Sunday, June 12, 2022

Their goal is not to protect trans kids (Idaho, 2022)

Read this first

A long, positive Twitter thread about trans kids (unrolled on Thread Reader App)

What if a child almost doesn't get assessed before transitioning?

Michael Hobbes, Oct 8, 2022 tweets: I still can't get over how a moral panic driven almost entirely by anecdotes can't seem to find a single anecdote of a teenager medically transitioning without assessment. It's a big country and an emerging medical field; I'm sure some cases do exist. But it's telling that we've had years of scare stories by openly anti-trans journalists and the best they've come up with are some cases of kids who *almost* transitioned without assessment.

What if a child grows up to be trans?

I mean, when they're an adult? What if they turn out to be a trans adult?

Colin Spacetwinks tweets January 22, 2023: another piece on trans kids from the nyt and thinking about how these things are always couched in kids 'safety' and 'health' and then thinking about how schools have gotten dramatically less safe and healthy for kids since columbine but they have gotten far more controlling ... they're talking about surgery and hormones in an environment that's entirely about *social* transition. names, pronouns, different clothes. they aren't getting surgeries, hormones from this. and people go 'but what if they DO get hormones LATER'. it's blatantly about control

What if a child grows up to be trans, and we can't tell that they're trans because they took puberty blockers?

Transphobes want to be able to tell who's trans so that they can target us. They do not want trans people to accidentally or intentionally look cis. They don't want that outcome for us or them or the world. They want a world in which trans kids go through a puberty we don't want to go through and must spend years in adulthood modifying and disguising our bodies — working with whatever we've got — to look how we want to look.

They don't want to help us from childhood to look how we want to look in adulthood because they don't want to help us ever. They don't want us to have certain outcomes. They don't want to allow us to integrate in society. They don't want us to be happy with our own bodies. They don't want us to be able to say "my reproductive system isn't your business." They want our reproductive systems to be their business, in childhood and in adulthood, now and forever.

First:

"The Idaho House of Representatives...passed legislation to make it a crime punishable by life in prison for a parent to seek out gender-affirming health care for their transgender child." (NBC, March 9, 2022)

Update: Idaho passed the law in 2023, and the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed the law to take effect while two trans kids appeal it.

Even though cis kids are allowed to have gender-affirming surgeries:

Erin Reed: Its notable that Democrats introduced amendments to gender affirming care bans for trans youth saying that 'we should also ban cosmetic surgery for cis kids.' Republicans universally shot this amendment down in virtually every state.

Even though LGBTQ kids become suicidal over anti-queer legislation and rhetoric:

An Idaho law "bans trans kids from using school facilities that align with their gender identity and offers children a $5,000 bounty for reporting trans students who use the restroom that matches their gender identity." (LGBTQ nation) It should go without saying that offering $5,000 to a child to allege that their classmate might be trans is not a way to get accurate information about who is trans or whether there are shenanigans in bathrooms, nor is it a way to protect trans kids or cis kids. It is a bounty. It encourages false allegations. Even if an allegation is true, it rewards students for transphobic attitudes and actions. It teaches them to police each other's genders. A federal judge temporarily blocked the law from taking effect a week before classes started.

Gerald Don Henderson, 72, was murdered. So was James L. Mauney, 83, in a separate incident. Police suspect "28-year-old Nicholas Umphenour and 31-year-old Skylar Meade, two members of the Aryan Knights prison gang who were later arrested by police in Twin Falls, Idaho..."
"Neo-Nazis kill 72-year-old gay man, leaving his partner heartbroken over 'senseless' murder" One of the neo-Nazis stayed with the gay couple as a teenager. Daniel Villarreal, LGBTQ Nation, March 26, 2024

Then:

"Idaho police...arrested 31 members of the Patriot Front hate group who planned to 'riot' at a Pride event in downtown Coeur d'Alene, officials announced...'They came to riot downtown,' Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said at a news conference...'It appears they did not come here to engage in peaceful events,' Kootenai County Sheriff Robert Norris, told the Coeur d’Alene Press...Those arrested came from at least 11 states..." (Huff Post, June 11, 2022)

The group's leader had a seven-page document with an operational plan for the protest.

