For U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, the homophobic hits just keep on coming.
Last week, Johnson was one of the speakers at the National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance, an event cofounded by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, dubbed an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by the watchdogs at the Southern Poverty Law Center. And a new report from another watchdog organization, Accountable.us, details the extent of Johnson’s relationship with Perkins, which goes back more than a quarter of a century.
“From his decades-long relationship with extreme anti-LGBTQ activist Tony Perkins to his legal career dedicated to rolling back LGBTQ rights, it’s clear where his allegiances lie,” Accountable.us president Caroline Ciccone says of Johnson. “Speaker Johnson is a champion for the dangerous extremist faction of the House MAGA majority — and his leadership has only meant more desperate political stunts to force a far-right agenda instead of actually solving the issues facing our nation.”
The National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance was held Wednesday at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and featured many Christian right activists and Republican politicians, including 16 members of Congress. Perkins founded the event with Jim Garlow, founder and CEO of Well Versed. Garlow hosted Johnson on a “prayer call” shortly before the latter was elected speaker, and during the call, Johnson said American culture was “dark and depraved,”partly because so many young people identify as “something other than straight.”
During Johnson’s segment of the prayer and repentance event, he shared the stage with the other members of Congress, and each of them offered a prayer. Most, including Johnson, avoided overtly anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in their prayers, instead saying in general terms that the U.S. has turned away from God and asking for God’s guidance. But there were some exceptions.
For instance, U.S. Rep. Randy Weber of Texas said, “We’ve trampled on holy marriage and called it an alternate lifestyle.” Bob Good of Virginia said the nation has “failed to honor [God’s] designs for marriage and the family.” Mary Miller of Illinois appealed for God’s forgiveness by saying, “We have disparaged your beautiful institution of marriage.” And Wisconsin’s Glenn Grothman listed homosexuality and feminism as evils that must be fought.
They were preceded on the program by Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, a Messianic Jew, that is, a person who identifies as Jewish but accepts Jesus Christ as savior — that church is a evangelical Christian sect. Cahn’s virulently anti-LGBTQ+ views were evident in his presentation. He said America is under the influence of pagan gods and goddesses, one of whom, Ishtar, “the enchantress,” is “the spirit of sexual immorality.”
The enchantress, he said, “turns men into women and women into men” and “seeks to possess an entire generation of children.” She is identified with the rainbow and the month of June, he continued.
Johnson’s entrenchment in the Christian right goes far beyond this event. His work as a lawyer with the Alliance Defense Fund (now Alliance Defending Freedom), which represents many anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-choice clients, is well documented, as are his writings denouncing marriage equality and LGBTQ+ rights in general. His coziness with Perkins is also well known, but the Accountable.us report provides a particularly expansive look at their work together.
They met in the 1990s in Louisiana, when Perkins was a Republican state representative and Johnson a law student at Louisiana State University. They met through Woody Jenkins, then also a Republican state representative who in 1996 ran for an open U.S. Senate seat against Democrat Mary Landrieu. Landrieu won by a narrow margin, leading Jenkins’s supporters to cry fraud. Johnson has said that election formed his views on fraud, and he went on to be closely involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Johnson and Perkins have both worked with the Council for National Policy, which Accountable.us describes as a secretive conservative organization.
When Perkins was a Louisiana state representative, Johnson sometimes helped him write legislation, such as a first-in-the-nation law establishing covenant marriage; it’s harder to end a covenant marriage than a conventional one. “Johnson and his wife, Kelly, were married under this law in 1999,” the report notes.
In 1997, Johnson helped Perkins found the Louisiana Family Forum, a right-wing political group. “Working pro bono, Johnson helped pen the group’s incorporation filing and later represented the organization in lawsuits targeting abortion access and same-sex marriage,” Accountable.us points out. “When Johnson first ran for Congress in 2016, he identified himself as a Louisiana Family Forum board member.”
Johnson and Perkins also worked together on Gov. Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana Commission on Marriage and Family, to which both were appointed in 2008. Perkins was a board member for a nonprofit law firm, Freedom Guard, that Johnson founded in 2014. It is no longer in operation, but it represented the same type of clients as ADF, and its other projects included drafting model bylaws for churches that characterized homosexuality and transgender identity as “sinful and offensive to God.”
When Perkins ran — unsuccessfully — for U.S. Senate in 2002, Kelly Johnson was one of his first campaign contributors, donating $1,000. Perkins returned the favor and then some in her husband’s first run for Congress, with a contribution of $2,700, the maximum personal donation allowed by law at the time.
In every run since then, Johnson has received the endorsement of the Family Research Council’s political action committee. He’s a three-time recipient of the FRC’s True Blue award, which goes to members of Congress who vote according to the group’s positions 100 percent of the time. That contrasts with Johnson’s zeroes from the Human Rights Campaign. And Johnson has described Perkins as one of his biggest heroes.
