AIDS/LifeCycle, the seven-day, 545-mile bike ride fundraiser traversing the golden state from San Francisco to Los Angeles, has announced a new finish line location in Santa Monica.
Co-producers the Los Angeles LGBT Center and San Francisco AIDS Foundation this week, the gFrom June 4-10, the route wheels out nearly 3,000 participants “from the Bay to the Beach” for the very first time in its almost 30-year history.
“We are excited to welcome the AIDS/LifeCycle Ride to Santa Monica. The work of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Los Angeles LGBT Center made possible by the Ride advances our commitments to equity and inclusion as we support and celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community during SaMo Pride this June,” said Santa Monica Mayor Gleam Davis.
The 2023 ride will begin at the Cow Palace in the San Francisco Bay Area. Cyclists will camp in six California cities to experience the diverse landscapes. On June 10, riders will leave Ventura for LA and turn south on San Vicente Blvd, past Santa Monica Pier, to the finish line.
“Whether this is your first or your 20th AIDS/LifeCycle, this finish line will contribute to an unforgettable final day on the Ride,” said Tracy Evans, AIDS/LifeCycle’s Ride Director. “Riders and volunteer Roadies will have the Pacific Ocean as the perfect backdrop to celebrate their incredible accomplishment. What could be better than the Pacific Ocean as the final stop for an iconic California event?”
The new location offers a fresh experience for cyclists and volunteer ‘Roadies’, while also being a beachside festival for friends, family, and spectators. Photo ops, sponsor activations and interactive stations will be part of the day-long celebration.
Proceeds from AIDS/LifeCycle benefit the HIV/AIDS-related services and research of the Los Angeles LGBT Center and San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Last year’s record $17.8M will serve these LGBTQ+ nonprofits, at a time when such assistance is most needed.
There are three ways to participate in AIDS/LifeCycle and support its mission: As cyclists who must fundraise a minimum of $3,500 for their “Ticket to Ride”; as roadies who are seven-day volunteers who may or may not fundraise; and @Home Heroes who set personal fundraising and fitness goals without traveling. Roadie teams cover areas of health services, route, and camp-based teams, while helping cyclists complete their 545-mile journey.
Debates over LGBTQ+ rights are having a negative effect on the lives of young people in the community, according to a new poll.
“An overwhelming majority of LGBTQ youth have been negatively impacted by recent debates and laws around anti-LGBTQ policies and that many have also experienced victimization as a result,” says a press release on the poll, conducted for the Trevor Project by Morning Consult between October 23 and November 2 and released this week.
The poll included 716 LGBTQ+ youth ages 13–24 around the U.S. It assessed emotional responses to anti-LGBTQ+ policies as well as which other social issues often give LGBTQ youth stress and anxiety. It came in a year in which more than 220 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced around the nation, most of them targeting transgender youth; many more are being introduced in 2023 — 150 across 23 states in the first two weeks of the year, the Trevor Project reports.
Among the key findings: Eighty-six percent of transgender and nonbinary youth say recent debates about state laws restricting the rights of transgender people have negatively impacted their mental health. A majority of those trans youth (55 percent) said it impacted their mental health “very negatively.” Seventy-one percent of LGBTQ+ youth overall say state laws restricting the rights of LGBTQ+ young people have negatively impacted their mental health.
Seventy-one percent of LGBTQ+ youth — including 82 percent of transgender and nonbinary youth — say that threats of violence against LGBTQ+ spaces, such as community centers, Pride events, drag shows, or medical providers that serve transgender people, often give them stress or anxiety. Nearly half (48 percent) of those LGBTQ+ youth say it gives them stress or anxiety “very often.”
As a result of anti-LGBTQ+ policies and debates in the last year, trans and nonbinary youth say they have had a range of harmful experiences, including cyberbullying or online harassment (45 percent); stopping speaking to a family member (42 percent); not feeling safe going to the doctor or hospital (29 percent); having a friend stop speaking to them (29 percent); bullying at school (24 percent); their school removing Pride flags or other LGBTQ-friendly symbols (15 percent); and physical assault (10 percent).
Among all LGBTQ+ youth, one in three report cyberbullying or online harassment, one in four say they stopped speaking to a family member or relative, and one in five say they experienced bullying.
