voters oppose these legislative efforts and will support Democratic politicians and lawmakers "who directly fight" back to oppose them.

"Our polling highlights that knowing trans people and experiencing queer culture significantly improves likely voters' support for trans and queer rights," they wrote. "Increasing public awareness and understanding of transgender and queer people shouldn't solely be the responsibility of trans people."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jon Queally.

Amid a growing wave of Republican attacks on transgender rights—including a recently passed U.S. House bill targeting trans youth—a pair of progressive congressional lawmakers on Thursday prepared to reintroduce a resolution codifying protections for transgender Americans.

The revived Transgender Bill of Rights—introduced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and co-sponsored by dozens of congressional Democrats—comes a day ahead of International Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31. According to Jayapal's office, the measure "provides a comprehensive policy framework to provide protections for transgender and nonbinary people, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to thrive, regardless of their gender identity or expression."

Jayapal, who co-chairs the Transgender Equality Task Force and whose daughter is trans, said in a statement: "Day after day, we see a constant onslaught of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation coming from elected officials. Today we say enough is enough."

"Day after day, we see a constant onslaught of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation coming from elected officials."

Markey asserted that "on this and every International Transgender Day of Visibility, we are reminded of our moral obligation to defend the fundamental rights of trans people against the violence, discrimination, and bigotry that too often mark their lived experience in our country."

"Lives are at stake. The health, safety, and freedom of trans people are at stake," he added. "Congress must take a stand in the face of dangerous, transphobic attacks waged by far-right state legislatures and once again reaffirm our nation's bedrock commitment to equality and justice for all."

According to Jayapal's office, "in 2023 alone, there have been more than 450 anti-LGBTQ+ bills proposed in both state and federal legislature, jeopardizing the safety and mental health of LGBTQ+ youth and trans youth in particular."

"Trans Americans are also four times more likely than cisgender peers to be victims of violent crime and more than 40% have attempted suicide," the congresswoman's office added.

State laws targeting transgender people include—but are not limited to—bans on lifesaving gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth and on trans students from participating on sports teams or using the bathrooms that match their gender identity; and prohibition of public drag shows.

Common Dreamsreported Thursday that West Virginia and Kentucky are the latest states to ban gender-affirming care for trans minors.

Meanwhile, the Kansas House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a bill which would bar transgender individuals from entering single-sex spaces including bathrooms, domestic violence shelters, and prison wards, while labeling intersex people as disabled.

No state is safe from at least the introduction of transphobic legislation, including California, where a Republican state lawmaker earlier this month proposed a bill that would force schools "out" transgender students to their parents under the pretext of boosting parental rights and helping children.

Not content with banning gender-affirming healthcare in their own state, a bill passed earlier this month by Idaho's Republican-controlled House of Representatives included a provision that criminalizes parents or guardians who allow their children to travel outside the state to receive such care.

At the federal level, anti-trans legislation includes the Parents Bill of Rights, passed last week by the Republican-controlled House in a 213-208 vote along party lines.

Among other things, the Transgender Bill of Rights calls on the federal government to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to explicitly include gender identity and to codify the U.S. Supreme Court's Bostock v. Clayton County ruling, which affirmed that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ+ employees from discrimination.

Biden continued:

As kids, they deserve what every child deserves: the chance to learn in safe and supportive schools, to develop meaningful friendships, and to live openly and honestly. As adults, they deserve the same rights enjoyed by every American, including equal access to healthcare, housing, and jobs and the chance to age with grace as senior citizens. But today, too many transgender Americans are still denied those rights and freedoms. A wave of discriminatory state laws is targeting transgender youth, terrifying families and hurting kids who are not hurting anyone. An epidemic of violence against transgender women and girls, in particular women and girls of color, has taken lives far too soon. Last year's Club Q shooting in Colorado was another painful example of this kind of violence—a stain on the conscience of our nation.

The president highlighted how his administration "fought to end these injustices from day one":

On my first day as president, I issued an executive order directing the federal government to root out discrimination against LGBTQI+ people and their families. We have appointed a record number of openly LGBTQI+ leaders, and I was proud to rescind the ban on openly transgender people serving in the military. We are also working to make public spaces and travel more accessible, including with more inclusive gender markers on United States passports. We are improving access to public services and entitlements like Social Security. We are cracking down on discrimination in housing and education. And last December, I signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law, ensuring that every American can marry the person they love and have that marriage accepted, period.

"There is much more to do," Biden added. "I continue to call on Congress to finally pass the Equality Act and extend long-overdue civil rights protections to all LGBTQI+ Americans to ensure they can live with safety and dignity."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

The impending arrival of Kelly-Jean Keen-Minshull — aka Posie Parker — has put the spotlight on the tension between free speech and protecting vulnerable communities in Aotearoa New Zealand.

In particular, it raises questions about Immigration New Zealand’s role in limiting who can visit and speak in the country.

Keen-Minshull is an anti-transgender rights activist and founder of a group called Standing for Women. On the back of a controversial Australian tour, she is planning to speak at a series of events across Aotearoa at the end of March.

• READ MORE: Being transgender is not a mental illness, and the WHO should acknowledge this
• Polarising, sensational media coverage of transgender athletes should end — our research shows a way forward
• Trans rights and political backlash: five key moments in history

But Immigration New Zealand is now reviewing her status after about 30 members of the far-right Nationalist Socialist Movement supported her rally in Melbourne, clashing with LGBTQI supporters.

The Melbourne police were also criticised by legal observers, accused of protecting and supporting the neo-Nazis while focusing “excessive violence” on the LGBTQI supporters.

Meanwhile, National Party leader Chris Luxon has said Keen-Minshull should be allowed into New Zealand on the grounds of free speech. He argued there should be a “high bar” to stop someone entering the country because of what they say.

At the same time, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has said he condemned people who used their right to free speech in a way that deliberately sought to create division. Therein lies the core of the debate.

Members of a neo-Nazi group made Nazi salutes on Saturday on the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne, Australia, during a protest against transgender rights. Political leaders said they would move to ban Nazi salutes in the state of Victoria.https://t.co/0CHFICjr93

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 20, 2023

Threat to public order
Keen-Minshull has allegedly had ties to white supremacist organisations, featuring in videos with Jean-François Gariépy, a prominent far-right YouTuber, and posting a selfie with Hans Jørgen Lysglimt Johansen, a Norwegian neo-Nazi known for Holocaust denial.

Keen-Minshull has also tweeted racist diatribes against Muslims.

The key question is whether the threat of unrest seen at Keen-Minshull’s events poses sufficient risk to public order to justify revoking her visa. It turns out there is a precedent for blocking entry to controversial figures.

In 2014, hip hop collective Odd Future was prevented from entering New Zealand on the grounds they and their audience had been implicated in violence against police and directing harassment towards opponents.

In one instance, members of Odd Future reportedly urged fans to attack police, leaving one officer hospitalised.

Odd Future member Tyler the Creator also unleashed a tirade against an activist who tried to have his Australian concert cancelled. Both instances were offered as reasons to prevent the collective from entering New Zealand.

Character judgements
The Immigration Act stipulates that individuals who are likely to be “a threat or risk” to security, public order or the public interest should not be eligible for a visa or entry permission.

In the past, good character requirements outlined by the act, including criminal background or deportation from other countries, have been used as a reason to block controversial speakers from entering New Zealand.

For example, Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church was denied entry to New Zealand after being deported from other countries.

Anderson has been known to promote Holocaust denial and has confirmed he believes in “hating homosexuals”.

On the flip side, alt-right speakers Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern were granted entry visas in 2018 after meeting character requirements, despite calls for the pair to be banned from entering New Zealand.

Potential harm
Arguably, Keen-Minshull should not be granted entry under the banner of free speech. Rallies like those recently held in Australia do appear to cause concrete harm.

Research after the Christchurch Call, a political summit initiated by former prime minister Jacinda Ardern in 2019 after the Christchurch massacre, found expanding extremist communities increased the risk of physical attacks in the future.

According to the 2018 Counting Ourselves survey, some 71 percent of trans people reported experiencing high or very high rates of mental distress, and 44 percent experienced harassment during the 2018 survey period.

Research shows that trans people experience “minority stress” — high levels of chronic stress faced by socially marginalised groups, caused by poor social support, low socioeconomic status and prejudice.

A key part of “minority stress” is linked to anticipating and attempting to avoid discrimination.

Being consistent
Beyond the question of free speech, Immigration New Zealand needs to be consistent in its application of the law. In the case of Odd Future, an Immigration official admitted it was unusual to ban musical acts:

Generally it’s aimed at organisations like white supremacists and neo-Nazis, people who have come in here to be public speakers, holocaust deniers – those kinds of people.

However, Immigration stood by its decision based on the lead singer’s incitement of violence against police and harassment of an activist. Considering the ruling on Odd Future as a risk to public order, it would surely be inconsistent to allow Keen-Minshull entry.

In 2018, she was spoken to by UK police for making videos criticising the chief executive of transgender charity Mermaids. And, in 2019, Keen-Minshull recorded herself in Washington DC confronting trans advocate Sarah McBride after breaking into a private meeting.

Encouraging the far-right?
In the post-covid era, New Zealand has already seen a more visible far-right anti-LGBTQI movement. There has been a rise in harassment and attacks against LGBTQI communities across the country, including the arson of the Tauranga Rainbow Youth and Gender Dynamix building.

We need to listen to those targeted by hate groups — it is their safety that is at risk from speakers who deny their existence and humanity.

The line between free speech and causing harm is complicated to draw. But this case seems clear cut. Whether you agree or disagree with the 2014 decision to bar Odd Future entry to New Zealand, the precedent has been set for visitors who pose a threat to public order.

