The Human Rights Campaign announced Tuesday that Kelley Robinson will serve as its ninth president — the first Black queer woman to lead the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization.
Robinson, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said she was honored to lead HRC and its 3 million member-advocates during “a pivotal moment in our movement for equality for LGBTQ+ people.”
“We, particularly our trans and BIPOC communities, are quite literally in the fight for our lives and facing unprecedented threats that seek to destroy us,” Robinson said in a statement Tuesday, using an acronym for Black and Indigenous people of color. “The overturning of Roe v. Wade reminds us we are just one Supreme Court decision away from losing fundamental freedoms including the freedom to marry, voting rights, and privacy.”
She continued, “We are facing a generational opportunity to rise to these challenges and create real, sustainable change. I believe that working together this change is possible right now. This next chapter of the Human Rights Campaign is about getting to freedom and liberation without any exceptions — and today I am making a promise and commitment to carry this work forward.”
Robinson began her career in 2008 as an organizer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in Missouri, and she has worked in advocacy ever since, according to the HRC. Prior to becoming the executive director of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the advocacy and political arm of the reproductive health care nonprofit group, she served as its national organizing director and as director for youth engagement.
Morgan Cox and Jodie Patterson, board chairs for the Human Rights Campaign and its foundation, said in a joint statement that Robinson was at the center of fights to stop the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and defund Planned Parenthood.
“These past months have reminded us why equality and liberation work is so important and we believe Kelley Robinson is the exact person to help us lead the fight for all LGBTQ+ people around the world,” Cox and Patterson said.
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A report released in August 2021 by the New York Attorney General’s Office alleged that David was involved in efforts to discredit a woman who accused then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment. David allegedly consulted with the governor’s office in December 2020, while president of HRC, the report said.
However, HRC conducted an internal investigation and found that David’s “conduct in assisting Governor Cuomo’s team, while president of HRC, was in violation of HRC’s conflict of interest policy and the mission of HRC,” the group said last year.
In February, David sued the organization in federal court, alleging that he was underpaid and then terminated “because he is Black.” He also claimed that there is a culture of racism in the organization.
Joni Madison, HRC’s interim president, said in a response that David’s complaint “is riddled with untruths” and described it as retaliation for his firing, which HRC said was the result of his own actions.
More than 1,600 books were banned in over 5,000 schools during the last school year, with most of the bans targeting titles related to the LGBTQ community or race and racism, according to a new report.
It found that there were 2,532 instances of individual books’ being banned, which affected 1,648 titles — meaning the same titles were targeted multiple times in different districts and states.
Books were banned in 5,049 schools with a combined enrollment of nearly 4 million students in 32 states, the report found.
Because PEN America stuck to documented cases of bans, which included reports to the group from parents and school staff members and news reports about book bans, the report says its data most likely undercounts the true number of bans.
Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN America, said the recent efforts to ban books are a new phenomenon that has been led primarily by a small number of conservative advocacy groups that believe parents don’t have enough control over what their children are learning.
“We all can agree that parents deserve to and are entitled to a say over their kids’ education,” Nossel said at a news conference PEN America hosted Monday. “That’s absolutely essential. But fundamentally, that is not what this is about when parents are mobilized in an orchestrated campaign to intimidate teachers and librarians to dictate that certain books be pulled off shelves even before they’ve been read or reviewed. That goes beyond the reasonable, legitimate entitlement of a parent to have a give-and-take with the school — things that are enshrined in parent-teacher conferences and PTAs.”
Preliminary data released Friday by the American Library Association, or ALA, found that the number of attempts to ban or restrict library resources in schools, universities and public libraries is on track to exceed the record counts of 2021.
From Jan. 1 to Aug. 31, the ALA documented 681 attempts to ban or restrict library resources, with 1,651 library titles being targeted, compared to 729 attempts for all of last year, with 1,597 books targeted.
The PEN America report said nearly all of the book bans — 96% — were enacted without schools or districts following the best practice guidelines for book challenges outlined by the ALA and the National Coalition Against Censorship.
Before the wave of book bans, parents would sometimes raise concerns to their children’s schools or teachers about books their children brought home, said Jonathan Friedman, PEN America’s director of free expression and education programs.
