This post is going to be a bit of a departure from my usual ancient history content. As some of my readers already know, I am a transgender woman. I am also bi/pansexual. Unfortunately, for roughly the past year and a half, but especially the past month, the political right wing in the United States has been increasingly making queer people, especially transgender people, into a primary target for vilification and attack. I can’t possibly cover everything the right has been doing in the past year and a half to attack us, but I feel it necessary to make my readers aware of just a tiny bit of some of what they have been doing and saying.
In the past month, Republican lawmakers have continued to push increasingly restrictive legislation and policies to take away or drastically curtail the existing rights of queer people, especially transgender people. Right-wing pundits have dedicated much time and attention to propagating a false, bigoted, and dangerous narrative that LGBTQ+ people are “grooming” children for sexual molestation. Meanwhile, neo-fascist and right-wing extremist groups have relentlessly targeted, harassed, and even tried to violently attack events associated with Pride and the LGBTQ+ community all across the United States. Sadly, all signs strongly indicate that things are only going to get much, much worse from here over the next few years, especially for those living in Republican-controlled states.
This post will be a very long one and it will discuss many deeply depressing topics. Nonetheless, I urge you, if you are a straight, cisgender person who genuinely cares about the wellbeing of any queer person, please read this post to the very end, since it will cover some very important information about the ongoing evisceration of queer rights in the U.S.
The Times They Are a-Changin’
First, I’d like to cover some background information that I feel is essential to understanding the recent events pertaining to queer and especially trans rights. Some of what I am going to say in these next couple of sections is going to be pretty basic, but I can’t expect that all of my readers closely follow U.S. politics, especially since I know that a substantial proportion of my regular readers do not live in the U.S.
Let us therefore begin at the ground level. Right-wingers in the U.S., although they usually will not openly admit it, generally want to uphold a social order in which non-Hispanic white people are socially and politically dominant over all other racial groups, men are socially and politically dominant over women, Christianity is socially and politically dominant over all other religious traditions and irreligion, and queer people are not allowed to exist openly at all.
Right-wingers can see that this social order they want to uphold is collapsing in slow motion. With each passing generation, the percentages of people in the United States who are non-Hispanic white, Christian, straight, and cisgender are all declining. Meanwhile, the percentages of people who are Black/Indigenous/people of color, Latino, non-Christian, openly gay or bi, and openly transgender are all increasing.
My own generation, Generation Z, is the most racially and ethnically diverse, least formally religious, and most openly queer generation in all of U.S. history. According to this demographic survey of Generation Z released by Pew Research Center in 2018, only 52% of Gen Zers in the U.S. (defined as those of us born between 1997 and 2012) are non-Hispanic white.
A survey by the Brookings Institute published in 2019 similarly found that only 50.1% of Gen Zers in the U.S. are non-Hispanic white. Additionally, the Brookings Institute found that, of children under the age of fifteen at the time, only 49.9% were non-Hispanic white, making non-Hispanic white children only a plurality, not a majority.
ABOVE: Chart from this article by Pew Research Center showing that 48% of Gen Zers are something other than non-Hispanic white
A survey published by Gallup on 17 June 2022 found that only 81% of all U.S. adults said that they believe in the existence of God, which is the lowest recorded percentage of people who believe in God in all of U.S. history—down more than ten whole percentage points from a decade ago and down six whole percentage points from the last time Gallup surveyed the question in 2017.
Even more strikingly, the survey found that only 68% of U.S. adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine said that they believe in the existence of God, making young adults much less likely to believe in God than U.S. adults overall.
ABOVE: Chart from this article by Gallup showing that the percentage of American adults overall who say they believe in God has tanked to the absolute lowest it has ever been in all of U.S. history at 81%
A larger percentage of Gen Zers identify as agnostics, atheists, or religiously unaffiliated than any previous generation in U.S. history. According to a survey published in 2018 by The Barna Group (an Evangelical Protestant polling agency), 8% of Gen Zers at that time identified as agnostics, 13% as atheists, and 14% as nothing in particular. In total, the survey found that fully 35% of Gen Zers at the time identified as some variety of irreligious or religiously unaffiliated.
For comparison, the same survey found that 8% of Millennials at that time identified as agnostics, 7% as atheists, and 15% as nothing in particular, meaning Gen Zers are nearly twice as likely as Millennials to identify as atheists.
ABOVE: Chart from this article by The Barna Group showing that fully 35% of Gen Zers identify as some variety of irreligious and 14% of us identify specifically as atheists
On top of all this, as I discuss in this previous post I wrote, another poll released by Gallup in February 2022 found that roughly 7.1% of all U.S. adults, including roughly 20.8% of U.S. adult Gen Zers and roughly 10.5% of Millennials, now identify as some variety of LGBTQ+. That means that fully one fifth of all adult members of my generational cohort and one tenth of people in the generational cohort immediately older than us are openly LGBTQ+.
ABOVE: Chart from this article by Gallup showing that fully 20.8% of U.S. Gen Zers identify as some variety of LGBTQ+
Another study released by Pew Research Center on 7 June 2022 found that roughly 5.1% of U.S. adults under the age of thirty specifically identify as transgender or nonbinary. This means that roughly one in twenty of all adults under the age of the thirty identifies as transgender or nonbinary.
For comparison, according to the Gallup poll I cited earlier, openly LGBTQ+ people make up only 4.2% of members of Generation X (i.e., those born 1965–1980). This means that the percentage of all U.S. adults under thirty who identify specifically as transgender or nonbinary alone is higher than the total percentage of all people in my parents’ generation who identify as lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, or queer combined.
ABOVE: Chart from this article by Pew Research Center showing that roughly 5.1% of U.S. adults under the age of thirty now identify as transgender or nonbinary
The reason why young people are more likely to identify as LGBTQ+ than older people is most likely not because we are more likely to feel same-gender attraction or have a gender identity that is different from the one we were assigned at birth, but rather because, for the first time in modern western history, it is starting to become socially acceptable for people to openly identify as LGBTQ+.
In previous generations, most queer people probably either repressed their queerness and buried it deep down or, if they couldn’t do that, then they killed themselves. Only a brave minority of them dared to come out. Now, though, more and more young people are starting to feel like they don’t need to repress their true desires and identities.
In June 2021, Gallup released the results of a poll which found that fully 70% of all U.S. adults said that they supported gay marriage. Among people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, the percentage was even higher, at 84%.
ABOVE: Chart from this article by Gallup showing that, in 2021, fully 70% of all U.S. adults said that they supported gay marriage
The endurance of old power structures in a changing world
Social conservatives who want to uphold an oppressive social order of white, male, Christian, straight, cisgender hegemony are terrified by these statistics. The oppressive social order that they are so heavily invested in is collapsing before their very eyes and they are willing to do whatever they can to stop it.
Sadly, the U.S. political system is set up in a way that structurally gives massively disproportionate power to conservatives that far exceeds the percentage of the population that they actually make up. This is because the U.S. political system gives power to states rather than people and, currently, there are more states in which the majority of voters vote Republican than there are states in which the majority of voters vote Democratic, even though Democratic candidates usually receive the most total votes nationwide.
This phenomenon is partly due to the fact that people living in large cities tend to be more likely to vote Democratic, while people living in rural areas and small towns tend to be more likely to vote Republican. As a result of this, states in which Democrats make up the majority of voters tend to be those that are the most densely populated, while states in which Republicans make up the majority of voters tend to be more sparsely populated. Thus, even though conservatives make up a minority of the overall population, the fact that they make up the majority in the majority of states gives them disproportionate power at basically every level.
We’ll start at the state level. There are currently twenty-three states in which Republicans hold a trifecta, meaning they hold the majority in both houses of the state legislature and the governorship. Thus, Republicans have complete control of the state government in nearly half of the state governments that exist.
Meanwhile and by contrast, there are only fourteen states in which Democrats hold a trifecta and only thirteen states with divided governments in which neither party holds a trifecta. This means that Democrats have complete control of a little less than one third of all state governments—a paltry fraction compared to those that Republicans control.
ABOVE: Diagram from Wikimedia Commons showing states that have Republican-controlled governments in red, states that have Democratic-controlled governments in blue, and states that have split governments in purple
In the U.S. Senate, each state has the exact same number of Senators (two), regardless of population. In each state, Senators are elected by the majority of voters statewide. As a result, states in which white, rural-dwelling conservatives, who typically vote Republican, make up the majority of the voting population receive massively disproportionate representation. Consequently, there are more solid red states than solid blue states in the Senate and, at any given time, Republicans are more likely to control the Senate than Democrats.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the party affiliation of the current Senators for each state. Currently, the Senate is split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans.
The electoral college similarly gives massively disproportionate power to the majority of voters in states where white, rural-dwelling conservatives make up the majority of the voting population. As a result of this, Republicans have a massive structural advantage in presidential elections as well.
Allow me to show you what I mean. In the past thirty years, there have been eight presidential elections (in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020). The Democratic candidate has won the national popular vote in seven out of those eight elections. Only one time in the past thirty years has any Republican presidential candidate ever won the national popular vote.
The only Republican presidential candidate who has ever won the national popular vote in the past thirty years was George W. Bush in 2004, but, in that election, he was already an incumbent, since he was elected to the presidency in the 2000 election, in which he lost the popular vote. This means that, in the past thirty years, no Republican has ever even once become president by winning the national popular vote.
Despite this, the Republican candidate has won the electoral college in three of the past eight presidential elections. As a result, for twelve of the past thirty years, a Republican president has been in power and two of the past five presidents have been Republicans.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the number of electoral college votes for each state
The fact that Republicans have these structural advantages in both the Senate and the electoral college means that Republicans are more likely to control both the Senate and the presidency at any given time than Democrats. Because all Supreme Court justices must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the majority in the Senate, Republicans can use their advantages in the Senate and the electoral college to control who is appointed to the Supreme Court.
For instance, the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who was generally regarded as one of the most conservative Supreme Court justices, on 13 February 2016 left a vacancy on the court. Barack Obama, a Democrat, was the president at the time, so he should have been able to fill that vacancy.
Republicans, however, controlled the Senate and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, refused to even give anyone nominated by Obama a hearing, citing the excuse that it was an election year and that the Senate should wait until the new president was elected to confirm Scalia’s successor. In saying this, McConnell was making a gamble, hoping that Republicans would retain control of the Senate, a Republican candidate would win the presidency, and the new Republican president would nominate a solidly conservative justice for the Senate to confirm.
McConnell’s bet ultimately paid off. In the election that year, Republicans retained control of the Senate. The Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.87 million votes, but the Republican candidate Donald Trump won the electoral college and became president. Trump assumed office on 20 January 2017 and soon nominated Neil Gorsuch, a staunch conservative, to fill the seat that had been left vacant by Scalia’s death a year earlier. The Republican-controlled Senate confirmed Gorsuch to the court on 10 April 2017.
ABOVE: Official portrait of Neil Gorsuch, the first of three justices appointed to the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump
Obama was president for eight years, but he only appointed two justices to the Supreme Court (Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan). Trump was only president for four years, but he still appointed three justices to the Supreme Court (Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett). He got to appoint one more justice than Obama did, despite the fact that he was only president for half as long.
As a result of this, of the nine total justices currently serving on the Supreme Court, six of them hold extremely right-wing views. Only three justices on the court are liberal. Five of the six right-wing justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by Republicans who became president without winning the national popular vote.
Because the Supreme Court has the absolute authority to decide what the Constitution says and the Constitution is the highest law of the land, this means that the extremely right-wing justices who hold a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, who have demonstrated that they have absolutely no qualms about overturning any and all precedents that they don’t like, have basically absolute power to take away people’s fundamental rights and impose their right-wing extremist agenda on all Americans.
ABOVE: Photograph showing all the current justices of the Supreme Court. Back row (from left to right): Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett. Front row (from left to right): Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor.
What the right is doing with this power
Ring-wingers are doing everything they possibly can using all the disproportionate power they wield to advance an atavistic agenda, a central component of which is taking away the rights of women, queer people, non-Christians, people of color, Indigenous people, immigrants, and other marginalized peoples. What they ultimately want is to completely reverse all the social and cultural changes of the past seventy years by force and take the U.S. back to what they imagine that it was like socially and culturally back in the 1950s, or even earlier.
For the purposes of this post, I will be focusing on what right-wingers are doing to attack queer people, partly because it’s an issue that is of major stake to me personally as a queer American and partly because the right has been especially aggressive in attacking queer people most recently.
It is, however, extremely important to emphasize that they are also attacking the rights of lots of other people as well and, when they attack queer people, it is consistently those who are the most marginalized who are the most disproportionately negatively impacted, with lower-income queer women of color typically being the most negatively impacted of all.
According to a statement released by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in March of this year, 2022 is on track to see more bills specifically attacking transgender people signed into law than any previous year in U.S. history. The website Freedom for All Americans has a tracker showing all the states in which anti-transgender bills have been filed for this year. As you can see, the map is looking very red—and this map doesn’t even give the complete picture because there is so much that it doesn’t show.
ABOVE: Map from the website Freedom for All Americans showing all the U.S. states in which anti-transgender bills have been filed so far for this year
Over the course of the past two years, eighteen states (including my own home state of Indiana) have passed laws banning all transgender youth from participating in school athletics consistent with their gender identity. Most of these laws apply to kindergarten through twelfth-grade athletics, but some of them also ban trans students from participating in college athletics as well. Many of the anti-trans bills that have been filed so far this year are sports bans.
These laws banning trans youth from participating in school athletics according to their gender identity are all fundamentally unjust, but I will not focus on them as much in this post, since many of them are old news at this point and they, for the most part, only affect the relatively small percentage of trans people who are involved or want to be involved in school athletics. I’m personally much more concerned about the other anti-transgender and broadly anti-queer narratives, laws, and policies that right-wingers are pushing.
ABOVE: Map from the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) website showing states that have enacted laws banning transgender youth from participating in student athletics
The right-wing canard that queer people are “grooming” children
One trend that I find far more worrisome than the anti-trans sports bans is that, this year, especially in the past month, right-wingers have dedicated much time and attention to promoting the false accusation that queer people are harming, abusing, and/or sexualizing children.
As I discuss in this post I wrote back in November 2021, homophobes and transphobes have been promoting the pernicious canard that queer people (especially queer people who were assigned male at birth) are dangerous pedophiles and a threat to children for the past sixty years at least.
All the way back in 1977, the singer Anita Bryant led a campaign with the rallying cry “Save Our Children,” which fought for the repeal of a recently-passed local ordinance in Dade County, Florida, that banned discrimination against same-gender-attracted people in housing, employment, and public accommodation.
Bryant’s campaign focused heavily on the false claim that queer people, especially gay and bisexual men, are pedophiles and that allowing discrimination against queer people is the only way to protect children from the gay menace. In the end, her campaign was successful and Dade County repealed its anti-discrimination ordinance.
The recent resurgence of this canard is a disturbing sign of just how hostile the political right has become toward queer people. Today, right-wingers are claiming that queer people are hurting or abusing children mainly in three ways. First, they claim that allowing transgender children to access gender-affirming medical care is child abuse. Second, they claim that it is inappropriate for schoolteachers to tell students about the existence of queer people or be openly queer themselves, with many right-wingers claiming that doing either these things is either child abuse itself or a form of “grooming” children for sexual molestation.
The right’s third accusation, which they have been especially focusing on most recently, is that allowing any child to view any kind of performance that involves drag is inherently inappropriate, with many claiming that it is child abuse or a form of “grooming.”
I will address all these accusations as they come up.
ABOVE: Photograph originally from the Associated Press reproduced in this article from The Atlantic showing gay rights activists in Miami, Florida, in 1977, carrying signs protesting Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign
What gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors is
For roughly the past year and a half, Republican lawmakers in various states have been working hard to pass laws and policies to ban all gender-affirming medical care for minors. No less than twenty-five different bills for this purpose have been filed so far in 2022 alone in states all across the country.
The right-wing opposition to gender-affirming care for minors hinges to a large extent on misinformation about what this care actually entails. I have discussed what this care actually involves in several previous posts, including this one from November 2020 and this one from March 2022, but I will summarize it again here for the sake of my readers’ convenience.
Contrary to what right-wingers often claim, current medical guidelines prohibit any form of medical or surgical intervention whatsoever for pre-pubescent transgender children. Pre-pubescent children do not receive any kind of surgery or hormones. Instead, for them, transitioning is exclusively social; for them, it means that, if they choose, they can adopt a new name and pronouns, change the way they wear their hair, change the way they dress, change which restroom they use, and things like that.
Once a transgender child reaches pubescence, then, if the child wants to, it is legal in their jurisdiction, they have their parents’ consent, and a doctor is willing to write a prescription, they may be able to go on puberty blockers, which do not cause any physical changes to the body and instead merely delay puberty for as long as the child continues taking them. Puberty blockers are considered safe and they have been widely used for decades to delay the onset of puberty in cisgender children who begin puberty too early.
Puberty blockers are invaluable because they allow a transgender adolescent the opportunity to wait until they are older and more mature to decide if they want to begin cross-sex hormone replacement therapy without forcing them to go through puberty and develop the secondary sex characteristics associated with the sex they were assigned at birth against their will.
As I and many other trans people know from first-hand experience, being forced to go through the puberty of the sex one was assigned at birth can be a deeply traumatic experience and the secondary sex characteristics one develops during puberty are the main source of body-related gender dysphoria for the vast majority of adult transgender people. Puberty blockers can spare trans adolescents this trauma and can even be lifesaving.
If a trans adolescent decides that they aren’t really trans or that they want to go through the puberty associated with the sex they were assigned at birth for any other reason, they can simply stop taking puberty blockers and go through the puberty associated with their assigned sex at birth in exactly the same way that any cisgender adolescent would with no harmful effects.