The goal of targeting gender-affirming care for kids isn't to protect kids. The goal is to make Nazis appear. Working as expected.

After the arrest, the police received death threats. Two days after the arrest, "Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said...he [had] received a mix of 149 phone calls, half of which were 'hate and threats from elsewhere, including white supremacists, etc.' The other half of the calls were 'supportive calls from the Coeur D’Alene community.'" (HuffPost)

Read the CNN explainer on Patriot Front, and also note:

Follow-up: "Florida legislature passes ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy," by Lori Rozsa and Caroline Kitchener, Washington Post, April 13, 2023. DeSantis signed it.

By the way, as of October 2022 (this is an update), now we're here:

If you believe people need to be protected from their own trans-ness, as if it were an illness of which they needed to be cured, why do you also want to villainize or hurt those people? An insight from Susan Sontag: In the mid-19th century, people began to understand that illnesses were caused by microorganisms. No longer was there simply a person who was mysteriously ill; there was an identifiable enemy attacking that person, so to speak. This was when "medicine really began to be effective, and the military metaphors took on new credibility and precision. Since then, military metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological ‘defenses,’ and medicine is ‘aggressive,’ as in the language of most chemotherapies." (Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), Chapter 1)

Update: Proud Boys also showed up to protest at a Nevada library on June 26, 2022. The library was holding a drag queen story hour, and one of the men was openly carrying a gun (legal in Nevada) and approached the library. Proud Boys showed up at a California LGBTQ bar on June 30, 2022, harassing patrons at the door and making comments about "pedophiles." The bar had planned an all-ages drag show and had to postpone the event.

On July 18, 2022, a candidate for Santa Rosa County School Board in Florida said in a public forum: "These doctors that are going along with mutilating these children and prescribing hormone blockers to these kids, in my opinion, they should be hanging from the nearest tree." People in attendance applauded her comment.

In the 2022 Arizona governor's race, Republican candidate Kari Lake tried to smear her opponent, Katie Hobbs, for "the crime of being married to a trauma therapist with a trans patient" (as Ari Drennen put it on X on November 4). Hobbs won, but barely. Lake presented this characterization of her opponent, Drennen said, "with the help of the Daily Wire and Charlie Kirk."

More on Charlie Kirk (by Vishal P. Singh, VPSReports, Jul 17, 2023): "The Groypers, a loose coalition of neo-Nazi internet trolls," showed up at Charlie Kirk's conference. "Over the weekend, Republicans and their increasingly radicalized base flocked to West Palm Beach in Florida for the annual conference hosted by Charlie Kirk and his influential media empire: Turning Point USA," along with the MAGA folk. The night before Trump's speech, "a crew of MAGA-faithful neo-Nazis called the Nationalist Network arrived on the scene." They're "a neo-Nazi streamer collective cosplaying as a militant movement. It’s somewhat of a splinter from Nick Fuentes and his Groypers, led by Ryan Sanchez, a disgraced former marine and member of the federally prosecuted neo-Nazi gang Rise Above Movement." After trying to network in-person at Turning Point on Friday night, they "went to nearby hotels with a simple plan: promote the flyer for a Groyper neo-Nazi party to as many young conservatives as they could. They live-streamed their activities up until the party began," and they were "indulging in a fantasy that 'antifa' was coming to fight them (nobody came to fight them). You know your party promotion is going well if you start wishing you were brawling with your political enemies instead." Of course: "Eventually, Nick Fuentes gave his big neo-Nazi speech as his young cultist followers pledged that they were willing to rape, kill, and die for Nick Fuentes." These aren't Charlie Kirk's people, not quite yet: "As the conference continued, Ryan Sanchez and his Nationalist Network boys ended up getting kicked out by security after harassing and surrounding a CNN journalist. For now: the mainstream of the Republican Party— while heavily motivated by white nationalism, isn’t ready to fully accept the Groyper culture yet. We’re still in the era of dogwhistles and innuendo with regards to the fascism of Trump’s party. But his young supporters are getting restless. And radicalization machines like Turning Point USA provide a nurturing space for eliminationist hate in the base."

