Hundreds of out transgender people and allies from across Florida and from as far away as Southern California gathered in Orlando Saturday to rally and to march, demanding justice, equality and acceptance.
“There are so many of us who feel excluded from our cities and our communities,” said Ariel Savage of Riverside, Calif.
“Visibility and support is crucial,” declared Savage, 24, in one of the stirring speeches to the crowd at a rally on the shores of Orlando’s Lake Eola, just prior to the march. “We are here today at the National Trans Visibility March because we are real and we have had enough!”
“There are so many of us who feel excluded from our cities and our communities,” said Ariel Savage of Riverside, Calif.
“Visibility and support is crucial,” declared Savage, 24, in one of the stirring speeches to the crowd at a rally on the shores of Orlando’s Lake Eola, just prior to the march. “We are here today at the National Trans Visibility March because we are real and we have had enough!”
ARIEL SAVAGE DELIVERS A SPEECH PRIOR TO THE NATIONAL TRANS VISIBILITY MARCH IN ORLANDO, FLA., ON SATURDAY. (VIDEO BY DAWN ENNIS)
“It just goes to showcase the collective love that we, as trans people, have for each other, and that even in a world that excludes us and locks doors on us, we keep marching and we keep breaking those doors down every day,” Savage later told the Los Angeles Blade. She’s the policy director at TruEvolution, a Riverside-based nonprofit focused on racial justice and providing health services and emergency housing for LGBTQ+ people. “The Inland Empire has a lot of work to do,” she said, calling it “not necessarily the most accepting environment.” This was her first visit to Orlando.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many trans people in one place before,” Savage said. “It feels very beautiful to be in a place where I’m not scared and I just feel excited and happy and at peace.”
Flynn, who is 14 and from Orlando, held a sign decorated in the blue, white and pink colors of the transgender flag that said, “I’m so proud to be me.” He marched with his mother, Michelle, and her cousin Rochelle, who is lesbian. Flynn said he’d known he was a trans boy since sixth grade but only recently came out to his mom. “Of course, I was confused, at first,” said Michelle, of Orlando. “But since then, I have educated myself and I’ve joined parent groups and I support him fully.”
Florida’s ban on trans student-athletes and similar laws in eight other states are worrisome for Flynn’s family, his mother said. “It does worry me as a mom, because I want to protect my kids. But I also want him to be who he is. I think it’s really important as parents to support our children.”
March organizers say they chose both this location, and the weekend of Orlando Pride, to show unity with the larger LGBTQ community. “Orlando has a spirit of heart and love, and we wanted it to be here to celebrate with them,” said NTVM executive director, CEO and founder Marissa Miller.
Following the march, members of the transgender community and allies formed a special contingent in the annual LGBTQ Pride Parade through downtown Orlando, holding aloft a huge trans Pride flag.
Next year, the march moves to Los Angeles, according to Come Out With Pride’s communications director, YouTuberMelody Maia Monet, who first brought the idea for combining the Orlando events to her board of directors. She’s been out 11 years and said she’s excited to see how Pride has evolved in her adopted hometown of Orlando.
“What I really love is that we’re kind of moving away from the binary,” Monet said. “When you walk around this place, not just the National Trans Visibility March area, but all around Lake Eola Park, where we’re having Come Out With Pride, you’ll see people of basically every stripe under the rainbow, you know? So I think that is that is a great thing to see.”
The Biden administration is using a Trump-era policy to approve the expansion of health care coverage for transgender Coloradans, forcing many of the state’s private insurers to cover gender-affirming care.
Former President Donald Trump’s 2018 policy allows states to redefine the essential health care benefits insurers are required to cover under the Affordable Care Act. On Tuesday, the Biden administration used it to approve Colorado’s request to add gender-affirming care among its health plans’ guaranteed benefits.
The move will force individual and small-group insurers to cover transition-related procedures, including hormone therapy, breast augmentation and laser hair removal, starting Jan. 1, 2023.
Federal officials and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, one of two openly LGBTQ governors, said they hoped the measure would serve as a model to expand gender-affirming care in other states. The Biden administration also cited discriminatory barriers that transgender Americans frequently face when they seek transition-related care, often described as cosmetic.
“Health care should be in reach for everyone; by guaranteeing transgender individuals can access recommended care, we’re one step closer to making this a reality,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement Tuesday. “I am proud to stand with Colorado to remove barriers that have historically made it difficult for transgender people to access health coverage and medical care.”
Medicaid covers gender-affirming care in more than a dozen states, including Colorado. But onlya handful of states, including Massachusetts and Washington, have policies similar to the new Colorado measure, requiring many private insurers to cover transition-related care.
As a result, nearly half of transgender Americans — including 54 percent of trans people of color — say that their health insurers covered only some of their gender-affirming care or that they had no providers in network, according to a survey last year by the Center for American Progress. The report found that 46 percentof trans respondents and 56 percent of trans respondents of color were denied gender-affirming care by their insurers.
Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, the director of the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center at Boston’s Fenway Institute, who works directly with transgender patients, applauded the Biden administration’s new measure.
“What we’ve learned the hard way is that private insurers and employers won’t necessarily have these equitable policies around coverage of medically necessary gender-affirming care without the government enforcing such expectations,” he said.
Keuroghlian said that when Massachusetts similarly expanded coverage for transgender patients in 2014, he had to modify his schedule to keep up with the demand.
“We saw a remarkable increase in trans and diverse community members pursuing gender-affirming care because they didn’t have to pay out of pocket,” he said.
Many health insurance companies and lawmakers describe transition-related procedures as cosmetic, but many of the country’s leading health institutions say they are vital.
“In our mind, there is no debate,” said Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, the first and only openly LGBTQ board member of the American Medical Association. “These transition services and gender-affirming care for transgender patients are medically necessary. That’s what the science has demonstrated.”
Trans advocates have also long argued that transition-related procedures can help trans people more easily assimilate into society and avoid targeting.
“We are trying to eliminate trauma and discrimination in our lives,” said Lourdes Ashley Hunter, the founder and executive director of the advocacy group Trans Women of Color Collective. “And if that means that I need to get facial feminization so that when I go to the store or market I’m not being harassed and I’m doing so freely and safely, then so be it.”
The Biden administration’s approval of Colorado’s health care request aligns with the president’s campaign pledgeto expand medical care for transgender Americans. It also follows the administration’s decision in May to reinstate federal discrimination protections for trans patients, which the Trump administration had rolled back.
Conversely, some states led by Republicans have tried to limit access to care for trans Americans.
In April, Arkansas became the first state to ban health care providersfrom providing trans youths with gender-affirming care, with legislators in favor of the measure arguing that they wanted to protect children from procedures they would regret later. Similar bills have been introduced in dozens of other states, including Texas.
“His shadow is huge,” says Moore, who was a writer and showrunner on Netflix’s “Dear White People.” “He’s a brilliant goofy comedian, he’s brilliant as a political comedian. He has been brilliant for so so long, but I also don’t think because you’ve been brilliant means that you’re always brilliant.”
Moore announced on Twitter and Instagram on Wednesday night that she would no longer work with Netflix after she watched Chappelle’s latest standup special, “The Closer,” which premiered on the streamer on Tuesday. In the special, Chappelle makes numerous jokes about trans women.
Moore transitioned during the pandemic, a journey she has chronicled across her social media platforms.
“After the Chappelle special, I can’t do this anymore. I won’t work for @netflix again as long as they keep promoting and profiting from dangerous transphobic content,” she wrote on Instagram.
She also tweeted, “I love so many of the people I’ve worked with at Netflix. Brilliant people and executives who have been collaborative and fought for important art….But I’ve been thrown against walls because, “I’m not a ‘real’ woman.” I’ve had beer bottles thrown at me. So, @netflix, I’m done.”
I talked to Moore on Thursday afternoon from New Orleans, where she is working on the Peacock reboot of “Queer As Folk.”
Why did you decide to speak out on Twitter?
I never loved Dave’s trans material before but this time it felt different. This is the first time I felt like, “Oh, people are laughing at this joke and they’re agreeing that it’s absurd to call me a woman.” The fact is that’s the exact rhetoric and language that is used against us. I have had beer bottles thrown at me. I have been thrown against a wall for using a women’s bathroom. I would just say it’s ironic that for somebody who famously walked away from a TV show because he felt like the messages of the joke got lost, he doesn’t see what the messages of these jokes do to people. He talks about our feelings being hurt. My feelings are fine, but being thrown against a wall hurts or worrying at night if I can get home safe. That stuff is not theoretical. I’m really tired of my existence being a matter of debate, that this is something that we all just get to have an opinion about. We all get to have an opinion whether or not I am what I say I am. Look, I have no desire to cancel Dave Chappelle. He should make whatever he wants to make but I will say to Netflix, it’s not like this was a live special. They saw this and were like, “Yeah this seems okay to put out there.” The truth is it’s not. It’s dangerous and it has real world physical violence repercussions. People like to say, “Oh, it’s just a joke.” I get the joke. By the way there’s a lot that’s funny about being trans, but the idea that it’s funny that we call ourselves women, which was the subtext of a lot of those jokes, is not one of them. It’s actually the same language used by people who seek to hurt us.
Why do you think this went through at Netflix? The streamer is known for inclusive and diverse programming and expanding opportunities for the most marginalized.
That’s a good question. I don’t know how it got passed because I will say having worked on a show there, I know that they think about these things and have conversations about these things. I think probably part of it is that Chappelle has carte blanche to say whatever he wants, and I think that’s great. I do believe in freedom of speech. I really do. But I have the freedom of speech to say that somebody’s speech bothers me, and I don’t want to work with a company that promotes that speech. It’s dangerous. It’s dangerous language. I can’t say it any clearer.