ABOVE: Photograph from RxList showing a vial of leuprolide acetate, which is one of the most commonly prescribed medicines to temporarily block puberty
If, on the other hand, a trans adolescent continues wanting to medically transition, then, once they reach older adolescence, they have the option that they can choose to go on cross-sex hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Before any adolescent is allowed to go on cross-sex HRT, though, they are required to go through a lengthy informed-consent process in which they and their parent or guardian will be extensively informed of all the effects and possible risks of HRT. (For those who are interested, I discuss the physical and behavioral effects of HRT in great detail in this post I wrote in March 2022.)
Until recently, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH)’s guidelines stated that a trans adolescent must be at least sixteen to go on cross-sex HRT and, even then, if the person was under eighteen, they could only go on cross-sex HRT with parental consent.
According to this news article that was published in The Los Angeles Times only one week ago, though, the WPATH has recently revised their guidelines to say that some adolescents may be mentally and emotionally mature enough to consent to cross-sex HRT at as young as age fourteen and that adolescents should be able to access cross-sex hormones at ages fourteen and fifteen if they have their parents’ consent and a qualified physician has assessed them as being mentally mature enough to make the decision.
Until recently, the WPATH guidelines prohibited the performance of any kind of gender-affirming surgery on any person under the age of eighteen. According to the article from The Los Angeles Times that I have already linked, however, they have now revised their guidelines to allow that some trans adolescents may be mentally mature enough to consent to some specific kinds of surgeries at as young as fifteen and seventeen respectively.
It is important to emphasize that, at every step of this process, it is the child or adolescent who is making all the decisions. At no point should a child ever be pressured to take any step in transitioning that they do not want to take. At the same time, a child or adolescent must have their parent or guardian’s consent and a positive assessment by a qualified physician in order to take any medical or surgical step in this process.
The reason why the right is currently attacking gender-affirming healthcare for minors is because they believe transgender minors are an easier target than trans adults. They are hoping that, once they have banned trans healthcare for minors, that will open a door for them to either outright ban or destroy access to gender-affirming healthcare for trans adults. As I will discuss later, Republicans in deep red states are already making moves to destroy access to medical care for trans adults. They will most likely double-down on these efforts within the next few years.
Governor Greg Abbott’s executive order in Texas
The right-wing campaign to ban gender-affirming care for minors took an extreme turn on 22 February 2022, when Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, issued an executive order, in which he declares that allowing any person under the age of eighteen to access any form of gender-affirming medical care, including any form of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgery, constitutes child abuse under Texas law. The order further instructs the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to investigate any parent or guardian who is accused of allowing their transgender child to access any form of gender-affirming medical care for child abuse.
The executive order also mandates that any professional, including any doctor, nurse, or teacher, who has contact with any child who they think may be receiving gender-affirming medical care is required by Texas law to report the child’s parents to DFPS so that they may be investigated for child abuse. It declares that any professional who fails to report a transgender child’s parents to DFPS will be subject to criminal prosecution.
The Texas DFPS swiftly began launching investigations for child abuse against parents who support their transgender children in their gender identity. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Lambda Legal swiftly filed a lawsuit in the state of Texas arguing that these investigations are unconstitutional and should be overturned.
The District Judge Amy Clark Meachum has ruled that the ACLU and Lambda Legal’s lawsuit is likely to succeed in permanently overturning Governor Abbott’s order and has issued a temporary injunction declaring that the DFPS’s investigations into parents of trans children must be ceased until the lawsuit can formally be heard in July.
Unfortunately, despite this, the Texas attorney general Ken Paxton has ignored Judge Meachum’s injunction, has insisted that the DFPS’s investigations into parents of trans children for child abuse are legal and necessary, and has insisted that such investigations must continue.
ABOVE: Screenshot of the first page of the executive order signed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott declaring that allowing any person under eighteen access to gender-affirming care constitutes child abuse (left) and photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing Governor Abbott himself (right)
Florida’s new law banning instruction about LGBTQ+ people in schools
On 28 March 2022, Ron DeSantis, the Republican incumbent governor of Florida, signed into law House Bill 1557. The law is officially titled “An Act Relating to Parental Rights in Education,” but opponents have cleverly nicknamed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
This law strictly prohibits all “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” whatsoever in Florida schools in kindergarten through third grade. The law additionally allows parents to sue school districts that have exposed their children at any age level from kindergarten through twelfth grade to any material that the parents believe is “not age-appropriate.”
The intentionally vague wording of the law effectively gives parents the ability to sue school districts for mentioning basically anything whatsoever about the existence of queer people or queer history to students at any age level, while at the same time giving Republican lawmakers the cover of plausible deniability.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing Ron DeSantis, the incumbent governor of Florida, who has been aggressively passing laws and implementing policies to attack queer people, especially transgender people
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Why banning discussion about LGBTQ+ people in schools is bad
Like the right-wing campaign against gender-affirming medical care for minors, the campaign against instruction about the existence of queer people in schools relies heavily on misinformation and propagandistic claims about what teachers are actually teaching their students and about what conservative lawmakers are actually trying to ban.
No one, or certainly no one on the mainstream left or in the mainstream queer community, is advocating that young elementary-school-aged children should be taught the precise details about how to have gay sex or about how gender-affirming genital surgeries are performed.
Instead, what we are advocating that children at the earliest grade levels should be taught are basic facts, such as that some people can fall in love with and marry a person of the same gender, that some children have two parents of the same gender, and that some people who were assigned one gender at birth live as a different gender.
There is nothing sexual or inappropriate about telling a child any of these things. After all, children are already bombarded with stories about men and women falling in love, getting married, and having children. Telling a child that a woman can fall in love with and marry another woman should not be seen as any more shocking or risqué than telling a child that a woman can fall in love with and marry a man.
Unfortunately, there is also some discrepancy about what exactly Florida’s new law prohibits. The law itself says that it prohibits any “classroom instruction” about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, but yet the preamble uses a different word and says that it prohibits all “classroom discussion,” which would seem to imply a much broader scope.
If the law prohibits all “discussion,” that inevitably leads to some pretty incoherent situations. For instance, it would mean that, if a first grader were to give a presentation to the class in which they mention that they have two mothers, the teacher would be required to punish them for mentioning the existence of lesbians. Even worse, the teacher presumably wouldn’t even be allowed to explain to the student why they are punishing them, because all “discussion” about LGBTQ+ people is banned and the teacher cannot explain how the student broke the rules without breaking the rules themself.
In any case, Florida’s new law will certainly have enormous negative implications for queer teachers, because the law’s ambiguous wording effectively allows parents to sue the school district if any of the students somehow find out that their teacher is queer.
This news report from NBC News, published back in March, describes how a middle-school science teacher at a Florida school district named Robert Thollander briefly acknowledged to his students, after one of them asked him about his marriage, that he is married to another man.
In a response to this incident, a group of outraged parents wrote a seething letter to the school district demanding that Thollander face “consequences” for revealing his sexual orientation to his students. Although the parents did not succeed in getting the school to fire Thollander, under the new law signed by DeSantis, parent groups of this kind now have the ability to sue school districts for precisely this sort of thing.
ABOVE: Photograph from this article in The Trinity Voice showing Robert Thollander, a former middle-school science teacher in Florida whom a group of parents demanded be fired after he acknowledged to his students the fact that he is married to a man
Florida’s law will most likely mean that gay or bisexual teachers who have partners or spouses of the same gender cannot have any photos of their partner or spouse on their desk, cannot make any mention whatsoever of their partner or spouse in front of their students, cannot answer any questions their students might ask them about their partner or spouse, cannot have their partner or spouse visit them at work, and potentially cannot even mention or post anything about their partner or spouse online where their students might be able to discover it.
Already, according to this report from WFTV, a Florida-based ABC News affiliate, attorneys for Orange County Public Schools gave a seminar for school administrators in which they explained that, because the wording of Florida’s law is so vague, schools will have to follow the strictest possible interpretation of it in order to ensure that they will not be sued.
The attorneys reportedly told administrators that rainbow “safe space” stickers on doors must be taken down and that elementary-school teachers who are married to spouses of the same gender must not have any photos of their spouses on their desks or make any mention of their spouses to their students.
They also said that, if a student comes out as gay, bi, or trans, teachers and staff will be required to notify the student’s parents. Furthermore, they said that, if a student comes out as trans, all teachers and staff will be required to intentionally misgender the student by always referring to them using the pronouns of the gender they were assigned at birth, regardless of what the child’s parents say, because a teacher correctly gendering a trans student could lead conservative parents of other students in the class to sue the school district.
The attorneys even said that all teachers and staff must be prohibited from wearing any articles of clothing featuring any kind of rainbows, since such articles of clothing could be interpreted as indicating support for the LGBTQ+ community and could therefore potentially incur a lawsuit under Florida’s new law.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a rainbow bowtie. Teachers in Orange County Public Schools are apparently prohibited from wearing rainbow articles of clothing because they could be interpreted as indicating support for the queer community, which could incur a lawsuit under Florida’s new law.
The implications for trans and nonbinary teachers are even more drastic. Banning instruction or discussion about LGBTQ+ people effectively means that teachers cannot be openly nonbinary or use they/them pronouns at all, since being openly nonbinary would require them to explain to their students what being nonbinary is.
It also means that a teacher who began teaching as one gender cannot transition while maintaining their job, because doing so would require them to explain to their students that trans people exist, that they are trans, and that they are transitioning. Instead, Florida’s law seems to require a teacher to quit their job entirely and somehow find some other job to make money while they transition that does not involve teaching.
It also means that a trans person who has already transitioned cannot be a teacher at all unless they are binary, able to completely pass as cisgender in all situations and scenarios, and able to completely hide the fact that they are trans from their students. This is something that would be impossible for the vast majority of trans people, especially now in the age of the internet, where it is so easy to search for someone’s name in Google and find out about their past.
Given what I have said here, it should come as little surprise that LGBTQ+ teachers across Florida, including Thollander, whom I mentioned earlier, are quitting their jobs and leaving the teaching profession forever en masse.
New laws in Alabama banning all gender-affirming care for minors and discussion of LGBTQ+ people in schools
Republicans in Alabama evidently couldn’t stand the fact that their colleagues in Texas and Florida were excelling them in the arena of anti-transgender legislation and policies, so they decided to one-up them both by enacting the most restrictive anti-transgender laws that have yet passed in any state.
On 7 April 2022, the Alabama state legislature passed a bill making it a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison and a criminal fine of up to $15,000 for any physician to provide any form of gender-affirming medical care to any person under the age of nineteen.
On that same day, the Alabama senate also passed a bill that bans teachers from telling students anything whatsoever about the existence of gay, bisexual, or transgender people or having any discussion whatsoever about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through fifth grade. The same bill also requires that all students in all public schools throughout Alabama must use the bathroom and locker room of the gender they were assigned at birth.
The very next day, on 8 April, Kay Ivey, the current governor of Alabama, signed both of these bills into law. She explained her decision to sign the bills, saying: “I believe very strongly that if the Good Lord made you a boy, you are a boy, and if he made you a girl, you are a girl.” In saying this, Governor Ivey made the reason for enacting these laws very explicit; quite simply, these laws are intended to try to force trans children and adolescents to be cisgender against their own wills.
These new laws went into effect in Alabama on 8 May of this year. Five days later, on 13 May, in response to a lawsuit, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama issued a partial temporary injunction, which blocks the state of Alabama from enforcing the part of the law that bans people under nineteen from accessing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones until the lawsuit can be fully heard in court.
ABOVE: Photograph taken by Mickey Welsh for USA Today Network showing Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, who has signed two of the most restrictive bills in the country attacking trans rights into law
Florida’s new executive policy forbidding minors from even being allowed to socially transition
On 20 April 2022, the Florida state surgeon general Joseph Ladapo issued an official guideline on behalf of the Department of Health for the DeSantis administration instructing all medical care providers throughout the state to prohibit all transgender and gender-nonconforming people under the age of eighteen from receiving any form of gender-affirming healthcare.
Ladapo’s letter, however, goes even further than just prohibiting minors from receiving gender-affirming care. Ladapo further declares that all minors should also be prohibited from socially transitioning (i.e., being allowed to change one’s name, pronouns, hairstyle, clothing, etc. to align with one’s gender identity). Instead, he declares that all transgender and gender-nonconforming people under the age of eighteen must live as the gender they were assigned at birth and should “seek counseling from a licensed provider.”
Although Ladapo does not specify exactly what kind of “counseling” trans minors should be told to seek, one can easily infer that he means conversion therapy, designed to try to force trans minors to be cisgender and gender-conforming.
ABOVE: Photograph taken by Chris O’Meara for the Associated Press, showing Joseph Ladapo, the surgeon general for the state of Florida, speaking, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis standing behind him
How the right wing is weaponizing the horrific Uvalde school shooting to further attack trans people
The right wing hates transgender people so much that they will weaponize anything to attack us—even a national tragedy that had absolutely no trans people involved in it or connected to it in any way.
Salvador Ramos was an apparently straight, cisgender eighteen-year-old boy and an American citizen born in North Dakota. He lived in the town of Uvalde, Texas, for most of his life. He frequently livestreamed videos of himself on the social media platform Yubo, in which he made repeated threats of violence, openly declaring that he was going to kidnap and rape teenaged girls and that he was going to commit a school shooting. He also frequently livestreamed videos of himself torturing and killing animals. His coworkers nicknamed him “school shooter.”
On 24 May 2022, at home, Ramos shot his own grandmother in the forehead. (She was severely injured, but she did not die.) He then brought one of two AR-15 style rifles that he had legally purchased on the day after his eighteenth birthday, along with 1,657 total rounds of legally-purchased ammunition, to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
There, at the school, Ramos brutally gunned down nineteen elementary school children and two teachers in a bloody massacre and injured seventeen other people. Eventually, over an hour after Ramos entered the building, members of the United States Border Patrol Tactical Unit shot him dead.
ABOVE: Collage from this article by CBC showing the nineteen children and two teachers whom Salvador Ramos brutally murdered in the Robb Elementary School shooting on 24 May 2022
As soon as Ramos committed the attack, the right wing immediately swung into action. They began promoting malicious transphobic and xenophobic lies and propaganda falsely claiming that Ramos was a trans woman and/or an undocumented immigrant, usually with the implication that the solution to prevent mass shootings is to kill, imprison, and/or forcibly detransition all trans women and hunt down and deport all undocumented immigrants.
The false claim that Ramos was a trans woman began with a post on the /pol/ imageboard on the website 4chan, which is known for having virtually no moderation whatsoever and being absolutely infested with Neo-Nazis who despise all queer people.
Only a few hours after the Uvalde shooting, an anonymous person made a post on /pol/ saying “here’s the shooter’s reddit” before linking to a Reddit profile that NBC News has now identified as belonging to an innocent twenty-year-old transgender woman artist named Sam, who lives in Georgia and has absolutely no connection to the Uvalde shooting or Salvador Ramos in any way.
Even in the initial replies to that post, there were people pointing out that Sam’s photos of herself on Reddit look nothing like the genuine photos of Ramos that were already being shared by news outlets. Nonetheless, it was not long before a photo taken without permission from Sam’s Reddit profile showing her wearing a black skirt and striking a pose in front of a transgender Pride flag began circulating on 4chan as a supposed photo of Salvador Ramos.
For instance, on the same day as the shooting, not long after the initial post linking Sam’s Reddit profile, someone posted Sam’s photo on /pol/ with the title “tranny criminal,” accompanied with the following message:
“Why are troons shooting up everything? We need to address this crisis and ban trannies from buying guns.”
Another reply beneath this one says:
“Don’t be too hasty, bro. don’t [sic] take away their means of suicide.”
This remark is a reference to the infamous statistic that 41% of adult transgender people in the United States have attempted to kill themselves at some point in their life. As I discuss in this post I wrote about the statistic back in December 2021, ever since that statistic first came out, anti-transgender trolls on 4chan have engaged in numerous vicious campaigns of targeted harassment to try to encourage trans women to kill themselves.
The 4channers’ use of Sam’s photo to falsely claim that Salvador Ramos was a trans woman can plausibly be interpreted as a deliberate harassment campaign of this variety. The initial 4channer who posted Sam’s Reddit claiming that it belonged to the shooter most likely did so intending to cause Sam as much suffering as possible and, under a best-case scenario, get her to kill herself, while also attacking the entire trans community in general by portraying us as dangerous threats to society.
ABOVE: Screenshot of a post made on 24 May 2022 on the 4chan message board /pol/
As this article from Slate describes, within hours, the false claim that the shooter was a trans woman quickly spread from 4chan to right-wing Facebook groups, including the group “Young Conservatives of Southern Indiana,” and other social media platforms. Slate says that the false claim most likely also spread significantly through private messages and chats.
By the end of the day, Republican elected officials were confidently spouting the lie that Salvador Ramos was a trans woman and/or undocumented immigrant. Paul Gosar, a Republican politician with right-wing extremist views who is currently the sitting representative in the U.S. House of Representatives for Arizona’s fourth congressional district, issued a quote tweet in response to a tweet by someone else speculating that the shooter was a Neo-Nazi, instead declaring:
“We know already fool. It’s a transsexual leftist illegal alien named Salvatore [sic] Ramos. It’s apparently your kind of trash.”
Multiple other Republican politicians in the U.S. House of Representatives also promoted the entirely baseless and transphobic lie that Ramos was a trans woman, including Representative Pete Sessions (the sitting representative for Texas’s seventeenth congressional district) and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (the sitting representative for Georgia’s fourteenth congressional district).
