The Madras High Court building in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, which in late April ruled in two trans rights cases, Sivakumar v State of Tamil Nadu and Sivakumar v Union of India. Photo by Yoga Balaji on Wikimedia Commons.
Special thanks to Orinam (ஓரினம்), an LGBTQIA+ advocacy group based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, for providing additional detailed information relating to Sivakumar v State of Tamil Nadu and Sivakumar v Union of India (story #7 in this issue). Orinam is a volunteer collective of LGBTQIA+ people and allies who provide a support, cultural and activist space for the queer and trans community.
Vale Andrea Dos Passos (c. 1987–2024)
On 23 April, Andrea Doria Dos Passos,1 a 37-year-old trans woman (Neammannee, 2024), was found dead outside the Miami City Ballet building at 2200 Liberty Avenue, Miami, Florida, United States. CCTV footage showed that Dos Passos, who was unhoused and, according to her family, mentally ill, had laid down there to sleep around 12 AM. She remained asleep until she was murdered by a passing attacker later in the morning. The primary cause of death appears to have been blunt force trauma to the skull inflicted with a piece of metal piping; her body also had puncture wounds at the time of recovery.
Dos Passos’ assailant was located, arrested and charged with second-degree murder on the same day as the killing. At present, his motive for killing Dosspassos is unclear (Batchelor & Morejon, 2024).
International
Academic
Biggs (2024) continues to grind axe about the Census
On 19 April 2024, Sociology, the journal of the British Sociological Association, published a research article, “Gender identity in the 2021 Census of England and Wales: How a flawed question created spurious data,” by Michael Biggs (2024). Naturally, neither Sociology nor any mass media coverage of the article known to me (Ward, 2024; etc.) mention that Biggs is an advisor to the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (2024).
The 2021 Census of England and Wales included a question on transness: “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”. Biggs’ article attempts to advance a critique of this question sufficient to invalidate its findings. However, the article is, as you would probably expect at this point, absolutely riddled with errors, inaccuracies, and plainly intentional misrepresentations and lies to the point that I think I will probably need to do a follow-up Special on it. Stay tuned.
Dangaran (2024): For trans plaintiffs, ADA OK
On 21 April 2024, the Harvard Law Review published an essay, “Bending gender: Disability justice, abolitionist queer theory, and ADA claims for gender dysphoria,” by D Dangaran (2024).
The article is a response to the question of whether trans people who have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria should bring claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA is a major avenue for trans people to seek legal relief from materially harmful anti-trans discrimination. The reason for this is that “gender dysphoria” is acknowledged as a medical condition by relevant diagnostic authorities, and is defined in such a way as to entail “clinically significant … impairment”; per Williams v Kincaid (2022), it can be considered a disability under the ADA. Therefore, anti-trans harm can be addressed by constructing it as ableism and/or denial of reasonable accommodations. This is particularly relevant for trans plaintiffs who are incarcerated and seeking to compel prison systems to provide them with the care to which they are entitled.
Dangaran examines an intervention by another prison litigator suggesting that lawyers should not bring anti-trans discrimination claims under the ADA. That litigator argues that: pursuing trans litigation through a disability framework places trans rights at the mercy of the cis medical authorities who define the GD diagnosis and issue diagnoses; that it puts trans people in the position of needing to construct themselves as people with an illness; that it creates systems which result in denial of care; and that the courts do not have the capacity to properly deal with the problem of institutional discrimination against trans people. Dangaran does a pretty capable job of steelmanning the argument, in my opinion, but ultimately takes the view that the ADA is preferable to the alternative.
As a disabled trans woman, I don’t know which side I’m on but it’s certainly an interesting read.
United Nations
Alsalem uses her platform to boost Cass Review
On 25 April, the United Nations (UN) News Centre published a release, “Gender therapy review reveals devastating impacts on teens” (2024), which appears to have originated from the office of Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. The release endeavours at length to legitimise several falsehoods and fascist canards circulated in the Final Report of the Cass Review, and in the popular media in the wake of its publication. These include:
treating the statistically predictable increase in trans kids presenting to NHS England’s Gender Identity Development Service, England’s paediatric gender service, as a crisis in need of intervention;
presenting the claim by “transgender rights groups” that “there are long waiting lists for treatment,” which is objectively true, as questionable;
lying that “health authorities” are “rapidly initiating permanent gender transition pathways”;
presenting the unevidenced claim that “puberty blockers … could cause temporary or permanent disruption to brain maturation” as true;
lying that the majority of people who detransition are transmasculine when in fact the majority, by a factor of greater than 2 to 1, are transfeminine (Turban et al., 2021).
Alsalem’s mandate, which she took up in August 2021, does not require her to be impartial, a fact on which she has extensively capitalised. Her tenure as special rapporteur has been characterised primarily by virulent anti-trans activism under colour of the execution of her office (see, e.g., “UN chief backs,” 2022; Barnes, 2024), to the point of provoking an outcry from several international organisations not specifically or traditionally concerned with the status of trans women (Morrison, 2022; Association for Women’s Rights in Development, 2023; Theilen, 2023; etc.).
For that matter, Alsalem herself is not supposed to be concerned with the status of trans people; trans affairs properly fall within the remit of the UN Independent Expert on Protection Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, currently Victor Madrigal-Borloz, whose views are significantly at odds with Alsalem’s (“UN chief backs,” 2022).
The poll surveyed 1,000 Kiwi adults, 750 by landline or mobile phone, 250 by online panel. It asked the following questions, reproduced here verbatim:
Do you believe that primary age children should be taught that they can choose their “gender” and that it can be changed through hormone treatment and surgery if they want it to be?
Would you support or oppose a law that prohibits primary schools from teaching any sexual issues, such as gender identity or sexual orientation, in the classroom as part of the curriculum in primary schools — that’s ages 5 up to 10 or 11 unless parents specifically opt their children into these classes.
The UK health service (the NHS) has stopped the use of puberty blockers, which begin the gender transition, for children under 16 as it deemed they are too young to consent. Do you support or oppose a similar ban in New Zealand on the use of puberty blockers for young people 16 or younger?
Some people have proposed banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and physical sex-change surgeries for children under the age of 18 who identify as transgender. Would you support or oppose this kind of ban?
If a young person says they want to change their gender, should the treatment be primarily based on providing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, or should the treatment primarily focus on dealing with the gender dysphoria and any other underlying mental health issues.
Do you think the taxpayers should fund surgery or hormone treatments for adults who wish to change their gender?
Every question returned strong majorities in the sample and among all subgroups for the anti-trans option. However, I’m not really putting much stock in it because it’s a comically obvious push poll — with that many leading questions and that much priming, the point of it is plainly less to provide accurate data about what Kiwis believe, and more to give Family First NZ a pretext to claim that their views are normal.
Australia
Western Australia
WA Liberals jump on the hate train
On 22 April, Libby Mettam MLA (LPA–Vasse), Leader of the Liberal Party Western Australia,2 announced that if elected, a Liberal Government of Western Australia would “ban the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone treatments and surgical intervention for children under the age of 16 for the purpose of gender transition” (Mettam, 2024). The Party press release carrying the announcement cited the Final Report of the Cass Review (2024) as well as Ruuska et al. (2024), both of which have been the subject of previous SP Weekly coverage.
The WA Liberals’ new policy has, of course, already been endorsed by Binary Australia, Family First, Family Voice Australia, the Institute of Public Affairs, and Women’s Forum Australia (Watson, 2024).
On 23 April, The Spectator Australia published an article by Maryka Groenewald of the Australian Christians, another WA political party, reflecting, unsurprisingly, a similar position to the Liberal Party (Groenewald, 2024).
India
Federal
Madras HC tells governments to stop breaking the law
During April, the Madras High Court ruled on, among others, two actions relevant to SP Weekly, Sivakumar v State of Tamil Nadu and Sivakumar v Union of India, referred to here as State of Tamil Nadu and Union of India respectively. Both were writ petitions, a type of judicial complaint which seeks a prerogative writ (a court order against the government). Both were brought by the same petitioner, Sivakumar TD, an activist affiliated with Nirangal, a Chennai-based advocacy group with a focus on queer and trans rights (Nirangal, 2015).
For context, the prevailing legal gender recognition regime in India operates according to, among other things, the Supreme Court of India’s 2014 decision in National Legal Services Authority v Union of India (hereafter referred to as NALSA). The Supreme Court’s ruling in NALSA provides that it is illegal for Indian governments, federal or state, to impose a basis for legal gender recognition other than self-determination.
On 4 April, the Court ruled in State of Tamil Nadu. That case related to the publication of name and gender changes in the official gazette of the Tamil Nadu state government. State officials had been requiring trans people who wanted their name and gender changes gazetted to produce either proof of having undergone sex reassignment surgery (SRS), or a state Social Welfare Department third-gender identity card.
Sivakumar contended that this requirement was unlawful given the NALSA ruling and the federal Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment’s Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Rules, 2020. They therefore sought a writ of mandamus compelling the State of Tamil Nadu to gazette name and gender changes without requiring the documents in question. The Court made the requested order.
On 29 April, the Court ruled in Union of India. That case related to changes of gender marker in passports. Officials of the Indian federal justice and foreign ministries had not been requiring trans people to produce proof of SRS if they wanted to change their passport gender marker to T (transgender, i.e., third gender), but had been requiring it if they wanted to change it to either male or female, based on certain provisions of the Passport Rules, 1980.
Sivakumar contended that this requirement was unlawful given the NALSA ruling. They therefore asked the Court to enjoin the operation of the affected provisions of the Rules, declare them unconstitutional, and direct the respondents to process gender changes without them. Ultimately, the respondents opted to update the Rules to be NALSA-compliant, and the Court dismissed the case for mootness.
Iraq
Federal
Queer relationships, gender transition punishable by law
On 27 April, the Council of Representatives of Iraq, the country’s de facto unicameral legislature,3 passed the Act amending Act No. 8 (Anti-Prostitution) of 1988. The Bill for the Act was moved in August 2023 by Raed Maliki4 (Ind–Maysan 1).
At date, no Arabic source text is available through the Council’s website and I am therefore unable to independently analyse the provisions. According to various Western media, the Act, on the text passed, provides that:
same-sex relationships are punishable by imprisonment for 10 to 15 years (Armstrong, 2024;
“promoting homosexuality” is punishable by imprisonment for up to 7 years (Mando & Kourdi, 2024) — this is possibly also true of promoting “sexual deviancy” (Zeyad & Abdul-Zahra, 2024);
“biological sex changes based on personal desires and inclination” are punishable by imprisonment for 1 to 3 years, and the relevant provisions include both gender-affirming care providers and trans people (Armstrong, op. cit.; Mando & Kourdi, op. cit.);
“intentionally” acting like a woman while being (regarded by the law as) a man is punishable by imprisonment, although none of my sources indicate for what term (Armstrong, op. cit.).
According to ADF International (2024), in the week of 14–20 April inclusive, the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (TEPJF; “Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary5“) declared Gabriel Quadri de la Torre, the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN)-affiliated deputy for Mexico City’s 23rd district, eligible to seek re-election.
Quadri’s eligibility had been challenged by the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (MORENA; “National Regeneration Movement”), the populist progressive party which leads the government bloc in the Congress of the Union. The basis for the challenge was a 2022 finding by the TEPJF’s Specialised Chamber that a number of transphobic actions and written statements on Quadri’s part targeting others including Lia Thomas and transfem fellow deputy Salma Luévano Luna amounted to violencia política contra las mujeres en razòn de género (“gender-based political violence against women”) (Sala Regional Especializada, 2022).
The finding of electoral eligibility does not vacate Quadri’s original conviction of political violence. The Christian Post reports Quadri is working with ADF International to have that conviction examined by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, one of the human rights organs of the Organisation of American States (OAS) (Foley, 2024).
Russia
Tver Oblast
Oblast Administration bans trans people from poetry prize (unfair advantage?)
On 16 April, Reuters reported that the Tver Oblast Administration has banned trans people from entering the 2024 Andrei Dementyev All-Russian Poetry Prize (Papachristou, 2024). This is not a requirement which the Prize has previously imposed (Russell, 2024).
В целях сохранения традиционных для российского общества и разделяемых всеми традиционными религиозными конфессиями представлений о браке, семье, материнстве, отцовстве, детстве к участию в Конкурсе не допускаются граждане, сменившие пол
V tselyakh sokraheneniya traditsionnykh dlya rossiyskogo obshchestva i razdelyayemykh vesemi raditsionnymi religioznymi konfessiyami predstavleniy o brake, sem’ye, materinstve, ottsovstve, detstve k uchastiyu v Konkurse ne dopuskayutsya grazhdane, smenivshiye pol.
In order to preserve the ideas about marriage, family, motherhood, paternity, and childhood which are traditional to Russian society and shared by all traditional religious confessions, citizens who have changed their gender are not allowed to participate in the Competition.
Nef Cellarius, Germany-based programme coordinator for Vykhod (“Coming Out”), a Russian LGBTQ+ advocacy group, told Reuters (Papachristou, 2024) that the Oblast Administration’s action was likely a show of loyalty to the administration of President Vladimir Putin (ONF). The federal government, controlled by United Russia under Putin’s leadership, has in recent years been pursuing an increasingly radicalised anti-queer and anti-trans line, finally escalating to the point of banning gender-affirming care in Russia altogether in 2023 (Papachristou, 2023).
On 22 April, the Health Ministry of the Slovak Republic told the Human Rights Committee of the National Council of the Slovak Republic that it intended to hold a roundtable discussion with representatives of the Interior and Justice Ministries, as well as “representatives of experts and” Slovak trans people (TASR, 2024).
The decision comes in the wake of the Health Ministry’s abrupt withdrawal last month of the Standard procedure for the diagnosis and comprehensive management of adults with transsexualism, the state-issued standard of care for trans healthcare. Slovak trans advocates identified that decision as likely a political decision made by or on behalf of the poltiical party Hlas–SD, which is a member of the government coalition in the National Council, is represented in the current Fico IV coalition executive, and controls the Health Ministry. Commentators linked Hlas’ motive for the action with the at-that-time pending Slovak presidential election, which was contested and ultimately won by Hlas candidate Peter Pellegrini.
United Kingdom
England and Wales
“Intricately woven by the Lord”: same shit, different diocese
On 24 April, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW) published a statement, Intricately woven by the Lord: A pastoral reflection on gender by the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales (Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, 2024). The statement places itself in the context of Amoris laetitia and Dignitas infinita and is theologically basically of a piece with them. Elements of the statement which stood out to me include that:
it raises a grievance about “holders of traditional theories being cancelled or even losing their jobs” (p. 2);
it makes reference to “gender ideology” (pp. 4, 10), which has been relatively unusual for the documents issued under Francis’ pontificate that I’m familiar with, likely because it tends to highlight the Church’s role in fabricating that concept itself;
it seems to echo TERF projective rhetoric about “reducing people to genitals,” saying specifically “A person cannot be reduced to one element of his or her being, such as his or her body or sex/gender” (p. 6);
it explicitly says “We are to honour our body resisting medical interventions, intended to ‘reassign gender where these destroy the body’s fertility or sexual function … all and especially ‘the young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created’” (p. 7);
it seems to refer obliquely and positively to the current British political trans-eliminationist status quo, saying, “Whilst mindful of the legal constraints within which many of our institutions operate, we are aware that currently the law is generous to and supportive of Catholic life and mission in this particular area” (p. 9);
it further says that “we cannot encourage or give support to reconstructive or drug based medical intervention that harms the body” (although “This does not apply to medical interventions aiming at resolving genital ambiguity,” apparently), “[n]or can we legitimise or uphold a way of living that is not respectful of the truth and vocation of each man and each woman, called to live according to the divine plan” (pp. 9–10);
it further says that “Medical intervention for children should not be supported. It should also be recognised that social ‘transition’ (living in the opposite gender role) can have a formative impact on a child’s development and can set a child on a path towards later medical interventions. Care should be taken to avoid this especially with young children” (p. 10).
The Tablet of London reports that Vincent Cardinal Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, says the document “was a pastoral reflection, not a doctrinal statement” (Gledhill, 2024), but all that tells me is that the bishops are cowards.
Scotland
Bute House Agreement collapses, implications unclear
I understand the primary cause of the collapse is that the SNP has decided to abandon the Scottish Government target of a 75% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 (“Scottish government scraps climate change targets,” 2024).
However, BBC coverage suggests (Bonar & Cook, 2024) at least some Greens are motivated by the decision of the Gender Service at Sandyford to voluntarily stop referring trans kids to access puberty blockers. That decision was made by NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, a board of NHS Scotland, itself an agency of the Scottish Government, and thus a number of Scottish Greens consider the Yousaf Government to be responsible. Jen Bell, the co-convenor of the Rainbow Greens, said the Sandyford decision violated a Bute House Agreement promise to “put trans patients at the heart of decisions on their own healthcare” (ibid.).
The Scottish Greens’ statement announcing the collapse certainly seems to bear out a social policy cause — the statement does not make specific factual claims but is scathing in tone, accusing the SNP of “selling out future generations to appease the most reactionary forces in the country,” fomenting “chaos, culture wars, and division,” and characterising Yousaf as not having “the fortitude or the bravery” to be anything other than a puppet of “the most reactionary and backward-looking forces within [the SNP]” (Scottish Greens, 2024).
The Scottish Conservatives announced they would move no confidence. During the drafting of this article it seemed that Yousaf would have to negotiate with Ash Regan MSP (Alba–Edinburgh Eastern) to survive. Given that Regan quit the MSP as a protest specifically against liberalisation of trans rights law this seemed like an almost absurdly unlucky turn of affairs. However, ultimately, while Yousaf has resigned, the SNP Government itself survived the vote of no confidence 70 votes to 58 (Smout, 2024).
United States
Federal
Red states “will not comply” with trans human rights
Multiple states have reacted to the Biden administration’s new regulations around Title IX and the Affordable Care Act § 1557 by asserting that they will not comply with them, or words to that effect. States which have so far joined this effort include:
Brockman v Kaiser Foundation Hospitals: Judge gives go-ahead
On 22 April, the California state Superior Court for the County of San Joaquin issued an order in Brockman v Kaiser Foundation Hospitals allowing the case to proceed rather than being diverted to compulsory arbitration.
Plaintiff Chloe E. Brockman (she/her) is an ideologically motivated detransitioned activist known professionally as Chloe Cole. Lead defendant Kaiser Foundation Hospitals is the healthcare system which provided her with gender-affirming care.
I personally dislike Cole, think she’s dishonest and unethical, and think the political ends that she and her sponsors intend to advance by litigating this case are destructive. However, I also think corporations’ ability to force healthcare consumers into compulsory pre-trial arbitration is a disease. Consequently, I think this was a fair enough reason for Judge Robert Waters to issue this order and it’s hard for me to feel any particular way about this.
New rule bans surgery which wasn’t happening anyway
On 15 April, the Ohio General Assembly “cleared the way” for an administrative rule to be issued providing that gender reassignment surgery (GRS) may not be provided to trans people under 18 in Ohio (BeMiller, 2024). Based on the information provided, the rule in question was likely two rules, Ohio Admin Code §§ 3701-59-06 & 3701-83-60.
However, as Ohio gender-affirming care providers say they don’t provide GRS to under-18s anyway (BeMiller, op. cit.), it’s unclear what effect either rule has beyond sound and fury.
Moe v Yost: AG appeals block on care ban, says court’s reach exceeded grasp
On 22 April, Dave Yost, the Republican state Attorney General of Ohio filed an emergency motion with the Supreme Court of the State of Ohio, seeking to overturn an order of the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas preventing Ohio’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans kids, HB 68 of 2024, from commencing in effect. Yost argues that the order, issued by Judge Michael Holbrook in the case of Moe v Yost, is illegal because it is overbroad in scope; he contends that it should only prevent enforcement of the parts of HB 68 specifically challenged by the plaintiffs in that case, and only against those plaintiffs (Henry, 2024).
Tennessee
Hammond v Nashville: Covenant School shooter’s manifesto inching closer to release
On 22 April, the Tennessee Chancery Court for Davidson County made orders in Hammond v Nashville. Per SP Weekly‘s previous coverage of the case, plaintiffs James Hammond et al., through counsel from right-wing activist litigant group Judicial Watch, seek to compel defendants the Metropolitan Government of Nashville to turn over documents held by the Metro Nashville Police Department which were written by the Covenant School shooter of 27 March 2023.
While Judge l’Ashea Myles did not order that the documents be released, she did order the Metropolitan Government and Metro Nashville PD to provide her with additional information on when they could be released, according to The Daily Wire (LeMahieu, 2024).
Texas
Abbott mulls trans teacher ban
On 26 April, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R), in remarks to the Young Conservatives of Texas convention in Dallas, suggested his administration might ban teachers who are trans from presenting as their correct gender. When publicised, the idea received immediate and emphatic support from state GOP figures, including
State Rep. Briscoe Cain (R–HD128);
Brent Money, Republican candidate for House District 2;
Matt Rinaldi, chair of the Texas Republican Party (Scherer, 2024).
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Footnotes
Sources gave Dos Passos’ name variously as “Andrea Dosspassos” and “Andrea Dos Passos”. I judged that the latter seemed more likely. ↩︎
The Iraqi situation is somewhat unusual. The authority for the Council of Representatives is provided by the Iraqi Constitution of 15 October 2005. According to article 48 of that Constitution, Iraq has a bicameral legislature of which the Council of Representatives is the lower chamber; the upper chamber is the Federation Council. However, article 65 of the same Constitution also stipulates that the task of providing for and establishing the Federation Council belongs to the Council of Representatives. As the Council of Representatives has taken no meaningful action to establish the Federation Council, the Federation Council therefore does not “yet” exist and the Council of Representatives de facto functions as the single chamber of a unicameral legislature. ↩︎
Strictly, the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation. However, when it appears in the name of an organisation, the Spanish phrase “poder judicial” (literally, “judicial power”) is typically rendered in English as “judiciary”. ↩︎
Brumley, C. (2024, April 22). Response to new federal Title IX rules [Letter]. Louisiana Department of Education (State of Louisiana); Wayback Machine (Internet Archive). Retrieved 29 April 2024.
Farrar, D. (2024, April 22). ‘Gender affirming treatment’ poll — April 2024. Curia Market Research; Family First New Zealand; Wayback Machine (Internet Archive). Retrieved 29 April 2024.
