Index

1. Vale Nancy Valverde (1932–2024)
2. Academic: Rawee et al. pretend trans kids don’t exist
3. Academic: Murugesh et al. discover that puberty requires puberty
4. Int.: X Corp. vows to shirtfront Australian eSafety Commissioner
5. Australia, NSW: Football NSW spil their jice, call mods
6. Australia, WA: “Blood money” imbroglio around TransFolk of WA
7. Canada: Tegan and Sara (and Fae) say no to transphobia
8. Hong Kong: Government introduces new gender policy; it sucks
9. Slovakia: Government screws over trans people to win; it works
10. Thailand: Senate debates Marriage Equality Bill
11. Uganda: Odoi v Attorney General: Court tells queers to go jump
12. UK: Scottish Hate Crime Act commences, wizard lady furious
13. US: Trans people steal Easter
14. US: United States v Utah: Biden finally meets a jail he doesn’t like
15. US: Gays Against Groomers v Garcia: Incoherent seething
16. US: Blakeman v James: Court to plaintiff: lol you thought
17. US, AZ: SB 1182: Accommodation for All Children (tr—ns don’t count)
18. US, AZ: SB 1628: Women’s Rights Bill removes women’s rights
19. US, CO: For kids, HB 24-1039 kills deadnames dead
20. US, CO: HB 24-1071: Tiara’s Law gives trans ex-cons a break
21. US, IL: X gender marker now available — about fucking time!
22. US, NE: LB 575: Spaces and sports saved from Sports and Spaces Act
23. US, NH: SB 375 proves it was never about being fair
24. US, OH: HB 467 ensures deadname trick only works once
25. US, WI: AB 377: Evers vetoes sports ban, tries shame on fascists

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Vale Nancy Valverde (1932–2024)

I can never say ‘no’ to the community — anything they asked for. If I can do it, I’ll do it. Because I know when I needed help, I had help.

Valverde, in Flay (2023)

Nancy Valverde, a Chicana lesbian and trailblazing LGBTQ+ rights activist, died at home in Los Angeles, California, United States, on 25 March 2024, at the age of 92.

Born 6 March 1932 in Deming, New Mexico (Hernández, 2024), from the age of 9 onward, Valverde grew up in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles (“Nancy Valverde, iconic LGBTQ+ activist,” 2024; Rodas, 2024). As she grew up, she began to face discrimination on the grounds of her ethnicity and sexual orientation; even if it hadn’t been omnipresent, by the time she was 17, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was making sure of it.

At the time, Los Angeles Municipal Ordinance 5022 was still in force. Enacted in 1898 and amended in 1922, the law criminalised men dressing as women — in the sense that those terms were then understood — and vice versa (Dresden, 2023). The LAPD enthusiastically used the statute to suppress queer and trans people, devising the “three-article rule” (Ryan, 2023) which stipulated that perceived crossdressers who were not wearing at least three items of clothing would face arrest (Sears, 2023). This rule seems not to have served any purpose other than to pretend that LAPD were simply neutrally and objectively enforcing the law.

Beginning in 1949, Valverde, a butch who routinely wore what were considered men’s clothes, was repeatedly accosted by the LAPD (Hernández, op. cit.), and jailed over two dozen times (“Nancy Valverde, lesbian activist,” 2024); as of 2016, she was still feeling the back pain with which one particularly brutal arrest had left her (Compton, 2016). Eventually she had enough; after considerable legal research, she discovered a Supreme Court of California precedent which proved that the cops’ treatment of her was illegal. She engaged an attorney, went to court, and won (Compton, op. cit.). While Ordinance 5022 wasn’t immediately struck down, Valverde’s civil action amounted to throwing the first brick (Hernández, op. cit.).

After her court victory, Valverde studied for, and got, her barber’s license at the Moler Barber College in downtown Los Angeles, at 265 South Main Street, coincidentally just a few doors down from Cooper Do-nuts, the reputed scene of the 1959 Cooper Do-nuts queer uprising, at No. 215 (Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council, 2023).¹ In the face of the anti-LGBTQ+ laws which remained in effect in Los Angeles at the time, Nancy’s Barber Shop provided a space for queer people to be safe (Rodas, op. cit.).

Valverde’s name is immortalised in the official name of the Cnr 2nd & Main St junction in downtown Los Angeles, “Cooper Do-nuts/Nancy Valverde Square”. I have no detail on survivors; a Los Angeles LGBT Center Senior Services (n.d.) profile published prior to her death indicates she helped raise 4 of her partners’ children. The Center says details of a memorial service will be forthcoming (Los Angeles LGBT Center, 2024).

Academic

Rawee et al. pretend trans kids don’t exist

On 27 February, the Archives of Sexual Behavior — that redoubtable, nominally peer-reviewed cornerstone of the tabloid ecosystem — published an article, “Development of gender non-contendedness during adolescence and early adulthood,” by Pien Rawee et al. (2024).

While the study was published over a month ago, it doesn’t seem to have made much of a splash until it got a sudden, coordinated boost early this month from conservative media and influencers, including, but let’s be real, probably not limited to:

• Breitbart (Mastrangelo, 2024);
• Ian Miles Cheong (2024);
• the Daily Mail (Lardieri, 2024);
• The Daily Wire (Kruta, 2024);
• Gript (Maynes, 2024);
• Elon Musk (2024b), chief executive officer of X Corp.;
• the New York Post (Markowicz, 2024).

I took a look at the study. It’s being represented in right-wing media as being meaningfully indicative of paediatric “desistance” rates — i.e., indicative of what percentage of kids who “think they are trans” later “stop being trans”.

However, as Erin Reed (2024) notes, what the study actually tracks is not any known close proxy for transness — it doesn’t track, for instance, symptomatology of gender dysphoria as defined in the DSM (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). What it tracks is a novel variable, apparently conceived for this study in particular, which it refers to as “gender non-contentedness”. The data source for this variable is a single multiple-choice question, “I wish I were the opposite sex: never, sometimes, often,” appearing in the ASEBA Youth Self-Report and Adult Self-Report (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001), two standardised psychological testing batteries which apart from that particular perfunctory question have nothing to do with trans people at all, which were used during the Tracking Adolescents’ Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS), a general study of Dutch youth (Ormel et al., 2012). Respondents are defined as having been “gender non-contented” if they answered either “sometimes” or “often”.

The study is centred around the finding “that gender non-contentedness is most common around the age of 11 and that the prevalence decreases with age”. This seems fairly clearly intended to be read as tracking desistance. However, as Reed (op. cit.) notes, this is not the case. The first clue is that the figure given for the prevalence of “gender non-contentedness” in the sample at the age of 11 is 12% (most of whom, incidentally, answered “sometimes”); it declines to 3% at 25. Compare that to the most generous estimates of the trans population in the United States, which are circa 0.5% (e.g., Crissman et al., 2017).

This is suggestive that what’s actually happening here is the apples and oranges trick, most famously pulled in the 1980s by Archives EIC Ken Zucker, who is also cited several times in this study. The apples and oranges trick consists of the following:

1. You design a longitudinal study which draws its conclusions from screening for specific psychological phenomena, qualities, or traits.
2. You pick a phenomenon, quality, or trait which is popularly associated with trans people, but which you know is not actually statistically specific or exclusive to trans people, such as gender nonconformity.
3. You collect basic data from those recipients at time 1 (t₁). You do not screen for actual transness at this time. This is vital.
4. At a later data collection, t_n, you introduce a new instrument to screen them specifically for being trans. Since you didn’t specifically recruit trans people, as you well know, the number of people “positive” for trans at t_n will be less than the total size of the sample, probably significantly so.
5. Immediately claim that the people who weren’t trans at t_n weren’t just not trans, but that they’d clearly originally been trans and then stopped, and that rate, the rate of desistance, is what the difference between the cohort size and the rate of positives at t_n actually represents. This is flagrant bullshit, but the cishets, up to and including the PhDs, are broadly gullible and transphobic as fuck, so everyone including, statistically speaking, your most likely peer reviewers is going to eat it up.

The fact that, as Reed (op. cit.) notes, the sample for this study is defined in such a way that it includes “[t]omboys, feminine gay teen boys, gender nonconforming individuals, people who experience sexism, and even those with curious minds” suggests to my mind very strongly that this is what’s happened here — or rather, what’s been done.

Of course, a methodology I don’t like is not enough to convict the accused on all charges. Cis researchers unfortunately bumble into that kind of shit depressingly often on their own. Thus, I was still unable to make a concrete determination of malice. However, I think the choice to publish in Arch Sex Behav is indicative — it is clear and it has been clear for a very long time exactly what kind of outfit the Archives is. Articles published in the 6 issues immediately preceding the date this paper was submitted, 28 April 2023, include:

• Bailey & Hsu (2022), “How autogynephilic are natal females?”
• Lowrey (2022), “Gender identity ideology conquers the world: Why are anthropologists cheering?”
• Pfaus (2022), “The cancer of cancel culture: Spreading ‘correct’ scientific ideologies across North American academia”
• Sullins (2022), “Sexual orientation change efforts do not increase suicide: Correcting a false research narrative”
• Diaz & Bailey (2023), “RETRACTED ARTICLE: Rapid onset gender dysphoria: Parent reports on 1655 possible cases”

… and so on and so forth. If you want to publish an article on trans kids, there are so many other, better journals: the International Journal of Transgender Health, the Journal of Adolescent Health, Liebert’s Transgender Health, Pediatrics, etc., etc. The Archives is the one nominally academic journal (in this field, anyway) to which it is credible the editor of the Daily Mail has a subscription. It statistically must be true that there are a few people who publish in it don’t know what they’ve gotten into, but it would be very few people indeed.

Among people doing research in trans health, doing this kind of research in trans health, from this basis, knowing the Archives‘ nature and character is fundamental knowledge about it, on the level of knowing it’s a sexology journal in the first place. I simply do not see it as plausible that this was an accident. Is that a vibes-based analysis? Maybe, but it’s one I’ll defend.

(Having said that, if this was a malicious publication I am not convinced that the source of the malice is lead author Rawee, whose bibliography is otherwise both unobjectionable and completely unrelated. I will probably follow this one up but for now I’m going to leave it here.)

Murugesh et al. discover that puberty requires puberty

On 27 March, a preprint, “Puberty blocker and aging impact on testicular cell states and function,” by Varshini Murugesh et al. (2024), was posted on biorXiv and has since received a great deal of attention from conservative media. The attention appears to revolve around two key points, summarised in the abstract as follows:

1. “we report mild-to-severe sex gland atrophy in PB [puberty blocker] treated children”;
2. “Applying these models [of the effect of aging on testicular tissue] to a PB-treated patient that [sic] they appeared pre-pubertal across the entire tissue. This combined with the noted gland atrophy and abnormalities from the histology data raise a potential concern regarding the complete ‘reversibility’ and reproductive fitness of SSC.”

I looked at the working for both findings. The testicular atrophy claim is interesting because I can’t actually determine how they reached it. The claim of atrophy suggests that their evidence indicates that in subjects who were on puberty blockers, the testes actually decreased in size over time — which would be expected, and could be proven through e.g. study of ultrasonographic evidence over time — but their actual description of their results seems to suggest that they compared testicular specimens from subjects on puberty blockers to specimens from controls and found that the experimental group had smaller testes.

That and the comparison with their models of aging on testicular tissue seem to both point to one result, but I find that result confusing because it’s trivial. Namely, they appear to have shown that people who are treated with puberty blockers appear to maintain a prepubertal phenotype of the testes, which … ? So what they’re saying is “people who haven’t gone through puberty haven’t gone through puberty”? Yeah, uh … no, shit, I think. But like, how does that intersect with the question of whether puberty blockers are reversible? Like at all?

I don’t at all know what to make of this one. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

General

eSafety Commissioner to be shirtfronted by X

In SP Weekly #5 I mentioned that the Australian eSafety Commissioner had issued an Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth) s 88 notice to X Corp., the company which operates Twitter. The notice was over a Tweet by “Billboard” Chris Elston which the Commissioner assessed, not in so many words, as constituting anti-trans hate speech.

X Corp. has now geoblocked the Tweet in Australia, but, through its Global Government Affairs division, has announced its intent to “file a legal challenge to the order to protect its user’s [sic?] right to free speech” (X Global Government Affairs, 2024). At press time I’m unsure of the venue in which any such filing might take place — anecdotally someone has suggested the Federal Court of Australia, which seems like a sensible place to sue the Australian Government, but I’m not a lawyer so I can’t confirm.

Speaking of which,

Australia

New South Wales

Football NSW spil their jice, call mods

On 4 April, Football New South Wales (Football NSW), the peak body for association football (“soccer”) in New South Wales, issued a news release announcing it had “sought guidance, support and leadership from” the Australian Government “around gender diversity in sport” (Football NSW, 2024).

The release carefully does not make specific reference to anything concrete, but from context it’s pretty obviously a response to the Beryl Ackroyd Cup brouhaha which I reported on in SP Weekly #5. In the release, Football NSW:

• spends two paragraphs establishing its credentials, describing itself as “an active and supportive organisation when it comes to equality and inclusion, continually striving towards making football accessible to all who wish to play,” and pleading that it has “received no support from government agencies, notwithstanding [its] adherence to” all applicable rules and regulations providing for the inclusion of trans people in sport;
• says it “has called upon the Federal Government to review” the rules and regulations in question “with consideration to the growing gender diversity issues faced by sport” “to ensure they remain fit for purpose”;
• rather alarmingly, characterises “[g]ender diversity” as “an ongoing challenge faced by … the community at large”.

On the whole, it seems difficult to interpret the release as anything other than a suggestion by Football NSW that they believe The Flying Bats FC’s victory may have been unfairly achieved. It’s unclear what grounds they would have had to come to this view as they do not specify in the release and apart from those suggested by scientifically unsupported transmisogyny there is nothing obvious it could be.

Western Australia

“Blood money” imbroglio around TransFolk of WA

On 23 March, Andrea Thompson, a trans community advocate, published an open letter (Thompson, 2024) to the board of TransFolk of WA, a prominent trans advocacy group which she describes as “the only collective voice gender diverse people have to” the Government of Western Australia. The letter comes in the context that the incumbent Cook Labor Government of Western Australia has less than a year left in its term, and has failed to honour its promises to remedy significant deficiencies in the treatment of trans people in Western Australian state law. These include the state’s extremely conservative and medicalised gender recognition regime. (See SP Weekly #4, where I touched on this in somewhat more detail.)

In the letter, which partly reiterates previous criticisms by Thompson and partly advances new ones, she:

• suggests that TransFolk of WA have “ties to the Labor Party” that facilitate funding for the group, and that, in doing that, create a “conflict of interest”;
• suggests that “the organisation has been outmanoeuvred by a government that has found the price of [their] silence,” characterising any funding facilitated in such a way as “hush/blood money”;
• calls for greater transparency on the part of TransFolk of WA;
• criticises TransFolk of WA’s existing line on gender recognition reform, and says it should “undertake further consultation with its constituents”;
• for her part, advocates a “fully person-centric” gender recognition regime which removes cis doctors from the process completely.

Canada

Tegan and Sara (and Fae) (and others) say no to transphobia

On 3 April, the Tegan and Sara Foundation published an open letter (Tegan and Sara Foundation Board of Directors & Johnstone, 2024) “against anti-trans legislation,” from “artists living in and/or hailing from Canada”. The letter, prepared with assistance from Fae Johnstone:

• notes that “Canada is not immune to the global attack on the trans community,” and explicitly condemns anti-trans action by the provincial governments of Alberta, New Brunswick, and Saskatchewan;
• “call[s] on the general public to turn their attention to a growing problem in our country”
• “call[s] on our communities and local and national policymakers to put a stop to this concerning surge in anti-trans policy”.

Signatories to the letter include:

• badbadnotgood;
• the Barenaked Ladies;
• Mac DeMarco;
• Dallas Green;
• Daryl Hannah;
• Dijah Payne/DijahSB;
• Carly Rae Jepsen;
• Avan Jogia;
• k.d. lang;
• Colin Mochrie;
• Alanis Morissette;
• Elliot Page;
• Raffi;
• Buffy Sainte-Marie;
• Sum 41;
• Cobie Smulders;
• Tegan and Sara, naturally;
• Kai Cheng Thom;
• Rufus Wainwright;
• Neil Young.

Hong Kong

Government introduces new gender policy; it sucks

On 3 April, the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (2024) announced changes to their policy on changes of sex entry on Hong Kong identity cards, implementing the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal’s ruling in Q & Tse Henry Edward v Commissioner of Registration (Q & Tse). The new policy comes after Henry Tse, one of the two plaintiffs in that case, initiated a new action against the Government in late March. In that action, he alleged they were engaging in unlawful discrimination by slow-walking the implementation of Q & Tse, which had been handed down 11 months prior (Leung, 2024).

Under the new policy, trans Hongkongers nominally no longer have to get “full sex reassignment surgery (SRS),” as the Government’s press release puts it — which for transfeminine applicants meant vaginoplasty and for transmasculine applicants meant phalloplasty — in order to be allowed to apply for a change of sex entry. Instead, they must satisfy all of the following criteria:

• they must have “completed surgical treatment for the purpose of modifying sexual characteristics,” meaning top surgery for transmascs and penectomy and orchiectomy for transfems;
• must satisfy the Commissioner, and must also make a statutory declaration, that they:
  • “ha[ve] or had gender dysphoria”
  • have lived as “the opposite sex” for at least 2 years;
  • will continue to live as “the opposite sex” for the rest of their life;
  • have been on HRT for all of that 2-year period;
  • will remain on HRT and will be subject to random blood tests to check “hormonal profile”.

Reception of the new policy by Hong Kong’s LGBTQ+ community has been chilly. Commentators whose remarks were reported in media included:

• Henry Tse, who expressed his concern regarding the new hormonal profile check requirement (Wong & Lin, 2024);
• Wong Hiu-chong, Tse’s attorney, who noted that the check, among other requirements imposed on applicants, does not apply to Hong Kong ID card holders who are cisgender, and is therefore “potentially discriminatory” as applied (de Guzman, 2024).
• Dr Zephyrus Tsang, who co-founded Quarks, a trans youth peer network, and who is a trans man, who (Wong & Lin, op. cit.):
  • said he was worried that trans people would still be legally compelled to get gender-related surgical interventions that they didn’t actually want;
  • noted that the new policy was transmisogynistic in its effect, as it requires transmascs to get top surgery, but requires transfems to get bottom surgery, which is riskier;
• Dr Diana Kwok, associate professor in the Education University of Hong Kong’s Department of Special Education and Counselling, who said the new policy amounted to pathologising trans people and could affect their mental health as a result (Wong & Lin, op. cit.)

Slovakia

Government screws over trans people to win; it works

On 2 April, the Health Ministry of the Slovak Republic withdrew the Standard procedure for the diagnosis and comprehensive management of healthcare for adults with transsexualism (TASR, 2024a). Information available to me as a monolingual English speaker is sparse, but it looks like the overall effect is to limit care access and legal gender recognition for Slovak trans people.

The Slovak Psychiatric Association (Slovenská psychiatrická spoločnosť; SPsS) has issued a strongly-worded press release (Slovak Psychiatric Association, 2024). A machine translation of the release includes the following statements:

• “A situation where professional clinical practice is subject to decisions on non-clinical grounds sets a dangerous precedent with far-reaching effects”;
• “With this decision, the Ministry abandons its history of cooperation with professional societies and experts who participated in the development of the Standard Procedure at its request”;
• “[This] puts us and our colleagues in a situation where we have to reevaluate the nature and meaning of our further bilateral cooperation”;
• “If our expertise, experience and knowledge are not required or taken into account, we as an [executive committee of the Slovak Psychiatric Association] do not see room for further meaningful cooperation with the Ministry of Health”.