Kevin Veale, Lecturer in Media Studies, part of the Digital Cultures Laboratory in the School of Humanities, Media, and Creative Communication, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

J. K. Rowling has recently argued that transgender ideology should be interrogated because sex is real, or at least that it has real lived experiences. Sadly I have to admit I have made the same argument rather carelessly in the past. I think Rowling could learn from her own hit book series Harry Potter.

In the first installment of the seven-book series, Rowling sorts her protagonist (and his peers) into one of four houses. The heroes of the story are in Gryffindor (courage), with allied forces in Hufflepuff (kindness) and Ravenclaw (brains). The dark side is in Slytherin. The houses mirror Wizard of Oz, with the lion symbol of Gryffindor aligning with the cowardly lion, the tin man’s heart with Hufflepuff and the scarecrow’s brain with Ravenclaw.

When the sorting hat is put on Harry Potter’s head it thinks of him as a Slytherin. Harry was struck by a killing curse by the most powerful and evil wizard (Voldemort) and therefore he, biologically speaking, has a lot of connections to the dark side. For example, he can talk to snakes, something only usually the darkest of wizards can do. He can also see into Voldemort’s mind and part of him enjoys this.

Because of this connection to the dark side, many liberal wizards don’t trust him, ignorant that he is on the front lines. But the Sorting Hat isn’t into wizard politics. What changes the mind of the Sorting Hat is that Harry Potter does not want to be in Slytherin. He wants to be in Gryffindor.

It is a striking parallel to the transgender ideology. Those against the transgender community say that the body you are born into should determine your gender. They say what you want doesn’t matter. They don’t want free choice on this issue. They want to decide everyone’s gender.

But the issue with their need for control is that the definition of gender is an alienated one. No one really feels like a man or a woman. People latch onto these identities to form order in their own lives. This always is a conservative choice but certainly something we should be free to do.

The transgender community must be defended. We must defend not only the right to exist but the right to exist as transgender. Rowling is more successful than ever since she began using transgender people as a punching bag and this sort of behavior has effects on the ground as transgender people are being met with murder, such as the recent case on Lake Street light rail in Minneapolis.

Ilhan Omar argued: Trans women have become a central focus of the right-wing culture war, with many states moving to ban trans health care, to reduce the visibility of trans and queer people in public life, and even to outlaw being transgender…We must recognize that the legislative attacks on trans people are part of the same violence that led to nearly 90 trans people being killed in the United States over the last two years.”

The issue with Rowling, like most people who are too rich to have real problems, is that what started as a legitimate question about feminism quickly became a conversation about Rowling herself and how everyone hates her (not what her sales reflect). I do find the demonization of feminism unfortunate. I don’t buy into the existence of “TERF” (trans-exclusive radical feminists) being the thing we must resist. This is horseshoe theory in action. Just as anyone saying transgender people rather than men are a threat to women, the same formula must be used to say feminists are not a threat to trans rights.

This is the only gripe I have with the otherwise important term intersectionality. It’s like the people arguing over whether Malcolm X was a feminist. You’re going to cancel Malcolm X? Who would be left? Whenever I hear something isn’t intersectional enough it reminds me of Marxist debates that retreat from material reality with sectarianism.

All that aside I do think it is unfortunate that the magic of Harry Potter, once censored by the right for being a threat to religion, is now seen as a right-wing series. The truth lies somewhere in the middle as the best art is up for interpretation and intervenes at the human level, transforming us without us realizing it. Most art nowadays has such obvious and clumsy political markers that half the audience boycotts it before they see it and no one changes or enjoys as a result.

But the question of freedom remains. The right-wing will advocate for parents’ right to control the sexuality of their children. If a right winger can have one eye on protecting his property with a gun and one eye monitoring his child’s sex life, he is happy. If an area is polluted or occupied by police it is fine because it is probably dark and poor and this makes the right winger feel safer. But this isn’t a great life.

Harry Potter could be read as a right-wing story. His superpower comes from his mother’s willingness to die for him, something the political right aims for these days. But the difference between Harry Potter and the right-wing narrative is that the purpose isn’t the mother’s death but rather the child’s life.

Another point against the right-wing reading of Harry Potter is that there is a mirror in which when you look into it you see everything you want. Rather than solving all of the problems of wizards, it leads them into madness. This seems to be against the number one rule of the conservative movement today. The most important thing for them is to live outside of reality in a magical world where the free market solves every problem and the villain isn’t environmental catastrophe or those wielding power.

It is more comforting for the right wing to believe the most vulnerable are the enemy. Trans people are another example of this tendency and the left must stop making this issue more complex than it needs to be. Many leftists claim that the trans issue has gone too far and that we are force-feeding children a trans identity.

Even if this were true, which it is not, what would be the solution to this? “Save the children” is the excuse for every right-wing intervention and we must assert something more radical than that. We must assert freedom for the children. Children must be allowed to play, to imagine, to experiment, to question to make mistakes. Childhood is the time when we should learn how to fail. Gender, no matter its end, is a failure, and we must learn how to fail better at it.

Childhood should be the time when the stakes are low enough to fail. Because if you fail as an adult, you are on your own in America. By policing children we end up with the forever childhoods the right wing complains about.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Pemberton.

The Nebraska state Senate's 90-day legislative session reached its halfway point on Wednesday, but not a single bill has been passed yet thanks to a filibuster that was begun three weeks ago by state Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh in a bid to stop Republicans from "legislating hate" against transgender children across the state.

Cavanaugh (D-6) was horrified to see an anti-transgender rights bill advance to the Senate floor in late February and was determined to keep it from passing into law, as at least nine other anti-LGBTQ+ bills have in state legislatures so far this year.

The so-called Let Them Grow Act (Legislative Bill 574) would bar transgender and nonbinary people under the age of 19 from obtaining gender-affirming healthcare.

Republicans hold 32 seats in the state Senate compared to Democrats' 17, but it takes 33 votes to overcome a filibuster.

"The children of Nebraska deserve to have somebody stand up and fight for them."

So Cavanaugh has spent every day in session since the bill arrived on the Senate floor introducing dozens of amendments to other pieces of legislation, slowing the Senate's business to a crawl and taking up every hour of debate time permitted by the chamber's rules—at times speaking at length about unrelated topics including her favorite foods and movies.

"If this Legislature collectively decides that legislating hate against children is our priority, then I am going to make it painful, painful for everyone, because if you want to inflict pain upon our children, I am going to inflict pain upon this body," Cavanaugh told her colleagues during one debate session. "I have nothing, nothing but time, and I am going to use all of it."

"I will burn the session to the ground over this bill," she added.

The Let Them Grow Act, like a number of the approximately 150 anti-LGBTQ+ bills that have been introduced in other states so far this year, would prohibit gender-affirming surgical procedures, hormone therapy, and puberty blockers for minors.

Gender-affirming care for minors is supported by the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, with the latter organization noting in a 2018 policy statement that many transgender youths experience fear of discrimination by providers and "lack of continuity with providers" as a result of limited access to gender-affirming care.

A study by the University of Washington found that youths who received gender-affirming care were 73% less likely to experience suicidality and 60% likely to suffer from depression than those who did not obtain care.

Cavanaugh also told the Associated Press Wednesday that 58% of transgender and nonbinary youths in her state seriously considered suicide in 2020, according to a 2021 survey by the Trevor Project, and more than 1 in 5 said they had attempted suicide.

"The children of Nebraska deserve to have somebody stand up and fight for them," Cavanaugh told the AP.

Speaking to "The New Yorker Radio Hour" last week, the senator said some of her Republican colleagues have privately told her they are frustrated with their own party's agenda as GOP leaders including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump wage attacks on transgender children.

"What has been expressed to me is a frustration over discussing policies like this instead of discussing policies that most of them ran to be here discussing. This is what a culture war looks like apparently," said Cavanaugh. "What I'm asking of them is to rise up and say that, if this really isn't who they are, rise up and say that and stop having private conversations with me telling me how much you don't like the bill, how much you don't want to be focusing on this issue, and rise up and say something about it. I'm challenging them."

LGBTQ+ advocacy group OutNebraska told the AP that Cavanaugh has embarked on a "heroic effort."

"It is extremely meaningful when an ally does more than pay lip service to allyship," said executive director Abbi Swatsworth. "She really is leading this charge."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

A trio of civil rights groups on Thursday said they will sue after Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee ignored pleas from human rights and health experts and signed a bill banning gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth—a move that came on the same day the governor also approved legislation criminalizing public drag shows.

Under S.B. 1—introduced by state Sen. Jack Johnson (R-23), the same lawmaker behind the public drag ban—transgender minors undergoing hormone therapy or taking prescribed puberty blockers as of July 1, 2023 will be cut off from such care in Tennessee after March 31, 2024. Trans youth not receiving gender-affirming care by July 1 will be barred from doing so in the state.

Tennessee joins Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah in outlawing or restricting gender-affirming care for trans youth—and, in the case of Alabama, anyone under age 19. Federal judges have blocked Alabama and Arkansas from implementing their bans. Meanwhile this year, at least 24 states have introduced legislation to prohibit or restrict such care.

Lambda Legal—which along with the ACLU and ACLU of Tennessee announced its intent to sue—accused Lee and Republican lawmakers of "taking away the freedom of families of transgender youth to seek critical healthcare" and "putting the government in charge of making vital decisions traditionally reserved to parents in Tennessee."

"They've chosen fearmongering, misrepresentations, intimidation, and extremist politics over the rights of families and the lives of transgender youth in Tennessee."

"We will not allow this dangerous law to stand," the groups said in a joint statement. "Certain politicians and Gov. Lee have made no secret of their intent to discriminate against youth who are transgender or their willful ignorance about the lifesaving healthcare they seek to ban."

"Instead, they've chosen fearmongering, misrepresentations, intimidation, and extremist politics over the rights of families and the lives of transgender youth in Tennessee," the groups added. "We are dedicated to overturning this unconstitutional law and are confident the state will find itself completely incapable of defending it in court. We want transgender youth to know they are not alone and this fight is not over."