In June 2024, Arturo Dominguez tells us about "former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke joining a protest on Sunday over the cancellation of the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC)," which Fuentes founded. "It was canceled after it became known that the event was to be attended by dozens of antisemitic and racist influencers."

Follow-up on Thomas Homan who attended a Fuentes event in 2022.

See also

"Trans Kids Are Found in History, Too" (5-minute read) or "How the Far-Right Comes for Trans People" (4-minute read). Using these links get you around the paywall.

fist breaking glass
April 1, 2022 tweet by Judd Legum @JuddLegum: Esther Bryd [sic: correct spelling is Byrd], who was recently appointed by @GovRonDeSantis to the Florida Board of Education, says it is 'unacceptable' for a teacher to wear a 'Protect Trans Kids' t-shirt on trans visibility day. She encourages parents to report similar violations. (via @emdrums)
June 9, 2021 tweet by Yesterday, @propublica broke a massive story exposing that the wealthiest people in America (including Zuckerberg) pay negligible taxes The top story on Facebook, by a country mile, was an aggregated anti-trans story from the Daily Wire ProPublica's scoop is not in the top ten

January 2023:

February 2023:

Relatedly, in case you want to know what else Charlie Kirk believes: In January 2024, HuffPost reports:

"Right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, leader of the MAGA youth groups Turning Point USA and Students for Trump and the host one of the most listened-to podcasts in the United States, encouraged his listeners this week to take up arms in preparation for an “invasion” of immigrants at the southern border.

“The break-ins, the looting, the murder, the rapes, the arson, it’s — by the way, this is just getting warmed up,” Kirk said Wednesday [January 24, 2024] on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” echoing white supremacist talking points depicting immigrants and asylum seekers as inherently criminal. “You got 15,000 fighting-age males that are getting deployed all across the country. Native-born Americans, you better buy weapons, everybody. Have a lot of guns at your disposal. I would never leave your home without a weapon. It’s the new country we live in. It is ‘Mad Max.’ [President Joe] Biden is creating ‘Mad Max.’ You’re on your own.”"

See also: "Texas Republicans See Attacking Trans Kids As Political Win: The far-right hopes to drag more moderate conservatives into a full-scale culture war." Roque Planas. Feb 2, 2023.

In Texas, 2023:

"After a yearslong barrage by activists and lawmakers, the state has won the battle against the use of transition-related care, like puberty blockers and hormone therapies, for transgender youth. While the war over this health care remains in question — and a legal fight to block the new law begins in Texas — clinics have closed and some doctors have stopped providing this care."
— “Unbearable”: Doctors treating trans kids are leaving Texas, exacerbating adolescent care crisis. William Melhado. Texas Tribune. July 17, 2023.

August 2023

In response to an Aug 5 2023 tweet by Peter Boghossian saying 'we need to begin having discussions about appropriate legal punishments for surgeons', Michael Hobbes tweets: Bizarre to me that centrists think they bear no responsibility for the radicalization of the right on trans rights. You're publishing stories that say thousands of children are receiving irreversible surgeries with no assessment! How do you expect people to react to that?
July 18, 2023: Erin Reed @ErinInTheMorn They never were going to just stop with trans people. Italy has begun stripping lesbian parents of their parental rights. They always intended to go after all LGBTQ people. Walsh and others have started sharing outrage posts on gay adoption and surrogacy.

August 2023

A study published in August 2023 finds that — according to the Associated Press — during a four-year period from 2016–2019, fewer than 3,700 gender-affirming surgeries were performed in the U.S. on patients ages 12 to 18 — emphasis, some were 18, not even minors, and "it's not clear how many" within the 12–18 group were 18. People 19+ received 10 times as many gender-affirming surgeries.