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Representative Paul Gosar (left), official portrait of Representative Pete Sessions (center), and official portrait of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (right)
On 25 May 2022, the day right after the shooting, the right-wing pundit Candace Owens, who is known as the host of the right-wing political talk show Candace, which is produced by the right-wing propaganda outlet The Daily Wire, issued a tweet in which she claims to have seen photos of Ramos crossdressing:
“What’s [sic] drives an 18 year old to murder innocent children? I don’t know. But judging by the photos of him cross-dressing, we can assume there were plenty of signs that he was mentally disturbed and abused by adults in his life. Societal cowardice ignored those plenty of signs.”
As of the time I am writing this post, Owens’s tweet, which she has not deleted, has received over 36,600 likes, and 5,867 retweets.
In reality, there are no authentic photos of Salvador Ramos wearing any kind of women’s apparel. Candace Owens must have seen either the photos of Sam or photos of at least two other innocent trans women that eventually became falsely circulated as supposed photos of Ramos. As Trans Safety Network explains in this post on their website, they have confirmed that all three trans women whose photos were appropriated are, in fact, alive and well and none of them have any connection whatsoever to the shooting.
Nonetheless, as Media Matters points out in this post from 1 June 2022, even after the claim that Ramos was a trans woman or a cross-dresser was thoroughly debunked, Owens doubled down on her initial claims. She went on a completely unhinged rant on her show, in which she promoted the deranged conspiracy theory that Ramos must have really been transgender and that “the media” must be covering up the truth because they supposedly don’t want to admit that the existence of trans women is a dangerous threat to American society.
Owens focuses on the fact that Ramos had long hair, the fact that he was sometimes known to wear black eyeliner, and the fact that, in the only photo he ever posted on his Instagram page, he has a facial expression that she perceives as effeminate as “glaring, obvious signs” that he was dangerously mentally unstable and that he was likely to commit a mass shooting.
Meanwhile, Owens completely ignores all the actual signs that Ramos was going to commit a school shooting, such as the fact that he frequently posted threats of violence (including specific threats that he was going to commit a school shooting) and videos of himself torturing and killing animals online or the fact that he was stockpiling assault weapons and ammunition for months leading up to the shooting. Here are some excerpts from her rant, as quoted in the Media Matters article:
“. . . even the one image that they show – you see him pursing his lips, standing to the side. And I said it’s very obvious that this should be considered a symptom, right? It is not normal for an adult man to want to dress like or look like a female. That is telling you that there is something going on in this household, that this person is, perhaps, being targeted by unstable adults in their household or within the school system. If we were a rational society, we would look for clues leading up. We would acknowledge that having a bunch of grown men that suddenly want to dress like little girls in our society isn’t normal. That would be a clue.”
“But nope. The job of the media is to hide that truth, right? So, instead, they are showing us one photo of the shooter and they are using terms now and saying that, well, he wasn’t trans, but — as The Daily Mail put it — he was ‘alternative.’ He wore makeup, he wore black eyeliner, and he grew his hair out, and he got increasingly weird, but don’t call him trans. . . . You’re not going to be able to just discern this for yourself, but we’re going to instead tell you that he was ‘alternative,’ whatever it is that that means. Right?”
“Let’s not talk about any of the symptoms leading up to all of the glaring, obvious signs that this person was, perhaps, mentally unstable because right now, we’re living in a society where we have accepted the narrative that men can become women and women can be men. And what was once acknowledged formerly as a mental illness, gender dysphoria, just a few years ago, was acknowledged officially in the DSM-5 as a mental illness, is now today considered something perfectly normal.”
If it weren’t for the fact that Ramos brutally murdered nineteen elementary school children and two teachers and the fact that the right wing is using this horrific mass shooting to attack and vilify trans women, the right’s obsession with attacking gender-nonconformity in any form would almost be outright funny. I mean, never mind the fact that Ramos explicitly posted online that he was going to commit a school shooting or the fact that he was stockpiling weapons, apparently, according to Candace Owens, it’s the long hair and the effeminate facial expression that really should have tipped people off that he was dangerous.
ABOVE: Screenshot showing the right-wing pundit Candace Owens going on an unhinged rant on her political talk show Candace, promoting the entirely baseless conspiracy theory that Salvador Ramos was actually transgender and that “the media” is somehow hiding the truth
New executive policies in Florida banning all Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care
June is LGBTQ+ Pride month, but the right has done the exact opposite of letting up on us in the past month; instead, they have relentlessly sought new ways to attack us.
On 2 June, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) released a forty-six-page report seeking to justify banning Medicaid from covering any form of gender-affirming healthcare for Floridians of any age by claiming that gender-affirming care is “experimental” and not proven to be safe or effective. The abstract for the report summarizes its conclusions as follows:
“Following a review of available literature, clinical guidelines, and coverage by other insurers and nations, Florida Medicaid has determined that the research supporting sex reassignment treatment is insufficient to demonstrate efficacy and safety. In addition, numerous studies, including the reports provided by the clinical and technical experts listed above, identify poor methods and the certainty of irreversible physical changes.”
“Considering the weak evidence supporting the use of puberty suppression, cross-sex hormones, and surgical procedures when compared to the stronger research demonstrating the permanent effects they cause, these treatments do not conform to GAPMS and are experimental and investigational.”
Just over two weeks after the DeSantis administration released this report, on 17 June, the Florida Medicaid office released a notice of a proposed rule stating that they will not cover any form of gender-affirming healthcare for any person of any age.
Florida’s ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming medical care is not unique. According to this report released by the Williams Institute in October 2019, at that time, twelve states already had similar laws or policies expressly banning Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming medical care. Indeed, according to the Williams Institute, prior to this move by the DeSantis administration, Florida was one of twenty states that had no express policy on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care.
Nonetheless, Florida’s new policy is especially alarming because of the specific context in which the state has issued it. Most of the other states that have enacted policies banning Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care did so over a decade ago at least, without any kind of official report seeking to justify the policy.
Florida, by contrast, has issued their policy just this past month, in the context of Republican-controlled states across the country, including Florida, pushing a whole flurry of bills and executive policies to ban gender-affirming medical care for minors. Moreover, the state has released a lengthy report seeking to justify the policy by attacking the validity of gender-affirming care altogether.
This context suggests that Florida Republicans may be gearing up to outlaw all gender-affirming care for all ages altogether. Fox News notably published an article on their website about the Florida AHCA report with the subheading “The report from the Florida agency cast doubt on whether transgender therapies are consistent with medical standards.” The report itself very much reads as though it is not just arguing to ban Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, but arguing to ban gender-affirming care itself entirely.
ABOVE: Screenshot showing the cover of the report that the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) for the state of Florida released on 2 June seeking to justify banning Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care
Why the Florida AHCA report is garbage
I have read the AHCA report in its entirety. I can understand how this report might sound convincing to someone who knows absolutely nothing about trans people or gender-affirming healthcare, since it cites a lot of names and uses a lot of big words. Nonetheless, the report is an absolute steaming pile of bovine manure. Indeed, it is difficult to convey just how unfathomably, absurdly poor-quality this report is.
To start off, the report makes numerous extremely basic factual errors. For instance, the report makes an error about which medicines trans women in the U.S. are prescribed for HRT. The report states, on page 17:
“For trans-females, the organizations state that progesterone (anti-androgen) is also necessary to block the effects of naturally produced testosterone (WPATH, 2012; Endocrine Society, 2017).”
It is true that an anti-androgen to block testosterone is usually a necessary part of the hormone regimen for a non-gonadectomized transfeminine person. It is also true that progesterone does have some anti-androgenic properties and that it is sometimes included as part of a trans woman’s hormone regimen.
In the United States, however, progesterone is relatively rarely prescribed to trans women and, as far as I am aware, it is never prescribed as a primary anti-androgen because its anti-androgenic properties are weak. Instead, the medication that is most commonly prescribed as the primary anti-androgen for trans women in the U.S. is spironolactone, which is a chemical derivative of progesterone, but not progesterone itself. (In Europe, the most commonly prescribed anti-androgen for trans women is cyproterone acetate, which is a progestational compound, but it is not approved for use in the U.S. and is therefore not used in feminizing HRT here.)
I have actually consulted both the 2012 WPATH Standards of Care and the Endocrine Society’s 2017 clinical practice guideline that the AHCA report cites for its statement about progesterone. Contrary to what the AHCA report claims, neither of these documents ever state that progesterone is “necessary” for feminizing HRT. In fact, the 2012 WPATH Standard of Care states exactly the opposite on page 49:
“With the exception of cyproterone, the inclusion of progestins in feminizing hormone therapy is controversial (Oriel, 2000). Because progestins play a role in mammary development on a cellular level, some clinicians believe that these agents are necessary for full breast development (Basson & Prior, 1998; Oriel, 2000). However, a clinical comparison of feminization regimens with and without progestins found that the addition of progestins neither enhanced breast growth nor lowered serum levels of free testosterone (Meyer III et al., 1986).”
This really does not bode well for the reading comprehension skills of the authors of the AHCA report. It’s especially striking that this report, which is ostensibly intended to justify banning Medicaid coverage for HRT and other gender-affirming medical treatments, makes a mistake about something so fundamental as which medicines are actually prescribed as part of those treatments in the first place.
ABOVE: Photo from WebMD showing both sides of an oral micronized progesterone pill (left) and photo I took myself showing both sides of a spironolactone pill (right)
Through its repeated claims about gender-affirming treatments supposedly being “experimental,” the report also gives the false impression that these treatments are new and untested. In reality, doctors have been providing gender-affirming treatments similar to the ones they provide today for over a hundred years at the very least. To wit:
- The American physician and tuberculosis researcher Alan L. Hart became the first recorded trans man to undergo a hysterectomy in around 1917.
- In 1931, at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, under the supervision of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, the German surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt performed the first recorded successful vaginoplasty on the trans woman Dora Richter, giving her a vulva and a vagina. Gohrbandt and the other surgeons at the institute performed successful vaginoplasties on several other trans women soon after Richter, including Charlotte Charlaque, Toni Ebel, and Lili Elbe. (Tragically, shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933, they violently stormed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, burned all the books and documents in the institute’s library as “degenerate,” and either sent all the people who worked at the institute whom they were able to capture to concentration camps or, in some cases, just outright murdered them on the spot. Dora Richter is believed to have been among those they murdered.)
- In 1939, the endocrinologist Dr. George Foss began supplying the British trans man Michael Dillon with testosterone. In 1942, Dillon underwent a double mastectomy (the first recorded transmasculine “top surgery”). Finally, between 1946 and 1949, the surgeon Harold Gillies performed the first gender-affirming phalloplasty on Dillon, giving him a penis.
- The German-American endocrinologist Harry Benjamin first prescribed estradiol to a young transfeminine patient in 1948.
- Starting in 1952, the Danish endocrinologist Dr. Christian Hamburger prescribed estradiol to the American trans woman Christine Jorgensen and subsequently performed a successful vaginoplasty on her. News of Jorgensen’s treatment became public and she became the first trans woman celebrity.
In the past seventy years since Dr. Hamburger treated Jorgensen, gender-affirming care has advanced greatly. Although more research is always a benefit, the basic processes, results, and possible complications of the various kinds of gender-affirming treatments that exist are generally well understood at this point. Every methodologically-sound study on the use of gender-affirming treatments for trans people has found that they greatly improve mental wellbeing and greatly reduce the likelihood of suicide.
ABOVE: Photograph of Alan L. Hart taken in 1943 (far left), photograph of Dora Richter (center left), photograph of Michael Dillon (center right), and photograph of Christine Jorgensen (far right)
The AHCA report also displays astounding ignorance of actual trans people and what we actually want. For instance, the report repeatedly emphasizes that gender-affirming treatments result in “irreversible physical changes” as an argument that they have too much risk of lasting harm to be supported by Medicaid, completely ignoring the fact that trans people overwhelmingly want these changes and that these changes are a large part of the reason why gender-affirming treatments are effective at reducing gender dysphoria.
The report tries to use the existence of a relatively small number of detransitioners (i.e., people who previously identified as trans who now identify with the gender they were assigned at birth) to argue against allowing Medicaid to cover gender-affirming treatments or potentially even allowing such treatments to be performed at all. This contention, however, seeks to deprive trans people of bodily autonomy.
All people who are capable of making decisions for themselves have an inherent right to do whatever they want to their own bodies. If a person is of a mental capacity where they are capable of making their own decisions, they want to go on HRT and/or have gender-affirming surgeries, and they have been adequately informed about the effects and possible complications of those treatments, then neither lawmakers nor health professionals have any right to preemptively deny the person access to those treatments on the ground that they think that the person might hypothetically regret seeking those treatments later. Meanwhile, as far as mental capacity goes, a physician who has spoken to an individual patient and knows the patient’s specific needs is far better qualified to make the assessment of whether the person is capable of making their own decisions than lawmakers are.
On top of this, this whole argument against allowing trans people access to gender-affirming care because detransitioners exist ignores the fact that the treatments that are used to help trans people are the exact same treatments that would be beneficial to detransitioners.
A man who previously identified as a trans woman who has been on feminizing HRT and has grown breasts is most likely going to want to take testosterone (assuming that his body is no longer producing the hormone in large enough quantities naturally) and have a double mastectomy. If he has previously undergone vaginoplasty, then he may want to undergo phalloplasty to acquire a new penis. These are the exact same things that trans men want.
Meanwhile, a woman who previously identified as a trans man who has been on testosterone, has grown facial hair, grown a permanently deeper voice as a result of the testosterone, and has had a double mastectomy is most likely going to want to take estradiol, undergo laser hair removal to remove her facial hair and possibly body hair, go through voice therapy so that she can learn to speak in a more feminine voice using her longer vocal cords, and so on. These are the exact same things that trans women want.
If you actually want to help detransitioners and not just use them as an excuse to deny trans people the right to do what we want with our own bodies, the solution is not to impose more obstacles and restrictions to make it harder for people who want gender-affirming treatments to access them, but rather to make those treatments more easily accessible and make them available to detransitioners who want them, as well as trans people.
Moving on, large portions of the AHCA report actually consist of the authors simply admitting that all the studies that have ever been conducted indicate that gender-affirming treatments are effective at reducing gender dysphoria and that every major medical organization supports gender-affirming treatments for trans people, but then casually dismissing all those studies and positions of medical organizations by insisting that the studies are all “low-quality,” usually citing one anti-transgender hack activist or another.
To give you some idea of just how laughably methodologically unsound the studies that this report relies on are, the report extensively cites a study by an anti-transgender activist researcher named Dr. Lisa Littman titled “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Young Adults: A Study of Parental Reports,” which was published in the journal PLOS One 13(8) in August 2018.
This study did not involve any conversations or interactions whatsoever with any actual trans youth. Instead, it relies solely on an online survey of anti-transgender parents with transgender adolescent children. All participants in the study were recruited solely from three explicitly anti-transgender websites. Based solely on what these anti-trans parents said in their survey responses, the study hypothesizes the existence of a new mental disorder that it calls “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” or “ROGD.”
The study hypothesizes that this condition occurs when an adolescent who has supposedly never shown any previous signs of gender dysphoria suddenly begins identifying as trans with intense gender dysphoria, following exposure to peers who identify as trans and/or media promoting “transgender lifestyles.” The study further hypothesizes that this supposed condition spreads as a “social and peer contagion.”
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably already noticed the glaringly obvious flaw in this study, which is that it only surveyed transphobic parents. The adolescent children of these parents may have actually been experiencing gender dysphoria for a long time before coming out to their parents about it and may have intentionally hid their dysphoria from their parents because they knew or suspected that their parents would not be accepting.
Even if the adolescents were not intentionally hiding their dysphoria, their parents may not have been able to recognize the signs of gender dysphoria because they didn’t know what signs to look for. Parents of LGBTQ+ adolescents can be notoriously oblivious.
To give one extreme example, there was one boy in my high school graduating class who was in the group of people I sat with at lunch during my senior year. He was from a very conservative Evangelical family, but most of the students at school knew that he was gay. He talked in a stereotypical gay voice, he had a boyfriend who went everywhere with him and frequently visited him at his parents’ home, he and his boyfriend were always sweet-talking each other, including even in front of his parents.
Despite this, he often told us at lunch about how no one in his family had even the faintest clue that he was gay and his parents seemed completely oblivious, even to things that seemed to him like really obvious clues. The possibility that their son could be gay didn’t even register to them because the idea was just so unthinkable.
Rather than suddenly becoming gender dysphoric as a result of exposure to transgender peers and trans-affirming media, the adolescents whose parents Littman surveyed may have actively sought out trans friends and trans-affirming media because they were already feeling gender dysphoric and they wanted to find people and media to which they could relate.
PLOS One eventually issued a partial correction/retraction of Littman’s paper and multiple other studies in the years since it came out have thoroughly refuted it, although Littman herself continues to defend her methodology.
ABOVE: Photograph of Dr. Lisa Littman, whom the AHCA report cites extensively
The AHCA report also tries (on page 25) to argue against allowing trans people to access gender-affirming surgeries by citing a study that found that trans people who underwent gender-affirming surgeries were more likely to attempt or commit suicide than non-transgender people in the general population. This argument is so obviously, objectively incoherent that it actually gives me a headache.
First, the report tries to argue against the effectiveness of gender-affirming surgeries by comparing trans people who have undergone gender-affirming surgeries to a control group of the general population (i.e., people who are not transgender). This assumes that the only difference between cisgender people in the general population and trans people who have undergone gender-affirming surgeries is the surgeries themselves—completely ignoring all the difficulties that many or all trans people face that cisgender people do not, including gender dysphoria, discrimination for being trans, rejection by one’s family and community, bullying and harassment, etc.
If you want to test the effectiveness of gender-affirming surgeries, then your control group should be trans people who want gender-affirming surgeries but cannot access them and your experimental group should be trans people who have had gender-affirming surgeries.