The statue of Sigmund Freud in front of the Tavistock Clinic, the now-former home of the NHS Gender Identity Development Service. Photo by Mike Peel, 2010.
We’re back! I went off to go and write an article for another outlet. One could argue that this isn’t a Weekly because I’m not consistently publishing it every week, to which I say: shut up.
On 12 March, eClinicalMedicine published an article, “Experiences of mpox illness and case management among cis and trans gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men in England: A qualitative study,” by T. Charles Witzel et al. (2024). I’m not going into a great deal of depth about it here because the total number of transmascs in the sample was 1 but trans men and transmascs in my readership might still find it worth reading.
Christensen et al.: transfem veterans’ thyroid cancer rate tends to norm
On 27 March, the Journal of the Endocrine Society published an article, “Thyroid cancer prevalence, risk exposure, and clinical features among transgender female veterans,” by John David Christensen et al. (2024). The study’s key finding was that among trans women veterans, the prevalence of thyroid cancer is nearly 2× as high as in cis men veterans, consistent with the elevated rate of thyroid cancer among cis women in general (Kurek, 2024).
Shaw et al.: Tommy and Emma at it again
On 16 April, the Journal of Sports Sciences published an article, “The perspective of current and retired world class, elite and national athletes on the inclusion and eligibility of transgender athletes in elite sport,” by A.L. Shaw et al. (2024). The article’s key finding appears to be that the elite athletes it surveyed, on the whole, favour transmasculine inclusion but not transfeminine inclusion.
I was curious about the motivation behind this because the research topic and the concept behind the study design seemed strange to me — this is essentially a peer-reviewed opinion poll. I had a look at the methodology. It’s blatant junk. I don’t know if they assume their audience are completely naïve to this kind of scientific fraud but none of it is new junk. I would characterise it as Littmanesque — most of these tricks are signatures of another anti-trans disinfo promoter, Lisa Littman. In particular:
The study was conducted by anonymous online survey.
The study had a year-long response window, raising concerns about data integrity.
The study used snowball sampling “via personal networks and social media platforms”. As has previously been noted (Leveille, 2021), snowball sampling is problematic when dealing with politically contested issues because it selects for people with the same politics as the study’s authors.
The authors were only listed by surname and initials, which seemed odd to me, so I went digging. To the best of my ability to determine given the available information (initials, surnames, affiliations), they are:
Alexandra L. Shaw;
Alun G. Williams;
Georgina K. Stebbings;
Marie Chollier;
Andrew Harvey;
Shane M. Heffernan.
Shaw and Harvey I know little about. Chollier appears to have no experience in any relevant field perhaps save sexology, the nature of whose relevance to trans affairs is, of course, rather grim.
Heffernan, Stebbings, and Williams have form in legitimising transphobic pseudoacademic work. Stebbings was lead author, and Heffernan and Williams were co-authors, on the British Association of Sports and Exercise Sciences’ summer 2021 position statements on trans (Stebbings et al., 2021b) and intersex (“DSD”) athletes (Stebbings et al., 2021a); the relationship of those statements to reality is, at best, contested. Heffernan and Williams were signatories to an anti-transfeminine open letter led by Tommy Lundberg earlier this year attacking the IOC Fairness Framework (Lundberg et al., 2024), which was also signed by such luminaries as Emma Hilton and Jon Pike.
In short, I’m assessing this as basically just more nominally peer-reviewed quotemaking by the Hilton–Lundberg clique at one degree of remove.
Catholic Church
Dignitas infinita: Red meat for the faith
On 8 April, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Catholic Church’s executive department for doctrine and discipline, published a statement, Dignitas infinita (“Infinite dignity“). The document is signed by the DDF’s prefect, Victor Manuel Cardinal Fernández, and the secretary of its doctrinal section, Monsignor Armando Matteo; it is noted as having been approved by Pope Francis on 25 March.
Dignitas infinita‘s central theme is the Church’s conception of “human dignity”. On the basis of that conception, Dignitas infinita concerns itself extensively with transness. It proclaims:
that “Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God”
that “gender theory … intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference”
that transness “envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family,” and therefore that “all attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected”.
that “the body … is endowed with personal meanings, particularly in its sexed condition,” and that “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception”.
While there are obvious limits on how liberal the head of the literal Catholic Church can be, Francis has been perceived during his pontificate as relatively progressive on LGBTQ+ affairs. Catholic media, both within (Keenan, 2024) and outside (McNulty, 2024) LGBTQ+ formations within the Church, certainly seem to have seen Dignitas infinita as a sharp move in the other direction.
Other
Elston v eSafety Commissioner: Billboard Chris can’t take the L-ston
On 17 April, “Billboard” Chris Elston filed an appeal with the Australian Administrative Appeals Tribunal concerning a notice issued in the name of the Australian eSafety Commissioner under the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth) s 88. The s 88 notice ultimately compelled X Corp to take down a Tweet by Elston that was smearing and attempting to humiliate an Australian citizen, a trans community advocate who I am choosing not to name. I’m also not linking Elston’s complaint because it republishes some of the material covered by the s 88 notice; entirely apart from the fact that I don’t want to harm Elston’s target further, given that I’m also Australian I don’t know if it would be legally wise.
Summarising the complaint and its context: Australia has fairly limited speech protections; for instance, there is no explicit protection in the Constitution of Australia for freedom of expression. However, since at least Nationwide News Pty Ltd v Wills (1992), Australian courts have held that there exists an implied freedom of political communication, and sought to define it. Elston’s complaint, prepared with the help of the Free Speech Union of Australia (McKenzie, 2024), appears to be framed around the argument that removing the Tweet unlawfully constrains that freedom. Offhand it looks like a bit of a reach to me but I’m not a lawyer. We’ll see how it plays out.
Aotearoa New Zealand
Late: Psychology board reviewing its LGBTQ+ guideline
I became aware this week — courtesy of alarmist coverage in The Spectator Australia (Stanley, 2024) — that te Poari Kaimātai Hinengaro o Aotearoa/the New Zealand Psychologists Board, the state regulator of psychologists in Aotearoa, has been revising its Best practice guidelines for working with clients with diverse sex, sexuality and gender since sometime before 18 September 2023 (Te Poari Kaimātai Hinengaro o Aotearoa, 2023).
I initially had no idea whether this was good or bad, seeing as The Spectator seemed to think it was a valuable opportunity for te Poari to pull an RANZCP. However, I understand from a source with knowledge of the matter that there’s no cause for concern.
On 21 April, a scheduled North West Sydney Football (NWSF) Women’s Premier League First Grade association football match between Macquarie Dragons FC and The Flying Bats FC was pre-empted by a forfeit from the Dragons (Dribl, n.d.).
Vigilant readers will recall that the Dragons and the Bats’ last matchup, in the NWSF Beryl Ackroyd Cup grand final in late March, became the subject of international attention because the Bats, who won, fielded a squad including 5 transfem players, and copped an international firehose of hate as a result.
Binary Australia have noticed the cancellation and are running with it, asserting that the Macquarie Dragons are pointedly forfeiting out of principle because they refuse to play against trans women (Smith, 2024). The tactic is not unheard of and is being used by right-wing activists in the United States. However, I’m unconvinced.
At press time, neither the Dragons nor the Bats had responded to a request for comment, but that’s to be expected as I sent it over the weekend. Any comments I do receive will be printed in SP Weekly #8.
Western Australia
Cook Government finally pulls its finger out on GRA reform
abolish the Gender Reassignment Board and establish a new process for people born in Western Australia to change their legal sex and gender through the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages.
establish a new process for WA residents born outside Australia to apply for a document acknowledging their sex or gender.
The explanatory memorandum (Government of Western Australia, 2024) suggests the new process will be able to be launched approximately six months after the Bill receives the Royal Assent.
Certain groups of people who have been convicted of crimes will need the approval of various relevant government officers to change their registered sex or gender. In particular, while promoting the Bill, Quigley referred to how it prevented people convicted of violent offences from accessing women-only spaces. This was, in my opinion justifiably, heard as a transmisogynistic dogwhistle by LGBTQ+ advocates (Watson, 2024a).
Germany
Self-determination Act passed; true self-determination yet to come
Under the SBGG, trans people 14 years of age or older (Associated Press, 2024) can change their registered first name and gender by giving 3 months’ notice to a registry office (“Gender identity law passes,” 2024). This replaces the TSG regime, which required the approval of 2 psychiatrists and a court order.
§§ 13–14 also provide that after a change of name or gender registration is made, neither the person’s assigned gender nor their deadname may be published without their consent, subject to a fine of up to €10,000 (approx. AU$49,600, US$32,000 at press time).
However, the SBGG also has several caveats:
Per § 5(1), name and gender changes are followed by a cooling-off period of one year before additional changes can be made.
Per § 6(3), gender recognised under the SBGG explicitly does not necessarily apply to the recognition of sporting achievements.
Per § 9, trans women in particular will not be allowed to change their legal gender during a state of tension under Article 80a of the Basic Law, or during compulsory military service should it be reintroduced.
Per § 10(2), a trans person is only entitled to have updated documents issued “soweit ein berechtiges Interesse glaubhaft gemacht werden kann” (“provided that a legitimate interest can be credibly demonstrated”) in the judgment of state authorities.
For reasons including some of these and some others, one German trans political content creator, UnrulyJuli, described the SBGG as “das reaktionärste selbsterklärungsbasierte Gesetz zur Änderung von registriertem Geschlecht weltweit” (“the most reactionary self-ID-based gender recognition law in the world”) (UnrulyJuli, 2024).
The SBGG was passed with 372 votes in favour, 251 votes against, and 11 abstentions, with 100 absences. The bill was supported by (Bundestagsverwaltung, 2024):
the current Government parties, who are an Ampelkoalition (“traffic-light coalition”):
the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD; “Social-Democratic Party of Germany”);
the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP; “Free Democratic Party”);
On 10 April, Amitesh Kumar, Commissioner of Police for Pune City, issued an order under the federal Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, s 144, banning trans people from begging at traffic signals, private residences, and public spaces including hospitals (Bhatt, 2024).
Sweden
SoU22:2023/24: Gender recognition law now slightly better
trans people 16 years or older in Sweden can now change their legal gender if they receive approval from a guardian, a doctor, and Socialstyrelsen (“the National Board of Health and Welfare”) (Rai, 2024);
a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria is no longer required (Rai, op. cit.).
According to the Snabbsprotokoll — the Riksdag’s equivalent of Hansard dailies — the bill was passed with 234 votes in favour and 94 votes against, with 21 absences. The bill was supported by:
Socialdemokraterna (S; “the Social Democrats”);
Moderaterna (M; “the Moderates”);
Centerpartiet (C; “the Centre Party”);
Vänsterpartiet (V; “the Left Party”)
Miljöpartiet de gröna (MP; “Environmental Party the Greens”);
Liberalerna (L; “the Liberals”).
The bill was opposed by:
Kristdemokraterna (KD; “the Christian Democrats”)
Sverigedemokraterna (SD; “the Sweden Democrats”).
Votes other than party line include:
Patrik Björck (S–Västra Götalands läns västra), who voted against;
Ellen Juntti (M–Västra Götalands läns västra), who voted against;
Elsa Widding (Ind–Stockholms kommun), who voted against;
Jamal El-Haj (Ind–Malmö kommun), who voted in favour.
United Kingdom
National
Physios make no bones about trans allyship
On 11 April, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP), the professional peak body for British physiotherapists, issued a position statement on transphobia (Chartered Society of Physiotherapy Council, 2024). I find the language satisfyingly resolute, to the point of occasionally being borderline provocative.
England
Cass Report drops
On 10 April, NHS England’s Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People released its Final Report (The Cass Review, 2024). I’ve written a long-form piece for another outlet detailing the problems with the Cass Review and will hopefully publish more coverage here over time. The summary is as follows.
The Cass Report recommends, in effect, preventing people under 18 from accessing virtually any meaningful gender-affirming intervention whatsoever. It stipulates that:
NHS England should provide HRT on an extremely limited and case-by-case basis, and only where a “clear clinical rationale” exists, which seems to mean “beyond simply being trans”;
NHS England should provide puberty blockers on an extremely limited case-by-case basis to some trans girls, and to trans boys not at all;
trans kids should not be allowed to change their name or pronouns before the NHS says they can;
measures should be taken to prevent trans kids from accessing gender-affirming care on a private basis outside the NHS.
The Report is heavily flawed. Here is why:
The Cass Review was known to be heavily compromised well before the publication of the Report. Its advisory group includes a narrow slice of professionals ranging from clinicians on the extremely conservative borderline-crank edge of nominal legitimacy to open, unashamed advocates of conversion therapy. It explicitly excluded trans people. In addition, the groundwork for the Cass Review, such as the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence’s “literature review” on puberty blockers, was similarly compromised.
The Report draws heavily on several systematic reviews carried out by the University of York at the request of the Cass Review. The methodology for all of the reviews was designed by Dr Trilby Langton, who has previously provided NHS staff with training materials recommending Genspect, an organisation which promotes conversion therapy. The methodology appears to have been designed to exclude as much evidence in favour of gender-affirming care as possible, while including as much evidence as possible to the contrary, in both cases regardless of the practical quality of the evidence.
A number of materials auxiliary to the review have also been published, including a 9 April editorial by Cass in The BMJ (Cass, 2024), and a 17 April Q&A session with Cass held by The Kite Trust, an LGBTQ+ support and advocacy group (The Kite Trust, 2024). The latter has attracted significant interest because Cass’ characterisation of the Cass Report seems to be pretty significantly at odds with what’s in it, to the point that you begin to wonder if she’s actually read what is nominally her own work.
On 17 April, the Scottish Parliament considered a motion, Repealing the Hate Crime Act (S6M-12855), moved by Russell Findlay MSP (CUP–West Scotland), which would if adopted have expressed the Scottish Parliament’s belief that the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 ought to be repealed. The motion would not actually have repealed the Act; a Bill is required to do that.
While the Act was passed by the Scottish Parliament on 11 March 2021, it did not commence until 1 April 2024. The Act extends hate crime protections under Scottish law to trans people, a prospect which attracts significantly more political hostility in 2024 than it did in 2021. Right-wing organisers including Elon Musk and JK Rowling have been mounting a furious hate campaign against the Bill since immediately before its commencement. The Act was also opposed by ADF UK, the British arm of US fascist legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, who published a media release in support of Findlay’s motion (ADF UK, 2024).
Ultimately, the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the Scottish Greens successfully amended Findlay’s motion to reverse its meaning, then put it to a vote and carried it. The Tories opposed it. Labour, the Lib Dems, and lone Alba Party MSP Ash Regan abstained.
NHS Scotland decides it’s easier to collude
On 18 April, it became public (Trans Safety Network, 2024; NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, 2024) that the Gender Service at Sandyford, which provides gender-affirming care to people under 18 in Scotland, had stopped referring trans youth to endocrinology in mid-March. Endocrinology referral is a prerequisite to receive puberty blockers. As a consequence, while young trans people already on blockers though Sandyford will be able to stay on them, no further trans youth will be able to access them through the Gender Service.
The decision appears to have been made by Sandyford’s supervising health board, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, in response to the Cass Report. It’s unclear why; the Cass Review was authorised by, and its scope was in relation to, NHS England, an agency of the UK Government operating within England. NHS Scotland is an entirely separate service administered by the Scottish Government. My understanding is that NHS Scotland has therefore not actually been compelled to take this action, but is taking it nonetheless.
United States
Federal
NAIA bans transfems for fairness (actually Christianity again)
On 8 April, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) Council of Presidents unanimously approved a new Transgender Participation Policy which functionally bans trans women from NAIA competitions (it also restricts trans men, but does not ban them).
While some media coverage (some included here, some not) has tried to play this off as an apolitical move based entirely on concerns of fairness, it isn’t, of course, because it never is. NAIA, a considerably smaller alternative to the mainstream National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), consists overwhelmingly of private institutions, and 17 of the 20 Council of Presidents members who endorsed the policy were from the 65% of NAIA member institutions which are explicitly faith-based (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, n.d.) — which is incidentally quite the apportionment; I wonder how that happened.
Media coverage has noted that the new NAIA Policy may be in violation of Title IX (Van Cleave, 2024). More immediately and practically, the policy is still compelled to rely on self-reporting by trans athletes. At least one NAIA-affiliated institution has chosen not to enforce the self-reporting requirement, and, thus, to functionally ignore the policy. Beyond NAIA institutions, the policy is opposed by the Transgender Network of Texas (Kennedy, 2024) and the National Women’s Law Center (Olson, 2024).
The NAIA Transgender Participation Policy will commence 1 August 2024.
American Immigration Council: Abolishing ICE is trans business
On 9 April, the American Immigration Council, the National Lawyers Guild’s National Immigration Project, and the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network filed a complaint (American Immigration Council et al., 2024) with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on behalf of 5 trans and nonbinary (TNB) people detained at an ICE facility in Aurora, Colorado.
The complaint asserts that
ICE has subjected the individuals detained to “needless delays in access to care, lack of communication regarding diagnoses and appropriate treatment options, and gaslighting from medical staff within the facility to fail to take their complaints seriously”;
“Gender affirming care is not categorically available within ICE detention, meaning people cannot access the treatment they require to manage their symptoms”
“in practice the Aurora facility systematically fails to adhere to its responsibilities, with potentially deadly consequences for TNB people detained at the facility”;
“TNB persons imprisoned at the Aurora facility who have disabilities are often punished for having a disability … Complainants’ experiences illuminate a pattern within the Aurora facility of placing persons with disabilities at risk of self-harm in solitary confinement”
in addition, complainants have variously been subjected to:
refusal under false pretences to house them appropriately;
threats under false pretences of placing them in solitary confinement for reasons related to their gender or gender expression;
interference with the HRT prescribed to them;
delays or outright lack of action on required supportive care such as serology labs;
physical assault;
sexual assault by guards;
facilitation by guards of sexual assault;
sexual harassment;
sexually violent humiliation;
forcible outing;
deadnaming;
misgendering;
destruction of personal property and personal hygiene items;
The complaint requests that ICE take a number of measures to address the conduct at issue, including that ICE investigate the specific incidents detailed in the complaint, stop appealing immigration judge decisions granting relief to TNB people, implement new liability mechanisms for contractors who mistreat trans people, place TNB people in “community-based and not-for-profit alternatives for detention”, and ideally put an “immediate and permanent end to [its] practice of detaining TNB people in immigration custody”.
Labrador v Poe: SCOTUS to Idaho trans kids: Drop dead
On 15 April, the Supreme Court of the United States, in a plurality decision, stayed the US District Court for the District of Idaho’s 26 December 2023 order in Poe v Labrador enjoining enforcement of the Vulnerable Child Protection Act, Idaho Code Ann § 18-1506C, passed as HB 71 of 2023, which bans gender-affirming care for people under 18 in Idaho. The application to stay was made by the State of Idaho’s counsel, the Alliance Defending Freedom (Talukder, 2024). The Act will immediately take effect for everyone in Idaho except the plaintiffs.
The Supreme Court’s pretext for the stay was that the District Court’s injunction was overbroad in scope. Of the justices of the court, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas supported the stay; Gorsuch wrote the plurality opinion, which expressed concerns about overbreadth, while Kavanaugh wrote a separate concurrence with Barrett which focused instead on the State’s likelihood of success on the merits. The stay was opposed by Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. Chief justice John Roberts did not write or join an opinion (Brown, 2024).
This has implications for similar cases going forward. If it can be assumed that SCOTUS will intervene to narrow the applicability of any injunction to the plaintiffs alone, future healthcare bans will be very difficult to hold off through the courts.
BPJ v Board: You can’t hide, but you can run (for now)
On 18 April, The Washington Post published an opinion article, “A new report roils the debate on youth gender care,” by Paul Garcia-Ryan (2024). While I won’t dissect the article here, its publication is, in my opinion, independently newsworthy for SP Press readers. This is because of what it reflects.
Garcia-Ryan is an ideologically motivated detransfem activist who heads up Therapy First, formerly known as the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association (GETA). Therapy First is part of what the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the “pseudoscience network” (Lamore et al., 2023) the unacknowledged anti-trans hydra whose currently most prominent heads include Genspect and the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine. Like its sisters, Therapy First promotes gender exploratory therapy, which, as Canadian jurist and expert Florence Ashley has pointed out, is literally just anti-trans conversion therapy (Ashley, 2022).
If I recall correctly, last time WaPo published a major anti-trans op-ed, they had to filter it through Laura Edwards-Leeper and Erica Anderson, who have frankly always been at least ideologically SEGM-adjacent but had the credibility of being part of the WPATH establishment. The fact that WaPo are now openly running a conversion therapist — even advertising the group he’s affiliated with at the top of the article — seems like a deeply concerning development.
California
Calexico recalls its whipping girl
On 16 April, the City of Calexico, Imperial County, held a recall election. Mayor Raúl Ureña and Councilmember Gilberto Manzanarez were recalled. Turnout for the recall was 23%.
Ureña, who came out as transfeminine after she was sworn in as mayor, told the Los Angeles Times she believed the recall was motivated by transphobia. Manzanarez said he thought Calexico’s political establishment scapegoated him and Ureña for existing systematic problems Recall organisers told the LA Times that the recall was primarily sparked by what the Times described as “concerns about rising homeless numbers and lagging economic development” (Branson-Potts, 2024).
Based on the Times‘ coverage and Equality California’s strident response (Equality California, 2024), I’m inclined to think Ureña and Manzanarez’s analyses are closer to the truth. This is not necessarily a judgment on the people of Calexico; with 23% turnout, it’s hard to treat the recall as representative. However, Ureña had already won one election a month after the publication of the audit which revealed the issues for which she was nominally recalled. She subsequently came out as trans and was served with recall papers two months later. Until I receive new information to the contrary, the causality here seems to me to be pretty clear.
Idaho
HB 421, 538: The machine demands blood
On 9 April, Idaho Governor Brad Little (R) signed 2 bills into law, HB 421 and HB 538.
HB 421 defines “sex” as being determined for all purposes of Idaho code exclusively by the type of gamete that is, was, will be, or “but for a developmental or genetic anomaly or historical accident, would” be produced by an individual’s reproductive system.