Do you think Chappelle has a responsibility to stop telling these jokes?
I don’t think it’s my place to tell Dave Chappelle what he needs to do. He should make the jokes that he wants to make. I cannot like them and that’s what I’m saying here.
Do you want Netflix to pull his specials?
I don’t think that’s the answer. I don’t think that’s a reasonable outcome here. I don’t think this material and a lot of his trans material has a place in discourse. I think a lot of his trans material that maybe I personally had given a pass before feels a lot worse in context of this material. Any benefit of the doubt that was given feels like it is gone. But what I really want is I want companies to hire trans people to work there who can say, “Hey, we sure about this?” The fact of the matter is there are very rarely trans people in those rooms and yet we are so often the subject of the derision. We’re very rarely in any decision-making positions. And I think that’s my bigger concern. I don’t know what Netflix should do, but I feel something needs to be done. Whether that’s removing part of this special, whether that’s amending the special in some way, I don’t know. To be honest it’s not my job to fix their problem, but I do think they have a problem.
Have you heard from anyone from Netflix since you tweeted last night?
I had a very nice conversation with somebody who I think is a stand up person who wanted to talk and to hear my point of view. And I really respect them for doing that. But it wasn’t like something was going to be changing after this one phone call, nor that’s what I expected.
Had you been talking to Netflix about any new projects?
I’m developing stuff currently and there’s always a conversation about where are we going to take the pitch. I am not going to be taking anything to Netflix for the time being. I don’t know what it will take for me to feel comfortable in changing that. I know that it will take some action.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) is leading a group of senators on Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine, the first openly transgender person to obtain Senate confirmation as a presidential appointee, to issue new guidance on mental health care needs for transgender youth.
“Our goal is to help mental health providers offer the best care they can to the nation’s TGE youth without a delay in treatment,” the letter says. “The focus of this request is for the pressing needs of hospital or residential care even as we recognize the need for guidance across all settings of mental health care.”
Specifically, the senators call on the Behavioral Health Coordinating Council, or BHCC, and experts in the field of adolescent transgender care to offer guidance on best practices for inpatient mental health care among these youth.
The senators address the letter to Levine, who in addition to being transgender has a background in care for adolescent youth, and Miriam Delphin-Rittmon, assistant secretary for mental health and substance use.
Cited in the letter are findings from the Trevor Project, an organization that supports LGBTQ youth, which determined more than half of transgender and non-binary youth seriously contemplated killing themselves in 2020.
“While behavioral health and pediatric organizations have published resources regarding TGE health care, we have heard from hospital providers they are seeking guidance on best practices for serving gender diverse youth in community residential and inpatient mental health settings,” the letter says.
The seven senators who signed the letter along with Murphy are Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).
An HHS spokesperson for Levine’s office, in response to the letter, told the Washington Blade: “We have received the letter and will be reviewing it.”
The Biden administration announced on Tuesday $2.21 billion in new funding under the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program for cities, counties, states and local community-based organizations providing care for low-income people with HIV/AIDS.
This funding is provided under the fiscal year 2021 budget through the Health Resources & Services Administration, or HRSA, supports a comprehensive system of HIV primary medical care for an estimated 560,000 people with HIV in the United States, according to the Department of Health & Human Services.
Secretary of Health & Human Services Xavier Becerra said in a statement the funding represents the latest in efforts in three decades of the department fighting HIV/AIDS.
“These funds support viral suppression that saves lives, reduces health disparities, and slows the spread of HIV. We will continue to support the Biden-Harris Administration’s goal of ending the HIV epidemic in the United States.”
The announcement comes on the heels of HRSA’s Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program awarding in March $99 million for the Ending the HIV Epidemic Initiative, which seeks to reduce new HIV transmission in the United States by 90 percent by 2030.
“Our Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program is a groundbreaking effort that has made extraordinary progress over the years toward ending the HIV epidemic in the U.S.,” HRSA Acting Administrator Diana Espinosa said in a statement. “These grants support life-saving care, treatment, and medication that improves health outcomes and reduces HIV transmission to patients across the country.”
Texas mom Annaliese Cothron drove an hour and a half from her home in San Antonio to the state Capitol in Austin this year for a rally in support of transgender children, including her own child. It’s a drive she has made so many times that she has lost count.
Trans youths in the state have been the targets this year of more than 50 bills that would restrict their participation in sports or ban them from gaining access to certain health care, among other restrictions.
Cothron was leading the crowd in a chant, but she started to get tired. So she asked the Rev. Remington Johnson, a Presbyterian clergywoman and a fellow activist, to take the bullhorn.
Johnson, a trans woman who has testified almost a half-dozen times against anti-trans bills, had shown up that day riding a longboard, wearing hot pink shorts and carrying a huge trans flag, Cothron recalled. She took the bullhorn, and the first thing she said was: “Trans kids are magical.”