Regarding policies that will bar doctors from providing gender-affirming medical care to trans and nonbinary youth, 74 percent of these young people say they feel angry, 59 percent feel stressed, 56 percent feel sad, 48 percent feel hopeless, 47 percent feel scared, 46 percent feel helpless, and 45 percent feel nervous.
Policies that prevent trans youth from playing on the sports teams aligned with their gender identity make 64 percent of trans and nonbinary youth feel angry, 44 percent feel sad, 39 percent feel stressed, and 30 percent feel hopeless, according to the poll.
There were also bad reactions to anti-LGBTQ+ school policies, given debates around respecting students’ identities and pronouns, censoring LGBTQ-inclusive curricula, and banning books. New policies that require schools to tell a student’s parent or guardian if they request to use a different name/pronoun or if they identify as LGBTQ+ at school make 67 percent of transgender and nonbinary youth feel angry, 54 percent feel stressed, 51 percent feel scared, 46 percent feel nervous, and 43 percent feel sad.
Fifty-eight percent of LGBTQ+ youth, including 71 percent of transgender and nonbinary youth, feel angry about new policies that bar teachers from discussing LGBTQ+ topics in the classroom. Among trans youth, 59 percent feel sad and 41 percent feel stressed.
Sixty-six percent of LGBTQ+ youth, including 80 percent of transgender and nonbinary youth, feel angry about policies that will ban LGBTQ-inclusive books from school libraries. Nearly half of LGBTQ+ youth, including 54 percent of trans youth, also felt sad about these book bans.
Black LGBTQ+ youth sampled reported disproportionately higher rates of racism, police brutality, doing poorly in school, and gun violence giving them stress or anxiety “very often” compared to white LGBTQ+ youth. Trans and nonbinary youth polled reported disproportionately higher rates of transphobia, losing their health care, anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes, and threats of violence in LGBTQ+ spaces giving them stress or anxiety “very often” compared to cisgender LGBQ+ youth.
“Right now, we are witnessing the highest number on record of anti-LGBTQ bills introduced this early in any legislative session. We must consider the negative toll of these ugly public debates on youth mental health and well-being. LGBTQ young people are watching, and internalizing the anti-LGBTQ messages they see in the media and from their elected officials. And so are those that would do our community harm,” Kasey Suffredini, vice president of advocacy and government affairs at the Trevor Project, said in the release.
Suffredini added: “The Trevor Project is proud to see that more than two-thirds of LGBTQ youth, including 81 percent of transgender and nonbinary youth, have seen, read, or heard about our work to fight back against anti-LGBTQ bills. We are prepared for the fight ahead and will not stop advocating for a safer, more accepting world for all.”
A lesbian couple has closed their shop in a small Florida town after allegedly enduring repeated harassment, including anti-LGBTQ+ comments from a town commissioner.
Joy Drawdy says that she and her wife were initially welcomed by the community when this past June in Micanopy, Florida, they opened Restless Mommas, which sold clothes and crafts made by LGBTQ+ artists and people of color. But Drawdy told University of Florida student paper The Independent Florida Alligator that they quickly became uneasy.
Soon after opening, they were informed by the shop’s landlord of a letter from the town commission demanding they remove a Pride flag displayed outside the building, calling it a violation of local zoning ordinances.
They later learned from friends and customers that Micanopy Commissioner Mike Roberts had allegedly made derogatory comments about their sexuality. As The Alligator reports, Roberts has a history of posting anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments on social media.
“I just feel sorry for those people. A eternity in Hell is their reward [sic]. God please have mercy on their souls,” Roberts posted on Facebook in 2012.
In 2013, he responded to an article about a father’s message of support to his gay son. “This all sounds good to read and get warm fuzzy feelings, but the fact of the matter is being Homosexual is a sin,” Roberts wrote. “Sin will take you to the pits of Hell. A loving father will tell his son the truth about his sin.”
“In such a small town, we couldn’t escape. We couldn’t do business,” Drawdy said of learning about Roberts’s comments from roughly 30 Micanopy residents. “It was all anybody was talking about.”
In the weeks that followed, Drawdy said that trucks would pull up in front of the shop, rev their engines, and then skid away. She also began noticing spiteful comments on Facebook.
Feeling threatened and fearing for her family’s safety, Drawdy and other business owners took up the issue with Town Administrator Sara Owen, who told them the issue would be addressed at the Town Commission meeting on January 10. But Drawdy said that Owen soon stopped returning her calls. Ahead of the Jan. 10 meeting, Drawdy’s neighbor was told that Roberts’s alleged comments would not be on the formal agenda, as town leaders did not consider it a town issue.
