Alliance Defending Freedom anti-trans activities since 2015

The Alliance Defending Freedom was founded in 1993.

According to Wikipedia, its first leader was Alan Sears, who had led president Reagan's anti-porn campaign, producing the Meese Report in 1986. Its next leader was Michael Farris (2017–2022), who had lobbied for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 and has been part of the Christian homeschooling movement since the 1980s, founding the Home School Legal Defense Association. Farris opposed Trump's candidacy in 2016 but in 2020 he "worked to overturn the election results, drafting a legal complaint with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the unsuccessful case Texas v. Pennsylvania." Kristen Waggoner has led the ADF since 2022.

The anti-gay movement had for years scaremongered about gay people somehow corrupting children, by directly recruiting them to be gay, by parenting them, or just by incidentally modeling gay relationships. In 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, with other countries making similar advances around that time, the anti-gay movement decided to transfer the moral panic and project it onto trans people.

Riki Wilchins says that, for decades, the gay rights movement adopted an assimilationism that downplayed sexuality and gender nonconformity. This created an opening for the Alliance Defending Feedom to come in and attack trans people for whatever sexuality and gender nonconformity they chose to project onto them. Wilchins:

"As the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented in excruciating detail, beginning in 2015 ADF built a multi-layered 57-organization network for the sole purpose of leveraging public discomfort over gender queerness.

Its goal was transforming trans women into predatory “folk devils,” and trans kids into confused children who couldn’t know their own genders— unless they were cis of course.

But homosexuals were always ADF’s real target, and the anti-trans backlash was quickly expanded to them."

— How Gender Came Back to Gay Rights, Medium, December 19, 2024

By now, at the end of 2024, Wilchins says, "14 states have now introduced and/or passed laws making drag illegal. In the past year, there have been 141 attacks by paramilitaries against drag events, some by armed groups."

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed an anti-drag bill "even after the press produced pictures of him doing drag," because "Of course ! Drag is only pedophilia when gay people do it." Right after he signed the bill, in Nashville, someone hung a publicly visible banner with a Nazi swastika "thanking Lee for his 'tireless work to fight trannies and fags.'"

In another article, Wilchins says that, according to a major tenet of the anti-trans playbook:

"All attacks on trans kids medicine must be framed as concern for their welfare. This goes back to a panel at the Family Research Council 2017 Values Voter Summit when it was decided that the frontal assaults long used against homosexuals would backfire against children. Henceforth, all attacks on trans care had to be framed as caring about them [kids] — a phenomenon scholar Mikey Elsner has termed insidious concern."

— WashPo Editorial Board Sh*ts the Bed on Pediatric Care, Medium, December 17, 2024

The Southern Poverty Law Center described the October 13–15, 2017 Values Voter Summit:

"In her presentation, Kilgannon mapped out three non-negotiables in the fight against the so-called gender identity agenda, a conspiracy theory touted by anti-LGBT groups that disavows sexual orientation and gender identity. The first is to 'divide and conquer. For all its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them. ...gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far [for many people to accept]. If we separate the T from the alphabet soup we’ll have more success.'

* * *

Kilgannon’s two other non-negotiables facilitate her divisive strategy: the first is to 'never ever attack LGBT people or trans people or parents of trans children.' She goes on: 'don’t play into their victim narrative because in this culture war they are the bullies, not the victims.' The last non-negotiable, for Kilgannon, is to not approach the topic of gender identity with religious arguments, which are 'simply not effective.' Instead, she recommends using arguments 'based on biology and reason.'"

Before the Trump administration takes off, build your protective systems and networks

At the end of this video, Rosa Brooks says:

"The final thing — and this is kind of depressing — this isn't about stopping it. This is about if you shift your mindset to thinking: If you live in Russia and you know Putin's coming down the road, you live in Hungary and you know Orban's coming down the road, what would you do to ensure that if you have to get through a period that could be four years, could be 20 years, could be 40 years of autocracy, that that little flame of democracy is not extinguished, you know? You want to set up the networks that can ensure people have cyber protection and legal assistance and potential physical protection if they need it, and communications help and so on. And you need to do that in advance, because if you wait until everybody is sort of isolated and alone, it's probably too late to do it. ... [a Trump administration] could be a while and a bad while, but there is a lot we can do to kind of protect the people and organizations and communities that he's likely to target during that time, if we start now." (16:07–17:15)

Disney won't let a character be trans

Earlier today, I wrote about ABC (owned by Disney) settling with Trump. Trump ‘In Fact Did Exactly That’, But Reporters Can’t Say So

A couple hours later, we learned that Pixar (owned by Disney) will cut a trans storyline from one of its shows.