Cothron, who has an 8-year-old child who is nonbinary, said the moment has stuck with her.
“That, to me, was so powerful,” she said. “Nobody talks about my child like that, because they don’t have the same experience that a trans person has to know really how truly unique and magical and powerful transgender children are.”
Johnson, a health care chaplain who previously worked in a hospital supporting people who are sick or dying, said her role in life is to be a caregiver and a “justice bringer.” She returns to the Capitol again and again despite the toll it has taken on her physically and emotionally, not only to advocate for herself as a trans woman, but also to bring some levity to a space that has been traumatizing for trans people and families.
“The caregiving at the bedside, the caregiving at the Capitol — it’s all one and the same,” said Johnson, who is working on her master’s degree in nursing at the University of Texas at Austin. “These are all systems, and there’s suffering swirling, and I feel like my role and my responsibility here is to at least show up.”
Activism as an ‘exercise in self-love’
Johnson, 35, grew up just outside Texas in the rural Oklahoma Panhandle, in a family with Mennonite roots. She said she wasn’t raised with liberal or conservative ideals; she was “kind of raised tabula rasa” — her parents would encourage her to put herself in other people’s shoes.
Johnson said that in junior high school, she had an experience with her family that made her feel as though she couldn’t talk about her identity openly. One evening, while her family was visiting the gay-friendly beach town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, two tall women walked past, she said.
“I remember as a kid just being like, ‘I don’t know what that is, but I love everything about it,’” Johnson said. “I don’t know if they were drag queens or trans women or what, but it was magical. But that was also the same moment where I got to hear from family members about how they were not OK with those folks. So it was this sort of whiplash.”
She said her coming out process was gradual after that. She told a therapist in college how she was feeling about her gender, and the therapist suggested that she might be a trans woman, “and I was like, ‘Thank you very much,’ and I never went back,” Johnson said.
She wrestled with internalized transphobia — a battle that continues to this day and plays a role in her activism, she said.
She moved to Texas in 2008. Nine years later, Texas Republicans introduced a bill that would have required trans people to use the bathrooms that matched the sexes listed on their birth certificates. Although Johnson was out as trans at that point, she said, she didn’t feel ready to participate in activism, because she felt she “was the problem.”
“I just felt like I was the boogeyman that Republicans were talking about, because I was this huge, built, powerful figure that was going to be using the restroom with them,” she said. She didn’t feel ready to advocate then, but when the 2020 legislative session began, she decided she wanted to be there.
“I want to show up for me and because a lot of the things that these legislators and anti-trans folks were saying are things that my loved ones have said to me during my transition and internalized transphobia that I say to myself,” she said. “So some of this is an exercise in self-love and self-compassion and a tangible reminder that there’s nothing wrong with me.”
‘Fixing things is what I do’
Among the families who are fighting anti-trans bills at the Capitol, Johnson’s presence is known as healing. She developed that skill, putting people at ease, during her work as a health care chaplain, when she would help people make difficult decisions, such as whether to go through with high-risk operations or to go home with hospice, or end-of-life, care.
She said she introduced herself to a woman in hospice care as “a fixer.” The woman responded “What are you going to fix?” and Johnson said, “I’m going to fix it.”
“And I did, I fixed it,” Johnson said. “I couldn’t cure her cancer, but I could help her build a relationship with her care team. I can help her build a relationship with her family.
“Fixing things is what I do,” she added.
Even outside of her activism, in her personal life, she fixes. She took up woodworking and built the cabinets and the countertops and redid the flooring and the windows in her last home. During the pandemic, she taught herself how to longboard, and she now builds her boards herself.
Her friend Meghan Jacobson said fixing things and caring for people are at the core of who Johnson is.
“She worked in hospice because she recognizes the specialness and the importance of these moments that a lot of other people run away from,” Jacobson said, adding that Johnson saved her life over the last year by connecting her with a mental health care provider and by simply being there to support her.
Parents who advocate on behalf of their transgender children at Texas’ Capitol tell similar stories.
Linzy Foster, who is from Austin, has been to the Capitol about a dozen times this year to advocate on behalf of her 7-year-old trans daughter. She said that she has been dealing with a lot of anxiety recently and that during a news conference last month, she was breathing heavily. Johnson, who was sitting next to her, noticed.
“She just put her hand on my back and was rubbing my back, and we just had this little moment,” Foster said. A reporter from the Austin American-Statesman captured a photo; Foster said that when she saw it, she “burst into tears.”
“Because it’s just symbolic — she is fighting her own battle, but she keeps showing up for the parents so that we can show up for our kids,” Foster said.
The energy at the Capitol is often heavy and traumatic for parents, Foster said, and Johnson makes everyone laugh.
For example, at one news conference, Johnson described how Republican legislators in Texas and elsewhere tried to pass bathroom bills after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality in 2015. “What happens is they try to vilify women like myself who have a little bit of size, and we’re just too charming and beautiful to want to pee next to,” she said, leading to a chorus of laughs.