But now, conservative groups and parents are Googling to find books that have any LGBTQ content, and then a conservative group adds it to a list of inappropriate books, Friedman said.
“They complain about the books online, the books go on a list, the list takes on a sense of legitimacy, and then it being on the list leads a school district to react to that list and take it seriously,” Friedman said, adding that in nearly all of the cases, the cycle happens without respect for process or policy.
Friedman pointed to a case in Walton County, Florida, where a popular children’s book called “Everywhere Babies” landed on a banned books list last spring. A few of the illustrations include what could be interpreted as same-sex couples, but they are never identified as such in the text. The Florida Citizens Alliance, a conservative nonprofit group focused on education, included it in its 2021 “Porn in Schools Report.”
The five LGBTQ books on the ALA’s list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2021. Candlewick Press; Hot Key Books; Oni Press; Algonquin Books; Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Of the 1,648 titles that were banned last year, the report found, 41% explicitly address LGBTQ themes or have protagonists or prominent secondary characters who are LGBTQ, and 40% include protagonists or secondary characters of color.
More than one-fifth (21%) directly address issues of race and racism, and 22% include sexual content of varying kinds, including novels with some level of description of sexual experiences of teenagers; stories about teen pregnancy, sexual assault and abortion; and informational books about puberty, sex or relationships.
The report estimates that at least 40% of the bans listed on PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans are connected to proposed or enacted legislation or to political pressure from elected officials to restrict the teaching of certain concepts.
PEN America also found at least 50 groups involved in pushing for book bans, 73% of which have formed since last year. One of the largest is Moms for Liberty, a group advocating for parental rights, which lists more than 200 local chapters on its website.
Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, said teachers should value parents’ input.
“I mean, there’s not two sides to this issue,” Justice said in an interview on “CBS Saturday Morning.” “There are moms who love their kids, who don’t want pornography in school, and then there are people who do want pornography in school. I think that the book issue has been used to try to marginalize and vilify parents. And the truth is there is no place for pornography in public schools.”
The 50 groups identified by the report have been involved in at least half of the book bans enacted last year, and at least 20% of the bans can be directly linked to the actions of the groups, the report found.
The most frequently banned books were “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” by Maia Kobabe, followed by “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” by George M. Johnson, and “Out of Darkness,” by Ashley Hope Pérez, the report found.
Pérez said what’s striking about her book’s being banned in 24 school districts is that it was published in 2015 and wasn’t challenged until last year. She said that some right-wing groups have used words like “pornographic,” “inappropriate,” “controversial” and “divisive” to describe the banned books and that the books they describe are most often by or about nonwhite people and other minorities.
“The books are a pretext. It is a proxy war on students who share the marginalized identities of the authors and characters in the books under attack,” she said at Monday’s news conference. “It is a political strategy. The goal is to stir up right-wing political engagement by drawing still brighter lines around targeted identities.”
She said banning books harms students in a few ways. When a student shares a gender or sexual identity with a character in a book and that book is banned, it “sends the message that stories about people like them are not fit for school.”
By giving into their demands, schools give conservative groups an unearned legitimacy, she said.
“When school leaders cave to these pressures, they elevate the questionable judgment of a handful of parents over the professional discretion and training of librarians and educators and, above all, above the needs of students,” she said.
Though public support for pro-LGBTQ policies is at an all-time high, many queer people living in the South report that a caregiver tried to change their LGBTQ identity, a new survey found.
More than half, or about 58%, of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people living in 13 Southern states reported that a parent or caregiver tried to change or repress their sexual orientation or gender identity, according to a survey published this week by the Campaign for Southern Equality, which promotes LGBTQ equality across the South.
Some groups were more likely to report experiencing such efforts: More than two-thirds of transgender participants (68.7%) and participants of color (67.5%) reported experiencing these efforts, compared to 50.8% of cisgender participants and 57.4% of white participants. Younger LGBTQ Southerners, those ages 18-24, were also more likely to report that a caregiver tried to change or repress their identity (64.4%) compared to those 25 and older (51.1%).