HB 538 inserts a new section into Idaho Code, § 67-5909B, which provides that:
employees of the state of Idaho, including employees working in public educational institutions, as well as students in those institutions, may not be compelled by any means to refer to trans people, including trans kids where applicable, by the correct name or pronouns;
state employees may not refer to trans kids who are school students by the correct name or pronouns without written permission from a parent or guardian;
any person who is “harmed” for “violating the provisions of this section” will have a private cause of action, with a statute of limitations of 2 years.
Both measures commence 1 July 2024.
Kansas
Kelly delays FACT Act, lets state KOSA through to keeper
On 12 April, Kansas Governor Laura Kelly (D) actioned a number of bills passed by the Kansas Legislature.
any recipient of state funds may not use such funds to provide gender-affirming care, including social transition, for people under 18, or to “promote or advocate” the provision of such care, nor shall any “state property, facility or building” be used for such provision, promotion, or advocacy of care;
healthcare providers may not knowingly provide gender-affirming care to people under 18 in Kansas except to the extent required to withdraw care completely by 31 December 2024, on penalty of revocation of licensure;
if a provider administers gender-affirming care to a child who later experiences “any physical, psychological, emotional or physiological harm” as a result, that child can sue up to the day they turn 28;
professional liability insurers for healthcare providers shall not cover damages related to the provision of gender-affirming care;
the Kansas Program of Medical Assistance (“Kansas Medicaid”) shall not cover gender-affirming care for people under 18.
However, the bill has a notional veto-proof majority. Its failure to pass by a veto-proof majority on this occasion is because 2 Republican legislators who had previously voted in favour of the bill were absent.
In addition, Kelly did not veto SB 394, which provides that websites which serve content “harmful to minors” must require Kansas residents to provide ID verification. The definition of “harmful to minors” is as provided for in Kan Stat Ann § 21-6402, which includes “acts of … homosexuality”.
Maine
LD 227: Maine passes trans shield law, Republicans predictably object
On 12 April, the Maine State Legislature approved Legislative Document (LD) 227, which is a shield law for gender-affirming care and abortion: it bars Maine law enforcement agencies from co-operating in investigations of gender-affirming care or abortion services provided legally in Maine carried out by states where those healthcare services are not legal.
The bill has already been opposed by the Republican attorneys general of Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. In a letter (Skrmetti et al., 2024) to Maine Governor Janet Mills (D) and several other officers of the Maine executive, they claim LD 227:
“seeks to contravene the lawful policy choices of our States’ citizens by imposing on the rest of the country” — ! — “Maine’s views on hotly-debated issues”;
is a “novel effort at state-sanctioned culture war litigation tourism” and an “ill-considered attempt to influence and intimidate officials in other States”;
“could … trigger a rapid tit-for-tat escalation that tears apart our Republic”.
The letter ends with a promise to “vigorously avail ourselves of every recourse our Constitution provides,” which is facially a threat to pursue litigation, but, given the place of “constitutional rights” in American right-wing discourse (Franke, 2023), likely also a plausibly deniable threat of violence.
On 17 April, the Montgomery County Department of Police arrested and charged an 18-year-old with threats of mass violence (Montgomery County Department of Police, 2024). The arrestee appears to be transmasc, so this may or may not snowball into a larger story.
Montana
Kalarchik v Montana: Stop breaking the Constitution, assholes
On 18 April, in the Montana state First Judicial District Court, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Montana filed suit (Kalarchik v Montana) on behalf of 2 plaintiffs, both trans women, against the State of Montana.
The filing is concerned with 2 particulars of Montana law:
Mont Code Ann § 50-15-224, enacted by SB 458 of 2023, which commenced notionally 19 May 2023, which defines sex as being determined by sex chromosomes and unspecified “biological … indication” for all purposes of Montana code;
The plaintiffs, Jessica Kalarchik and “Jane Doe,” attest having faced harassment and discrimination as a result of the direct and indirect effects of SB 458 and the 2022 Rule. They claim that the two together constitute unlawful discrimination in violation of the Constitution of the State of Montana, in particular the following sections of Article II:
§ 4, the equal protection clause;
§ 7, the free expression clause, which must also be interpreted to bar compelled speech per SCOTUS’ ruling in Wooley v Maynard (1977);
§ 10, the constitutional right to privacy.
They are seeking:
declaratory relief utilising Montana Administrative Procedure Act powers to invalidate MAR 37.3.811(5) and invalidate the use of SB 458 as described in the filing;
injunctive relief preventing the State from enforcing any of the invalidated particulars, or any new superficially different particulars intended to get around them;
Per previous coverage, the action is being brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio on behalf of two young trans girls, “Madeline Moe” and “Grace Goe”. While the point of the action is obviously to get rid of the law, the specific argument in this case is that HB 68, the Saving Adolescents From Experimentation Act and Save Women’s Sports Act, violates the Constitution of the State of Ohio, specifically the single-subject rule, which stipulates that laws must concern themselves only with a single subject.
Oklahoma
OSAC feels threatened by trans boxers
In undated news reported 18 April by KOKH, the Oklahoma State Athletic Commission has warned All Elite Wrestling not to hold measures between cis and trans competitors of the same gender in the state again. The warning is based on OSAC’s rule against intergender matches, which is intentionally drafted to falsely classify matches between a cis and a trans athlete of the same gender as “intergender” (Wilson & Chasanov, 2024).
Tennessee
Hammond v Nashville: Judicial Watch says “fuck them kids”
On 16 April, the Tennessee state Chancery Court for Davidson County heard Hammond v Nashville. The action was filed by Judicial Watch, a right-wing activist litigant group, against the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County. Judicial Watch seeks to compel the Metropolitan Government to release documentation, allegedly including a manifesto, seized from the estate of the 2023 Covenant School shooter. The shooting is of interest to fascists because the culprit was a trans man.
While the Metropolitan Government’s own attitude to defending the case seems fairly ambivalent, intervenors the Covenant School and the Covenant Presbyterian Church argue the documents should not be released because they have the potential to “trigger more hatred and violence toward children and Christians,” as The Daily Wire put it (Lindquist & LeMahieu, 2024).
Virginia
Powhatan School District adopts 2023 Model Policies
Ashley, F. (2022, September 6). Interrogating gender-exploratory therapy. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(2), 472–481. doi: 10.1177/17456916221102325. Retrieved 20 April 2024.
Chartered Society of Physiotherapists Council (2024, April 11). Position statement on transphobia. Chartered Society of Physiotherapists; Archive Today. Retrieved 18 April 2024.
Te Poari Kaimātai Hinengaro o Aotearoa (2023, September 18). Call for volunteers [Update]. Te Poari Kaimātai Hinengaro o Aotearoa; Archive Today. Retrieved 21 April 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:
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:
You design a longitudinal study which draws its conclusions from screening for specific psychological phenomena, qualities, or traits.
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.
You collect basic data from those recipients at time 1 (t1). You do not screen for actual transness at this time. This is vital.
At a later data collection, tn, 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 tn will be less than the total size of the sample, probably significantly so.
Immediately claim that the people who weren’t trans at tn 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 tn 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:
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:
“we report mild-to-severe sex gland atrophy in PB [puberty blocker] treated children”;
“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).
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).
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);
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;
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:
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:
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;
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)
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.
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
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”.
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”. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
Specifically, Brown is an adherent of the misleadingly-named Messianic Judaism, a denomination of Protestant Christianity. ↩︎
I have some reason to think this is a dogwhistle but I’m fucked if I know for what. ↩︎
Bailey, J.M., & Hsu, K.J. (2022, June 27). How autogynephilic are natal females?. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 51, 3311–3318. doi: 10.1007/s10508-022-02359-8. Retrieved 7 April 2024.
Dresden, H. (2023, April 14). L.A. has its own history of anti-drag laws. The Hollywood Reporter (Eldridge Industries, LLC; Penske Media Corporation); Archive Today. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
Opray, M. (2024, March 28). Post: Thailand on track to become first South-East Asian country to legalise gay marriage. The Saturday Paper (Schwartz Media).
Reuters & Sattaburuth, A. (2024, March 28). House passes landmark Marriage Equality Bill. Bangkok Post (Bangkok Post Public Company Ltd); Thomson Reuters Corporation; Archive Today. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
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;
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.
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.
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:
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);
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);
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);
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:
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%].
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)
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” Gillickcompetency and the Fraser guidelines “as precedent for providing autonomy to children and young people” (p. 2).
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:
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).
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 Youthinitiative 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:
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.
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.
§ 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;
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.
Thanks for reading! If you found this bulletin at all useful, please consider supporting me via Patreon, Ko-fi, or PayPal.
For Women Scotland Sport [@FWSSport] (2024, March 26). There are 5, that’s right 5, males who identify as women in this team. How long until there are no … [Tweet]. Twitter (X Corp.); Archive Today. Retrieved 28 March 2024. https://twitter.com/FWSSport/status/1772533581132308829
Kaltiala, R., Takala, L., Byng, R., Hutchinson, A., Spiliadis, A., … & Hunter, P.K. (2023, July 13). Youth gender transition is pushed without evidence. The Wall Street Journal (News Corporation); Archive Today. Retrieved 31 March 2024.
My SP Press email address, isabelle@severalproblems.press, has not worked since I migrated over from WordPress hosting, because I’m a music performance major and I get cute little question marks over my head when someone says the words “SMTP authentication” or “MX record”.
Every man has two deaths: when he is buried in the ground, and the last time someone says his name.
Ernest Hemingway (attrib.)
On 25 February 2024, an anarchist protester self-immolated outside the Embassy of Israel to the United States at 3514 Continental Drive, North Cleveland Park, Washington, D.C., to protest the Zionist colonisation and genocide in Palestine. The protester self-identified, and was identified by media, as Aaron James Bushnell (he/him), a United States Air Force cyberdefence operations specialist with the grade of senior airman. Bushnell died in hospital from burn injuries 7 hours after the act.
On the basis of certain unusual features of Bushnell’s martyrdom, community members including Isabelle Moreton (IM) of SP Press began an inquiry. What we found, and our attempts to document and preserve Lilly Bushnell’s legacy, is catalogued below.
Project timeline
Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.
On 22 March 2024, IM published “Redemptio memoriae,” version 2.
On 24 March 2024, this version was republished, with consent, by Immer Autonom, a project of anarcha-feminist collective Judith’s Dagger; IA contributor narcissus described it as a “a project that reflects our concern for militant remembering, de-erasure, and anarchism as a radical form of grief”.
On 13 March 2024, IM published version 1 of “Redemptio memoriae: the destruction(?) and re(?)construction of Lilly Bushnell,” the document from which this collection takes its name.
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 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).
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.
If you found this article at all useful, please consider supporting me via Patreon, Ko-fi, or PayPal.
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 —Iam not acanon lawyer.
3 — For the avoidance of doubt, the NYCLU is the affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union in the State of New York.
Asseler, J.D., del Valle, J.S., Chuva de Sousa Lopes, S.M., Verhoeven, M.O., Goddijn, M., … & van Mello, N.M. (2024, February 22). One-third of amenorrhoeic transmasculine people on testosterone ovulate. Cell Reports Medicine, online ahead of print. doi: 10.1016/j.xcrm.2024.101440. Retrieved 23 February 2024.
Dwyer, D. (Host) (2024, February 20). February 20, 2024 [Podcast episode]. In Conversations with Cardinal Dolan. The Good Newsroom (Archdiocese of New York). Retrieved 21 February 2024.
Mahlburg, K. (2024, February 22). When can we talk about trans mass shooters?. The Daily Declaration (Australian Heart Ministries Inc); Archive Today. Retrieved 22 February 2024.
On 14 February 2024, The Australian Financial Review republished a piece from The New York Times, “As kids, they thought they were trans. They no longer do,” by Pamela Paul (2024b).
This piece has several problems.
Here are a few.
Headnotes
Paul’s piece was originally published in The New York Times (“The Times“) on 2 February (Paul, 2024a). I didn’t do a Several Problems of it then because I was exhausted and because United States-based subject matter experts like Erin Reed (2024), Assigned Media‘s Evan Urquhart (2024), and Whipping Girl author Julia Serano (2024) had already jumped on it and done a great job. However, Nine went out of their way to syndicate the piece into a local masthead and put it in front of Australian readers, and I felt like that made it my problem.
For my Australian readers, The New York Times has a consistent record of polite, “just asking questions”-style transphobic propaganda (Yang, 2023) which has already attracted fierce resistance from trans people, allies (Accountable for Equality et al., 2023), and its own contributors (Andrews et al., 2023). Paul is the hand they use to do it (Bibi, 2023). She was already The Times‘ book editor, but became a regular opinion columnist in April 2022, two weeks after The Times dropped its only trans regular columnist, Jennifer Finney Boylan (Hollar, 2022; GLAAD, 2023). The Times Company press release announcing her onboarding in the role (“Pamela Paul’s next chapter,” 2022) uses language like “her keen desire to write about what people really think and believe but are often too afraid to say” — skating, not for nothing, very close to a slogan by Senator Pauline Hanson (PHON–QLD) about “ha[ving] the guts to say what you’re thinking” (Harris, 2020).
For my foreign readers, Nine Entertainment Company, the publisher of The Australian Financial Review (“the Financial Review“), also have a record of this kind of bullshit. Offhand I think it is the biggest single Australian contributor to the Several Problems Special corpus, and that’s in Australia, the company that gave us News Corp and modern Fox. Nine’s newspapers, including the Financial Review, used to be published by John Fairfax and Sons, which Nine acquired in 2018; under Fairfax management, they accumulated a lot of prestige and became newspapers of record. Since Nine acquired them, the editorial orientation of the ex-Fairfax, now “Ninefax,” newspapers has taken a sharp right turn, but they still retain enough prestige that bad actors find them very attractive.
1
The narrative [Powell] had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.
First, there is no such narrative. There is no “narrative,” because that implies someone put one together. What there is is the common understanding that access to gender-affirming care is associated with lower depression and suicidality. That understanding is based in solid empirical fact (Bauer et al., 2015; Turban et al., 2020; Green et al., 2021; Tordoff et al., 2022; etc.).
Second, there’s clearly no broad message that “no matter who you are, if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself,” because if there were, a hell of a lot more people would be transitioning. There may be a common understanding that “if trans people don’t transition, they’ll kill themselves,” because that would make sense as a simplification of the actual facts. If Powell heard that as “if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself,” then that reflects something material about her internal experience. It does not demonstrate the existence of a broad spray of pro-trans propaganda in all directions.
2
At 160cm, [Powell] felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.
This is a cute little jab because this is clearly intended to play on trans men’s and transmascs’ dysphoria — “No matter what, Powell’s transition was doomed from the start! No italics real end italics man is that short!”
In reality, that’s approximately the 4th percentile for male height in the United States (U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, 2017). Does that sound extremely low? Yes, it does. But if you divide a very large number, like the number of people in the US, into 100 pieces, each of those 100 pieces is still going to be very large. Being at the 4th percentile means Powell is taller than about 7 or 8 million men in the United States alone; about 300 million in the world (Jelenkovic et al., 2016). Height dysphoria, or the attempt to inflame it, cannot be treated as neutral, objective fact.
3
At no point was [Powell] asked about her sexual orientation
neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child
I’m going to take the mask of sarcastic, laconic criticism off for a moment and say this: Powell’s experience of child sexual abuse (CSA) victimisation is both horrifically broadly shared (Pereda et al., 2009; Mathews et al., 2023, Box 1) and, individually, simply horrific. I sincerely hope that she’s been able to get care and that she has some kind of peace.
With equal sincerity, I do not believe Pamela Paul cares a jot. She’s leveraging Powell’s trauma to restate an old homophobic canard, namely that queerness — or, in this updated form, transness — is caused by CSA (Schlatter & Steinback, 2011). At the time I wrote the Twitter version of this piece, there was a meme on the topic by fascist webcartoonist Stonetoss merrily doing numbers. Bluntly put, this is Nazi shit.
5
Many … well-meaning liberal … people … have been attacked … and intimidated into silencing their concerns.
Who? By whom? Given how potent a weapon this claim is for the article’s central ideological line of attack, it would be really helpful to back it up with a source.
6
Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States
I have always found this kind of appeal to authority really interesting, because it sounds great if you’re not the patient. It sounds great because of certain beliefs we have about healthcare as a “caring” occupation and therefore about what personal qualities must be required to accrue medical authority. If you are the patient, at least if you’re the patient for long enough, it becomes more apparent that that the personality traits with which medical authority is associated are only those which are associated with authority everywhere else — the propensity to seek it and the competence to do so successfully. People may want medical authority for good reasons, like effectively assisting patients they care about, or they may not, but there is no way to know in advance. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Given the tone of the last paragraph it will probably therefore come to you as no shock that Laura Edwards-Leeper is not actually being quoted here for her genuine concern for the wellbeing of trans kids. She’s being quoted here because she’s a conservative clinician who has been a dial-a-quote for other conservative and anti-trans commentators since no later than 2018 (James, 2024a), and has done a little bit of anti-trans commentary herself (see, e.g., Edwards-Leeper & Anderson, 2021).
7
Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria
Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender
The intentionally ambiguous wording, “mental health issues,” is supposed to imply that they have diminished capacity to give informed medical consent. Of course, they’re always just talking about stuff like anxiety and depression, using its commonness among trans people (Wanta et al., 2019) as a lever.
Of course, sometimes it’s stuff like autism, again because it’s common (Strang et al., 2018). In that case, the lever is that a lot of allistic people think that autistic people are too childish or eccentric to make decisions. There is no actual evidence to support this position. For instance, there is no evidence of increased transition regret among autistics (Gratton et al., 2023). The only material impact that autism has on transition is that allistic practitioners use it as a pretext to improperly deny care to autistic trans people based on vibes (Strang et al., 2016, p. 5).
And, of course, what all this is missing is that even disorders that do compromise decisional capacity — psychotic disorders, those that include delusion or hallucination — don’t automatically disqualify you as a medical decision maker, because it would be fucked up if they did. The direction given in the WPATH Standards of Care is that a patient who has such a condition should be assisted in stabilising it and then allowed to proceed with transition (Coleman et al., 2022, pp. S36–S37); this is consistent with the capacity standard in every other field which has to consider this scenario (Morris & Heinssen, 2014). I realise that it would be very convenient for the right if there were a category of people who they could use as precedent for a blanket permanent all-circumstances denial of healthcare that they don’t like, but there isn’t! The world doesn’t work that way!
9
several researchers have documented [rapid onset gender dysphoria]
There are several hyperlinks in The Times‘ source copy of this passage. Those links lead to, in order:
the website of Lisa Littman, a professional anti-trans disinformation operator (Billard, 2023);
a paper by two other such operators, J. Michael Bailey (on whom more later) and Suzanna Diaz, in its republication (Diaz & Bailey, 2023c) in the fringe Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, neatly concealing the fact that its first publication (Diaz & Bailey, 2023a) in the Archives of Sexual Behavior — on which more later (#25) — was retracted for research misconduct (Diaz & Bailey, 2023b);
a paper by Littman (2021) which, as Lee Leveille (2021b) notes, relies heavily on extremely biased sampling for politically reliable subjects, leading questions, and p-hacking, and still fails to massage its data into supporting its conclusions, which have no obvious factual basis.
However, while I’m including these findings to illustrate the depth of Paul’s duplicity here, it’s actually not strictly relevant to my critique of the Financial Review‘s copy of the piece, because in the Financial Review‘s copy, those passages do not contain those links. More on this later (#66).
10
many healthcare practitioners have seen evidence of it in their practices
The plural of anecdote is not data.
11
Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which … until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity
This feels incidental compared to everything else, but fuck it, I’m a completionist: it’s not true. The Tavistock was the only paediatric gender clinic in England and Wales. Scotland, which geography enjoyers will remember is also in Great Britain, has the Sandyford paediatric gender clinic. The UK as a whole has the adult Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) system, which is still running, insofar as it has ever run at all. It wouldn’t suit Paul’s angle to note this, though, so she simply lies about it.
12
[The Cass Review’s Interim Report] noted that ‘primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach’ …
From the way this is placed, you’re clearly supposed to think it’s a key finding. It’s not. It’s in there (The Cass Review, 2022, p. 17, clause 1.14) but it’s in there as evidence, without a judgement on its veracity. The finding would still be in the report, in the same place, even if, for example, the review’s chair Dr Hilary Cass and her team knew that it was false, because the existence of a false assertion of that nature would be relevant to the Review.
Can we assume it’s true? No, not really. While the NHS England Gender Identity Development Service (NHS GIDS) — the paediatric gender clinic at “the Tavistock,” which is a broader medical entity which provides non-gender-related care — was still operating, there was deep political division between evidence-based providers and anti-trans clinicians, broadly acknowledged by both (Moore, 2021a) sides (Brooks, 2023).
Paul obliquely admits to knowing this later in the article by way of her casual mention of Grace Powell’s therapist, who she describes as a non-gender-affirming practitioner from the Tavistock. Paul therefore knows about the political division at the Tavistock, and knows that the mere fact that someone at the Tavistock said this means nothing. But she lies about it anyway.
13
In 2021, [Stephanie Winn] spoke out in favour of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way
Did she, though? I had the temerity to click on the link that Paul provided and it looks like what Winn actually spoke out in favour of was forcing trans men onto estrogen:
Furthermore:
When a natal female tells us she feels unfeminine & dysphoric, & thinks this might mean she’s trans, shouldn’t a doctor first check her hormone levels? Could low estrogen/progesterone be the cause of both her depression, and her sense of being less feminine?
This is more likely to occur if she has experienced complex trauma, especially early sexual trauma, which would also correlate with feeling disconnected and unsafe in her body.
Could it be that women who want testosterone actually need estrogen instead?
That seems like a different thing from what Paul described! Actually a totally different thing! And also kind of evil!
14
Some threatened to send complaints to [Winn’s] licensing board, saying that she was trying to make trans kids change their minds through conversion therapy
Winn’s licensure is in Oregon, meaning she is banned from practicing conversion therapy on people under 18 under Oregon Revised Statutes (Or Rev Stat) § 675.850(1) per Or Rev Stat § 675.850(2)(b)(A)(v). The definition of “conversion therapy” in Oregon state law is in Or Rev Stat § 675.850(2)(a)(A): “attempting to change a person’s … gender identity, including behaviors or expressions of self”.