Ari Drennen tweets on Aug 31, 2023: Libs of TikTok tweeted out a flier from a 'playdate social for black, brown, and API families' hosted at an elementary school in one of the whitest neighborhoods of Oakland. I don't even need to tell you what happened next at this point.

Virginia Gov. Youngkin

Glenn Youngkin, governor of Virginia since January 2022, by the end of that year had delayed his intended policies. (HuffPost, Dec 21, 2022)

And by August 2023: "Several school districts in Virginia’s Democratic-leaning regions are flat-out refusing to implement transphobic policies recently handed down by the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE). The policies force students to use bathrooms, pronouns, and names that align with their sex assigned at birth."
— Virginia schools are refusing to follow the governor’s transphobic policies... and there may not be much that the governor can legally do about it. Daniel Villarreal, LGBTQ Nation, August 24, 2023

A few months later:

"To be fair to Republican strategists, there was a moment, in the fall of 2021, when it looked as if the plan was working. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor in Virginia, ran on a campaign of “parents’ rights” against “critical race theory” and won a narrow victory against Terry McAuliffe, a former Democratic governor, sweeping Republicans into power statewide for the first time since 2009. Youngkin shot to national prominence, and Republicans made immediate plans to take the strategy to every competitive race in the country.
* * *
Overall, election night 2022 was a serious disappointment for the Republican Party, which failed to win a Senate majority and barely won control of the House of Representatives. The hoped-for red wave was little more than a puddle. The culture war strategy had fallen flat on its face."
* * *
One Youngkin-endorsed candidate for State Senate, Juan Pablo Segura, told Fox News that he wants to revisit a failed bill that would have required schools to notify parents if there was any hint a child was interested in transgender identity.
Segura lost his race [on November 7, 2023]..."
— "The G.O.P’s Culture War Shtick Is Wearing Thin With Voters", Jamelle Bouie, New York Times, Nov. 10, 2023

September 2023

At least 22 U.S. states have banned gender-affirming care for minors.

A teenager does her makeup and gets ready to go back to school. This is normal. Protect trans kids.

11-year-old trans girl’s plea for “peace” leaves school board speechless “I came here not to fight, but to make peace. How? I’m going to tell a story.” Bil Browning, LGBTQ Nation, October 4, 2023. Here's the video on Twitter and on the story Erin Reed wrote on Substack.

Genspect tweeted on Oct 3 2023: 'US-UTAH: 11 yr old 'Alison' came out as trans at 8 after having a vision of wearing a long white dress in a field. Dad says his 'daughter' must be 'validated in who she is” & allowed to use girls spaces bc many trans-identified people consider suicide.' Erin Reed tweets that this comment is 'vile' and points out that they are about to have a conference with 7 speakers: @LeorSapir @heterodorx @JamieWhistle @ChoooCole @LisaMarchiano @JanuaryDoNoHarm @HJoyceGender

March 2024

Drag story hour at Pa. library canceled after suspicious package and threats, authorities say A state police bomb squad later cleared the library, but police said “additional reported threats” were still being investigated. Associated Press, whyy.org, March 23, 2024

Can anyone, including a child themselves, know if the child is gay?

The LGB Alliance opposes gay kids. This is a homophobic position. They oppose their own past gay-child selves.

In a four-tweet thread on September 16, 2022, Katy Montgomerie said that LGB Alliance was "claiming that gay kids don't exist." She noted: "Coming out to yourself as gay as a teenager and dealing with the homophobia around etc is such a big deal for so many people. Children go through it alone often[.] A whole generation of kids grew up in Section 28 and were literally on their own, worrying what it meant that they had these feelings and if their friends and families would even love them anymore[.] The LGBT rights orgs that LGB Alliance campaigns against fought for these kids[.]" She adds: "I bet all of them were aware of their sexual orientation before they were 18." "So obsessed with harming trans people that they are willing to throw gay kids under the bus too[.]" And, crucially: "it's not even consistent with another one of their hateful claims: that gay kids are being forced to transition. What gay kids? You don't even believe they exist."