The Campaign for Southern Equality partnered with Campus Pride, which advocates for LGBTQ inclusivity and safety at U.S. colleges and universities, to survey 4,146 LGBTQ Southerners in the fall of 2021. The new survey’s questions covered family, faith, education and health.
Austin H. Johnson, the director of the Campaign for Southern Equality’s Research & Policy Center and an assistant professor of sociology at Kenyon College, said in a statement that the dominant narrative emerging from the survey data “is that thousands of individuals throughout the South are not getting the social support they need and deserve at home, in schools, and in their communities.”
“This lack of support and inclusion is disempowering and may cause detrimental harm to their mental and physical wellbeing, especially when that lack of support gets compounded with clear, state-sponsored discrimination such as the passage of anti-LGBTQ laws,” he stated.
Among the other data, the survey found that more than two-thirds (68.82%) of respondents who identified as spiritual or religious reported that they were alienated or discouraged from participating in their faith community due to their LGBTQ identity.
More than one-third (33.9%) of all LGBTQ survey respondents reported experiencing efforts to repress or change their sexual orientation or gender identity in a religious setting, with participants ages 18-24 more likely to report such efforts (44.1%) compared to respondents 25 or older (30.7%).
The survey also asked LGBTQ Southerners about their physical and mental health. Most participants rated their physical health as fair (43.42%) or good (37.48%), though most also rated their mental health poor (28.7%) or fair (40.2%). More than half of LGBTQ Southerners surveyed (56%) reported experiencing suicidal ideation, and more than one in 10 (13.5%) reported attempting suicide at least once.
Shane L. Windmeyer, founder and executive director of Campus Pride, said in a statement that “it’s especially troubling that younger people are often perceiving and receiving less emotional, mental, and physical support and resources than older respondents.”
“Young LGBTQ+ people are being forced to conjure immense strength and resilience to combat marginalization and isolation — and it’s vital that we do everything we can, on every level of society, to support and affirm them for being who they are,” Windmeyer stated.
The survey recommends that educational institutions “take a proactive approach to inclusion” by having a clear mission statement against discrimination of LGBTQ students and by including queer students in school policies. It also recommends that schools create privacy policies that do not “out” LGBTQ students to their family or others without their knowledge and permission — a recommendation that contradicts guidance that some teachers say they have received due to new state laws.
“Considering both the findings of this report and the anti-LGBTQ sentiment among many school boards and decision makers across the South, it is clear that much of the harm experienced by younger LGBTQ individuals is in school,” the authors wrote in the report’s conclusion. “Regardless of the political and cultural attacks in the South, and the lack of protections from the institutions we rely on as Southerners, the LBGTQ community in the South is truly that — a community, one with an overwhelming amount of love, acceptance, joy, and beauty.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
In March of 1947, a Florida court ordered the Ha Ha Club — a nightclub famous for its “female impersonators,” as they were called at the time — to close after declaring it a public nuisance.
The order came just a month after Frank Tuppen, a juvenile probation officer with political ambitions, filed a complaint against the venue. He argued that the club’s performers were “sexual perverts” who had embedded “in the minds of the youngsters” who lived in the area “things immoral” and were “breaking down their character.”
The owner of the club, Charles “Babe” Baker, appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, but in October 1947, it affirmed the lower court’s decision that the club was a public nuisance. “Men impersonating women” in performances that are “nasty, suggestive and indecent” injure the “manners and morals of the people,” the court ruled.
Andrea Kinig at the Ha Ha Club in New York City. Herb Breuer / NY Daily News via Getty Images
Last month, nearly 75 later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who is widely thought to be eyeing a 2024 presidential run, cited the case that shut down Ha Ha Club in a complaint against Miami restaurant R House over its drag performances.
The 2022 complaint, filed by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, threatened to revoke R House’s liquor license, arguing that the establishment violated a state public nuisance law by becoming “manifestly injurious to the morals or manners of the people.”
Historians say the parallels between the R House and the Ha Ha Club complaints, and the fact that DeSantis’ administration cited a 75-year-old court decision, reveal how conservatives are resurfacing a decades-old moral panic about LGBTQ people to target queer spaces.