Johnson said she tries to bring humor and joy to her activism because she wants trans people watching “to feel safe, at least for a tiny moment.”
“I want them to see somebody that gets to stand up in front of them, and I want to feel like I’m a good representative,” she said. “I want to feel like the mothers can look and say, ‘Oh my gosh, my child can grow up and it’s going to be OK.’ I want to offer a tiny moment of levity and power and hope.”
‘This is not trans tragedy. This is trans joy.’
Although someone wouldn’t know it by watching her speak at the Capitol, Johnson said that she has been traumatized by her activism this year and that the trauma is getting worse as she continues to go back.
She compared the experience to a sports injury. Sports have been and still are a huge part of her life — which is partly why she fights so hard for trans kids to have the right to play. She plays on a gay flag football team in Austin.
“Showing up to the Capitol is like playing through an injury,” she said. “There has been a traumatic injury to my soul. And I see it, and I’ve had it checked out by professionals, and they say, ‘You can keep playing on it, but it’s going to hurt you.’”
But she stressed that activism isn’t only about trauma. She said that after the Supreme Court ruled last year that LGBTQ people are protected from employment discrimination under federal law, she rode 26 miles around Austin on her homemade longboard carrying a huge trans pride flag. “People were honking and stopping for photos,” she said. “It was really special.”
For Cothron, Johnson’s positivity and joy show her that her nonbinary child can grow to thrive.
“This is not trans tragedy. This is trans joy,” Cothron said. “And Remington is there to really embody that. … To me, my child being able to have role models who are adults and fighting — and not just fighting but also thriving — that is just so critically important.”
For Johnson, that’s the trans experience: “to be able to go through discomfort and come out on the other side with this buoyant, joyous presence,” she said. “That’s who we are. That’s who I am.”
With the goal of beating HIV by 2025 domestically and a pledge for a renewed effort to fight the disease globally, President Biden has put in place officials charged with making that happen.
The White House kicked off the week with the announcement that John Nkengasong, who has served as a top official on global health at the Centers for Disease Control, would be nominated as ambassador-at-large and coordinator of U.S. government activities to combat HIV/AIDS globally at the State Department.
Meanwhile, leadership within the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, otherwise known as PACHA, was restructured in August as the Biden administration has continued the Ending the HIV Epidemic plan health officials started in the Trump administration.
Carl Schmid, who served as co-chair of PACHA during the Trump years, no longer holds that position, and has been replaced by Marlene McNeese, a woman of color and deputy assistant director of the Houston Health Department. John Wiesman, former secretary of health for Washington State, will continue to serve as co-chair.
McNeese is among eight new members of PACHA. The others are:
Guillermo Chacón, president of the Latino Commission on AIDS;
Tori Cooper, director of community engagement for the Transgender Justice Initiative at the Human Rights Campaign;
Raniyah Copeland, CEO of the Black AIDS Institute;
Leo Moore, medical director for clinic services at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health;
Kayla Quimbley, national youth HIV and AIDS Awareness Day ambassador for Advocates for Youth;
Adrian Shanker, founder and executive director of Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center; and
Darrell Wheeler, senior vice president for academic affairs at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y.
The changes underscore the new approach to HIV/AIDS Biden promised during his presidential campaign. Among them is beating HIV/AIDS domestically by 2025, which is five years earlier than the plan under the Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative that began in the Trump administration. Whether or not Biden will meet that ambitious goal remains to be seen.
Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS, hailed the nomination of Nkengasong to the global AIDS position upon news of the announcement.
“John Nkengasong’s vast experience in combatting HIV, combined with his position as Africa’s leading disease expert fighting Ebola, COVID-19 and more, position him extremely well to guide the United States’ global contribution towards ending the AIDS pandemic,” Byanyima said. “Today, the HIV and COVID-19 pandemics are colliding in communities throughout the world, and the threat of a resurgent AIDS pandemic is very real. We need the kind of bold thinking and commitment he has brought throughout his career.”
While the global AIDS appointment will have a role in international programs, such as PEPFAR and U.S. participation in the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis & Malaria, the PACHA appointments will focus on both domestic and global perspectives.
Schmid, executive director of the HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute, said despite the change in leadership he will maintain his role as head of the subcommittee on the Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative.
“It’s good,” Schmid said.”They appointed a lot of African-American community, Latino community [members] and they said they’ll rotate co-chairs,” Schmid said. “I think it’s good that they put on new blood, and new leadership.”
“I think I was replaced because the Biden administration wanted the leadership of PACHA to be more representative of the current epidemic in the United States,” Schmid said.
Schmid, however, refused to back down from his prediction that Biden won’t be able to make his 2025 goal a reality.
“I think you will find wide agreement within the HIV community that it is not feasible to end HIV by 2025,” Schmid said. “There is just too much work to do and change to happen.”