There isn’t a lot of information accessible to me about what motivated this decision. English-language coverage from the News Agency of the Slovak Republic (TASR, 2024b) carried paraphrased remarks from Saplinq, o.z., an LGBTQ+ advocacy group based in Košice, to the effect that “this [is] a gamble with the lives of transsexual people, and a political deal aimed to garner coalition support for one of the candidates in the run-up to the second round of the presidential election”.

More context may be appropriate here. On 6 April, the second round of elections for the Presidency of the Slovak Republic took place; incumbent President Zuzana Čaputová (Ind) opted not to seek a second term. The candidates contesting the office in the second round were:

• Ivan Korcok (Ind), former minister of foreign and European affairs;
• Peter Pellegrini (Hlas), former Chairman of the Government and incumbent Speaker of the National Council.

While, as is usual in parliamentary republics, the Slovak President isn’t the day-to-day chief executive, they do have some power independent of the Chairman of the Government (“prime minister”) and some power to check the Government, so the position is worth having

Pellegrini’s party, Hlas – sociálna demokracia (Hlas, Hlas-SD; “Voice — Social Democracy”), is part of the current Fourth Fico Ministry.² Hlas is a “socially conservative left-wing” political party, a tendency for which I can’t think of many straightforward Anglophone equivalents³ but which for my European Union enjoyers is comparable to, e.g., Germany’s Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW; “Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance”). In any event, the incumbent Health minister is Hlas’ Zuzana Dolinková — this may or may not be directly relevant but is probably involved somehow.

What Saplinq seems to be suggesting is that this was a move by either Dolinková or the Fico Government to shore up support for Pellegrini, the Hlas candidate, from the other coalition parties: most likely particularly from the fascist Slovenská národná strana (SNS; “Slovak National Party”), as the other coalition party, Chairman Robert Fico’s own party Smer – sociálna demokracia (Smer, Smer-SD; “Direction — Social Democracy”) is of much the same type as Hlas.

While it’s unlikely that the Health Ministry’s decision had much of an impact either way, it will unfortunately certainly be possible to say that it worked — Pellegrini won (“A close ally,” 2024).

Thailand

Senate debates Marriage Equality Bill

On 2 April, the Senate of Thailand considered the Marriage Equality Bill (Agence France-Presse, 2024), which I previously covered in SP Weekly #5. If adopted, the Bill:

• will amends the Thai Civil and Commercial Code s 1448, replacing (words translating as) “men and women” with “individuals”, and “husband and wife” with “marriage partners,” which will have the effect of instituting marriage equality (Pearl, 2023);
• will not, however, give same-gender couples equal parental rights (Opray, 2024).

The incumbent 12th Senate is an appointed body, similar to the Canadian Senate or (most of) the British House of Lords; it was stacked with conservatives under the National Council for Peace and Order, Thailand’s 2014–2019 military junta. As a result, the Senate is considered rather more conservative than the House.

However, the Thai Senate is a weak upper house; it can refer the Bill back to the House for 180 days, but can’t definitively veto it. Coverage from the Thai Enquirer (“Marriage equality in Thailand!,” 2024) suggests that the overwhelming margin by which the House approved the Bill — 399 or 400 to 10, depending on the source — means that there is little chance the Senate will exercise the powers it has.

At present, it’s expected that Senate debate on the Bill will continue through 9 April, the final sitting day of the National Assembly of Thailand’s current session. It will then be referred to a Senate committee for additional scrutiny during the session break, before being returned to the full Senate for final approval (Reuters & Sattaburuth, 2024).

Uganda

Odoi v Attorney General: Court tells queers to go jump

On 3 April, the Constitutional Court of Uganda handed down its ruling in Odoi v Attorney General, a case concerning the constitutionality of the Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2023. The Court struck down 4 sections of the Act, ss 3(2)(c), 9, 11(2)(d), and 14, which between them restricted healthcare access for LGBTQ+ people, criminalised renting premises to LGBTQ+ people, and created a mandatory reporting obligation for all citizens concerning “acts of homosexuality”.

However, the Court upheld the majority of the Act, including provisions creating an offence of “promotion of homosexuality,” punishable with up to 20 years in jail (Human Rights Watch, 2024).

United Kingdom

Scotland

Hate Crime Act commences, wizard lady furious

On 1 April the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, an act of the Scottish Parliament, commenced in effect. The Act:

• revises the Scottish statutory definition of the protected characteristic of transgender identity, in order to distinguish it from variations in sex characteristics;
• amends existing Scottish hate crime law to more effectively address hate crimes against multiply marginalised people;
• creates a new offence, “stirring up hatred,” which operates on the same principle as the existing Scottish offence of incitement to racial hatred but is slightly narrower in the protections it offers victims, and applies to all protected classes covered in the Act (Chalmers, 2024).

The Act, and its treatment of trans people as a protected class, has received pushback from:

• Joanna Cherry MP (SNP–Edinburgh South West, Scotland) (Lawless, 2024), an MP from the governing Scottish National Party (SNP) who has previously suggested anti-trans conversion therapy should be legal (Wakefield, 2021);
• Roddy Dunlop, the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates (Cook, 2024);
• For Women Scotland (Cook, 2024), an anti-trans advocacy group (Kelleher, 2023);
• Elon Musk (2024a), CEO of X Corp.;
• Joe Rogan (Harrison, 2024), host of The Joe Rogan Experience and veteran promoter of anti-trans rhetoric (Shatto, 2022; Gaydos, 2023; Ring, 2024);
• Joanne Rowling (2024), anti-trans activist also known for creating the Harry Potter series, who went on a tear so vicious it attracted its own little media bubble;
• various police bodies, including the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents (Cook, 2024; Press Trust of India, 2024) and the Scottish Police Federation (Lawless, op. cit.);
• the Scottish Conservatives (Bussey & Howie, 2024);
• Jim Sillars, former SNP deputy leader (Koenig, 2024), who has a record of white-anting the current SNP leadership on trans affairs (Sanderson, 2023).

United States

Federal

Trans people steal Easter

On 29 March, US President Joe Biden (D) issued a Presidential proclamation recognising Transgender Day of Visibility (TDoV) on 31 March (Biden, 2024). While this is the usual date of TDoV, this year it was also the date of Easter Sunday, as Easter is calculated according to the Computus, a fairly complex algorithm not based on the Gregorian (and therefore Western civil) calendar.

As a result, while conservatives know perfectly well how all this works, the proclamation attracted rabid pushback from conservatives who were pretending not to, including:

• Michael Brown (2024), fringe Protestant Christian columnist and author;⁴
• the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN News, 2024);
• Shawn Fleetwood (2024), staff writer for The Federalist;
• Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church (Colter, 2024), a Southern Baptist megachurch in Plano, Texas;
• Marjorie Taylor Greene (2024), Republican US Representative for Georgia’s 14th Congressional district;
• Caitlyn Jenner (2024), former Olympic athlete, trans woman, and anti-trans activist;
• Benny Johnson (2024a & 2024b), conservative columnist and conspiracy theorist (Darcy, 2017);
• Mike Johnson (2024), Republican US Representative for Louisiana’s 4th Congressional district, Speaker of the US House of Representatives;
• Mike Lee (2024), Republican US Senator for Utah;
• Phil Lyman (2024), candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination for Governor of Utah;
• Trent Staggs (2024), Mayor of Riverton, Utah, and candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination for US Senator for Utah;
• Matt Walsh (2024), self-described “theocratic fascist”;
• Brad Wilson (2024), candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination for US Senator for Utah.

United States v Utah: Biden finally meets a jail he doesn’t like

On 2 April, in the US District Court for the District of Utah, the United States, through the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice (DOJ), filed suit against the State of Utah. The action follows a DOJ letter of findings from the Division’s Disability Rights Section dated 12 March, concerning a complaint filed by an unnamed trans woman who is currently incarcerated in a facility of the Utah Department of Corrections (UDOC). In the letter of findings, the United States finds that:

• UDOC has an internal policy, Policy AG37, which compels incarcerated trans people to go through a multi-step evaluation process before they can receive gender-affirming care, and imposes a 1-year waiting period before they can reapply if their care request is denied;
• Policy AG37 subjects all requests for transition care to a committee which includes both non-medical and medical staff members, and which includes members who are overtly biased against providing care;
• UDOC did not allow the complainant to receive a clinical evaluation for gender dysphoria until June 2022, more than 9 months after she was incarcerated;
• after the complainant passed the evaluation, UDOC did not provide her with hormone replacement therapy (HRT) until January 2023, more than 6 months later;
• it did not do so safely or effectively: it did not do the routine bloodwork necessary to ensure that her HRT did not interfere with other medications she was on, nor did it check that her HRT dose was having the intended effect;
• the complainant requested adjustments to her living situation constituting reasonable modifications under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which is also the federal law providing for reasonable accommodations for trans people — UDOC rejected the complainant’s ADA requests out of hand;
• the complainant’s dysphoria was worsened, at least in part by UDOC’s conduct,to the point that in May 2023 she performed an orchiectomy on herself.

The letter of findings closes with a note to the effect that “[DOJ] hope[s] to work together with [UDOC] to resolve this matter cooperatively through a court-enforceable consent degree that brings UDOC into compliance with the ADA. If we are unable to reach such a resolution, the Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit”. Apparently such a resolution was not reached.

In its court filing, the United States contends that UDOC’s conduct is impermissible disability discrimination under the ADA. In its filing, it seeks:

• declaratory relief (“[a] declar[ation] that Defendant has violated [the ADA]”);
• injunctive relief:
  • enjoining UDOC and associated entities from engaging in anti-trans discrimination;
  • enjoining UDOC and associated entities to treat trans people equally;
• compensatory damages to the complainant.

Gays Against Groomers v Garcia: Incoherent seething

On 4 April, in the US District Court for the District of Colorado, two fascist anti-trans advocacy groups, Gays Against Groomers (GAG) and Rocky Mountain Women’s Network (RMWN), filed suit against 5 Democratic members of the Colorado General Assembly. Honestly the filing is pretty circuitous and incoherent even for right-wing litigation so it took me some time to figure out what they were saying had happened and how they were saying it was unlawful. Here’s what I got.

The General Assembly is currently deliberating on HB 24-1071, “Tiara’s Law,” which if adopted will make name changes easier for convicted felons who are trans. The process for the bill requires public hearings. It appears that during those hearings, the defendants formalised and enforced decorum rules prohibiting public witnesses from deadnaming, misgendering, or transphobic commentary in general. Those witnesses happened to include Rich Guggenheim of GAG and Christine Goeke of RMWN, with hilarious consequences.

Throughout the complaint, the plaintiffs seethingly inveigh against this unbearable imposition, taking every opportunity — including repeating themselves several times — to deadname any trans people specifically mentioned. At various times, they characterise:

• all chosen names as “trans-inspired names”;
• the fact that the Assembly’s online signup interface lets speakers indicate their pronouns as “suggest[ing] speakers should submit to trans ideology via [a] pronoun ritual”;
• any voluntary respect for trans people’s identities, by anyone, as “lying”;
• the defendants as “proponents of transgender ideology”;
• any decorum rules against transphobia as “compel[ling] citizens to mouth support for,” or even “requiring [them] to express fealty to,” “transgender ideology”;
• Defendants’ enforcement of such decorum rules as “forc[ing] their ideological beliefs on plaintiffs” and “stealing [the plaintiffs’ speaking] time”;
• Defendants’ advocacy for HB 24-1071 as “pro-felon statements that sought to normalize criminal convictions as a form of victimization”;
• Defendants as obviously ideologically biased because they did not expel Tiara Kelley (the law’s unofficial namesake), Bread and Roses, the American Civil Liberties Union, Parasol Patrol, or Black Sex Workers of Colorado (one wonders why that might have been).

Subsequent to this litany of outrages the plaintiffs eventually contend that the Democratic legislators’ prohibition on deadnaming, misgendering, and transphobic commentary is in violation of the plaintiffs’ rights under:

• the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States;
• 42 USC § 1983, which provides that individuals have the right to sue state governments for civil rights violations committed “under colour of law”.

They are seeking:

• injunctive relief, specifically an order enjoining the defendants or any parties associated with them from imposing or enforcing any decorum rules against deadnaming, misgendering, or transphobic commentary in general;
• declaratory relief consistent with the injunction;
• nominal damages of US$17.91;⁵
• costs and attorneys’ fees.

Blakeman v James: Court to County Exec: lol you thought

On 4 April, the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York refused the request of Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman (R) to enjoin state Attorney General Letitia James (D) from pursuing legal action against him. The action contemplated is over Nassau County Executive Order #2-2024, issued by Blakeman in February, which bars trans women and girls from playing sports at county-owned facilities (Associated Press, 2024a). According to Fox News Digital, Nusrat Choudhury, the presiding judge, said she would dismiss Blakeman’s suit entirely later this month (S. Thompson, 2024).

Arizona

SB 1182: Accommodation for All Children (tr—ns don’t count)

On 3 April, the Arizona House of Representatives approved SB 1182, the bravely-named Arizona Accommodation for All Children Act. If adopted, which now appears: certain, SB 1182 will:

• prohibits Arizona public schools from allowing trans students to use correctly gendered shower rooms, and creates a cause of action to allow aggrieved cis students to sue schools which do so;
• nominally provides for trans students by allowing schools to offer them access to single-occupancy or employee shower rooms.

Somewhat depressingly, SB 1182 was cut down from an even more extreme form which would have “required the same rules for bathrooms, locker rooms, and sleeping areas” (Gomez, 2024a).

SB 1628: Women’s Rights Bill removes women’s rights

Also on 3 April, the Arizona House approved SB 1628, the Arizona Women’s Bill of Rights. SB 1628 provides that for all purposes of Arizona code, gendered terms (“man,” “boy,” “woman,” “girl,” etc.) are determined based on the approximate type of the reproductive system of the person in question (Gomez, 2024b).

Colorado

For kids, HB 24-1039 kills deadnames dead

On 1 April, the Colorado State Senate passed HB 24-1039. If adopted, HB 24-1039 will provide that:

• schools are required to use a student’s chosen name;
• either actively deadnaming a student, or avoiding the use of a chosen name once it has been specified, is a form of discrimination;
• students thus discriminated against may file an administrative complaint or a Title IX complaint with the school.

HB 24-1071: Tiara’s Law gives trans ex-cons a break

On 3 April, the Colorado State Senate passed HB 24-1071, unofficially Tiara’s Law. Under current law, Colorado Revised Statutes § 13-15-101(3)(b) provides that if a person who is a convicted felon proposes to change their name to a name other than the name under which they were convicted, a court may allow it “for good cause”. HB 24-1071 adds a paragraph providing that “changing the petitioner’s name to conform with the petitioner’s gender identity” constitutes “good cause” for the purposes of that section.

The proceedings around the passage of Tiara’s Law are the subject of Gays Against Groomers v Garcia, mentioned above.

Illinois

X gender marker now available — about fucking time

On 1 April, after over four years of delay, the Illinois Secretary of State finally implemented the amendments made to the Illinois Identification Card Act by Public Act 101-0513, which requires that state identification cards must allow petitioners to identify their sex as nonbinary.

The amending Act commenced 1 January 2020, but the Illinois Secretary of State did not then immediately act to implement it. No source has been very clear on why. When the law passed, the Secretary of State informed journalists that changes might be delayed until 2024, saying the Secretary was locked into a contract for the relevant state documents with IDEMIA Identity and Security, LLC. However, IDEMIA released a media statement at that time indicating it would support the changes (Wittich, 2024).

Sources I consider credible have differed on whether the slow rollout was in any way the result of discriminatory intent:

• In 2023, Avi Rudnick (he/they), an attorney for the Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois who is transmasc nonbinary, told the Chicago Tribune the slow rollout was “just another example of structural transphobia” (Gorner, 2023).
• In 2021, in an email to StateScoop, Anne Petersen (they/them), a user experience (UX) designer for the US Web Design System who is nonbinary, placed the majority of the blame on “how the state buys software … the requirements have to be set up front and then the state islocked into a term” (Johnston, 2021).

Nebraska

LB 575: Spaces, sports saved from Sports and Spaces Act

On 5 April, the Nebraska Legislature killed LB 575, the Sports and Spaces Act. If adopted, LB 575 would have:

• compelled schools to observe a binary definition of “biological sex” based on reproductive anatomy and sex chromosomes;
• compelled schools to segregate “group bathroom[s] and locker room[s]” according to that definition of “biological sex”;
• prohibited schools from allowing trans kids to use correctly gendered restrooms or locker rooms, and created a civil cause of action allowing aggrieved cis students to sue schools which disobeyed;
• compelled schools to segregate sports teams as either specifically for one “biological sex,” or co-ed;
• prohibited schools from allowing transfem kids to play on girls’ teams at all, and from allowing transmasc kids to play on boys’ teams unless there was no girls’ team;
• prohibited athletic associations, licensing organisations, etc., from taking any action against schools which segregated their teams in this way;
• created wide-ranging causes of action with long statutes of limitations for students and schools alleging “any direct or indirect harm” as a result of any party bound by the Act not complying with it;
• commenced immediately upon passage, citing an emergency.

State Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh (Ind/D–LD6), who has a record of vocal trans allyship, vowed to filibuster the bill (Dvorak & Caracta, 2024). A cloture motion — i.e., a motion to terminate debate on the bill, and thus any ongoing filibuster — unexpectedly failed, receiving only 31 of the 33 votes it needed to pass. The shortfall was due to abstentions by 2 Republican senators who had previously supported the bill, with one explicitly citing a “change of heart” (Beck, 2024b).

As there were only 4 sitting days left in the Nebraska legislative session, there is no prospect that LB 575 will be reconsidered; instead, the bill will lapse (Beck, 2024a).

New Hampshire

SB 375 proves it was never about being fair

On 5 April, the New Hampshire State Senate voted 14–10 along party lines to approve SB 375. If adopted, the bill will:

• require all public educational institutions, i.e., schools and institutions of higher education, to segregate sporting teams into “male,” “female,” or “co-ed,” the first two being based on sex assigned at birth;
• provide that only people assigned female at birth may participate in events designated for “female” participation;
• require all public educational institutions to provide separate locker rooms for “male” and “female” athletes;
• create a broad cause of action allowing athletes to sue public educational institutions for “any direct or indirect harm” caused by those institutions’ noncompliance with the provisions of the bill.

State Sen. Rebecca Perkins Kwoka (D–SD21, Portsmouth) moved an amendment which would have created eligibility requirements which would allow trans girls who satisfied them to play sports on girls’ teams. However, that amendment failed along party lines (Margolis, 2024).

Ohio

HB 467 ensures deadname trick only works once

On 27 March, HB 467 was introduced in the Ohio House of Representatives. The bill deals with Ohio Revised Code § 3513.06, which as it stands provides that anyone who wants to become a candidate for public office in Ohio has to include all of their name changes in the last 5 years, except changes by reason of marriage, on their declaration of candidacy and petition, which are public.

The reason this is a problem for trans people, and the reason it applies unequally to them, is obvious. However, that’s actually not why the issue has come up. The issue has come up because candidate guidance from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office doesn’t mention § 3513.06 anywhere, nor is there any space on the existing paperwork to comply with it. For all practical intents and purposes, nobody knew it existed. As a result, Republican-controlled county electoral authorities were able to pull the statute out of nowhere to attempt, sometimes successfully, to disqualify multiple trans candidates contesting Democratic primaries. State House Democrats are therefore introducing HB 467 to close that loophole.

House Republicans have filed another bill, not yet numbered at press time, sponsored by State Reps. Rodney Creech (R–HD40, West Alexandria) and Angie King (R–HD84, Celina). Current law provides that candidates in primary elections can only be protested by members of their own party. The Creech–King bill would change the law so that anyone can protest a candidate in any party. Coincidentally, at the state legislative elections this November, Creech and King will face Democratic candidates Bobbie Arnold and Arienne Childrey respectively, both of whom are trans but who their local Republicans could not find ways to disqualify (Trau, 2024).