Ahead of the meeting, the Drawdys decided to close Restless Mamas and move their unsold inventory to another shop they own in Gainesville, Florida. The town commission’s refusal to address the issue, she said, “was our last breath.”
Still, many supporters packed the Jan. 10 meeting.
“To have two women invest in a business in this town — that helps us all — be discriminated against because they’re gay is not OK,” Micanopy resident Deborah Hart said during public comments.
Roberts claimed that his comments were misunderstood, saying he merely referred to the Drawdys as “the two lesbian women who bought a business downtown.” Owens claimed that the issue was left off the meeting’s agenda because Roberts was “acting in his personal capacity” when he made the alleged comments.
When attorney and local business owner Holiday Russell suggested voluntary discrimination sensitivity training for town commissioners, Roberts reportedly took issue.
“You know the most discriminated person sitting in this room?” Roberts asked. “[They are] disliked by whites, Blacks, reds and yellows — [it’s] the fat people of this world.”
“I didn’t come in here and identify [him] as the fat commissioner,” Russell said following the meeting. “In my view, he doesn’t get it… If it’s not intentional, then he’s ignorant.”
Pope Francis criticized laws that criminalize homosexuality as “unjust,” saying God loves all his children just as they are and called on Catholic bishops who support the laws to welcome LGBTQ people into the church. “Being homosexual isn’t a crime,” Francis said during an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.
Francis acknowledged that Catholic bishops in some parts of the world support laws that criminalize homosexuality or discriminate against the LGBTQ community, and he himself referred to the issue in terms of “sin.”
But he attributed such attitudes to cultural backgrounds, and said bishops in particular need to undergo a process of change to recognize the dignity of everyone. Declaring such laws “unjust,” Francis said the Catholic Church can and should work to put an end to them. “It must do this. It must do this,” he said.
The Church of England will refuse to allow same-sex couples to get married in its churches under proposals set out on Wednesday in which the centuries-old institution said it would stick to its teaching that marriage is between a man and a woman.
The proposals were developed by bishops, who form one of three parts of the Church’s governing body known as the General Synod, after the Church of England’s six-year consultation on sexuality and marriage — among other subjects — and will be put to the General Synod at a meeting next month.
The Church of England is central to the wider Anglican communion, which represents more than 85 million people in over 165 countries.
“Same-sex couples would still not be able to get married in a Church of England church,” the statement said, confirming a BBC report overnight that bishops had refused to support a change in teaching to allow priests to marry gay couples.
Under the proposals, same-sex couples could have a service in which there would be “prayers of dedication, thanksgiving or for God’s blessing on the couple” in church after a civil marriage. Gay marriage was legalized in Britain in 2013.
Still, the prayers would be voluntary for clergy to use and could be used in combinations “reflecting the theological diversity of the Church”, the Church of England said, implying spiritual leaders could choose not to offer such blessings.
“I am under no illusions that what we are proposing today will appear to go too far for some and not nearly far enough for others, but it is my hope that what we have agreed will be received in a spirit of generosity, seeking the common good,” said Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Separately, Church of England bishops will be issuing an apology later this week to LGBTQ people for the “rejection, exclusion and hostility” they have faced in churches, according to the statement.
The Church of England, which was founded in 1534, has been divided for years on how to deal with same-sex marriages, with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer activists fighting for the same rights as heterosexual Christians.
Seeking to address the contentious issue, Welby called on the bishops last year to “abound in love for all,” even as he backed the validity of a resolution passed in 1998 that rejected “homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture.”
The only HIV vaccine in a late-stage trial has failed, researchers announced Wednesday, dealing a significant blow to the effort to control the global HIV epidemic and adding to a decadeslong roster of failed attempts.
Known as Mosaico, the trial was the product of a public-private partnership including the U.S. government and the pharmaceutical giant Janssen. It was run out of eight nations in Europe and the Americas, including the U.S., starting in 2019. Researchers enrolled nearly 3,900 men who have sex with men and transgender people, all deemed at substantial risk of HIV.
The leaders of the studydecided to discontinue the mammoth research effort after an independent data and safety monitoring board reviewed the trial’s findings and saw no evidence the vaccine lowered participants’ rate of HIV acquisition.