But who says Winn was “attempting to change [any] person’s … gender identity, including behaviors or expressions of self”? Well, Winn, for one thing, who as well as proposing to subject trans kids to the Alan Turing treatment (see Meyer, 2013) also, for example, advised parents to put them through acupuncture in the hopes of provoking a hatred of needles because “the child’s hatred of needles could also help spark desistence [sic]” (Winn, 2022).
Winn stated an intention to engage in conversion therapy, and, to my understanding, actually did so. Oregon law says this is the point where, at minimum, the Board should get involved. Call me crazy but I actually think it is good when people Pamela Paul doesn’t like and people she does are equally bound by the law.
15
which has left [detransitioners] open as attacks as hapless tools of the right
If they are choosing to allow themselves to be used to achieve the right’s broader strategic ends — which the detransitioners with the most media prominence verifiably are (Alfonseca, 2022; Doyle, 2023; Henry, 2024) — then they are, objectively, tools of the right, regardless of any other quality of the relationship.
Under those circumstances, assuming that they are simply hapless — unfortunate — is the charitable, reasonable thing to do. The alternative would be assuming that the very specific and by no means representative subset of detransitioned people who engage in this activism are actually intentionally complicit.
16
These are people who were once the trans-identified kids
To me, this is a revelatory phrase, because it really cuts to the heart of what Paul is trying to pull here.
Transness is an internal experience with no empirical test. The way you know if someone is trans is if they tell you — if they identify themself to you as trans — if they “trans-identify,” if you like. The hostile “trans-identified” (TransActual, n.d., 3(d)) and the neutral “trans” overlap 1:1.
Paul wants you to think that her angle is that it was wrong to treat these specific people, and that it was wrong ab initio, from the start, because sufficient care wasn’t taken to ensure that they were trans — which logically requires that there must be a level of care which would be sufficient for that purpose.
However, Paul also says that these people “were,” without condition or qualification, “trans-identified kids,” i.e., trans kids. So there is no distinction between these people when they were kids, and trans kids. There may be a standard which could be used to distinguish the two but that standard has in all of human experience so far failed to do so.
That’s interesting, because that leads us inescapably to another conclusion: that all actually existing trans kids, jointly and severally, can’t be distinguished from these people by any measure. Meaning that no trans kid has received sufficient assessment to make sure they are really trans. Meaning affirming any trans kid is wrong. This isn’t an argument for more careful care, this is an argument for total prohibition, now, everywhere.
17
that so many organisations say they’re trying to protect
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the “say” in this passage, dropped in with such pointed lightness and delicacy. Read: “But they’re lying! They’re filthy degenerates who have designs on your children! I tell you they’re lying!”
18
Several of those who questioned their child’s self-diagnosis …
Paul calls knowing you’re trans a “self-diagnosis” to make it sound complex and technical. Note that she could also have used this argument with homosexuality when it was in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (American Psychiatric Association, 1952; American Psychiatric Association, 1974) and the International Classification of Diseases (World Health Organization, 1977). Note that in fact nobody left of say Nick Fuentes would now bother pretending that “mum, dad, I’m gay” is a “self-diagnosis”.
Paul can only get away with this kind of obfuscatory bullshit because she and people like her have, with significant funding and institutional backing, been able to present transness, including in kids (Gill-Peterson, 2021) — a phenomenon which has been present for literally all of human history (Daniels, 2021) — as “new”.
19
… say it has ruined their relationship
Yeah, telling your child they’re wrong about something only they’d know will have that effect, especially when you deny them medically necessary care as a result. A key element of love is trust. Parents are not exempt from having to act like they actually love their kids. I don’t know what these folks expected.
20
How would hormones help a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression? she wondered
I mean I could argue against the easy version of this position: depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can both be secondary to (caused by) dysphoria. They can also both be exacerbated by it; the mood state dysphoria, with which specific gender dysphoria intersects, is also a core symptom of depression (Morin, 2023), while as an anxiety disorder (Better Health Channel, 2022), OCD is susceptible to gender dysphoria’s anxiogenic effects (Dhejne et al., 2016). Hormones relieve dysphoria. Therefore, hormones can relieve depression and OCD — voila.
So the only way this position holds up any better than that is assuming that she means depression or OCD which is primary (of no other cause), or at least not secondary to dysphoria. So the immediate question obviously is why — as the framing implies — would you have expected this answer to come up in a group of people whose connecting element is that their kids experience dysphoria? Why would it be their job to know?
But more broadly, as someone with primary major depression and OCD, I can take this one: the answer to “how do hormones help with those things?” is they don’t; that’s not what they’re for, which doesn’t make them any less useful for what they are for. It’s like saying “How does ibuprofen help with ADHD?” It doesn’t! Why would it? Why would it have to?
21
Others say their child learned these ideas in the classroom … through curricula supplied by trans rights organisations
Okay, look, I’m sceptical about this given the furore that ensues every time the possibility of “curricula supplied by trans rights organisations” or anyone close to them comes up — anybody remember Safe Schools (Law, 2017; Louden, 2017; McKay, 2019)? — but since I don’t have the evidence to dismiss it out of hand I have to press on.
Which I will do like this: yeah it’s expected for school curricula to be informed by current knowledge from subject matter experts. It’s considered good even!
22
The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. ‘In front of my son, the therapist said, “do you want a dead son or a live daughter?”‘
Strictly speaking I can’t dismiss this out of hand either because I wasn’t there but I have my limits. Let’s be real: this didn’t happen. I changed my pronouns to they/them in 2013, changed them again to she/her and started HRT in 2020, and started doing Several Problems-type work in or around 2021. In over a decade of being increasingly engaged with trans issues, I have never heard or read of this phrase being used in a clinical context except in pieces like this one. If I Google it, I don’t get results from providers or LGBTQ+ advocacy groups; I get them from Newsmax (Cacciatore, 2022), Ben Shapiro (2022), and Transgender Trend (Biggs, 2018) — people who share Paul’s views, to a one. To the extent that it intersects with reality at all, it’s parents describing their own thought processes (e.g., Hirt-Manheimer, 2021), not providers trying to coerce them.
As an aside, I actually disapprove of this formulation anyway. Like it’s fair but I also think it’s oversimplified and reductive. Your child is statistically more likely to die if you don’t let them access care, but it’s not a given. They might simply breathe their last in eighty years having never truly lived.
23
Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside agreeing with a child’s … gender identity is to put a [trans] youth at risk of suicide
which feels to many people like emotional blackmail
When someone tells you, with bulletproof evidence, “you are actively increasing your child’s risk of suicide,” the well-adjusted and normal thing to do is, obviously, to go “you know, the real problem here is that what you said made me feel bad”.
25
But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive
In The Times‘ copy, this passage contains two citations. The second one goes to Edwards-Leeper & Anderson (op. cit.), which is an op-ed so I’m not fisking it here (get your own primary sources, Pamela!). The first one, ‘methodological flaws,’ however, goes to an apparently peer-reviewed paper, Abbruzzese et al. (2023) … which was published in a Clarke–Northwestern journal, and written by three members of the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM). In a just world, citing this bullshit would get Paul’s article taken down and me paid $50,000 for the number of brain cells I lost reading it.
The Clarke–Northwestern clique is a group of anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation operators and pseudoscience extruders who coalesced at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) — which later became the core of the merger that formed the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto — and Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois, United States) in the early 1980s. Core members are considered to include (Abernathey, n.d.; James, 2019):
J. Michael Bailey, on whom more later;
Ray Blanchard, who formulated Blanchard’s transsexualism typology, which heavily pathologises trans women (Serano, 2020) and separates them into two groups, homosexual–transsexual (HSTS; in brief, “gay men so gay they want to be women to fuck more men”) and autogynaephilic1 (AGP; “straight men with an all-consuming fetish for being women”);2
Alice Dreger, an acolyte of Blanchard, and a major influence on the “irrational censorious trans activists vs. innocent scientists” media narrative which Paul leverages here (Jones, 2016; Serano, 2021);
Dr Kenneth J. “Ken” Zucker, disgraced former director of the CAMH Gender Identity Service who used it to do conversion therapy (Zinck & Pignatiello, 2015, p. 21, clause 14), now a conversion therapy promoter and anti-trans dial-a-quote (James, 2024e).
The best-known Clarke–Northwestern-aligned journal is the Archives of Sexual Behavior, founded by fellow conversion therapist Richard Green (Ashley, 2019) and published by Springer Nature for the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR). Ken Zucker has been its editor since 2000 and uses it, according to veteran trans affairs analyst Andrea James (2024f), as a “bully pulpit” for his views. Zucker’s editorship has notably been characterised by a rather laissez-faire attitude to peer review for authors who share his political views (see, e.g., Carey, 2012).
The Archives is not the journal cited here. The journal cited here is the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy (JSMT), another Clarke–Northwestern journal edited by trusted Zucker associate (Abernathey, n.d.) Robert Taylor Segraves (Taylor & Francis Online, n.d.). The editorial board under Segraves’ editorship includes (Taylor & Francis Online, op. cit.) Zucker himself, as well as Stephen Levine, an advisor to conversion therapy promotion group Genspect (Duval, 2021) also known for his work helping to deny trans prisoners medically necessary care (Stahl, 2021).
With regard to trans healthcare, JSMT serves as a nominally peer-reviewed platform for the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM), an opaquely funded anti-trans disinformation operation (Moore, 2021b) with members on several continents, including Australia (Turner, 2023). The authors of the paper cited by Paul are
Evgenia Abbruzzese, who discloses her affiliation with SEGM in the paper;
Levine, mentioned above, who does not here disclose his affiliation with Genspect;
Julia Mason, who does not here disclose her affiliation with SEGM.
The substance of the paper itself would take me another entire article to properly dissect; I have focused mostly on the context here because that context, unlike the specific contents of this paper, remains relevant throughout the article. In short, its three key criticisms are that
the study had uncontrolled confounding (it didn’t);
it didn’t report all relevant adverse outcomes (it did), and
it doesn’t count today for Secret Reasons (it does; this is discussed further below).
For anyone who’s bothered to actually read the article and follow up its citations it is a transparently specious and baseless critique. Not that that stops Paul.
26
Pediatricians, psychologists, and other clinicians … dissent from this orthodoxy, believing it is not based on reliable evidence
[Kimberly] subsequently founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and the LGBT Courage Coalition …
One man, two supposedly full-fledged advocacy groups. I personally think I’d be satisfied with one but that’s just me. I am familiar with the Gender Dysphoria Alliance — its membership consists largely of conservative trans men and transmasculine people who pursue a self-interested but broadly anti-trans politics founded in transmisogyny, the hatred of trans women. Their 2021 open letter Trans Men Fight Back (Kimberly et al., 2021) is particularly edifying reading on that subject.
I was not previously aware of the LGBT Courage Coalition, but upon review it appears to consist entirely of established, mostly cis, anti-trans activists, and conducts its activism entirely through two social media accounts, one on Substack and one on Twitter. Notably, it shares a significant noun with the Catholic Church’s ex-gay apostolate, Courage International — perhaps coincidental, but then again (#30), perhaps not.
29
and before sexual maturation
The fact that Pamela Paul and her allies believe it is obligatory for children to “sexually mature” in the way Paul and co. would like, even against any wishes the child themself might have on the matter, has implications I would prefer not to think about.
30
and that gender ideology can mask and even abet homophobia
For anyone not as in the weeds as I am, “gender ideology” is a flag. I would call it a dogwhistle but it gets used so often and with such obvious vitriol very quickly descending into the range of the human ear.
Specifically, it’s a snarl word originally developed for political work by the Roman Curia, the central administration of the Catholic Church. The actual origin is from the strain of Catholic social teaching expounded by Pope John Paul II starting with his Theology of the Body lecture series of 1979–1984, which treats men and women as different in an essential way, complementary (intended by God for different roles), and immutable.
The concept was developed and fleshed out by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, who was at that time the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Church’s senior doctrine officer and internal investigator. The catalyst for Ratzinger’s interest appears to have been the proceedings surrounding the Federal Republic of Germany’s Transsexuellengetz (Transsexual Act) of 1980, which ultimately passed and established Germany’s current legal gender recognition regime (Case, 2019).
“Gender ideology,” as used by the Holy See and other people who have picked it up — I’m not suggesting this is a solely Catholic conspiracy, I’m not Dan Brown — is an empty signifier (Reid, 2018). It has no fixed denotative (literal) meaning: if you ask “what is it?” or “show me an example of it,” the speaker can define it however they want. It does, however, have a connotative (felt/implied) meaning: that trans gender is an ideological project; that trans people say, act as if, believe they are trans because we have been convinced certain political propositions are true.
This doesn’t make any damn sense. Historically, practitioners who would be ultraconservative by modern standards have felt free to admit in the privacy of journals (see, e.g., Lebovitz, 1972, p. 105; Davenport, 1986, p. 515) that plenty of kids come out as trans practically the instant they can talk. If humans had the capacity to just pop out kids capable of that level of leftist political sophistication at that age right and left, this article would be in Russian. On the other hand, “gender ideology” is 2 words and so far I have spent 4 paragraphs explaining it; in the much less verbose Twitter version, I still needed 5 Tweets. You can see therefore how the term might be useful for its proponents.
Incidentally, like Paul’s accusation of trans “institutional capture,” the reas: in German academic use, the term “gender ideology” (Geschlechterideologie) has an established meaning that does not refer to trans people — namely “an ideology that regulates sex and gender” (see, e.g., Knapp, 1988, p. 12; Rohde-Dachser, 1991, p. 143; Kuhn, 1994, p. 6). The Catholic Church’s appropriation of the term “floods the zone” (see Stelter, 2021) of an entire strain of sociological discussion — one whose conclusions in the cold light of day look rather inconvenient for institutions like the Catholic Church. As with most right-wing canards, every accusation is a confession.
31
I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay
According to Reisner et al. (2023), the proportion of respondents in a sample of United States trans people who described themselves as straight was 17.6% (versus 90.1% of cis controls), so I am forced to tactfully suggest that this may not have been a very clever idea.
32
says Kasey Emerick
I was surprised to discover that I know, or at least directly know of, Kasey Emerick. We are not acquainted, but she (I am following the article’s guidance on pronouns) is an established ideologically motivated detransitioned activist who was previously active on Twitter under the name “KC Miller”.
Because I was active at the same time as, and adjacent to, Emerick, I can’t help but notice that some of the particulars of her story appear to have changed. For instance, Emerick says she detransitioned because she realised she had been “living a lie”. She joined Twitter after her detransition, yet at that time, she said that she was “comfortable living as a man”:
She also mentioned at the time that she didn’t have any intention of stopping testosterone — which is why it’s somewhat surprising that Paul’s narrative now indicates Emerick had stopped testosterone around that time. Actually, Paul indicates that Emerick said that; there may be a reason Paul isn’t confident enough in the claim to put it in the authoritative editorial voice. But maybe not.
33
Raised in a conservative Christian church, she says ‘I believed homosexuality was a sin’
As someone who’s estranged from a birth family which (apart from a few escapee atheists) consists of several generations of Latter-day Saints and a handful of Pentecostals, I’m entertained by the suggestion that conservative Christianity doesn’t also teach that transgenderism is a sin. What about the Nashville Statement (2017, Art. VII) or the SBC’s 2014 Resolution on Transgender Identity (Burk, 2014)? What are they, a pork chop?
34
To the trans activist dictum …
The use of “dictum” here is intentional. Who issues dicta? Logically, a dictator. Paul is endeavouring to suggest that the filthy trans are attempting to assert a deeply unwholesome authority over your kids.
After I published the original version of this piece on Twitter, a friend suggested I might be giving Paul too much credit — it could quite simply be intended to evoke “dick,” which in context would be equally grim.
35
… says Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counsellor based in Phoenix
Paul forgets, once again, to mention precisely who her subject is. Ayad is an anti-trans disinformation operator in the same small, tightly-bound network as the other such operators named in this article, and is a core member of it: she is a member not only of Genspect (n.d.) and SEGM (James, 2024c), but of a number of others, including the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association (GETA) (Murphy, 2024) and Sex Matters (James, 2024c). GETA’s stock in trade may be inferred from the fact that “gender exploratory therapy” was previously named “gender reparative therapy” (Countering Hate Speech Aotearoa, 2023) — a euphemism presumably abandoned when it became too well known that “reparative therapy” is simply another name for conversion therapy (Human Rights Campaign Foundation, “The lies and dangers of efforts,” n.d.). Of Sex Matters — more later (#61).
36
[Ayad is] a co-author of When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents
Studies show that around 8 in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty
Wrong! This is an old canard, and I, being a fool, am constantly surprised that it’s still in circulation, but I guess with mastheads as complicit as The Times (and the Financial Review) there was no need to come up with anything new.
The trail of citations here is indirect: Paul cites Kaltiala-Heino et al. (2018), who cite Ristori & Steensma (2015). The figure in question is indeed present in Ristori & Steensma (op. cit., p. 3) — actually 85.2%, by their reckoning. That does not mean it is true. In fact, it is manufactured through what I can only describe as scientific fraud.
Here is how. Gender dysphoria is a common experience that a lot of trans people have. “Gender dysphoria” (GD) is also the name of the clinical proxy for transness, i.e., the concept the medical and psychiatric professions use to understand and interact with transness. We’re going to call this second sense “construct gender dysphoria” (“construct GD”) for the purposes of this article. The strict definition of construct GD is given in the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013); any post-2013 academic work referring to “gender dysphoria” is assumed to be referring to the DSM-5 category.
Ristori & Steensma (op. cit.) present their work as a literature review on “gender dysphoria in childhood,” defining GD explicitly with reference to the DSM-5, i.e., defining it as construct GD. They include 11 studies in the review, claiming that those studies pertain to (construct) GD in children.
This is unambiguously not the truth. The studies used wildly recruitment criteria, some informally using the term “gender dysphoria,” but all using a rubric which was approximately or exactly the pre-DSM-5 construct which included transness in kids, gender identity disorder (GID).
This may not sound like a big deal. This is a huge deal. GID included trans kids, but it also included a far, far larger population of cis kids who were gender-nonconforming (GNC): “sissy” cis boys, tomboy cis girls, and any other kid who was GNC in a way considered troublesome, inconvenient, or annoying — and therefore of course obviously pathological — by the medical, psychiatric, and social authorities of the time.
The studies in the review were longitudinal, meaning they collected data on the same variables at one or more points after initial subject enrolment and data collection (Coggon et al., 2003, ch. 7); the studies in this review typically used a single later point (“follow-up”). They uniformly enrolled and collected initial data from participants recruited based on GID-like criteria. At follow-up, however, they investigated (in some cases among other things) how many participants met a set of criteria far more narrowly centred on what we would recognise as transness — typically “transsexualism,” the pre-DSM-5 construct for transness in teenagers and adults. They then determined what proportion of participants with GID were not trans at follow-up and declared that the rate of what, after later work by the VU University Medical Center clinical research group that included Steensma, came to be called “desistance”.
The problem here is obvious. The initial sample can be characterised as “cis and a little fruity with it, or trans”. There are far more cis people than there are trans people; there are still far more GNC cis people than there are trans people total. Studies that have attempted to ascertain what proportion of the general population are trans, even by the broadest possible definition(s) thereof, have not come anywhere close to 20% (Collin et al., 2016). The most likely reason a “GNC cis and trans” sample was still 85% cis at follow-up isn’t that a big chunk of it stopped being trans, it’s that it was circa 85% cis to begin with.
The authors of the studies reviewed perhaps may be forgiven — loath as I am to do so — because the way cis people understood transness at the time was still evolving. Ristori and Steensma, however, were, and remain, leading authorities in trans healthcare, including in paediatric trans healthcare, to the point that they were co-authors of the current WPATH Standards of Care (Coleman et al., op. cit.). Given that — and given that Steensma separately has a record of very interesting data analysis that “just happens” to boost the apparent desistance rate into the stratosphere (Brooks, 2018) — it is not plausible that this was unintentional. Nor is it plausible that Paul herself didn’t know, because she’s clearly au fait enough with this game that, at this point in the article, she’s about to try some statistical sleight of hand herself.
38
and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within five years
What Paul is employing here is a different but equally time-honoured propagandistic device — incidentally, a trademark of Tom Steensma (Brooks, op. cit.). I’ve taken to calling it the “lost to follow-up” trick.
Here is how it works. Every longitudinal study which is big enough and runs for long enough has attrition. Attrition is when, at some point after initial enrollment and data collection, one or more participants becomes unavailable for further collection. The term of art is that they become “lost to follow-up”. Attrition can compromise the validity of the study (Bankhead et al., 2017).
One way it can do so is through nonresponse bias. This happens when the likelihood of participation has a direct causal link to a variable of interest in the study, i.e., when whether you are part of a certain subgroup of interest to the study is something, or is caused by something, that determines whether you can respond to the study at all (Turk et al., 2019). For a straightforward example of a survey consisting of a single question, “Do you have time to answer a survey? (Y/N)” is going to return a higher apparent “Yes” rate than exists in the general population, because only the people who would answer “Yes” are participating at all.
It is necessary to be aware of attrition and nonresponse bias. What you cannot do is arbitrarily assume that attrition entails the specific kind of nonresponse bias you want. So of course Paul is doing exactly this.
The study cited, Roberts et al. (2022), examined a sample of trans and gender-diverse patients who were getting hormones through Tricare, the United States military’s health insurance program, between 2009 and 2018 inclusive. It concluded that “>70% of TGD individuals who start gender-affirming hormones will continue use beyond 4 years”.
Paul asserts that this by definition means the other 30% stopped hormones altogether, implying that they did so because they realised they weren’t trans. That’s not how “lost to follow-up” works; the only thing you by definition know about people who are lost to follow-up is that they’re lost to follow-up.
It may be possible to determine why you lost who you lost, and who you never had in the first place. Erin Reed (2024), for instance, notes several reasons the study may have overestimated discontinuation rates or failed to capture all eligible trans people, based on the social and political context that existed during the study period (2009–2018);
increasing movement of trans customers toward online pharmacies, which have grown more popular, as well as GoodRx plans, which offer more privacy;
political pressure from the Trump administration (2017 onward), which had executive control over Tricare and which had begun pursuing trans service members, and other decisions by U.S. military leadership which may have forced study subjects off HRT other than voluntarily;
Tricare’s notoriously poor trans health coverage even under ideal circumstances and without active political interference.