Wisconsin

AB 377: Evers vetoes sports ban, tries shame on fascists

On 2 April, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers (D) vetoed Assembly Bill (AB) 377. If adopted, AB 377 would have:

• required all Wisconsin schools to designate teams and/or sports as either “male,” “female,” or “co-ed,” the first two being based on sex assigned at birth;
• required schools who intended to change the gender designation of a team and/or sport to provide written notification to all pupils eligible under the previous and current designations, and to their parents and guardians;
• created a wide-ranging cause of action for aggrieved cis girl students who were “deprived of the opportunity to participate in an athletic sport or on an athletic team”, or “who suffer[ed] any direct or indirect harm as the result” of schools not complying with the law’s provisions, to seek “injunctive relief, damages, and any other relief available under law”;
• forbidden schools from taking any “adverse action” against cis students who dobbed in their stealth trans classmates to the school, or who dobbed in their schools to the state;
• created a cause of action for schools who “suffer[ed] any direct or indirect harm … as the result” of their own compliance with the other provisions of the bill.

In his veto message, Governor Evers cited:

• the bill’s incompatibility with existing Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association policy;
• the bill’s potential incompatibility with Title IX, whose provisions against discrimination in education on the basis of sex also protect trans people per Bostock v Clayton County;
• the bill’s “fail[ure] to comport with our Wisconsin values,” including “kindness, respect, empathy, and compassion,” and his own corresponding “object[ion] to codifying discrimination into state statute and the Wisconsin State Legislature’s ongoing efforts to perpetuate hateful and discriminatory rhetoric targeting LGBTQ Wisconsinites, including our transgender and gender nonconforming kids”.

Footnotes

1. According to the text of Los Angeles City Council File 23-0468, the motion which renamed Cooper Do-nuts/Nancy Valverde Square. ↩︎
2. i.e., the fourth ministry to be overseen by Government Chairman Robert Fico. The Slovak term translates literally to “fourth cabinet of Robert Fico”. However, this is a linguistically ambiguous construction in English; while in the United States and many European countries “cabinet” means the body of all ministers in the government, in Westminster and Westminster-variant states like the UK and Australia respectively, it means a particular body of senior ministers. As I live in Australia and as the effect is disambiguating in any case, I therefore use the Australionormative construction “Fourth Fico Ministry”. ↩︎
3. In Australian, UK, and I believe US electoral social-democratic/left-liberal formations, the most socially right-wing members also tend to be the most economically right-wing and least social-democratic. Hlas seems more to be, or at least to pretend to be, in the “luv unions, ‘ate faggots, simple as” area, which most Anglophone parties I know don’t bother with. ↩︎
4. Specifically, Brown is an adherent of the misleadingly-named Messianic Judaism, a denomination of Protestant Christianity. ↩︎
5. I have some reason to think this is a dogwhistle but I’m fucked if I know for what. ↩︎

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We’re back! A day later than expected because holy shit there was a lot of news this week!

Index

1. SP Press — Redemptio memoriae: New collection published
2. SP Press — Technical: Email works now
3. Int., Academic — Baxendale: Just asking questions
4. Int., Academic — Kalman-Rome et al.: Transmascs crave those minerals, says study
5. Int., Academic — Landén: Puberty blockers are dangerous, say vibes
6. Int., Academic — Lundberg et al.: Tommy and Emma are at it again
7. Int., Academic — Kidd et al.: You like Tuck Everlasting? Haha, but seriously, folks,
8. Int., Academic — McDeavitt: Psychiatrist has hot take, film at eleven
9. Int., AU/US — In shocking twist, Australian eSafety Commissioner helpful for once
10. Int., US/global — Exciting new extremely normal activewear brand
11. Int., World Wide Web — Meta proves Wilhoit’s maxim a universal law
12. Argentina — Federal Court: Pozo de Banfield torturers sentenced
13. Australia — ALRC religious schools discrimination report tabled
14. Australia — Federal Court: Pesutto to suffer one almighty SLAPP
15. Australia, ACT — ANU: Gender Affirmation Guide released
16. Australia, NSW, Sydney — Committee approves transfem housing (bæddels’ fault)
17. Australia, NSW, Ryde — Flying Bats FC bring A-game, suffer consequences
18. France — Sénat Républicains transphobic (it’s in the name)
19. Netherlands — Trans woman has biological advantage at … darts apparently?
20. Pakistan, Sindh — Mayor of Larkana receives trans delegation
21. Thailand — Marriage Equality Act passes House
22. UK — BBC Sport: Just asking questions (2)
23. UK — Paediatrics peak body makes fatal mistake of being normal in Britain
24. US — In re Vague, Boe v Marshall: Judge-shopping case opened by case-shopping judge
25. US — DeGross v Hunter: How dare you make us respect trans kids
26. US — Data for Progress: Everything going to hell, new report confirms
27. US — Education Department: Curse your inevitable, not at all sudden betrayal
28. US — Disney: Are you a man or a Mouse?
29. US, California — Restrict Trans Youth Rights Initiative trudges on
30. US, California — Sacramento resolves to be nice to trans people
31. US, Colorado — Title Board to decide whether GOP bound by law or just protected
32. US, Georgia — HB 1104: “Frankenbill” disappointingly fails to kill creator
33. US, Idaho — HB 668: The machine demands blood
34. US, Kansas — SB 223: The machine demands blood (2)
35. US, New York — CEC 2 Resolution 248: Just asking questions (3)
36. US, Ohio — Moe v Yost: Moe and Goe tell Ohio “no”
37. US, Texas — Doe and PFLAG: Court delivers third W in Texas history
38. US, Wisconsin — Doe v EASD: The restroom gazes also into you

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SP Press

Redemptio memoriae: New collection published

On 25 February, an anarchist protester with the surname Bushnell self-immolated outside the Embassy of Israel to the United States in Washington, D.C., in protest of the Zionist entity’s colonisation and genocide in Palestine, making international news. It quickly became apparent that there was more to the story than initially met the eye and that the “more” might fall within SP Press’ scope, and I put SP Weekly on hiatus to investigate. I’ve assembled what I found as a newly-created SP Press Collection, Redemptio memoriae.

For broader coverage of Bushnell’s legacy, outside the aspects which fall within SP Press’ scope, I strongly recommend only the 2 articles published by CrimethInc ex-Workers’ Collective (2024a & 2024b).

Technical: Email works now

It turns out that for most of the time since I migrated to my new email provider, my SP Press address, isabelle@severalproblems.press, has been unable to receive email. The reason is that I set it up wrong, because my degree is in music performance and so cute little question marks appear over my head when people say things like “SMTP authentication” or “MX record”. It should work now. Any and all hate mail is welcome.

International

Academic

Baxendale: Just asking questions

On 9 February, Acta Paediatrica published an article, “The impact of suppressing puberty on neuropsychological function: A review,” by Sallie Baxendale (2024). The study concludes that “Critical questions remain unanswered regarding the nature, extent and permanence of any arrested development of cognitive function associated with puberty blockers”.

Andrea James (2024c), writing for Transgender Map, characterises Baxendale as a “psychologist and anti-transgender activist,” noting she is affiliated with at least two anti-trans pressure groups, the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM) and the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender (CAN-SG), and is a contributor to UnHerd, a British publication with an anti-trans editorial line. Of all things, a Quillette article promoting the study (Lane, 2024) notes that it was rejected by 3 other journals before Acta Paediatrica decided to pick it up.

Kalman-Rome et al.: Transmascs crave those minerals, says study

On 11 February, the Journal of Dietary Supplements published “Dietary supplement use in transmasculine people: Results of an online survey of volunteer adults,” by Eli Kalman-Rome et al. (2024). The study concluded that “[t]ransmasculine people in our [cohort] reported a high use of dietary supplements”.

Landén: Puberty blockers are dangerous, say vibes

On 3 March, Acta Paediatrica published an article, “Puberty suppression of children with gender dysphoria: Urgent call for research,” an editorial by Mikael Landén (2024). The article:

• promotes the notion that “GnRHa [gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist; i.e., puberty blocker] treatment … serves as an initial step in the transition to the opposite sex,” which in this context is a coded way of suggesting that puberty blockers make cis kids trans;
• contends, based on one study on which Landén was one of the corresponding authors, that “the evidence supporting the use of GnRHa to mitigate gender dysphoria and improve psychosocial functioning is insufficient”;
• contends that “treatment with GnRH agonists impacts bone health by delaying the natural increase in bone mineral density that typically occurs during puberty,” citing the 2020 review conducted by the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which Trans Safety Network’s Mallory Moore notes was run by anti-trans conversion therapists and shot through with undisclosed conflicts of interest and methodological issues (Moore, 2024) to the point that I would consider it functionally nullified;
• cites Baxendale (op. cit.), with the attendant issues described above;
• does not disclose that the author has a conflict of interest, namely that he, like Baxendale, is associated with SEGM, having previously spoken at a SEGM-organised 2023 anti-trans conference (James, 2024b).

Lundberg et al.: Tommy and Emma are at it again

On 21 March, the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports published a commentary, “The International Olympic Committee framework on fairness, inclusion and nondiscrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations does not protect fairness for female athletes,” by Tommy R. Lundberg et al. (2024).

Lead author Lundberg and the two authors credited as having “contributed equally,” Ross Tucker and Dr Emma Hilton, are well-known anti-trans activists (A. James, 2023a; Rook, 2023). None have any background in trans healthcare or any related fields of research, such as endocrinology; Lundberg and Tucker are exercise physiologists, while Hilton is a biologist whose work on human subjects appears to be concentrated in clinical genetics and immunology.

The commentary is also co-authored by Jon Pike, who is a British academic philosopher specialising in the philosophy of sport and an anti-trans activist, notably the convenor of the Open University’s Gender Critical Research Network (A. James, 2023b; S. Richards, 2023).

Kidd et al.: You like Tuck Everlasting? Haha, but seriously, folks,

On 25 March, the Annals of Family Medicine, the journal of the American Association of Family Physicians, published a research brief, “Genital tucking practices in transgender and gender diverse patients,” by Nicholas Kidd et al. (2024). The article concludes that”On 25 March, the Annals of Family Medicine, the journal of the American Association of Family Physicians, published a research brief, “Genital tucking practices in transgender and gender diverse patients,” by Nicholas Kidd et al. (2024). The article concludes that:

[t]he risk of side effects increased with the length of tucking sessions … with many patients avoiding medical care despite experiencing side effects. Health care providers should empathetically discuss tucking and its potential risks and benefits with transgender and gender diverse patients.

Kidd et al. (op. cit.)

McDeavitt: Psychiatrist has hot take, film at eleven

On 28 March, Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, published a letter to the editor, “Prohibition of gender-affirming care as a form of child maltreatment: Reframing the discussion,” by Kathleen McDeavitt (2024). In the letter, McDeavitt expresses a stance opposing the scientific and professional consensus on paediatric trans healthcare. There are no substantially novel elements to her argumentation and the letter is noted here primarily for the record.

General

Australia/United States: In shocking twist, eSafety Commissioner helpful for once

On 22 March, the Australian eSafety Commissioner¹ served X Corp., operator of Twitter (“X”), with a removal notice under the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth) s 88.

The content addressed by the notice is a Tweet by Chris Elston, a Canadian activist better known as “Billboard Chris,” promoting a Daily Mail smear piece/revenge porn attack against the complainant, an Australian trans community advocate who, to avoid compounding the harm, I am electing not to name. Elston added further commentary which the Commissioner assessed as cause to intervene, on the grounds that Elston’s contribution deliberately misgendered the complainant and pathologised trans people as a whole. If X Corp. fails to remove the Tweet, the Commissioner may initiate civil action to fine it up to AU$782,500 (Elston, 2024), which is circa CA$689,000 or US$510,000 at press time.

United States/global: Exciting new extremely normal activewear brand

On 25 March, Jennifer Sey (2024) announced the launch of XX–XY Athletics, a new activewear brand. Sey is the former global brand president at Levi Strauss & Co. She was removed from the role in January 2022 by Chip Bergh, Levi’s chief executive officer, because she failed a due diligence check due to being vocally anti-vax, anti-lockdown and COVID denialist on Twitter and then on Fox News, ignoring all attempts by corporate to get her to stop (Suddath, 2022).

XX–XY Athletics’ primary value proposition seems to be letting consumers vice-signal being transphobic. The launch attracted puff pieces in Forbes (Danziger, 2024) and Women’s Wear Daily (Feitelberg, 2024).

World Wide Web: Meta proves Wilhoit’s maxim a universal law

On 27 March (M. James, 2024), GLAAD, a US-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group, published a social media safety report, “Unsafe: Meta fails to moderate extreme anti-trans hate across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads” (GLAAD, 2024). In the report, GLAAD found that Meta Platforms, Inc., which operates and moderates those three platforms, consistently either did not take any action on anti-trans hate content, or actively falsely classified the content as not in violation of its rules (GLAAD, op. cit.; Villarreal, 2024).

Argentina

Tribunal Federal: Pozo de Banfield torturers sentenced

On 26 March, in La Plata, Buenos Aires, the Tribunal Federal № 1 (“Federal Court No. 1”) announced the conviction and sentencing of 10 former officers of the Argentine government who served during the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (PRN; “National Reorganisation Process”), the military junta which ruled Argentina from 1976 through 1983. The charges on which they were convicted included offences relating to sexual violence targeting trans women in particular (Voice of America, 2024), which took place at the Pozo de Banfield (“Banfield Pit”), a junta black site in Banfield, Buenos Aires Province. The violence in question was related to the Process’ political and cultural program of Catholic-inflected clerical fascism, under which queer and trans people were regarded as inherently subversive.

The full text of the decision is scheduled for release on 6 July (Tian, 2024).

Australia

Federal

ALRC religious schools discrimination report tabled

On 21 March, in the Australian House of Representatives, Mark Dreyfus MP (ALP–Isaacs, VIC), Attorney-General for Australia, tabled (Ludwig, 2024) Australian Law Reform Commission Report 142, Maximising the realisation of human rights: Religious educational institutions and anti-discrimination laws (Australian Law Reform Commission, 2023). The recommendations of the report include that:

• in respect of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth), which is also the centrepiece of Australian federal queer and trans anti-discrimination law, the Government should:
  • terminate the current legal regime under which religious schools are functionally exempt from complying with broad portions of the Act by amending ss 23, 37, and 38 (Recommendation 1);
  • extend the protection which the Act offers to employees and “contract workers” at religious schools to “all persons, employed, engaged, or otherwise utilised by a religious educational institution who fall within the definition of ‘worker’ as provided in s 4 of [the] Act” (Recommendation 3);
  • extend the protection which the Act offers to protected persons to people who “associate[…] with (whether as[…] relative[s] or otherwise); or, [are] believed to associate with” protected persons, so that, for instance, a religious school cannot lawfully deny enrolment to a child merely because that child’s parents are of the same gender (Recommendation 4);
• the Government should legislate so that religious schools cannot impose terms in awards and enterprise agreements that “impose[…] a requirement that an employee abide by, or comply with, a code of practice or other condition dealing with the personal beliefs or private life of the employee” (Recommendation 6).

Federal Court: Pesutto to suffer one almighty SLAPP

In the week of 24 March, Justice Michael Wheelahan of the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia ordered that Deeming v Pesutto, Jones v Pesutto and Keen v Pesutto be heard together (Cosoleto, 2024). Deeming, Jones, and Keen are the defamation actions brought against John Pesutto MLA (LPA–Hawthorn), Leader of the Liberal Party of Australia in the Parliament of Victoria, by Moira Deeming MLC (Ind/LPA–Western Metropolitan Region) and two anti-trans activists, Angela “Angie” Jones and Kellie-Jay Keen.

The actions are related to remarks made and actions taken by Pesutto regarding Deeming, then one of his MPs, and to a lesser extent Jones and Keen, in particular characterising them as Nazi sympathisers (Kolovos, 2024; Silva & Willingham, 2024), after Keen’s March 2023 Let Women Speak rally, which members of the National Socialist Network (NSN) attended in full-throated support of Deeming’s, Jones’, and Keen’s anti-trans beliefs.

A trial date has been set for 16 September 2024.

Conflict of interest (COI) disclosure: I’m not involved in Deeming, Jones, or Keen, and don’t have any stake in the outcome. However it is my understanding that at least one plaintiff’s legal strategy relies, in part, on a negative characterisation of me personally. I’m still reporting this because it’s newsworthy, and I don’t expect to have any issues self-managing this COI, but under the circumstances I figured a COI disclosure was appropriate. A similar disclosure will go on any future coverage of this story that I write.

Australian Capital Territory

ANU Gender Affirmation Guide released

On 25 March, the Australian National University (ANU) People & Culture Division published ANU’s Gender Affirmation Guide (ANU People & Culture Division, 2024). The Guide is related to the Australian National University Enterprise Agreement 2023–2026, which commenced 5 December 2023, will remain in effect until 30 June 2026, and includes provision for gender affirmation leave.

New South Wales

City of Ryde: Flying Bats FC brings A-game, suffers the consequences

On 24 March, at Christie Park ground in Macquarie Park, the grand final of the Beryl Ackroyd Cup, a women’s pre-season association football competition organised by North West Sydney Football, was played between The Flying Bats FC and Macquarie Dragons FC. The Flying Bats, who have performed solidly through the season (Reilly, 2024; Smith, 2024d) won 4–0 (Bye, 2024).

As The Flying Bats are sponsored by Pride Football Australia and fielded 5 trans players in the grand final, they are predictably now receiving an onslaught of national and international hate, stoked by, among others:

• Senator Claire Chandler (LPA–Tasmania) (news.com.au, 2024);
• 2GB’s Ben Fordham Live (Fordham, 2024)
• Kirralie Smith:
  • personally (Smith, 2024a, 2024b, & 2024c);
  • as Binary Australia (Smith, 2024d);
• Sky News Australia (2024);
• the Daily Mail (“Women’s soccer team featuring five,” 2024);
• For Women Scotland Sport (2024);
• Riley Gaines (2024);
• Press Holdings’ The Telegraph (Rumsby, 2024).

In response to my request for comment, Flying Bats FC provided the following statement from Jennifer Peden, president of the club:

As a club, the Flying Bats FC stand strongly for inclusion, and pride ourselves on safe, respectful and fair play, the promotion of a supportive community for LGBTQIA+ players, officials and supporters, and the significant physical, social and mental health benefits that participation in sport brings, especially to marginalised members of the LGBTQIA+ community. We are a club that values our cisgender and transgender players equally.

We strongly support the Australian Human Rights Commission’s guidelines for the inclusion of transgender and gender diverse people in sport. These guidelines, along with the Sex Discrimination Act, inform the gender inclusion policies of Football Australia, Football NSW, and the North West Sydney Football Association at the community, grassroots level at which we play. Trans women belong in the women’s competition because that is the gender with which they identify. Trans women have played with the club for at least 20 years, at levels ranging from beginner to skilled, just like our cis women players. Our players are graded on ability, and placed in the team that is most appropriate for their skill and experience level, and we look forward to a respectful, competitive season across our 8 teams in 2024.

J. Peden (personal communication, 31 March 2024)

City of Sydney: Committee approves transfem housing (bæddels’ fault)

On 25 March, the Housing for All Committee of the Sydney City Council unanimously approved a motion, “Sale of surplus residential property — Affordable and diverse housing,” including a recommendation, Recommendation (C)(iii), that a property at Darlinghurst be sold to Common Equity NSW Ltd (“Common Equity”) for $2.5 million. The project will now need to be signed off by the full Council, which will consider a motion to that effect at its 9 April meeting.

If approved, Common Equity will partner with All Nations Housing Co-operative to use the property to provide affordable housing for trans women, totalling 11 beds (Johnson, 2024).

France

Sénat Républicains transphobic (it’s in the name)

On 18 March, the group of Les Républicains (LR; “The Republicans”) in the French Senate published a report, Rapport sur la transidentification des mineurs (Report on the trans-identification of minors) (Groupe Les Républicains au Sénat, 2024). LR, the party of Nicolas Sarkozy, former President of France, was France’s conservative major party until it was supplanted around 2017 by Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN; “National Rally”). It remains the largest party in the Senate.