Disney decides against transgender arc in Pixar’s "Win or Lose" series: A Disney spokesperson said the decision was made with parents in mind, Kelly McClure, Salon, Dec 17, 2024

The leaked prerender scene featuring a trans story line that Disney/Pixar removed from their new show Win or Lose. (sped up a bit to meet the upload limit)

[image or embed]

— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) December 17, 2024 at 7:29 PM

Probably this is an unofficial part of the settlement, and of heading into a new Trump administration. It's among many things that Disney is being asked to do. And they do it.

Anti-gender-affirming-care article in The Federalist (Dec 2024)

Here's a treat from The Federalist a couple days ago.

If you'd like to find it, after https://thefederalist.com/ ...

...type: /2024/12/13/landmark-transgender-scotus-case-could-redefine-medicine/

(I'm trying not to give them SEO value on this one.)

It's written by Dr. Aida Cerundolo, who has practiced clinical emergency medicine for two decades. (Not a specialist in gender-affirming care, it seems.) She's arguing that doctors harm trans kids by affirming their gender.

She says: "Aspirin can be dangerous when taken inappropriately or by those with an allergy, but the risks and benefits have been studied since the 1800s." Since gender-affirming care has not been studied since the 1800s, I guess it fails to meet that standard, if "studied since the 1800s" is the standard. But hormones were synthesized in the early 20th century, so there is a century-long history of humans taking hormones. And there are plenty of medications and surgeries that are more recent than gender-affirming care.

"Conversely, so-called “gender-affirming” treatments have no long-term studies that establish a clear risk-benefit ratio." She doesn't cite a source for that. But then, a study can't be done until the "risk" and "benefit" are defined.

She then gives an example. As the risk of trans people attempting suicide is "a claim used to promote these treatments" (i.e., to allow trans people to live in their gender), she uses that as an example, and says simply: "the evidence so far from multiple systematic reviews does not demonstrate a reduction in suicide." For that, she links to the Washington Examiner (a right-wing news outlet) and the Cass Review (a politicized document in the UK).

Anyway, she says, whereas medications like aspirin are meant to make you healthier, "gender-affirming treatments seek to disrupt a healthy physiology." So it seems she doesn't think there can be any benefit.

Next: "Since it is impossible to diagnose which children will persist with a transgender identity into adulthood," there is an "unmitigable risk of misdiagnosis. Hippocratic oath medicine doesn’t allow this harm to be whitewashed under the premise that it is, as the ACLU attorney indicated, a 'very low' 'one percent.'"

Just consider, she says, "wrong-site surgeries (when a wrong limb or organ is removed)." An organization is investigating it because "that’s a harm rate of 0.00000788 percent — too high for doctors seeking to 'first, do no harm.'"

Of course this is illogical.

1. There is a commission investigating why some surgeries go wrong, not stopping all surgeries because the risk of error is too high.
2. In the case of wrong-site surgeries, the error belongs entirely to the nurse or surgeon (not the person getting surgery), so the commission can investigate what happened (e.g., the nurse wrote wrong information on the notepad, or the surgeon was drunk). Asking why some people change their minds about what they want their body to look like is another question.
3. Not everyone who detransitions has been "harmed" by taking hormones or getting surgery. Some are happy to have had that experience and simply decide they don't wish to continue with hormones or they adjust how they present themselves in the world, not minding that they've had hormones or surgery.
4. There isn't an acceptable risk percentage that applies equally to every kind of healthcare. Knee surgery has a high regret rate, yet surgeons continue to do it, because for whatever reason, that risk is considered acceptable.
5. If indeed 1% of kids regret transition but 99% are living full lives because of it, and if that's an unacceptable risk-benefit ratio, what she's saying is that one cis person matters more than 100 trans people.
6. As she acknowledges, "the stated 'one percent' risk of regret is unverifiable. The rate of detransition is unknown because there is no system in place to measure it." So if there's no evidence that many people are unhappy that their doctors allowed them to access hormones and surgery, whence the concern?