“Once a fringe organization on the right, the Family Research Council has been elevated to newfound prominence with the Speaker’s gavel in Mike Johnson’s hand,” the Accountable.us report states. That newfound prominence has chilling implications for LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive freedom, and more.
The Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board (LCB) has paused enforcement of lewd conduct regulations following outcry over raids conducted late last month at multiple Seattle LGBTQ+ bars.
The Stranger reports that the LCB sent a letter last Thursday to state officials informing them of the pause. The board also announced that it would not issue citations for any violations reported by officers during the raids and that it has paused its participation in the city’s Joint Enforcement Team (JET), the coalition of police, fire, and other departments that conducted the January raids.
“Since LCB’s participation last week with the City of Seattle Joint Enforcement Team (JET) on Capitol Hill and additional enforcement work Saturday at some historically gay venues in the greater Seattle area, the agency has become acutely aware of the fear and alarm it raised within the LGBTQ+ community,” the February 1 letter read. “At Wednesday’s Board meeting and in many private conversations, we heard strong objections to our actions. The community expressed concerns that LGBTQ+ venues are being targeted and that the LCB did not understand the troubling history of such enforcement or the value of these clubs as a safe place for people who often face discrimination, threats, and violence.”
The LCB said that it would present a proposal to change the lewd conduct rules at its February 6 caucus and vote on the proposal next week.
The raids, conducted over the January 26 weekend, sparked outrage in Seattle’s LGBTQ+ community and drew national attention. Shortly after midnight on January 27, ten JET task force members enter LGBTQ+ bar The Cuff wielding flashlights, according to owner Joey Burgess, causing patrons to leave the venue in fright. All they discovered was a bartender with his nipple visible. According to The Stranger, JET also raided two other LGBTQ+ venues, Neighbours Nightclub and The Lumberyard, on the same night.
The following evening, two JET members entered the Eagle at around 11:30 p.m., where they found patrons wearing jockstraps. They also reportedly photographed patrons.
Both the Cuff bartender’s exposed nipple and the Eagle patrons’ jockstraps were cited as violations of LCB’s rules prohibiting “lewd conduct” in venues that serve liquor. Meanwhile, Washington state has no other laws restricting public nudity. As Eater Seattle notes, you can wear a G-string outside in a public park but not in a bar.
According to The Stranger, during a recent meeting with the LCB, the state Senate LGBTQ caucus made it clear they wanted changes to the regulation.
“As the only openly LGBTQ member of the board, I take that role and responsibility seriously,” said LCB Board member Jim Vollendroff. “I made a commitment to the Legislature to see this through and to hold the Board accountable. To make long-lasting change to make sure this doesn’t occur in the future, long after the leadership that’s in place now changes.”
State Sen. Jamie Pedersen (D), the out gay majority floor leader, saidlawmakers are working to repeal the “lewd conduct” regulation.
Meanwhile, Seattle’s LGBTQ+ community cheered the LCB’s announcement.
“This is a huge victory for queer people, queer spaces, and queer self-expression,” a group of club owners said in a statement.
“The relief that I have–that I no longer have to strip away queer culture and honestly people’s right to be themselves on behalf of an agency that’s threatening our liquor license–is probably one of the most gratifying things in my career, period,” Cuff and Queer/Bar owner Joey Burgess told The Stranger. “I feel like a ton of bricks are off me, and that heading into this weekend people can feel safe and good about themselves.”
A Tennessee city must pay $500,000 as part of a settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups over an ordinance designed to ban drag performances from taking place on public property, attorneys announced Wednesday.
Last year, the Tennessee Equality Project — a nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ rights — filed a federal lawsuit after Murfreesboro leaders announced they would no longer be approving any event permit requests submitted by the organization. At the time, the city alleged that the drag performances that took place during TEP’s 2022 Pride event resulted in the “illegal sexualization of kids.”
TEP denied the shows were inappropriate, countering that the performers were fully clothed. However, the city not only vowed to deny TEP permits but also decided later to update its “community decency standards” intended to “assist in the determination of conduct, materials, and events that may be judged as obscene or harmful to minors.”
Murfreesboro is located about 34 miles (55 kilometers) south of Nashville.
Eventually, a federal judge temporarily blocked Murfreesboro from enforcing the ordinance while the lawsuit proceeded.
On Wednesday, the ACLU announced the case had reached a settlement. Under the agreement, the city not only agreed to pay $500,000 but also to repeal the ordinance and process any upcoming event permit applications submitted by TEP.
“The government has no right to censor LGBTQ+ people and expression,” said attorneys for the ACLU, ACLU of Tennessee, Ballard Spahr, and Burr & Forman in a joint statement. “More important than the monetary recovery, this settlement sends a clear message that the city’s discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community was blatantly unconstitutional and that this type of behavior will no longer be tolerated here — or anywhere across the country.”
A spokesperson for the city of Murfreesboro didn’t immediately respond to an email for comment.