Ivy Hill, director of gender justice for the Campaign for Southern Equality, said in a statement after the bill passed that "my heart is breaking for transgender youth all across the country and throughout the South."

"We've known for years that it's never been easy to access gender-affirming care in states like Tennessee and the passage of this bill will only make it harder," they added. "But the trans and queer community across the South will do what we've always done: come together, support each other, and chart new systems that help people live authentic, thriving lives where they know they are loved and supported."

Dr. Allison Stiles, a Memphis physician, said that "this bill, I feel, was born out of fearmongering—out of false rhetoric that we are doing sex-change operations on our children."

"The hate has grown, and we now have a bill that could get parents arrested for taking their gender-dysphoric child to the physician, and their physicians for taking care of them," she asserted.

"There are at least four human beings that I have touched with my hands who are this side of the grave because of the gender-affirming care."

"Just to throw in a little science here... there are four independent aspects to our sexuality," Stiles added. "Our genetics—which could be XX, XO, XY, XXY, XYY—there is our outward appearance, our gender identity, and our sexual preference. The XX and XY fetus are identical, actually, until six weeks of gestation."

Proponents of gender-affirming care noted it saves lives.

"There are at least four human beings that I have touched with my hands who are this side of the grave because of the gender-affirming care," Rev. Dawn Bennett of the Table Nashville, a faith group that centers the LGBTQ+ community, recently asserted.

According to the ACLU, Republican lawmakers in more than 20 states are trying to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth—and in some cases, even adults.

Lee also signed a bill on Thursday making Tennessee the first state to criminalize public drag shows. The governor signed the measure amid allegations of hypocrisy following the revelation that he dressed in drag at least once while in high school in the 1970s.

"Drag is not a threat to anyone. It makes no sense to be criminalizing or vilifying drag in 2023," Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a professor of culture and gender studies at the University of Michigan who has performed in drag, told the Associated Press.

"It is a space where people explore their identities," La Fountain-Stokes continued. "But it is also a place where people simply make a living. Drag is a job. Drag is a legitimate artistic expression that brings people together, that entertains, that allows certain individuals to explore who they are and allows all of us to have a very nice time. So it makes literally no sense for legislators, for people in government, to try to ban drag."

Other GOP-run states—including Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma—are considering similar drag bans.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Tennessee joins Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah in outlawing or restricting gender-affirming care for trans youth—and, in the case of Alabama, anyone under age 19. Federal judges have blocked Alabama and Arkansas from implementing their bans. Meanwhile this year, at least 24 states have introduced legislation to prohibit or restrict such care.

Lambda Legal—which along with the ACLU and ACLU of Tennessee announced its intent to sue—accused Lee and Republican lawmakers of "taking away the freedom of families of transgender youth to seek critical healthcare" and "putting the government in charge of making vital decisions traditionally reserved to parents in Tennessee."

"They've chosen fearmongering, misrepresentations, intimidation, and extremist politics over the rights of families and the lives of transgender youth in Tennessee."

"We will not allow this dangerous law to stand," the groups said in a joint statement. "Certain politicians and Gov. Lee have made no secret of their intent to discriminate against youth who are transgender or their willful ignorance about the lifesaving healthcare they seek to ban."

"Instead, they've chosen fearmongering, misrepresentations, intimidation, and extremist politics over the rights of families and the lives of transgender youth in Tennessee," the groups added. "We are dedicated to overturning this unconstitutional law and are confident the state will find itself completely incapable of defending it in court. We want transgender youth to know they are not alone and this fight is not over."

Ivy Hill, director of gender justice for the Campaign for Southern Equality, said in a statement after the bill passed that "my heart is breaking for transgender youth all across the country and throughout the South."

"We've known for years that it's never been easy to access gender-affirming care in states like Tennessee and the passage of this bill will only make it harder," they added. "But the trans and queer community across the South will do what we've always done: come together, support each other, and chart new systems that help people live authentic, thriving lives where they know they are loved and supported."

Dr. Allison Stiles, a Memphis physician, said that "this bill, I feel, was born out of fearmongering—out of false rhetoric that we are doing sex-change operations on our children."

"The hate has grown, and we now have a bill that could get parents arrested for taking their gender-dysphoric child to the physician, and their physicians for taking care of them," she asserted.

"There are at least four human beings that I have touched with my hands who are this side of the grave because of the gender-affirming care."

"Just to throw in a little science here... there are four independent aspects to our sexuality," Stiles added. "Our genetics—which could be XX, XO, XY, XXY, XYY—there is our outward appearance, our gender identity, and our sexual preference. The XX and XY fetus are identical, actually, until six weeks of gestation."

Proponents of gender-affirming care noted it saves lives.

"There are at least four human beings that I have touched with my hands who are this side of the grave because of the gender-affirming care," Rev. Dawn Bennett of the Table Nashville, a faith group that centers the LGBTQ+ community, recently asserted.

According to the ACLU, Republican lawmakers in more than 20 states are trying to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth—and in some cases, even adults.

Lee also signed a bill on Thursday making Tennessee the first state to criminalize public drag shows. The governor signed the measure amid allegations of hypocrisy following the revelation that he dressed in drag at least once while in high school in the 1970s.

"Drag is not a threat to anyone. It makes no sense to be criminalizing or vilifying drag in 2023," Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a professor of culture and gender studies at the University of Michigan who has performed in drag, told the Associated Press.

"It is a space where people explore their identities," La Fountain-Stokes continued. "But it is also a place where people simply make a living. Drag is a job. Drag is a legitimate artistic expression that brings people together, that entertains, that allows certain individuals to explore who they are and allows all of us to have a very nice time. So it makes literally no sense for legislators, for people in government, to try to ban drag."

Other GOP-run states—including Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma—are considering similar drag bans.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

In moves that alarmed advocates for transgender youth, the Tennessee and Mississippi GOP-dominated legislatures this week sent bills banning gender-affirming care for minors to their Republican governors' desks.

Even though organizations including the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and American Psychiatric Association support gender-affirming care for young people, GOP state lawmakers nationwide have recently introduced bills intended to restrict or outlaw it.

The Tennessee House of Representatives on Thursday voted 77-16 on House Bill 1, with three Democrats joining Republicans to pass the measure, which the state Senate passed 26-6 last week.

Under H.B. 1, doctors could not provide healthcare such as hormone therapies, puberty blockers, or surgical procedures to trans minors, with limited exceptions for care that began before the bill would take effect on July 1. Those who violate the pending law could face a state attorney general probe and a $25,000 fine.

As The Tennesseeanreported Thursday:

The bill will soon be sent to Gov. Bill Lee's desk, which kicks off a 10-day countdown, not including Sundays, for Lee to sign it into law. Even if Lee chooses not to sign, the bill becomes law without his signature unless he vetoes it.

Though he rarely takes an explicit position on pending bills, Lee on Friday signaled he is "supportive" of the bill's content.

ACLU of Tennessee staff attorney Lucas Cameron-Vaughn promised a court fight if the GOP governor does not veto the bill.

"We are deeply disturbed that state politicians have voted to interfere with the ability of families to make decisions, in consultation with medical professionals, to provide critical care for young people who are transgender," Cameron-Vaughn said. "All Tennesseans should have access to the healthcare they need to survive and thrive."

"Gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth is safe, necessary, effective, and often lifesaving," the lawyer stressed. "Legislators are risking trans young people’s health, well-being, and safety with this dangerous legislation. We urge Gov. Lee to veto this overreaching, discriminatory bill, or we will see him in court."

"We urge Gov. Lee to veto this overreaching, discriminatory bill, or we will see him in court."

Cameron-Vaughn's colleague McKenna Raney-Gray, LGBTQ Justice Project staff attorney at the ACLU of Mississippi, delivered a similar message about House Bill 1125 to GOP Gov. Tate Reeves earlier this week.

After the Mississippi House of Representatives last month passed that bill 78-30, with four Democrats joining Republicans, the state Senate on Tuesday approved it 33-15, voting along party lines.

"This is a devastating development for transgender youth in Mississippi and heartbreaking for all of us who love and support them," said the ACLU's Raney-Gray. "This care was already too difficult to access across the state for transgender people of any age, but this law shuts the door on best-practice medical care and puts politics between parents, their children, and their doctors."

In a letter to Reeves, Raney-Gray wrote that "if enacted, this legislation will deny children lifesaving, medically necessary healthcare and violate the constitutional rights of Mississippians," and urged him to veto the ban.

However, Reeves vowed to sign the legislation, tweeting Tuesday that "sterilizing and castrating children in the name of new gender ideology is wrong. That plain truth is somehow controversial in today's world. I called for us to stop these sick experimental treatments, and I look forward to getting the bill."

Mickie Stratos, president of the Spectrum Center of Hattiesburg, emphasized that "Mississippi legislators are positioning H.B. 1125 as a measure to protect kids, when the reality is that this bill will do the exact opposite. Access to gender-affirming medical care is a top indicator of healthy and positive outcomes for trans people."

"To criminalize that care is a direct assault on the physical, emotional, and mental health of trans youth, and we will see negative outcomes for our trans youth and their families in [Mississippi] as a result," they warned. "Regardless of the outcome of this legislation, we will remain here in Mississippi to support, affirm, love, and care for the trans folks and their families impacted by this attack."

Ivy Hill, director of gender justice for the Campaign for Southern Equality, said that "this bill—and an overwhelming wave of similar legislation moving quickly in states across the country—is cruelly targeting transgender youth and their doctors. To every trans young person who feels attacked, marginalized, or fearful for the future: Please know that you are loved, you are supported, and there is queer community across the state and nationwide who care about you and are joining with you in solidarity."