Ideas from the 'Serial Killing' philosophy anthology

"...the period [of video games] I wish had gotten some serious attention from the Review is the 1990s: that first decade of first-person shooters, from Wolfenstein 3D (1992) to about Halo (2001), is endlessly interesting, both as an era of relentless formal and technical one-upmanship — as programmers raced one another to work out how to virtually represent three-dimensional space, movement, and interaction — and as a sustained unselfconscious exploration of American gun obsession. It was probably the most important video game genre of its time, and it was entirely about seeing the world down the barrel of a gun — some of the games are works of genius, some are absolute garbage, but the whole period amounts to something that still feels deeply strange and important. But I have no idea what it means."
— "Compulsion, Triumph, Regret, and Unease." Gabriel Winslow-Yost, interviewed by Daniel Drake. New York Review of Books. August 20, 2022.

---

"a literary bouquet that is to this day one of the finest extant examples of remix culture, generally attributed to that late medieval genre of writing known as florilegium or 'flower-culling.' ...florilegia were extensive and systematic compilations of extracts from past writings: proverbs, maxims, and stories, sometimes quoted verbatim in mnemonically brief segments, but more often summarized or subject to some alteration with the aim of exemplifying certain topics which, when combined and recombined together, illuminated a central doctrine or idea; thus producing, through a mode of literary splicing, the telescopic effect traditionally associated with targumim texts."
Edia Connole, "The Language of Flowers: Serial Kitsch In Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology. Edia Connole and Gary J. Shipley, eds. Schism, 2015. pp. 95-96.

---

From the same Serial Killing anthology:

David Roden, in "Aliens Under the Skin," asks: In describing a serial killer as "inhuman," do we make "any more than an exclamation of moral disgust?" Or do we make "some kind of truth claim?" He uses bioethicist Darian Meacham's suggestion of the Phenomenological Species Concept - meaning, we have "empathic awareness" of others, recognizing that they have "mental states analogous to our own." This is "intrinsically motivating and normative," enabling us to "share moral practices" that relate to the very feelings we recognize that others have. But, on the other hand, we can't empathize with serial killers, either, can we? The suggestion that we ought to empathize with serial killers even if they do not empathize with us has the appearance of logic, despite its unfairness. (It is unfair because fairness, by definition, usually implies reciprocity). Sometimes we give to others in ways they cannot give to us, under the rubric of dignity, charity, or social justice, but it isn't immediately obvious that we want to offer any of that to serial killers.

Gary J. Shipley, in "Visceral Incredulity," points out that serial killers are defined in terms of what they've done to their victims, and furthermore they are outside "the moral dialogue" that everyone else shares, so they are "unstable, transitory and impersonal" and seen "as void, as zombielike and personless."

Daniel Colucciello Barber, in "Nonrelation and Metarelation": Metarelation means some kind of resistance against reality. It "involves saying no to the world's definition of construction, as well as to the very construction of the world."

Niall W. R. Scott, "A Creeping Death": When a physical body dies, it experiences "the very precipice of what it is and what it is not at that particular moment." So death is not just physical but psychological. The anticipation of death is "the anticipation of no longer being able to be aware of oneself as a thing." A serial killer seeks to make someone "experience the moment of the light diminishing."

It is asked whether a person's sadism can be attributed to a cultural influence such as "poverty, despair, political and economic impotence and disillusion, a figure of abjection, weakness and brutality shivering with a generalised, aimless and endless rage." Sometimes the killer reveals surprisingly "ordinary" feelings "of pleasure-desire central to the productive and profane world" rather than "an utterly unimaginable excess or a corporeal conduit of excremental forces that leave all structures, laws and grounds in ruins." (Fred Botting, "Bataille's Vampire")

I Wrote More About This Book

To read more, please see "What Murderers Make Philosophers Think About". It's a 3-minute read on Medium.

Antisemitism and transphobia: It cooks your brain

"On Monday [October 21, 2024], Elon Musk invoked the names of two German Nazis in a tweet while simultaneously disparaging modern pronoun conventions — attempting, as he so often does, to make a joke. (I’m not repeating the text here — not because it’s profane, but mostly because it’s just not funny.)

For context, Musk was responding to a post about a Der Spiegel article that compared him to a media mogul who helped Hitler climb to power.

— Allison Morrow, Any other CEO would have been fired for what Elon Musk just said, CNN, October 23, 2024

Morrow also mentions that the previous month, Musk had promoted a

"widely condemned interview with a Nazi apologist who said the murder of Jews in concentration camps was “humane” and that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War II. Musk later deleted his X post that called the interview 'very interesting' and 'worth watching,' per the Independent."