The legal challenge is the latest development in the ongoing political battle over LGBTQ rights inside Tennessee, where the state’s conservative leaders have sought to limit events where drag performers may appear, restrict classroom conversations about gender and sexuality, and ban gender-affirming care.
The year: 1969. Man landed on the moon, the Beatles gave their last concert on top of the Apple building in London, and we mourned Judy Garland’s death. But most notable for me was the Stonewall Uprising on June 28.
As a gay African-American man, I am an activist and a pioneer. I have experienced some of the brightest and darkest highlights of LGBTQ history. So much has changed and I know my generation has made a significant contribution to the growth and positive changes. My mantra: “I’m living my best life!”
The year of the Stonewall Uprising, I was beginning my studies at Parsons School of Design. It was a turning point in my life. I felt equipped to leave my family nest and ready to be independent, a trait that was instilled in me at an early age.
As soon as I arrived in New York, the city was swarming with so much energy that it was hard to contain myself. New York City has always been a significant influence on gay life, art, music, fashion, commerce, and innovations on all fronts. I took some time to discover myself during those years, learning to navigate the city and indulge in self-expression.
The diversity of New York is something I have always loved. In fact, it was the openness and freedom of expression that led me to accept my sexuality. I gradually acclimated to my new life and adventures, only later realizing what an accomplishment it was to move to New York City and succeed at the tender age of 18.
As a textile designer and artist in the Garment District, I continued to take drawing classes at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art to keep my skills sharp. While in the workforce, I complied to corporate standards in the workplace to be taken seriously and avoid discrimination. But even so, I accepted my truth and began to live unapologetically as a gay African-American man.
One of the hard truths I had to learn – and something many people still refuse to acknowledge – is that the LGBTQ community has always been splintered and separated. I made it a point to nurture friendships with young gay people, mostly people of color. Most of my gay and bi friends attended venues that attracted people like me, where nightlife was flourishing and the creative community thrived. We saw diverse venues like David’s Loft in Manhattan, the first private dance club, as well as Andre’s, Jays, and the Big Apple in Harlem, all catering to people of color. I saw the 70’s as a “Golden Age” of gay life and freedom of self-expression.
Overwhelmed with a thirst for knowledge and enthusiasm to discover more about the LGBTQ experience, I moved to Berlin, Germany, in 1979. I was influenced by many Black figures who paved the way, including Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. Moving to another country allowed me to escape racial disparities back home.
I was emboldened to continue advocating for LGBTQ people of color, which became crucial as we were hit with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As a result of attending so many funerals weekly, I became exhausted and fearful for my own health. I moved back to the U.S., making the best of my time in the Midwest professionally, but also prioritized being an advocate for HIV/AIDS and the LGBTQ community as a whole.
Together, gays and lesbians organized community events, prepared meals, and initiated housing projects for suffering people who had been on the street. Fundraisers were held to raise money for those in need. Organizations like AmfAR (the Foundation for Aids Research) made their debut, as well as the drag ball Night of a Thousand Gowns and the Design Industry Foundation for AIDS. The late great Larry Kramer founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP, two organizations that changed the narrative in New York City and the world, invoking lifesaving solutions and resources for the LGBTQ community.
In 1995, the introduction of protease inhibitors – drugs that impede the spread of the virus – added longevity to a generation that did not expect to survive.
Returning to New York in the early 2000s and having reached my 50th birthday, I began to think about how I was beginning this stage in my life. My generation of LGBTQ folks have now become elders, with organizations like SAGE helping us age with dignity.
As we age, there are challenges in housing, healthcare, and other life support systems for our cohort. Many of us do not have families and face discrimination and isolation because of our sexual orientation, making LGBTQ elder support groups critical. I remain an advocate for older adults so we can keep our independence as we age.
As I continue to share my experiences before and after 50 years of Stonewall activism, I age with pride and dignity.
Alston Green is a longtime activist and fighter in social justice and LGBTQ movements. A creative thinker and a passionate spokesperson, Alston has worked with the Intergenerational Media Literacy program with Senior Planet (OATS) and SAGE – two organizations that offer aging adults an opportunity to explore, learn, mingle and renew their passions, to keep abreast of the ever changing world of digital technology and how it impacts everyone’s lives daily.
Saturday, February 17th 4-5:30PM Occidental Center for the Arts Literary Series. Book Launch for Pink Paisley Scarf byMarylu Downing. Vivid imagery, humor in the ordinary, and the complexities of intimate relationships propel Marylu Downing’s writing. Her most recent book, Pink Paisley Scarf is a work of fiction. Marylu, long time resident of the Occidental community, and board member at the inception of Occidental Center for the Arts now lives in Avila Beach, California with her husband Roger House. Selected readings, and conversation with Patrick Fanning, author, publisher and President of the OCA Board. Audience Q&A. Free admission, all donations gratefully accepted. Book sales and signing. Refreshments/Wine/Beer available for sale. Persian Love Cake available by donation. OCA: 3850 Doris Murphy Way, Occidental, at corner of Bohemian Hwy & Graton Rd. OCA’s facilities are accessible to people with disabilities. More info: occidentalcenterforthearts.org or 707-874-9392.