‘Seeding America with queer consciousness’
Baker first opened the Ha Ha Club in April 1933 in New York City’s Midtown Manhattan neighborhood, where it became “Broadway’s favorite hangout spot,” said Michail Takach, who researched the Ha Ha Club for a book he co-authored, “A History of Milwaukee Drag: Seven Generations of Glamour.”
Later that year, Baker traveled south and opened the club in Hallandale, Florida, about 13 miles north of R House, which is in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood. He opened the club toward the end of the so-called Pansy Craze, which was a time period when drag surged in popularity, particularly in cities, Takach said.
Same-sex sexual relations were illegal at the time in most states, and cross-dressing was criminalized in many cities, though Miami never officially had an anti-cross-dressing law on the books. As a result, Takach said clubs like the Ha Ha Club catered primarily to seemingly straight, cisgender audiences, because drag drew attention and could be a liability to club owners.
Dozens of men dressed as women were locked up on charges of masquerading and indecent exposure at the National Variety Artists’ Exotic Carnival and Ball held at the Manhattan Center in 1962. Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
However, Takach wrote in his book that female impersonator clubs offered gay and gender-nonconforming men that performed at these venues “a safe sanctuary where they could not only embrace their identities but make a name for themselves.”
In Baker’s court testimony, he described how he stood at the club’s door every night and greeted all of the guests. The club held three shows from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., with more than 40 performers who sang, danced and told jokes, according to court documents.
Baker featured some of the most famous female impersonators, including Jackie Maye, whose wardrobe was estimated at the time to have been worth $50,000, Takach said, which would be worth over $1 million in today’s dollars.
His production was also a traveling show, called the Ha Ha Revue, which was inspired by the Jewel Box Revue, a famous touring company of female impersonators — and the first racially integrated drag revue in the country — that operated from 1937 to about 1960, according to Takach’s drag history book.
The traveling version of the Ha Ha Club’s show and the Jewel Box Revue “really did a solid job of seeding America with queer consciousness,” Takach said. “And you have to wonder how much of that played into the gay liberation era — how many children that went to these shows, how many adults that watched these shows, were later part of the gay liberation scene.”
The shows brought queer representation to many cities across the U.S. at a time when gay people were being criminalized and also at a time when drag had fallen “violently out of favor,” Takach said.
“They brought it back in a big way and created a mid-century drag craze in the 1950s that, in some ways, is a parallel and a rival to the RuPaul drag craze of this decade,” he said.
‘A home of perverts, queers, phonies’
On Feb. 2, 1947, after operating his club in Hallandale for 14 years, Baker tried to stop a fight between two customers at the club and called the police. Both he and a customer were arrested for assault and battery, though Baker was never charged, according to court documents.
Just three days later, on Feb. 5, Tuppen — who was running for sheriff of Broward County in an upcoming election — filed his complaint against the club. He claimed multiple men he had arrested for having same-sex sexual relations said they frequented the Ha Ha Club.
James Lathero, the lawyer for the state, asked Tuppen what the general reputation of the Ha Ha Club is, and Tuppen said, “General knowledge, it is nothing but a home of perverts, queers, phonies.” Tuppen’s complaint also alleged that the venue had contributed to “juvenile delinquency” in the county that was “injurious to the manners and morals of the people” residing there.
Baker’s lawyers called more than half a dozen locals who testified that they enjoyed the club’s shows. Baker also testified that his cast had performed for a church and the Kiwanis Club and that it had raised money for the March of Dimes, a nonprofit organization that supports mothers and babies. He also denied that his club was associated with homosexuals and said there was no evidence of “crimes of perversion” at the club.
But the Broward County Circuit Court ultimately declared the Ha Ha Club a public nuisance and ordered it to close in the spring of 1947.
Baker appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, and one of his lawyer’s, Robert Lane, wrote in the appeal that there were no complaints against Baker’s club during its 14 years in business “until an aspirant for a political office decided to complain,” referring to Tuppen and his run for sheriff.
Lane also argued that “there are different views as to what may injure the manners and morals of the public.”
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Despite Baker’s efforts, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s decision in October 1947.