The study’s authors, meanwhile, note in their ‘Discussion’ section several limitations which are inherent to the study itself as designed:
“We only collected information on medication refills obtained using a single insurance plan. If patients elected to pay out of pocket for hormones, accessed hormones through nonmedical channels, or used a different insurance plan to pay for treatment before and/or after obtaining gender-affirming hormones using TRICARE insurance, we did not capture this information”; and
“We would miscategorize patients as terminations if patients elected to obtain their gender-affirming medications using alternative payment options while continuing to receive other medical care using TRICARE,”
and, significantly, conclude that “our findings are likely an underestimate [of] continuation rates among transgender patients”.
Paul could have done the same as either of these, drawing on the sociopolitical environment or the study design to contextualise the results. She simply asserts what is most advantageous to her, and then sails onward, knowing that the preconceptions of her mostly cis readership will carry her the rest of the way.
39
At the end of her freshman year of college, Powell, horrifically depressed, began dissociating, feeling detached from her body and from reality, which had never happened before
This is an interesting one because the framing is a variation of accusation in a mirror. Paul appears to be trying to dogwhistle toward the right-wing “body dissociation” theory about trans healthcare, which has been floating around for a while (Leveille, 2021b). This theory, in turn, appears to function as a mirror-propaganda-type response to the observation, made by both trans people — notably and rigorously by Gender Analysis’ Transgender Depersonalization Project (Jones, n.d.) — and to a lesser extent by the cis clinicians studying us (Fisher et al., 2014; Colizzi et al., 2015), that unmanaged dysphoria is attended by symptoms similar to depersonalisation/derealisation disorder (DP/DR).
The Project corpus and others like it reflect that the DP/DR aspect of dysphoria is relieved by access to medical transition. The conspiracy theory — the one in whose direction Paul is winking here — therefore holds that access to medical transition causes dissociation. But that accusation can’t work with this timeline: on the dates in the article, Powell started dissociating, seemingly quite abruptly based on the wording, more than a year after she started testosterone, and indeed more than a year after the last change of any kind in her regimen of gender-affirming care. It therefore does not make sense to assume that gender-affirming care caused it.
40
“I expected it to change everything, but I was just me, with a slightly deeper voice,” she adds.
Yes, that’s, uh, that’s the value proposition. T stands for “testosterone,” not “transsubstantiation”.
41
[Powell] tried in vain to find a therapist who would treat her underlying issues, but they kept asking her: how do you want to be seen? Do you want to be nonbinary?
This is interesting, because what this passage says and what it wants you to think it says are different. You’re supposed to read it fast enough that you take away the meaning that Powell’s therapists were trying, through intrusive, repeated questioning (“they kept asking her”), to push her into a specific, presumably begin rainbow text gender-ideological end rainbow text, way of thinking about herself.
What the words actually say, however, is that “she tried in vain to find a therapist … they kept asking her,” which means: she went to more than one therapist, and each one asked her at least one of these questions at least once. If these questions are asked repeatedly by the same therapist, of the same person, they sure do look like inappropriate browbeating, because just about any questions repeated in that way would be inappropriate browbeating in that context. But what Paul says is just as open to the interpretation that Powell’s therapists asked her basic framing questions or questions that logically followed from what she’d been through, and the issue is simply that the questions were trans-friendly at all.
42
Powell wanted to talk about her trauma, not her identity or her gender presentation
As a sometime adherent of feminist theory, I am intrigued by the contention that trauma, identity, and gender presentation can be separated with such surgical neatness. It seems inconsistent with the fact that, for instance, trans people are 4× as likely to be victims of violent crime, including sexual violence (Flores et al., 2021) — both typically fairly traumatic by nature.
Drawing even closer to the core of the issue, trans people are about twice as likely as cis people to have experienced sexually violent victimisation in childhood (Thoma et al., 2021) — the exact kind of victimisation of which Powell was a survivor. I am inclined to say it would have been very nearly a breach of due diligence for therapists not to at least have inquired about the subject.
43
The [ex-Tavistock] therapist asked questions like “Who is Grace? What do you want from your life?”
The thing is, these are substantially the same questions Powell’s other therapists were asking her, so the difference can’t be the questions. “Do you want to be nonbinary?” is extremely clearly a subset of “Who is Grace?”. Similarly, “How do you want to be seen?” is extremely clearly a subset — and not a small subset — of “What do you want from your life?”
What Powell, as Paul represents her, seems to want, is for therapists to simply completely avoid any conversation which might lead to mention of her transition. I am also of the view that your average psychiatroid should be kept on a leash, but given the outsized role that Powell’s transition played in her life — enough so that she is now speaking about it to The New York Times! — I do not see how that is a viable ask.
44
Many detransitioners say they face ostracism and silencing because of the toxic politics around transgender issues
Ah yes, the toxic politics. Not otherwise specified.
The thing is that when Paul says “detransitioners,” she’s talking about a very specific kind of detransitioned person. I know a number of detransitioners and retransitioners myself — they decided transition wasn’t for them after all, or that it was for them but they didn’t want it to develop any further, so they stopped HRT, or went onto different HRT, and/or changed their gender presentation, maybe back to the one they had before HRT, maybe to a different one.
Those aren’t the people Paul is talking about. It’s not particularly true that detransitioned people can’t get a platform in liberal media, but it is absolutely true that right-wing media both can, and are willing to, provide them a disproportionately large and loud platform. Consequently, the kind of detransitioners most represented in media narratives, with the complicity of people like Paul, are a very specific, in my experience politically nonrepresentative subset. When you know that, you can really see the classic conservative routine at work here. “They silenced me for my views!” “Which views?” “Oh, you know …” “On taxes?” “No …”
45
“It is extraordinarily frustrating to feel that something I am is inherently political,” Powell says.
And to think that the trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) movement arose from second-wave feminism, she of “the personal is political”. We’ve come so far.
46
In a recent study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria.
Oh, look, it’s the Archives. Even if that weren’t the case, though, simply knowing this study’s authors would give me an idea of its quality. Lisa Littman and Stella O’Malley I have already mentioned. Helena Kerschner is an advisor to Genspect (n.d.) — no surprise there at this point. J. Michael Bailey, for his part, is a disgraced ex-Northwestern psychologist, who Andrea James (2024g) calls, in an extensively researched entry for Transgender Map, “one of the most unethical sexologists in history,” which I think is laudably restrained given the account she then provides of his career.
Of course, this is all just ad hominem. Don’t worry, there are also huge glaring problems with both the study and its use in this context. To name three:
Sampling was non-random. Of the three named recruitment sources, one was Pique Resilience Project, a since-dissolved “ex-transgender” organisation which worked with conservative politicians and media (James, 2024b), and /r/detrans, a large reddit community infamous for its anti-trans bent, which at and until some time after the time of the survey had an overwhelming majority of non-detransitioned subscribers, according to its own internal polling (DetransIS, 2022).
A central part of the survey instrument was based on the proposal that “traumatic events can contribute to the occurrence of gender dysphoria” without any more evidence than that this is “[a] common belief among clinicians who favor ROGD theory”.
Finally, as you might expect from all of the above, the study unquestioningly treated Littman’s ROGD — as well as Ray Blanchard’s autogynaephilia and autoandrophilia — as real conditions, despite the complete absence of evidence for their existence. The study does not prove the existence of ROGD because it did not set out to do so — it took the existence of ROGD as an unquestionable fundamental assumption.
(To be fair, “I assume things therefore they are real” appears to be Paul’s methodology, too.)
47
Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria
As Zinnia Jones has pointed out, this is not the case. I will append that it’s also another case of projection. Trans people are an underrepresented (Vyse, 2019), impoverished and economically marginalised (Carpenter et al., 2020) group. We do not either individually or collectively have the power to suppress anything.
What trans people have actually done is confront the pseudoscientific spectre of ROGD and show it to be completely baseless and without merit, time and time again (Duck-Chong, 2018; Restar, 2019; Ashley, 2020). We’re participating in the public discourse and, despite being constantly stomped on, we’re winning because we’re right. But this is inconvenient for Paul, so she decides to lie instead.
48
the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term [ROGD] as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis”
Given that this is true it seems like a good reason to me. Things do not become untrue simply because advocacy groups are saying them. Granted throughout this very piece I’ve cited Genspect and SEGM affiliation as the first line evidence that a source is biased, but in every single case I have then gone on to show that it is in fact biased. Paul is just citing the fact that GLAAD is an activist group as if that means something on its own. Should we, as a matter of principle, take the position that elephants don’t exist simply because the Republican Party has one in its logo?
49
a group of professional organisations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use
I’m familiar with the group in question, the Coalition for the Advancement & Application of Psychological Science (2021), and I must say that “a group of professional organisations” is masterful downplaying of “both APAs — the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association — and several of their major international peers”.
50
But those studies, which often rely on self-reported cases to gender clinics, probably understate the actual numbers. None of the seven detransitioners I interviewed even considered reporting back …
See? Paul knows very well what attrition and non-response bias are, and therefore, as above, knows full well she’s full of shit. But sure — let’s do this.
First, 7 people is a comically small sample size to be asserting anything at all. Even if this were a peer-reviewed paper instead of a hit piece in The Times, you couldn’t call it evidence of anything. With an extremely sympathetic funder you might be able to make the case that it was grounds to give you more money to do a pilot study for further research. But it is nowhere near a result on its own.
Second, the mere fact that attrition is present at all does not automatically invalidate a study, as Paul is implying. It is present in pretty much every study, including every randomised controlled trial, and they’re still considered the gold standard (Hariton & Locascio, 2018). Paul even goes on to advocate for them later in the argument. Attrition becomes a problem when it rises to an unsustainable level (Bankhead et al., op. cit.).
What Paul would have to be alleging for her position to make sense is that trans healthcare research has a systematic problem with attrition at an invalidating level. You cannot make this claim without pointing to some actual studies and their attrition rates. You need a more solid basis for alleging that a systematic problem is present than “it would be politically convenient for me if it were”.
Moreover, you could have a hundred detransitioners — which honestly I think is about as many as the right has managed to scrame up between them worldwide — and it still wouldn’t mean shit because their existence alone does not prove compromising attrition bias. If I’m running a longitudinal study at a gender clinic in Australia with a sample of 1,000 patients an attrition rate of, say, 3% — well within the “perfectly fine” zone (Bankhead et al., op. cit.) — then the fact that someone in Idaho stopped T and didn’t tell their doctor affects the validity of my findings not at all.
51
Unlike the current population of gender dysphoric youth, the Dutch study participants had no serious psychological conditions
This is a lie (of omission). Paul’s argument here is lifted directly from Abbruzzese et al. (op. cit.), the SEGM paper previously cited. The SEGM paper notes that the two Dutch studies to which Paul refers here (de Vries et al., 2011; de Vries et al., 2014) were carried out with a cohort of gender clinic patients who had previously been screened using criteria including the following:
Second, they must be psychologically stable (with the exception of depressed feelings, which often are a consequence of their living in the unwanted gender role) and function socially without problems (e.g., have a supportive family, do well at school).
Personally I think this is a stupid set of criteria to gatekeep youth transition anyway but as I’m arguing against the strong form of Paul’s argument, which is the form made by Abbruzzese et al., let’s see what these new “serious psychological conditions” are that the Dutch team failed to consider:
… significant preexisting mental illness such as depression and anxiety or neurocognitive challenges such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) …
So, to recap: the “significant preexisting mental illness” that the SEGM paper refers to — which is the same as the “serious psychological conditions” to which Paul refers — consists in part of two neurodivergences that are not at all incompatible with the Dutch clinic screening criteria. The actual mental illnesses that Abbruzzese et al. contend makes modern trans kids meaningfully different from the Dutch gender clinic cohort are … depression and anxiety, i.e., the specific disorder cluster which the Dutch clinic explicitly, and for very good reason, considered OK.
In short, Paul’s argument here is directly and unambiguously false — “the current population of gender dysphoric youth” and “the Dutch study participants” are not different at all and there’s zero possibility that she doesn’t know that. She’s just relying on you not to look.
52
There was no evidence that any intervention was lifesaving
This argument is also lifted from the SEGM paper, which cloaks its point in the more comfortably detached language of “lack of research equipoise”. In both guises, this point is based on the contention that any and all research showing that trans healthcare is lifesaving is invalid because it doesn’t have a control group. That’s dark. Really dark. Like “at this point, maybe this person should be arrested” levels of dark.
Studies of new medical interventions typically have two groups of subjects, the experimental group and the control group. The experimental group receive the novel intervention. The controls are selected for statistical similarity to the experimental group, but don’t receive the intervention; they provide a “normal” baseline against which the performance of the novel intervention can be assessed.
The control and experimental groups are “blinded,” prevented from knowing who’s receiving the treatment and who’s not. The way this is typically achieved is with a placebo, a treatment which resembles the novel treatment but doesn’t do anything (Kendall, 2003). However, the principle of nonmaleficence in research stipulates that an experiment is unethical and therefore impermissible if it places subjects at risk of harm (Alele & Malau-Aduli, 2023). Where a placebo would do that, the control group must instead be provided with the existing standard treatment (Millum & Grady, 2013).
In this case, though, the treatment being disputed is the existing standard treatment, because decades of reactionary propaganda have been able to successfully present interventions that have been used, in one form or another, for over a century, as “novel”.
What Paul and SEGM are saying, consciously, with clear eyes and no regrets, is that every study showing that trans healthcare saves lives is invalid because they didn’t take an equal-sized, equally miserable and desperate control group, give them sugar pill “E2” and saline “T,” and count the corpses at follow-up. Couched in technical language though it might be, I cannot help but regard this as hate speech. Use as many five-dollar words as you like, but this is incitement to murder.
53
There was no long-term follow-up with any of the [Dutch] study’s 55 participants
Both Dutch studies — Paul does not seem to have been paying close enough attention to remember that there were 2 — were longitudinal studies which took place over a set time period. Any rubric which invalidated them for having “no long-term follow-up” would also invalidate any other study that didn’t run literally forever. (Notably, Paul does not attempt to apply this standard to any of the studies she actually likes.)
54
or any of the 15 who dropped out
Per de Vries et al. (2014, p. 697), no one dropped out. 70 people were invited to participate. 15 didn’t: 1 had died, 1 had left that clinic, 4 were medically ineligible for various reasons, 2 didn’t reply, and 2 refused to participate. Post-enrolment attrition was 0.
There were a further 15 participants who did not contribute complete data. There was a set of 5 survey instruments which were not completed at initial collection by 8 participants because those instruments were added to the study after initial collection. There was 1 survey instrument for which 10 participants did not ultimately have complete data at initial collection due to unspecified “clinician error” (ibid., p. 699). None of those further 15 participants even temporarily “dropped out” in any sense of the term.
55
A British effort to replicate the study said that it ‘identified no changes in psychological function’ and that more studies were needed
Paul intentionally does not mention which of the Dutch studies was replicated because it would destroy her argument. de Vries et al. (2011) was concerned with puberty blockers; de Vries et al. (2014) was concerned with HRT. The British replication (Carmichael et al., 2021) is of the 2011 study.
The thing with puberty blockers is that they’re not supposed to cause changes in psychological functioning; they’re supposed to stop them where they are and give trans kids “time to decide”. (Editorially: The fact that circa 100% of trans kids decide to continue reveals that this is, more than anything, an artifact of cis people desperately hoping the trans kids in question can somehow be led to “decide otherwise”.)
Some of the participants in the British replication started blockers before Tanner stage III, i.e., the point where puberty de facto really kicks in. Most did not. The reason for no psychological change in the pre-Tanner III kids is that they went from “never really having experienced puberty” to … “still never really having experienced puberty”.
Carmichael et al. themselves give measured support to this position, saying that a situation where “[puberty blocker] treatment brought no measurable benefit nor harm to psychological function … is consonant with the action of [puberty blockade], which only stops further pubertal development and does not change the body to be more congruent with a young person’s gender identity” (Carmichael et al., op. cit., p. 20).
The reason for no psychological change in the post-Tanner III kids, meanwhile, is likely that puberty suppression has its own set of unpleasantnesses literally regardless of where you go from there. Sex hormone blockade without hormone replacement sucks — as Carmichael et al. (op. cit., p. 5) note, its “anticipated side-effects … includ[e] … headaches, hot flushes, fatigue, loss of libido and low mood”. It’s a compromise by trans people, not a concession to us.
56
Britain’s Tavistock was ordered to be shut down in March after a[n] investigation found deficiencies in service and “a lack of consensus … about the nature of … dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response”.
Oh, “after”, my old friend. Paul is trying to dog-walk her readers into inferring a causal link: “after, therefore because of”. Paul is leading the reader to believe that the Tavistock was seeing too many kids, some sensible and moderate individual pulled the fire alarm, credible authorities verified that this was the case, and the clinic has been shut down as a result.
But in this case, the truth is quite the opposite. The Tavistock was shut down because, according to the Interim Report:
It has become increasingly clear that that a single specialist provider model is not a safe or viable long-term option in view of concerns about lack of peer review and the ability to respond to the increasing demand.
Additionally, children and young people with gender-related distress have been inadvertently disadvantaged because local services have not felt adequately equipped to see them. It is essential that they can access the same level as psychological and social support as any other child or young person in distress, from their first encounter with the NHS and at every level within the service.
In short: the Tavistock was shut down not because it was seeing too many kids, but because it was seeing too few. This admission is all the more remarkable because it comes from a Review which is now known to have been compromised throughout by Paul’s ideological allies (Jones, 2023; Ruuska et al., 20243). The Review could not avoid admitting this much despite having a very clear interest in not doing so.
But, of course, Paul can’t mention any of this, and wouldn’t if she could. So she simply implies that things are as she wishes they were, and leaves the reader to fill in the blanks.
57
The American Academy of Pediatrics only recently agreed to conduct more research
None of these words are untrue and yet it is a lie anyway.
The lie is in the words “only recently” and “agreed”. “Agreed” implies the decision was made as a concession after being prevailed upon by another party. “Only recently” implies that the concession was secured through several years of such prevailing. The use of both terms falsely links the AAP agreement to several years of semi-publicised internal anti-trans agitation by clinicians such as, e.g., paediatrician and SEGM member Julia Mason (Block, 2023).
In reality, the “agreement” was a measure adopted by a vote of the AAP Board of Directors on its own initiative. In the measure, the AAP specifically reaffirmed its commitment to the principles Paul and her allies politically oppose, reiterating its “support [for] giving transgender adolescents access to the health care they need,” and indicating that the measures were a practical decision intended to address “restrictions on access to health care with bans on gender-affirming care” (Wyckoff, 2023).
Second, Paul makes the assertion that the AAP is “conduct[ing] more research” because it implies more primary (original) research, which in turn implies that the AAP is materially conceding the common anti-trans claim that the current evidence base is insufficient to support its position. This is incorrect. The AAP authorised a systematic review, a scholarly synthesis of the existing evidence. In effect, the AAP is reorganising the existing research for more efficient use.
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in response to years-long efforts by dissenting experts including Dr Julia Mason, a self-described ‘bleeding-heart liberal’ …
As noted above, and as not noted by Paul, Julia Mason is, among other things, an advisor to Genspect (n.d.) and a co-founder of SEGM (Block, 2023).
59
politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine
And yet, observably, they do. Politics determines how and what laws are made. Medical practice is subject to those laws. Politics therefore influences medical practice. It’s not a matter of “should” — the fact that it does so is both unavoidable and cannot be attenuated in any way, and Paul knows that.
This means this statement does not serve the ends it pretends to. Rather, when authors like Paul say, with an affectation of high-minded idealism, that certain matters bound by law should be ‘above politics,’ what they’re really saying is that those matters should be bound by only those politics that have already become embodied in the law prior to now, without right of appeal, in perpetuity.
60
Last year, The Economist published a thorough investigation into America’s approach to gender medicine. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor, put the issue into political context.
Ah yes, The Economist. That place where Helen Joyce used to hang out. For anyone not in the loop: for most of the two decades to 2023, The Economist employed and platformed columnist/editor Helen Joyce, who formally quit in 2023 to devote more time to her work as advocacy director at Sex Matters (“Helen Joyce joins Sex Matters,” 2022), an extremist anti-trans advocacy group (Trans Safety Network, 2023). She is on record with the following view of trans people:
… we have to try to limit the harm and that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition. That’s for two reasons — one of them is that every one of those people is a person who’s been damaged. But the second one is every one of those people is basically, you know, a huge problem to a sane world.
I am not overfamiliar with Zanny Minton Beddoes, who became editor of The Economist in 2015 (Kemp, 2015). However, Joyce has consistently said she was introduced to anti-trans politics by her editor (Jones, 2021; Joyce, 2022). Joyce herself joined The Economist‘s editorship in 2014 as international editor (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, n.d.), meaning that at the time she says this happened, in 2017 (Jones, 2021), there is only one person of whom I am aware who could credibly have been described as “her editor”.
61
Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria
(Pamela) Paul neglects to mention that Garcia-Ryan is a member of GETA (James, 2024d). There are no empirical claims here to disprove; since Garcia-Ryan’s contribution to the article consists solely of his personal and clinical opinion, the fact that he is a member of a conversion therapy promotion group discredits his entire contribution.
62
Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda
Read: Persuading people is good when I do it in The Times, but not when the troons do it on the internet and in the streets.
63
Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults
This claim is sourced to two different graphics from the same Pew Research Center poll (Parker et al., 2022). For the sake of argument, let’s put aside that this data, which is polling data and therefore by nature has a short shelf life, is two years old. The first source, which superficially appears to support Paul’s point, is a simplified, summarised version of the second, which doesn’t. Let’s look at the second.
This section of the poll is concerned with whether respondents favor or oppose particular types of laws being imposed on trans Americans across the country at the time of the poll. Paul is leaning on the headline figure, which shows that 64% of Americans Strongly favor/Favor laws that will “Protect transgender people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces,” while only 10% of Americans Strongly oppose/Oppose them, a margin of 54%. (25% of Americans neither favoured nor opposed.)
Sounds good, right? Now let’s look at the other questions— oh.
Require that trans athletes compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth: Strongly favor/Favor (41% margin);
Make it illegal for health care professionals to help someone under 18 with medical care for gender transition: Strongly favor/Favor (15% margin);
Require trans individuals to use public bathrooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth: Strongly favor/Favor (10% margin);
Make it illegal for public school districts to teach about gender identity in elementary schools: Strongly favor/Favor (3% margin);
Investigate parents for child abuse if they help someone under 18 get medical care for gender transition: Strongly favor/Favor (1% margin).