As part of that wave, GOP Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed into law a ban on gender-affirming care for youth last month, and Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem signed another last week.

While similar bills have advanced in Nebraska and Oklahoma, "a federal judge who blocked Arkansas' ban on gender-affirming care for minors is now considering whether to strike down the law as unconstitutional," The Associated Pressreported Thursday. "A similar ban in Alabama has also been temporarily blocked by a federal judge."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

U.S. House Republicans laid the groundwork for some top legislative priorities during a hearing this week that examined public funding for charter schools and voucher programs, as well as increasing parents’ oversight of school curriculum. The Republican chair of the Education and the Workforce Committee, North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, provided a forum for a discussion of legislation that would prioritize tax incentives for private or alternative schooling over public schools, allow parental access to public school curriculum and bar many transgender athletes from competing in school sports.

Public education has become a major cause for the GOP, mainly in Republican-controlled state legislatures and at local school board meetings at which conservatives target books, often with themes or characters centering on LGBTQ individuals or people of color. The results have been the banning of thousands of books as well as a culture war over school curriculum that centers on diversity, gender identity and inclusion.

The Republican chair of the Education and the Workforce Committee... provided a forum for a discussion of legislation that would prioritize tax incentives for private or alternative schooling over public schools, allow parental access to public school curriculum and bar many transgender athletes from competing in school sports.

Now with Republicans in control of the U.S. House, the battle has made its way to the federal stage, though progress may be difficult for the GOP given a Democratic-controlled Senate and a Democratic president. Education policy also has traditionally largely remained in the hands of states and local school bodies.

Foxx said that she intends to champion a bill that GOP Rep. Julia Letlow of Louisiana, a member of the committee, introduced in the prior Congress, known as the Parents Bill of Rights Act. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri also introduced a Senate version of the bill, which boosts the so-called parents’ rights movement pushed by conservatives.

Letlow’s bill, which garnered 116 Republican co-sponsors, has several broad provisions, such as a requirement that schools provide parents with a list of books in the schools’ libraries and give parents the right to meet with their child’s teacher at least twice a year.

The measure specifies that parents are allowed to review curriculum and instructional materials.

“It is time for the education complex to understand that children belong to their parents, not the state,” Foxx said in her opening statement.

'Educational gag orders'

Democrats pushed back, arguing that Republicans were not addressing the real issues in education such as low teacher pay and school shootings.

They criticized Republicans for instead focusing on advancing and passing “educational gag orders” — a term used by ranking member Bobby Scott of Virginia — such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, book bans and restrictions on how educators can teach topics related to race and gender.

“Many of these attacks have been launched under the guise of transparency and expanding parents’ rights,” Scott said in his opening statement. “While parental engagement is critical for a student’s success, the bills introduced have been crafted to give a vocal minority the power to impose personal beliefs over all students.”

Scott, the top Democrat on the committee, said that in his state, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin set up an emergency hotline for people to call about the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 public schools.

“That dedicated phone line was shut down since there were no complaints about CRT being taught in elementary or secondary schools,” Scott said. “That’s maybe because it’s only taught in a few law schools.”

Schools targeted

The spotlight on public education has increased since 2020, when schools were shut down by the pandemic and parents and educators fought over mask mandates when schools reopened.

Targeting education is a strategy that worked for Youngkin in 2021, when he campaigned on his opposition to critical race theory, though it did not prove as successful for Republican candidates across the country in 2022.

Youngkin also aired strong objections to schools’ use of the late novelist Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Beloved,” a story about a former slave who runs away and is haunted by the ghosts of her past.

Targeting education is a strategy that worked for Youngkin in 2021, when he campaigned on his opposition to critical race theory, though it did not prove as successful for Republican candidates across the country in 2022.

One of the Republican witnesses at Wednesday’s hearing, Virginia Gentles of the Independent Women’s Forum, said she supported several Republican-led education bills such as Letlow’s and also the Education Choice for Children’s Act, which the late Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana introduced in the previous Congress. The bill would create a tax credit for individuals or corporations donating to scholarship-granting organizations that provide private school vouchers to students.

“Students must be allowed to escape the residentially assigned public schools that are not effectively educating them,” Gentles said.

In a House Oversight hearing last year, Gentles argued that parents should be allowed to not send their children to public school, and should be provided with vouchers to send their children to private institutions that have a curriculum with which they agree.

Gentles is the director of the Education Freedom Center at IWF, a right-wing public policy group that is financially backed by the Koch brothers, who are billionaires that fund conservative movements.

School vouchers in general allow taxpayer money to be used by parents to help pay tuition for private education. Charter schools are publicly funded but privately run and divert money away from public schools.

'Real crisis'

Democratic Rep. Suzanne Marie Bonamici of Oregon said the solution to addressing problems in America’s education system is not “to funnel taxpayer dollars to unaccountable private schools and for-profit charter schools,” because it undermines the effectiveness of public schools and education.

“A real crisis in American education is that many of my colleagues, in Congress and in state legislatures, are applying a divisive strategy rooted in discrimination toward and exclusion of LGBTQ students and students with disabilities, trying to censor and silence content that does not fit their political ideology and agenda, defunding public schools and failing to address gun violence,” Bonamici said.

She asked the witness tapped by Democrats, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, about how his state’s public schools were working with parents to involve them in their children’s education while also supporting the wellbeing of LGBTQ+ students.

Polis said that a critical part of a school system’s success is how much it includes parents.

“I’ve seen school leaders do (an) inventory of skills of parents and find ways that parents can supplement and provide additional learning opportunities for kids at the classroom level, making sure that parents are partners and know what their students assign for homework,” he said.

Democratic Rep. Frederica Wilson of Florida pushed for support of her legislation, which would establish a minimum salary for teachers of $60,000, arguing that “low teacher pay is one of the many factors contributing to teacher shortages across the nation.”

And Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia said that the five-year anniversary of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, is next week, and said the committee needed to address the epidemic of school shootings.

Transgender athletes

Gentles also brought up her support of a bill introduced in the last Congress by Republican Rep. Greg Steube of Florida titled The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. According to a summary, it would “make it a violation of federal law for a recipient of federal funds who operates, sponsors, or facilitates athletic programs or activities to permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.”

It says that for purposes of the bill, “sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”

Republican Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana asked Polis if he thought boys and girls should be competing with each other.

Polis said that his 8-year-old daughter plays baseball on a coed team that is about 90% boys and 10% girls, and he said that “she’s every bit as competitive as them.” He added that if he was not running the state of Colorado, he would be the baseball coach of her Little League team.

“Pretty soon your 8-year-old will be 15 to 16, and I wonder how you’ll feel at that point,” Banks said.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Ariana Figueroa.

Defying the guidance of the nation's leading medical organizations, Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox on Saturday signed into law a bill banning gender-affirming care for minors in the state.

Passed by the Utah House of Representatives on Thursday and the state Senate on Friday, S.B. 16 prohibits gender-affirming surgeries for trans youth and bars hormonal treatment for new patients who were not diagnosed with gender dysphoria before the bill's effective date, May 3.

"This bill effectively bans access to lifesaving medical care for transgender youth in Utah," said Brittney Nystrom, executive director of the ACLU of Utah, after the Senate vote Friday. "It undermines the health and well-being of adolescents, limits the options of doctors, patients, and parents, and violates the constitutional rights of these families."

Nystrom also sent Cox a letter urging him to veto the bill. She wrote that "the ACLU of Utah is deeply concerned about the damaging and potentially catastrophic effects this law will have on people's lives and medical care, and the grave violations of people's constitutional rights it will cause."

Cathryn Oakley, Human Rights Campaign's state legislative director and senior counsel, had also pressured Cox to veto the bill, arguing Friday that "Utah legislators capitulated to extremism and fear-mongering, and by doing so, shamelessly put the lives and well-being of young Utahans at risk—young transgender folks who are simply trying to navigate life as their authentic selves."

"Every parent wants and deserves access to the highest quality healthcare for our kids," Oakley said. "This discriminatory legislation bans care that is age-appropriate and supported by every major medical association, representing more than 1.3 million doctors. Medical decisions are best left to medical experts and parents or guardians, not politicians without an ounce of medical training acting as if they know how to raise and support our children better than we do."

Dr. Jack Turban, an assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco who researches the mental health of transgender and gender diverse youth, also pointed out that the new Utah law contradicts the positions of various medical organizations.

Some LGBTQ+ advocates had hoped Cox would be compelled to block the bill because last March, citing trans youth suicide rates, he vetoed H.B. 11, which banned transgender girls from playing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity. Utah lawmakers swiftly overrode his veto but a state judge in August issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law.

Republican lawmakers in various states have ramped up efforts to enact anti-trans laws—particularly those targeting youth—over the past few years. As The New York Timesreported Wednesday:

But even by those standards, the start of the 2023 legislative season stands out for the aggressiveness with which lawmakers are pushing into new territory.

The bills they have proposed—more than 150 in at least 25 states—include bans on transition care into young adulthood; restrictions on drag shows using definitions that could broadly encompass performances by transgender people; measures that would prevent teachers in many cases from using names or pronouns matching students' gender identities; and requirements that schools out transgender students to their parents.

Legislative researcher Erin Reed, who is transgender, told the Times that the more aggressive proposals could make others seem like compromises.

"I really hope that people don't allow that to happen," Reed said. "Because these bills still target trans people who will then have to suffer the consequences."

In a tweet about Cox's decision Saturday, Reed said that "my heart breaks for Utah trans kids."

After the Utah House passed the measure Thursday, the chamber's Democrats expressed their disappointment with what they called "a misguided step by our Legislature and a violation of parents' rights," and said that "we recognize that gender-affirming healthcare is lifesaving, patient-center healthcare."