“It’s obviously disappointing,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, who as the long-time head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) was an integral partner in the trial, said of the vaccine’s failure. However, he said, “there are a lot of other approaches” early in the HIV-vaccine research pipeline that he finds promising.
“I don’t think that people should give up on the field of the HIV vaccine,” Fauci said.
Fauci previously said he did not want to retire from the NIAID until an HIV vaccine had been proven at least 50% effective — good enough, in his view, for a global rollout. Instead, he retired from his post at the end of last month with this dream unfulfilled.
In addition to NIAID and Janssen, which is a division of Johnson & Johnson, the trial was run by the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, which is headquartered in the Fred Hutchinson Research Center in Seattle, and the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command.
Mosaico’s lack of efficacy was not unexpected, experts said, because of the recent failure, announced in August 2021, of a separate clinical trial, called Imbokodo, which tested a similar vaccine among women in Africa. Between the two trials, NIAID spent $56 million, according to an agency spokesperson.
The vaccines testedin both trials used a common cold virus to deliver what are known as mosaic immunogens, which were intended to trigger a robust and protective immune response by including genetic material from a variety of HIV strains prevalent around the world, according to the National Institutes of Health. Mosaico included an additional element intended to broaden the immune response.
Participants in Mosaico, who were between ages 18 and 60, received four injections over 12 months, either of the vaccine or a placebo. The monitoring board found no significant difference in the HIV acquisition rate between the two study groups.
Fauci said that a critical limitation of the Mosaico vaccine was that it elicited what are known as non-neutralizing — as opposed to neutralizing — antibodies against HIV.
“It is becoming clear,” he said, “that vaccines that do not induce neutralizing antibodies are not effective against HIV.”
The critical problem that has bedeviled HIV vaccine research for decades, Fauci noted, is a crucial weakness that the virus already successfully exploits: The natural immune response to infection is not sufficient to thwart the virus.
“So vaccines would actually have to do better than natural infection to be effective,” he said. “That would be a very high bar.”
A decadeslong effort
In 1984, following the discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS the previous year, President Ronald Reagan’s health secretary, Margaret Heckler, famously claimed a vaccine for the virus would be available within two years.
In the decades since, there have been nine late-stage clinical trials of HIV vaccines, including Mosaico and Imbokodo, plus one, called PrEPVacc, that is still underway in Africa. However, the vaccine in PrEPVacc is not considered to be on a direct path to licensure if it demonstrates efficacy. Only one of these vaccines has shown any efficacy — and only at a modest level, not considered robust enough for regulatory approval — in a trial conducted in Thailand between 2003 and 2006, the findings of which were published in 2009.
In the years since, a phalanx of global researchers has studied the Thai trial in hopes of developing insights to inform further HIV-vaccine development.
The yearslong effort to design the Imbokodo and Mosaico vaccines was in part grounded in an attempt to build on the modest success of the Thai trial.
“We had hoped that we would see some signal of efficacy from this vaccine,” said Dr. Susan Buchbinder, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who co-led the Mosaico trial. She added that, promisingly, as in the Imbokodo trial, there were no evident concerns about the vaccine’s safety.
Buchbinder said it is too early to determine the reasons behind the Mosaico vaccine’s failure. Her team will be analyzing blood samples from participants over the coming months to investigate. They will also seek to determine if there were any subgroups of participants among whom the vaccine did show any efficacy. As with the Thai trial, the hope is to channel research findings into future HIV vaccine development.
Other HIV prevention tools
Jennifer Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at Kaiser Family Foundation, said the trial’s failure is a “stark reminder of just how elusive an HIV vaccine really is and why this kind of research continues to be important.”
“Fortunately, there are a number of highly effective HIV prevention interventions already,” Kates added. “The challenge is to scale them up to reach all at risk.”
Pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, in which people at risk of HIV take antiretroviral medications in advance of potential exposure to the virus, is highly effectiveat preventing infection but remains vastly underutilized in the U.S. and around the world.
Additionally, researchpublishedin the mid-2000s showed that voluntary medical male circumcision lowers the risk of female-to-male HIV acquisition by about 60%. This led to a major effort to promote circumcision in sub-Saharan Africa, home to two-thirds of the HIV cases in the world.
In more recent years, an antiretroviral-infused vaginal ring has proven effective at lowering women’s HIV risk. Initial efforts are underway to introduce it in African nations.
And, of course, there is the old mainstay: condoms.