Stephanie Vigil, a queer Colorado state legislator, flipped her district from Republican to Democrat. Now, she’s ready to make some other changes.
While the GOP has launched repeated attacks on transgender students nationwide, a local effort to prevent teachers from asking a teenager about their preferred pronouns has spawned a response from Vigil.
She’s introduced a bill requiring teachers to use a student’s preferred name in the classroom. Deadnaming a trans student would be considered discrimination.
“Making sure that we can create space for them to be seen and heard as their true self is very important,” said Nadine Bridges, the executive director of One Colorado, told the local news after the bill was introduced. “It’s a great opportunity to kind of create equity and inclusion in schools.”
A controversial effort by a school board that would have prevented school staff from accommodating trans students was ultimately defeated after students, parents, and activists objected.
“I’m kind of old-fashioned,” one school board member said at the time. “I know a boy when I see one, and I know a girl when I see one.”
The board has reservations about the proposed law too, insisting that “parents are responsible for determining the upbringing, education, care, and moral development of their child.”
“Parents do have the right, for their specific child, to make whatever decisions they deem best for that young person,” Bridges said. “They do not have the right to make decisions for every student that attends a charter school or a public school.”
“We’re talking about pronouns and names and making sure that a young person can be seen as their authentic selves. Why wouldn’t anybody want to create space for that?”
The bill would also create a task force to “examine existing school policies and provide recommendations to schools on how to best implement student non-legal name change policies.”
In an article published in the opinion section of The New York Times, opinion columnist Pamela Paul wrote a 4,500-word article filled with factual errors and unfounded assumptions about transgender care and the lived experiences of transgender people. Although the article is presented as a piece on detransitioners, the interviews serve as vehicles through which Paul packages inaccuracies and disinformation with faulty citations and claims that are not supported by the evidence she presents. The article is the latest in a seriespublished by The New York Times to do so, and a simple fact check of the claims presented easily debunks the article’s central premises as highly misleading.
It is notable that this is not the first time Paul has waded into LGBTQ+ issues with the seeming goal of covering for anti-LGBTQ+ policies. Previously, she wrote an article criticizing LGBTQ+ organizations for the use of the word “queer,” a word that many LGBTQ+ people use to describe themselves. She has written articles accusing transgender people of “erasing women.” However, this article is certainly her longest and most in depth attempt to tackle transgender issues; in doing so, she misses the mark.
Claim: Rapid onset gender dysphoria and transgender social contagion is making people trans.
Fact: Rapid onset gender dysphoria and transgender social contagion is not a validated theory, has been widely debunked as pseudoscience by major medical organizations.
“Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, severalresearchershave documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.”
At the beginning of the article, Paul discusses “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” and “social contagion” as potential reasons for the apparent increase in transgender individuals in recent years, raising concerns that these individuals will detransition. However, her sources clearly contradict her premise. Her first source, used to support “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” is an article by Lisa Littman that has been retracted. Littman is notably one of the only researchers to argue for the theory, which has been repeatedlydismissed for lacking factual support and for recruiting subjects from anti-trans websites. Recently, unable to validate the theory, she collaborated with Leor Sapir, who lacks a background in transgender mental health care and works at the anti-trans Manhattan Institute, to broaden the definition of “Rapid” so that even a period of two to four years could be considered rapid. She then published it in a journal run by Ken Zucker, an anti-trans “expert” whose clinic was closed following accusations of conversion therapy.
The second set of links, claiming to show “several researchers” documenting the phenomenon, actually refers to only three researchers, not “several.” These “researchers” include Lisa Littman’s personal website, a retracted article by Michael Bailey (Lisa Littman’s treasurer), and another article by Lisa Littman herself. The sources cited for the “documented phenomenon” are the anti-trans website Transgender Trend and a SurveyMonkey poll distributed on Reddit and Twitter.
The only source that correctly represents the consensus is the source showing that professional organizations oppose ROGD as pseudoscientific. In a letter from over 60 psychological organizations, the coalition for the Advancement & Application of Psychological Science calls for the elimination of the term, stating, “There are no sound empirical studies of ROGD” and “there is no evidence that ROGD aligns with the lived experiences of transgender children and adolescents.” Paul, however, simply and misleadingly presents this letter as the organization stating “there is not enough quality research.”
A study in the prestigious journal Pediatrics entirely debunked the concept of ROGD, determining that most transgender people know their gender identity for years before they come out and seek treatment for gender dysphoria. When transgender people finally do come out, many are overjoyed to finally reveal their true self to the world around them – to others, however, the process may seem “rapid.” To ascertain whether transgender identification occurs “rapidly,” researchers directly asked transgender teenagers: “How long have you known you were transgender?” They discovered that on average, transgender people know their gender identity for four years before first coming out and presenting for treatment.