The working group heard 67 witnesses, including 4 anonymous parents and 1 anonymous detransitioner. Of the remainder, some were from trans community advocacy and health promotion groups, or were clinicians who supported the scientific consensus.

A considerable number, however, were anti-trans activists with whom I was already familiar because they are primarily or incidentally active in Anglophone spaces, mostly members of SEGM and/or Genspect —Zhenya Abbruzzese (#6), Stephen Levine (#9), David Bell (#11), Michael Biggs (#13), Patrick Hunter (#34), Riittakerttu Kaltiala (#35), Lisa Littman (#42), Lori Regenstreif (#52), Kathleen Stock (#60), and Ken Zucker (#67); in my view, Annelou de Vries (#65) could defensibly be included in this category as well. I don’t go into a great deal of detail about these people here because this is a regular bulletin and their careers have been explored more thoroughly and capably elsewhere.

However, there were also a number of European anti-trans clinicians and activists with whom I was not previously familiar because they are not regularly or significantly active in Anglophone media. These included the following:

• Nicole Athéa, gynaecologist and endocrinologist, who:
  • co-signed an open letter in L’Express promoting the “social contagion” and “gender ideology” canards (Masson et al., 2021);
  • co-authored a paper promoting the “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) canard (Masson et al., 2023);
• Sophie Audugé, spokesperson for extreme-right pressure group SOS Éducation, who has a record of promoting the “gender ideology” and “social contagion” canards (ADHEOS, 2022; Périer, 2022);
• Maurice Berger, paediatric psychiatrist, who co-signed an open letter in The Wall Street Journal attacking the Endocrine Society for its role in facilitating trans healthcare (Kaltiala et al., 2023);
• Jean-François Braunstein, professor of contemporary philosophy at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (“Panthéon-Sorbonne University”), who:
  • has published anti-trans work of a conspiratorial-impressionist type not dissimilar to, e.g., Jennifer Bilek (see, e.g., Braunstein, 2021b);
  • has a record of general anti-trans advocacy in the press (Braunstein, 2021a; Masson et al., 2021; etc.);
  • is a broadly Intellectual Dark Web-esque right-wing activist with a record of inveighing against things like “islamogauchisme” (“Islamo-leftism,” a racially charged snarl word used by French fascists) and “wokisme” (“wokeness”) in general (see, e.g., Braunstein, 2022).
• Silvia Carrasco Pons, professor of social anthropology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, who:
  • is a member (Lowrey, 2023) of Docentes Feministas por la Coeducación (DoFemCo; “Feminist Teachers for Co-education”), a Spanish TERF pressure group;
  • has a history of using her professional and pedagogical authority to, e.g., promote an anti-trans, interphobic conception of “biological sex” (see, e.g., Carrasco, 2023);
• José Errasti, professor of clinical psychology at the Universidad de Oviedo, and co-author of Nadie nace un cuerpo equivocado (No one is born in the wrong body) (Errasti & Pérez, 2022a), a book characterised, in a piece by the authors promoting it in right-wing daily El Mundo, as a “manifesto against the ‘trans’ obsession” (Errasti & Pérez, 2022b);
• Christian Flavigny, paediatric psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who:
  • was, as of 30 June 2020, an affiliate of the Institut Thomas More, a Paris-based Catholic right-wing think tank (Lesueur & Flavigny, 2020);
  • has described transness and gender-affirming care as a disease of “American culture” and the “Americanisation” of France (Flavigny, 2021a);
  • vocally opposed a conversion therapy ban (Flavigny, 2021b);
  • has a record of general anti-trans advocacy in the press (Masson et al., 2021, etc.);
• Angélique Gozlan, clinical psychologist, who has a record of promoting the “social contagion” canard (Gozlan & Masson, 2023), with which her remarks to the LR working group seem to have been of a piece (Sugy, 2024);
• Magali Pignard, “autism mom” activist, who has promoted the “transing away the gay” canard (Pignard, 2023);
• Olivia Sarton, attorney, who:
  • is affiliated with Juristes pour l’Enfance (“Lawyers for Children”), a right-wing legal advocacy group, in which capacity she has promoted the “social contagion” canard (Lamy, 2022);
  • in that capacity, is affiliated with Radio Espérance, a traditionalist Catholic radio network, where she has used her platform as co-host of Et le droit dans tout ça ?² to promote a version of the “parental rights” line popular among anti-trans US conservatives (Mirkovic & Sarton, 2022);
• Dr Samuel Veissière, clinician-researcher at CIUSSS of Montréal, who has promoted the “ROGD” and “social contagion” canards (Veissière, 2018a & 2018b; Serano, 2018);
• Michèle Vianès, who:
  • is an anti-trans activist (Vianès, 2023);
  • is co-founder and president of Regards de Femmes (“Women’s Views”), an Islamophobic and trans-exclusionary feminist group (Lamy, 2022b);
  • is noted for her racist and Islamophobic views and her collaboration with the fascist website Riposte laïque (Secular Response) (Le Planning Familial, 2021);
• Dr Catherine Zittoun, a child psychiatrist who has previously made remarks to FSSPX Attualità (“FSSPX News“) — the organ of the Society of St Pius X, a traditionalist Catholic group — suggesting that transmasculine youth are overly “hasty” in seeking transition (FSSPX Attualità, 2024).

The report makes 17 préconisations (“recommendations”), including that:

• trans kids with “troubles psychopathologiques et/ou neurodéveloppementaux” (“psychopathologies and/or neurodevelopmental disorders”) should be diverted into psychotherapy as a first-line intervention (Préconisation 2);
• trans kids should not be allowed to access trans healthcare services at all unless “détresse liée au genre perdure depuis la petite enfance” (“gender-related distress has persisted since early childhood”) (Préconisation 3);
• no new prescriptions for puberty blockers should be issued, and referrals of trans kids for hormone replacement therapy or gender-affirming surgery should be prohibited outright — the report also implies that when practical these restrictions should be extended to apply to people up to the age of 25 (Préconisation 5);
• the circulaire Blanquer (“Blanquer circular”) of 29 September 2021, which provides a modicum of gender recognition for trans students in French schools, should be withdrawn; instead, in accordance with “le principe de neutralité de l’Education nationale” (“the principle of neutrality in public education”), teachers should be directed to regard trans students as merely “enfants en questionnement de genre” (“gender-questioning children”) and address them according to their “état civil” (“civil status,” i.e., legal identity, in this case particularly meaning legal given name and assigned gender) (Préconisations 9, 10 & 11);
  • “associations qui ne respectant pas le principe de neutralité” (“organisations which do not respect the principle of neutrality”) — i.e., organisations who object to this approach — should be prevented from working with students (Préconisation 13);
• measures should be taken to “[p]rotéger les espaces non mixtes” (“[p]rotect single-sex spaces”) in schools, including toilets, showers, and changing rooms (Préconisation 12);
• administrative forms, acts, questionnaires, documents, and so on, which are distributed by a public authority or by a private entity exercising delegated public service authority, may only refer to “male” or “female” sex (Préconisation 15).

The Netherlands

Trans woman has biological advantage at … darts, apparently?

On 24 March, two members of the Dutch national women’s darts team, Anca Zijlstra (2024) and Aileen de Graaf, both cis women, quit in protest against the inclusion on the team of Noa-Lynn van Leuven, a trans woman (Zijlstra, op. cit.). Zijlstra also resigned her post with the Nederlands Darts Bond (NDB; “Dutch Darts Federation”), which oversees competitive darts in the Kingdom of the Netherlands (Smit, 2024).

Van Leuven has also come under international attack, including from Tory MP Nick Fletcher and from Martina Navratilova (D. Burke, 2024).

Pakistan

Sindh

Mayor of Larkana receives trans delegation

On 25 March, Anwar Ali Nawaz Luhar, the mayor of Larkana, Sindh, met with a delegation of trans members of the Larkana Municipal Corporation. The delegation expressed their concerns regarding (“Complaint of LMC’s transgender members,” 2024):

• barriers preventing trans people from acquiring a Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC);
• the lack of provision for trans people in the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), which provides financial assistance to marginalised groups;
• police attitudes toward trans people.

Thailand

Marriage Equality Act passes House

On 27 March, the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the National Assembly of Thailand, passed the Marriage Equality Act,³ which would make legal provision for same-gender marriage in Thailand. The Act passed with 400 MPs in favour, 10 against, 2 abstentions, and 3 members not voting (Human Rights Watch, 2024).

The Act must now be approved by the Senate of Thailand and must receive royal assent. While the monarch of the Commonwealth realms — who is the most familiar example of monarchy for me and, I suspect, many of SP Press’ readers — functionally cannot unilaterally refuse the assent (Allard-Tremblay, 2013), the Thai monarch functionally can do so, and the reigning King, Vajiralongkorn, has exercised that power with unusual frequency since his accession (Mérieau, 2017). However, there is no expectation that he will do so in this case. The Act is thus expected to become law by the end of 2024 (Head & Ng, 2024).

United Kingdom

BBC Sport: Just asking questions (2)

On 25 March, the BBC published the results of the BBC Elite British Sportswomen’s Study 2024 (BBC Sport, 2024). This year’s edition marks the fourth iteration of this poll, after 3 previous editions (Fordyce, 2013; BBC Sport, 2015 & 2020).

For the 2024 iteration, the BBC contacted 615 respondents in 28 different sports and received 143 responses. The 2024 Study contained the following 2 new questions relating to trans people, with the following results:

22. How comfortable do you feel about transgender athletes competing in female categories in your sport?
    • Very comfortable: 6 [4.2%];
    • Comfortable: 5 [3.5%];
    • Neutral: 21 [14.7%];
    • Uncomfortable: 45 [31.5%];
    • Very uncomfortable: 59 [41.3%];
    • Not applicable/don’t wish to answer: 5 [3.5%];
    • Did not answer: 2 [1.4%].

23. How comfortable would you feel speaking publicly on the topic of transgender athletes competing in female categories in your sport?
    • Very comfortable: 6 [4.2%];
    • Comfortable: 13 [9.1%]
    • Neutral: 21 [14.7%];
    • Uncomfortable: 50 [~35.0%];
    • Very uncomfortable: 46 [32.2%];
    • Not applicable/don’t wish to answer: 6 [4.2%];
    • Did not answer: 1 [0.7%].

Notably, this year’s instrument is the first to be titled a Study, despite no apparent changes in methodology; previous instruments referred to themselves as Surveys, connoting a more relaxed standard of rigour.

Paediatrics peak body makes fatal mistake of being normal in Britain

On 26 March, the response by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) to the Department for Education (DfE) consultation (HM Department for Education, 2023) on its draft Guidance for schools and colleges: gender questioning children became public. The response, written by Professor Andrew Rowland (2024), RCPCH Officer for Child Protection:

• expresses that the RCPCH is “deeply concerned that the proposed guidance poses a risk to children and young people in that, if enacted, many of the measures set out are likely to cause distress for those who may be gender questioning or with gender incongruence, and their peers, and foster a negative school environment where children are not supported to be themselves” (p. 1);
• expresses that the RCPCH is “concerned to see that the guidance states that parents should be involved other than in the ‘exceptionally rare circumstances where involving parents would constitute a significant risk of harm to the child’ … without citing evidence to demonstrate that this risk is, in fact, exceptionally rare” (pp. 1–2)
  • “invite[s] the Department to consider whether ‘significant risk of harm’ is the appropriate threshold for making decisions about excluding parents from such decisions”, given that “There is no statutory definition of ‘significant’” (p. 2)
• rejects strongly as “not acceptable” the draft guidance’s failure to honour HM Government’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, in the latter case with specific reference to art 12, 16, and 28 (pp. 2–3);
• expresses that the RCPCH is “particularly concerned by the provisions set out for primary school age children,” noting that not letting trans primary school students use their correct pronouns “removes an opportunity for primary schools to manage distress in young children who are gender questioning or with gender incongruence” (p. 3);
• expresses the RCPCH’s belief that, “as currently worded, … it is more likely than not that education practitioners will be dissuaded from acting in a child’s best interests” (p. 2);
• “urge[s] the Department to consider the responses to this consultation … in the context of their duty as outlined in the Children Act 1989 to ensure that the welfare of the child is the paramount consideration in all matters concerning them” (p. 1);
  • “ask[s] that the Department addresses how they meet this requirement specifically in their response to this consultation” (p. 1);
• “recommend[s] that the Department commissions a full literature review in order to fully and wholly explore the potential consequences of informing parents that a child is gender questioning without their consent” (p. 2);
• asserts “it is essential that the Department must … seek independent, objective advice on whether this guidance would be lawful under the Equality Act 2010, and whether it complies with all required Human Rights Conventions” (p. 3);
• indicates that “The Department may find it helpful to look to” Gillick competency and the Fraser guidelines “as precedent for providing autonomy to children and young people” (p. 2).
• expresses the RCPCH’s belief that the Scottish Government Children and Families Directorate’s guidance Taking a children’s human rights approach “should be used as a framework to underpin revisions to this Guidance that is currently subject to consultation” (p. 3).

The RCPCH response has attracted significant criticism, invariably from anti-trans groups and actors, including:

• the Family Education Trust, a right-wing Christian advocacy group;
• Nick Fletcher MP (CUP–Don Valley, England), a Tory MP with a consistent track record of anti-trans commentary (Baska, 2022; Stone, 2022a & 2022b);
• Helen Joyce, director of advocacy for Sex Matters, an anti-trans advocacy group.

United States

Federal

In re Vague/Boe v Marshall: Judge-shopping case opened by case-shopping judge

On 19 March, in the US District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, District Judge Liles C. Burke unsealed two documents:

• a final report of a judicial inquiry, In re Vague, dated 27 October 2023;
• an order to show cause in Boe v Marshall, dated 21 February 2024.

The In re Vague inquiry was convened at Judge Burke’s request on the pretext that he believed “certain actions taken by counsel for the plaintiffs” in two cases, Walker v Marshall and Ladinsky v Ivey, “may have evidenced judge shopping”. The Panel decided on its own initiative to examine the conduct of plaintiffs’ counsel in an additional case, Eknes-Tucker v Ivey.

The plaintiffs in all three cases were trans and had filed suit on state actions or points of state law that were anti-trans in their effect in such a way that plaintiffs asserted they were unlawful. My view is that this is very likely to be material to Burke’s motivation. Burke, appointed to the District Court bench in 2017 by then-President Donald Trump (R), has collaborated with the Federalist Society (2016), a right-wing legal advocacy group renowned (Scherer & Miller, 2009) for the uncanny consistency with which judges who are its alumni consistently rule on constitutional questions in ways that entrench and advance conservative and fascist political ends seemingly regardless of irrelevances such as, for example, the “text,” per se, of the law in question (Ward, 2023).

Burke’s political views, to the extent that they are on record, could be characterised broadly as far-right, given that, for instance, as of 2017 he openly hung a portrait of Confederate president Jefferson Davis in his office (Gray, 2017). Burke has also displayed hostility to LGBTQ+ people in particular, pointedly refusing during his confirmation process to answer questions for the record concerning whether he thought that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States required states to treat queer couples equally to straight couples, or trans people equally to cis people (L.C. Burke, 2017).⁴

Given that Burke could credibly be described as a fascist it will perhaps not be altogether surprising that this appears to a case of “every fascist accusation is a confession”. The In re Vague report tries to give the impression that the attorneys under scrutiny intentionally subverted a process that those attorneys knew to be a fair random draw by leaning on instances where testimony indicated the attorneys described Burke as a “bad draw”. However, it is as a matter of fact not a “draw” at all if there’s only one ticket in the hat — as Harvard Law School’s Alejandra Caraballo (2022) has pointed out, there appear to be arrangements in place to ensure that a case touching on trans rights filed in either the Middle or Northern Districts of Alabama will be immediately procedurally redirected to Burke, arrangements egregious enough that Caraballo describes them as “rigging of court procedure to determine [the] outcome”. It therefore seems credible that Judge Burke may have been motivated by knowledge of his own conduct in deciding to go on the attack.

Given all the above it will also perhaps not come as a shock that the panel of inquiry — composed of 2 Bush appointees and a Trump appointee selected by a Bush appointee and a Trump appointee — found “without hesitation that” 11 of the 39 total attorneys for the plaintiffs across the 3 cases “purposefully attempted to circumvent the random case assignment procedures of the … District Courts”. The 21 February 2024 show cause order is issued pursuant to that report. The 11 attorneys are, in the sequence named in the show cause order:

• Melody Eagan, of Lightfoot, Franklin & White, LLC;
• Jeffrey Doss, of Lightfoot, Franklin & White, LLC;
• Scott McCoy, of the Southern Poverty Law Center;
• Jennifer Levi, of GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders;
• Shannon Minter, of the National Center for Lesbian Rights;
• James Esseks, of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU);
• Kathleen Hartnett, of Cooley LLP;
• Michael Shortnacy, of King & Spalding LLP.
• LaTisha Faulks, of the ACLU of Alabama;
• Asaf Orr, of the National Center for Lesbian Rights;
• Carl Charles, of Lambda Legal.

The show cause hearing will take place on 22–23 May. If respondents fail in the Court’s opinion to show cause why they should not be sanctioned, then “the Court may consider one or more of … suspension from practice in the Northern and Middle Districts of Alabama; censure; public or private reprimand; disqualification; ineligibility for appointment as court-appointed counsel; ineligibility to appear pro hac vice or on behalf of the United States in the Northern and Middle Districts of Alabama; and monetary sanctions,” per the show cause order.

DeGross v Hunter: How dare you make us respect trans kids

On 22 March, in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a fascist legal advocacy group, filed suit against officials of the Washington Department of Children, Youth, and Families, on behalf of two plaintiffs, Jennifer and Shane DeGross.

Beginning in 2015, the DeGrosses were licensed by the Department to provide foster care. In 2022, the Department declined the DeGrosses’ request to renew their foster care license (Richardson, 2024) due to the DeGrosses’ active refusal to comply with Washington Administrative Code § 110-148-1520, which requires foster carers to “provide and arrange for care that is appropriate for the child’s … SOGIE [sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression]”. The plaintiffs allege religiously motivated discrimination amounting to:

• violation of their rights to free speech and free association under the Free Speech and Freedom of Assembly Clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States;
• violation of their rights to the free exercise of religion under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment;
• violation of their right to equal protection of law under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

They are seeking:

• declaratory relief (“A declaration that the Department’s policy violated and continues to violate Plaintiffs’ constitutionally protected rights to free speech, free association, religious exercise, and equal protection of the law”);
• a permanent injunction forbidding the Department from taking similar action in future;
• costs and expenses;
• in relation specifically to the claims against lead defendant Ross Hunter, the Department’s secretary, nominal and punitive damages.

Data for Progress: New report confirms everything going to hell

On 28 March, Data for Progress published a report, “Anti-LGBTQ+ policies and rhetoric are harming LGBTQ+ lives,” by Kirby Phares et al. (2024). The report’s findings “emphasize the negative impacts of recent anti-LGBTQ+ policies and rhetoric on LGBTQ+ people’s lives, including a worse quality of life and mental health, experiences of discrimination and harassment, and difficulties accessing health care. Additionally, the findings point to the importance of having access to LGBTQ+ representation in media and LGBTQ+-affirming online spaces and resources, particularly for young people”.

Education Department: Curse your inevitable and not at all sudden betrayal

On 28 March, The Washington Post reported that anonymous sources in the US Department of Education have advised that the Biden administration will likely take no action prior to the general elections of November 2024 to finalise its proposed regulation of 6 April 2023 which would have formally instituted some protections for student athletes who are trans. This is not really news; the Biden administration has been finding excuses not to take any action in this area since 2022 (Heckler, 2024).

Disney: Are you a man or a Mouse?