What the AHCA report has done here is essentially the gender-care equivalent of arguing that heart transplants are ineffective and should be banned because patients who receive heart transplants have a higher rate of death than people in the general population who don’t need heart transplants, while ignoring the fact that people who receive heart transplants have a lower rate of death than people who need heart transplants and don’t receive them. It’s such a flagrantly fallacious argument that I cannot possibly believe it was made in good faith.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a human heart ready to be transplanted
Why banning Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care will most likely have negative consequences for trans people
Leaving all that aside, banning Medicaid coverage for all forms of gender-affirming care will most likely have serious negative effects on trans people in Florida. According to the report from the Williams Institute I referenced earlier, in 2019, there were 9,000 transgender adults in the state of Florida who were enrolled in Medicaid, but it is unclear how many of these adults, if any, were receiving Medicaid coverage for any aspect of gender-affirming, since the state of Florida previously had no express policy regarding such coverage.
Assuming that there were at least some trans people who were receiving Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care in Florida before this policy, it is likely that many of those people will lose coverage and will no longer be able to afford their hormone therapy. As a result of this, trans people in Florida who still have their original gonads and can’t afford HRT without Medicaid may be effectively forced to medically detransition against their wills.
Meanwhile, the loss of Medicaid coverage may have even more devastating health consequences for trans people who have had their gonads removed. Every person needs to have sex hormones in their body in order to be physically healthy. Gonadectomized trans people no longer have the primary organs that would normally make those hormones naturally, which means that they receive all the sex hormones on which their physical health depends through HRT.
In the long run, depriving gonadectomized trans people of access to HRT may result in, among other symptoms, severe premature loss of bone density, osteoporosis, accelerated loss of lung function, and increased risk of heart disease. HRT can easily prevent all of these symptoms, but not if Florida takes away trans people’s access to it by banning Medicaid coverage for it.
Additionally, because many private insurance companies decide what to cover based on what Medicaid covers, this policy will most likely result in many private insurance companies dropping all coverage for gender-affirming care in the state of Florida. This means that even many trans people who have good health insurance may lose insurance coverage for gender-affirming care, may not be able to afford it otherwise, and may lose access to HRT as well.
The clear aim of this policy by the DeSantis administration is to force adult trans people who are happily transitioned and living fulfilling lives to medically detransition against their wills.
The difference between a trans woman and a drag queen
Moving on from the Florida AHCA report, one of the right wing’s main moral panics pertaining to queer people this past month has been about children viewing drag performances. Rightists are claiming that allowing a person under the age of eighteen to view any kind of drag performance is sexually inappropriate and that queer people are allowing children to view such performances in order to “groom” them for molestation.
For those readers who are not already aware, trans woman and drag queen are two different terms that refer to two distinct kinds of people. A transgender woman or trans woman is a person who was assigned male at birth (meaning the gender marker on her original birth certificate says “male”) who identifies as a woman and generally seeks acceptance as a woman full-time and in all aspects of her everyday life.
Most (but not all) trans women choose to go on feminizing HRT and some (but not all or even necessarily most) trans women choose to undergo some form of gender-affirming surgery. Although trans women can dress however they want and some trans women do choose to dress very flamboyantly, on a daily basis, most trans women typically dress in fairly “normal” everyday clothing of the same general variety that any cisgender woman might wear.
A drag queen, by contrast, is a person (most commonly a cisgender gay man, although there have been cisgender straight men, trans women, and trans men who have performed as drag queens) who dresses up to look like an over-the-top exaggeration of what a stereotypical woman is said to look like for a performance. When they are performing, drag queens typically wear wildly flamboyant, over-the-top costumes with enormous wigs, enormous fake eyelashes, extreme or garish makeup, fake jewelry, enormous fake fingernails, and outlandish, brightly-colored dresses, often decorated with glitter and/or rhinestones.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the drag queen Kim Chi in full costume and makeup
As a trans woman a little over a year into my transition who does not dress or behave in an especially campy or flamboyant manner, I will honestly admit that I personally don’t really enjoy watching extremely campy and flamboyant drag performances, because they uncomfortably remind me of the way many cisgender people view trans women as men in dresses overperforming stereotypical femininity (despite the fact that many trans women, including I myself, do not even wear dresses). I’ve never watched even a single episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, nor do I currently have any intention to do so.
As Samantha Riedel discusses in an article published in March 2018 for the LGBTQ+ online magazine Them, this sentiment is not uncommon among young trans women like me. There has been some tension between drag queens and trans women for several decades now, despite the fact that the two communities overlap and have many overlapping interests.
Unfortunately, people on the right wing routinely conflate trans women with drag queens and, in many cases, they don’t recognize any fundamental distinction between us, since they view us both as essentially men in dresses pretending to be women. For this reason, right-wingers often lump trans women and drag queens together and attack one group by attacking the other.
Why drag is not inherently inappropriate for children
My personal opinions aside, I recognize that enjoying or not enjoying drag performances is a subjective matter of personal taste and I will zealously defend the right of drag performers to do what they do. Drag is just people of one gender dressing up to look the way people of a different gender are stereotypically said to look. It’s just a genre of costume. Although drag artists performing for adult audiences frequently engage in sexual innuendo, there is absolutely nothing inherently sexual about drag itself.
There is nothing inherently any more sexual about a man dressing up as a woman or a woman dressing up as a man than there is about a man dressing up as a cowboy or an astronaut or a doctor. Sure, “sexy cowboy” and “sexy doctor” costumes may exist, but not every person wearing a cowboy costume is a “sexy cowboy” and not every person wearing a doctor costume is a “sexy doctor.” In the same way, some drag performances are not appropriate for children, while other performances are completely appropriate and child friendly. It all depends on the specific performance in question.
One example of a kind of child-friendly drag event are “Drag Queen Story Hours,” a kind of event that the author and poet Michelle Tea started in 2015. These events are usually held at public libraries and mainly involve a drag queen coming in to read children’s picture books to children. These events are mainly intended for children ages three through eleven. The stories the drag queens read usually have some generic message encouraging children to be true to themselves and follow their dreams.
I remember back when I was in first grade, there was at least one occasion when a group of clowns came into my school, performed, and read picture books to us. Fundamentally, Drag Queen Story Hour is not really much different from that; you have an adult wearing a huge wig, crazy makeup, and a colorful, outlandish outfit reading picture books to children.
ABOVE: Photograph taken by Tammy Orr Wyant for the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson showing the drag queen Lil Miss Hot Mess reading a picture book to a group of children at recent Drag Queen Story Hour in Tuscon, Arizona
What is the purpose of child-friendly drag events?
Now that I have argued that drag is not inherently inappropriate for children in and of itself, let’s talk about why someone might want children to view a drag event that is specifically designed to be child-friendly. In other words: what purpose does having these events serve?
Contrary to what many right-wingers will insist, the purpose of child-friendly drag events is not to turn straight children gay, nor is it to “groom” children for any kind of sexual molestation. Instead, these events serve two purposes. The first purpose is to teach children in general that gender-nonconforming people exist and that it is ok for a person to be gender-nonconforming. In other words, the first purpose is to teach tolerance, open-mindedness, and empathy.
The second purpose applies more specifically to children of queer parents. Drag has been a major part of queer culture and queer history for over a hundred years at least. Many queer parents therefore want to be able to show their children what drag is and teach them about it, without exposing them to the more risqué aspects of drag performances that are intended for adults. The obvious solution to this is to have separate drag events that are specially designed to be appropriate for children.
ABOVE: Photograph from the King County Library System showing a drag queen reading picture books to children as part of a Drag Queen Story Hour at the King County Public Library in Washington state in June 2019
The “Drag Your Kids to Pride” event in Dallas
Unfortunately, right-wingers view the existence of queer people as inherently sexual and inappropriate for children and, since they associate drag with queer people, they view it as inherently sexual and inappropriate for children also. It doesn’t help that right-wingers have spent decades falsely portraying queer people as pedophiles and a menace to children. Thus, when right-wingers see any person whom they perceive as queer interacting with a child in any way, many of them automatically, instinctively interpret the person as a dangerous pedophile who is “grooming” their next victim.
This brings us to the specific event that has helped set off the most recent wave of right-wing hysteria over children and drag. At 11:00 p.m. on 4 June 2022, the LGBTQ+ bar and nightclub Mr. Misster on Cedar Springs Road in Dallas, Texas, hosted an event that was advertised in advance as a “family-friendly” drag queen brunch with the tagline “Drag Your Kids to Pride.” The itinerary for the event included a game of musical chairs, “mocktails,” drag queens giving a special performance that was supposed to be child-friendly, and an opportunity for children to dance along the aisle with the queens.
To be honest, judging from what I’ve seen in the videos I’ve watched and the photos I’ve seen of the event, I personally don’t think that this particular event succeeded in its stated goal of being child-friendly. The bar was closed for the ostensibly family-friendly event, but signs that the building is normally used as a gay bar and nightclub were evident, including a huge neon sign on the back wall with the sexually implicit phrase “IT’S NOT GONNA LICK ITSELF” in all capital letters. Video clips of the event show that some of the drag queens wore somewhat revealing costumes and performed somewhat suggestive dances. Some clips also appear to show children handing tips to the drag queens.
On some level, I can sort of understand each of these elements of the event individually. For instance, the neon sign is permanently attached to the wall, so they couldn’t have easily removed it just for this event. As for the drag queens’ outfits and dance routines, each drag queen probably owns a limited selection of costumes and probably only knows a limited repertoire of dances.
Because the queens normally perform for adults, the costumes they own are probably all at least somewhat revealing and the dances they know are probably all at least somewhat suggestive. It’s understandable that they might not want or be able to buy new costumes or learn new dances just for this one-time event. In any case, the outfits were, if anything, less revealing than the ones high school cheerleaders typically wear and even the most suggestive dance routines were no more suggestive than those that such cheerleaders perform.
As for the children handing the drag queens tips, tips are not inherently sexual; after all, people normally tip waiters in restaurants. The drag queens probably don’t make much money and they probably make most of their money off tips, so it’s understandable that they would allow attendees of this event to give them tips. It is also understandable that some parents might give money to their children to give to the drag queens so that the children can feel like they are being generous—not entirely unlike how Christian parents often give their children money to put in the offering plate at church.
Nonetheless, the cumulative effect of all these things put together is an event that I personally do not think was appropriate for young children. I do not have children and it is unlikely that I will ever have children, but, if I did have them, I personally would not want to take them to event like this one.
There are a million things that the organizers of this event could have done differently to make the event more genuinely child-friendly. For one thing, they could have had the event at a different location entirely, rather than inside a building that normally operates as a bar and nightclub. Even if there was no other location available for the event, they could have easily turned the neon sign that says “IT’S NOT GONNA LICK ITSELF” off and covered it up with a blanket or a curtain or something so that none of the children would be able to see it.
I think that the drag queens’ outfits on their own were generally acceptable for children to see. (After all, the outfits covered far more than most women’s bathing suits.) I think that at least some of the dances were also acceptable, although some I would say were not. The queens could have restricted the dances they performed to only the ones that are least suggestive.
Finally, the combination of the somewhat suggestive outfits and dances with children giving tips does result in the appearance that the parents are encouraging their children to tip the drag queens to reward them for the sexually suggestive aspects of their work.
The organizers could have easily designed a better system to pay the drag queens for their work. Instead of having the audience, including the children, tip the drag queens directly, they could have raised the entry fee or had the audience leave their tips in a jar at the door before they leave to be subsequently divided evenly among the queens.
ABOVE: Photo credited to Aldo Buttazzoni showing one of the drag queens performing at the “Drag Your Kids to Pride” event in the Mr. Misster LGBTQ+ bar and nightclub in Dallas on 4 June 2022
The fascist backlash against the event
Whatever legitimate criticisms one can make of the event, far worse than the event itself are the throngs of right-wing extremists who showed up at the bar to viciously and relentlessly harass families and performers going in and out and, at various points, try to force their way into the bar itself.
There is a right-wing account on Twitter called “Libs of TikTok” run by a woman named Chaya Raichik that selects content created by progressive and LGBTQ+ people on TikTok and reposts that content on Twitter for the purpose of mockery and harassment. The account, which currently has over 1.3 million followers as of the time I am writing this post, has also begun sharing information about child-friendly drag events and LGBTQ+ Pride events in advance, explicitly urging its followers to do whatever they can to disrupt these events or force them to cancel.
In the past month, multiple anti-LGBTQ+ militant groups have seemingly used the account to find targets to attack. On 30 May 2022, about a week before the “Drag Your Kids to Pride” event in Dallas, Libs of TikTok shared information about the upcoming event on Twitter, portraying it as part of a supposed effort by LGBTQ+ people to “groom” children.
According to this article in the Dallas Observer, on the night before the event itself, at around 9:30 p.m., an unidentified man called Mr. Misster on the phone and threatened to set off bombs unless the bar agreed to cancel the event. The bar reported the threat to the Dallas police, who are investigating the bomb threat as a possible hate crime.
On the day of the event, at least a half dozen different groups of self-described Christian fascists descended upon Mr. Misster in droves, showing up even before the bar opened its door to ferociously harass the people attending the event. They stayed there and continued to shout abuse and harassment throughout. Numerous of them tried to force their way into the bar multiple times, shouting abuse and insults as they did so, but were prevented from entering. Several of them also followed and harassed parents and performers as they were leaving the event.
This article for Salon gives an overview of some of the various neo-fascist individuals and organizations that were present. These include members of the white Christian nationalist “Groyper” movement and the University of North Texas student activist Kelly Neidert, who described herself in a tweet in October 2021 as a “Christian fascist.”
Also present were members of the New Columbia Movement, a white supremacist Christian neo-fascist organization which regards “false equality” as “evil.” The New Columbia Movement advocates the abolition of American democracy and the creation of a new authoritarian state modeled on the Roman Empire, which they say will be dominated by “a High American Culture” based on “Christian morality, rule of law, and the common good.”
The group traffics heavily in white male supremacist, antisemitic, anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ+, and xenophobic rhetoric. Leaders of the organization have also, among other things, opened praised Elliot Rodger, the self-described “incel” mass murderer who brutally murdered six people and injured fourteen others in a misogyny-motivated killing spree on 23 May 2014 in Isla Vista.
The right-wing extremist YouTuber John Doyle, who has described himself as a “Christian fascist” and “white nationalist,” was among the loudest and most vicious of all the various right-wing extremists who gathered outside the bar. One video shows Doyle and a whole mob of his cronies walking up to a crowd of parents with young children waiting to be let into the bar, shouting into a megaphone at them: “Why do you want to put an axe-wound between your son’s legs?” Later in the same video, Doyle shouts at the parents through his megaphone:
“You people are the symptom of a dying society and you know it . . . You are child abusers. . . . Your children should be home. Your kids aren’t actually gay; you’ve just groomed them. You’re a groomer!”
In a different video, a Christian fascist shouts at counterprotesters at the top of his lungs with seething anger:
“The fist of Christ will come down on you very soon!!! You’re done with this!!! You’re done with this! Groomer!!! Groomer!!! You’re disgusting!!!”
In another video, one of the Groypers gleefully tells a pro-LGBTQ+ counterprotester: “It’s going to be so kek when we take away all your rights!” (Kek is a far-right slang word meaning “funny” or “awesome.”) Doyle, standing nearby and smirking in agreement, adds emphatically: “Every single one of them. Every single one.”
Another video records Doyle as saying that the sheriffs should “go in there [i.e., into the bar] and put bullets in all their heads,” adding: “They’d be rewarded for it. That’s what the badge is for.”
ABOVE: Photo showing John Doyle (the man holding the megaphone at center) and his various cronies coming to harass a group of parents with young children waiting to be let in outside the bar
The right-wing media’s coverage of the event
Right-wing pundits gleefully leapt on bandwagon, attacking the “Drag Your Kids to Pride” event using very similar rhetoric to the self-described fascists who gathered outside the bar and even praising the fascists as heroes.
For instance, on Monday, 6 June 2022, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who, as I have discussed before on this blog, has a history of promoting fascist propaganda and talking points, devoted an entire segment on his show to talking about the “Drag Your Kids to Pride” event, in which he denounced the event at great length, calling it “grotesque,” accusing the adults involved in it of “sexualizing children,” and portraying it as supposed evidence that LGBTQ+ people have a depraved agenda to sexually groom children.
Carlson also heaped exuberant praise on the neo-fascists and Neo-Nazis who were gathered outside the event, describing them as “brave protesters” who dared to stand up against the supposed evil of child-grooming queer people. He plays a video showing one of the neo-fascists trying to force his way into the bar while shouting that the people inside are pedophiles and child abusers and praises the neo-fascist who appears in it, declaring: “If more people acted like that, we would have less people sexualizing children!”
Most disturbing of all, Carlson opened the segment with the callout “Just another weekend in Weimar,” implying that the present-day United States is a degenerate and immoral society in just the same way that Nazi propagandists claim that the Weimar Republic (which was the government of Germany before the Nazis seized power in 1933) was and that, very soon, a new Nazi Party will rise up to take control over the United States, purge it of the degeneracy and depravity that currently reigns, and establish a better, more fascist national order.
ABOVE: Screenshot from Tucker Carlson’s segment on his Fox News show on 6 June, in which he strenuously denounces the “Drag Your Kids to Pride” event that took place in Dallas as supposedly “sexualizing children” and praises the crowd of neo-fascists who surrounded the bar as “brave protesters”
Republican state lawmakers’ proposed bills to make allowing a person under eighteen to see a drag performance a crime
In the wake of this event, Republican lawmakers in various states have proposed bills to ban minors from attending drag events. Unsurprisingly, one of the first announcements of a proposed bill came in Texas. On 6 June, the Texas state representative Bryan Slaton proposed a bill to the Texas state legislature that would make it a crime to allow any person under the age of eighteen to attend any kind of event involving drag.