"With no pathway forward for children in need of care, this legislation will inevitably lead to litigation and a likely injunction," they added. "This is a tremendous waste of taxpayer money, and worse, a terrible message for our Legislature to send to transgender Utahns, their family, and their friends."

After the governor signed the bill, the ACLU of Utah tweeted Saturday that "trans kids are kids—they deserve to grow up without constant political attacks on their lives and healthcare; we will defend that right. We see you. We support you."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

What makes a good society? Is it a guaranteed right to pursue happiness, as our Declaration of Independence proclaimed? Perhaps, as Gandhi said, it’s providing the poorest and most vulnerable among us with the means to control their own lives. But what happens when it’s the pursuit of happiness that makes someone most vulnerable?

Let me introduce you to my child, my one and only. They — and, no, it wasn’t as hard as I expected to get used to the gender-neutral plural pronoun that they prefer — are brown-skinned, Mexican-American, secular-Jewish, and gay-married. In a country where Donald Trump is still admired by some 40% of the public, don’t imagine for a second that my child, with all those identities, isn’t horrifyingly vulnerable.

Lately, however, the Trumpian movement (with the full support of the future president’s assumed Republican opponent in 2024, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis) has targeted its most intense hatred on another part of my child’s identity. They are a gender-non-binary (and highly successful) drag queen, bringing happiness not only to themselves but to their cheering audiences. That’s where their right to the pursuit of happiness is most threatened at the moment and what makes them most vulnerable.

My child has been safe from attack — so far. Others haven’t been so fortunate. The murderous shootings at a drag club in my home state of Colorado are just the most notorious in a string of hate crimes directed at drag shows. More than 120 of them reportedly experienced protests, were threatened, or even attacked in 2022. Some transgender folks have come to believe that it’s no longer safe to live in this country. Others are thinking they might be better off taking leave of life itself.

In such a world, what’s a proud, concerned, on-the-edge-of-frightened father to do? For me, a first step is to come out of retirement and try to write some helpful words.

It would be easy to simply denounce the spread of right-wing bigotry as misinformed, misguided, and unjust, but what good would that do? Right-wingers live in a Fox News-mediated world of their own, where their bigotry seems to make perfectly good sense to them, while otherwise reasonable arguments fall on deaf ears.

So I want to write for a different audience. I’m inspired by the words Martin Luther King, Jr., penned while sitting in a Birmingham jail. “The Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom” was not, he said, the out-and-out racist. It was “the white moderate, more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice… Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

Of course, there are big differences between the Jim Crow South of his day and the gender-identity-biased world of today. Still, I’ve talked to people who would never countenance discrimination, much less violence, against any minority, yet offer, at best, the most lukewarm acceptance of drag queens, non-binary, or transgender folks. They tell me they aren’t quite sure how they feel about such people. Some admit to just not being comfortable going to a drag show and finding themselves surprisingly unnerved around anyone who claims to be transgender.

Often, their understanding of what’s going on in our world couldn’t be shallower. They may even refer to my child as transgender because they haven’t grasped the difference between that and non-binary. To put it all too briefly: a transgender person has a specific gender identity different from the sex assigned them at birth; a non-binary person doesn’t identify exclusively as male or female, but as both, neither, or some combination of the two. Acquaintances who do know the difference have said to me that it’s still not clear to them what category my beloved drag queen fits into. (In fact, drag queens come with all kinds of gender identities.)

Since many people of good will remain uncertain and confused on issues like these, they don’t raise their voices to protest such discrimination. To my mind, that hesitation holds the key to understanding the problem in a basic way — and also to reducing discrimination and violence, and so moving this society in a more just direction.

Reinforcing the Wall of Gender Separation

Why are many thoughtful, well-educated people so ready to lump drag queens, non-binary, and transgender people in a single rejectable category? I suspect it’s much the same reason that leads to attacks on all three from the bigoted right and the same reason media stories often lump all three together: they all challenge the traditional division of humanity into two simple categories, male and female. They seem to blur that line or even dissolve it. Think of them, then, as gender-blenders. And because of that, they threaten our sense of social order, which, as King pointed out, may be more important than justice, even to many well-meaning people.

In my professional field as an academic, the study of religion, we have often explored how people create order in their lives by translating the world into sets of binary opposites with firm values attached: up is better than down; God is better than the devil; our God is better than their devil; we are better than them. Religion is often remarkably devoted to shoring up the boundary lines that keep those opposites apart.

These days, scholars are more likely to stress the ways that religion can actually help people blur and cross boundaries, because most of us grasp the danger of maintaining a separation between categories that naturally blur in the real world. Doing so is a first step down the slippery slope to creating ever more extreme hierarchies, which all too often end in injustice, oppression, and violence. The quest for order, in other words, has a way of transforming itself into a license to suppress or even ultimately eliminate “those people” on the other side of the line.

One recent analyst of the right-wing’s hatred of gender-blenders, Nathan Robinson, explains that it comes from “a visceral distaste for that which is different.” And behind that distaste lies “a devotion to traditional hierarchies.” Trumpublicans hope, writes Amanda Marcotte, “that they can return men to some imaginary glory days when the line between the genders was thick and inflexible, and women’s role was unquestionably that of subservience to men… If people start questioning what gender even means, then the whole right-wing system of power allocation begins to crumble.”

To paraphrase Robert Frost, something there is about a bigot that does love a wall, whether it’s between Mexico and the U.S. or men and women. How appropriate, then, that the legendary beginning of the gay rights movement in this country was a 1969 police raid on a gay bar named the Stonewall Inn. Consider it an irony, then, that there is now a growing acceptance of gays and lesbians, in part because they are seen as maintaining (or even reinforcing) the clear difference between male and female.

Despite the bill Florida Governor DeSantis passed — dubbed by its opponents the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — the reactionary right-wing has largely lost the battle against gay and lesbian rights and is now turning to a more popular target: those who blur, or even dissolve, that gender boundary. And the bigots fight all the more fiercely because they’re not just defending a particular boundary, but the very existence of social demarcation itself.

Today, the appropriate metaphor for it may not be a wall at all, but a dam. Martin Luther King put it aptly so long ago, indicting those “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” because order without justice is a “dangerously structured dam that blocks the flow of social progress.” And a New York City politician proved King’s point all too well recently. Condemning schools and libraries that bring in drag queens to read books to children, that Republican (after mouthing the usual, totally unfounded charge of “sexual grooming”) revealed her deepest source of anger — that it’s “a program teaching little children about their gender fluidity.”

Fluids, of course, may dissolve whatever they touch, whatever kinds of boundaries we create to give us a sense of social order. If so, the satisfaction we get from believing those lines to be immutable will begin to dissolve, too. Hence, the fierce desire to attack “gender fluidity.”

There surely is a big difference between the right-wingers who actively hate gender-blenders and the moderates or liberals who offer lukewarm acceptance and shallow understanding. The latter earn the title “people of good will” because they’re not seized by the urge to maintain boundaries or strengthen hierarchies that give them power and control over others. They won’t, in other words, actively demand unjust laws and policies.

But neither will they take a strong stand for justice, because those binary categories and boundaries still offer them a sense of order in their own lives. Somewhere, somehow, they want our fast-changing world to remain stable, simple, and familiar. As a result, they do share with the bigots, though obviously to a lesser degree, discomfort at seeing that classic boundary between male and female, which used to feel so immutable, disappear before their very eyes.

If we look in the mirror honestly enough, we’re likely to recognize that all of us have some boundary lines that are truly important to us, even if it’s only “us well-meaning liberals against those nasty Trumpsters.” Each of us has our own bottom line, the place where the blurring of lines does indeed become disturbing or even intolerable.

For a lot of people, however unconsciously, the distinction between male and female may be the hardest one of all to surrender. No wonder, then, that even people of good will regularly offer only lukewarm acceptance and shallow understanding to their fellow Americans who are gender-blenders.

Tear Down the Dam, It’s Good for Us All

Make no mistake, though. Those same people of good will may hold the key to freeing the gender-blenders from oppression and violence, if they can be roused to active support.

Every successful movement for social change needs just such a broad base of support. That’s why Dr. King called those lukewarm white moderates the great stumbling block to his own movement’s success. Doug McAdam, a prominent scholar of the civil rights movement, notes that it had to “compel supportive intervention by liberal northern allies… to the point where sympathetic media coverage and broad public support for the movement could be mobilized.” He quotes famed civil rights leader Bob Moses: “When the interest of the country is awakened, the government responds to that issue.”

America’s laws now demand that schools, parks, restaurants, and the like be open to all. Even virulent racists no longer call for those laws to be repealed. That’s because things do indeed become unthinkable once a large enough chunk of the public views them that way. Just as no one talks openly about reinstituting Jim Crow laws anymore, nobody urges that the vote be taken away from women either.

How can we make the right of gender-blenders simply to be who they are an equally unquestionable part of American society? Perhaps the key is to persuade well-meaning but confused and hesitant Americans not merely to tolerate them, or even simply to speak out for their safety or rights, but to appreciate how they actually enrich life for us all.

How we treat the most marginal and vulnerable among us determines the quality of life for the rest of us, too. A good society takes care of the most vulnerable by assuring their safety and the means to sustain their lives, along with their liberty to choose their own unique paths in pursuing happiness. If some find happiness by blending familiar categories, or even erasing the lines between them totally, supporting their choice could make a better society for us all.

The famed poet Walt Whitman suggested that there are “two main constituents for a truly grand nationality: first, a large variety of character, and second, full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions.”

Gender-blenders serve us by bringing us closer to that ideal. They are a model for a truly free society where we don’t feel compelled to fit ourselves into narrow binary categories, where everyone can accept themselves and explore who they really are, safely and without shame.

If the gender-blenders are provocative, all the better. Then they’ll provoke us to think and talk more freely about individuality, acceptance, and true community. Why wouldn’t we want them teaching our children? Even a 10-year-old can see that drag performers are “the most encouraging thing ever.” Openly non-binary and transgender people can be similarly encouraging.