“The lawful evidence presents a dirty picture; the Ha Ha Club looks as if it were a cross between a ‘honky tonk’ and a ‘speak easy,’” wrote Justice William Terrell, who later went on to defend segregation after the Supreme Court struck it down in Brown v. Board of Education. He added that the lower court determined that the Ha Ha Club’s “major connotations were evil, that it was exerting a corrupting influence and that the time had arrived to abate it.”
The case against the Ha Ha Club happened at a time when public support for drag had waned, because law enforcement and media nationwide claimed that gay people were a danger to women and children, Takach said.
“There was a very strong reaction to the liberation that people had felt, and the visibility that gay and lesbian people and gender-nonconforming people had earned during the Pansy Craze,” he said. “It led to many cities creating drag bans, shutting down drag clubs, banning female impersonation completely — silencing the queer nightlife and the queer representation that had really flourished during the Pansy Craze in the early parts of the 1930s.”
‘A cultural panic moment’
Last month, the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation alleged in its complaint against R House that a “nearly nude dancer was filmed parading a young girl through the audience” on or about July 3 and that the video ignited public outrage.
Inquired about it during a news conference, DeSantis said the video prompted the department to investigate further, “and what they found was not only were there minors there — and these are sexually explicit drag shows — the bar had a children’s menu. And you think to yourself: ‘Give me a break, what’s going on?’”
People wait in line for a Drag Brunch at R House Wynwood on April 9, 2022 in Miami, Fla. Daniel A. Varela / Tribune News Service via Getty Images
The complaint threatened to revoke R House’s liquor license and cited the Ha Ha Club case, noting that the Florida Supreme Court recognized that “men impersonating women” in the context of “suggestive and indecent” performances can constitute a public nuisance.
R House’s ownership said in an emailed statement last month that it is aware of the complaint and that it is working with the department through its attorney to “rectify the situation.”
“We are an inclusive establishment and welcome all people to visit our restaurant,” the email said. “We are hopeful that Governor DeSantis, a vociferous supporter and champion of Florida’s hospitality industry and small businesses, will see this as what it is, a misunderstanding, and that the matter will be resolved positively and promptly.” Ownership has not returned an additional request for comment.
There are multiple parallels between the Ha Ha Club case and DeSantis’ complaint against R House, historians said, revealing a cultural cycle.
Just as there was a public backlash to increasing queer visibility after the Pansy Craze, historians said conservatives are now pushing back against LGBTQ people winning major rights such as same-sex marriage.
But unlike in decades past, those who oppose LGBTQ equality cannot “attack gay people per se, so the people they attack are actually trans people or trans youth or drag queens, and then only in connection with children,” said Michael Bronski, a professor of women and gender studies at Harvard University and author of “A Queer History of the United States for Young People.”
Bronski called the backlash against drag today part of a “cultural panic moment,” and Takach said it’s happened throughout history in the U.S.
“People get drawn in by the glamor, and it’s a novelty,” he said of drag, “and then something happens, and the entire community turns on it.”
Maxx Fenning, the president and founder of Prism, a nonprofit that works to expand access to LGBTQ-inclusive education in South Florida, said the complaint against R House, like the one filed against the Ha Ha Club 75 years ago, shows how laws related to “public morals” can be used to disproportionately censor LGBTQ people and topics.
“This Florida Supreme Court case noted that men impersonating women is not in and of itself a verifiable offense, but it’s doing it in an indecent fashion,” he said. “You see very often this use of vague and subjective language to be able to create laws and rulings that seem common sense, but have just enough vagueness to be applied in ways that unnecessarily silence the queer community.”
As for the Ha Ha Club, Babe Baker didn’t shut down his performance after the club was forced to close. In fact, he moved it to about a mile away, to a club called Leon & Eddie’s, a nightclub first opened in New York City by Leon Enker and Eddie Davis and later moved to Miami.
He also started advertising in a “curious” fashion, Takach said. He placed ads in the Miami Herald that prominently featured the word “gay” in phrases like “gay laughs,” “gay surprises,” “gay faces,” “gay music” and “gay dancing.” Even though gay wasn’t widely used at the time to refer to queer people, Takach said Baker chose the word intentionally.