As you may have noticed, the other laws which Pew respondents favour are not quite as benign in their effects as the one to which Paul was so keen to direct her readers’ attention. But this last one sounds nice, what about—
Require health insurance companies to cover medical care for gender transitions:Strongly oppose/Oppose (17% margin).
—ah. So, to clarify, Americans think we should be protected from discrimination. They also want to ban us from sports — just for the hell of it, since there’s no actual evidence (Pérez Ortega, 2023). And make us out ourselves to anyone in sight if we need to piss in public. And schools shouldn’t be able to talk about us, and if parents support their trans kids and let them get medically necessary paediatric care then it’s child abuse. And if we want to transition when we’re adults then it should be made as expensive as possible to make sure we can’t. Does that sound like “protection” to you?
What this graph shows is that Americans are fine with anti-discrimination protections for trans people on general principle — no one wants to think of themselves as a bigot. But they resolutely oppose any measure that might actually ameliorate that discrimination in any way. In a way, they want trans people to have equal rights — they don’t want trans people to have any rights they can’t imagine wanting themselves.
This is ultimately about equality vs. equity. As a queer teenager in the 2000s, I often heard a particularly insufferable strain of right-winger say, in the most self-satisfied imaginable tone, “Gays already have equal rights — the right to marry the opposite sex” (see, e.g., Prell, 2009). Anatole France put the quandary slightly more elegantly:
… la majestueuse égalité des lois … interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.
… the majestic equality of laws … prevents rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets, and stealing bread.
Vulgar equality, being as able as the majority to do only those things that are necessary for the majority, is no equality at all. What is required is equity — the ability to do those things that are necessary for one to live as well as the majority does without needing to do them. Trans people need rights that cis people don’t.4 There is no serious debate on the necessity of those rights, simply a political and media establishment which is implacably opposed to our getting them.
But enough about that, let’s get back to Paul. Paul pretends she believes she’s advocating a sensible moderate agenda focusing on a core demand. But she cited this graph herself, so she read it, and she therefore knows as well as I do that this poll says Americans are not up for any actual substantial relief of discrimination at all, no matter how minor. If that’s the case then the agenda that Paul proposes we should rally around is no more survivable than the “maximalist” agenda, of demanding the basic human rights and care we are owed, which she opposes. And she knows it. But she chooses to lie anyway.
64
They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible
As a former trans kid, I’d love that too! If only that was what Paul actually meant.
Unfortunately we are caught in a catch-22 where everyone wants more data, but any attempt to actually get it is immediately seized upon by the media as superficially plausible “proof” that the existing knowledge base is insufficient and all current care should therefore be stopped regardless of the consequences.
We’ve also seen what “research on trans kids” looks like under the aegis of current institutions: for instance NHS England (2023), which has advised “the intention that the NHS will only commission puberty supressing [sic] hormones as part of clinical research” and that “outside of a research setting, puberty suppressing hormones should not be routinely commissioned”. This means trans kids will be under constant surveillance for an excuse to forcibly detransition them and/or their peers. It also suggests that if NHS England feels it has enough data, or that at any rate it has no need for any more research, then your child can go jump off a bridge.
65
It would require rising above culture war politics and returning to reason
The intimation here is clearly that the burden of doing these things is on trans people. To that I am forced to say: asserting that trans people should “return to reason” is pretending we didn’t have a demonstrable monopoly on it in the first place. What Paul has is bias, junk science, and vibes.
As for “culture war” politics: the thing about trying to “rise above” a war is that if the other side haven’t stopped firing you just get shot down — and in this case it is very much Paul’s side which is doing the firing. I would say that for the war to stop Paul’s side needs to choose to stop it but that’s not quite true. It is a fact that the war will eventually end. Paul’s faction can choose to stop now, or be compelled later to stop on much worse terms, but one way or another, they are going to stop whether they want to or not, and on that day the “culture war” will have ended.
I’m done with my critique of Pamela Paul. Let’s move on to the Financial Review.
66
This piece was a flaming bag of shit that The Times should never have published, but they did. Nine decided to bring it here, so now it is just as much their flaming bag of shit.
When Nine acquired Fairfax Media, it reaffirmed the 1988 Charter of Editorial Independence, whose jurisdiction includes the Financial Review. The Charter stipulates
that editorial staff shall not be required to work other than in accordance with the Media, Entertainment and Alliance journalist code of ethics and in line with rulings of the Australian Press Council
Now, there is some controversy over whether the Charter of Editorial Independence actually applies — Anthony Klan (2020) alleges Nine never actually signed it and therefore it is not legally binding, which would not surprise me; as he notes in another article, it would be consistent with the state of affairs which has persisted since no later than 2006 (Klan, 2022). The synchronised right turn of the Ninefax mastheads suggests the question of the Charter‘s legal effect is moot: whether or not they are bound by it de jure they clearly do not treat it as binding de facto.
However, despite all of that, clause 3 of the Charter is automatically true. Editorial staff cannot be made to work other than in accordance with the MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics (2018) or the rulings of the Australian Press Council (“Press Council”) because they can simply quit. Given the importance and prominence of their job I would go so far as to say they are obliged to. There is a commonsense ceiling to the stringency of the ethical scrutiny that people are obliged to apply to their employers — Gerry Harvey is a repellent human being who uses the immense influence that his wealth gives him to advocate an actively anti-human politics (Evans, 2008; Godfrey & van den Broeke, 2014), but nobody is suggesting that Harvey Norman cashiers with no influence over corporate policy should quit their jobs and starve. This analogy, however, does not apply here. When you are a member of the editorial staff of a Nine masthead, what you do matters.
Now of course you could simply say that you meant well — you could say that this piece was syndicated from another paper, that you can’t expect every editor to be a world-leading expert in trans healthcare, paediatric psychology, paediatric endocrinology, and so on and so forth, etc. But the thing I noticed is that someone at Nine cleaned this up.
The day I first read this piece, 16 February, I took a snapshot of the Financial Review‘s copy at 01:55 AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10; 15 February 15:55 UTC). I took a snapshot of The Times‘ copy at 02:32 AEST (15 February 16:32 UTC). Both are available through the “Archived copy” link in their reference list entries (Paul, 2024a & 2024b). No changes to either piece were made in the interim.
As discussed throughout this essay, Paul’s assertions are “substantiated” in The Times‘ copy with external links to various sources, however dubious those sources might be. In the Financial Review‘s copy, however, several of those links have been removed. It’s not, as you might expect, a case of accidentally purging all links during the syndication process — links have been selectively removed. Specifically and precisely those links, in fact, whose veracity has been identified as an issue.
Check out, for example, the passage referred to in #7. In The Times‘ copy, as I — and Erin Reed (2024) and Evan Urquhart (2024) — mentioned, two phrases are hyperlinked. The words “some controversy” link to Diaz & Bailey (2023a), which did not bother to solicit its participants’ “wr’tten informed consent to participate in scholarly research, … to have their responses published in a peer reviewed article, … [or] to have their data included in this article,” a consent violation sufficiently severe that publisher Springer Nature twisted the Archives‘ arm into retracting the paper (Diaz & Bailey, 2023b).5 To put in perspective how huge of a fuckup this is on Bailey’s part — and therefore how huge of a fuckup it is for Paul to cite him — the Archives never retracts anything. I mentioned above a study by Robert Spitzer which benefited from a laissez-faire approach to peer review on Zucker’s part; Zucker refused to retract that study even when, years later, Spitzer — having recognised the methodological unsoundness of the study (Arana, 2012) — personally asked him to (Dreger, 2012).
The words “tween and teenage girls” link to the article (Littman, 2018) that made Lisa Littman famous — because, as previously noted, it was forced, amid massive scandal (Heber, 2019), to correct out its major “finding”: that “rapid onset gender dysphoria” exists (Littman, 2019). This is the precise finding for which Paul is citing it as a source.
It is a truism that newspapers don’t care, and have cared less and less over at least the course of my life — born 1994, for reference — whether what they print is true. But fuckups this large have a great deal of potential to be converted into the kind of leverage that can force newspapers to care.
Someone at Nine clearly understood this. How do I know? Because those two hyperlinks have silently, without a printed correction, or any other editorial notation, been removed. The assertions they were sourcing, however, remain in the piece unaltered.
There were almost 2 weeks between The Times‘ publication (2 February) and the Financial Review‘s syndication (14 February). Maybe whoever changed it read Evan’s teardown, or Erin’s. Maybe they evaluated the sourcing themself. How they knew is immaterial. What matters is that they knew. Someone at Nine knew that this piece was a tissue of hate speech and lies, and they actively, consciously, decided to deal with that not by retracting it and apologising, not by correcting it, but by making it harder for Australian readers to realise what it was.
Nine is a member of the Australian Press Council. Running this piece, and actively helping to launder it, clearly violates General Principles 3 and 6, which are binding (Australian Press Council, n.d.). For all the good it will do, I have therefore initiated a complaint with the Press Council, and sent a similar but shorter editorial complaint to Nine directly. I have also judged that since someone at the Financial Review could read Paul’s 4,500-word piece closely enough to pick the sunflower seeds out of its teeth, they are therefore capable of reading this one too. Accordingly, I have publicly asked Nine and the editors of the Financial Review the following questions (Moreton, 2024):
Who made the decision to run this piece?
Who made the conscious decision to launder it?
Why?
What are you going to do about it?
If you found this piece useful or interesting in any way, please consider supporting me via Patreon, Ko-fi, or PayPal.
Footnotes
1 — In virtually all literature on the topic, including I believe Blanchard’s, the concept is spelled “autogynephilic,” but I’m Australian, so I spell it “autogynaephilic,” with an a.
2 — This is a long as hell article so here’s a fun little experiment to break it up: remember that Lana and Lilly Wachowski, creators of The Matrix, are both trans women. Look up The Architect (Helmut Bakaitis) from The Matrix Reloaded. Now look up Ray Blanchard. Go on, I dare you.
3 — The relevant part is the interest disclosure by Riittakerttu Kaltiala-Heino, uncharacteristically modestly credited as the fourth author, who gives “The Cass Review, member of advisory board” as one of her competing interests. h/t Zinnia Jones, who Tweeted about this about a day before I published this article.
4 — Cis people will of course get any rights that trans people get that cis people didn’t already have; that’s the nature of the game. But they still won’t need them.
5 — Bailey has form for violating research subjects’ consent, by the way, the same thing got him fired from Northwestern (Conway, 2004/2005).
Accountable for Equality, Advocates for Youth, Alaskans Together For Equality, Caraballo, A., Ali Forney Center, … & Drucker, Z. (2023, February 15). New York Times sign on letter. GLAAD. Retrieved 20 February 2024.
Alele, F., & Malau-Aduli, B. (2023). 6.3: Principles of research ethics. In F. Alele & B. Malau-Aduli (Eds.), An introduction to research methods for undergraduate health profession students. James Cook University; Pressbooks. Retrieved 20 February 2024.
American Psychiatric Association (1952). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders.
American Psychiatric Association (1974). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (2nd ed.).
American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.).
Andrews, A., Edwards, A., Nicolle, A., Bainbridge, A., Maida, A., … & Schlanger, Z. (2023, April 6). NYT letter. (Original letter published 15 February 2023.) Retrieved 20 February 2024.
Arana, G. (2012, April 11). My so-called ex-gay life. The American Prospect (The American Prospect, Inc.). Retrieved 22 February 2024.
Benestad, R.E., Nuccitelli, D., Lewandowsky, S., Hayhoe, K., Hygen, H.O., … & Cook, J. (2015, August 20). Learning from mistakes in climate research. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 126, 699–703. doi: 10.1007/s00704-015-1597-5. Retrieved 21 February 2024.
Better Health Channel (2022, November 8). Obsessive compulsive disorder. Victorian State Government. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
Cohen-Kettenis, P.T., & van Goozen, S.H.M. (1997, February). Sex reassignment of adolescent transsexuals: A follow-up study. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 36(2), 263–271. doi: 10.1097/00004583-199702000-00017. Retrieved 20 February 2024.
Davenport, C.W. (1986, December). A follow-up study of 10 feminine boys. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 15, 511–517. doi: 10.1007/BF01542316. Retrieved 22 February 2024.
Dhejne, C., Van Vlerken, R., Heylens, G., & Arcelus, J. (2016, February 2). Mental health and gender dysphoria: A review of the literature. International Review of Psychiatry, 28(1), 44–57. doi: 10.3109/09540261.2015.1115753. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
Diaz, S., & Bailey, J.M. (2023c, October). Rapid-onset gender dysphoria: Parent reports on 1,655 possible cases. Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences), online ahead(?) of print(?); Researchers.one. doi: 10.58408/issn.2992-9253.2023.01.01.00000012. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
Kaltiala-Heino, R., Bergman, H., Tvöläjärvi, M., & Frisén, L. (2018, March 2). Gender dysphoria in adolescence: current perspectives. Adolescent Health, Medicine and Therapeutics, 9, 31–14. doi: 10.2147/AHMT.S135432. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
Kimberly, A., Newgent, S., Angel, B., Terrell, A., & Pirie, K., “et al.” (2021, July 25). Trans men fight back. Gender Dysphoria Alliance Canada; Wayback Machine (Internet Archive). Retrieved 18 February 2024.
Nashville statement (2017). Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood; Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (Southern Baptist Convention). Retrieved 18 February 2024.
Nine Publishing (2022, September). Charter of editorial independence. The Australian Financial Review (Nine Entertainment Company). Retrieved 20 February 2024.
Reisner, S.L., Choi, S.K., Herman, J.L., Bockting, W., Krueger, E.A., & Meyer, I.H. (2023, September 15). Sexual orientation in transgender adults in the United States. BMC Public Health, 23, 1799. doi: 10.1186/s12889-023-16654-z. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
Rohde-Dachser, C. (1991). Expedition in den dunklen Kontinent: Weiblichkeit im Diskurs der Psychoanalyse. Springer Berlin, Heidelberg.
Ristori, J., & Steensma, T.D. (2016, January 7). Gender dysphoria in childhood. International Review of Psychiatry, 28(1), 13–20. doi: 10.3109/09540261.2015.1115754. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
Schlatter, E., & Steinback, R. (2011, February 27). 10 anti-gay myths debunked. Intelligence Report (Southern Poverty Law Center). Retrieved 18 February 2024.
There was also a Several Problems Special this week. When I publish the article version on this website I’ll replace this paragraph with a link to the special.
International
Gomez-Lumbreras & Villa-Zapata on HRT
On 12 February, the Annals of Pharmacotherapy published a research article, “Exploring safety in gender-affirming hormonal treatments,” by Ainhoa Gomez-Lumbreras and Lorenzo Villa-Zapata (2024). It received an immediate follow-up in the Daily Mail, emphasising the scary risks of HRT (Morrison, 2024). Editorially, I suspect this is a “vaccine injury”-style scare study — it has a very small sample size and does not give an indication of the prevalence of hormone adverse events in cis people who take HRT.
Babbs et al. on trans emergency department use
Also on 12 February, JAMA Internal Medicine published a research letter, “Emergency department use disparities among transgender and cisgender Medicare beneficiaries, 2011–2020,” by Gray Babbs et al. (2024). While the paper to which the research letter is related is currently embargoed, the JAMA Network (2024) press release said the study results “suggested that transgender and gender-diverse Medicare beneficiaries use significantly more emergency department services than cisgender beneficiaries, particularly for psychological care, and those visits were more likely to be followed by an admission”.
Kalavacherla et al. on prostate cancer
On 14 February, JAMA Network Open published an original investigation in urology, “Prostate cancer screening update in transgender women,” by Sandhya Kalavacherla et al. (2024). The study group concluded that “disparities in [prostate-specific antigen] screening among transgender women may be associated with clinician patterns of care [i.e., whether their doctors tell them to] rather than differences in sociodemographic characteristics or access to care”.
SportAccord World Sport & Business Summit 2024
From 7 to 11 April, in Birmingham, England, United Kingdom, the SportAccord World Sport & Business Summit will take place. SportAccord is the umbrella organisation for all sporting International Federations (IFs) and organisations which work closely with them.
Based on the Summit’s media release (Lingeswaran, 2024; Sweaney, 2024) it seems particularly concerned with the regulation and restriction of trans athletes. Individuals featured on the programme (SportAccord, 2024) include World Aquatics executive director Brent Nowicki, who previously defended that IF’s ban on transfem athletes (Melnick & Carpenter, 2022), and Prof Yannis Pitsiladis, a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Medical and Scientific Commission who is at least perceived by anti-trans activists such as Jon Pike (2023) as an advocate of trans inclusion.
Australia
Federal
AMA 2023 LGBTQIASB+ Health Position Statement
On 6 February, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) published its 2023 LGBTQIASB+ Health Position Statement (Australian Medical Association, 2023).1 The Position Statement calls on the Australian Government to:
“urgently enhance access to beneficial gender-affirming treatment … including through appropriate avenues under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and Medicare Benefits Schedule” (clause 2.4);
“add sensitive, evidence-based, and community-guided questions on gender, sexual orientation, and intersex variation to the Australian Census, in order to better understand the distribution of people who are LGBTQIASB+ and thus provide appropriate services where needed” (clause 2.8);
“improve school-based sexual education curricula to be more inclusive of the sexual and reproductive health needs of people who are LGBTQIASB+” (clause 2.9),
and notes that “measures [of the size of LGBTQIASB+ populations in Australia]” through “the Census or other … research studies” are “widely acknowledged as underestimates due to the restrictive wording and criteria of questions,” and notes that “the lack of nationally representative data on LGBTQIASB+ populations makes it difficult for governments to plan and design appropriate health services for those communities” (clause 6.2).
On 12 February, ABC Radio National’s RN Breakfast broadcast an interview (Karvelas, 2024) with Professor Steve Robson, president of the AMA, following up the Position Statement.
Jones v Pesutto; Keen-Minshull v Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Keen-Minshull v Pesutto
Anti-trans organisers Angela “Angie” Jones and Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (“Posie Parker”) have filed suit in the Federal and Family Court of Australia against John Pesutto MLA (LPA–Hawthorn), the Leader of the Liberal Party of Australia in the Parliament of Victoria. Both are represented by Alexander Rashidi Lawyers, Bridie Nolan, and Katherine “Kath” Deves.
Keen-Minshull has also issued a concerns notice against the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), accusing the ABC show 7.30 “of making 11 defamatory imputations against [her], implying that she either is a neo-Nazi or sympathises with people who are” (Baxendale, 2024).
Pamela Paul strikes again
On 14 February, The Australian Financial Review republished (Paul, 2024b) a 2 February hit piece by Pamela Paul from The New York Times (Paul, 2024a). As this brought the article to the attention of an Australian domestic audience, I felt I had to say something about it, so I wrote a Several Problems Special about it. This paragraph will be edited to include a link to the finalised article version of the SP Special when I’ve published it.
This March, Australia becomes 100% more divorced
In March, Graham Linehan will reputedly arrive in Australia on a book tour organised by the Free Speech Union of Australia (McKenzie, 2024; Napier-Raman, 2024), which is an offshoot of the London-based Free Speech Union, and which was co-founded and continues to be co-directed by Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) research fellow Dara Macdonald. The FSUA says Linehan will stop “in all capital cities of Australia, as well as some regional venues” (Quattrochi, 2024).
Canada
Alberta
Florence v the machine
On 15 February, a group of 36 law professors, legal researchers, and other staff from the University of Alberta and University of Calgary — including well-known trans law expert Florence Ashley — published an open letter, “Re: ‘Preserving choice for children and youth’ announcement”. In the letter, they “express[ed their] deep concerns with [Danielle Smith’s UCP] government of Alberta’s announcement of restrictions targeting transgender youth,” and urged the Alberta Government not to implement the proposed restrictions and not to invoke the notwithstanding clause (The Canadian Press, 2024).
Greece
Hellenic Parliament approves the Equality in Civil Marriage Bill
the Κομμουνιστικό Κόμμα Ελλάδας Kommounistikó Kómma Elládas (KKE; “Communist Party of Greece”);
Σπαρτιάτες Spartiátes (“Spartans”), which is a de facto successor to the internationally better-known Golden Dawn (Fallon, 2023).
Outside Parliament, the bill was also opposed by the Church of Greece, the main Eastern Orthodox church in Greece (Paphitis, op. cit.).
While the Bill gives full parental rights to married same-gender partners who have children, it does not allow them to become parents through surrogacy. It also does not make any provision for trans people (Paphitis, op. cit.).
India
Telangana
Hate violence in Nizamabad and Kamareddy
In Nizamabad, a 50-year-old trans person was lynched by a group believed to have been motivated by rumours about the kidnapping of children in the area. In Kamareddy, 2 cis women conducting a survey were mistakenly clocked as trans and consequently barely avoided a similar attack (Basheer, 2024).
Nepal
HRW reports on Nepali gender recognition; assessment scathing
On 15 February 2024, Human Rights Watch published a report, “We have to beg so many people”: Human rights violations in Nepal’s legal gender recognition practices (Knight, 2024). According to the accompanying press release (Human Rights Watch, 2024), major issues with the gender recognition process in Nepal include:
that the Government of Nepal has been delinquent in implementing the 2008 order of the Supreme Court of Nepal pursuant to Pant v Nepal (2007), which required the Government to legally recognise a third gender category based on self-ID;
that Nepali authorities commonly deny correct documentation to trans people, or deceive or mislead them about the requirements to be eligible for it;
that Nepali trans women are commonly forced to undergo “an invasive and humiliating physical exam in a medical setting” in order to be legally recognised as female.
On Saturday 10 February at 7pm, at a birthday party at the Harrow Leasure Centre in Wealdstone, London (Padgett, 2024), a 19-year-old cis woman (whose name I am not providing) attacked an 18-year-old trans woman who has not been identified, stabbing her 14 times. The victim was hospitalised and survived (Kirk, 2024), and had been discharged as of 13 February (Shields, 2024). The Metropolitan Police (2024) have confirmed they are treating the attack as a transphobic hate crime.
Scotland
Simon Fanshawe elected Rector at Edinburgh
On Tuesday 13 February, the University of Edinburgh (2024) announced that Simon Fanshawe OBE had been elected unopposed as the University’s Rector, having filed the only valid nomination for the post.