Just to speak for myself, I’m so proud of my child, and the many thousands like them, claiming and proclaiming their right to pursue happiness by tearing down the old gender walls. To me, they — and in this case I mean all of them — are heroes because, as Whitman put it, they “walk at their ease through and out of that custom or precedent or authority that suits them not.”

I will be equally proud of my country when enough of us stand up strongly for the right to, and value of, gender fluidity — so strongly that this innocent and socially constructive pursuit of happiness will never make anyone vulnerable again.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Ira Chernus.

A gunman wearing body armor and armed with an AR-15-style rifle attacked an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs late Saturday night, killing five people and injuring at least 25. Two Club Q patrons managed to disarm the shooter, a 22-year-old suspect with ties to an extremist family, before he was taken into police custody. The attack came on the the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance, and police are investigating the attack as a potential hate crime. “This was an intentional act to push LGBTQ people back into the shadows,” says Denver mayoral candidate Leslie Herod, who is the first LGBTQ+ African American to hold office in the Colorado General Assembly and considers Colorado Springs her hometown. Herod describes a “clear connection” between hateful anti-gay rhetoric and violence toward the LGBTQ community.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Brazilians made history Sunday by electing not just one but three transgender women—all progressives—to the country's National Congress in federal elections that featured more than 300 LGBTQ+ aspirants, around 80 of them trans.

"We won the election, despite the attacks from sectors of the left, attacks from Christian fundamentalists, and death threats from the extreme right."

While leftists expressed disappointment after Workers' Party presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva fell just short of the 50%+1 threshold needed to avert an October 30 runoff against far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, human rights advocates pointed to historic victories by LGBTQ+ and Indigenous candidates as signs of social progress long overdue.

In addition to victories by Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) candidates Sônia Guajajara and Célia Xakriabá—the first Indigenous women to represent their respective states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais in Congress—three transgender women, two of them on the PSOL ticket, declared victory.

Erika Hilton, a São Paulo city council member representing PSOL, will be the first Black trans woman to serve in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress, where she says she will continue fighting for the same social and healthcare reforms she's championed at the local level.

"We are going to get off the street corners, we are going to get out of jails, we are going to get off crack corners and prostitution and start to think about public policies and legislation," Hilton—who was a sex worker for several years after she was kicked out of her family home at age 14—told The Guardian.

"Our mandate in Brasília will be more organized, more committed, and closer to people," the 29-year-old added.

Duda Salabert, a city council member from Belo Horizonte—the capital of the landlocked southeastern state of Minas Gerais—and a member of the leftist Democratic Labor Party, said she received more votes than any candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in the state's history.

"I am the first trans person elected to the National Congress," Salabert, who is 41 years old, tweeted. "We won the election, despite the attacks from sectors of the left, attacks from Christian fundamentalists, and death threats from the extreme right."

Robeyoncé Lima, the first Black transgender lawyer in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, tweeted that "we are a force to be reckoned with and no one else will stop us" after winning her race to represent PSOL in the Chamber of Deputies.

"This is a societal project and we are moving forward," the 27-year-old added. "We were always told that it was not possible, but we are here, in the fight for all of our dignity."

Observers noted the significance of Hilton, Salabert, and Lima being elected to the Congress of a country that leads the world in transgender murders. Writing for Pink News, Lily Wakefield underscored how trans people have "endured years of increasing anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and violence" during Bolsonaro's self-described homophobic rule.

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Hilton said that "the reality for trans people in Brazil is shocking. We are treated as the ones who must be executed in the most horrendous ways. That is why I want to become a member of Congress. So we can rescue this country."

Lima stressed that the task at hand is now ensuring Lula wins the runoff round.

"The struggle does not stop here, but continues and grows from that moment," she tweeted. "Now my commitment is to elect Lula president at the end of October and I call on all my voters to do the same!"

Hilton said that "Bolsonaro is a fascist. Bolsonaro despises humanity... He is someone who legitimizes violence, who facilitates the circulation of guns, someone opposed to the rights of Indigenous people, someone who disregards women, who hates LGBTQ+ people."

"Lula is the one who will confront fascism—the deaths, the poverty, the misery that Brazil is going through," she added. "As long as I'm alive, I'll fight like a lioness to protect what I believe in and avenge the voices of my people."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

LGBTQ+ rights advocates on Tuesday celebrated Tuesday after a federal court became the first in the U.S. to rule that transgender people who suffer from gender dysphoria must be protected from discrimination under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Rewire News Group called the ruling in Williams v. Kincaid "a win for gender-affirming care."

The case stemmed from the experience of Kesha Williams, a transgender woman who was incarcerated in Fairfax County, Virginia in 2018.

"The disorder that my client now has did not exist, at least diagnostically... We must apply a modern understanding."

When jail staff found out Williams was transgender, they housed her with men, harrassed her, confiscated her bras, and frequently refused to provide her with the hormone treatments she'd been taking for 15 years.

Williams filed a lawsuit arguing the Fairfax County Sheriff's Office had violated her rights under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), with her lawyers arguing that she should have been protected from discrimination under the law.

They argued that the ADA should extend protections to people with gender dysphoria—defined as the "psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one's sex assigned at birth and one's gender identity."

A district court ruled against Williams last year, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on Tuesday reversed that decision.

In 1990, when the ADA was signed into law, it did not mention gender dysphoria but explicitly excluded "gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments" from the protections it offered.

As The Washington Post reported in May while the appeals court was considering Williams' case, right-wing policymakers pushed for the exclusion of "gender identity disorders" along with pedophilia, voyeurism, and exhibitionism, classifying all as "sexual behavior disorders."

Continuing to exclude people with gender dysphoria from discrimination protections would make the ADA unconstitutional, Williams argued.

"The disorder that my client now has did not exist, at least diagnostically" when the ADA was signed into law, Joshua Erlich told the court. "We must apply a modern understanding."

In an amicus brief, LGBTQ+ rights groups including GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, Lambda Legal, the ACLU, and the National Center for Transgender Equality wrote that gender dysphoria "results from an atypical interaction of sex hormones with the developing brain."

"This atypical interaction, which results in a person being born with circulating hormones inconsistent with their gender identity, is a physical impairment," said the groups.

In what rights activist Erin Reed called a "massive win for transgender people," the appeals court on Tuesday ruled that Williams "plausibly alleged that gender dysphoria does not fall within the ADA's exclusion."

Williams's case against Sheriff Stacy Kincaid's office alleging disability discrimination will now be able to proceed.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

"If they are discriminating against students on the basis of gender, they could be jeopardizing their funding."

The Post cites people familiar with a draft text of the proposed Title IX regulation that would expand the definition of "discrimination on the basis of sex" to include "discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex-related characteristics (including intersex traits), pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity."

David Hinojosa, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the nonprofit Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told the Post that the new regulations "could very well be a game-changer."

"States accept federal moneys and agree not to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, etc., under federal laws including Title IX," he said. "If they are discriminating against students on the basis of gender, they could be jeopardizing their funding."

Title IX is the 1972 law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity. Last June, the Department of Education said that Title IX bans discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation, reversing guidance issued by the openly anti-transgender Trump administration.

In announcing its departure from Trump-era policy, the Education Department cited Bostock v. Clayton County, the landmark 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling declaring workplace discrimination against LGBTQ+ people unconstitutional.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said last June that the Biden administration believes "that all students—including LGBTQ+ students—deserve the opportunity to learn and thrive in schools that are free from discrimination."

Related Content

The impending regulatory revision comes as Republican-controlled states across the country pass laws banning transgender student-athletes from participating on the sports teams that match their gender identity. On Wednesday Oklahoma became the 13th state to approve such legislation.

The new Title IX regulations will also rewrite rules on how schools handle allegations of sexual assault and harassment. The Trump administration gutted protections for sexual abuse survivors while expanding the rights of the accused.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism explains why the radical feminist analysis that Raymond articulates so clearly is not a threat to trans-identified people but rather an alternative to the transgender movement’s liberal precepts, which are biologically incoherent and anti-feminist. Raymond shows that we can critique the ideology of the transgender movement without ignoring the suffering of people with gender dysphoria. We can affirm the rights of girls and women while rejecting discrimination against trans-identified people.

Doublethink deepened my understanding of the liberatory promise of radical feminism—not just for trans-identified people but for us all. That shouldn’t be surprising, given radical feminism’s trenchant critique of the many dimensions of patriarchy. As Raymond reminds us, “Feminists invented gender non-conformity.” Feminists such as Raymond recognized that patriarchy turns the biological sex differences between male and female into the oppressive gender norms of masculinity and femininity, which disadvantage and sometimes destroy girls and women while constraining the humanity of boys and men. Sex differences are a biological reality that can’t be changed. Gender norms help perpetuate institutionalized male dominance, a political reality that we must change.

While the central analysis of transgenderism in Doublethink is not new, Raymond offers insights into the cultural changes since she first published The Transsexual Empire in 1979. But no matter how insightful, the larger radical feminist critique has lost ground—not only to conservatives who embrace patriarchy but to progressives who claim to oppose male dominance but avoid some of the political commitments that would make their politics meaningful. More on that later.

Perhaps most importantly for me, Doublethink made me realize that my critique of transgender ideology should be recast as a challenge to the theology of the trans movement. Raymond’s analysis demonstrates why the current liberal/left embrace of transgenderism is more like religious fundamentalism than political ideology.

Raymond details the physical and psychological dangers that transgender medicine poses to trans-identified people, the constraints that transgender policies place on girls and women, and the threats when trans-identified people claim the right to lesbian status. Despite those well-documented negative consequences, Raymond points out that in progressive circles, “To question any trans precept is to question trans existence.” Let me quote her at length, with my emphasis on certain terms added.