Prior to opening the Ha Ha Club in New York, Baker worked at the Howdy Club, which Takach described as “an unapologetic lesbian bar” and one of the first places in Manhattan to hire lesbians as entertainers and allow women to gather and drink without male company. Takach said it was raided by police regularly, and that the word “howdy” became synonymous code for queer.
The word “gay” similarly became a code in Baker’s newspaper ads, and the Miami Daily News caught on in 1952, Takach said. The paper criticized the Miami Herald, its competitor, for running ads for clubs like Baker’s on one page and then condemning the clubs in the Herald’s editorials. “The words ‘gay,’ ‘ha ha’ and ‘howdy’ have become beacons pointing to the hands of the perverts,” the Miami Daily News wrote, according to Takach.
Baker’s cast performed four times a night at Leon & Eddie’s, and they also went on tour across the country, selling out weeks of shows in cities including Milwaukee; Detroit; Dayton, Ohio; Minneapolis; and Spokane, Washington, Takach said.
“You could say that Broward County won the battle, but Babe Baker won the war.”
Anti-LGBTQ hate surged onlinefollowing the passage of a Florida law thatlimits classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, a new report found.
This particular surge involves rhetoric implying that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people are “grooming” childrenand includes such slurs as “groomer,” “pedophile” and “predator” in relation to the LGBTQ community.
The month after the Florida Senate passed the Parental Rights in Education bill, or what critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, on March 8, tweets mentioning the LGBTQ community alongside these slurs increased 406%, according to the report, which was conducted by the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign and the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.
The law, which took effect July 1, bans instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity “in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
To evaluate the increase in rhetoric related to “grooming”, researchers collected a sample of 989,547 tweets that were posted between Jan. 1 and July 27 and that mentioned the LGBTQ community alongside words including “groomer” and “pedophile.” They found that an average of 6,607 tweets a day used such rhetoric in the month after the bill passed, a significant increase from 1,307 tweets the month before.
On March 28, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the bill into law, there was also a marked increase in the use of the “#OKGroomer” hashtag, which the report said was often used as a derogatory response to tweets from LGBTQ educators, organizations and health care providers, among others. On the day after DeSantis signed the bill, “OK groomer” tweets peaked with 9,219 total, or about one every nine seconds, the report found.
“Grooming” rhetoric was spread by a “small group of radical extremists as part of a coordinated and concerted effort to attack LGBTQ+ kids to rile up extreme members of their base,” the report said.
Tweets from just 10 people — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’ press secretary — were viewed an estimated 48 million times and were “responsible for driving” the “grooming” narrative, researchers found.
“We’re in the middle of a growing wave of hate and demonization targeting LGBTQ+ people — often distributed digitally by opportunistic politicians and so-called ‘influencers’ for personal gain,” Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said in a statement, according to a press release. “Online hate and lies reflect and reinforce offline violence and hate. The normalization of anti-LGBTQ+ narratives in digital spaces puts LGBTQ+ people in danger.”
In an emailed statement, Pushaw stressed that Florida’s new law affects those in “kindergarten through third grade.” However, critics of the law argue the language can be applied to those beyond grade 3.
“By definition, then, opponents of the law support adults talking to young children about sex and gender behind their parents’ backs. If you know a politically correct word for such behavior, I’ll gladly use it instead,” she said. “There are groomers of all sexual orientations and gender identities. My tweets did not mention LGBTQ people at all. Florida’s parental rights law likewise does not single out any identity or orientation.”
Pushaw added, “The only side playing into the hands of bigots, are the progressive activists who pretend that ‘grooming’ is somehow unique to the ‘LGBTQ community.’ It is not, and I do not understand why the Human Rights Campaign would want the public to think otherwise.”
A spokesperson for Greene did not answer questions about the report’s findings but encouraged NBC News to “be objective” and shared several links to the congresswoman’s Twitter posts and articles from the conservative news site Washington Examiner.
Boebert did not immediately return a request for comment.
Ahmed said Facebook and Twitter claim in their rules that they prohibit the use of “grooming” rhetoric to target LGBTQ people, but the report found that the platforms don’t always enforce those rules.
Researchers used Twitter’s “Report an issue” feature to report the 100 most-viewed tweets that used “grooming” rhetoric after July 21, when Twitter told the Daily Dot that calling transgender people “groomers” violates its policy against hateful conduct.