Claim: Stephanie Winn, a “licensed marriage and family therapist,” spoke out in favor of “approach gender dysphoria in a more considered way” but then was “investigated” for conversion therapy.
Fact: Stephanie Winn suggested the treatment of transgender youth with acupuncture to “see if they like having needles put in them” and stating it could “help spark desistance.” She also pushed the idea that transgender men should be estrogen to make them feel more feminine.
“They have good reasons to be wary. Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Oregon, was trained in gender-affirming care and treated multiple transgender patients. But in 2020, after coming across detransition videos online, she began to doubt the gender-affirming model. In 2021 she spoke out in favor of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way, urging others in the field to pay attention to detransitioners, people who no longer consider themselves transgender after undergoing medical or surgical interventions. She has since been attacked by transgender activists. Some threatened to send complaints to her licensing board saying that she was trying to make trans kids change their minds through conversion therapy. In April 2022, the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists told Winn that she was under investigation. Her case was ultimately dismissed, but Winn no longer treats minors and practices only online, where many of her patients are worried parents of trans-identifying children.”
Paul then attempts to take readers through to other researchers who are, presumably, being “unfairly treated” for their “unorthodox” views on transgender people. One of those people is Stephanie Winn, who she presents as a “licensed marriage and family therapist” in Oregon. She claims that Winn simply spoke out “in favor of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way” and was attacked for this. A simple click on Paul’s link, however, shows how this is a highly misleading claim and misrepresents the brutality of what Winn was proposing.
In the thread linked by Paul, Winn muses that transgender men have a “sense of being less feminine” and could be made to feel more feminine by giving them estrogen. There is absolutely no research behind this claim, and in fact, giving transgender people the hormone of their assigned sex at birth has been tried in the past with disastrous effects. In a paper published in 1967 by Harry Benjamin, one of the first major researchers into transgender care, he stated: “I have heard rather frequently in the patient’s history that androgen had been used in the past in an attempt to cure the transsexualism by masculinization. It is the wrong treatment. It aggravates the condition by increasing libido without changing its character or direction. Androgen is contraindicated.”
Winn has also advocated for the treatment of transgender youth with acupuncture, stating, “they can see how they like having needles put in them.”
“So Your Kid Wants To Live As The Opposite Sex” by Stephanie WinnStephanie Winn has not been investigated or attacked simply for “approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way.” Rather, attacks on Winn are linked to extremely cruel suggestions and musings around how transgender youth should be dealt using cruel, coercive, and painful conversion therapy techniques.
Claim: Transgender people may actually just be gay, and transitioning is a form of “conversion therapy.”
Fact: Gender and sexuality are different, many transgender people identify as gay or bisexual after transition, and gay acceptance is higher than trans acceptance.
Gay men and women often told me they fear that same-sex-attracted kids, especially effeminate boys and tomboy girls who are gender nonconforming, will be transitioned during a normal phase of childhood and before sexual maturation — and that gender ideology can mask and even abet homophobia. … “I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay,” Kasey Emerick, a 23-year-old woman and detransitioner from Pennsylvania, told me. Raised in a conservative Christian church, she said, “I believed homosexuality was a sin.”
The claim that transgender people are “actually just gay” is one that has been made repeatedly by those opposed to gender affirming care, and one that has been repeatedlydebunked. Paul wades into this claim by featuring Kasey Emerick, who claims that “believing homosexuality was a sin” played into her transition.
Factually, though, attitudes towards transgender people tend to be “significantly more negative” according to an article in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. This contributes to a much higher rate of violence and discrimination. Many transgender people, such as celebrity Laverne Cox, report that the most common response to coming out is, “couldn’t you have just been gay?”
According to the 2012 National Transgender Discrimination Survey, most transgender people identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer after transition. If transition was being used to “cure” being gay, it is a startlingly ineffective cure.
Claim: 80% of transgender individuals desist from being transgender if they go through puberty without intervention, and another study suggests that 30% of individuals stop taking hormone therapy medication.
Fact: Detransition rates are estimated to be between 1-4%. The study citing an 80% detransition rate is based on faulty outdated data, using criteria no longer in use. Furthermore, the study indicating a 30% discontinuation rate is based on military families not refilling their prescriptions through Tricare, rather than actual discontinuation of hormone therapy.
The claim that 80% of transgender youth detransition has been widely debunkedand is contradicted by modern research, which indicates regret and detransition rates of 1-4%, according to a review of newer peer-reviewed studies by Cornell University. Recent studies reveal that 97.5% of transgender youth maintain a stable gender identity after five years. The older article Paul references is a journal article in a publication with a very low impact factor; this article does not provide new data, and instead discusses the same two outdated sources commonly associated with the exaggerated “80% detransition rate” claim: Kenneth Zucker’s research from the 1990s on detransition, which uses outdated diagnostic criteria for “gender identity disorder” that misclassified feminine gay men as “disordered,” and Steensma’s studies from 2011/2013, known for similar methodological shortcomings.