Globally, an estimated 38.4 million people were living with HIV in 2021, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. Some 1.5 million people currently contract the virus annually, a figure that has more than halved since its peak in 1996.
It is at least theoretically possible, although extremely challenging, to bring HIV to heel without a vaccine. Fortunately, successfully treating HIV eliminates the risk of transmitting the virus through sex. So HIV transmission has declined in recent years in large part because of the dramatic scale-up of antiretroviral treatment of the virus, which by 2021 reached 28.7 million people.
Mosaico was particularly challenging to design ethically because of the advent of PrEP, which was first approved in the U.S. in 2012. To prove a vaccine works, researchers must recruit participants who remain at substantial risk of HIV over time. So Mosaico first offered PrEP to those seeking to enroll in the trial and only accepted as participants those who adamantly declined the preventive therapy notwithstanding their risk of HIV.
Transgender youths reported more life satisfaction and fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety after receiving gender-affirming hormone therapy for two years, according to a new study.
The research, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, evaluated 315 transgender youths between 12 to 20 years old, with an average age of 16, over the course of two years while they were being treated with gender-affirming hormone therapy.
The researchers are a group of physicians and professors associated with universities and children’s hospitals in Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles. The study was supported by a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
The researchers used scales that measured depression and anxiety, positive emotions and sense of life satisfaction, and appearance congruence — meaning how much a trans person feels their external appearance aligns with their gender identity. Participants rated each of these factors numerically.
Researchers found that, on average, participants reported increases in positive emotions, life satisfaction and appearance congruence. Those increases were associated with decreases in depression and anxiety symptoms.
The findings, researchers wrote, support the use of hormone therapy as an effective treatment for trans and nonbinary youths.
The researchers said their findingsalso suggest appearance congruence is important for trans and nonbinary youths’ well-being. The mental and physical health differences between youth who had undergone substantial “gender-incongruent” puberty — which is the puberty associated with their assigned sex at birth — and those who had not also supported the importance of appearance congruence for well-being.
Only a small subgroup (24 participants) in the study did not undergo extensive gender-incongruent puberty, either because they began puberty blockers at an early stage of puberty, or started gender-affirming hormones when their puberty began later.
“Those who had not gone through substantial gender-incongruent puberty had higher scores for appearance congruence, positive affect, and life satisfaction and lower scores for depression and anxiety at baseline than youth who had undergone substantial endogenous puberty,” meaning the puberty associated with their assigned sex, the researchers wrote.
They also noted that depression and anxiety symptoms decreased significantly and life satisfaction increased significantly among trans and nonbinary youth designated female at birth but not for those designated male at birth. This difference, they wrote, could be attributed to a few factors: First, some physical changes associated with estrogen, such as breast growth, can take between two to five years to reach their “maximum effect.”
As a result, the researchers speculated that a longer follow-up period may be necessary for trans feminine youth to see an effect on mental health.
Second, they wrote that physical changes that result from going through testosterone-driven puberty, such as a deeper voice, might be “more pronounced and observable” than those associated with an estrogen-driven puberty.
Third, the researchers wrote that it’s possible the differences in anxiety and life satisfaction could be related to less social acceptance of transfeminine people, compared with transmasculine people.
Research published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2021 suggested that transfeminine youth may experience more minority stress, which is stress faced by stigmatized minority groups like LGBTQ people, than transmasculine youth.
The authors of the new study wrote that understanding the effect of gender-affirming hormones on the mental health and well-being of transgender and nonbinary youth “would appear crucial, given the documented mental health disparities observed in this population, particularly in the context of increasing politicization of gender-affirming medical care.”
Over the last two years, state legislatures have considered dozens of bills that seek to restrict access to gender-affirming medical care, such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery for transgender minors.
Governors in four states — Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee and Arizona — have signed restrictions on such care into law, but measures in Arkansas and Alabama have been blocked from taking effect by federal judges pending litigation.
So far this year, lawmakers have introduced such legislation in at least 16 states.
Supporters of this legislation argue that the care is experimental and that minors are too young to make decisions about medical care that could have irreversible impacts.
These groups point to the growing body of research that has found the care to have significant positive mental and physical health effects for transgender youth, who have disproportionately high rates of suicide.
A national survey released last year by the Trevor Project, a national youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, found that more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth (53%) seriously considered suicide in the past year. Nearly 1 in 5 (19%) reported that they had attempted suicide in the past year.