Twitter didn’t act on 99% of the 100 tweets, the report found.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Twitter confirmed that use of the term “groomer” is prohibited under the site’s policy when it is used as a descriptor “in the context of gender identity.” The spokesperson said Twitter remains committed to combating abuse motivated by hatred or intolerance.
Researchers identified a similar problem on Facebook, whose parent company, Meta, also told the Daily Dot that calling LGBTQ people “groomers” violates existing policy.
Researchers identified 59 paid ads on Facebook and Instagram that promote the narrative that the LGBTQ community and its allies are “grooming” children. After researchers reported them, Meta removed only one of the ads and has continued to accept and run other similar ads since, the report said.
The report also found that Meta profited off the ads. According to statistics from Meta’s Ad Library, the company accepted up to $24,987 in payment for the 59 ads, which received more than 2.1 million impressions, the report said.
“The clear message from social media giants is that they are willing to turn a blind eye,” Ahmed said. “LGTBQ+ rights have been transformed after decades of hard-won progress, but progress is fragile unless you continue to defend it.”
A Meta spokesperson said in an email, “We reviewed the ads flagged in the report and have taken action on any content that violates our policies.”
Joni Madison, interim president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement that the rise of online vitriol “doesn’t just have political implications — there are deadly, real world consequences as violent rhetoric leads to stigma, radicalization, and ultimately violence.”
The report provides recommendations to Facebook and Twitter, including that they hire, train and support moderators to remove hate and enforce their community standards, act on hashtags that fuel anti-LGBTQ hate, and be liable for harm when they fail to enforce their community standards.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf signed an executive order Tuesday to ban conversion therapy, a discredited form of therapy that seeks to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, for minors.
The executive order directs state agencies to discourage conversion therapy for people of all ages, and to instead promote evidence-based practices for supporting LGBTQ people. The order also directs the Department of Human Services, among other agencies, to ensure that state funds are not being used to provide or reimburse for conversion therapy.
“Conversion therapy is a traumatic practice based on junk science that actively harms the people it supposedly seeks to treat,” Wolf, a Democrat, said in a statement. “This discriminatory practice is widely rejected by medical and scientific professionals and has been proven to lead to worse mental health outcomes for LGBTQIA+ youth subjected to it. This is about keeping our children safe from bullying and extreme practices that harm them.”
Survivors of conversion therapy have said that it can include talk therapy and being urged to take on traditional gender roles. A 2020 United Nations report found that it can also include more extreme practices such as aversion therapy, which can involve administering electric shock or medication to induce nausea while exposing the patient to same-sex erotic images.
The executive order makes Pennsylvania the 26th state to at least partially bar the practice for minors, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank. Twenty other states and Washington, D.C., completely ban the practice, while five states partially ban conversion therapy for minors. A federal court has barred three states — Alabama, Georgia and Florida — from enforcing conversion therapy bans. The remaining 21 states have no law or policy on conversion therapy.
Mathew Shurka, a conversion therapy survivor and co-founder of Born Perfect, a national campaign to end conversion therapy, said Wolf is “taking a critical step to protect LGBTQ minors” in Pennsylvania.
“LGBTQ kids and their families are targeted by so-called therapists causing lifelong harm,” Shurka said in a statement. “This executive order demonstrates that our political offices have the power to protect our youth and it is their responsibility to do so.”
The governor’s executive order cited research that has found conversion therapy contributes to negative mental health outcomes among LGBTQ youth.
A national survey published in March by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, found that 13% of all LGBTQ respondents ages 13-24 reported being subjected to conversion therapy, and 83% of those reported being subjected to it before they turned 18. The number was higher for transgender and nonbinary young people, 18% of whom reported being subjected to conversion therapy.
A 2020 peer-reviewed study published by The Trevor Project in the American Journal of Public Health found that LGBTQ youth who experienced conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to report having attempted suicide than youth who had not experienced it, and more than 2.5 times as likely to report multiple suicide attempts in the past year.