Both of these studies share a similar problem that explains why the numbers are so different when compared to modern studies around transgender care: they utilize outdated criteria for “gender identity disorder,” which misclassified tomboys, masculine lesbians, and effeminate gay men as “disordered.” Notably, Zucker advocated for conversion therapy, arguing that “a homosexual lifestyle in a fundamentally unaccepting culture simply creates unnecessary social difficulties.” He also employed techniques aimed at coercing trans kids to conform to their assigned sex at birth, such as withholding cross-gender toys and advising parents “not to give in” to their trans youth’s desires to wear clothing that aligns with their gender identity.
The old criteria noted that to be diagnosed with “gender identity disorder,” you did not need to desire to be “the other sex.” Instead, the disorder was about gendered behavior that was deemed “too masculine” or “too feminine” by society, and purposefully included gay people who didn’t “act man or woman enough.” The new criteria, however, require the transgender youth to desire or insist to be the other sex.
Steensma’s2011 and 2013 studies had similar issues in his research, which in some ways had even worse methodological flaws. Steensma used the old criteria, which is not the way that gender dysphoria is diagnosed today. Worse, the two studies classified every youth who did not return to the clinic as having “desisted” or “detransitioned” with no long term follow-up. Half of the participants in the studies did not return and all were classified as having “desisted.” The sample sizes were tiny at the getgo – only 53 people were in the first study and 127 in the second study. Given the fact that a large portion if not the majority of Steensma’s patients were classified under decades old criteria and assumed permanently detransitioned simply for refusing to follow up, these studies cannot be used to make any reasonable claim of high desistance rates.
The last study that Paul refers to is a study released two years ago on military continuance of care. That study looked at all hormone therapy distributed under the military Tricare health insurance plan and determined that 30% of people stopped receiving their hormones through Tricare. What the study does not do, as Paul claims, is support the idea that “30% of people discontinued hormone therapy.” In fact, there are many reasons why people would no longer fill their hormone therapy through a military Tricare plan, especially towards the end of the study in 2017-2018:
The Trump administration began targeting transgender servicemembers, and many transgender servicemembers likely stopped filling their hormone prescriptions through Tricare for themselves or their family members, fearing being targeted.
Tricare has notoriously poor transgender care coverage, as evidenced by many military members responding to a thread discussing the results of this study, and many transgender servicemembers may opt to get their medication through a low cost alternative such as Planned Parenthood
Hormone therapy can be discontinued for surgery, fertility and pregnancy planning, and many other purposes.
Some nonbinary patients may obtain all the results they wish from hormone therapy before discontinuing, desiring no future results.
Transgender people may simply have not filled the medication through insurance and instead utilized online pharmacies, which have grown increasingly popular.
Transgender patients can easily fill prescriptions through GoodRX plans, which would allow them more privacy.
Transgender people may have been forced off care by military decisions
Even the authors of the article themselves state that they likely overestimate discontinuation:
“We only collected information on medication refills obtained using a single insurance plan. If patients elected to pay out of pocket for hormones, accessed hormones through nonmedical channels, or used a different insurance plan to pay for treatment before and/or after obtaining gender-affirming hormones using TRICARE insurance, we did not capture this information. This means that our findings are likely an underestimate continuation rates among transgender patients.”
There are many more factual errors contained within Paul’s article; it is 4,500 words long and covers virtually every anti-trans claim made in legislative hearings across the United States. Many advocates for transgender people, medical experts, and journalists have weighed in to cover other aspects of Paul’s piece. You can find those here:
The National LGBTQ Task Force announced on Tuesday that long-time transgender rights activist and community leader Kris Hayashi has joined the organization as its director of advocacy and action.
Hayashi most recently served as the executive director of the Transgender Law Center and previously led the Audre Lorde Project as its executive director/co-director.
“We could not be more excited or honored to welcome Kris Hayashi to our team and the Task Force family. Kris will bring immeasurable expertise to our advocacy and policy work as our community, especially our trans and non-binary siblings, are under unrelenting and unprecedented attacks,” said Kierra Johnson, executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force, in a statement.
Hayashi told The Advocate that he was “honored” and thrilled to be joining Johnson and the Task Force. But he understands there is a real danger to LGBTQ+ rights, specifically to the rights of transgender people.
“I will say that particularly at this moment, particularly at this time when trans communities, when nonbinary communities, when we are facing an escalation in attacks on our rights and our lives, I am excited to be joining the Task Force to be able to support and continue the organization’s work to really build an LGBTQ progressive movement that centers trans power, resistance, and joy,” he said.
The work he has before him isn’t anything new, Hayashi explained.