On 3 April, in Burbank, California, The Walt Disney Company’s annual meeting of shareholders will take place (The Walt Disney Company, 2024).⁵ At the meeting, shareholders will consider a proposal, “Gender-based compensation gaps and associated risks,” filed 3 October 2023 by the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a right-wing advocacy and activist litigation group which is a Disney shareholder (Chesser, 2024).

If adopted, the NLPC resolution will request that Disney’s board of directors issue a report by 31 December 2024 detailing “how they address dysphoria and detransitioning care across gender classifications, including associated reputational, competitive, operational and litigative risks, and risks related to recruiting and retaining diverse talent” (National Legal and Policy Center, 2023).

California

Restrict Trans Youth Rights Initiative trudges on

On 16 March, at Glory Church in downtown Los Angeles, the Time to Stand Rally took place. The Rally was organised by a number of religious and “parental rights” organisations. Its goal was to collect signatures to place a ballot initiative before California voters at the November elections. If adopted, the ballot initiative — referred to by conservatives as the Protect Kids of California Act of 2024, but legally designated the Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth initiative by Rob Bonta, California’s Democratic state attorney general — will (Kalish, 2024; Protect Kids California, 2023)

• ban gender-affirming care for trans people under 18 in California (§ 11).
• require schools to notify parents if a child comes out as trans (§ 5);
• ban trans girls who are students in California schools from participating in sports or using facilities which are specified for their correct gender (§§ 6, 8 & 10).

City of Sacramento: Council resolves to be nice to trans people

On 26 March, the Sacramento City Council unanimously approved a “Resolution declaring the City of Sacramento a Sanctuary City for Transgender People,” moved by outgoing councilmember Katie Valenzuela (D–District 4). In adopting the resolution, the City Council resolved that:

• “the City of Sacramento … declares itself a sanctuary city and a place of safety for transgender people” — s 1(A);
• “the City … recognizes the importance of gender-affirming healthcare as a matter of health, privacy, and equality; and will ensure … that those rights are upheld for all people living, working, or seeking services within the City of Sacramento” — s 1(B);
• “No city resources … shall be utilized for detaining persons for seeking or providing gender-affirming care” — s 2(A);
• “No city resources shall be utilized for cooperating with or providing any information to any individual or out-of-state agency regarding the provision of lawful gender-affirming healthcare” — s 2(B).

Reception of the resolution has been mixed. Associate Professor Eric Stanley, the Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Los Angeles Times (Deng, 2024) that the resolution is “more or less a political stunt,” noting that while it is very effective in signalling trans allyship on the part of the City Council, it contains no substantial provisions actually addressing the basic needs of trans people, an economically marginalised group, in California, one of the most expensive states in the country. Other than Stanley, the resolution was:

• endorsed by the Sacramento branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (Sacramento Democratic Socialists of America, 2024), with which Councilmember Valenzuela is affiliated;
• opposed by Moms for Liberty, a right-wing group with a consistent presence in anti-trans activism (“City Council unanimously declares Sacramento,” 2024).

Colorado

Title Board to decide whether fascists bound by law or just protected

On 3 April, the Colorado Title Board will hold a rehearing on Initiative 2023–2024 #175, unofficially designated “Prohibit Certain Medical Procedures for Minors” by legislative staff. If adopted, Initiative 2023–2024 #175 will ban gender-affirming care for trans people under 18 in Colorado. The Board approved the initiative on 6 March, but LGBTQ+ advocacy group One Colorado and other trans advocacy organisations have secured a rehearing on the grounds that the measure appears to violate the single-subject rule, which requires that ballot initiatives concern themselves with a single subject (Irizarry, 2024).

Georgia

HB 1104: Anti-trans “frankenbill” disappointingly fails to kill creators

On 26 March, the Georgia Senate passed HB 1104. In the form passed, HB 1104 bans trans youth from playing on sports teams and using sports facilities that are designated for their correct gender.

The bill has been described as a “frankenbill”; it is a previously innocuous bill onto which Republican Senators suddenly amended anti-trans language which had previously been killed when presented as its own bill (D. Richards, 2024).

Idaho

HB 668: The machine demands blood

On 27 March, Idaho Governor Brad Little (R) signed HB 668 into law. HB 668 prohibits Medicaid and state insurance programs from covering puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or gender-affirming surgical intervention. It will commence in effect 1 July (Maldonado, 2024).

Kansas

SB 233: The machine demands blood (2)

On 27 March, both chambers of the Kansas Legislature passed SB 233, which will ban gender-affirming care for trans people under 18 in Kansas. SB 233 now goes to Governor Laura Kelly (D) for her signature. It may or may not have a veto-proof majority; it was 2 votes short in the House due to absences, but both absent Representatives were Republicans who had previously voted in favour of the bill.

New York

CEC 2 Resolution 248: Just asking questions (3)

On 20 March, New York City Public Schools’ Community Education Council District 2 (“CEC 2”, or “CEC D2”) passed Resolution 248, “[…] calling for a comprehensive review and redrafting of NYCPS Guidelines on Gender with regard to the application and impact on female athletes participating in physical education, intramural and competitive Public School Athletic League (PSAL) sports”. The resolution’s lead sponsor was Maud Maron, a collaborator of Moms for Liberty (Elsen-Rooney & Zimmer, 2024), who has previously expressed the view that trans kids don’t exist (McMurdock, 2024).

Reaction to the resolution has been consistently chilly:

• David Banks, Chancellor of New York City Schools, said the resolution is based on “unfounded and misleading” information, and described it as “excluding our trans students” (Russo, 2024);
• the New York City Council’s LGBTQIA+ Caucus released a furious statement through its chair, Rita Joseph, expressing that the Caucus was “enraged and appalled” by the “disgraceful” resolution (Bottcher, 2024);
• State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal (D–SD47) said “The anti-transgender resolution passed by CEC 2 … will not stand” (Hoylman-Sigal, 2024);
• City Journal — the organ of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a right-wing think tank which has consistently advocated in opposition to trans rights — ran an article by Maron (2024), defending and promoting the resolution.

Ohio

Moe v Yost: Moe and Goe tell Ohio “no”

On 26 March, in the state Court of Common Pleas for Franklin County, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio filed suit against Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) and other Ohio state officers to bar implementation of HB 68, on behalf of two pseudonymous plaintiffs, “Madeline Moe” and “Grace Goe”. HB 68, which will take effect on 24 April unless stayed, will:

• ban trans people under 18 from accessing gender-affirming care;
• ban trans girls from competing on correctly-gendered school sports teams (Migdon, 2024a).

Moe and Goe are two trans girls, both 12 years old, who are both currently receiving medical transition care and will be forcibly medically detransitioned if HB 68’s health care ban provisions are allowed to commence.

The plaintiffs, through counsel, contend that HB 68 violates four provisions of the Constitution of the State of Ohio:

• art I,
  • § 2, the state Equal Protection Clause;
  • § 16, the Due Course of Law provision, which provides that “every person, for an injury done him … shall have remedy by due course of law”;
  • § 21, which establishes that no authority may “prohibit the purchase or sale of Health Care or health insurance in the state of Ohio”;
• art II § 15(D), the single-subject rule.

Plaintiffs are seeking:

• a declaration by the Court that HB 68, both as a whole, and to the extent that it unconstitutionally restrains plaintiffs’ rights to healthcare, is void and without legal effect;
• injunctions restraining the Attorney General and the State Medical Board of Ohio from enforcing HB 68 or disciplining violations thereof;
• costs, expenses, and reasonable attorneys’ fees.

Texas

Doe and PFLAG: Court delivers third W in Texas history

On 29 March, at Austin, the Texas Court of Appeals, Third District, issued orders in Abbott v Doe and Muth v PFLAG affirming temporary injunctions issued by the 201st and 459th District Courts in Doe v Abbott and PFLAG v Abbott respectively.

According to OutSmart magazine of Houston, “[u]nder the upheld injunctions, [the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services] is prohibited from initiating investigations or taking any further actions against families solely based on allegations of providing gender-affirming care to their adolescents” (“Texas court upholds injunctions,” 2024).

Wisconsin

Doe v Elkhorn Area School District: The restroom gazes also into you

On 21 March, in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Wardenski PC, a New York-based civil rights law firm, filed suit on behalf of a pseudonymous plaintiff, “Jane Doe,” against the Elkhorn Area School District and two of its officers.

Doe, a 13-year-old trans girl who is a seventh-grade student at Elkhorn Area Middle School, alleges that when she came out in November 2022, the District compelled her to use faculty restrooms in lieu of allowing her to use the correct student facilities and locker rooms for her gender, singling her out for unwanted attention and forcing her to miss class time. Doe asserts that this conduct is unlawful and that defendants have known it to be so since no later than 2017. Doe contends that defendants’ actions have caused her “emotional distress, embarrassment, social isolation, stigma, and heightened symptoms of gender dysphoria,” and that they amount to unlawful restraint of her rights under:

• Title IX, which prohibits federally funded education programs from discriminating on the basis of sex;
• the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Footnotes

1 — Formally, the Australian eSafety Commissioner is a single natural person, currently Julie Inman Grant. However, the Commissioner’s powers can be exercised by a delegate, as they were in this case; when the powers are exercised as such they are still exercised by the Commissioner, even though they are exercised by a different person. In an attempt to represent this as simply and as accurately as possible, the notice is referred to in the body of this piece simply as having been served “by the Commissioner,” without reference to a personal name.

2 — Literally, And the Law in All This?. However, the phrase is a snowclone, “Et le foo dans tout ça ?”, for which the customary English equivalent seems to be “What’s foo got to do with it?” — for instance, the 2022 English-language Netflix original What’s Love Got to Do With It? was released in Francophone countries as Et l’amour dans tout ça ?. Therefore, a more idiomatic translation of the title of Sarton’s show might be, appropriately enough, What’s the Law Got to Do With It?

3 — I was unfortunately unable to locate a copy of the Act in either English or Thai.

4 — In isolation, Burke’s response to the relevant questions simply says he “believe[s] it would be inappropriate to opine,” which might appear unobjectionable on its face. However, when asked other questions of case law which he is clearly affirming under duress, Burke uses a different response, of the form “I acknowledge that a higher court has decided this question; the precedent thus set would bind me, therefore I would rule accordingly”. On questions of treatment of LGBTQ+ people, by contrast, he refuses to provide a substantial answer at all.

5 — For SP Weekly, I generally prioritise stories based on the minimum absolute number of trans readers I think they will affect. To that end, while I cover government actions, such as legislation, as well as litigation that might establish binding precedent, I try to stay away from corporate affairs. Smith & Jones Widgets Pty Ltd might have just been rated a Platinum Employer on ACON’s Australian Workplace Equality Index but I doubt my readers are going to care enough to justify me putting in the energy to cover it.

However, The Walt Disney Company is a special case. Since 1967, Disney has governed a small territory in Florida as a de facto autonomous county, overlapping the de jure Orange and Osceola Counties. The Disney territory’s previous incarnation, the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID), had significantly more autonomy, but was abolished at the behest of Governor Ron DeSantis (R) through a legislative and judicial process which began with the passage of HB 9B of 2023. However, Disney still retains administrative responsibility for and power over the successor Central Florida Tourism Oversight District (CFTOD), comparable to the power exercised by British or Australian local governments.

Consequently, for SP Weekly purposes, I treat The Walt Disney Company as a subnational government in the United States, and consider that the business of deliberative assemblies which are constituent parts of Disney or are convened on its authorities is legislative business and within scope. As Disney’s corporate operations extend throughout the United States and worldwide, the section in which news relating to Disney will be included is determined case-by-case depending on the area of relevance of the news in question.

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Smith, K. [@KirralieS] (2024c, March 27). Flying Bats began as a lesbian club for same-sex attracted females. Now they give spots to a 3rd of their … [Tweet]. Twitter (X Corp.). Retrieved 28 March 2024.

Smith, K. (2024d, March 28). The Flying Bats fielded up to 5 males to win the $1000 Beryl Ackroyd Cup. Binary Australia (Gender Awareness Australia Ltd). Retrieved 28 March 2024.

Stone, G. (2022a, May 24). UK Government debates non-binary legal recognition, sort of. Trans Writes. Retrieved 1 April 2024.

Stone, G. (2022b, June 17). Nick Fletcher MP sends transphobic rant to schools. Trans Writes. Retrieved 1 April 2024.

Suddath, C. (2022, April 28). How one rogue exec thrust Levi’s into the culture wars. Bloomberg Businessweek (Bloomberg, L.P.). Retrieved 30 March 2024.

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Vianès, M. (2023, January 23). Dans l’arsenal législatif français les principes de Jogjakarta sont déjà là ! Les combats des femmes contre les obscurantismes [In the French legislative arsenal, the Yogyakarta Principles are already there!: The battle of women against obscurantism]. Observatoire des idéologies identitaires (Laboratoire d’Analyse des Idéologies Contemporaines). Retrieved 31 March 2024.

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Walker, J. (2024, March 26). California capital may become transgender ‘sanctuary’ city. KATV (Sinclair, Inc.). Retrieved 26 March 2024.

Walker v Marshall (MD Ala, Case No 5:2022cv00480, commenced 11 April 2022).

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Zijlstra, A. [anca.zijlstra] (2024, March 24). Met pijn in mijn hart… Het moment wanneer je je schaamt omvoor het Nederlands Team uit te komen, omdat … [Post]. Facebook (Meta Platforms, Inc.). Retrieved 26 March 2024.

Wash Admin Code § 110-148-1520 (2024).

Correction, 27 February 2024: This article has been updated to reflect information from Yurcaba (2024) about Nex Benedict’s pronouns.

For this week we are trying a new index format:

1. Ruuska et al.: Trans kids probably lying
2. CPAC 2024: Same as CPAC 2023, but 2024
3. Asseler et al.: T is not birth control
4. Warner Bros. Discovery: Potter grinding inexorably forward
5. Australia: Sky News: Transgenderism is forcefemming the ADF
6. Australia, NSW: Orange Christians take on Rainbow Festival
7. Australia, WA: Government buys our loyalty; Quigley calls it quits
8. Canada: Poilievre stages least surprising coming out in history
9. India, Tamil Nadu: Thennarasu announces free money, less-free money
10. UK, England: Pool-itical correctness gone mad
11. UK, England: Resolution pondered as TERF war escalates
12. US: Labrador v. Poe: Emergency motion pending
13. US: B.E. v. Vigo C’y School Corp.: Our long nationalist nightmare is over?
14. US, California: M. v. Komrosky: Preliminary injunction denied
15. US, Colorado: HB 24-1039, -1071, -1170: Small wins for Big Trans
16. US, Florida: HB 1639: Florida GOP determined to make us pay
17. US, Mississippi: HB 585: Prisoner transvestigation bill advances
18. US, Montana: Montana HHS: All this has happened before …
19. US, New Hampshire: HB 1664: Lying in wait
20. US, New Jersey: Old Bridge school board revokes trans protections
21. US, New York: Cecilia Gentili’s funeral and its consequences
22. US, Iowa: Linn-Mar decides it easier just to pay PDE to go away
23. US, Oklahoma: 16-year-old murdered, everyone pretending otherwise
24. US, Tennessee: HB 878: Because one Kim Davis wasn’t enough
25. US, Texas: Fox v. Austin: Try posting through it
26. US, Texas: Lakewood Church shooting: Fascist bullshit intensifies
27. US, Texas: San Antonio college transphobe reinstated
28. US, Utah: Natalie Cline incapable of taking a break
29. US, West Virginia: HB 5297: Suicidal trans kids? Let them die
30. US, Wyoming: SF 98 and 99: There is no kill like overkill
31. SP Press: Change of hosting
32. SP Press: Feedback: Where are the pictures?

Footnotes; references. A glossary is also available.

---

International

Ruuska et al.: Trans kids probably lying

On 17 February, BMJ Mental Health published a paper by a Finnish research group, “All-cause and suicide mortalities among adolescents and young adults who contacted specialised gender identity services in Finland in 1996–2019: a register study,” by Sami-Matti Ruuska et al. (2024). Right-wing media (Arain, 2024; Harrington, 2024; Lane, 2024; Smith, 2024) have published a flood of laudatory coverage about the study, claiming that it shows that trans kids aren’t actually at a higher risk of suicide if they’re denied gender-affirming medical care and that psychotherapy is enough. Under the circumstances it seems material that the fourth-credited author (who I suspect is probably the lead author in all but name) is Riittakerttu Kaltiala-Heino, a well-established anti-trans disinformation operator linked to the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) (Jones, 2022; James, 2023; Reed, 2023).

I’m hoping for someone less sleep-deprived than me to publish an actual critique of the methodology; at a quick skim, it looks like it might literally boil down to “the trannies are less suicidal if you control for suicidality”.

Some right-wing media reporting the story are also using it to attempt to resurrect the zombie claim that Dhejne et al. (2011) shows that medical transition is ineffective in relieving suicidality in adults, or that it actively increases it. This claim has been exhaustively debunked, including directly by that study’s PI, Cecilia Dhejne (Williams, n.d.).

CPAC 2024: Same as CPAC 2023, but 2024

From 21 through 24 February, in National Harbor, Maryland, United States, the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC 2024) took place. While this is a US-based event focused primarily on US politics, attendance was international and CPAC US has affiliates abroad, such as CPAC Australia, for which it is essentially the ideological lodestar, hence its inclusion in this section. Notable speakers at CPAC 2024 from the point of view of this publication include:

• Kari Lake, currently a candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination for United States senator from Arizona and a transphobic opportunist (Kaczynski & Steck, 2022);
• Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas, in the news recently for pursuing Texan trans kids across state lines (Rubin, 2024);
• Donald Trump, former President of the United States and current frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, who has vowed to stamp out “transgender insanity,” among other things, if reelected (Pollard, 2024);
• Liz Truss, British MP (CUP—South West Norfolk, England), former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and outspoken transphobe (Factora, 2021);
• Tommy Tuberville, Republican Senator from Alabama and advocate of banning trans women from women’s sports (Kane, 2024).

Asseler et al. (2024): T is not birth control

On 22 February, Cell Reports Medicine published a report, “One-third of amenorrhoeic transmasculine people on testosterone ovulate,” by Joyce D. Asseler et al. (2024). If someone is ovulating that means they can theoretically get pregnant. Testosterone causes amenorrhoea (lack of periods), and it’s often assumed that amenorrhoea means anovulation (lack of ovulation). However, Asseler et al. found that of a sample of 52 people who’d undergone gender-affirming oophorectomy (removal of the ovaries), in 17 participants the ovarian tissue “show[ed] signs of recent ovulation”. In the study’s press release (Amsterdam University Medical Center, 2024), Asseler said “we cannot explain this difference by the type of testosterone, or how long someone has been taking testosterone”.

Warner Bros. Discovery: Potter grinding inexorably forward

On 23 February, during that day’s Warner Bros. Discovery earnings call, chief executive officer David Zaslav confirmed the target air date for HBO Max’s planned Harry Potter TV series¹ and reaffirmed previous remarks indicating creator Joanne Rowling is playing an active role in the production (Spangler, 2024). After the Hogwarts Legacy debacle I feel compelled to note that Rowling’s involvement has nothing to do with whether she’s getting paid; she was getting paid either way.

Australia

Federal

Sky News Australia: Transgenderism is forcefemming the ADF

On 18 February, in an appearance on Sky News Australia’s The Jury (De Giorgio, 2024), Lincoln Parker, the Liberal Party of Australia’s chair for defence and national security policy, suggested the Australian Defence Force (ADF) should stop paying for trans personnel’s healthcare, saying, “I don’t think that China is paying for gender reassignment surgery … I’m just not really quite sure that fits into the overarching objective of what the military should be”. He also suggested the ADF should pull out of LGBTQ+ health promotion charity ACON’s Workplace Equality Index (De Giorgio, op. cit.; Watson, 2024).

New South Wales

Orange Christians take on Rainbow Festival (bit unfair; 7 vs. 1?)

The Orange Christian Alliance (“OCA”), a small Christian dominionist group based in Orange, is lobbying the City of Orange to withdraw its support for the Orange Rainbow Festival.