On that same day, the Florida state representative Anthony Sabatini proposed a bill that would make it a felony for any adult to allow any person under the age of eighteen to attend any kind of event involving drag. As an added measure of cruelty, the bill would also require that any parent found guilty of allowing their child to attend a drag event must be stripped of their parental rights and have their child permanently taken away from them.
ABOVE: Campaign photo of Texas state representative Bryan Slaton (left) and official portrait of Florida state representative Anthony Sabatini (right)
Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, has strongly spoken out in favor of Sabatini’s proposed bill and has announced that he is looking to see what he can do under existing statutes to punish parents who allow their children to attend drag events. PinkNews quotes him as saying:
“We’re going to look to see what can be done under existing statutes, but I do think targeting these kids with all this stuff. It used to be kids would be off-limits, used be everybody agreed with that. And now, it just seems like there’s a concerted effort to be exposing kids more and more to things that are not age-appropriate. I think our state, Florida, we need to be a family-friendly state. We need to be a good state for people to be able to raise a family, get a high-quality education, have a lot of opportunities without having some political agenda shoved down their throat.”
Sadly, it is highly probable that the heavily Republican-dominated Texas and Florida state legislatures will pass these proposed anti-drag bills and that the Republican governors of both states will sign them into law. Other Republican-controlled state governments may pass similar laws.
These bills are appalling in and of themselves. Even though, as I have stated above, I do not think that the “Drag Your Kids to Pride” event in Dallas succeeded in being “child-friendly” and I would not take my children, if I had them, to that event or any other event like it in a gay bar, I do not think that such events should be illegal. I certainly do not think that anyone should face a felony conviction or have their children permanently taken away from them for allowing their child to attend such an event.
Moreover, these bills would not only criminalize allowing children to attend events like the one in Dallas, but also much tamer and genuinely child-friendly events like Drag Queen Story Hour. The idea that someone could be thrown in prison, have their parenting rights revoked, and have their child permanently taken away from them just for allowing their child to attend an event where a drag queen reads children’s picture books to them is truly appalling.
Sadly, these bills could have even more horrible and far-reaching ramifications if they are passed. These anti-drag bills seek to establish that it is a crime to allow any person under the age of eighteen to see a person wearing clothing associated with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth as part of a performance event. But what about outside the context of a performance event?
There is a fairly high likelihood that, if Republican states succeed in passing laws that make it a felony to allow a child to attend a drag event that use vague or general enough wording, such a law would be used to criminally prosecute transgender or gender-nonconforming people for wearing clothing that is not traditionally associated with the gender they were assigned at birth in any public space where children could conceivably be present.
It could, for instance, become dangerous for any person assigned male at birth to wear any kind of dress, skirt, makeup, or any other traditionally feminine clothing in public, since they could conceivably be charged with a felony, be thrown in prison, have any children they might have taken away from them, and have their parenting rights permanently revoked for doing so. It could even become legally dangerous for a person assigned male at birth to merely have long hair in public that police officers with a reductionist view of masculinity think looks just a bit too feminine. That’s precisely the road red states could be headed down if these bills pass.
Mark Burns’s plan to round up and exterminate all LGBTQ+ people
Mark Burns is an Evangelical Protestant pastor. In June of this year, he was running as a Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in South Carolina’s fourth congressional district. Burns is an ardent supporter of Donald Trump and Trump himself endorsed his candidacy for the House.
On 9 June 2022, during an interview with the right-wing host Jane Ruby on The Stew Peters Show, Burns declared that all queer people (especially singling out transgender people), all parents who accept and support their queer children, and all teachers who teach anything about the existence of queer people in schools are “groomers” and that our existence is a “national security threat.”
As a solution to this supposed threat, Burns declares that all queer people, all parents who support their queer children, and all teachers who acknowledge the existence of queer people in the classroom must be systematically rounded up, be given sham trials for “treason,” and be promptly executed. Here is a partial excerpt from his speech, with his exact words:
“The LGBT transgenders grooming our children’s minds is a national security threat. That’s why, when I’m elected, I don’t wanna just vote; I wanna start holding people accountable—for treason! I’m going to push to reenact HUAC. HUAC is the House Un-American Activities Committee. We need to hold people for treason, start having some public hearings, and start executing people who are found guilty for their treasonous acts against the Constitution of the United States of America—just like they did back in 1776!”
In response to this speech, Ruby, the host, applauds and enthusiastically declares with a beaming smile on her face: “You know what, South Carolina, this is our guy!”
Thankfully, despite Ruby’s enthusiastic declaration of support, Burns did not ultimately win the Republican nomination for South Carolina’s fourth congressional district. (Unfortunately, the nomination instead went to the incumbent for that seat William Timmons, who has tried to claim that Trump actually won the 2020 election and voted to object to the certification of Joe Biden as president.)
Despite Burns’s loss, the fact that he evidently made these statements believing that they would increase his popularity with the Republican base and make him more likely to win his primary, and the fact that the right-wing host openly applauded his declarations in favor of mass genocide, is a startling illustration of what many mainstream Republicans increasingly want: to eliminate all queer people from society by any means necessary, even if means rounding us all up and murdering us. Mass genocide against queer people is a mainstream idea in conservative discourse now.
ABOVE: Screenshot showing the Evangelical pastor Mark Burns, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in South Carolina’s fourth congressional district, saying that all queer people, parents who support queer children, and teachers who teach about the existence of queer people must be rounded up and executed on The Stew Peters Show
The Proud Boys’ storming of the San Lorenzo Library
On 30 May 2022, Libs of TikTok made a tweet that shared information about a Drag Queen Story Hour that was scheduled for Saturday, 11 June 2022, at the San Lorenzo Library in Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, along with a comment implying that the story hour must be stopped.
On the day of the event, the drag queen Panda Dulce was reading a picture book to children when at least five members of the Proud Boys, an all-male, right-wing extremist, neo-fascist organization whose members have a history of violent activity, burst into the room with video cameras set on “record,” aggressively shouting various transphobic and homophobic slurs and insults at the attendees.
None of the Proud Boys who stormed the library were from Alameda County. One of them was wearing a T-shirt that read “Kill your local pedophile” in all-capital letters above an image of an AR-15 style rifle. The Proud Boys’ own video recording, which has been shared online, records one of them angrily shouting upon entering the room:
“Who brought the tranny? It’s a groomer. It’s a pedophile. Why do you bring your kids to this event?”
The video records the Proud Boys verbally attacking the drag queen and the other adults in the room at length, repeatedly calling the drag queen a pedophile. As the drag queen leaves the room, the video records one of them shouting:
“Get out of here, you pedophile! Get out of here! You’re not safe here! Get out of here!”
After she leaves the room, he addresses the remaining adults, shouting:
“That’s disgusting! Look, no, this is sick!!! You are sick! You are sick! Look at these poor children! These poor children! How dare you guys! You godless whores!!!”
The Proud Boys’ own video also shows several of them flash the “ok” hand signal, which white supremacists have appropriated as a sign meaning “white power.” The Washington Post reports in this article that the sheriff’s office is conducting a probe to decide whether the Proud Boys involved in this incident committed any hate crimes.
ABOVE: Images from the Proud Boys’ own video recording showing three of the men who stormed the San Lorenzo Library on 11 June. (Notice the man on the left and the man on the right making the “white power” hand signal and the man in the center wearing that T-shirt that reads “Kill your local pedophile.”)
The arrest of thirty-one members of Patriot Front who were planning to attack a Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
On 9 June 2022, Libs of TikTok made a tweet sharing information about a Pride event called “Pride in the Park” that was scheduled to take place on 11 June in Coeur d’Alene. The event was set to include, among other activities, a “family-friendly drag dance party.” Libs of TikTok commented on the event saying: “We are living in hell.” (Apparently, in their mind, merely knowing that, somewhere on the planet, there are people dancing in drag in the presence of children is equivalent to the agony of eternal torture in the unquenchable fires of perdition.)
On the day of the event, an anonymous 911 caller told the police that they saw a “little army” of men wearing masks and bearing riot shields getting into a U-Haul. Ten minutes later, Idaho police pulled over the U-Haul. They found thirty-one members of the Neo-Nazi organization Patriot Front from at least ten different states. The Patriot Front members were heading toward the Pride event in Coeur d’Alene armed with riot gear, including riot shields, shin guards, and smoke grenades. They also had a seven-page document describing in detail their tactical plans to violently attack people at the event.
It is hard to overstate just how close this incident came to a bloodbath. If the 119 caller hadn’t called and the police hadn’t stopped the Patriot Front members before they reached the event, then they would have attacked the unarmed Pride attendees. They would have certainly injured some people and may very well have killed some people. Thankfully, that didn’t happen this time and no one was injured or killed. We must be on guard that Patriot Front and other far-right groups will certainly try to do something like this again.
According to this article from The Washington Post and this article by NBC News, since the incident, the Idaho police force has received over 149 phone calls about the incident, about half of which have been from anonymous, right-wing extremist callers, who have angrily shouted insults and slurs into the phone, made extensive death threats, and also made threats to dox individual police officers.
ABOVE: Photograph showing Idaho police arresting the thirty-one members of the Neo-Nazi organization Patriot Front who were planning to attack a Pride event in Coeur d’Alene
Why Twitter refuses to ban Libs of TikTok
At this point, you may be wondering why on earth Twitter has not banned the account Libs of TikTok when it is so clearly engaging in stochastic terrorism against queer people. The answer to this question is that the ultrawealthy tech plutocrat Elon Musk—who, as of the time I am writing this post, has an estimated net worth of US$203 billion, making him the wealthiest human being on the planet—is currently Twitter’s largest shareholder and he is currently in the midst of buying the corporation for US$43 billion, planning to turn it into a private company under his personal ownership.
Musk has repeatedly criticized people stating their gender pronouns, has repeatedly shared transphobic memes, and has been extremely outspoken in his viewpoint that right-wing accounts should be allowed to basically say whatever they want on Twitter without any fear of being banned.
He has claimed that, after he buys Twitter, he will change Twitter’s policy so that there will be absolutely no restrictions on speech other than the laws of the jurisdiction in which a person resides. At the very least, he will almost certainly remove all policies banning hate speech against queer people.
Musk has emphatically denounced Twitter’s decision to ban the former U.S. president Donald Trump from the platform (after Trump used it to encourage and incite pro-Trump insurrectionists during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021) as “morally wrong” and he has vowed that, after he buys Twitter, he will invite Trump to return to the platform.
When asked which politician he would support for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Musk replied that he is “leaning towards” supporting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who, as I have noted previously, is known for his stridently anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
Musk has even spoken out on Twitter in support of Libs of TikTok specifically, in response to the owner of the account claiming that she has been receiving death threats. (If she has truly been receiving death threats, that is terrible, but what’s far more terrible is that fact that she is relentlessly demonizing and attacking LGBTQ+ people and helping right-wing extremist groups to find pro-LGBTQ+ events to target.)
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing Elon Musk, the wealthiest man on the planet, who is buying Twitter and has been vocal about his plans to protect right-wing accounts that engage in stochastic terrorism, such as Libs of TikTok
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Increasing calls by Republican lawmakers to ban drag
In any case, in the wake of the recent incidents of right-wing groups seeking to interrupt pro-LGBTQ+ events, the conservative clamor to make allowing a minor to see drag a crime has only grown even louder.
On 14 June, Republican leaders in the Arizona State Senate announced that they also want to pass a law to make it illegal for any person under the age of eighteen to attend any kind of event involving drag, although Vince Leach, who will likely be the bill’s sponsor, told the Arizona Mirror that the exact details of the bill are a “work in progress.”
On that same day, U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene announced on Twitter that she is introducing a bill at the federal level that would make it illegal for any adult person in any U.S. state or territory to allow any person under the age of eighteen to view any form of drag.
Thankfully, at least for now, Greene’s proposed bill is unlikely to go anywhere, since Democrats currently hold the majority in both houses of Congress, albeit by the slimmest possible margins, and, even if the bill were to pass both houses, President Joe Biden still has at least two more years left in his presidency and he is highly unlikely to sign a bill banning drag into federal law.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Arizona state senator Vince Leach (left) and official portrait of U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (right)
The Texas Republican Party platform
On 21 June 2022, the Republican Party for the state of Texas released its official 2022 party platform, which has been viewed for many decades now as effectively the “right-wing wish list,” describing all the policies that the Republican Party really wants to enact.
This year, the Texas GOP platform declares, among other things, that President Joe Biden “was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States” (pg. 40), that the state of Texas should hold a referendum within the next year on whether the state should secede from the Union (pg. 6), that Texas should pass a law that legally defines personhood as beginning at the moment of fertilization and any abortion performed at any stage of development as murder with no exceptions not even for the life of the pregnant person (pg. 31), and that Texas should pass a law requiring that every student in every school across the state must be taught that personhood “begins at fertilization” and must be required to view a live ultrasound of a fetus (pg. 17).
The party platform also includes a whole section on page 21 titled “Homosexuality and Gender Issues,” which begins with the stark declaration:
“Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice. We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin, and we oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values. No one should be granted special legal status based on their LGBTQ+ identification.”
What the Texas Republican Party means when they say that LGBTQ+ people should not be granted any “special legal status” is that they oppose any form of laws or policies that are designed in any way to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination. For instance, the Texas GOP is opposed to any law or policy of any kind that might prohibit an employer from firing someone from their job for being queer, or that might prohibit a landlord from evicting a tenant for being queer.
This also means that they oppose any law or policy that would categorize crimes specifically targeting LGBTQ+ people as hate crimes. In other words, if someone were to bash a gay or trans person’s skull open while shouting homophobic and/or transphobic slurs, the Texas GOP does not think that should be categorized as a hate crime.
The platform takes an even more aggressive stance in opposition to trans rights, declaring: “We oppose all efforts to validate transgender identity.” The platform further declares that the Texas Republican Party will seek to make it a crime for any person to provide any kind of gender-affirming medical care for any person under the age of twenty-one. Yes, you read that right: twenty-one. They want to ban all forms of gender-affirming care not only for minors, but also for young adults. Apparently, according to the Texas GOP, twenty-year-olds are apparently old enough to be forcibly drafted into the military and sent to war overseas, but not old enough to decide they want to take estrogen.
The platform also declares that the party supports banning the allocation of “Federal, state, insurance, or probate monies” for any form of gender-affirming care. This means that they want to not only ban Medicaid from covering gender-affirming care, but also make it illegal for private insurance companies to cover it. If they go through with this, this measure will most likely strip the vast majority of trans people in the state of Texas of access to gender-affirming care and force thousands of trans people to medically detransition against their wills.
The platform also declares that people serving in the military and prison inmates should be banned from receiving any form of gender-affirming medical care and that all inmates should be imprisoned according to their sex assigned at birth, meaning that they think trans women should be kept in men’s prisons and denied estrogen and that trans men should be kept in women’s prisons and denied testosterone.
Finally, this section of the platform declares that “therapists, psychologists, and counselors licensed with the State of Texas” should be allowed to practice “Reintegrative Therapy or other counseling methods when counseling clients of any age with gender dysphoria or unwanted same-sex attraction.”
By “Reintegrative Therapy” the Texas GOP is referring to the practice more commonly known as conversion therapy (i.e., practices designed to try to make a gay or bi person straight or a transgender person cisgender and gender-conforming). All methodologically sound studies and all respected medical authorities have concluded that conversion therapy is not effective and that it is, in fact, immensely harmful to the mental wellbeing of queer people, but the Texas GOP wants to promote it anyway.
Also notice that the Texas Republican Party platform says that they support the practice of conversion therapy on “clients of any age.” This means that they support queerphobic parents being allowed to force their underaged gay, bi, or trans children to go to conversion therapy to try to force them to be straight, cisgender, and gender-conforming against their own will.
ABOVE: Photograph taken by Lola Gomez for this article in The Dallas Morning News showing Governor Greg Abbott of Texas at the Republican Party of Texas State Convention Welcome Reception at The Rustic Restaurant in Houston on 16 June 2022
This isn’t all, though! A later section, entitled “Individual Rights and Freedoms,” includes a subsection on page 29 titled “Gender Identity,” which says that no government agency should be permitted to “define for any private business or private entity how it must segregate its restrooms, changing facilities, or showers,” meaning they think private businesses and entities should be allowed to deny trans people access to the restroom of their gender identity.
It also declares that the state of Texas should enact legislation to protect people who oppose LGBTQ+ rights from discrimination. (Notice the irony that they oppose any form of legislation to protect queer people from discrimination and they apparently think that people who want to take away queer people’s rights are the ones who really need special legal protections.)
The final bullet point of this subsection declares:
“We recognize that gender identity disorder is a genuine and extremely rare mental health condition and that denial of an immutable gender binary not only denies those with the condition proper mental healthcare but also leads to physically and psychologically abusive ‘social transitioning’ as well as irreversible physical mutilation. We urge the State Legislature to pass legislation that requires adherence to sex identifications on all official documents that will be based upon biological gender, as well as legislation enacting civil penalties and fiscal compensation awarded to de-transitioners who have received ‘gender affirming surgery’ as compensation for malpractice.”
In other words, they regard it as “physically and psychologically abusive” for anyone to allow an adult transgender person to even socially transition (which means allowing them to adopt a new name, new pronouns, a new manner of personal dress, et cetera) and they want to make it impossible for anyone to legally change their gender on any of their official documents.
Finally, they want to pass legislation to legally classify performing any kind of gender-affirming surgeries as a form of medical malpractice, so that any adult who has voluntarily undergone gender-affirming surgery and later regretted it can sue anyone who was involved in performing the operation. This final provision is clearly designed to allow anti-trans detransitioners to sue surgeons who provide gender-affirming surgeries out of business so that trans people who want those surgeries will not be able to access them.