“As a trans person, as a person of color, as a queer person here in the U.S., from a pretty young age, I understood that the world was not set up for me to survive and thrive,” he said.
That experience led him to a professional career in advocacy and activism from California to New York.
“I was really fortunate and privileged to have mentors — from Black power movements, from migrant justice movements, from environmental justice movements — who really took me under their wing, and I really learned from them the ways that our communities have in the past and continue to speak truth to power, to fight for justice, and to build strong movements,” Hayashi said.
As he sets out to lead the Task Force’s advocacy and action arm, Hayashi said it’s important to understand the violence LGBTQ+ people already face. Attacks on transgender and nonbinary people were already endemic. Now, there’s a more legislative turn that’s amplifying the attacks.
“In this moment, trans and nonbinary people are facing just an extreme escalation in attacks on our rights and lives across the globe, but specifically here in the U.S.,” Hayashi said. “Over 20 states have passed laws that ban and in some cases criminalize our health care. Similarly, states have banned trans you from playing sports. We’re seeing attacks on our ability to get identity documents, [go to] bathrooms, even [our names].”
He continued: “It’s very clear that the conservative right is using attacking trans and non-binary people to advance their anti-democratic agenda, which ultimately impacts everyone.”
Hayashi said that local LGBTQ+ leaders are still trying to combat such measures, but they need support. They need more help.
That’s where, he said, the Task Force and his work comes in.
“[Local leaders] cannot do it alone,” he said. “This is a time when we need to bring all of our resources and all our capacities into this fight because there is just so much at stake, not just for trans people, but really for all of us.”
Findings from the National Center for Transgender Equality’s 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey counter the right-wing narrative about “transition regret” by showing how gender-affirming care improves trans people’s lives, while the survey also documents the continued discrimination and marginalization trans Americans face.
The NCTE released its “Early Insights” report of survey findings Wednesday. The survey includes data from 92,329 binary and nonbinary trans people across the U.S., the largest number of participants ever. “Early Insights” is the first in a series of reports to be released from the survey.
Ninety-four percent of respondents who lived at least some of the time in a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth reported that they were either “a lot more satisfied” (79 percent) or “a little more satisfied” (15 percent) with their life than before their transition. Nearly all of those who were undergoing hormone treatment or had received at least one form of gender-affirming surgery said this health care had improved their lives.
Respondents also reported substantial family support, with more than two-thirds of trans adults saying that their families were either supportive or highly supportive of their identity and gender expression.
“It’s impactful to see so many trans people report life satisfaction when they live according to their gender identity and get the health care they need, but we also see that trans people face substantial barriers to living full, healthy, and authentic lives,” Dr. Sandy E. James, co-principal investigator and lead researcher for the survey, said in a press release. “As the most comprehensive source of data about trans people in the U.S., these findings fill an important gap in our knowledge and serve as a critical resource for understanding and addressing the needs of trans people.”
Trans people still face discrimination and mistreatment at work, at school and elsewhere, according to the survey.
Eleven percent of respondents who had ever held a job said they had lost a job because of their gender identity or expression.
Eighty percent of adult respondents and 60 percent of 16- and 17-year-old respondents who were out or perceived as trans in elementary or secondary school said they went through one or more forms of mistreatment or negative experience.
Of those who had seen a health care provider within the previous 12 months, 48 percent reported having at least one negative experience because they were transgender, such as being refused health care, being misgendered, or being verbally or physically abused.
Most respondents reported being denied equal treatment due to their gender identity or being verbally harassed, physically harassed, or harassed online.
Respondents also faced economic challenges. Thirty-four percent were experiencing poverty. The unemployment rate among respondents was 18 percent. Nearly one-third had experienced homelessness in at some point.
Regarding the impact of discriminatory laws, 47 percent of respondents had thought about moving to another state because their state government considered or passed anti-trans laws and 5 percent had moved out of state because of this. The top 10 states from which respondents moved for this reason were Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
“Trans people deserve equal access to the same societal benefits as everyone else — access to good jobs, affordable health care, stable housing and to feel safe in their communities,” said Josie Caballero, director of the survey. “The ‘Early Insights’ report highlights how much further the U.S. still needs to go to achieve trans equality.”
NCTE developed the survey in partnership with the National Black Trans Advocacy Coalition, the TransLatin@ Coalition, and the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance.
“Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and fairness,” added Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of NCTE. “We need laws at the federal and state level that make sure all people — including trans people — are treated fairly. No one should ever face discrimination in employment, housing, health care, education, and other areas of life just because of who they are. Transgender people are here to stay, and we are proud of who we are.”
In the past century, there have been three waves of opposition to transgenderhealth care.
In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, they cracked down on transgender medical research and clinical practice in Europe. In 1979, a research report critical of transgender medicine led to the closure of the most well-respected clinics in the United States. And since 2021, when Arkansas became the first U.S. state among now at least 21 other states banning gender-affirming care for minors, we have been living in a third wave.