As the University’s announcement notes, Fanshawe is one of the six co-founders of Stonewall. As the University’s announcement does not note, Fanshawe is an outspoken anti-trans activist. in 2019, he joined an open letter to The Sunday Times with a number of other anti-trans activists, including Julie Bindel, Stephanie Davies-Arai (Transgender Trend), Kate Harris and Bev Jackson (both LGB Alliance), Jane Clare Jones, Kathleen Stock, and Miranda Yardley, which accused Stonewall of undermining “women’s sex-based rights and protections” (Best et al., 2019). In 2022, Fanshawe penned an anti-Stonewall hit piece for the Daily Mail, in which he accused Stonewall of “preach[ing] extreme and divisive gender ideology … fast eroding women’s rights and their protection … [and] posing a potential risk to children” (Fanshawe, 2022).
United States
Federal
Donald Trump rails against “transgender insanity”
On 11 February, former US President Donald Trump, who is currently considered the frontrunner for the Republican nomination (Reid et al., 2024), held a campaign rally in Conway, South Carolina. During the rally, he told the crowd that if elected, he would sign an executive order to cut federal funding “for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto the lives of our children” (Tomazin, 2024).
HRC/UConn 2024 Black LGBTQ+ Youth Report published
On 14 February, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation in partnership with the University of Connecticut published the 2024 Black LGBTQ+ Youth Report (Fiohr et al., 2024). The report polled 1,200 Black LGBTQ+ kids aged 13 to 17 inclusive from across the United States (Keller, 2024). I strongly recommend taking the time to read it.
M.C. v. Indiana Department of Child Services
On 15 February, in the Supreme Court of the United States, attorneys for Mary and Jeremy Cox filed a reply brief seeking to appeal the Indiana Supreme Court’s ruling in M.C. v. Indiana Department of Child Services. Plaintiffs Cox and Cox are Catholics who lost custody of their trans daughter partly because they persistently deadnamed and misgendered her (“Parents turn to Supreme Court,” 2024).
Medical Licensing Board v. K.C.
On 16 February, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit heard oral arguments in Medical Licensing Board v. K.C., appealed from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Indianapolis Division. The District Court previously issued an injunction blocking Senate Enrolled Act (SEA) 480, Indiana’s ban on gender-affirming care for people under 18, from going into effect. The Board is asking the Seventh Circuit to overturn that injunction and allow SEA 480 to take effect.
Colorado
Kent v. Children’s Hospital Colorado
On 14 February, in the Colorado District Court in Denver, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Colorado filed suit against Children’s Hospital Colorado (CHCO), on behalf of Caden Kent (a pseudonym). Plaintiff Kent alleges that on or about 13 July 2023, CHCO abruptly and “without warning, notice, or plans for ensuring continuity of care” (American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, 2024) adopted a policy of refusing to provide medically necessary gender-affirming surgery to trans patients, and cancelled all pending surgeries, including Kent’s. He further alleges that CHCO continues to provide these interventions to cis patients. He contends that CHCO’s conduct “unlawfully discriminates on the basis of sex, gender identity, gender expression, and disability in violation of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act”. Kent is seeking:
declaratory relief — “an order finding that CHCO discriminated against Plaintiff on the basis of his sex, gender identity, gender expression, and disability”;
injunctive relief — “an injunction and order requiring CHCO’s compliance with [the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act]”;
damages;
costs.
Georgia
SB 88
On 14 February, the Education and Youth Committee of the Georgia Senate approved Senate Bill (SB) 88. If passed by the Georgia General Assembly, SB 88 will require private schools to obtain written permission from “each parent of each child who will participate” before instruction “addressing issues of gender identity, queer theory, gender ideology, or gender transition” (lines 77–78).
Iowa
HF 2389
On 13 February, the Education Committee of the Iowa House of Representatives amended House File (HF) 2389. As noted in SP Weekly #2, HSB 649, Governor Kim Reynolds’ initial proposal for HF 2389, would have allowed trans people to change their gender markers on their drivers’ licenses only to include both their assigned sex and their (binary) gender, i.e., “M–F” for transfeminine people or “F–M” for transmasculine people. The House Education Committee amended it to remove that requirement (Opsahl, 2024a).
In addition, Iowa Capital Dispatch reportage on HF 2389 quoted advice from attorney Breanna Young, who said that the definition of “female” used in the bill would exclude cis women who have medical conditions that prevent them from producing ova. This includes women with, for example, polycystic ovary syndrome (Opsahl, 2024b).
Kansas
HB 2791, HB 2792, HB 2793
On 14 February, the Committee on Appropriations of the Kansas House of Representatives referred two bills back to the House Committee on Health and Human Services (“House HHS Committee”):
House Bill (HB) 2791, which would ban any organisation that receives state funds from recommending gender-affirming care for trans people under the age of 18;
HB 2792, which would prohibit all gender-affirming surgical intervention for people under the age of 18, and would institute the outdated 2017 Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline (Hembree et al., 2017) as the legally binding standard for all other gender-affirming care (Mipro, 2024).
The House HHS Committee, for its part, also held hearings on HB 2793, which prohibits the provision of healthcare services to minors without the consent of their parents — any healthcare services, including in emergency or crisis situations such as mental health crises or physical or sexual abuse (Mipro, op. cit.).
Maryland
SB 119
On 15 February, the Finance Committee of the Maryland Senate held a hearing on SB 119, which
would make Maryland a sanctuary state for transgender individuals and providers fleeing other states. The bill would add gender-affirming care to a law passed last year that shields abortion patients and providers from out-of-state prosecution and investigations”.
On 9 February, in the Montana Supreme Court, the State of Montana filed its opening brief in Montana v. Van Garderen. Last year, the state District Court issued an injunction blocking SB 99 of 2023, Montana’s ban on gender-affirming care for people under 18, from going into effect. The State, appellant, is asking the state Supreme Court to overturn the injunction and allow SB 99 to take effect (Miller, 2024).
New Mexico
Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico launches Casa Lola
In Albuquerque, the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico is opening Casa Lola, a transitional housing program that will allow 6 people to live in a home, rent free, for up to 18 months (Sosa, 2024).
North Carolina
Mark Robinson back at it again (“it” is fascism)
On 3 February, at a campaign stop in Cary, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson (R), who is considered the frontrunner in the Republican gubernatorial primary in early March, advocated for violence against trans women. Specifically, media quoted him as saying:
If you’re a man on Friday night, and all the sudden on Saturday you feel like a woman, and you want to go in the women’s bathroom in the mall, you will be arrested — or whatever we got to do to you. We got to protect our women.
This is not new behaviour for Robinson, who has previously:
said that people “who support this mass delusion called transgenderism” are trying “to turn God’s creation backwards, and make it into a sickening image of rebellion to glorify Satan”;
promoted the fascist conspiracy theory that former First Lady Michelle Obama is a trans woman (Campbell, 2020);
in June 2021, told a Baptist Church in Seagrove that “there’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality — any of that filth” (Yurcaba, 2021).
He also says cultural acceptance of queer people is “part of a slide toward pedophilia and ‘the end of civilisation as we know it’,” (Fain, 2020), denies anthropogenic climate change, and denies the Holocaust (Campbell, op. cit.).
Oklahoma
HB 3219
On 14 February, the General Government Committee of the Oklahoma House of Representatives referred HB 3219 to the house with a “do pass” recommendation. If passed, HB 3219 would prohibit the amendment of sex on Oklahoma birth certificates (Ferguson, 2024).
Pennsylvania
Perkiomen Valley School Board rescinds Policy 720
In Montgomery County, the Perkiomen Valley School Board voted to rescind Policy 720, enacted by a Republican-majority board in October 2023. Policy 720 stipulated that students, staff, and visitors at any of the district’s buildings were only allowed to use bathrooms corresponding to their assigned sex at birth (Assunção, 2024).
Texas
Lakewood Church mass shooting
In Houston, a shooting took place at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church, injuring a middle-aged man (Williams et al., 2024). The shooter herself was killed by responding police officers, who also shot her 7-year-old son in the head, apparently non-fatally (Faguy, 2024).
Right-wing misinformation networks instantly started promoting the intentionally false narrative that the shooter was trans, despite the near-immediate and clear dismissal of that claim by investigators (Stanton, 2024). The pretext was the previous use of a masculine name in the context of forgery by the shooter, who was a cis woman (Drennen, 2024).
Participants in the disinformation effort included:
Continuing a story reported in SP Weekly #2, the Utah State Board of Education (USBE) has officially censured Board Member Natalie Cline (R–District 11), who made the mistake of transvestigating a cis girl where people could see her. While the USBE cannot currently expel Cline, Axios Salt Lake City reports that the State of Utah is investigating potentially impeaching Cline in the Legislature, or empowering the USBE to impeach her (Bojórquez, 2024).
In the meantime, however, the Board has requested that Cline resign from the Board by 19 February, and announced that, pursuant to Board policy and bylaws, “she will be removed from all committee assignments, not be allowed to place items on upcoming Board agendas, and prohibited from attending any Board advisory committee meetings” (Utah State Board of Education, 2024). Cline (2024), for her part, has claimed that the disciplinary measures “constitute election interference” and that the Board is denying her “appropriate due process … that must be afforded me”.
Virginia
Shenandoah County School Board adopts 2023 Model Policies
On 15 February, in the Virginia 9th and 15th Circuit Courts, the ACLU of Virginia filed suit separately on behalf of two different plaintiffs, respectively Jane Doe and Lily Loe (both pseudonyms), against the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE). Both allege harm arising from the 2023 Model Policies.
Doe is a high school student in York County who experienced persistent deadnaming by at least one teacher. Her school claimed that, under the 2023 Model Policies, it had to allow that behaviour, and gave Doe no options to escape other than rearranging her entire class schedule.
Loe is a middle school student in Hanover County who was prevented from participating in a girls’ sports team for which she was, at the time, unambiguously eligible, by a board which cited the 2023 Model Policies as pretext and then immediately changed the eligibility policy to definitively exclude her (American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, 2023).
Plaintiffs contend that the 2023 Model Policies go beyond the limits of the VDOE’s Va. Code § 22.1–23.3 statutory authority for the issue of Model Policies of that kind. They are asking the Court to:
set aside the 2023 Model Policies, which it has the authority under Va. Code § 2.2–4029 to do;
issue a declaratory judgement that the VDOE exceeded the scope of its statutory authority in issuing the 2023 Model Policies, that the policies are contrary to law, that local school divisions are not required to adopt them, and that the Northam administration’s 2021 Model Policies remain in effect;
The legislation says “equal” does not mean “same” or “identical” with respect to equality of the sexes. It would define in statues [sic] and official public policies that a person’s sex is determined at birth and that gender equity terms may not be substituted. It would also establish that limiting certain environments, such as athletics, locker rooms, and bathrooms, to the use of people of one assigned sex only, is not discriminatory.
On 12 February 2024, in the Wyoming House of Representatives, Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams (R–HD50) introduced HB 156. If passed, HB 156 would require courts and other child protection entities to assume that it is not in a child’s best interest to receive gender-affirming medical care (McFarland, 2024).
HB 50
On 15 February 2024, HB 50 failed introduction in the Wyoming House. HB 50 would have defined “gender” as “sex assigned at birth” for all purposes of statutory interpretation, and would have banned trans people from using correctly gendered public accommodations of any sort.
The vote was 37–24 in favour. It failed anyway because the Wyoming State Legislature is in budget session until 8 March. During a budget session, introduction of a bill requires a two-thirds majority. Notably, the Wyoming House is 57–5 Republican; the bill failed because 19 Republicans joined the 5 Democrats in voting to kill it, earning them the ire of Wyoming’s far-right Freedom Caucus (Wolfson, 2024).
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Footnotes
1 — Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, sistergirl, brotherboy, and others. Sistergirl and brotherboy are trans identities specific to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
2 — i.e., the Greek parliament. “Greece” is an exonym derived from the Latin name of a Greek tribe who settled in Roman Italy; the Greek-language short name for Greece is Ελλάδα Elláda or Ελλάς Ellás, the people are Έλληνες Éllenes, the country is the Ελληνική Δημοκρατία Elleniké Demokratía (“Hellenic Republic”), and its institutions are named accordingly.
Fiohr, C.J., Goldberg, S.J., Jones, R., & Lewis, T. (2024, February). 2024 Black LGBTQ+ youth report. Human Rights Campaign Foundation; University of Connecticut. Retrieved 15 February 2024.
Paul, P. (2024b, February 14). As kids, they thought they were trans. They no longer do. The New York Times (The New York Times Company); The Australian Financial Review (Nine Entertainment Company); Archive Today. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
This entry covers Sunday 4 — Saturday 10 February. Apologies for the delay in posting it; I lost access to my ADHD medication and therefore had to cram this all in on Sunday and Monday.
This week I am adding headings so hopefully it is a bit easier to find your way around if you need to come back and skim read at some point in the future.
International
parkrun no longer publishing performance data
parkrun is no longer publishing certain data about participants’ performance, including most first-place finishes and speed records by age grade and gender category. parkrun has been an explicitly noncompetitive fun run since it was established, and the organisation says the records have been removed to counter the growing perception that the event is in some way a competition (“parkrun removes speed records,” 2024). According to the organisation, the decision has been in the works since before the COVID-19 pandemic (“parkrun removes speed records,” op. cit.), and GB News reports that parkrun chief executive officer Russ Jeffereys has denied the timing of the decisions is influenced by an ongoing campaign by anti-trans groups (Trapnell, 2024).
Dave Chappelle wins Grammy Award
On 4 February, the 66th annual Grammy Awards ceremony was held at the Staples Center (footnote: “Staples Center”) in Los Angeles, California. The Grammy for Best Comedy Album was awarded to Dave Chappelle for What’s In a Name? (Hughes, 2022). This is relevant because the entire album is a byproduct of Chappelle’s decision to go all in on transphobia. The title is a reference to the controversy that ensued when Chappelle’s high school, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, tried to rename its theatre after him (Stein & Andrade-Rhodes, 2022). The controversy occurred because of the anti-trans remarks that Chappelle had already made in his previous special (Horowitz, 2024), The Closer (Lathan, 2021). Anecdotally, the primary content of the album is Gervais-esque jerking off about the “importance” of “comedians” as “social commentators”.
Joe Rogan attacks trans kids’ healthcare
On 7 February, The Joe Rogan Experience published episode 2099 (Rogan, 2024), featuring US National Football League (NFL) quarterback Aaron Rodgers, whose far-right political views are a matter of public record (Rosenberg, 2021; Salvador, 2022; Simonetti, 2024). During the episode, Rogan expressed his opposition to allowing trans kids to access gender-affirming care on the grounds that “children are … manipulated by this emerging market” (Rogan, 2024; Hookstead, 2024).
Irish dancing says trans rights
On 8 February, Ain Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha (CLRG; “The Irish Dancing Commission”), the de facto world governing body, adopted a binding motion that trans Irish dancers can compete in the correct categories for their genders. Motions to force trans dancers to misgender themselves, or to establish a separate-but-equal “open” category, were defeated at the meeting by majority vote. CLRG is now drafting a new diversity, equality, and inclusion policy which will reflect its position on trans dancers, to be voted on at its annual meeting in May (Coyne, 2024).
Australia
New South Wales
Midcoast Christian College copping it from Binary
Starting 5 February, Midcoast Christian College in Taree, New South Wales, became the subject of targeted harassment by Binary Australia for “allowing [a trans girl student] to lie about being a girl and making the staff and students go along with it” (Smith, 2024a).
South Australia
Proposed select committee on trans kids
On 7 February, the South Australian Legislative Council considered a motion by Frank Pangallo MLC (Ind–A/L), carried over from November 2023, to establish a select committee to inquire into and report on gender-affirming care for trans kids in South Australia. Remarks by Pangallo and other advocates of the proposal, as well as the language of the proposal, use standard language which made it evident that the intention of the committee was similar to other inquiries into gender-affirming paediatrics proposed or secured by conservative politicians in other Western states — namely to engage in politically motivated “investigation” of the care in question in order to use the fact that it was being investigated as a basis to deny it. For instance, Pangallo said that his rationale was
a pretty clear-cut issue of child protection … We need to make sure these kids aren’t making a decision that is ill-informed, or that they’re being pressured or rushed into it, or that they aren’t perhaps suffering from some other kind of mental health issue that can be resolved from other treatment.
Prior to debate on the motion there was some speculation in right-wing media (see, e.g., Penberthy, op. cit.) that it might pass if Premier Peter Malinauskas (ALP–Croydon) were to permit a conscience vote to MPs of the Labor Party’s Right faction. It may have been considered plausible that Malinauskas would do this because he is affiliated (Dayman, 2022) with the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA), the union “representing” Australian retail and service workers, whose affiliates in federal and state parliament represent the far-right wing of the Labor Party (Seccombe, 2014; Schneiders & Millar, 2016; Australian Associated Press, 2019). However, in the event, Malinauskas did not permit a conscience vote and the motion did not pass (Baxendale, 2024).
Victoria
Geelong Grammar and the Child Safe Standards
Right-wing media appear to have become aware of the Victorian Department of Education’s Ministerial Order No. 1359, which took effect 1 July 2022, and which implements the Victorian Child Safe Standards. Standard 5.3 requires schools to:
[pay] particular attention to the needs of children and young people with disability, children and young people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, those who are unable to live at home, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex children and young people.
The media actors in question are, naturally, misrepresenting this as schools being required to pay attention to the needs of trans students specifically, to the detriment of other students if necessary, as opposed to paying attention to children’s safety needs in general (O’Brien, 2024).
The catalyst for this sudden upsurge in interest appears to have been that one parent has removed his child from Geelong Grammar School, an elite private school previously attended by King Charles III, among others. The student is not Geelong Grammar’s first trans student by a long shot — although right-wing media are admitting this reluctantly, e.g. in the second last paragraph of O’Brien & Borg (2024), or not at all, e.g. in Hannaford (2024) — and the school has noted that its handling of the student is consistent with its Inclusivity Policy, first issued 2015. The matter has, of course, attracted the interest of local political bottom-feeders including Binary Australia (Smith, 2024b).
Moira Deeming and the 2017 study
On 7 February, in the Victorian Legislative Council, Moira Deeming MLC (Independent LPA—Western Metropolitan Region) raised a previous question on notice, #1264, to the Minister for Mental Health, “regarding the progress or fate of a very well-funded and much-needed long-term study established in 2017 into the health outcomes of children and adolescents with gender dysphoria attending the Royal Children’s Hospital”. I am unsure of the context here, but given Deeming’s well-established views on trans people (not positive!), I am very curious to know.
Canada
Alberta
More fallout from Smith anti-trans policy package
On 4 February, the Alberta Medical Association’s Section of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry issued a statement of concern about Premier Danielle Smith’s new anti-trans policy package, mentioned in SPW #1 (Alberta Medical Association, 2024).
On 5 February, Randy Boissonnault MP (LPC–Edmonton Centre, AB), federal Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Official Languages, indicated the Liberal federal government of Canada would not seek to challenge the Smith UCP Government of Alberta’s anti-trans policy package through the courts, according to CBC News (Tasker, 2024).
Northwest Territories
Possible knock-on effects from Alberta
CBC News this week reported that the anti-trans policy measures taken by the Smith UCP Government of Alberta might adversely affect care in the Northwest Territories (NWT). While the NWT is not part of Alberta, due to its much smaller population and therefore much smaller base of medical expertise, the NWT Health and Social Services Authority is often forced to refer patients to specialists in Alberta (Krymalowski, 2024).
India
Delhi
Free bus travel for trans people
On 5 February, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal MLA (AAP–New Delhi) announced that his government would provide free travel for members of the transgender community on buses operated by or under contract to the Delhi Transport Corporation, Delhi’s government-owned mass transit operator. The measure comes in the context of several years of lobbying followed by public interest litigation in the High Court of Delhi; it is similar to pre-existing initiatives for women and senior citizens (Rao, 2024).
Local LGBTQ+ groups have welcomed the scheme, albeit conditionally. For instance, Rupika Dhillon, director of the Society for People’s Awareness, Care and Empowerment (SPACE), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) which works with the trans community, has noted that trans women already qualify for free travel under the women’s free travel scheme, while trans men may have difficulty accessing the trans free travel scheme (Gupta, 2024).
Rudrani Chhetri, managing director of Mitr Trust, a trans health and human rights NGO, says it is important that the Delhi Government should clarify whether trans people who aren’t Delhi residents can use the free service, and how the scheme can be accessed without correctly-gendered legal identification, as access to correctly gendered ID for trans people is very slow (Gupta, op. cit.).
Dhillon also noted, more broadly, that the free transport initiative is not sufficient in and of itself, and indicated that if the Government was really interested in improving the plight of trans people — per Kejriwal’s remarks when introducing the scheme — then it should also draw up a policy to tackle the employment inequality faced by trans people (Gupta, op. cit.).
Maharashtra
Mumbai’s first Pride march in four years
On 3 February, the first Pride march in Mumbai in four years took place. According to organisers before the event, expected attendance was about 1,000 (Ferlita, 2024a).
Pakistan
Federal
On 8 February, elections were held for the National Assembly of Pakistan. Nayyab Ali (Ind), a trans woman who is a well-established trans community advocate, contested the NA-46 and NA-47 districts, in the Islamabad area (Ali, 2024).
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Elections for the provincial assemblies of all four provinces of Pakistan were also held on 8 February. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sobia Khan (Ind), a trans civil rights and judicial activist, contested Provincial Assembly district KP-84, in the Peshawar area (Arshad, 2023).
On 19 January, Charlotte Nichols MP (Labour–Warrington North, England) filed a written parliamentary question with the Women and Equalities portfolio, “to ask the Minister for Women and Equalities if she will reform the Gender Recognition Act 2004 to allow transgender people who are deceased to be legally remembered by the gender they lived by”.
On 29 January, the question was answered by Stuart Andrew MP (CUP–Pudsey, England), the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women and Equalities, who said:
We recognise the sensitivity of these situations, particularly when family and friends are dealing with the loss of a loved one. The Gender Recognition Act (GRA) 2004 provides for people to change their legal gender. Those who have undergone this process and acquired a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) before the time of their death will, of course, be recognised in their new gender.
Without undergoing the process of legal gender recognition and acquiring a GRC under the provisions laid out in the GRA 2004, a person has not legally changed gender. Therefore they would not be recognised in their new gender upon the unfortunate event of their death. That said, where a person was using their new gender with an organisation prior to their death, and that was on their personal records, then we anticipate that the organisation would engage with their family members using the new gender. These organisations could include the NHS, their place of work or community groups.