The new appointments will add to the cadre of Biden appointees engaged on HIV/AIDS, including Harold Phillips, who was appointed in June to lead the White House Office of National AIDS Policy after that position remained vacant for the entirety of the Trump administration.
‘Too early’ to gauge effort to beat HIV domestically
The focus of the appointees on the domestic front will be the Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative, a plan heavily focused on PrEP as a means of preventing HIV in an effort to reduce new incidents of infections by 90 percent within 10 years. The program was launched in 2019.
Jennifer Kates, senior vice president and director of global health & HIV policy at Kaiser Family Foundation, said data isn’t yet available on whether new incidents of HIV are reduced because the latest data is from fiscal year 2019.
“From the perspective of the timeline of the goals of the initiative, it’s too early, we wouldn’t know that anyway, but just even given the context and what’s happened since it started, I just don’t know how you’d evaluate it,” Kates said. “What I do believe is important though, is the idea of dedicated new funding. It was the first new funding provided to HIV for years that’s been channeled to local jurisdictions [and] has the potential to catalyze new and better responses, but we don’t know yet that’s happened.”
The coronavirus pandemic, which has been the top priority for health officials around the world, is also obfuscating any potential assessment of the Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative.
Daniel Bruner, senior director of policy at the D.C.-based Whitman-Walker Institute, said the coronavirus has “dramatically impacted medical care,” including HIV/AIDS efforts.
“The pandemic has also necessitated substantial shifts in federal, state, and local resources into COVID prevention, diagnosis and treatment,” Bruner said. “Therefore, it is premature to draw any conclusions about the EHE initiative’s effectiveness. The federal government has emphasized its continuing commitment to the EHE initiative, and Whitman-Walker also remains committed to that work.”
Rachel Gonzales has been to the Texas Capitol at least a dozen times since 2017, when she advocated against a bill that would’ve banned her then-6-year-old transgender daughter, Libby, from using the girls’ bathroom.
That bill died in 2017,but the fight hasn’t stopped. Since January, Texas has considered 52bills that target trans people, particularly youth, according to Equality Texas, an LGBTQ advocacy group in the state.
Parents like Gonzales and advocates have defeated all of the bills so far. But last week, during a third special legislative session, the Texas Senate passed a bill that would ban transgender student athletes in public schools from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity, as opposed to their sex assigned at birth.
State Sens. Bob Halland Charles Perry, both Republicans, also refiled bills last week that would ban health care providers from providing trans children with gender-affirming health care — including therapy — and that could charge parents and doctors with child abuse if they provide such care for trans children.
Gonzales said she will continue to fight the bills, but she added that she is so burnt out by the last nine months that she doesn’t feel like an effective advocate.
“I joke, but it’s not really a joke, that I have definitely lost years off my life from this battle — the amount of stress, the physical manifestation of that stress and the mental anguish,” she said. “It’s so much of negotiating my own feelings in order to assure my kid that she’s going to be OK. But it’s terrifying that I don’t know if it’s going to be OK, and not just for her, but for other kids across the state, kids who cannot safely be out.”
It’s taken a mental and physical toll on her, she said, and other parents and advocates in the state say the same. They say they won’t stop, because they’re doing it for their kids, but they need more help.
‘It takes me hours to fall asleep’
Supporters of trans athlete bans in Texas say they are trying to protect fairness in women’s sports, though — like most supporters of similar bills — they haven’t been able to provide any examples in their state of trans girls jeopardizing fairness, according to LGBTQ advocates.
Proponents of bans on gender-affirming care such as puberty blockers say the care is “experimental” and that children are too young to receive it. But medical experts who provide gender-affirming care say it is supported by all relevant major medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association. Some of these groups note that gender-affirming care is backed by decades of research and has been used to treat cisgender kids experiencing precocious puberty, for example.
Parents like Gonzales have been fighting the bills so relentlessly because they say the proposals, whether they pass or not, have a devastating effect on trans youth in the state — especially youth who help advocate against them.
Libby, Gonzales’s 11-year-old daughter who is transgender, said the anti-trans bills reintroduced by Republican state senators make her “feel really scared and like they are trying to harm me in very terrible ways.”
She first became an activist at 6 years old, when conservatives in the state tried to pass a billthat would’ve banned her from using the girls’ restroom. Libby said being an advocate is important to her because if she wasn’t, “I would be really hurt, and people wouldn’t hear me.”
“It is very tiring,” she said. “Sometimes it takes me hours to fall asleep just because I’m so scared about these specific bills.”
Rebekah Bryant, who lives in Houston and has been to the Capitol six times this year to advocate against the bills, said they’ve also affected her 8-year-old trans daughter, Sunny.
Sunny has testified against the sports bills twice,in July and August. The first time she testified, she told the Senate committee she likes baseball, soccer, tennis and gymnastics, and that none of her teammates cared that she is trans.
“I’ve been with the same classmates for three years, and none of them knew I was trans until this year,” she said. “When my mom had to speak at the Capitol, they loved me just the same, because kids my age don’t care about that stuff. Kids care about what’s in your heart.”