April 2024

"A large percentage of [U.S.] trans youth live in states where such [anti-trans] laws have been enacted, including 85 percent of trans youth in the South and 40 percent in the Midwest.

Conversely, nearly half of all trans youth live within the 14 states that have enacted shield laws that protect access to gender-affirming care and prohibit conversion therapy. This includes all trans youth in the Northeast and 97 percent of those in the West."

— Over 90% of trans youth live in states pushing anti-trans legislation: report, Ryan Adamczeski, The Advocate, April 23, 2024

Bomb threat interrupts Drag Story Hour event at Arlington gay bar [Virginia], Lou Chibbaro Jr., Washington Blade, April 8, 2024

Pennsylvania: A school board canceled an anti-bullying talk because the speaker is gay.
Bluesky link to NYT article, Bluesky quote from NYT article

Look at the result of the law

"Idaho State Police’s sexual assault nurse coordinator told Idaho Reports that the new law prevents law enforcement from administering rape kits to minors without parental permission."
A new Idaho law is keeping child sexual assault victims from receiving care, Andru Zodrow, KHQ, Aug 9, 2024

West Virginia:

"Businessperson Chris Miller is running in the GOP primary for governor of West Virginia next month, and his campaign has one clear message: he simply hates transgender children.

His recent ads have focused on promising to roll back the rights of transgender students, lying about gender-affirming care to make it sound scarier, and accusing his opponents of supporting gender-affirming surgery on minors, something that is almost never performed on minors."

— Republican governor candidate is making his entire campaign about hating trans kids: "His pronoun? Money-grubbing liberal," an ad says of one of his Republican opponents. Alex Bollinger, LGBTQ Nation, April 23, 2024

Republicans are running ads showing children taking their pants down in restrooms

2024 election. Not kidding.

How do you know if a murder victim was trans?

Anti-trans policies make it more likely that trans people will go missing.

Looking for a person in their old name and old gender presentation won't help you find that missing person as they're presenting right now. It's a prejudice against finding people who are living in a gender that doesn't "match" their sex assigned at birth.

In March 2024, Indiana's HB 1291 proposes that law enforcement be required to gather information on the "biological sex" of a missing person.

Anti-trans policies make it more likely that trans people will die.

The medical examiner looks at that person who has (or hasn't) had surgery, does (or doesn't) have updated ID, and may not see "a trans person."

How do you know if any human is trans?

"A recent drama residency from the Missoula Children's Theatre prompted Lakeland Joint School District [in North Idaho] to apologize last week after some audience members complained that a staff member was transgender."
Lakeland superintendent apologizes after transgender actor visits school, Carolyn Bostick, Coeur d'Alene/Post Falls Press, May 23, 2024.

Read the Bluesky thread

"We found that trans youth were three times more likely to kill themselves but then we controlled for the dumbest thing imaginable and the difference went away." mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/ebme...

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— Michael Hobbes (@michaelhobbes.bsky.social) May 18, 2024 at 9:34 AM

Trans elders exist

The goal of anti-LGBTQ laws is not to protect trans elders, either: In September 2023, four teenagers allegedly broke the jaw of a 72-year-old man while using anti-LGBTQ slurs. They will come after their own, at any age. In November 2023, "a Baptist pastor and small town mayor in Alabama was hounded into suicide by a right wing news site who discovered he had a secret online persona as a trans woman."

U.S. states are handing over the records of transgender patients.

My grim satisfaction at seeing this taken seriously is marred by my outrage that this study has to exist at all. "We studied people who were deprived of oxygen, and by year three the number of corpse-identifying individuals increased sharply" yeah no shit sherlock

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— Werepixie 🏳️‍⚧️ (@poljack.bsky.social) September 26, 2024 at 9:00 AM
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