At the core of trans ideology is the insistence that self-declared women (men) are women. But self-declared women are not women historically, experientially, or biologically, and certainly not by reason of a simple declaration that they expect everyone to accept because they say it is so. “I feel it, thus it is real.” The feeling may be real, but the facts are otherwise. If critics don’t cooperate in this fantasy, they are labeled ‘violent TERFs’. Any dissent from trans dogma is considered a mortal sin, even when male biology and masculinist behavior are graphically on display. In translandia, any disagreement with trans dogmas is treated as disputing trans existence or, in trans speak, as “killing us.”

Raymond returns to this point at the end of the book, and again I’ll add emphasis.

Refusing to accept that men can be women is not disputing transpersons’ existence; it’s disputing their gender identity and their claim to be women. When the transgenderist position is ‘no discussion of our very existence,’ this censors legitimate questions about what existence means. It promotes a fundamentalist belief system, a doctrinaire faith of trans evangelists who punish misgendering and mispronouning as blasphemy and that consigns doubters to damnation.”

Raymond’s observations explain why challenging the transgender movement’s arguments is less like a political and intellectual discussion and more like an engagement with faith-based systems, those that makes claims not based on evidence and reason. In my own experience, the times that liberal/left people have “canceled” me because of my alleged transphobia—rescinding a speaking invitation or removing an article I wrote—felt not like an intellectual or political disagreement but more like a religious shunning. I was being cast out of the circle of the elect, not on the basis of a reasoned response to my arguments but because I had dared to make the arguments at all. I was treated like a heretic.

An aside: This is not a suggestion that all of life can be reduced to evidence and reason. Feelings, which are sometimes inarticulate, matter in our lives. When we are moved to tears by a song or express our love for a partner, no one expects an evidence-based logical argument. But in social interaction in a multicultural society, whether those interactions are governed by law or custom, we expect more than faith-based claims. When arguing for public policy, we have a responsibility to provide reasons that can be articulated clearly, based on evidence that is transparent.

Here are examples of what that means in our daily lives. When committed Christians say “God loves us,” I take seriously the feeling they are describing and don’t doubt their sincerity. But that is not evidence of the existence of a divine entity whose commands we must follow. Similarly, when trans-identified people say, “I am biologically male but I feel like a woman (or vice versa),” I understand the feeling and accept their sincerity. But that is not evidence that a male is female. An internal subjective experience of gender is not evidence that gender is an innate, immutable, and unchallengeable feature of one’s personality rather than a social construct.

Here are practical applications. If I were in a meeting that began with a sectarian prayer, I would not recite the prayer because to do so suggests that I endorse that theology. In a multicultural society, such compulsion should be rejected as a violation of freedom of conscience. Similarly, if a meeting opened with the chairperson asking people to state their pronouns, I would decline because to do so suggests that I endorse the ideology/theology of the transgender movement. Demanding that I participate in pronoun announcement would be like compelling people to pray. Only fundamentalists try to impose such demands.

By now, transactivists likely will have concluded I’m an anti-trans bigot. But I hope that critics will read Raymond’s book, which is not bigotry but simply a different approach to sex/gender struggles that not only could contribute to individuals’ mental health but also to a more just society. Such a feminist approach to gender non-conformity does not require us to ignore material or historical realities and is consistent with biology and the politics of liberation. Radical feminists don’t deny the experience of gender dysphoria or gender dissatisfaction, but rather present an alternative path to deal with those experiences.

Raymond analyzes the many issues on which this feminist approach is needed today: the importance of female-only spaces and programs for safety and to promote justice, fairness in girls’ and women’s sports, the integrity of lesbian communities. These are important goals for public policy and in social relationships, but the trans movement tries to shut down the debate. Raymond points out that too often “disagreement is renamed discrimination” and leads to claims that anything less than full acceptance of all transgender demands will lead to increased trans suicides. That leads many transactivists to label Raymond’s writing “hate speech.” It’s a strange claim, given what she actually writes:

Trans-identified people are entitled to the same human and civil rights as others. Recognizing these rights, however, does not mean that we must accept that hormones and surgery transform men into women and women into men; or that persons who self-declare as members of the opposite sex are what they subjectively claim to be; or that hormones and surgery are ‘life-saving and necessary treatments’ for those seeking transition.

As I have mentioned, I’ve also been accused of hate speech. Since my first article on this subject in 2014, I’ve faced transactivists trying to shout me down at some of my public presentations. I have been invited to speak about my varied political projects and then disinvited when someone complained about my writing on transgenderism. I have been told by editors with whom I had worked for years that they would no longer publish anything written by me on any subject. And I’ve lost friends and political allies who decided to distance themselves from me rather than risk guilt-by-association.

None of that has been fun, but if I were ever tempted to feel sorry for myself, Raymond’s book would snap me out of it. She includes stories of the many women who have endured not only the petty harassment and shunning I’ve experienced but much more—being fired from jobs, having scholarly research trashed for ideological reasons, being denounced by colleagues, and facing threats and assaults. There are always myriad reasons for differing treatment in different cases, but it’s hard not to notice that women routinely experience harsher treatment than men do. For anyone with a radical feminist critique of patriarchy, that’s not surprising.

One thing is for sure—no one has ever told me “suck on my lady stick.” When a man who identifies as a woman wants to verbally assault a woman, the penis becomes a lady stick but remains a potential weapon. It’s a trans variation on something that women hear from angry men all too often. Though only a minority of transactivists speak that way, such comments show up regularly online, and the failure of the transgender movement to condemn such misogyny suggests the movement is not serious about challenging patriarchy.

The anti-feminist character of so much transactivism raises a troubling question: Why are so many progressives so entranced with transgender theology? Raymond points out that the liberal/left has never been a political formation with deep feminist commitments, genuflecting to anti-sexist politics only when necessary. For the left, embracing transgenderism creates the appearance of a critique of patriarchy without a commitment to substantive actions. That’s why so many of the same people who embrace the subordination of women in the sexual-exploitation industries (pornography, prostitution, stripping) tend to endorse the transgender movement’s policy goals. In both cases, an analysis of institutionalized male dominance gives way to a liberal individualist account. Without that deeper structural analysis, so-called sex work and transgenderism are promoted as transgressive, and a radical feminist analysis is dismissed as out of date.

Raymond ends her book with an important insight that links the two issues. The radical feminist critique of prostitution was rooted in the experiences of survivors, the women who have exited the sexual-exploitation industries and spoken about the abuse. Raymond suggests that the voices of detransitioners—women who once transitioned to male status but later reasserted their identity as female—should be central in our analysis. These “survivors of transgenderism” are starting to speak out, to organize, to challenge the idea that the solution to the distress of living in patriarchy is transgender ideology. As detransitioner Keira Bell put it, “I recognized that gender dysphoria was a symptom of my overall misery, not its cause.”

In her 1979 book on the trans movement, Raymond challenged the medicalized and individualist response to the rigid, repressive, and reactionary gender norms of patriarchy. Doublethink demonstrates why her analysis is more desperately needed than ever. Rather than embrace illusions about “sex change” or “gender identity,” she reminds us of how genuine freedom can come through feminist struggle: “If we expand the bandwidth of what it is to be a man or a woman, we don’t need to seek a change in sex but rather a change in society’s codes of femininity or masculinity.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Jensen.

The post Transgender Lives Lost to Violence appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• Senate hearing on For the People Act to expand voting rights and protections.
• President Joe Biden picks Vice President Kamala Harris to tackle nation’s immigration crisis.
• California Governor Gavin Newsom nominates Alameda County Assemblyman Rob Bonta for Attorney General.
• Senate confirms first transgender to cabinet post, Dr. Rachel Levine, as Assistant Secretary of Health.
• President Joe Biden calls for end to gender pay gap on Equal Pay Day.
• 700 janitors go on strike in San Francisco, demand better wages and protections.

Photo of Dr. Rachel Levine by The Office of Governor Tom Wolf.

The post Senate hearing on For the People Act; California Governor nominates Asian American Assemblyman Rob Bonta for Attorney General; Senate confirms first transgender to cabinet post, Dr. Rachel Levine appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

A growing and coordinated attack on the rights of transgender people is taking place through state legislation and sadly it is receiving support from people across the political spectrum. The attack is successful because its proponents are using myths about transgender people to cloak their efforts under a veneer of feminism and concerns about children’s health. In reality, this attack is anti-feminist and threatens the well-being and lives of not only the transgender community, particularly the youth, which is one of the most vulnerable communities in our society, but also of all of us.

It is necessary to understand where this attack is coming from and the facts that dispel these myths so we can all take action to protect the rights of transgender people. The media is largely silent about what is happening. We need to raise awareness and halt these bills. Solidarity is critical to stop the assault and protect us from being divided against each other at a time when we need to struggle together for our People(s)-Centered Human Rights.

This week, I interviewed Chase Strangio, a lawyer with the ACLU who is a national leader in the fight for the rights of transgender people, on Clearing the FOG (available Monday night). We discussed the state bills, the impact they will have if they are made into law and how to stop them.

Anatoliy Cherkasov/SOPA Images/Getty.

A coordinated attack on transgender rights in the states

The number of states that have introduced bills restricting the rights of transgender people has increased from 20 states in 2020 to 26 states so far in 2021. The bills range from those that prevent transgender people from participating in sports, using gender-appropriate facilities or obtaining identification documents to ones that make providing health care to transgender youth a felony and allow religious discrimination. You will find a list of the states, the bills and their current status here.

One bill that is imminent in Alabama would make it a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison and up to a $15,000 fine for health professionals who provide hormone therapy, hormone blockers or surgery to transgender youth. The bill also requires school staff to inform parents if a student has the “perception that his or her gender is inconsistent with his or her sex.” A version of the bill recently passed in both the Alabama House and the Senate. Sixteen other states have introduced similar legislation.