In addition to the New England Journal of Medicine study, about half a dozen others have shown that access to puberty blockers and hormone therapy can improve mental health outcomes, including reducing suicidal ideation, among transgender youths.
Three studies — two published in 2020 and another published in 2021 — found that earlier access to gender-affirming medical care is associated with better mental health.
And a 2021 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, which was based on data from the Trevor Project, found that gender-affirming hormone therapy is strongly linked to a lower risk of suicide and depression for transgender youths between the ages of 13 and 24.
The researchers behind the New England Journal of Medicine Study noted that there were some limitations to their study. For example, they recruited participants from gender clinics at children’s hospitals in Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles.
As a result, they said the findings might not apply to youth who cannot access comprehensive gender-affirming care or youth who are self-medicating with gender-affirming hormones.
They also noted that improvement in mental health varied widely, and that some participants continued to report high levels of depression and anxiety and lower levels of positive emotions and life satisfaction.
Two participants died by suicide during the study and six withdrew, according to the researchers. The information gathered before they died or left the study was included in the analyses, they added.
The study did not examine other factors that are known to affect psychosocial functioning among trans youth, such as parental support. The study also lacked a comparison group, which the researchers said limits their ability to establish causality. They plan to study those other factors and will continue to follow the cohort to see whether the improvements are sustained over a longer period of time.
Lingering supply chain issues related to the COVID pandemic are affecting stocks of testosterone available for trans men.
Around the world, sporadic shortages of the hormone are creating anxiety among the trans population over the potential physical and psychological effects of missed doses.
In Mexico, the shortage is having real-world consequences.
“One day, I wrote to all my friends that there aren’t any hormones left at the pharmacy downtown,” Chiapas resident Chiu Palomeque told Global Press Journal. “I told them I would go and check another one and I was like ‘Phew! They have it here. Yes! Come and get it here.’”
But soon after, supplies of the injectable drug ran out. After his first missed monthly dose, Palomeque’s period returned with a vengeance.
“It’s as if knives are stabbing into my stomach,” he said.
The shortage dates back to the beginning of the COVID pandemic when supply chain problems and COVID vaccine manufacturing upended the pharmaceutical industry.
The lack of one affordable option in particular, Primoteston Depot from Bayer AG, hit the uninsured in Mexico hard. A statement from the pharmaceutical giant in July said supply chain disruptions continue to reduce the manufacturer’s ability to produce and supply the drug in Latin America and around the world.
Trans men who have not undergone a hystero-oophorectomy, hysterectomy, or oophorectomy, which involve the removal of the uterus and/or ovaries, are particularly vulnerable to adverse effects. According to Dr. Daniela Muñoz Jiménez, a physician and the founder of the community health organization Trans Salud, the absence of testosterone replacement therapy “becomes catastrophic” for those individuals.
For those who have undergone the procedures, discontinuing hormone therapy increases the risk of decalcification, or the loss of bone calcium.
With or without those surgeries, drastic changes in cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, and glucose can occur within days, while the psychological effects can be just as debilitating, reviving the gender dysphoria that hormone therapy addresses.
Trans men in Mexico who are uninsured rely on inexpensive versions of the drug like Bayer’s Primoteston. Alternatives, including Nebido from Grünenthal, can cost ten times as much.
According to Sony Rangel, a founder of trans support service Transmasculinidades MX, trans men and transmasculine individuals are more economically vulnerable than their transfeminine peers, because trans women often start their transition at an older age.
While shortages persist, organizations like Rangel’s and online communities are getting the word out on available supplies and alternatives.
In Canada, Ontario’s trans community on Reddit is sharing helpful information.
“Hi all!” read a post in December. “Just wanted to share that yesterday, I went to pick up my renewal for injectable testosterone at a Shopper’s Drug Mart in Ottawa and was informed that there was a shortage, that it was on back order, and that it wouldn’t be available for a while. They said they have other forms available (gels & capsules) and would fax my doctor to get a prescription for one of those, but heads up if you inject T!”
Republican legislators in Iowa have introduced their version of a “don’t say gay” bill, largely mimicking the one that became law in Florida last year, and a bill that would essentially out transgender and nonbinary students to their parents.
House File 8, introduced Wednesday, would prohibit instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. House File 9, introduced the same day, would bar schools from making accommodations for a student’s gender identity, if different from the one assigned at birth, without the written consent of a parent or guardian. It also says school staff must not encourage students to undergo gender-affirming care or pressure their parents into allowing them to receive it.