We recognise that everyone who decides to undergo a change in how their legal sex is recorded deserves our respect, support and compassion throughout the process. The process does not currently allow for third-party applications, such as posthumous applications on behalf of a deceased friend or relative, as any application will be a deeply personal undertaking and choice.
Following the GRA consultation and the subsequent changes we made to the application process, we have no plans to further amend the Act.
(emphases mine)
Esther Ghey, mindfulness, and the internet
On 6 February, Esther Ghey appeared on BBC Breakfast. Ghey is the mother of Brianna Ghey, 16, who was murdered partly because she was trans. One of Brianna’s killers, then known as Girl X, told the Crown Court she “enjoyed watching videos of murder and torture on the dark web” (Pidd, 2024). Presumably in reaction to this, Ms Ghey is campaigning for “under-16s to be blocked from accessing social media on smartphones and stronger parental controls to flag potentially harmful searches to parents”. She voiced her approval of the Online Safety Act 2023, which commenced in part on 10 January this year, but said “we do need something a little bit more drastic for children” (Landi, 2024). She is also raising money to “deliver mindfulness training” in schools (Standley, 2024).
As Trans Safety Network’s Mallory Moore notes in social media commentary (Moore, 2024a & 2024b), Ms Ghey’s goals are unfortunately likely to do more harm than good. Any expansion of the Online Safety Act is more likely to be targeted at restricting trans interest content than it is at restricting the content in which Brianna Ghey’s killers were interested; s 121 of the Act introduces a monitoring regime described by The Register as “encryption busting” (Clark, 2023), and described by Stonewall as “endanger[ing] LGBTQ+ people on a global scale” because LGBTQ+ people facing repression have to use end-to-end encrypted services of the kind being “busted” to communicate with caseworkers in — or to communicate within — the UK (de Santos, 2023). Moreover, the kind of school counselling for which Ms Ghey is advocating has been shown not to work (“Mindfulness in schools,” 2023).
Rishi Sunak does the impossible
On 7 February, in the House of Commons, an exchange took place between Prime Minister Rishi Sunak MP and Opposition Leader Sir Keir Starmer MP (Labour—Holborn and St Pancras, England) that attracted significant media interest in the United Kingdom and abroad. Hansardgives the exchange as follows:
KEIR STARMER: He says he stands by his commitments. He once insisted that if he missed his promises,
“I’m the Prime Minister…it’s on me personally”.
Today we learn from his own officials that he is the blocker to any deal to end the doctors’ strikes. Every time he is asked, he blames everyone else. What exactly did he mean when he said “it’s on me personally” if he does not meet his promise?
THE PRIME MINISTER: We are bringing down waiting lists for the longest waiters and making progress. It is a bit rich to hear about promises from someone who has broken every single promise he was elected on. I have counted almost 30 in the last year: pensions, planning, peerages, public sector pay, tuition fees, childcare, second referendums, defining a woman — although, in fairness, that was only 99% of a U-turn. The list goes on, but the theme is the same: empty words, broken promises and absolutely no plan.
KEIR STARMER: Of all the weeks to say that, when Brianna’s mother is in this chamber—shame! […]
The reason generally given for the media interest is that, as Starmer noted, Brianna Ghey’s mother Esther (mentioned separately above) was in the chamber at the time. Sunak’s remarks have been condemned by, among others,
Dehenna Davison MP (CUP—Bishop Auckland, England), who said it was “disappointing to hear jokes being made at the trans community’s expense”;
Penny Mordaunt MP (CUP—Portsmouth North, England), Leader of the House of Commons, who said the PM should “reflect” on his remarks.
Jess Phillips MP (Labour—Birmingham Yardley, England), who called Sunak “an absolute disgrace”.
as well as Ghey’s father Peter Spooner, who has demanded an apology, which Sunak has staunchly refused to provide (A. Mitchell, 2024). In short, Rishi Sunak has stumbled unenviably into doing the impossible: telling a transphobic joke that the British political media and class didn’t laugh at.
Informally, while the offence given to Brianna Ghey’s parents is the reason now being cited for why the story has had so much traction, I am not sure I believe it is the actual reason. While Sunak’s remarks are bigoted and fascist without context, and horrific with context, the British press is transparently a highly coordinated right-wing propaganda machine with a small number of points of centralised direction. Had it wished to, it could simply have chosen not to notice that anything occurred.
I am inclined to speculate that the actual reason that this is sticking, to the extent that it has done so, is that Sunak, the fifth prime minister of the Conservative Government initially installed under David Cameron’s leadership, appears himself to be the subject of yet another coup plot. Members of the plot may include Kemi Badenoch MP (CUP—Saffron Walden, England), the Minister for Women and Equalities (Crerar & Courea, 2024). If the media is foregrounding Sunak’s wrongdoing here in order to elevate Badenoch, that would be grimly hilarious given that Badenoch has been a leading exponent and architect of the specific transphobic Conservative Party policy agenda which motivated Sunak to say what he did (see, e.g., Bancroft, 2021; Ramsay & Bychawski, 2022; Adu, 2023).
I would like to believe, as some of my international correspondents do, that this might instead represent the high-water mark for transphobia in the British political and media class, and be the start of a turning of the tide. I do not believe it, but I would be very grateful to be proven wrong.
England
’52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals’
Playbill advises that from 4 to 16 March this year, Laurie Ward and Charli Cowgill’s 52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals, which was a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, will play at the Soho Theatre in London. The production, which is for adults only, “dives into the reality of life as a trans woman,” and “was inspired by verbatim interviews with a wide variety of trans women about romance, sex, and the relationship between the mind and the body” (Hall, 2024).
United States
Federal or interstate
Saying the quiet part out loud
On 27 January, Republicans and anti-trans activists held a Twitter Space. Prominent attendees included:
Ohio State Rep. Gary Click (R–HD88, OH), who has a history of anti-trans activism (Riedel, 2022);
Michigan State Rep. Tom Kunse (R–HD100, MI);
Michigan State Rep. Brad Paquette (R–HD37, MI);
Michigan State Rep. Josh Schriver (R–HD66, MI);
Sen. Jonathan Lindsey (R–SD17, MI);
Sen. Lana Theis (R–SD22, MI), who has a history of comparing her LGBTQ+ and allied opponents to child molesters (King, 2022/2023);
Prisha Mosley, an ideologically motivated detransitioned activist (Urquhart, 2023).
In-depth reporting of the Space is available from Erin Reed (2024a). Notable remarks during the Space include (ibid.):
Rep. Click: “… Planned Parenthoods; they pass out hormones like candy, [Ohio Governor Mike DeWine]’s put a stop to that. That’s one of the places a lot of adults go. There’s also Euphoria and Plume …”
Rep. Schriver: “… why are we allowing these practices [i.e., gender-affirming care] for anyone? … we have to be … using that to move the window to say that this isn’t just wrong zero to eighteen, it’s wrong for everyone and we shouldn’t be allowing that to happen.”
Mosley: “I did want to say that … you cannot consent to a lie. Most of thse doctors are straight up lying about the effects and saying … that you can magically change sex.”
Vitsaxaki v. Skaneateles Central School District
On 31 January, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, Syracuse Division, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a right-wing anti-trans pressure group whose activity has been reported on in detail elsewhere, filed suit against Skaneateles Central School District in Onondaga County. In the complaint, plaintiff Jennifer Vitsaxaki alleges Skaneateles CSD allowed her child to use a chosen name and pronouns and provided the child with resources for medical transition. Vitsaxaki alleges infringement of her right to religious freedom, as well as infringement of her parental rights and consequent deprivation of liberty. She is seeking declaratory relief, damages, and attorneys’ fees.
House Bill 7187 & Senate Bill 3729
On 1 February, in the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Greg Steube (R–FL-17) filed House Bill (HR) 7187, which would prohibit governing bodies recognised by the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) from allowing trans women to participate in women’s athletic events. In the Senate, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R–AL) introduced a companion bill, Senate Bill (S.) 3729 (Migdon, 2024).
New ACPeds position statement, same conga line of suckholes
On 1 February, the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), a United States-based anti-trans pressure group, published a position statement “Mental health in adolescents with incongruence of gender identity and biological sex” (Anderson et al., 2024). While ACPeds is transparently a pressure group with no scientific credibility, right-wing media have, naturally, picked up the story and treated it as if it had scientific validity (Bukuras, 2024a & 2024b; Foley, 2024a; Rosiak, 2024; Rudy, 2024).
NY Times platforming Pamela Paul again
On 2 February, The New York Times published an opinion article, “As kids, they thought they were trans. They no longer do,” by Pamela Paul (2024). As Erin Reed (2024b) notes in the Advocate, the article:
misrepresents the credentials and professional record of therapist Stephanie Winn to present her as credible. In reality, Winn is a conversion therapist and relatively eccentric even given that context; she has advocated the use of acupuncture to “help spark desistance” and has suggested trans men should be forced onto estrogen.
revives the old canard that trans people are just gay and transition is a form of conversion therapy. If this allegation were true it would be extremely ineffective conversion therapy, as the percentage of trans people who self-identify as gay, bisexual, queer, etc., is astronomically higher than the corresponding fraction among cis people (Reisner et al., 2023).
revives the baseless claim that 80% of self-identified trans kids “desist” — stop being trans — by the time they reach adulthood. This canard dates back to the 1980s and was manufactured for exactly this rhetorical purpose. It was manufactured by falsely classifying gay kids who never considered themselves trans as having “gender identity disorder,” the diagnostic construct used to represent transness in “scientific” study at the time; by noting that those gay kids still did not consider themselves trans at the end of the study period; and therefore immediately claiming that those kids had “desisted” (Brooks, 2018; Reed, 2023).
On 10 February, The Times published letters following up the piece (Yale et al., 2024). I could not verify the provenance of several of the letters published. One letter is noted as being from a Women’s Declaration International (WDI) organiser, but The Times does not bother to clarify that WDI is a single-purpose anti-trans pressure group (Allday, 2023; McLamore et al., 2023), allowing readers who are not deep in the weeds to make their own assumptions.
The War on Children
On 2 February, Robby Starbuck’s fascist propaganda film The War on Children premiered on Twitter. The film is best known for having been caught by Eli Erlick (2023) attempting to deceive LGBTQ+ people and allies into participating under false pretences (McCann Ramirez, 2023). At that time, the film’s external communications claimed that it aimed
to delve deeper [into] exposing how these recent drag bans and gender-affirming care bans have been made, look at how it has affected the mental health of trans people and look forward into what future progress will look and sound like.
In practice, the film was unable to secure significant usable participation from LGBTQ+ people, and instead heavily features right-wing and fascist figures including
Riley Gaines, a professional anti-trans activist
Rand Paul, the Republican Senator for Kentucky
Chaya Raichik, the influencer behind Libs of TikTok;
representatives of The Heritage Foundation, a broad pressure group with a significant record of anti-trans advocacy;
representatives of White Rose Resistance, an anti-abortion pressure group.
The film directly accuses several notable trans activists and medical practitioners of “grooming” children and being “pro-child mutilation” (McCann Ramirez, 2024).
Trump shills(?) for Bud Light
On 7 February, former US President Donald J. Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, published a Truth Social post advocating for right-wingers to stop the boycott of Budweiser brewers Anheuser-Busch (Trump, 2024), which was launched over an Instagram promotion for Bud Light featuring TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who is a trans woman (Foley, 2024b). The Christian Post, normally very sympathetic to Trump but more sympathetic to transphobia, speculated that the post might have been precipitated by financial links between Trump’s campaign and Anheuser-Busch (Foley, 2024b).
Arizona
House Bill 2183
On 5 February, the Arizona House of Representatives passed House Bill (HB) 2183, which the Human Rights Campaign describes as “a forced outing bill that would require healthcare entities to provide access to minors’ medical records, including for services that do not require parental approval, such as emergency mental health treatment” (Wolf, 2024).
Senate Concurrent Resolution 1013
On 7 February, the Education Committee of the Arizona Senate voted 4–3 to recommend “do pass” for Senate Concurrent Resolution (SCR) 1013. SCR 1013 proposes to require teachers to obtain written parental permission before using a student’s preferred pronouns or name, and mandate that schools separate their toilet facilities, locker rooms, and sleeping accommodations by assigned sex at birth, providing separate-but-equal single-occupancy alternatives for trans students (Gomez, 2024). In effect, it combines two Senate bills which failed to pass in the previous Legislature — SB 1001, which targeted correct pronoun use, and SB 1040, a bathroom bill.
If SCR 1013 is adopted by both chambers of the Arizona Legislature, the proposed measures will be placed on this November’s general election ballot as a ballot initiative, which will then need to be adopted by Arizona voters in order to become law.
Senate Bill 1066
On 7 February, the Education Accountability and Reform Committee of the Arizona Senate voted 4–3 with no abstentions to recommend “do pass” on SB 1166, which would require a public school to notify a student’s parent within 5 days of the first time their child requests the use of a name that doesn’t match the given name they were enrolled under, or pronouns that are not conventionally associated with their assigned sex at birth (Gomez, 2024).
Colorado
On 16 January, the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, a Colorado-based Christian dominionist pressure group established by Richard Nixon’s hatchet man Chuck Colson, “presented a discussion on how to think about and engage gender ideology”. Guests included Miriam Grossman, who is an anti-trans activist clinician (James, 2023), and Stephen Grcevich, with whom I am unfamiliar (Plasterer, 2024).
Florida
Florida Congressional Democrats seeking federal intervention
On 2 February, the Democratic members of Florida’s delegation to the U.S. Congress sent a joint letter to Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, urging him to issue new rules on the federal Real ID Act to counter Florida’s new policy of not allowing trans people to list their correct genders on their driving licenses (Frost, 2024).
House Bill 1639
On 5 February, the Insurance & Banking Committee of the Florida House of Representatives referred HB 1639 to the House Infrastructure Strategies Committee. The ACLU of Florida says the bill “requires health plans to cover the widely discredited practice of conversion therapy and creates additional obstacles for health plans to cover gender-affirming care” (American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, 2024); the Human Rights Campaign characterises it as an “anti-transgender healthcare ban” (Wolf, op. cit.).
Prism die-in against the Kynoch memo
On 9 February, trans community advocates staged a die-in protest at driver’s license offices around Florida. Groups organising the protest included PRISM, which was the primary coordinator, as well as Equality Florida, GLSEN Central Florida, Hope CommUnity Center, SPEKTRUM Health, and the Youth Action Fund (H. Mitchell, 2024). The catalyst for the protest was the 26 January memo issued by Robert Kynoch, deputy executive director of Florida Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, stipulating that trans people could no longer change the gender indicator on their driver’s licenses (Kynoch, 2024; H. Mitchell, op. cit.).
Iowa
House Study Bill 649/House File 2389
On 1 February, in the Iowa Legislature, Governor Kim Reynolds introduced House Study Bill (HSB) 649. On 8 February, the House Education Committee approved the bill, whereupon it was renumbered House File (HF) 2389. HSB 649/HF 2389 provides that:
in all Iowa code, the term “sex” refers to a person’s assigned sex at birth — this would functionally terminate all legal recognition of trans people by the State of Iowa;
gender marker changes on state documentation such as driver’s licenses and birth certificates are only allowed for those who have a letter from a “doctor and surgeon” showing that the “sex designation has changed”;
only a single type of gender marker change is allowed, namely listing both assigned sex and actual gender on the license (if that gender is binary); e.g., a trans woman’s driver license might read “M–F”.
Reynolds has issued the following statement on HF 2389:
Women and men are not identical; they possess unique biological differences. That’s not controversial, it’s common sense. Just like we did with girls’ sports, this bill protects women’s spaces and rights afforded to us by Iowa law and the Constitution. It’s unfortunate that defining a woman in code has become necessary to protect spaces where women’s health, safety, and privacy are being threatened like domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers. The bill allows the law to recognise biological differences while forbidding unfair discrimination.
The bill represents a broader push to impose “separate-but-equal” facilities on trans people across the United States, a fact which it more or less admits, explicitly asserting that “separate accommodations are not inherently unequal” (Russell, 2024).
Erin Reed (2024c) notes that this bill is significantly more dangerous than previous anti-trans bills introduced in Iowa, because, as its HSB status indicates, it was introduced by the Governor, “indicating that it may have stronger backing and is considered a policy priority”.
Kansas
Kobach’s bum rush
On 8 February, the office of Kris Kobach, Attorney General of Kansas, issued a media release, “School districts ‘socially transitioning’ students without parental consent, despite AG warning” (Attorney General of the State of Kansas, 2024). The release accused six unified school districts of allowing trans students to use their correct names and pronouns without notifying their parents:
As the Associated Press has noted (Hanna & Mulvihill, 2024), the actions of which Kobach is accusing the Unified School Districts are perfectly legal under Kansas law; he is acting without a legal basis. This is on brand for Kobach, who in 2023 managed to secure the termination of a consent order which compelled Kansas state officials to let trans Kansans update their birth certificates to reflect their gender identity (Condon, 2023).
Michigan
Four pro-LGBTQ+ bills: HB 5300, 5301, 5302, and 5303
On 7 February, the Judiciary Committee of the Michigan House of Representatives held hearings on four pro-LGBTQ+ bills:
HB 5300, which “would allow family court to change names for individuals, including minors, upon request” (Wolf, op. cit.);
HB 5301, 5302, and 5303, which collectively “would allow individuals to indicate a sex designation of ‘M’, ‘F’, or ‘X’ on their applications for driver’s licenses, state identification cards and birth certificates” (Wolf, op. cit.).
Kingsley v. Wojciechowski
On 7 February, in Pontiac, Oakland County, the Michigan 50th District Court dismissed Kingsley v. Wojciechowski and countersuit. Original plaintiff Brianna Kingsley, who is trans, filed in small claims in August 2023 over original respondent William Wojciechowski’s failure to return her testicles, which had been removed during her sex reassignment surgery (SRS), plus US$6,500 in damages. Wojciechowski countersued for emotional harm over the “humiliation” inflicted on him by world media coverage of the case, seeking $6,500 in damages (Hunter, 2024).
Ohio
Revised Department of Health draft rules
On 7 February, the Ohio Department of Health published a revised draft of proposed rule #3701-3-17, “Reporting gender-related condition diagnoses and gender transition care” (Ohio Department of Health, 2024).
The new draft omits language from the original draft that restricted gender-affirming care for adults. However, despite overwhelming opposition from Ohioans, the new rules still ban all medical interventions, including puberty-delaying medication, for trans people under 18 (Riedel, 2024).
South Dakota
Settlement with The Transformation Project
On 30 January, the State of South Dakota issued a letter of apology and paid a cash settlement of US$300,000 to The Transformation Project, a trans advocacy group. The settlement stems from South Dakota’s abrupt cancellation of a contract with The Transformation Project in December 2022 (Hult, 2024).
Utah
Salt Lake County misgendering incident
On 6 February, Utah State Board of Education member Natalie Cline (R–District 11) made a public Facebook post containing a flyer for the girls’ basketball team of a Salt Lake County high school, with the caption “Girls’ basketball…”, implying in context that a particular player was a trans girl (Tanner, 2024).
The 16-year-old in question is not transfem (Curtis, 2024), and now needs police protection due to threats (Tanner, op. cit.). Cline has been condemned by the student’s parents (“Parents of female student-athlete,” 2024), by Governor Spencer Cox and Lieutenant Governor Deirdre Henderson, both Republicans (Cox, 2024), and by the Utah Democratic Party (Utah House Democrats, 2024). The Board of Education has also condemned Cline (Utah State Board of Education, 2024), who has been the subject of previous internal proceedings for anti-trans hatred (Cortez, 2021; Houck, 2023); however, regardless of the outcome of any additional proceedings, the Board does not have the power to expel her (Utah State Board of Education, op. cit.). Cline, for her part, shared an “apology” (Cline, 2024) but continued to discuss the 16-year-old student’s body and did not allow comments on the post.
Utah State Rep. Kera Birkeland, the architect of HB 11 of 2022, which upon passage de facto banned trans girls from participation in high school sports, also commented on the original post — demanding that Cline take it down, oddly enough. In the process of doing so, she quoted an apparent figure for how many trans kids have sought clearance to play in Utah. Disclosing such a figure is a criminal offence per Utah Code § 63G-2-801(1)(a) (Tanner, op. cit.; Tanner & Stern, 2024). Whether Birkeland will face charges is, of course, unclear.
Virginia
ETSI health clinic opens in Portsmouth
In the week of 4 February, the ETSI (Ending Transmission of Sexual Infections) Health Clinic opened in downtown Portsmouth. The clinic, which is funded by the Virginia Department of Health and pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, Inc., will offer, at no cost:
hormone therapy;
human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing as well as treatment;
mental health services, through referrals and an on-site psychologist;
substance abuse services and referrals (Payne, 2024).
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Note, 12 February 2024: Updated to reflect that Penny Mordaunt MP is the leader of the British House of Commons. Thanks Emma (@hasrock36)!
References
A Bill to modify eligibility requirements for amateur sports governing organizations, HR 7187, 118th United States Congress (2024). No text available at date.
A Bill to modify eligibility requirements for amateur sports governing organizations, S 3729, 118th United States Congress (2024). No text available at date.
Bukuras, J. (2024b, February 7). Pediatric pushback on ‘trans kids’ treatments. National Catholic Register (Eternal Word Television Network, Inc.); Catholic News Agency (Eternal Word Television Network, Inc.). Retrieved 11 February 2024.
Reisner, S.L., Choi, S.K., Herman, J.L., Bockting, W., Krueger, E.A., & Meyer, I.H. (2023, September 15). Sexual orientation in transgender adults in the United States. BMC Public Health, 23, 1799. doi: 10.1186/s12889-023-16654-z. Retrieved 12 February 2024.
Seccombe, M. (2014, March 8). Shoppies boss Joe de Bruyn bows out. The Saturday Paper (Schwartz Publishing); Archive Today. Retrieved 12 February 2024.
Sweeney, M. (2024, February 5). Maryland ‘fairness in girls’ sports’ bill dies in committee. The Gazette (The Anschutz Corporation); The Center Square (Donors Trust); Washington Examiner (The Anschutz Corporation). Retrieved 6 February 2024.