Believe it or not, this still isn’t everything! The next section, titled “Family and Gender Issues,” begins at the bottom of the same page with a subsection titled “Human Sexuality,” which begins with the solemn declaration:
“We affirm God’s biblical design for marriage and sexual behavior between one biological man and one biological woman, which has proven to be the foundation for all great nations in Western civilization. We oppose homosexual marriage, regardless of state of origin. We urge the Texas Legislature to pass religious liberty protections for individuals, businesses, and government officials who believe marriage is between one man and one woman. We oppose the granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for sexual behavior or identity, regardless of state of origin. We oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose non-traditional sexual behavior out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values.”
Unsurprisingly, on page 30, the same section calls for the state of Texas to pass legislation to nullify the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 2015 case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which declared that the Constitution protects the right of same-gender couples to marry, declaring:
“We believe the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, overturning the Texas law prohibiting same-sex marriage in Texas, has no basis in the Constitution and should be nullified.”
Later, on page 31, the same section calls for the state of Texas to pass a law to make it illegal for gay or bi people to adopt children:
“We believe that, in the best interests of the family and child, the State of Texas should allow children to be adopted only by married or single heterosexuals.”
If anyone ever asks, this is what Republicans are planning. These are some of the laws and policies they will be pushing to enact in the next few years in the state of Texas and in the U.S. at large.
ABOVE: Photograph taken by Elizabeth Conley for the Houston Chronicle showing Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick posing for a photo op with a supporter in front of his pickup truck on 16 June, the first day of the Texas GOP convention
How the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the right to an abortion is also part of the right-wing attack on queer rights
Now we come to the event pertaining to queer rights that has (justifiably) received by far the most attention in the past month.
Nearly fifty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade that the U.S. Constitution generally protects the inherent right of a pregnant person to have an abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy. In the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court upheld the substance of Roe, but revised the framework, ruling that the Constitution protects the right of a pregnant person to an abortion until the point at which the fetus becomes viable outside the womb.
Right-wingers, however, have spent the past fifty years fighting tooth and nail to stack the Supreme Court with right-wing anti-choice justices. On Friday, 24 June 2022, these right-wing efforts finally came to their fruition as the U.S. Supreme Court released its official verdict in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the conservative majority on the court overturned both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Justice Samuel Alito declares in the court’s majority verdict that the U.S. Constitution does not protect any right for any person to have an abortion and that states have the absolute right to ban abortion at any stage of pregnancy with no exceptions.
The majority verdict rules that states are not even required to allow an abortion if it is medically necessary in order to save the life of a pregnant person. This means that states are now allowed to literally force both a pregnant person and the embryo or fetus they carry to die, rather than allow the pregnant person to survive by terminating the pregnancy. This is transparently not “pro-life” in any arguable sense or even “pro-forced-birth,” but rather “pro-forcing-pregnant-people-to-remain-pregnant-even-if-it-literally-kills-them.”
Meanwhile, in many states, even if a pregnant person can afford to travel out of state for an abortion, that may become illegal or legally dangerous, since some red states are already not only banning abortions in-state, but also making it a crime to travel out of state for the purpose of obtaining an abortion.
ABOVE: Map from this article for NBC News showing the states in which abortion will most likely be made completely illegal or heavily restricted in red
This ruling is a heinous assault on the fundamental rights of all people with wombs, including cisgender women, transgender men, and assigned-female-at-birth nonbinary people. More broadly, though, right-wingers’ efforts to ban abortion and their efforts to ban gender-affirming healthcare for transgender people are two prongs of the same agenda, which is to take away people’s right to do what we want with our own bodies. The fight for abortion rights and the fight for trans healthcare are inextricably linked.
The Supreme Court’s decision also has direct repercussions that will disproportionately impact queer people that most people haven’t even thought about. For instance, the Supreme Court’s decision is also a direct assault on the right of transgender people and cisgender women in same-gender relationships to produce biological offspring.
Transgender people, including both trans women and trans men, usually become reproductively infertile after having been on HRT for a few months. If a trans person is on HRT long enough, they will eventually become permanently sterile so that, even if they stop taking HRT, they will no longer be able to produce biological offspring. For this reason, before a trans person goes on HRT, they are given the option to have their sperm or eggs frozen.
The idea is that, if a trans person chooses to have their eggs or sperm frozen and they end up in a relationship with a person who is reproductively compatible with their particular kind of gamete, then they can have their sperm or eggs unfrozen. Then, the person in the relationship who has a womb can be impregnated through an assisted reproductive technology known as in vitro fertilization or IVF.
IVF is also one of the most common means by which a cisgender woman who is in a relationship with another cisgender woman can become pregnant using donor sperm, so that the woman can give birth to a child with her own DNA and raise that child with her partner. It is also commonly used to help cisgender heterosexual couples who, due to various reasons, are struggling to have a child.
Here is how IVF usually works: First, sperm and egg cells are required. In the case of a trans man who is trying to become pregnant, the eggs will be his own eggs that he had frozen before he went on HRT and the sperm will be supplied either by his assigned-male-at-birth partner or a sperm donor. In the case of a trans woman who is trying to get her assigned-female-at-birth partner pregnant, the sperm will be her own sperm that she had frozen before going on HRT and the eggs will be from her partner. In the case of a cisgender woman who is in a relationship with another cisgender woman and trying to become pregnant, the eggs will be her eggs and the sperm will be donor sperm.
Next, a clinician in a laboratory uses the supplied sperm cells to fertilize several of the supplied egg cells in an embryo culture to create fertilized egg cells known as zygotes. Then, the clinician will let the zygotes mature for two-to-six days to become very early-stage embryos, which are microscopic clusters of undifferentiated cells.
After waiting two-to-six days, the clinician will implant one of these very early-stage embryos into the womb of the person who is trying to become pregnant. The clinician will then dispose of the embryos that they have not implanted. Although it is possible to do IVF by only fertilizing one egg, this greatly reduces the chances of success, since it is very common for an early-stage embryo to die in the embryo culture before it can be implanted.
ABOVE: Diagram from Wikimedia Commons illustrating the process of in vitro fertilization or IVF, which will most likely soon become illegal in states that pass laws that define personhood as beginning at conception
Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the right to an abortion, many states are now going to start passing and enforcing laws that define personhood as beginning at the moment of fertilization and the act of killing any embryo, even one that has only been fertilized for a few days and is still nothing but a microscopic clump of undifferentiated cells, as murder.
These laws will inherently make standard IVF, which involves the creation and disposal of many early-stage embryos, illegal. These laws will make even modified IVF, in which the clinician only fertilizes one egg to create one embryo, extremely legally precarious, since, if the clinician creates an embryo and it dies in the embryo culture before it can be implanted (which is, again, extremely common), then the clinician will be able to be prosecuted for murder or manslaughter.
As a result of this, in many states, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the right to an abortion will almost certainly make it impossible or at least much more difficult than it is currently for transgender people who have been on HRT to produce biological offspring.
There is an extremely high likelihood that, sometime in the next few years, the Supreme Court will issue a ruling in which they will declare that a zygote possesses full legal personhood from the moment of fertilization and that the U.S. Constitution protects the inherent right of a zygote, embryo, or fetus to live. Once the Supreme Court issues this decision, any abortion performed at any stage of pregnancy will instantly become legally classified as murder in every U.S. state and territory, including every blue state. IVF will likewise most likely become illegal in every U.S. state and territory.
I think the likelihood of the Supreme Court ruling in favor of fetal personhood sometime in the next three years is higher than 80%. In fact, if the court does not rule in favor of fetal personhood, I will be greatly surprised. No less an eminent figure among conservatives than Mike Pence, the former Vice President of the U.S., has urged the Supreme Court to declare that fetal personhood is enshrined in the Constitution. In a statement to the right-wing propaganda outlet Breitbart on 24 June 2022, Pence exuberantly declares:
“By returning the question of abortion to the states and to the people, this Supreme Court has righted an historic wrong and reaffirmed the right of the American people to govern themselves at the state level in a manner consistent with their values and aspirations.”
“Now that Roe v. Wade has been consigned to the ash heap of history, a new arena in the cause of life has emerged, and it is incumbent on all who cherish the sanctity of life to resolve that we will take the defense of the unborn and the support for women in crisis pregnancy centers to every state in America. Having been given this second chance for Life, we must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land.”
If you are a reproductively fertile adult who lives anywhere in the United States, even if you live in a blue state, and you know for certain that you don’t want to have any children in the future, I would highly recommend that you permanently sterilize yourself as soon as you can, if you haven’t done so already, so that you won’t be at risk of becoming pregnant or making someone else pregnant without wanting to.
I am personally almost certainly physically incapable at this point of making anyone pregnant, since I’ve been on feminizing HRT since 3 October 2021 and it’s caused enough changes to my body that I am fairly certain I have lost the ability to impregnate, possibly forever, although it could perhaps come back if I were to quit HRT. I wasn’t planning on having children, so this works out pretty well.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a newly-fertilized zygote. Sometime in the next few years, the Supreme Court will most likely rule that this zygote constitutes a full person with a inherent right to life.
Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson
As I have shown, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will have a directly negative impact on queer people in several different ways. To make matters even worse, though, it clearly indicates that the current right-wing Supreme Court is willing to overturn any and all precedents that get in the way of their right-wing extremist agenda. This means that all the fundamental rights that the Supreme Court has enshrined over the course of the past seventy years, especially rights for queer people, are now in serious jeopardy.
Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization explicitly urges the Supreme Court to go beyond merely overturning Roe v. Wade. In addition, he urges them to also overturn Griswold v. Connecticut (the 1965 Supreme Court case that established that the Constitution protects the inherent right of married couples to buy and use contraception), Lawrence v. Texas (the 2003 Supreme Court case that established that the Constitution protects the inherent right of an adult person to engage in private, consensual sexual activity with another adult of the same gender), and Obergefell v. Hodges (the 2015 Supreme Court case that established that the Constitution protects the inherent right of same-gender couples to marry).
Thomas writes in his concurrence:
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ regarding these established in those precedents.”
Rather conveniently, Justice Thomas—a Black man who is currently married to a white woman—does not urge the court to overturn Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case in which the Supreme Court held, based in part on the very same substantive due process clause that Thomas attacks in this paragraph, that the U.S. Constitution protects the inherent right of an adult to marry a consenting adult of a different race.
ABOVE: Official portrait of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who explicitly urges the court to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges in his concurring opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
The imminent likelihood of the Supreme Court overturning same-gender marriage
None of the other conservative justices joined Thomas in his concurring opinion and Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion insists that overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey will not affect any other rights that the court has ruled that the Constitution protects. Nonetheless, Alito himself has been extremely vocally denouncing the idea of same-gender marriage for years, including in a fiery speech he gave to the right-wing Federalist Society in 2020, in which he declared “marriage is a union between one man and one woman.”
Furthermore, as the liberal justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor point out in their dissenting opinion, Alito’s entire argument for overturning Roe and Casey rests on his (historically dubious) assertion that abortion was illegal throughout the United States at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified and that it therefore cannot be a protected right under that amendment.
If followed, this reasoning inherently leads to the conclusion that other rights that were not widely recognized at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was originally ratified—including the right to buy and use contraception, the right to marry someone of a different race, the right to not be forcibly sterilized, the right to engage in private sexual activity with a consenting adult of the same gender, and the right to marry someone of the same gender—must all be overturned as well.
Since conservatives currently hold a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, there is a very high likelihood that, sometime in the next few years, the court will vote to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges and take away the right to same-gender marriage. I am certain that Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are all already fully on board with this initiative. All they would need to do to overturn Obergefell is accept a case in which marriage equality is at issue (of which there will surely be many) and get either Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Gorsuch to join them.
Gorsuch is generally very right-wing, but he might be opposed to overturning Obergefell, since he wrote the majority opinion in the 2020 case of Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that firing an employee because they are LGBT violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Roberts is generally very right-wing also and he actually dissented to Obergefell v. Hodges when it was decided. Nonetheless, he sided with Gorsuch and the liberals on the court in Bostock v. Clayton County and he has shown that he is less willing than the other right-wing justices to overturn established precedents. Notably, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., he concurred with the right wing of the court in upholding Mississippi’s fifteen-week abortion ban, but voted against overturning the right to an abortion altogether.
The conservatives on the court, though, don’t need both Gorsuch and Roberts to overturn Obergefell; they only need one of them. If either of them can be persuaded to overturn Obergefell, then Obergefell is done for. If this happens, many states controlled by Republicans will quickly pass laws that will outlaw same-gender marriage and annul all already-existing same-gender marriages in those states.
In fact, it is possible that the court may go even further and outright declare that the Constitution defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman. If the court does this, then same-gender marriage will become illegal throughout all U.S. states and territories and all existing same-gender marriages throughout the entire country will be annulled. In an instant, through a single decision made by six right-wing partisan hack justices, hundreds of thousands of people who have been happily, legally married for years or even decades at this point will no longer be legally married.
I should hardly need to state that, if they do this, it will impact not only cisgender gay and bisexual people who are married to or want to marry a person of the same gender, but also transgender people who are married to or want to marry a person of the same assigned sex at birth as themselves.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a wedding of two men in New Orleans in November 2017. It is sadly highly probable that the Supreme Court will overturn the right to gay marriage sometime in the near future.
The possible imminent return of laws banning “sodomy”
Sadly, there is a reasonable likelihood that the current right-wing Supreme Court will go even further than just overturning gay marriage. They may overturn Lawrence v. Texas as well, which will allow states to pass laws making it a crime for any person to have any kind of sexual relations with any consenting adult of the same assigned gender at birth as themself.
Again, I’m fairly certain that Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are already on board with overturning Lawrence. To overturn it, all they would need is to accept a case in which the right of a state to ban “sodomy” is at issue and get either Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Gorsuch to agree with them.
State-level Republicans are already contemplating trying to enforce laws against “sodomy” to give the Supreme Court a case it might use to overturn Lawrence v. Texas. As this article for the Houston Chronicle discusses, on Friday, 24 June 2022, Ken Paxton, the current attorney general of Texas, appeared on the right-wing political talk show On Balance with Leland Vittert, which is broadcast by NewsNation. In the interview, the host Leland Vittert asks Paxton:
“I’m sure you read Justice Thomas’s concurrence where he said there were a number of other of these issues, Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell he felt needs to be looked at again. Obviously the Lawrence case came from Texas . . . would you as attorney general be comfortable defending a law that once again outlawed sodomy? That questioned Lawrence again or Griswold or gay marriage? That came from the state legislature to put to the test what Justice Thomas said?”
Ken Paxton replies to this question in the affirmative, declaring without reservation that he thinks that the Supreme Court should absolutely overturn Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. In fact, Paxton goes even further, implying that he thinks that the Supreme Court should overturn other landmark decisions as well to take away even more people’s rights. He declares:
“Yeah, I mean there’s all kinds of issues here, but certainly the Supreme Court has stepped into issues that I don’t think there’s any constitutional provision dealing with. They were legislative issues and this is one of those issues and there may be more.”
Hearing this response, Vittert asks Paxton:
“For the sake of time here, you wouldn’t rule out that if the state legislature passed the same law that Lawrence overturned on sodomy, you wouldn’t have any problem then defending that and taking that case back to the Supreme Court?”
Paxton replies:
“Yeah, look, my job is to defend state law and I’ll continue to do that. That is my job under the Constitution and I’m certainly willing and able to do that.”
In other words, if the Texas state legislature were to pass a law that made it illegal for any person to have consensual, private sexual relations with any person of the same gender right now, Attorney General Paxton would order for that law to be enforced and, if someone sued to overturn the law, he would defend the law all the way to the Supreme Court to give them a case they might use to overturn Lawrence v. Texas.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing Ken Paxton, the current attorney general of Texas, who has said that he will enforce Texas’s law banning “sodomy” if the Supreme Court overturns Lawrence v. Texas
As of June 2022, eleven states (Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma and South Carolina) still have old laws on the books that ban all forms of “sodomy” and three states (Kansas, Kentucky, and Texas) still have laws on the books that specifically only ban same-gender “sodomy.”
Currently, under Lawrence v. Texas, none of these laws can actually be enforced, but they have never been formally repealed, so they remain technically on the books. If the Supreme Court overturns Lawrence, all of these laws will immediately become enforceable.
No constitutional right is safe as long as conservatives retain the majority on the Supreme Court. The rights of queer people, women, people of color, Indigenous people, immigrants, disabled people, non-Christians, and other marginalized groups are especially in jeopardy.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the states that still have laws banning “sodomy” on the books that were never fully repealed after Lawrence v. Texas
The imminent likelihood of Republicans passing laws making it illegal to be trans
On Monday, 27 June 2022, only four days after the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the high court for the state of Alabama filed a request to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals asking that the court overturn a partial injunction against the enforcement of Alabama’s recently-enacted law banning all forms of gender-affirming care for people under the age of nineteen.
The request cites Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson no less than fourteen times. It argues, relying heavily on the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, that, under the U.S. Constitution, no person has any right to access any form of gender-affirming medical care and that the state has the absolute right under the Constitution to ban all forms of gender-affirming care for anyone of any age. The request declares, on page 5:
“But no one—adult or child—has a right to transitioning treatments that is deeply rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition. The State can thus regulate or prohibit those interventions for children, even if an adult wants the drugs for his child. Just as the parental relationship does not unlock a Due Process right allowing parents to obtain medical marijuana or abortions for their children, neither does it unlock a right to transitioning treatments. The Constitution reserves to the State—not courts or medical interest groups—the authority to determine that these sterilizing interventions are too dangerous for minors.”