In an interview with The Orange News Examiner (Holmes, 2024), OCA spokesperson Kris Dhillon — herself a long-time activist with the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) — said the group opposes “transgender ideology” because it is “an affront to the Creator God” and “an extremely harmful ideology for those who are enticed into its tentacles”.

While Dhillon says adults transitioning is “not an issue for” OCA, she alleges an “ideological move that accelerated about a decade ago … that when a child or a young teen presents with mental health issues and social issues they are diagnosed … with gender dysphoria”. The News Examiner also provides some examples of correspondence between OCA and local politicians, which I would characterise as standard conspiracy fare leaning heavily on the “irreversible damage” and “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” stock tropes, and which apparently quote LGB Alliance favourably. I would recommend reading the whole interview; for me, it was a spiritual experience.

The Orange Rainbow Festival will run from 22 through 24 March 2024.

Western Australia

Government buys our loyalty; Quigley calls it quits

On 23 February, the Government of Western Australia (2024) issued a press release indicating it was allocating $900,000 to develop and implement an LGBTQIA+ inclusion strategy. It announced that funding “to support the development and implementation of the strategy” would be provided to Living Proud, TransFolk of WA, and GLBTI Rights in Ageing, Inc. While this is, I assume, welcome news, my impression is that, due to a broader sense of betrayal by and disappointment with the Government, it is not being received with the unqualified joy it might otherwise have been.

The legal treatment of trans people in Western Australia is extraordinarily conservative even by Australian standards. The core of the state’s legal gender recognition regime is the Gender Reassignment Act 2000 (“GRA“). The GRA provides for the Gender Reassignment Board of Western Australia, which issues Gender Recognition Certificates (GRCs). A GRC is a prerequisite for recognition as trans for purposes of Western Australian state law, including for the purposes of the Equal Opportunity Act 1984, the state’s primary body of protections against anti-trans discrimination. Since GRCs require medical transition and recognise transition to “the opposite sex” (GRA s 3) nonbinary people and people not seeking medical transition cannot receive GRCs under the GRA as written and therefore are not protected from discrimination by the Equal Opportunity Act.

Western Australia also does not have a law banning conversion practices (Equality Australia, 2024; Fiore, 2024), and it is understood that if the present Government were to introduce a bill for such a law, it would not provide for civil prosecutions of conversion practitioners, rendering it effectively useless (“Attorney-General John Quigley calls time,” 2024). Additionally, Western Australia does not have laws against anti-trans vilification (Kelly, 2023; Equality Australia, op. cit.).

The state attorney-general, John Quigley MLA (ALP–Butler), this week announced he would retire from politics at the election of 8 March 2025. Since his appointment as Attorney-General in 2017, and especially since the Final Report of the Review of the Equal Opportunity Act (Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, 2022), Quigley had undertaken to remedy some of the above problems (WA Equal Opportunity Commission, 2022). He has so far done somewhere between “very little” and “nothing at all”. On the news of Quigley’s retirement, Just.Equal Australia spokesperson Brian Greig OAM urged him to either begin to act decisively, or step aside so someone else could actually do the job (“Attorney-General John Quigley calls time,” op. cit.).

Canada

Federal

Poilievre stages least surprising coming out in history

Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre MP (CPC—Carleton, ON) has now officially come out in support for the sweeping anti-trans provincial policy package introduced by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith MLA (UCP—Brooks–Medicine Hat), and for broader sanctions on trans people, particularly trans women, in general (Poilievre, 2024; The Canadian Press, 2024).

India

Tamil Nadu

Thennarasu announces free money, less-free money

On 18 February, Thangam Thennarasu MLA (DMK—Tiruchuli), Tamil Nadu state Minister for Finance and Human Resources Management, announced in his 2024–2025 Budget speech that the Tamil Nadu Transgender Welfare Board would receive an additional allocation of ₹20 million which would be used to fully cover higher education expenses for trans students.

Thennarasu also announced that the Government of Tamil Nadu will introduce a scheme to incentivise businesses to hire workers who are disabled, trans, and/or women by providing any industrial unit employing over 500 Tamil Nadu residents who fall into those categories with a subsidy of 10% of each worker’s salary for a period of 2 years (Sivapriyan, 2024).

United Kingdom

England

Pool-itical correctness gone mad

On 16 February this year, the English Blackball Pool Federation (EBPF) announced it was being sued by Harriet Haynes, a pool player who is a trans woman. On 3 December last year, new EBPF policies took effect which replace its Ladies’ and Men’s Tours with a Female Tour (for people assigned female at birth) and an Open Tour (for people assigned male at birth). EBPF asserts that they “believe that people who have gone through [testosterone] puberty have a competitive advantage over [cis women]”.

Haynes alleges the new eligibility rules constitute unlawful discrimination on the ground of gender reassignment under the Equality Act 2010 s 19. EBPF, relying on s 19(2)(d) of the Act, asserts that the rules are “necessary to secure fair competition and a justified means of promoting female participation in the game,” and that Haynes was “in any event” “ineligible for the Female Tour … as a result of having turned professional” (Pinches, 2024).

Resolution pond-ered as TERF war escalates

On 3 March, at its Annual General Meeting (AGM), the Kenwood Ladies Pond Association (KLPA), which represents users of Kenwood Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath, may consider a resolution to amend its constitution to “ban” trans women from using the pond. The quotation marks are because, although right-wing media — for instance Corless (2024), the main source for this story — have striven to imply otherwise, the KLPA does not actually have the authority to ban trans women from using the pond; instead, the constitutional amendment, if adopted, will bind the KLPA to “seek to influence” the facility’s manager, the City of London Corporation, to impose such a ban.

The reason the AGM “may” consider the resolution is because the KLPA’s Management Committee has advised that “the amendment may be removed from consideration at the AGM,” as it has said that it “is in receipt of legal opinion that the proposal is likely to be unlawful” (Corless, op. cit.).

United States

Federal

Labrador v. Poe: Emergency motion pending

On 16 February, in the Supreme Court of the United States, Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador (R), with the assistance of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a fascist legal advocacy group, filed an emergency motion asking the Court to lift the injunction blocking Idaho’s Vulnerable Child Protection Act, HB 71 of 2023, from going into effect. The injunction on HB 71, which bans gender-affirming care for under-18s in Idaho, was issued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho in December 2023 (Guido, 2024a). Labrador’s motion follows a previous unsuccessful request to the District Court and an appeal to the Ninth Circuit (Guido, 2024b).

B.E. v. Vigo County School Corporation: Our long nationalist nightmare is over?

On 22 February, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, plaintiffs’ and respondents’ attorneys in B.E. v. Vigo County School Corporation filed a request for a settlement conference. The plaintiffs are two transmasc students at Terre Haute North Vigo High School who allege they were illegally denied the use of correctly gendered school bathrooms and locker rooms, in violation of Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution of the United States (“VCSC transgender lawsuit,” 2024).

California

M. v. Komrosky: Preliminary injunction denied

On 23 February, in the Superior Court of California, County of Riverside, in the case of M. v. Komrosky, Judge Eric Keen denied a motion for a preliminary injunction blocking several policies adopted by Temecula Valley Unified School District, including one requiring district officials to notify parents if their child comes out as trans (Horseman, 2024).

Colorado

HB 24-1039, -1071, -1170: Small victories for Big Trans

On 23 February 2024, in the Colorado House of Representatives, 3 bills passed second reading, meaning they have been agreed to in principle (Richard, 2024):

• HB 24-1039, which, if adopted, will require schools to use a student’s preferred name if the student requests it, even if they haven’t legally changed their name;
• HB 24-1071, which, if adopted, will make it easier for convicted felons who are trans to change their names to suit their gender identity.
• HB 24–1170, which, if adopted, will establish certain rights for trans youth in juvenile detention, for instance the right to use their preferred name and gender and to have access to showers and bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.

Florida

HB 1639: Florida GOP determined to make us pay

On 22 February, the Infrastructure Strategies Committee of the Florida House of Representatives referred HB 1639 back to the House with a favourable recommendation. If passed, HB 1639 will require, with effect 1 July this year, that (Walker, 2024):

• a person’s driving license must list their assigned sex at birth;
• insurance companies must cover conversion therapy.

Montana

All this has happened before …

On 20 February, the Montana Department of Health and Human Services announced it would reinstate an administrative rule preventing trans Montanans from changing the gender on their birth certificates. The American Civil Liberties Union of Montana has already indicated it will sue (Silver, 2024).

Mississippi

HB 585: Prisoner transvestigation bill advances

On 24 February, the Corrections Committee of the Mississippi House of Representatives referred HB 585, the Dignity and Safety for Incarcerated Women Act, back to the full House. HB 585 — drafted at least in part by Alliance Defending Freedom, according to its sponsor Rep. Gene Newman (R—HD61) — would require inmate restrooms, changing rooms, and sleeping quarters in correction facilities to be designated for use only by members of a specific sex assigned at birth, and establishes a civil cause of action for inmates who encounter someone of a different assigned sex in any of those areas. How this will be determined is unclear (Goldberg, 2024).

New Hampshire

HB 1664: Lying in (20 years of) wait

On 21 February, the Judiciary Committee of the New Hampshire House of Representatives heard HB 1664, which would amend New Hampshire medical malpractice law to allow people who underwent “gender transition surgery, administration of puberty blocking drugs, and/or the administration of cross-sex hormones” while under the age of 21 to sue for “injury” resulting therefrom for up to 20 years after the fact (Freedman, 2024).

New Jersey

Old Bridge school board revokes trans protections

On 20 February, the Old Bridge Board of Education, in Middlesex County, voted 5–4 to rescind Policy 5756 (Flanagan, 2024), a policy adopted by the previous Board which protected trans students by establishing that staff members were not required to notify parents or guardians of changes in their children’s gender identity or expression, and by allowing trans students to participate in gendered activities with their correct gender and to use correctly gendered school facilities (Gross, 2023). The Board rescinded the policy despite one board member noting that of public comments received by the Board, comments favouring retention of Policy 5756 outnumbered comments favouring rescission by a margin of 2.7:1 (Flanagan, 2024).

New York

Cecilia Gentili’s funeral and its consequences

On 6 February, Cecilia Gentili, 52, trans liberationist and sex workers’ rights activist died of causes that have not as yet been publicly released (Asher, 2024). On 8 February, memorial services were held for Gentili at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan. When cathedral staff realised who she was, they cut the service short by an hour, claiming “irreveren[t] … disrespect[ful]” behaviour by mourners (Hannon & Millman, 2024).

On 17 February, Rev. Enrique Salvo (2024), the cathedral’s pastor, issued a statement claiming the Archdiocese of New York had been deceived, and announcing that the clergy had offered a Mass of Reparation. On 20 February, on a podcast distributed by the Archdiocese’s digital platform The Good Newsroom, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, said he supported the cathedral’s response (Dwyer, 2024).

On the same date, CatholicVote, a Catholic political NGO, sent a letter to Letitia James, New York State Attorney General, demanding she investigate the funeral as a hate crime (Burch, 2024). His legal argument is that the fact that the organisers weren’t fully upfront qualifies the funeral as criminal trespass per People v. Segal, which means it can be prosecuted as a hate crime under the New York Hate Crimes Act. This legal argument seems novel but I am not a lawyer, much less licensed to practice in the State of New York, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Gays and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society, the organisation which arranged the funeral service, assert they “advised cathedral staff to look up Cecilia Gentili, her work, and the community she served”. They also assert St Patrick’s Cathedral violated the 1983 Code of Canon Law — I am guessing can 1181 — by forcing the service to be conducted without a Mass (Hathaway, 2024). Again, this seems like bullshit — Gentili lived a full, decent, worthwhile life so would probably be disqualified under cann 1184(1)(1) and 1184(1)(3) — but IANACL,² and anyway I like Gentili’s people more so they get a pass.

Bruce Blakeman saves women’s sports (eye roll, wanking motion)

On 22 February, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman (R) issued an order banning women’s sports teams and leagues from using any of Nassau County’s ballfields and athletic facilities, numbering 100 or so, unless they affirm in writing that trans athletes are not competing. The order also bans trans women from women’s locker rooms (Ingle, 2024). From context, the effect of the order appears to be specific to trans women athletes; trans men are not similarly constrained from competing on men’s teams, and the order establishes a process by which they may be permitted to do so (Fahy, 2024).

In a press release, Letitia James, New York State Attorney General, said the order was “transphobic and deeply dangerous” and that “we are reviewing our legal options” (Office of the New York State Attorney General, 2024). The Gender Equality Law Center (Williams & Anderson, 2024), LGBT Network (Ingram, 2024), and the New York Civil Liberties Union³ (Campanile & Sheehan, 2024), have all gone further by explicitly describing the order as illegal. Bobby Hodgson, Director of LGBTQ+ rights litigation at the NYCLU, specifically asserted the executive order contravenes the New York Civil Rights Law and the New York Human Rights Law (Barmash, 2024), and said the NYCLU was reviewing its legal options (Ingram, 2024; New York Civil Liberties Union, 2024).

Caveat: At date, 26 February 00:19 AEST (25 February 14:19 UTC), I still haven’t been able to read the order itself because the Nassau County Executive website is unresponsive. Judging by the way all of my sources are hedging about specifics I have a feeling I’m not the only one with this issue.

Iowa

Linn-Mar decides it easier to just pay PDE to go away

On 20 February, Linn-Mar Community School District announced it would pay $20,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Parents Defending Education (PDE), a fascist legal advocacy group, over a district policy supporting trans kids. Policy 504.13-R, Administrative regulations regarding transgender students nonconforming to gender role stereotypes, adopted 25 April 2022 and rescinded in March 2023, allowed trans kids to start socially transitioning at school whether or not their parents approved (King, 2024).

Oklahoma

16-year-old child murdered, everyone pretending otherwise

On 7 February, Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old student at Owasso High School, Tulsa County, was physically assaulted by three cis girls in a bathroom, sustaining head injuries (Ayer et al., 2024), bruises and scratches (Algar, 2024). The attack came amidst an ongoing campaign of bullying targeting Benedict over his gender (Talt, 2024).

Owasso HS staff did not call police or an ambulance, claiming Benedict had been medically cleared by a registered nurse (Owasso Public Schools, 2024), even though since-released surveillance footage (Drennen, 2024) makes it extremely obvious that he was displaying cardinal signs of a concussion. Benedict ultimately only received treatment at Bailey Medical Center when his grandmother Sue took him there there. The next day, 8 February, Benedict abruptly stopped breathing and lost consciousness; he was pronounced dead that evening.

The specific pretext for the attack is unclear; it may have been sparked by Oklahoma’s anti-trans bathroom law (Hurley, 2024a), 70 Okla Stat § 1-125, with which Benedict was complying at the time of the attack (Rajkumar, 2024). The attack took place in a broader context of anti-trans forces being allowed to act with increasing impunity in Oklahoma; a teacher to whom Benedict looked up, Tyler Wrynn, was forced to resign after being targeted by fascist influencer Chaya Raichik (a/k/a Libs of TikTok) over a video in which he told students, “If your parents don’t accept you for who you are, fuck ’em.” In January this year, Oklahoma Public Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters (R) appointed Raichik to the Oklahoma Library Media Advisory Committee (Carless, 2024; Hurley, 2024a).

The Tulsa County District Attorney’s office has not filed charges at date, pending the results of an investigation by Owasso Police Department (“Owasso PD”). Owasso PD, for their part, are claiming the autopsy results indicated that Benedict “did not die as a result of trauma” (Owasso Police Department, 2024). They also say they have not yet received toxicology and “other ancillary testing” results; they also say that the official autopsy report will be released “at a later date” (Alfonseca, 2024). Benedict’s family have announced they will conduct their own independent investigation (Hurley, 2024b). The New York Times reports that Owasso HS students have said that — aside from informing students that counselling is available (Owasso Public Schools, op. cit.) — staff have taken no meaningful action to address the issue (Goodman & Sandoval, 2024).

On 21 February, Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a liberal LGBTQ+ advocacy group, requested in a letter to Merrick Garland, U.S. Attorney General, that the Department of Justice initiated a federal investigation into Benedict’s death (Robinson, 2024). That request has since been echoed by U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres (D–NY-15) (Torres, 2024).

Tennessee

HB 878: Because one Kim Davis wasn’t enough

On 21 February, Governor Bill Lee (R) signed HB 878 into law. HB 878 provides that “A person shall not be required to solemnize a marriage if the person has an objection to solemnizing the marriage based on the person’s conscience or religious beliefs”. HB 878 does not permit officials to deny marriage licenses (Sforza, 2024); however, a marriage license only allows the recipient to marry. Solemnisation is the process by which the marriage becomes legally official and binding.

There are, to my knowledge, no restrictions on which reasons of conscience constitute sufficient grounds to refuse to solemnise a marriage. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Monty Fritts (R–HD32), has claimed that the bill is intended to combat “young folks … trying to marry older folks to get to their financial accounts” (Migdon, 2024). Notwithstanding the impressive chutzpah required to try that one on, LGBTQ+ advocacy groups including Lambda Legal and the Tennessee Equality Project have identified the bill as primarily targeting queer couples; however, I am inclined to agree with commentators who say that interracial and interfaith couples are likely to be primary targets as well (Faqiri, 2024; Salerno, 2024).

The fact that refusing to solemnise an interracial or queer marriage would — as I understand it — immediately provoke an as-applied challenge to the constitutionality of the statute based on Loving v. Virginia or Obergefell v. Hodges respectively may or may not matter; Obergefell depends heavily on Loving, and both are in the category of substantive due process precedents which at least one justice overtly, and probably more covertly, has had their eye on since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case which overturned Roe v. Wade.

Texas

Fox v. City of Austin: Try posting through it

On 20 February, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Austin Division, in the case of Fox v. City of Austin, Alliance Defending Freedom filed a motion for summary judgement on behalf of plaintiff Dr Andrew Fox. On 9 December 2023, Fox was dismissed in his role as Austin Fire Department chaplain after a series of blog posts which his colleagues characterised as “male chauvinis[t], racis[t], and transphobi[c]” (Abrams, 2024).

Lakewood Church shooting: Right-wing bullshit intensifies

SP Weekly #3 covered an extensive operation aimed at pretending the Lakewood Church shooter was trans. The case is now being used by a number of fascist activists to pretend there is a growing trend of violence by trans and nonbinary people (Mahlburg, 2024; Trump, 2024). As USA Today notes, this is unequivocally not the case (Settles, 2024).

San Antonio college transphobe reinstated

On 20 February, First Liberty Institute (2024), a fascist legal advocacy group, announced that a plaintiff they represented, Johnson Varkey, had been reinstated as an adjunct professor at St. Philip’s College in San Antonio. Varkey had been dismissed from the College in January 2023 (“Biology professor fired,” 2023) for “religious preaching, discriminatory comments about homosexuals and transgender individuals, anti-abortion rhetoric, and misogynistic banter” (Dawson, 2023). In July of that year he had filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging unlawful discrimination under Title VII and the Texas Commission on Human Rights Act. His reinstatement appears to be part of the Alamo College District’s settlement of that complaint.

Utah

Natalie Cline incapable of taking a break

On 19 February, Utah State Board of Education Member Natalie Cline (R–District 11) — who, as reported in SP Weekly #2 and #3, was censured by her colleagues and the State of Utah was censured for transvestigating a teenage cis girl — announced she would stand for re-election. The announcement also functioned as a response to the Board’s demand that she resign by that date; the Board currently does not have the power to expel her (Schoenbaum, 2024).

West Virginia

HB 5297: Suicidal trans kids? Let ’em die

On 23 February, the Health and Human Resources Committee of the West Virginia House of Delegates took up HB 5297. West Virginia imposed a ban on gender-affirming care for people under 18 last year, with an exemption for those at risk of harming or killing themselves. HB 5297 removes that exemption. Del. Amy Summers (R–HD49), the Committee chair, scheduled deliberation on the bill specifically so as to prevent a public hearing (Culvyhouse, 2023).