“Only old people can’t see that,” she added, with a smile. Committee members, including Republicans, laughed, Bryant said.
The second time she testified, Sunny didn’t step up to the podium — which was taller than her — until 1 a.m. Afterward, when she and her mom got back to their hotel room, Sunny sat down on the bed and started crying.
“She said, ‘Why do so many people not like me?’” Bryant said. “And that’s the first time she’s expressed any pain toward this. I was exhausted, and I just said to her, ‘Look, there are way more people there that love you. … There are so many more people in the world that are on your side than aren’t. Those people are the outliers.’”
She said Sunny developed anxiety afterward. Though it’s slowly gone away, Bryant hasn’t brought Sunny to the Capitol again.
Advocates say the rhetoric used in the bills has also had a negative effect on the mental health of transgender — as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer — youth statewide.
For example, between Jan. 1 and Aug. 30, crisis calls from LGBTQ young people in Texas increased 150 percent compared to the same period last year, according to data shared last week by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization. About 4,000, or 36 percent of all contacts from Texas, came from transgender or nonbinary youth.
The Trevor Project added that while the volume of crisis contacts “can not be attributed to any one factor (or bill),” a qualitative analysis of the crisis contacts found that “transgender and nonbinary youth in Texas have directly stated that they are feeling stressed, using self-harm, and considering suicide due to anti-LGBTQ laws being debated in their state.”
The Trans Lifeline, the country’s first transgender crisis hotline, also saw a 72 percent increase in calls from Texas in May — when state lawmakers first considered about a dozen anti-trans bills — when compared to May 2020, according to data shared with NBC News. In July, when the legislation was reconsidered, Trans Lifeline saw a 19 percent increase in calls from Texas.
Adri Pèrez, policy and advocacy strategist for LGBTQ equality at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said it’s unclear whether Texas’ trans athlete ban will pass the House and become law and that its passage “shouldn’t be the focal point.”
“The larger issue, I think, is out of the state of Texas there is a lot of misinformation about transgender people and transgender youth, specifically,” Pèrez said. “The work is not necessarily inside of the Texas Legislature; it’s outside of it. And what we’re doing to help humanize trans people and trans youth to those who have never met a transgender person or a transgender kid, that would be the most effective firewall for these bills. It’s not letting that misinformation take hold at all.”
Whether someone knows a transgender person can significantly affect their views on legislation such as trans athlete bans, according a survey released Thursday by the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute. A slim majority of Americans who know a transgender person (52 percent), compared to one-third of Americans who do not know anyone who is transgender (33 percent), believe that a transgender girl should be allowed to compete in high school sports with cisgender female students.
PRRI also noted that support for trans people participating in sports has declined since 2018. About one-third, or 36 percent, of Americans believe that trans girls should be allowed to participate in sports with their cisgender classmates, compared to 50 percent in 2018.
Physical, mental and financial strain
Parents who are transgender advocates say Texas’ last few legislative sessions have been particularly difficult for them, too.
Bryant said this is the first year she’s become more active, and it has taken an emotional and financial toll on her family. She said she has to take off work to travel to the Capitol, which is about a 3 1/2-hour drive away, and she often has to book a hotel room. All told, she said she’s spent close to $3,000 going back and forth to the Capitol just this year.
“It’s just so draining, because it’s not only just sitting there and waiting, but it’s sitting there and listening to people lie about you and your family — people that have never met a person who’s trans in their life and really haven’t walked the walk that all of us have,” she said.
Recently, many parents and advocates have been hitting “a wall,” said Linzy Foster, who is from Austin and has been to the Capitol about a dozen times this year to advocate on behalf of her 7-year-old trans daughter.
“The general population who usually are all on board and showing up and fighting for these things, they’re getting fatigued, and there’s also so many things to fight now,” she said. “We’re beginning to feel more and more lonely.”
Many of the advocates described being at the Capitol as traumatic. Annaleise Cothron, whose 8-year-old is nonbinary, said one day she went to the Capitol and the supporters of anti-trans bills called her child “a freak” and “disgusting.”
“While I would never tell my child that, just hearing that from somebody else is really emotionally taxing, and my child doesn’t deserve that,” she said. “People need to understand that’s the level of vitriol that we’re facing just going to the Capitol to say, ‘Please leave us alone. Please leave our community alone.’ This isn’t about politics; this is about human beings.”
More than just sports
Though the parents and advocates believe that trans kids have a right to play on the sports teams that match their gender identity, they said their advocacy is about more than just sports.
“Just the conversation of whether or not my child should exist in public school sports and whether or not other kids should bully them for who they are — that’s the conversation that this legislative body is inviting by entertaining these bills,” Cothron said.
She said the other bills that Republicans have reintroduced or plan to reintroduce that could charge her with child abuse for providing her child with access to gender-affirming care prove that the conversation is about more than fairness in sports.