There are a couple of important things to point out about this passage. The first is the fact that it explicitly argues that the state of Alabama has the right to ban gender-affirming medical care for anyone, including not just minors, but also adults. The second is the fact that it uses the phrase “deeply rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition” to justify banning medical care for trans minors, which is an exact quote from Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson.
This suggests that red states like Alabama may be gearing up to enact bans on all gender-affirming medical care for all trans people, using Dobbs v. Jackson as their vindication. Such a measure, especially if combined with other already-proposed measures, such as making it a crime to wear any article of clothing associated with a gender other than the one a person was assigned at birth in a public space where children could be present, making it impossible for a person to legally change their gender, and so forth, would effectively make it illegal to be transgender and force all trans people throughout the U.S. to detransition and go back into the closet against our own wills.
The continued emboldening of neo-fascists
Neo-fascists are already in sheer ecstasy over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the right to an abortion. For instance, Nick Fuentes is a white supremacist neo-fascist who has attacked the Republican Party for not being right-wing enough, claiming that the party is “run by Jews, atheists, and homosexuals.” He has also, among other things, gleefully praised Adolf Hitler on more than one occasion, denied the Holocaust, and declared that the United States should abolish women’s right to vote. He is the founder of the white supremacist “America First Political Action Conference” or AFPAC.
In a video released shortly after the Supreme Court ruling, Fuentes, with an enormous, beaming smile on his face and audible glee in his voice, declares, literally waving his arms around with joyful enthusiasm:
“The Supreme Court has a blueprint to revisit all those decisions and say ‘Guess what? It’s not in there!!!’ So that means that banning gay marriage is back on the menu! Banning sodomy is back on the menu! Banning contraceptives is back on the menu!!! And, basically, we’re having something like Taliban rule in America—in a good way!!! We’re having something like a Catholic Taliban rule in America!!!”
The sad truth is that, in terms of his predictions for the future, Fuentes is probably not too far off. Fascists like him will be laughing gleefully as their Republican allies relentlessly destroy every right that Americans have fought for and won in the past seventy years. They have all the power they need to do it and there is no reason to think that they will hesitate.
ABOVE: Screenshot of the neo-fascist Nick Fuentes beaming and waving his arms as he describes how, thanks to the Supreme Court, the right finally has the opportunity to ban all gay marriage, ban all same-gender sexual relations, and ban all contraceptives
Fuentes is not the only neo-fascist who is feeling emboldened after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. On Saturday, 2 June 2022, a group of around one hundred members of Patriot Front—the same violent Neo-Nazi organization that was only narrowly stopped from attacking the Pride event in Idaho—marched through the streets of Boston to the sound of an army drum.
The marchers all wore navy blue T-shirts, beige trousers, and beige baseball caps, along with full-face masks and dark sunglasses to hide their faces. They were equipped with riot shields and other forms of riot gear. Many of them were carrying flags, including the American flag, the so-called “Betsy Ross” flag (which, as I discuss in this post I wrote in January 2021, right-wing extremists have appropriated as one of their symbols), and flags bearing the Roman fasces, which was the primary symbol of Italian Fascism.
The marchers carried at least two enormous banners bearing the dog whistle messages “Strong Families Make Strong Nations” (which is a thinly-disguised attack on all families that do not fit the traditional model of a straight, cisgender, patriarchal household in which the father rules with absolute dominance and authority over his wife and their offspring) and “Reclaim America” (which is a thinly-disguised call for straight, cisgender white Anglo-Americans to overthrow the U.S. government and establish a new fascist government that will commit mass genocide against all people who are not straight, cisgender white Anglo-Americans and allow for the establishment of a “white ethnostate”).
A man who has been identified as Thomas Rousseau, the founder of Patriot Front, marched without a mask alongside the other members of the group, wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a megaphone, which he used to shout propaganda.
Some of the marchers also hung propaganda flyers along their marching route bearing a conspiracy theory message claiming that the “true rulers” the United States (who they heavily imply are Jewish people) are secretly controlling the current U.S. government from behind the scenes and that racially pure white Anglo-Americans need to rise up take back their country from its supposed occupiers.
ABOVE: Photograph taken by Stuart Cahill for this article in the Boston Herald showing Patriot Front members marching through the streets of Boston carrying a huge banner with the racist dog whistle slogan “Reclaim America”
At one point along their route, the Patriot Front members stopped in front of the Boston Public Library, underneath a Progress Pride flag that was hanging there, and Rousseau himself delivered an unhinged rant into his megaphone. I have only managed to find one very incomplete recording of a snippet of this rant, in which Rousseau can be heard lambasting the U.S. government, abortion providers, and “foreigners,” shouting:
“The current state neither represents the people, the nation, or virtue!!! They rip children from wombs and sell the ground beneath your feet to foreigners and then they tell you that it’s justice!!!”
Patriot Front considers anyone who is not a racially white Anglo-American to be a “foreigner.” Thus, when Rousseau uses the terms “the people” and “the nation,” he is not referring to the citizens or inhabitants of the United States, but rather exclusively to white Anglo-Americans, who, in his mind, are the only real Americans.
At around 1:25 p.m., an unarmed Black man wearing a pink tank top who happened to be walking down the sidewalk on Dartmouth Street saw the Patriot Front members marching and tried to get out his phone to record them. To keep him from recording them, the Patriot Front marchers violently assaulted the man. According to this report from ABC News, first, they surrounded the man and shoved him around. Then, after he tried to free himself, they knocked him to the ground, kicked him, and beat him while he was down.
The man was significantly injured, with lacerations to his head, eyebrow, and right ring finger. He was subsequently taken to Tufts Medical Center for treatment. He has now identified himself publicly as Charles Murrell, a composer, artist, and social justice organizer.
The Patriot Front fascists concluded their march at around 1:30 p.m. at Back Bay Station. According to the Boston Herald, police have currently made no arrests, but are investigating the incident for possible hate crimes.
ABOVE: Photograph taken by Stuart Cahill for this article in the Boston Herald showing Patriot Front members stopped in front of the Boston Public Library underneath a Progress Pride flag as the group’s founder Thomas Rousseau delivers an unhinged, hateful tirade
Omens of dark times ahead
Unfortunately, all signs indicate that the situation for queer and especially transgender people in the United States is likely to become much, much worse over the course of the next few years. National and state-level Republicans are almost certain to make opposition to queer rights a major part of their platform for the 2022 midterm elections, in which they are almost certain to take control of both the House and the Senate.
Right now, Democrats only control both houses of Congress by the slimmest possible margins. The party of the incumbent president virtually always loses seats in the mid-term elections and Democrats don’t have any seats at all that they can afford to lose.
Additionally, the people who usually decide elections are the people who aren’t really politically informed or committed to any particular set of ideas and who decide which party to vote for based on whether their own circumstances are better or worse than they were before the current administration was inaugurated.
The western world as a whole is currently experiencing extremely high inflation due to a variety of factors, most of which have nothing to do to with President Biden or any of his policies. Nonetheless, because of this inflation, most of the people who aren’t really politically committed are most likely going to vote Republican in the midterms. This will most likely result in Republicans taking control of both houses of Congress.
President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in general are historically unpopular right now. According to Gallup, Biden’s approval rating has been stably hovering at around 41% for the entirety of 2022. Meanwhile, this recent article for the Associated Press notes that, in the past year, over one million voters have switched their registration from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, with people switching from Democratic to Republican making up roughly two-thirds of all people who have switched their party affiliation in the past year.
ABOVE: Chart from Gallup showing that President Joe Biden’s approval rating is in the basement at only 41%
On top of all this, as this article in The Guardian and this article in The New York Times describe, the Republican Party has been working tirelessly for the past year and a half to sabotage the election system in their favor through tactics which include the following:
- heavily gerrymandering districts for state legislatures in swing states
- making it more difficult for lower-class and minority citizens (who tend to vote Democratic) to vote
- pressuring non-partisan election workers to quit and replacing them with openly pro-Republican workers
- nominating candidates who deny that Biden won the 2020 election for key positions that have authority over presidential elections
- convincing the Republican base that the 2020 election was stolen
- advancing the independent state legislature (ISL) doctrine, which claims that state legislatures (the majority of which are controlled by Republicans) have virtually absolute authority to determine election rules and may even disregard federal laws and state constitutions
If things continue the way they have been going, there is a fairly high chance that the Republican presidential candidate in 2024 will win in the electoral college and become president.
Once this happens, right-wingers will hold a supermajority on the Supreme Court, will control the majority of state governments, will hold at least a simple majority if not a supermajority in both houses of Congress, and will control the presidency. This will give them absolute free reign to enact whatever laws or policies they want whatsoever, which will almost certainly include laws specifically designed to attack queer people and especially transgender people.
It is extremely likely that, within the next five years, the Supreme Court will have overturned Obergefell v. Hodges. Even if the Supreme Court does not outright declare that gay marriage violates the Constitution (which, again, is something they absolutely might do), Republicans will most likely enact legislation at least at the state level and possibly at the national level that will nullify existing gay marriages and declare gay marriage illegal.
It is also highly likely that, within the next five years, the Supreme Court will have overturned Lawrence v. Texas and there will be laws in many Republican-controlled states, if not federal laws, that make it a crime—potentially even a felony punishable by many years in prison—to have any kind of sexual relations with any person of the same sex assigned at birth.
Conservatives may also pass laws that outright completely ban all forms of medical transition even for adults and that force all trans people who have already medically transitioned to detransition against our wills. Alternatively, if they don’t want to go quite that far, they may implement laws or policies that heavily restrict access to gender-affirming medical care even for adults.
At the very least, they will almost certainly completely outlaw all forms of gender-affirming care and possibly even social transition for all trans people under the age of eighteen, if not nineteen or twenty-one. They may also make it illegal for Medicaid and private insurance companies to cover gender-affirming care and/or mandate that any adult who wants to medically transition must first go through years of grueling conversion therapy that will try to force them to be cisgender and gender-conforming.
In addition, within the next five years, there is also a high likelihood that there will be laws in place in the majority of states, if not at the federal level, that do all the following things:
- make it legally dangerous or outright illegal for any K-12 teacher to make any mention whatsoever of the existence of LGBTQ+ people—let alone be openly gay, bi, trans, gender-nonconforming, or queer in any way themself
- make it a crime for any adult to wear any article of clothing traditionally associated with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth in any public space where children could conceivably be present
- make it impossible for a person to legally change their gender on official documents
- make it a crime to use a public restroom other than the one of the gender a person was assigned at birth
Meanwhile, far-right extremist groups are growing increasingly organized in their strident opposition to queer rights and they are openly using social media sites like Twitter for target selection. Once Elon Musk takes over Twitter, he will most likely abolish all policies banning hate speech against queer people, which will allow anti-queer hate speech to flourish on Twitter as it never has before. This tolerance for anti-queer hate speech will most likely influence other social media platforms to become more tolerant of hate speech as well.
As a result of this, hate groups will only continue to grow more organized and more influential. In five years, it may be impossible for anyone to hold any kind of Pride or pro-LGBTQ+ event anywhere in the U.S. without an army of heavily armed Neo-Nazis showing up to violently assault the attendees or, even worse, just outright murder everyone in a bloody mass shooting.
Some readers may think I am being pessimistic, but think about how, back in 2015, very few people would have predicted the relentless political backsliding that the past seven years have brought. Given how drastically the political situation has deteriorated so far, it only makes sense to predict that it will continue to deteriorate at the same rate in the future.
We all need to prepare for the likely imminent future in which right-wing Republicans continue their ongoing successful takeover of the federal government and enforce laws and policies so authoritarian and so unflinchingly cruel that they will make the past seven years of political backsliding seem like a daydream.
What should we all do?
Sadly, most Democratic politicians have little genuine interest in protecting queer people in general or trans people in particular. If they really cared at all about protecting us, then Senate Democrats would have already abolished the filibuster and passed federal legislation to protect trans people and block the laws that state-level Republicans have been passing and policies they have been implementing to attack us.
The absolute least that Senate Democrats could possibly do is pass the Equality Act, which is a bill that has already been passed by the House that would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to expressly prohibit discrimination in employment, education, housing, federally funded programs, public accommodations, credit, and jury service on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Sadly, Senate Democrats have not passed the bill and, at this point, with the midterm elections drawing near, in which Congressional Democrats are likely to be slaughtered, they are unlikely to do so.
Nonetheless, unlike most Republicans, most Democrats at least do not want to legislate queer people out of existence and, under our current broken political system, voting for Democrats is still the only way to keep Republican fascists out of power. I would therefore urge everyone reading this post who is a U.S. citizen and who thinks that people like me should be allowed to exist in peace to vote for candidates who support queer rights in in every Democratic primary in which you are able, vote straight-ticket Democratic in every general election in which you are able, and encourage all your friends to vote straight-ticket Democratic as well.
We also need to call on Democrats in power to take action in support of queer, sexual, and reproductive rights. I would therefore urge everyone reading this that, if you have a Democratic Senator, representative in Congress, state governor, or representative in your state legislature, call them or write them an email to let them know that the issues of queer and reproductive rights are important to you.
In the end, though, it is necessary to recognize that these measures will probably still do little or nothing to prevent the impending rise of Republican fascism. Thus, in the meantime, I would highly recommend that any queer people currently living in red states who might be reading this get out as soon as you possibly can.
I have lived my whole life up until this point in Indiana, but I am lucky enough to be moving to Massachusetts this August for graduate school. Although there are many things I love about my home state and the people I know who live here, I recognize that neither Indiana nor any other red state is a safe place for me to live. I am eager to get out. Sadly, I am not sure how much longer even blue states will be safe.
Yeah I’ve been painfully aware of this horrific situation for a while now. It’s not clear to me what’s going to happen long term. Most Americans don’t seem to agree with the radical right-wing but they have an insane amount of police power. I’m just not sure how the system can remain stable in these situations. But I’m glad you’re moving to Massachusetts! That’s my home state and even our current Republican governor supports trans rights, gay rights and reproductive rights although he’s retiring and will almost certainly be replaced by a Democrat this year. But yeah long term if the Republicans take power federally and impose fascist federal laws on blue states… Idk in that case you might want to consider Canada. My I have family up there and it’s much less insane there.
*political power
It’s not entirely clear at this point to what extent Republicans are going to try to push their fascist policies at the federal level, but it is abundantly clear that they are aggressively pushing these policies at the state level. I personally think that, given the opportunity, they will most likely ardently push the same policies at the federal level.
I have lived my entire life (andbwill probably live my entire life) in Canada, where abortion is legal at all pregnancy stages and where there are very good LGBTQ rights. Unless the US tries to invade us, I encourage any Americans worried about where their country is going to join me.
I’ve had people telling me that puberty blockers are dangerous because it’s prevents hormonal puberty from ever taking effect, which is the point of course (though only as long as they take them). As a cis-man, I don’t know what it’s like going through puberty and having your body go through changes which reflect the biological sex your gender doesn’t align with, but I bet it’s horrifying.
But for some they think puberty, no matter the gender the child identifies as, must be done with no medical interference in order for someone to develop physically and mentally. I can’t say I agree with it, but I fear voicing such dissention anywhere else.
Ok, first, the claim that the use of puberty blockers prevents a trans person from ever going through “hormonal puberty” is simply false. A trans adolescent who has been on puberty blockers does, in fact, go through a “hormonal puberty” when they eventually go on cross-sex HRT. In such a case, the puberty that the adolescent goes through is one associated with their gender identity, rather than their assigned sex at birth, but it is still very much a “hormonal puberty.”
Now, there are some anti-trans hack activists who argue that delaying hormonal puberty could interfere with an adolescent’s ability to develop physically and mentally, but there is currently no compelling evidence to indicate this and it is highly unlikely, especially when one considers the fact that there is a relatively wide range of ages for when it is normal for a cisgender adolescent to begin puberty naturally.
Even when the WPATH’s standards of care held that a trans adolescent had to be at least sixteen years old to go on HRT, that still wasn’t actually any older than when puberty naturally begins for some people. Today, in the twenty-first-century United States, cisgender girls typically begin puberty at some point between the ages of ten and fourteen and cisgender boys typically begin at some point between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. It’s perfectly normal for some “late-blooming” cisgender boys to only enter puberty naturally at age sixteen, even today in the twenty-first century.
Furthermore, most likely thanks primarily to improved nutrition, the average age for the onset of puberty is actually significantly younger today than it used to be. Back in the nineteenth century, it was normal for cisgender girls to begin puberty between the ages of thirteen and sixteen and most cisgender girls began menstruating at some point between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. Today, in the twenty-first-century United States, by contrast, the average cisgender girl begins menstruating at the age of 11.9 years.
In any case, now, the WPATH holds that some adolescents may be mentally mature enough to consent to cross-sex HRT at as young as age fourteen, which is a perfectly normal age for either a cisgender boy or girl to begin puberty. It’s on the later end of the normal range for a cisgender girl and in the middle of the normal range for a cisgender boy.
Hypothetically, of course, someone could try to assert that a trans adolescent going through a different puberty than the one associated with the sex they were assigned at birth could lead to some kind of developmental issues, but there is no compelling evidence to indicate that this is the case and it is, again, unlikely.
Moreover, for at least the first full year of cross-sex hormones, a qualified physician is supposed to monitor the trans person’s hormone levels and other health factors on a relatively frequent schedule (generally every three months) to make sure everything is in the normal, healthy range for a human being. They are especially diligent to do this for trans adolescents, since they are still growing and maturing. After the first year, the physician is supposed to continue to check up on the person’s hormone levels and other health factors, but they can do so on a somewhat less frequent schedule (generally every six months). The physical and mental health of the trans person is obviously the first priority.