House File 9 is partly a reaction to policies like that in Iowa’s Linn-Mar Community School District, which allows students to set up a gender support plan without giving notice to their parents, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reports. Parents Defending Education, a right-wing group, has filed a lawsuit against the policy.
“We need to empower parents,” House Speaker Pat Grassley, a Republican who cosponsored both bills, told The Gazette. “In our opinion, that’s what the goal of these [bills] are, making sure conversations are happening with children and their parents, instead of happening in the school system. We feel confident standing in that position.”
Republican Rep. Skyler Wheeler, also a sponsor of both, made a similar comment. “Parents want to know what’s going on,” he told the Dispatch. “They need to know what is happening with their children. They need to be the first one to be helping their children through processes and things that they truly need help with.”
But it’s not as simple as that, LGBTQ+ advocates pointed out. “We absolutely encourage students to come out to their parents on their own time, on their own ground, their own rules, when they are most comfortable,” Damian Thompson, director of public policy for Iowa Safe Schools, told the Dispatch regarding House File 9. “Ultimately, unfortunately, there are parents that are just not affirming people. And that can really put a student in danger get if they are outed, not on their own terms.”
Of House File 8, Keenan Crow of One Iowa told the publication, “It’s taking all the tools that educators have to deal with bullying on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and throwing them up out the window. If we’re saying that you can’t have any materials or announcements regarding gender identity or sexual orientation, that the very antibullying policies that school districts are required to publicize and to create training materials around for students are not going to be able to be shared with the students.”
But Wheeler said the bill wouldn’t have such a deleterious effect. “If a kid has, you know, same-sex parents, nothing prevents them in this bill from mentioning that in class,” he said to the Dispatch. “It just simply says to the teacher, ‘Hey, we’re going to stick to what we’ve been teaching.’”
Sen. Liz Bennett, who is bisexual and was the first queer woman elected to the Iowa legislature, called both bills harmful. “This sends the message to these kids that people think that there is something so wrong” with being part of the LGBTQ+ community, Bennett, a Democrat, told The Gazette. “That’s incredibly harmful.”
“I think it’s really sad that at a time when Iowans are struggling to afford groceries, trying to find jobs, struggling to go the doctor, etc., that we’re seeing more extreme culture war legislation,” she added. “That should not be the priority here in Iowa.”
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is asking state universities for the number and ages of their students who sought or received gender dysphoria treatment, including sex reassignment surgery and hormone prescriptions, according to a survey released Wednesday.
Why he’s conducting the survey wasn’t completely clear. DeSantis has been criticized by LGBTQ advocates for policies seen as discriminatory, including banning instruction on sexual and gender identity in early grades and making it easier for parents to remove books related to the topic in public schools.
“We can see cuts in funding for universities to treat students with this condition, and I think an all-out elimination of services is certainly on the table,” said House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell.
The survey was released the same day the university presidents voted to support DeSantis’ anti-woke agenda and to reject “the progressivist higher education indoctrination agenda” and committing to “removing all woke positions and ideologies by February 1, 2023,” according to a Department of Education news release.
The survey is being sent to the university board of trustee chairs by DeSantis’ budget director, Chris Spencer.
“Our office has learned that several state universities provide services to persons suffering from gender dysphoria,” Spencer wrote. “On behalf of the Governor, I hereby request that you respond to the enclosed inquiries related to such services.”
The governor’s office did not respond to emails and a phone call seeking information about the purpose of the survey, which must be completed by Feb. 10. Spencer told the chairs the survey is to be completed as part of their obligation to govern institutional resources and protect the public interest.
Driskell said DeSantis is trying to remake the state’s universities “in his own image” as far as what can be taught and how students can be treated.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s a really terrifying place that we’re at in Florida history,” Driskell said. “What can happen is a brain drain where we have Florida students not want to stay here and attend school at our public colleges and universities.”
The survey is similar to one the governor is forcing state universities to complete regarding spending on diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory programs.
The current memo asks universities to “provide the number of encounters for sex-reassignment treatment or where such treatment was sought” as well as data for students referred to other facilities. It says to protect students’ identities when completing the information.
The survey requires a breakdown by age, regardless of whether the student is age 18 or older, of people prescribed hormones or hormone antagonists or who underwent a medical procedures like mastectomies, breast augmentation or removal and reconstruction of genitals.