“This is about the broader conversation of saying whether or not a transgender child should exist in Texas and access public services,” she said.
For now, the parents say they are leaning on each other for support.
“The only reason I’m doing OK, to be honest with you, is because in all of this I have met these amazing people in this community who show up, and we support one another,” Foster said. “We have moments of levity even in the trauma that we’re dealing with when we’re in the Capitol, being able to make each other laugh, knowing that you’re loved, knowing that you’re supported. That is the only thing that’s keeping me going.”
A human rights tribunal in British Columbia, Canada, has ruled that refusing to use someone’s correct pronouns violates their human rights.
The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal ruled in favour of restaurant server Jessie Nelson, 32, a non‐binary, gender fluid, transgenderperson, who was fired from their job after asking the bar manager to use they/them pronouns to refer to them.
Brian Gobelle “persistently referred to Jessie Nelson with she/her pronounsand with gendered nicknames like ‘sweetheart’, ‘honey’, and ‘pinky’”, according to the ruling by Devyn Cousineau, member of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
Despite Nelson asking Gobelle to stop, he refused, and a second conversation between them about the issue became “heated”. Four days later, Nelson was fired by Ryan Kingsberry, who runs the restaurant.
Explaining to Nelson why they were fired, Kingsberry said they had come on “too strong too fast” and were too “militant”.
Nelson later took their case to the human rights tribunal, alleging that “Gobelle’s conduct towards them, and the employer’s response, amounts to discrimination in employment based on their gender identity and expression”, in violation of the British Columbia Human Rights Code.
Cousineau agreed that Nelson’s human rights had been violated by the deliberate misgendering.
The judge ordered the Canada restaurant’s management to pay Nelson $30,000 in damages, as well as “implement a pronoun policy and mandatory training for all staff and managers about diversity, equity and inclusion”.
Jessie Nelson, a restaurant server in Canada, said the discrimination was ‘a piece of trauma in a long line of trauma for a trans person living a trans experience’
Testifying for the hearing, Jessie Nelson said they “don’t expect perfection around my pronouns; I never have”.
But the deliberate and repeated misgendering by the bar manager was a “trauma” that left them “scared and sad”.
They said that the job at the restaurant was one of their “first jobs I had where I felt confident enough to disclose who I was”.
“This was the first time I was like, ‘You know what, I’m going to be fully myself’,” Nelson said.
“I deserve that. I’m 32 years old. I’ve lived long enough pretending… I don’t believe that trans people should have to do that, but I did feel like it would be beneficial. And it was devastating.
“It’s a piece of trauma in a long line of trauma for a trans person living a trans experience.”
They added: “I was scared and sad for myself, but more than that I was really worried about future people… I am here today in bringing this forward because it is important for me, as a trans person, to have my existence respected.
“I’m a human being, with a beating heart and a desire to be seen and valued and heard in the world. And I’m also here for every other current and future trans or queer person working in a service or customer‐facing setting so that hopefully this doesn’t happen anymore.
“Because it’s a lot. It’s very draining. And we deserve to live, and have joy, and be respected for who we are.”
Scores of students took a stand for trans rights by staging a massive walkout after one of their classmates was blocked from the girls’ locker room and toilets.
The protest kicked off at Temple High School in Texas on Wednesday (30 September) in support of a 16-year-old trans girl named Kendall Tinoco after she shared her experience on Instagram.
Over the past few years I’ve been in transition, to be more specific I’ve been using the females restroom since the 7th grade. Teachers and staff has had no issue with it until now, earlier this month I was told I couldn’t use the locker room because there were ‘actual girls’ in there,” the high school junior wrote in the post.
“However today [22 September] yet again my teacher mentioned I could not use the locker room because I am trans.
“I mentioned to her that I have a form specifically saying she has no right to tell a student that let alone tell them what locker room or restroom to use,” she added.
The post quickly went viral with more than 4,000 likes, and a week later her fellow students marched out of their classes in protest.
Tinoco told local news station 6 News: “Overall, I was really proud to see all of the people come together and stand for one another. Just support after support after support. It was really amazing.
“I fought for my place to be treated equally, and people are aware of that”.
“I just wanted to help make a change, do whatever I could,” said junior student Akayla Shahan.
“We said what we had to say. We will not be silenced,” added Stevie Williams, another student.
So many people joined the protest that additional security and members of the local police force were called to campus to “help ensure the safety of staff and students”, according to Temple Independent School District spokesperson Christine Parks. She noted that protests are allowed, but skipping class is not.
Parks told 6 News that the high school administration met with the student and parent that week to review the district’s Enrollment of Transgender Students guidelines.
These guidelines require students to be identified by their “legal surname” as it appears on the student’s birth certificate or other identity document and to dress in accordance with school dress codes.
They also require that all trans students have access to a “gender-neutral” restroom, locker room and/or overnight facility, like a nurse’s office.