The father of a 12 y/o transgender girl challenging Ohio's ban describes in court his daughter's suicide attempt at 6 before she began living as a girl.

"Why did God make me like this? Why can't I just die and come back into a girl's body...I wish I could die and be reborn."

After meeting with pediatric mental health specialists and being allowed to dress and present as a girl, "she is a happy, healthy, well-rounded, grounded, happy young woman," a straight-A student heading into the 7th grade. Her doctors expect she will need puberty blockers soon.

The headline is right but the story is wrong: none of the countries they cite have banned this care outright, much less threaten to put doctors in jail and take trans kids from their parents. From that perspective, the GOP is more aligned with Russia and Hungary than Sweden A federal judge just rejected these comparisons on Friday. I'm so tired of this effort to conflate a medical debate between "more assessment" and "less assessment" with a political debate between "trans people are people" and "trans people are an abomination"

In this NYT report about states restricting health care for trans adults, Terry Schilling of APP compares trans people's health care to "lobotomies or eugenics--it's a bad medical fad." In just eight words, we have three glaring falsehoods and a mountain of missing context First, to suggest eugenics and lobotomies are a "fad" is to suggest they're something from long ago that we did away with while also minimizing their harm. He's discussing two massive and still active projects weaponized against many people, especially the disabled, today.

Occurred to me recently how the invention of a trans "social contagion" is a means of denying both our subjectivity (the legitimacy of our self-determination) and our collectivity (the legitimacy of our group identity) by implying we must literally be quarantined from each other In the Missouri AG's proposed ban on trans health care he would require every trans patient to be assessed for "social contagion," implying you could not access health care if you have too many trans friends. It's an explicit attempt at alienation.

I'm not sure what the purpose of this story is other than to make the bad faith rhetoric of an explicitly-eliminationist movement look savvy and reasonable at the very moment they're political vulnerability is also becoming more obvious nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/… Palate cleanser ettingermentum.news/p/the-modern-e…

An overlooked reason for the flood of anti-trans bills and rhetoric is the hope they could stem the bleed of a post-Dobbs political fallout with rampant, nonstop transphobia. They were hoping you'd be so afraid of our freedom you wouldn't mind sacrificing your own.

https://twitter.com/ddiamond/status/1644526631522824195

Terry Schilling and APP first started trying to sell the GOP on transphobia as a way of winning over many of the same voters now clubbing them over abortion. Even if people are soft on an issue like trans athletes, it's too niche a grievance to overcome their deficit on abortion.

This from @maxwelltani (on the difference between UK and US left split on trans rights) is mostly right; I also think the kind of liberal white feminism most prone to trans exclusion has lost relevance faster in the US than in the UK Neither is universally true of course--there are strong intersectional feminists organizers and writers in the UK and still plenty of shallow feminism to go around in the US--but I think the US right's brand of transphobia is a harder pill to swallow, especially post-Dobbs

I need someone to study the allure of transphobia to divorced men specifically This seems right, and tied to the "betrayal" of being denied labor (emotional, reproductive, sexual) they feel entitled to as a benefit of their own gender assignment.

https://twitter.com/rochellehd/status/1642509038951841793?s=20

Queer identities are frequently portrayed as Western imports--whether it's by officials in Uganda, Ghana, Russia, or Hungary. In order to believe this, they have to ignore 1) the well-documented involvement of US Evangelicals and 2) the colonial roots of these laws.

https://twitter.com/radleybalko/status/1639088105079681024

The Christian right has spent over $280 million advancing anti-LGBTQ laws across the world since 2008. Alliance Defending Freedom, Focus on the Family, and the Fellowship Foundation--often referred to as "the Family"--are leading spenders. opendemocracy.net/en/5050/africa…

In a federal lawsuit attempting to force a Massachusetts public school district to out transgender students against their will, 19 states have filed an amicus brief defending what they call parent's "fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their minor children." As Attorneys General from these 19 states note in their filing, “our constitutional system has 'historically...recognized that the natural bonds of affection lead parents to act in the best interests of their children'"

So this week the House was supposed to hold a vote on a federal ban on trans student athletes in K-12 athletics.

Notably, they did not.