Wyoming

SF 98 and 99: There is no kill like overkill

On 21 February, the Labor, Health and Social Services Committee of the Wyoming Senate held hearings on:

• Senate File (SF) 98, which would extend the statute of limitations for causes of action relating to youth gender-affirming care, allowing recipients of such care to sue their practitioners until their 21st birthday — in contrast to Wyoming malpractice law in general, which requires a malpractice lawsuit to be filed within 2 years of the injury (Beaudet, 2024);
• SF 99, Chloe’s Law, named for Chloe Cole, an ideologically motivated detransitioned activist, which would ban gender-affirming care in Wyoming for people under 18 (Wolfson, 2024).

Several Problems Press

Change of hosting

On 24 February, I migrated Several Problems Press to a new hosting provider. Previously SP Press was on a paid WordPress.com plan, meaning my hosting provider was Automattic, Inc., which operates WordPress.com and tumblr. Anecdotally, over the years, tumblr moderation has displayed an intensifying pattern of transmisogyny, overpolicing and wrongly penalising transmisogyny-affected (TMA) people, such as trans women and other transfeminine people, for content which is objectively compliant with tumblr’s terms of service (TOS), while refusing to action complaints from TMA people even when doing so is clearly warranted.

In the past week or so, in reaction to someone sending him a Tumblr ask about this (Mullenweg, 2024a), Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s chief executive officer (CEO), has engaged in what I can only describe as a spree of transmisogynistic stalking and harassment, including grossly violating data protection law by posting the usernames of all the alts of the trans woman whose suspension he was being asked about (Mullenweg, 2024b), and by pretending to believe that the following post by her was a legitimate threat to his life which justified reporting her to the FBI (Mullenweg, 2024a):

Unlike, for example, Twitter, where the reactionary failson CEO who runs the platform as a dictator is also the sole owner, Automattic is a public company, so it is in theory possible that Matt could be forced to pull his head in. However, the subsequent statement released by tumblr staff (2024) has not filled me with confidence; it reads like pushing out Automattic’s queer and trans staff in front of the enraged crowd as meatshields and forcing them to release a statement which makes a big show of performatively disowning Matt while committing to fixing precisely none of the systematic issues which have been highlighted by his conduct.

Under the circumstances, I feel that remaining a paying customer of Automattic is being a turkey paying for Christmas. Because SP Press also has a policy of allowing pseudonymous contributions, the fact that Matt’s malicious disregard for data protection law did not get him immediately extremely fired does not fill me with confidence that I can protect the privacy of my so far majority transfem contributors.

Accordingly, I have moved to a new WordPress.org hosting provider. Since the WordPress CMS is open-source, Automattic is not getting one red cent from me. That said, I get sweaty and nauseous when I see words like “cPanel,” so I don’t know how well the migration worked. Please let me know if you find any issues.

Feedback: Where are the pictures?

I have received feedback suggesting SP Press needs more pictures. I agree. Unfortunately I don’t know how to make that happen without violating copyright: I am a single person who is financially underwater so my image licensing budget is $0. I could use royalty-free stock images but they wouldn’t be relevant to the stories and it would quickly become obvious that I just had pictures to have pictures, which I feel is sort of missing the point of having pictures. Please contact me if you have any ideas.

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If you found this article at all useful, please consider supporting me via Patreon, Ko-fi, or PayPal.

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Footnotes

1 — It’s in the sources but I’m not providing it on SP Press. If Joanne wants advertising she can pay me.

2 — I am not a canon lawyer.

3 — For the avoidance of doubt, the NYCLU is the affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union in the State of New York.

References

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A bill to amend and reenact §30-3-20 of the Code of West Virginia, 1931, as amended (etc.), HB 5297, 2nd Regular Session, 86th West Virginia Legislature (2024).

Alfonseca, K. (2024, February 22). Oklahoma nonbinary student’s death after in-school fight ‘not a result of trauma,’ police say. ABC News (The Walt Disney Company). Retrieved 22 February 2024.

Algar, S. (2024, February 20). Non-binary student, 16, dies after girls ‘beat [their] head across the floor’ in bathroom assault: reports. New York Post (News Corporation); Archive Today. Retrieved 22 February 2024.

Amsterdam University Medical Center (2024, February 22). A third of trans masculine individuals on testosterone ovulate [News release]. EurekAlert! (American Association for the Advancement of Science). Retrieved 23 February 2024.

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An act concerning permitting a name change for a person convicted of a felony to conform with the person’s gender identity, HB 24-1071, 2nd Regular Session, 74th Colorado General Assembly (2024).

An act concerning the establishment of a bill of rights for youth in facilities operated by the Division of Youth Services, HB 24-1170, 2nd Regular Session, 74th Colorado General Assembly (2024).

An act relating to civil procedure; extending the statute of limitation for causes of action for gender transition services performed on minors (etc.), SF 98, 2024 Budget Session, 67th Wyoming State Legislature (2024).

An act relating to gender and biological sex (etc.), HB 1639, 2024 Regular Session, Florida State Legislature (2024).

An act relating to public health and safety; prohibiting physicians from performing procedures for children relating to gender transitioning and gender reassignment (etc.), a/k/a Chloe’s law, SF 99, 2024 Budget Session, 67th Wyoming State Legislature (2024).

An act relative to legal remedies for individuals who receive medical detransitioning, HB 1664, 2024 Regular Session, General Court of New Hampshire (2024).

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Culvyhouse, H. (2024, February 23). West Virginia lawmakers want to stop suicidal trans kids from getting gender-affirming care. Mountain State Spotlight. Retrieved 24 February 2024.

De Giorgio, D. (Host). (2024, February 18). ADF has ‘clearly’ become too woke to fight a war [Video clip]. In The jury. Sky News Australia (News Corp Australia). Retrieved 24 February 2024.

Dhejne, C., Lichtenstein, P., Boman, M., Johansson, A.L.V., Långström, N., & Landén, M. (2011, February 22). Long-term follow-up of transsexual persons undergoing sex reassignment surgery: Cohort study in Sweden. PLOS ONE, 6(2), e16885. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0016885. Retrieved 21 February 2024.

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Faqiri, S. (2024, February 21). Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signs law that allows people to refuse to ‘solemnize’ marriage licenses. CNN US (Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc.). Retrieved 25 February 2024.

Fiore, B. (2024, February 17). Conversion therapy still legal in WA despite promises to ban it, drawing concerns from LGBTQIA+ community. Stateline (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Retrieved 25 February 2024.

First Liberty Institute (2024, February 20). Texas professor wins job back after he was fired for teaching biology [News release]. Retrieved 24 February 2024.

Flanagan, B. (2024, February 21). Transgender policy debate sparks school board ejection. NJ Spotlight News (Public Media NJ, Inc.). Retrieved 22 February 2024.

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Goldberg, M. (2024, February 23). Mississippi might allow incarcerated people to sue prisons over transgender inmates. AP News (Associated Press). Retrieved 23 February 2024.

Goodman, J.D., & Sandoval, E. (2024, February 21). Anti-trans policies draw scrutiny after 16-year-old’s death in Oklahoma. The New York Times (The New York Times Company). Retrieved 22 February 2024.

Government of Western Australia (2024, February 23). New LGBTQIA+ inclusion strategy to promote equality [Media statement]. Retrieved 24 February 2024.

Gibbons, K. (2024, February 18). Transgender women’s milk just as good
for for [sic] babies, says NHS Trust. The Times (News UK); Archive Today. Retrieved 19 February 2024.

Gross, H. (2023, October 31). Transgender students: How controversy over NJ school policy is taking a toll. NJ Spotlight News (Public Media NJ, Inc.). Retrieved 25 February 2024.

Guido, L. (2024a, January 17). Block of Idaho’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors to remain in effect. Idaho Press (Adams Publishing Group, LLC). Retrieved 19 February 2024.

Guido, L. (2024b, February 20). Labrador asks U.S. Supreme Court to allow Idaho to ban transgender care for minors. Idaho Press (Adams Publishing Group, LLC). Retrieved 20 February 2024.

Hannon, B.P.D., & Millman, J. (2024, February 21). Backlash brews after church cuts transgender activist’s funeral at St. Patrick’s short. WNBC (Comcast Corporation). Retrieved 22 February 2024.

Harrington, M. (2024, February 19). New study: Trans youth not at elevated risk of suicide. UnHerd (UnHerd Ltd); Archive Today. Retrieved 19 February 2024.

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Holmes, P. (2024, February 17). Orange Christians lobby councillors to withdraw support for Rainbow Festival, claiming youth “enticed” into transgender tentacles “tentacles”. The Orange News Examiner (Peter Holmes). Retrieved 19 February 2024.

Horseman, J. (2024, February 23). Temecula’s critical race theory ban, transgender policy stand for now, judge rules. The Press-Enterprise (Alden Global Capital). Retrieved 24 February 2024.

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Hurley, B. (2024a, February 21). Oklahoma banned trans students from bathrooms. Now a bullied student is dead after a fight. The Independent (Independent Digital News & Media Ltd). Retrieved 21 February 2024.

Hurley, B. (2024b, February 22). Nex Benedict: Non-binary student who died after Oklahoma bathroom assault was a ‘shining light’. The Independent (Independent Digital News & Media Ltd). Retrieved 23 February 2024.

Ingle, L. (2024, February 22). NY county bans trans athletes in girls’ sports at county facilities. NewsNation (Nexstar Media, Inc.). Retrieved 23 February 2024.

Ingram, M. (2024, February 22). Nassau County bans transgender women from competing on women’s teams. WSHU (Sacred Heart University; National Public Radio, Inc.). Retrieved 23 February 2024.

James, A. (2023, November 1). Riittakerttu Kaltiala vs. transgender people. Transgender Map (Deep Stealth Productions, Inc.). Retrieved 25 February 2024.

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Kane, C. (2024, February 22). Tuberville promotes anti-transgender sports ban at CPAC. Washington Blade (Brown, Naff, Pitts Omnimedia, Inc.). Retrieved 25 February 2024.

King, G. (2024, February 21). Linn-Mar settles with parent group over gender policy. The Gazette (Gazette Communications, Inc.). Retrieved 23 February 2024.

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Mikhailova, A. (2024, February 20). Row as hospitals say hormone-filled milk from trans women who were born male is just as good for a baby as the real thing. Daily Mail (Daily Mail and General Trust). Retrieved 22 February 2024.

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Poilievre, P. [@PierrePoilievre] (2024, February 18). Canadians support Premier Smith’s common sense protections of children. Trudeau must butt out. [Tweet]. Twitter (X Corp.); Archive Today. Retrieved 22 February 2024.

Pollard, J. (2024, February 19). GOP candidates elevate anti-transgender message as a rallying call to Christian conservatives. AP News (Associated Press). Retrieved 25 February 2024.

Rajkumar, S. (2024, February 20). Bullied transgender teen dies after alleged assault by students in Oklahoma. HuffPost (BuzzFeed, Inc.). Retrieved 21 February 2024.

Reed, E. (2023, November 1). Abusive practices and conversion therapy ties: The right latches on to Finnish doctor Kaltiala. Erin In The Morning (Substack, Inc.). Retrieved 20 February 2024.

Richard, B. (2024, February 21). State lawmakers consider bill dealing with rights of transgender Coloradans. KCDO (The E.W. Scripps Company). Retrieved 21 February 2024.

Robinson, K. (2024, February 21). Re: Request for investigation on the incidents leading to the death of Nex Benedict [letter]. Human Rights Campaign. Retrieved 24 February 2024.

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Rose, A. (2024, February 21). The death of an Oklahoma teen after a fight in school has LGBTQ+ advocates seeking answers. CNN US (Warner Bros. Discovery). Retrieved 21 February 2024.

Rubin, M. (2024, January 26). Texas attorney general requests transgender youths’ patient records from Georgia clinic. The Texas Tribune (The Texas Tribune, Inc.). Retrieved 25 February 2024.

Ruuska, S.-M., Tuisku, K., Holttinen, T., & Kaltiala, R. (2024, February 17). All-cause and suicide mortalities among adolescents and young adults who contacted specialised gender identity services in Finland 1996–2019: a register study. BMJ Mental Health, 27(1), e300940. doi: 10.1136/bmjment-2023-300940. Retrieved 19 February 2024.

Salerno, R. (2024, February 21). New Tenn. law allows refusal to conduct same-sex marriages. Los Angeles Blade (Los Angeles Blade, LLC). Retrieved 25 February 2024.

Salvo, E. (2024, February 17). Statement of The Very Rev. Enrique Salvo, pastor, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral [Press release]. Archdiocese of New York. Retrieved 21 February 2024.

Schoenbaum, H. (2021, February 21). Utah school board member censured over transgender comments is seeking reelection. Associated Press; ABC News (The Walt Disney Company). Retrieved 21 February 2024.

Searles, M. (2024, February 18). Trans-women’s milk as good as breast milk, says NHS trust. The Telegraph (Press Holdings). Retrieved 20 February 2024.

Selcke, D. (2024, February 23). Max aiming to release Harry Potter series in 2026, J.K. Rowling “thrilled”. Winter is Coming (Minute Media). Retrieved 24 February 2024.

Settles, G. (2024, February 23). There is no growing ‘trend’ of transgender, nonbinary shooters, experts say | Fact check. USA Today (Gannett Co., Inc.). Retrieved 24 February 2024.

Sforza, L. (2024, February 21). Tennessee governor signs bill allowing public officials to refuse to perform same-sex marriages. The Hill (Nexstar Media Group, Inc.). Retrieved 21 February 2024.

Shah, A. (2024, February 17). Right-wingers spread misinformation about megachurch shooting to stoke fears of “trans terrorism”. Salon (Salon.com, LLC). Retrieved 19 February 2024.

Smith, K. (2024, February 21). An important new landmark transgender study from Finland. Binary Australia (Gender Awareness Australia Ltd); Archive Today. Retrieved 21 February 2024.

Silvers, M. (2024, February 20). State health department returns to near ban on transgender birth certificate changes. Montana Free Press. Retrieved 21 February 2024.

Sivapriyan, E.T.B. (2024, February 19). Tamil Nadu govt to cover higher education expenses of transgender students. Deccan Herald (The Printers Mysore). Retrieved 19 February 2024.

Sky News Australia (2024, February 19). ‘Outrageous’: James Macpherson opposes trans milk being ingested by infants. Sky News Australia (News Corp Australia). Retrieved 20 February 2024.

Spangler, T. (2024, February 23). Harry Potter TV series targeted for [redacted] premiere on Max; J.K. Rowling recently met with studio execs to discuss show. Variety (Penske Media Corporation). Retrieved 24 February 2024.

Storer, E. (2024, February 19). NHS trust claims trans women’s milk is ‘comparable’ to breast milk. Sky News Australia (News Corp Australia). Retrieved 20 February 2024.

Talt, V. (2024, February 21). Authenticity is a privilege many minorities aren’t afforded (L. Ma, Ed.). Psychology Today (Sussex Publishers). Retrieved 22 February 2024.

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Torres, R. [@RepRitchie] (2024, February 24). Nex Benedict’s death is a horrific tragedy and cannot be allowed to go overlooked. I stand by @HRC in calling … [Tweet]. Twitter (X Corp.); Archive Today. Retrieved 24 February 2024.

Trump, D.J., Jr. [@DonaldJTrumpJr] (2024, February 13). Per capita violent trans extremists have to have become the most violent group of people anywhere in the world. The … [Tweet]. Twitter (X Corp.); Archive Today. Retrieved 19 February 2024.

tumblr staff [@staff] (2024, February 24). A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic: [Post]. Tumblr (Automattic, Inc.); Archive Today. Retrieved 25 February 2024.

Varkey v Alamo College District (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, case number unknown, commenced 25 July 2023).

VCSC transgender lawsuit may be nearing settlement (2024, February 23). Tribune-Star (Retirement Systems of Alabama). Retrieved 24 February 2024.

Vulnerable Child Protection Act, Idaho Code Ann § 18-1506C (2024).

WA Equal Opportunity Commission (2022, September 2). A more streamlined Act for a more streamlined WA [Announcement]. Government of Western Australia. Retrieved 25 February 2024.

Walker, F. (2024, February 23). Florida bill mandating sex on licenses, coverage of conversion therapy passes final committee. Florida Today (Gannett Co., Inc.). Retrieved 24 February 2024.

Watson, G. (2024, February 18). Lincoln Parker: Defence Force needs to stop paying for trans healthcare. OUTinPerth (Speirins Media Pty Ltd). Retrieved 19 February 2024.

West Virginia Medical Practice Act, W Va Code §§ 30-3-20 et seq (2024).

Williams, A.R., & Anderson, N.F. (2024, February 22). County executive in New York bans transgender athletes from competing on girls’ sports teams. CNN US (Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc.). Retrieved 23 February 2024.

Williams, C. (n.d.). Fact check: Study shows transition makes trans people suicidal. The TransAdvocate (Transgender Foundation of America, Inc.). Retrieved 24 February 2024.

Wolfson, L. (2024, February 22). National activist Chloe Cole testifies against transgender treatments for minors in Wyoming. Cowboy State Daily (B. Wayne Hughes, Jr.). Retrieved 22 February 2024.

Yurcaba, J. (2024, February 27). Friends remember Nex Benedict, Oklahoma student who died after school fight, as ‘fiery kid’. NBC News (Comcast Corporation). Retrieved 27 February 2024.

Welcome to Several Problems Weekly.

If you’re reading this you may be familiar with the original Several Problems format, which involved fisking news articles on trans affairs that contained misinformation, disinformation, or deception. This will continue under the label Several Problems Special. However, I am now trying something new.

Several Problems Weekly will be a roundup of the news in trans affairs that comes across my desk every week. Stories are collected using a keyword-based change detection and notification dragnet, currently based on Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts. There will likely be more coverage of United States news, because it produces such a huge majority of English-language news content, and more detailed of Australian news, because I live there.

This week’s issue covers stories from 28 January through 3 February 2024 inclusive. Most issues will likely include events that occurred outside the timeframe they cover but first received significant media in that timeframe — for instance, this issue includes a peer-reviewed study which was published in early January but whose accompanying university media release was published on 2 February. Please feel free to send me any stories that you think I should include.

This week there have been outbreaks of news in:

• Australia (federal, NSW, Queensland, Tasmania);
• Canada (federal, Alberta);
• India (Kerala);
• Italy (Tuscany);
• the United Kingdom (national, England and Wales); and
• the United States (federal, Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Maryland, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Virginia).

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Global

Academic

All peer-reviewed academic work is automatically treated as being of Global relevance. You may of course decide whether it is relevant to you.

On 7 January, Hormones and Behavior (Elsevier) published a study, “Gender minority stress and diurnal cortisol profiles among transgender and gender diverse people in the United States,” by L. Zachary DuBois et al. (2024). According to its 2 February press release (Université de Montréal, 2024), the study found that “feeling connected to community may alleviate the adverse health effects of chronic exposure to stigma” and that “transgender women and gender-diverse people who were assigned male at birth … experience more overall stigma than the rest of the community”.

On Tuesday 30 January, BMC Public Health (Springer Nature) published a research article, “Health literacy of trans and gender diverse individuals—a cross sectional study in Germany,” by Rieka von der Warth et al. (2024). The conclusion of the study was that trans and gender-diverse Germans might have poorer general health literacy, on average, than the German population at large.

In its February 2024 issue, The Lancet Public Health (Elsevier) published an online article, “Gender-related self-reported mental health inequalities in primary care in England: A cross-sectional analysis using the GP Patient Survey,” by Ruth Elizabeth Watkinson et al. (2024). Key findings were generally unremarkable, including that the proportion of trans people experiencing mental health conditions such as depression or anxiety was 1 in 6, compared to 1 in 10 in the general population (Pickles, 2024).