On the other hand, the archives of transgender medicine demonstrate that backlash against these practices has historically been rooted in pseudoscience. And today, an anti-science movement that aims to discredit science altogether is fueling the fire of the current wave of anti-trans panic.
The 1930s − eugenics and sexology collide
In the 1920s, the new science of hormones was just reaching maturation and entering mainstream consciousness. In the field of sexology – the study of human sexuality, founded in 19th century Europe – scientists were excited about research on animals demonstrating that removing or transplanting gonads could effectively change an organism’s sex.
In 1919, the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, which became the world’s leading center for queer and transgender research and clinical practice. Hirschfeld worked closely with trans women as co-researchers throughout the 1920s. Several trans women also received care at the institute, including orchiectomies that halted the production of testosterone in their bodies.
Within months of Hitler’s rise to power in early 1933, a mob of far-right studentsbroke into and shuttered the institute for being “un-German.” Some of the most famous images of Nazi book burning show the institute’s library set ablaze in an outdoor plaza.
Nazi ideology was based on another prominent field of science of that time: eugenics, the belief that certain superior populations should survive while inferior populations must be exterminated. In fact, Hirschfeld’s sexology and Nazi race science had common roots in the Enlightenment-era effort to classify and categorize the world’s life forms.
But in the late 19th century, many scientists went a step further and developed a hierarchy of human types based on race, gender and sexuality. They were inspired by social Darwinism, a set of pseudoscientific beliefs applying the theory of survival of the fittest to human differences. As race scientists imagined a fixed number of human races of varying intelligence, sexologists simultaneously sought to classify sexual behaviors as innate, inherited states of being: the “homosexual” in the 1860s and the “transvestite,” a term coined by Hirschfeld himself, in 1910.
But where Hirschfeld and other sexologists saw the classification of queer and trans people as justifications for legal emancipation, eugenicists of the early 20th century in the U.S. and Europe believed sexually transgressive people should be sterilized and ultimately eradicated.
By the 1970s, trans medicine went mainstream. Nearly two dozen university hospitals were operating gender identity clinics and treating thousands of transgender Americans. Several trans women and men wrote popular autobiographical accounts of their transitions. Trans people were even on television, talking about their bodies and fighting for their rights.
Yet trouble was brewing behind the scenes. Jon Meyer, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, was skeptical of whether medical interventions really helped transgender people. In 1979, Meyer, along with his secretary Donna Reter, published a short academic paper that ushered in the second wave of historic backlash to trans medicine.
In their study, Meyer and Reter contacted previous patients of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic. To understand whether surgery had improved patients’ lives, the authors developed an “adjustment scoring system.” They assigned points to patients who were in heterosexual marriages and had achieved economic security since their operations, while deducting points from those who continued to engage in gender nonconformity, homosexuality, criminality, or sought mental health care.
Meyer and Reter believed that gender-affirming surgeries were successful only if they made model citizens out of transgender people: straight, married and law-abiding.
In their results, the authors found no negative effects from surgery, and no patients expressed regret. They concluded that “sex reassignment surgery confers no objective advantage in terms of social rehabilitation,” but it is “subjectively satisfying” to the patients themselves. This was not a damning conclusion.
Yet, within two months, Johns Hopkins had shuttered its clinic. The New York Times reported that universities would feel pressure to similarly “curtail their operations and discourage others from starting to do them.” Indeed, only a handful of clinics remained by the 1990s. Transgender medicine did not return to Johns Hopkins until 2017.
In requiring trans patients to enter straight marriages and hold gender-appropriate jobs to be considered successful, Meyer and Reter’s study was homophobic and classist in design. The study exemplified the pseudoscientific beliefs at the heart of transgender medicine in the 1960s through the 1980s, that patients had to conform to societal norms – including heterosexuality, gender conformity, domesticity and marriage – in order to receive care. This was not an ideology rooted in science but in bigotry.
The 2020s − distrust in science
As in the 1930s, opposition to trans medicine today is part of a broad reactionary movement against what some far-right groups consider the “toxic normalization” of LGBTQ people.
But widespread distrust in science and medicine in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has affected how Americans perceive trans health care. Prohibitions on gender-affirming care have occurred simultaneously with the relaxing of pandemic restrictions, and some scholars argue that the movement against trans health care is part of a broader movement aimed at discrediting scientific consensus.
Yet the adage “believe in science” is not an effective rejoinder to these anti-trans policies. Instead, many trans activists today call for diminishing the role of medical authority altogether in gatekeeping access to trans health care. Medical gatekeeping occurs through stringent guidelines that govern access to trans health care, including mandated psychiatric evaluations and extended waiting periods that limit and control patient choice.
It is not clear how the current third wave of backlash to transgender medicine will end. For now, trans health care remains a question dominated by medical experts on one hand and people who question science on the other.