In any case, ultimately, the mental and physical health risks of not allowing a trans adolescent who wants to go on puberty blockers to go on them are most likely far greater than whatever potential health risks may exist of allowing them to go on puberty blockers. As I mention in the article above, for the vast majority of trans people, being forced to go through the puberty of the sex one was assigned at birth is a deeply traumatizing experience and the secondary sex characteristics one develops during such a puberty are the primary source of body-related gender dysphoria for the vast majority of trans people.
It’s normal for people do go through anxiety during puberty, but, for trans people, the puberty of the sex one was assigned at birth is a unique body horror kind of experience in which the person feels like they have no control over their own body and their body is changing in ways that the person emphatically does not want. I’ve heard transfemmes describe the experience of male puberty as being like “turning into a troll,” which is a description I find completely relatable. Suffice it to say, being forced to go through the puberty of the sex one was assigned at birth can take a devastating toll on a trans person’s mental and emotional health and can drive some trans people to kill themselves.
This is all I will say for now, but I’m planning to write a post at some point in which I will talk a little bit about my personal gender history and, in that post, I will talk more about my own experience of puberty as a trans person.
Can’t wait to read it, I’d like hearing people’s personal experiences through these things whenever they’re comfortable doing so. To tell a personal story, my dad (who’ve I previously shared as being transgendered herself) was completely miserable trying to act like a cis-gendered man and tried to commit suicided multiple times, her mental health has improved much since transitioning. If allowing a person who is transgender to transition to gender they identify as helps them, than I’m all for such treatment being legal. Alas as you’ve said in detail in your post, trans people are currently a persecuted minority in the U.S., and these days if feels like you’re more likely be accepted as gay than trans (though that’s not to say homophobia isn’t still as much a problem as transphobia here in the states).
Actually I had no idea of your gender status or orientation – because I’d no reason to know. Christo-fascists are destroying this country and the majority of people just don’t care – laziness? stupidity? psychopathology? After fighting these monsters for decades I’m worn out.
If’n you find yourself in Holyoke after you move to MA please feel free to drop in on my daughter’s family.
This post is the very first time I have ever disclosed my sexual orientation anywhere online and it is only the second time on this blog that I have come out as a trans woman. I’ve generally kept quiet about those aspects of my identity online, mainly in order to avoid harassment.
Thank you for the invitation! I probably won’t make use of it, but I appreciate it nonetheless.
Hi,
I have a question: so I’m 16 and I’m a Gnostic Christian theologian and I was wondering if I could ask you a question on Twitter?
-luke
I’m generally willing to answer questions, but I will need to hear the question you want to ask before I decide whether I am willing to answer it.
Sabatini’s bill will make it illegal to take one’s kids to the pantomime.
Absolutely! It’s a wildly ridiculous proposal for a bill that, in any other historical circumstance, would be universally regarded as such. Unfortunately, this whole fake moral panic over children and drag that right-wingers have cooked up gives them license to propose ridiculous and draconian measures.
It’s also absolutely insane that, following the horrific mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, right-wingers are loudly insisting that drag of all things is somehow the real threat to children’s safety, rather than readily-available AR-15s.
Thanks, by the way, for another fascinating and very comprehensive article.
You’re welcome! This is a very tough subject to write about, especially for me as a trans person myself, but I felt that I needed to bring it to my readers’ attention.
I’m personally do not agree about allowing kids around drag queens, I also don’t think parents or other guardian figures are “grooming” children when they take them to these types of events, but I nevertheless don’t think it’s appropriate. But I agree that some of these bills (especially the one from Florida) go too far in punishing parents and can be downright draconian.
Spenser,
When applying for a Ph.D program I would suggest somewhere outside of the USA.
I’ve definitely started thinking about that possibility. Unfortunately, there isn’t really any country on earth that is accepting toward trans people and, at least for now, until Republicans completely take over the federal government, blue states in the U.S. are actually some of the safest places for trans people to live.
One thing I can say is that there is absolutely no chance of me moving to the U.K., since the U.K. is probably the most notoriously transphobic country in the western world right now and the situation over there for trans people in general is actually much worse than the situation in blue states in the U.S.
Admittedly, the flavor of the transphobia in the U.K. tends to be a bit different from the flavor of transphobia here in the U.S. Here in the U.S., most left-leaning people generally support trans rights and most transphobia is of the overtly right-wing, Christian fascist variety. In the U.K., by contrast, the Christian fascist variety of transphobia is much less common, but transphobia of the TERF (i.e., “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”) variety is much more widespread (thanks in part to the U.K. news media and J. K. Rowling).
“There isn’t really any country on earth that is accepting toward trans people”? Not even Canada? Or anywhere else?
My understanding is that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most countries in continental western Europe are at least generally more accepting of trans people than the U.K. and U.S. are, but, frankly, that’s not saying much. Every country on earth has deeply entrenched transphobia.
What would it take for a country to lose its deeply entrenched transphobia?
I’m not sure if transphobia will ever go away, but I do hope that, over time, as newer generations grow more accepting, its prevalence and institutional power will gradually start to wane. There are lots of things that could help. For one thing, news outlets could stop constantly stoking up anti-trans fervor with cooked-up moral panics and instead draw attention to the real struggles trans people face from a sympathetic perspective. Liberal and leftist politicians could also help by actually taking firm stands in support of trans rights, rather than just giving lip service to the idea of those rights.
The simple fact of the matter is that the opposition will not change their minds or lose their resolve. They have to be actually defeated. If they are trimmed back politically, they will move to violence. If safe zones are established, it is a matter of time before they attack. Their insanity (and I use that term literally and very deliberately) is such that they perceive themselves to be at risk of life or death, when the reality is that they are simply facing a future without successors. Those who assign a strong role to evolutionary biology to the formation of belief would make rather a lot out of that–as it is, the opposition already makes all-too-much of the fact that social evolution will leave them behind in the longer run.
I truly think that the only possible counter in the short and middle game is to resolve that they are an implacable enemy beyond the reach of either logic or decency. If zones of sanity can hold out for another twenty to fifty years, it may well be that re-occupation of their territory, as their own descendants reject them, might become possible. The problem with every long game is that it must survive midgame and that may very well be an actual civil war, probably one seeing parallel confrontations worldwide. The thing to do is to prepare mentally now.
I am personally very used to the idea. I take great heart in the fact that part of their pathology is that they really, truly, think they have all the guns and training.
I am very sorry to read of all this. It seems we are a bit similar in more than our interest in the ancient world: I am also bisexual, and I have been questioning my gender identity for some time. Right now I have a lot of empathy for American LGBT people, and am very glad to not live in the USA
What country do you live in?
I may be misremembering, but, if I remember correctly, I believe that Jaojao stated in a comment under a previous post that they live in Sweden. I’m pretty sure it was one of the Nordic countries.
You remembered correctly, indeed I live in Sweden! While LGBTQ rights are not perfect here (we have some prominent TERFs, and the far-right often complains when government buildings fly rainbow flags) , there is at least no push right now to legally restrict LGBTQ people like American conservatives are doing
It’s distressing to read this, even for a cisgender person living on the other side of the continent. I sincerely hope your worst fears don’t come to being, and the situation won’t get any darker for LGBT+ people in the States.
As I have already said in other comments, I happen to live in Argentina. A couple of months ago, our government was celebrating the tenth anniversary of one of the most progressive laws for transgender rights in Latin America (https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/ley-de-identidad-de-genero-10-anos), which allowed thousands of trans people to legally register themselves according to their gender of preference instead of that assigned at birth. For more information, I suggest you to read the Wikipedia article on “Trans rights in Argentina.”
Argentina was also the first Latin American country to legalize same-sex marriage (2010), and has a relatively high level of acceptance of LGBT+ people: according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2019, the percentage of people who think homosexuality should be accepted by society in Argentina is higher than in Brazil, Mexico, the US or even Italy. Among the less educated, three quarters of the population still express acceptance, and even two thirds of those who see religion as a very important issue in their daily lives are still accepting homosexuality.
Besides that, I’m proud to say that my country has a very inclusive university system, and not just regarding LGBT+ people: many of the country’s universities, including the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) and the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP, where I’m currently studying and working), are public universities with no tuition fees at all, making them accesible to any person with a high-school degree.
(As an irrelevant anecdote, I remember meeting once a young transgender astronomer in my university; I later learned that she had had a brilliant performance as a student, and had since moved to the US to work in the Rochester Institute of Technology.)
Sadly, I can’t tell you much about the Humanities departments, because it’s not my professional area. I’m just a bookworm with an amateur interest in classical culture, history and literature. But I’m sure the La Plata or Buenos Aires Universities would be proud to have you among their scholars, in case you consider moving over here for some time.
In any case, I hope the best for you! Thank you for all your work!
Hello, there.
I am incredibly sorry about what you and other LGBT+ and women/non-white Americans are going through. Such a horrific thing, that I was not able to even fathom.
I feel like this changes up my plans rather drastically. I (man) am currently in a long-distance relationship with another man in America. I feel like he underestimates the damage that’s being done to America right now, and I’m deeply afraid for his safety. ‘Luckily’, he isn’t out to many people, and he isn’t stereotypically ‘gay looking’, so there should be no particular problem about that. I am however a bit worried about any hacking occurring and discovering anything that might point to his sexuality and/or relationship with me. Also, I am afraid that meeting up with him in America might lead me to put him in danger.
We wanted to get married in America, since it’s not possible to do that in Italy, but I do wonder if this will be possible… Honestly, if something big about America changes and he finds unable to leave the country, I would rather go to him and suffer with him, if he allows me to. Being away from him would be worse…
I can’t believe that this is all happening, and I can’t believe that people are paying attention to memes and conspiracy theory videos instead of really informing themselves before making drastic statements. τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια; indeed
Don’t panic.
If your partner is in a blue state, then he is almost definitely safe, at least for now. Right now, blue states are actually passing laws to protect queer people, even as red states are trying to persecute queer people. If he is in a blue state, your partner will most likely remain safe at least until we end up in a situation with a Republican president and Republicans controlling both houses of Congress. The soonest that Republicans could possibly gain control of the presidency is January 2025, so, if your partner is in a blue state, he is definitely safe until then at the earliest.
Even if your partner is in a red state, realistically, if he is an adult cisgender gay man, he is not a K-12 teacher, and he is not a drag performer, then he is probably still safe, at least for now. I highly doubt that any red states will try to outright criminalize being gay anytime in the next two years; they’re probably going to be more focused on attacking trans people, pro-LGBTQ+ teachers, queer youth, parents of queer youth, drag performances, and gay marriage. Making it a crime to be gay is their end goal, but they may not succeed in that goal and, even if they do succeed, their success in achieving this goal is almost certainly years away, even in red states.
How do you feel about the Catholic and Orthodox Churchs’ attitudes towards LGBT people?
Well, as you might easily have guessed from the general tone of this article I have written, as well as from the numerous articles I have written in the past, I do not agree with the Catholic or Orthodox Churches’ positions on this subject. I’m an atheist, though, and I was raised Protestant, so the Catholic and Orthodox Churches’ positions on anything are not especially pertinent to my own beliefs in any direct sense.
What about the Protestant Church’s beliefs?
There is no single “Protestant Church”; instead, there are many different Protestant denominations, which have drastically varying positions on LGBTQ+ people. On one end of the spectrum, there are die-hard, fundamentalist Protestant denominations that are stridently anti-LGBTQ+ and loudly preach that all queer people will suffer unimaginable tortures for all of eternity in the unquenchable fires of Hell. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, there are liberal Protestant denominations that are openly supportive of LGBTQ+ people.
Both of my great-grandfathers on my father’s side were ministers for the Church of the Brethren and my Dad was raised in that church. Historically, the Brethren have been a very conservative Anabaptist denomination and they have traditionally strongly discouraged members from engaging in all forms of premarital sex, drinking alcohol, smoking, gambling, swearing oaths, prostitution, same-gender sexual relations of any kind, abortion, et cetera.
Nonetheless, the Brethren have always taken some liberal stances on certain issues. For instance, they generally support programs to help the poor. They are also one of the three historic “peace churches”; they preach absolute nonresistance and they are stridently opposed to all war. (The Brethren take that thing about “turning the other cheek” very seriously.) In recent years, they have been growing more liberal; they support women in all positions of church leadership, including as ministers, and some congregations welcome openly LGBTQ+ members, but the church still does not recognize same-gender weddings and they do not allow openly LGBTQ+ people to be ordained as ministers or church leaders.
Meanwhile, my mother’s parents raised her in the Presbyterian Church (USA), which is a mainline Protestant denomination and is considered one of the “Seven Sisters” of American Protestantism. Historically, the Presbyterian Church (USA) used to be more conservative, but, today, the church is generally known for being very liberal. For instance, they ordain women as elders and ministers, they recognize and perform same-gender weddings, and they ordain openly LGBTQ+ people as elders and ministers.
When I was born, my parents were attending the Church of Brethren and that’s the church I was originally dedicated in as a newborn, but my parents stopped attending the Church of the Brethren shortly after that. The Brethren teach that baptism only counts if a person is old enough to make a conscious choice to be baptized, my Mom had only been baptized as a Presbyterian as an infant, and the Brethren wanted her to be baptized again as an adult. My Mom didn’t like that, so my parents started attending the Presbyterian Church for a while. While they were there, they had me baptized as an infant as a Presbyterian.
My parents stopped attending the Presbyterian Church, though, when I was very young and the church that I actually grew up attending for virtually my entire childhood and adolescence was the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), which is a congregationalist mainline Protestant denomination. The Disciples of Christ practice adult baptism, so, when I was an adolescent, I was baptized a second time as a Disciple of Christ.
The Disciples of Christ have ordained women as ministers for decades and they had their first woman denominational president in 2005. Being congregationalist, they have no official policy on LGBTQ+ inclusion and leave it up to individual congregations to decide those policies. Many, if not most, Disciples of Christ congregations nowadays, though, perform and recognize same-gender weddings and allow LGBTQ+ people to be serve as ministers. The Disciples of Christ actually protested Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 2015, which was designed to give conservative Christians state approval to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.
If you’re trying to keep track, I was dedicated as a newborn into the Church of the Brethren, baptized as an infant as a Presbyterian, and baptized as an adolescent as a Disciple of Christ, but I guess none of those dedications or baptisms stuck, since I still ended up becoming an atheist as an adult.
Hi Spencer! There’s no reason to publish this comment, as it isn’t useful or contributing in any way to your blog. I just wanted to privately thank you for your post, and I don’t see any way to do that besides leaving a reply.
I didn’t know a lot of this information; I’ve seen news stories here and there, but you brought them all together in one coherent (and scary) whole. These are difficult times, especially for those of us living in red states.
I mostly just want to offer you support. I’m an agender college professor in Texas, with a pansexual husband, a gay daughter, a bisexual son, and a trans best friend. I teach Sociology, so I educate students on gender and race every semester. I am also the sponsor of my college’s student LGBTQ+ club. You can probably imagine how I, my family, my friends, and my students feel about living in Texas right now.
I’ve admired your work for a while, and shared your posts many times on my Facebook page. You are always insightful, interesting, and a fantastic writer. I have no idea how I might help you on your journey, but if you think of anything — I’m here. You can write me at my email address, connected with this reply.
Sorry, I thought this comment wouldn’t be immediately published! My mistake. Still, the thought stands!
Conservatives who claim that kids are being brainwashed by learning about CRT and the so called “gay agenda” are very disingenuous. They do not have any problem with kids being brainwashed or taught certain perspectives at an early age.
How do I know? These same parents will take their kids to church, where they learn in Sunday school and, if Evangelical, become “born again.” They’ll have no problem with them reading books that focus on heterosexual romance.
So do not give me this crap about kids being too young to learn about sexual orientation. They just don’t want kids learning about certain types of sexual orientation.
Which is cool, be homophobic, but at least own up to the fact that you are. What is up with people saying racist and homophobic things but getting squeamish about being called racist or homophobic?
Hi Spencer, it took me a few days but I finally finished reading this piece. It was a very tough read, but a vital one. I was appalled and am so sorry this is happening in your country. I can’t imagine what it must be like for you to see this happening. Even though I’ve only commented a few times, I’ve spent long enough on your blog to feel like you’re an acquaintance — albeit a parasocial one, admittedly. Please do stay safe. For what it’s worth, if you ever decide to emigrate to Australia, you’re absolutely welcome to crash on our sofa bed until you’re set up.
Thanks! I really appreciate your words of support. This article took me nearly a month to write, in part because more and more new bad things in the news just kept piling up. I will admit that it was a very emotionally difficult piece for me to write, but I felt that it was my moral duty to help raise attention to this issue.
Spencer, I will just add my words of support and gratitude to the pile. It must have been very painful for you to write this (not to mention the other difficulties of your journey). My partner and I are happy to offer you the spare room should you decide to emigrate to Canada (closer than Australia, but colder in winter).
Thank you so much for your kind words of support! I won’t deny that I am extremely anxious about what the future may bring for trans people in the United States, but I do expect that I will most likely be at least relatively safe in Massachusetts at least for the next few years.
I do not plan to leave the United States unless there are strong indications that a worst-case scenario is coming. (And, by “worst-case scenario,” I mean one in which right-wing Republicans take complete control over the federal government and start implementing severely restrictive laws and/or policies at the federal level that are designed to hurt and criminalize queer people nationwide.)
If I do end up emigrating anywhere, it will most likely be to Canada. While I greatly appreciate your offer to let me stay in your spare bedroom, I would be very hesitant to crash in the house of a person whom I barely know. In any case, I doubt that crashing in your spare bedroom would be necessary. I am enormously privileged compared to the vast majority of trans people in the fact that I have loving, supportive, upper-middle-class parents. In a worst-case scenario, I’m sure that, with my parents’ help, I could find someplace to live in Canada on my own without having to rely on the generosity of near-strangers.