— Allison Morrow, Any other CEO would have been fired for what Elon Musk just said, CNN, October 23, 2024

a lesson we have learned repeatedly in the UK is that when transphobes suddenly appear in load-bearing roles in organisations, they are usually prepared to sacrifice everything, including their job and their org’s credibility, in order to platform and perform transphobia

— Alyson Greaves (@badambulist.bsky.social) December 11, 2024 at 3:51 AM

like, transphobia legit cooks people's brains. I'm talking people who are so determined to keep abusing trans children at their teaching job that they keep returning to school even after they've been fired, even after they've been taken to court. you cannot communicate rationally with these people.

— Alyson Greaves (@badambulist.bsky.social) December 11, 2024 at 5:46 AM

a new antisemitism, the parasitic traits of the belief — jeopardizing one's job, jeopardizing one's relationships, solely isolating the hosts in communities of persons who similarly can only discuss a single topic daily and for years straight, the conspiratorialism, etc.

— Salty 🇵🇸 🇵🇸 (@nacl.sh) December 11, 2024 at 6:33 AM

transphobia operates very much like the antisemitism we're all familiar with, but born anew altho still modeled in a distinct image

— Salty 🇵🇸 🇵🇸 (@nacl.sh) December 11, 2024 at 6:34 AM

Strangio: 'You are never just a lawyer. You are the trans lawyer'

Imara Jones, host of the TransLash podcast, summarizes that the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Skrmetti could "decide the overall constitutionality of gender-affirming care for all trans people in the United States," not just youth.

In that interview, Chase Strangio says that while there are "incredible advocates who are regularly appearing" as experts before the Supreme Court, there are fewer people who've been "in the trenches fighting for their communities" and who thus "know, in their bones, the consequences" of what the court is preparing to decide.

Jones: "I mean, you know, that's been a problem with, sort of, American life since the 1970s is the growing you know, one might argue over-professionalization of everything, which means that everything gets separated more and more from the people, which is why things seem to be esoteric and disconnected."

(This feels important to me because it's related to arguments about elitism and meritocracy. When Trump voters say that Democratic voters are elitist, maybe what they're experiencing is that many aspects of society (not specifically conservative or liberal, or otherwise partisan) are elitist. A thought I shall table for now.)

Jones asks Strangio: "After you stand up after the Solicitor General [at the forthcoming hearing on December 4, 2024], look those nine justices in the eyes, and let the words, 'May it please the Court' leave your mouth, what do you think is going to be the personal feeling that you have of both having to stand there at the highest level of your professionalism and at the same time be debating the essence of your humanity, facing off on the other side against people who refuse to to see that?"

 

Chase Strangio points out that he frequently testifies in state legislatures and committee hearings where he hears "the most vile misrepresentations and cruel things about about trans people," so he's not new to this.

"I cross-examine and depose experts who fundamentally don't believe trans people should exist, the same experts who are being used by the state of Tennessee in this case, and I have argued before courts that I know will have ruled against me, will rule against me in this fight that is so central to everything about me as a human being. So that is something that I am used to. I think obviously in this context where, when you enter the Supreme Court, it, in and of itself, just has that feeling of you were, many people were never meant to be in that space. It is a space that has been occupied by the very sort of, you know, most limited constructions of the elite, and over time, that has a lot more and more people have been able to enter the doors, but only in a very limited way. And so whenever you are in that space, and whenever you are representing a community of people that was never meant to be there, I think it is both powerful and destabilizing. A little bit it's sort of holding that those sets of truths and trying to be as best of an advocate for your community as you can be knowing that so much is being projected onto you, so much misinformation, misunderstanding and dehumanization in that moment, you never have the sort of privilege of just being a lawyer. And that is something that I think many lawyers from you know, sort of historically excluded and currently discriminated against communities feel. It's like: You are never just a lawyer. You are the trans lawyer, or you are the Black trans lawyer, or you are the disabled lawyer. People's experience of that obviously affects the theater of the courtroom very significantly, and I think to suggest otherwise would be to do a just huge disservice to the nature of law and how law is made through its very performative elements, so I'm thinking about those things. And then, you know, obviously, like, it's, it's not lost on me that we're having a conversation about health care, that the health care is the very reason I will be standing there in that, in that moment, like there is no version of me that gets to the Supreme Court that has the life that I have if I didn't have access to this health care that now the governments are seeking to take away."

This is from the November 14, 2024 episode of TransLash.

Relatedly, see my info: Will SCOTUS Let Parents and Doctors Support Trans Kids? (5 min read) on Medium