There are several reasons a vote might be delayed, but the most common is the Speaker lacking the votes. A failure to pass a bill banning trans athletes--which is frequently portrayed as a political *loser* for Dems--would likewise threaten the fate of bills like Marjorie Taylor Greene's federal health care ban, among many other national attacks on trans people.

Most trans adults have never accessed gender-affirming care, according to a new WaPo-KFF poll. The majority also identify as something other than a man or woman, and two thirds said they knew they were trans before they turned 18. washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/… While trans people were nearly twice as likely (47%) to report needing medication or therapy in the past year as cis people (26%), they were also three times as likely to say they couldn't afford it.

If a Stanford University official had shut down an event featuring Kyle Duncan--who rejects abortion, birth control, and every feminist legal gain since the 1970s--on the basis he "degrades women" it would be a nonstop national story for a month.

https://twitter.com/1AMorey/status/1637993457653252102

Kyle Duncan is not owed more speech than a drag queen, and yet you're being expected to care more about what happens to a federal judge at an elite college than independent artists and performers at a public college. Of the two, who are you closer to in income and status?

There are an impressive six falsehoods in this single paragraph, starting with the "recent" recognition of trans rights. The first nondiscrimination ordinance protecting trans rights was passed in Minneapolis in 1975; the ACLU has been defending trans rights since 1964

https://twitter.com/michaeljknowles/status/1636020928118243332

I'm not sure I would characterize a jump from 1% to 2% as "skyrocketing," particularly given new numbers from Gallup suggesting trans identification even among Gen Z has plateaued. news.gallup.com/poll/470708/lg…

It's a trick they've been pulling for a while where they point to shallow gestures of inclusion by oppressive institutions as evidence of institutional capture somehow waged by the very people being oppressed

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1635767448233230337

It's a real weakness for trans rights in particular because most people don't know a trans person, so when they see a trans pride flag in the window of a bank exploiting them they're invited to think of trans people as being privileged over them

One reason I suspect the Missouri AG threw such a fit when the clinic refused to shut down after he threatened an investigation is he doesn't have much confidence in the claims Reed made and was hoping the threat alone would suffice (a la Vanderbilt U in TN)

https://twitter.com/michelemunz/status/1630994302762450969

Emails, you say missouriindependent.com/2023/03/01/tra…

The willingness of many liberal institutions to show more sympathy of the arguments of transphobes than the humanity of trans people makes more sense when you remember these same institutions enforced the pre-"tipping point" consensus that kept us out of public life to begin with One of the consequences of the idea that trans people were "discovered" in 2014 is it ignores the generations of censorship and mockery that enforced the consensus that our lives were unlivable and perspectives unserious. It'd be remarkable if all that vanished in a single decade

What DeSantis is doing is best understood as revenge for nondiscrimination laws preventing open forms of discrimination in education and public life. The right views a pluralist society--and the marginalized groups within it--as an ideology being forced upon them. As far as Rufo et al are concerned the "left" (people of color, feminists, queer people, etc)

has "captured institutions" (made marginal gains towards acceptance and inclusion)

And they're doing the "same" (mobilizing the full force of the state)

for Christian nationalism

The obsession cis people have with the possibility, no matter how small, of transition regret is fundamentally a fear of the trans body. They'd rather throw all trans people under the dysphoria bus than risk a single member of their own kind living like we do. I keep thinking of this caption from the NYT puberty blockers story. I'm sure many would say I, too, am "left with a voice that sounds like a man's." The fear of transition regret is inseparable from the disgust felt towards bodies and lives that defy gendered expectations.

The last few weeks in trans media fights are symptoms of a broader fear that every trans person I know feels. We look into the future and do not see the bottom, yet boycotting a video game or criticizing a newspaper are somehow beyond the bounds of reasonable solidarity. When Arkansas and Alabama passed their health care bans, it felt earth-shattering to the people who need that care to stay alive. Now two additional states (UT and SD) made similar moves in just the last two weeks while far-right activists openly call for our elimination.

A FL school district dropped a CDC study asking adolescents about their experiences with violence because it also asked them about their sexual orientation and gender identity--functionally hiding the impacts of Ron DeSantis' anti-trans school policies news4jax.com/health/2023/02… The Youth Risk Behavioral Survey began asking about SOGI status in 2017 and has found trans youth face much higher rates of harassment, physical violence, and sexual violence. If GOP states drop the survey, it helps them deny the harm they're causing cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/6…