However, as the GP Patient Survey, which provided the data, used standard questions drawn from the UK’s 2021 Census, the study came under attack from anti-trans groups including Sex Matters as part of a broader, clearly coordinated wave of attacks on the Census (see also, e.g., Hazell, 2024). The (to be clear, spurious) talking point is that the Census questions on gender identity may have been imprecisely worded in such a way as to cause the trans population of the UK to be overreported, which anti-trans campaigners allege means the study “has unreliable figures at its core, and cannot be used to draw conclusions about complex mental health needs” (Forstater, in Pickles, op. cit.).

Judicial

In a media release dated Friday 26 January, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (2024) confirmed that an arbitration request, Thomas v/ World Aquatics, brought by Lia Thomas against World Aquatics’ ban on transfem swimmers, has been in process since September 2023.

Australia

National

On Thursday 25 January, Rip Curl, a Geelong-based surfwear brand, published an Instagram video featuring trans surfer Sasha Jane Lowerson as part of its Meet the Local Heroes of Western Australia campaign. This started an immediate right-wing backlash which appears to have been spearheaded by established US-based anti-trans mouthpieces Riley Gaines and Taylor Silverman (Flint, 2024) and which filtered up in a steady, stage-managed fashion through gradually less niche right-wing media to, eventually, news.com.au (“Boycott threats turn to destruction,” 2024) and Channel Ten (“Rip Curl faces backlash,” 2024) over the course of the next week. On 1 February, Rip Curl Women published a grovelling apology statement which amounted to a formal disavowal of Lowerson and campaign material featuring her (Rip Curl Women, 2024).

New South Wales

On Wednesday 31 January, in Taree, New South Wales, Taree Local Court declined to grant an Apprehended Personal Violence Order to Stephanie Blanch against consistent online transphobic harassment by Kirralie Smith, executive director of anti-trans campaign group Binary Australia (Watson, 2024).

Queensland

On Sunday 28 January, Queensland health minister Shannon Fentiman MP (ALP–Waterford) announced a review into the operations of the Queensland Childrens’s Gender Service (Sinnerton, 2024), which according to anti-trans journalist Bernard Lane (2023) had already begun as of 19 December 2023. There has been a flurry of right-wing discontent over the panel appointed to conduct the review, which, according to anti-trans activist Nastassja Freischmidt, includes Dr Victoria Featherstone of Holdsworth House, current Australian Professional Association for Transgender Health (AusPATH) president Dr Ashleigh Lin, and Transcend Australia chief executive officer Jeremy Wiggins (Freischmidt, 2024).

Tasmania

On Thursday 1 February, in Tasmania, the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commissioner, Sarah Bolt, convened a directions hearing into a complaint by Hobart City Cr Louise Elliot (LPA–A/L) that she was prevented from hiring Hobart Town Hall under false pretences related to her anti-trans views. The matter will now proceed to a full hearing (Denholm, 2024).

Canada

Federal

On Thursday 1 February, the Federal Court of Canada issued its ruling in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Bellamy. The ruling overturns an October 2022 decision by the Refugee Appeal Division which granted refugee status to a trans woman and United States national, Daria Bloodworth, whose surname at that time was Bellamy, on the grounds that “a combination of gun culture and rising transphobia left her at risk of persecution in the United States”. Bloodworth has indicated she will appeal (Proctor, 2024).

Alberta

On Wednesday 31 January, Danielle Smith MLA (UCP—Brooks–Medicine Hat), Premier of Alberta, unveiled a broad suite of new trans-exclusionary politics targeting children. Under the new policy, puberty blockers are now illegal in Alberta for people under 16, and top surgery is illegal for people under 18; the package also purports to ban bottom surgery for people under 18, but that was already illegal (Bellefontaine, 2024). Schools will now be required to notify parents and obtain their consent to alter the name and pronouns of students under 16, and to notify parents in the case of students who are 16 and 17 (Black, 2024). According to Smith, the new policy will be legislated in the fall sitting, which will begin on 28 October. She has suggested she is willing to invoke the notwithstanding clause to implement the policy (Heidenreich, 2024).

Members of Canada’s Liberal federal government, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau MP (LPC—Papineau, QC), Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault (LPC–Edmonton Centre, AB), Health Minister Mark Holland MP (LPC—Ajax, ON), and Attorney-General Arif Virani MP (LPC—Parkdale–High Park, ON), have strongly condemned the policy (Zimonjic, 2024). However, the government has not to my knowledge so far indicated whether it intends to take any action to oppose the new policy:

• Trudeau offered “few specifics” (Zimonjic, op. cit.);
• when asked whether he would mount a judicial challenge, Virani appears to have evaded the question (Tasker, 2024);
• Holland, for his part, said only that he would “talk” to his Alberta counterpart (Nardi, 2024).

Alberta New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Rachel Notley MLA (NDP—Edmonton-Strathcona), for her part, has announced she will be investigating whether Smith’s policy breaches the Canada Health Act (Heidenreich, op. cit.).

India

In December 2023, at Renai Medicity in Kochi, Kerala, an unnamed woman gave birth to a baby conceived using one of her husband’s cryopreserved eggs and donor sperm. Dr Jisha Varghese, who oversaw the process, said in remarks to media on Friday 2 February that this is the first time this procedure has been carried out successfully with the involvement of a trans donor in India (Press Trust of India, 2024; Times News Network, 2024).

Italy

On Tuesday 23 January, Italian Health Minister Orazio Schillaci initiated an investigation into the Azienda ospedaliero-universitaria Careggi (AOUC, AOU Careggi; “Careggi University Hospital”) in Florence, Tuscany, specifically into its Andrologia, Endocrinologia femminile e incongruenza di genere (“Andrology, Women’s Endocrinology and Gender Incongruence”) unit, which provides paediatric gender services. According to Il Giornale d’Italia, the investigation is being carried out over the objections of the Regional Council of Tuscany (“Careggi di Firenze,” 2024).

The pretext appears to be “concern” about whether the unit is observing Agenzia italiana del farmaco (AIFA; “Italian Medicines Agency”) rules in its prescription of the gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonist puberty blocker triptorelin. The political impetus appears to be coming from the right-wing Forza Italia party, and from lawyer and journalist Annamaria Bernardini de Pace (Arachi, 2024; “Careggi di Firenze,” op. cit.).

Corriere della Sera‘s coverage (Arachi, op. cit.) specifically notes that the hospital is the home base of Alessandra Fisher and Jiska Ristori, who I recognise as WPATH SOC 8 co-authors (Coleman et al., 2022); whether this is specifically relevant is unclear. Input from Italian trans people and allies on this story would be most welcome.

United Kingdom

On Wednesday 31 January, in the UK, the Consortium for Stronger LGBT+ Communities (2024) initiated the Supportive Schools Campaign. The campaign is a result to HM Government’s draft guidance “Gender questioning children: draft schools and colleges guidance” and the accompanying consultation. The Campaign says that

The proposed guidance … seeks to deny the existence of transgender pupils, discouraging them from coming out and being their authentic selves, and could lead to young people being forcibly outed to parents and teachers

Consortium for Stronger LGBT+ Communities (op. cit.)

and therefore the Campaign

call[s] on the government to listen to LGBT+ youth and inclusive educators, withdraw the guidance and rethink their approach

Consortium for Stronger LGBT+ Communities (op. cit.)

Signatories include Amnesty International UK, Gendered Intelligence, the Good Law Project, Mermaids, Stonewall, and TransActual.

England and Wales

On Friday 2 February, in the Crown Court at Manchester, the girl and boy convicted of killing Brianna Ghey were sentenced. The two were known as Girl X and Boy Y during the trial, but the order protecting their identities was lifted during the sentencing and their names are now public. However, due to my personal views on naming hate-motivated assailants, I have chosen not to identify them in the body of this article, although they are named in the reference list in the interest of accuracy. Both were sentenced to be detained at His Majesty’s pleasure, i.e., indefinitely — juvenile defendants cannot be sentenced to life without parole (a whole life order) in the United Kingdom under the Sentencing Act 2020 s 259. The former Girl X will serve a minimum non-parole period of 22 years; the former Boy Y will serve a minimum of 20 (R v X [34]–[35]).

The trial judge, Dame Amanda Yip, recognised “hostility toward transgender people’ as a material part of the killers’ motivation (R v X [21], [25]; UPI, 2024). This is important because throughout the trial, media and anti-trans activists have incorrectly or untruthfully asserted that transphobia did not form part of the killers’ motive or that, if it did, it was not a sufficiently significant part of their motive to warrant legal recognition as such. This assertion was often based on the observation that the killing “was not charged as a hate crime”. This narrative took advantage of popular assumptions about the functioning of the legal system influenced by United States culture. In the United States, it is more common than in England and Wales for hate-related motives to be legally reflected in the initiation of hate crime charges against the defendant(s). In the England and Wales legal system, only racial and religious motivations are reflected at the charging stage, under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Other types of hate-related motives, including “hostility related to transgender identity,” are legally reflected as aggravating factors in sentencing under the Sentencing Act 2020. Therefore, Mrs Justice Yip’s recognition of anti-trans hostility as an aggravation in sentencing represents the same degree of legal recognition of a hate motive that would have been reflected by a hate crime charge in a United States court.

United States

Federal

All actions in federal court, including those at the District Court level, are classified as being of “federal” interest.

On Tuesday 23 January, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Indianapolis Division, Judge James Patrick Hanlon granted class action certification in K.C. v. Medical Licensing Board of Indiana, an action challenging Indiana Senate Enrolled Act (SEA) 480 of 2023, which bans gender-affirming care for people under 18 (Bonilla Muñiz, 2024).

On Thursday 25 January, the Transgender American Veterans Association (TAVA) filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The action, In re Transgender American Veterans Association, seeks to compel the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to observe its legal obligations and provide gender-affirming surgery through the Veterans’ Health Administration system. The Biden administration promised to provide this care in 2021; however, it never came about (Eaton-Robb, 2024; Padilla, 2024). On 29 January, the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute filed an amicus (UCLA Williams Institute, 2024).

On Thursday 25 January, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, the Independent Women’s Law Center, an anti-trans legal advocacy group, filed suit against the women’s fraternity Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG). The suit, Levang v. Kappa Kappa Gamma, is on behalf of two plaintiffs, both activists with a related anti-trans pressure group, the Independent Women’s Network (2024), who were both dismissed from KKG last year for smearing a trans sister as a sexual predator and using KKG internal resources, as well as speaking to media in KKG’s name, to advocate for her expulsion (Land, 2023).

The legal pretext on which the suit is brought, per Evan Urquhart (2024), appears to be that KKG admitting trans women reflects an interpretation of Title IX gender discrimination protections as applying on a basis other than sex assigned at birth, which if accepted as valid might force nominally gender-specific fraternities and sororities to admit members of all genders. The suit seeks to compel KKG to stop recognising trans women as women and to immediately dismiss the elected student leadership who were willing to do so, as well as to reinstate the plaintiffs as life members, etc. (Downey, 2024).

On Tuesday 30 January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an order in the case of Poe v. Labrador, allowing a district court’s injunction blocking enforcement of Idaho HB 71 to remain in effect. HB 71, the Vulnerable Child Protection Act, signed May 2023, bans gender-affirming medical care for trans people under 18 (American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho, 2024).

Alaska

On Wednesday 31 January, in the Superior Court for the State of Alaska, the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska filed suit against the Matanuska-Susitna (“Mat-Su”) Borough School District. The action, X.A. v. Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District, challenges Mat-Su’s Policy No. 5134 BP, approved October 2022, which prevents students from using bathrooms and locker rooms which match their gender identity. The ACLU contends that the policy contravenes the Constitution of the State of Alaska, specifically the Equal Protection Clause (Art. I § 1) and the constitutional right of privacy (Art. I § 22) (American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska, 2024).

Arizona

On Monday 29 January, State Senator Janae Shamp (R–SD29) introduced SB 1511, which is intended to force insurance companies and medical practitioners who fund or provide gender-affirming healthcare to also provide detransition care, and to report the number and details of detransitioners to the Arizona Secretary of State. It also requires state agencies to implement a number of “expedited” administrative processes to legally recognise detransition — it does not, of course, require similarly expedited legal processes to recognise transition (Fischer, 2024).

California

On Monday 29 January, Judicial Watch, a right-wing legal pressure group, filed suit in the Superior Court of California against the City and County of San Francisco. The suit, Phillips v. Breed, seeks an injunction halting payouts from the City’s Guaranteed Income for Trans People (GIFT) program. Currently, GIFT is scheduled to continue paying out US$1,200/month to 55 low-income trans Californians until the program finishes its 18-month run in July (Charles, 2023). Judicial Watch claims GIFT violates the Constitution of the State of California, specifically Art I § 7, the Equal Protection Clause (Judicial Watch, 2024).

Florida

On Friday 26 January, Robert Kynoch, the deputy executive director of the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, issued a memorandum (Kynoch, 2024) changing the requirements for listing gender on driver licenses (Rahman, 2024). The memorandum asserts that “the term ‘gender’ in s 322.08, F.S., does not refer to a person’s internal sense of [their] gender, but to … [sex assigned at birth],” and that therefore the previous policy from 2011, which had allowed trans people to change the gender marker on their driver’s licenses with a letter from their doctor (Migdon, 2024), was invalid and had no force — a legal theory which Simone Chriss of Southern Legal Counsel says the state “just made up” (Ellenbogen, 2024).

Who the action will apply to and what the consequences will be is not clear. On 30 January, when the action became public, Harvard Law’s Alejandra Caraballo suggested that the law could mean any trans person driving in Florida with a changed gender marker, including tourists, could be charged with fraud (Caraballo, 2024). Regarding current licenses, however, HSMV Department communications director Molly Best told the Florida Phoenix that “the recission [sic] pertains solely to replacement license requests” (Moline, 2024).

My sense is that there is broad consensus that Florida cannot treat licenses issued elsewhere as fraudulent due to the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution of the United States, which obliges each state to recognise “the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state” as legitimate. However, the action comes in the context of increasing advocacy by prominent Republicans of novel, or at least eclectic, legal theories — for instance, Nikki Haley’s theory that states can unilaterally secede (Kerr et al., 2024), which has previously been tried and found wanting. What the law actually says may not mean much except insofar as it provides a pretext for police to take armed coercive action, after which events may develop as they will.

Georgia

On 12 January, Georgia State Rep. Josh Bonner (R–HD073) introduced HB 936, which would prevent trans students from using the correct bathroom for their gender.

Idaho

See Federal: Poe v. Labrador, above.

Iowa

On Monday 22 January, in Iowa, Rep. Jeff Shipley (R–HD82) introduced House File (HF) 2082, which would have amended the Iowa Civil Rights Act to “partially” delete anti-trans discrimination protections — “partially” because HF 2082 would have “protected” some trans Iowans, namely those with a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, by reclassifying them as disabled and subject to disability discrimination protection (Purpura, 2024). Trans Iowans without a diagnosis, including trans Iowans who would previously have qualified for a diagnosis but whose dysphoria had been reduced to a level below the clinical threshold by transition (Sostaric et al., 2024), would no longer have had statutory protections (Murphy, 2024).

On 31 January, the House Judiciary Subcommittee, consisting of 2 Republicans and a Democrat, killed the bill 3–0.

Maryland

On Wednesday 31 January, the Ways and Means Committee of the Maryland House of Delegates took up HB 47, the Fairness in Girls’ Sports Act, which if passed will ban trans girls from school sports. Its Senate companion bill, SB 381, is scheduled to be heard by the Senate Education, Energy, and Environment Committee on 7 February (Pencek, 2024).

Montana

On Monday 29 January, Governor Greg Gianforte released a statement on Twitter (Gianforte, 2024a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h), defending the conduct of the Montana Child and Family Services case surrounding Leo Kolstad to a right-wing audience. MCFS removed Kolstad, 14, from his home in August 2023. They became the subject of a full-court press from right-wing media such as Reduxx (Slatz, 2023), who promoted the narrative that the State of Montana had removed Kolstad from his parents in order to facilitate his transition.

New Hampshire

On Monday 29 January, the House Education Committee heard HB 1205, which would prevent trans girls from participating in girls’ sports (Cullen, 2024).

On Tuesday 30 January, the New Hampshire Senate Education Committee heard SB 375, which would prevent trans girls from participating in girls’ sports. SB 375 is a companion to HB 1205, but goes further and also prohibits trans students from using the correct school bathroom for their gender (Cullen, op. cit.).

New York

On 24 November 2023, in the New York Supreme Court in Bronx County, an anonymous plaintiff, “Rose Doe,” who is a prisoner at Rikers Island, filed suit against the City of New York. Doe says she was sexually assaulted and then raped by a man who secured a transfer to the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s unit at Rikers, by pretending to be a woman. The plaintiff says she believes her assailant, who had previously been the subject of five complaints under the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, was instructed to pretend to be trans by New York City Department of Correction staff, who she says subsequently covered up the incident (Glorioso & Sola, 2024).

Ohio

On Monday 29 January, the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio announced it would be challenging HB 68, which bans gender-affirming healthcare for people under 18 (“ACLU suing Ohio over ban,” 2024).

Oregon

On Thursday 1 February, the Supreme Court of the State of Oregon issued its ruling in Knopp v. Griffin-Valade, upholding a 2023 decision by the Oregon Secretary of State that 10 Republican state senators who staged a long walkout to stall bills on abortion, gun rights, and trans healthcare, by depriving the Oregon Legislature of a quorum, cannot run for re-election (Rush, 2024). The basis of the ruling is Measure 113, a ballot initiative adopted by voters in 2022 with the intention of preventing Republicans from pulling exactly this kind of shit (Associated Press, 2023). Predictably, the disqualified Republicans have reacted by announcing they are simply not going to show up (Shumway, 2024).

Texas

On Friday 26 January, QueerMed, a Georgia-based telehealth clinic providing trans healthcare services, confirmed that in December of 2023 it received a request from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to provide the medical records of Texas youth who had sought care there. While Texas banned trans healthcare in 2023, QueerMed said Paxton’s request covered records back to 1 January 2022, well before the ban took effect (Rubin, 2024). QueerMed has released a statement saying it will disclose protected patient information “under no circumstances” (Mascarenhas, 2024), and characterising the request as

a deliberate effort to deter healthcare providers who offer gender-affirming care, as well as the families and individuals who seek such services beyond the confines of Texas and other states where prohibitive legislation exists

Mascarenhas (op. cit.)

On Tuesday 30 January, the Supreme Court of Texas heard oral arguments in Texas v. Loe. The appellants, the State of Texas, petitioned the Court to stay the 201st Judicial District Court’s temporary injunction blocking enforcement of SB 14, which prohibits gender-affirming care for Texans under 18 — i.e., the appeal was to allow SB 14 to go into effect (American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, 2024).

Utah

On Friday 26 January, the Utah Legislature passed HB 257, which makes it a criminal offence, specifically criminal trespass, for trans people to enter a changing room or locker room that does not correspond to the sex on their birth certificate; penalty enhancements for lewdness, loitering, or voyeurism are also available if the space is a restroom. The vote was broadly party-line, except that two Republicans, Rep. Marsha Judkins (HD 61) and Rep. Anthony E. Loubet (HD 27), voted Nay. On Tuesday 30 January, Governor Spencer Cox (R) signed HB 257 into law (Curtis, 2024).

On Wednesday 31 January, Utah HB 316 went to a second reading. HB 316 would prevent jails and prisons from assigning inmates to a housing block other than that corresponding with the sex they were assigned at birth (Miller, 2024). Despite being nominally intended to reduce sexual violence in prison, the measures in HB 316 are noncompliant with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (Seariac, 2024).

Virginia

On Thursday 1 February, the Virginia Senate killed SB 68 and SB 723. SB 68 would have forced trans girls in grades 9 through 12 to play school sports on boys’ teams, but would have permitted trans girls who transitioned before the onset of puberty to play on girls’ teams. SB 723 would have applied to all trans girls and women, from kindergarten to college, and would have removed the exemption for trans girls who transitioned before the onset of puberty (Schmidt, 2024).

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References

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