Both of these measures put transgender youth at a serious risk of lifetime harm or suicide if they are not able to receive appropriate medical therapy during puberty or are outed to parents who may not support them. A study from 2018 finds that suicide, the second leading cause of death in teenagers, and self-harm rates are higher in transgender adolescents than cisgender teens. In the Minnesota study of teens aged 11 to 19, nearly a third of transgender girls and more than half of transgender boys had attempted suicide, two-thirds had suicidal thoughts and more than half had injured themselves. The National Center for Transgender Equality finds that of the 1.6 million homeless youth in the United States, 20 to 40% of them are transgender youth while transgender people are less than 1% of the overall population. They face family rejection, denial of access to spaces in homeless shelters that are consistent with their gender and discrimination when they seek to rent or buy a home.

The bills also run counter to standard medical practice. After more than 100 years of work to provide gender-affirming health care to transgender youth and adults, this area of medicine is well-documented and supported by major institutions such as the American Association of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society and the American Psychological Association. At a time when the medical establishment is working to improve care for transgender people in all settings, these state bills would be a huge impediment to that progress.

Another major set of bills currently present in 26 states would prohibit transgender students from participating in school sports on the same teams as their cisgender peers. As the ACLU writes, these bills are less about sports and more about “erasing and excluding trans people from participation in all aspects of public life.” The fight to exclude trans people from restrooms that are consistent with their gender failed, so this is the new tool to attack their rights.

Transgender girls and boys and women and men already compete in sports all over the world and their participation is supported by major institutions such as the Women’s Sports Foundation, the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education and the National Women’s Law Center. Nearly two dozen organizations signed onto a letter supporting the full inclusion of transgender people in athletics. Depriving transgender youth of the right to participate in sports harms their physical, social and emotional well-being. Transgender youth already face obstacles to being accepted in society and not being allowed into sports worsens that while preventing them from crucial areas of their development such as being part of a team and discovering their physical capabilities.

Creating barriers to participation in sports harms everyone, but especially women who as a group already face discrimination over their gender and attempts to control their bodies. In order to exclude transgender people from sports, all participants will be required to ‘prove’ their gender. As the National Women’s Law Center states, “The law allows anyone, for any reason, to question whether a student athlete is a woman or girl, and then the student has to ‘verify’ her gender by undergoing invasive testing.” They add that by “allowing coaches, administrators, and other athletes to become the arbiters of who ‘looks like’ a girl or a woman,” the  laws “will rely on and perpetuate racist and sexist stereotypes.”

Chase Strangio and Gabriel Arkles dispel four of the common myths about transgender athletes. They point out that the effort to exclude transgender women from sports is being done in a way that “reinforces stereotypes that women are weak and in need of protection. Politicians have used the ‘protection’ trope time and time again, including in 2016 when they tried banning trans people from public restrooms by creating the debunked ‘bathroom predator‘ myth.” These myths are being spread widely, so it is critical that we understand the facts so we can stop them.

Katherine Jones / Idaho Statesman via Getty Images file.

The groups behind the attacks on the rights of transgender people

There are a host of right-wing and conservative groups behind the attacks on transgender people. The major players involved in the state legislative efforts are the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation and ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council). The Alliance Defending Freedom is a conservative Christian group formed in 1994 that does legal advocacy against women’s right to an abortion and for discrimination against lesbian, gay and transgender people. It is a well-funded ($35 million budget) and powerful group that trains “future legislators, judges, prosecutors, attorneys general, and other government lawyers.” It is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its support for the criminalization of same sex marriage, sterilization of transgender people and bigoted beliefs.

One way that conservative groups have gained credibility with liberals is by portraying their work as in the interest of women’s rights. They project a zero sum view that somehow advocacy for the rights of transgender women takes away from the long struggle for ciswomen’s rights, as if transgender women and men have not struggled for recognition and for their rights for a long time too. They falsely argue that transgender women spent part of their life as ‘privileged’ males and so they either cannot understand what women have experienced or they are bringing patriarchal views into women’s spaces. This view conflicts with the reality that transgender women experience greater discrimination and violence than cisgender women. They are hardly a privileged group. Similarly, they falsely portray transgender men as ‘victims of patriarchy.’

This bigotry has entered some radical feminist spaces that actively exclude transgender woman and portray them as threats to their safety. Left Voice provides a history of the rise of what is called “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists” or TERFs,” their violence against transgender women and their alliances with the alt-right. Katelyn Burns explains who some of these groups are and their attempts to dominate political space in the United Kingdom. Fortunately there is not much support for them in the United States, but it does exist.

Trans-exclusionary groups use fear as a weapon against transgender women by portraying them as threats to the physical safety of cisgender girls and women without solid evidence to back this claim. The National Resource Center on Domestic Violence finds that around half of transgender and nonbinary people have been sexually assaulted and more than half have experienced domestic partner violence. This is far less than the 18% of cisgender women who are victims of sexual violence. This use of a concocted threat of violence to discriminate against transgender women is similar to that used to justify repression against Muslims, immigrants and Black people.

Penelope Barritt/Rex/Shutterstock.

Building an inclusive society

The increasing attacks on the rights of transgender people in the United States needs to be a concern to all of us. We cannot create an inclusive society that supports the healthy development and rights of all people if we remain silent as the most vulnerable among us are targeted with damaging and deadly discrimination. We cannot teach our children tolerance if they see their friends being prohibited from basic childhood activities such as participation in sports. We cannot deny people the right to determine who they are and to live in ways that support them. Transgender people are our neighbors, our friends and our family members.

Chase Strangio describes five specific ways we can take action to end discrimination against transgender people and to affirm them as members of our communities. There is something for everyone to do no matter where you are. We can all strive to point out and correct bigotry where we see it, work to educate people around us and donate to groups doing this work that are led by transgender people. If you live in a state where these bills are introduced, contact your state lawmaker and let them know of your opposition to them. You can also join local groups to advocate for the rights of transgender people.

Let’s stop the attack on transgender people in the United States before it is allowed to escalate further.

This article was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2021 at 10:27am and is filed under Children/Youth, Discrimination, Sports, Transgender.

Selina Soule, a senior at Glastonbury High School, Chelsea Mitchell, a senior at Canton High School and Alanna Smith, a sophomore at Danbury High School are represented by the conservative nonprofit organization Alliance Defending Freedom. They argue that allowing athletes with male anatomy to compete has deprived them of track titles and scholarship opportunities.

“Mentally and physically, we know the outcome before the race even starts,” said Smith, who is the daughter of former Major League pitcher Lee Smith. “That biological unfairness doesn’t go away because of what someone believes about gender identity. All girls deserve the chance to compete on a level playing field.”

The lawsuit was filed against the Connecticut Association of Schools-Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference and the boards of education in Bloomfield, Cromwell, Glastonbury, Canton and Danbury.

“Forcing girls to be spectators in their own sports is completely at odds with Title IX, a federal law designed to create equal opportunities for women in education and athletics,” attorney Christiana Holcomb said. “Connecticut’s policy violates that law and reverses nearly 50 years of advances for women.”

The Connecticut Association of Schools-Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference says its policy follows a state anti-discrimination law that says students must be treated in school by the gender with which they identify and the group believes the policy is “appropriate under both state and federal law.”

The lawsuit follows a Title IX complaint filed last June by the girls’ families and the Alliance Defending Freedom with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which is investigating the policy.

The lawsuit centers on two transgender sprinters, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, who have frequently outperformed their cisgender competitors.

The two seniors have combined to win 15 girls state indoor or outdoor championship races since 2017, according to the lawsuit.

The three plaintiffs have competed directly against them, almost always losing to Miller and usually behind Yearwood. Mitchell finished third in the 2019 state championship in the girls 55-meter indoor track competition behind Miller and Yearwood.

“Our dream is not to come in second or third place, but to win fair and square,” Mitchell said. “All we’re asking for is a fair chance.”

Yearwood, a senior at Cromwell High School, and Miller, a senior at Bloomfield High School, issued statements vehemently defending their right to run in girls events.

“I have faced discrimination in every aspect of my life and I no longer want to remain silent,” Miller said. “I am a girl and I am a runner. I participate in athletics just like my peers to excel, find community, and meaning in my life. It is both unfair and painful that my victories have to be attacked and my hard work ignored.”

Yearwood said she also is a girl and has been hurt by the efforts to “tear down my successes.”

“I will never stop being me!” she said in her statement. “I will never stop running! I hope that the next generation of trans youth doesn’t have to fight the fights that I have. I hope they can be celebrated when they succeed not demonized. For the next generation, I run for you!”

The American Civil Liberties Union said it will represent the transgender teens and defend the Connecticut policy in court. Attorney Chase Strangio, deputy director for Trans Justice with the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project, said transgender girls also are protected by Title IX.

“The idea that the law only protects the individuals with XX chromosomes as compared to individuals with XY chromosomes is found nowhere in the legislative history of Title IX, in any implementing regulation or in any other aspect of the interpretation of Title IX over the last 50 years by the courts,” he said.

The attorneys Alliance Defending Freedom is asking the court to prevent the transgender girls from competing while the lawsuit moves forward. No hearing date on that request had been scheduled Wednesday, the day before the state’s indoor track championships begin.

Connecticut is one of 17 states that allowed transgender high school athletes to compete without restrictions in 2019, according to Transathlete.com, which tracks state policies in high school sports across the country. Eight states had restrictions that make it difficult for transgender athletes to compete while in school, such requiring athletes to compete under the gender on their birth certificate, or allowing them to participate only after going through sex reassignment procedures or hormone therapies, according to Transathlete.

Yearwood and Miller have said they are still in the process of transitioning but have declined to provide details.