“Taxpayers’ dollars must never again be spent on the dangerous and discredited practice of conversion ‘therapy’ — which has been consistently associated with increased suicide risk and an estimated $9.23 billion economic burden in the U.S.,” Troy Stevenson, senior campaign manager for advocacy and government affairs at The Trevor Project, said in a statement citing the research the group published in March.
He added, “We urge the state legislature to pass comprehensive state-wide protections and for governors across the nation to follow the Keystone State’s lead in ending this abusive practice.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
The study also found that the proportion of adolescents who were assigned female at birth and have come out as transgender also has not increased, which contradicts claims that adolescents whose birth sex is female are more susceptible to this so-called external influence.
“The hypothesis that transgender and gender diverse youth assigned female at birth identify as transgender due to social contagion does not hold up to scrutiny and should not be used to argue against the provision of gender-affirming medical care for adolescents,” study senior author Dr. Alex S. Keuroghlian, director of the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center at the Fenway Institute and the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Gender Identity Program, said in a statement.
The “social contagion” theory can be traced back to a 2018 paperpublished in the journal PLOS One. Dr. Lisa Littman, who at the time was a professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University, coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” which she described as adolescents experiencing a conflict between their birth sex and gender identity “suddenly during or after puberty.” These adolescents, she wrote, “would not have met the criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood” and are experiencing dysphoria due to social influence.
Littman also hypothesized that adolescents assigned female at birth are more likely to be affected by social contagion and, as a result, are overrepresented in groups of adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria when compared to those who were assigned male at birth.
After intense debate andcriticism, PLOS One conducted a post-publication reassessment of the article, and issued a correction that included changing the headline to clarify that Littman did not survey transgender or gender-diverse youth themselves, but actually surveyed their parents. The correction also noted that, “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is not a formal mental health diagnosis at this time.”
To test the social contagion theory, researchers used data from the 2017 and 2019 biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which collected gender identity data across 16 states from ages 12 to 18. In 2017, 2.4%, or 2,161 of the 91,937 adolescents surveyed, identified as trans or gender diverse. In 2019, that percentage dropped slightly to 1.6%, or 1,640 of 105,437 adolescents surveyed.
Researchers concluded that the decrease in the overall percentage of adolescents identifying as trans or gender diverse “is incongruent with the (rapid-onset gender dysphoria hypothesis) that posits social contagion.”
The study also found that the number of transgender adolescents who were assigned male at birth outnumbered those assigned female at birth in both 2017 and 2019, providing additional evidence against a “notion of social contagion with unique susceptibility” among those assigned female at birth.
The social contagion hypothesis, by assuming that youth are coming out, for example, because their friends are, asserts that there’s some social desirability to being trans. Some supporters of the theory, according to the study, also believe that more youth identify as trans or gender diverse because those identities are less stigmatized than cisgender sexual minority identities, or those who identify with their birth sex and are lesbian, bisexual, gay or queer, among other sexual identities.
To evaluate these claims, researchers examined rates of bullying among adolescents who identified as trans and gender diverse, and those who did not.
They found that, consistent with other surveys, trans and gender-diverse youth were significantly more likely to be victims of school bullying (at 38.7% in 2017 and 45.4% in 2019) compared to cisgender lesbian, gay and bisexual youth (at 30.5% in 2017 and 28.7% in 2019) and cisgender, heterosexual youth (at 17.1% in 2017 and 16.6% in 2019).
“The idea that attempts to flee sexual minority stigma drive teenagers to come out as transgender is absurd, especially to those of us who provide treatment to [transgender and gender diverse] youth,” study lead author Dr. Jack Turban, incoming assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a statement. “The damaging effects of these unfounded hypotheses in further stigmatizing transgender and gender diverse youth cannot be understated. We hope that clinicians, policymakers, journalists, and anyone else who contributes to health policy will review these findings.”
They wrote that despite the methodological flaws in Littman’s study, the concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria “has been used in recent legislative debates to argue for and subsequently enact policies that prohibit gender-affirming medical care” for trans and gender diverse adolescents.
An increasing number of states have also tried to ban or restrict trans youths’ access to gender-affirming medical care through legislation. The number of bills seeking to restrict gender-affirming health care for transgender youths has grown from one in 2018 to 36 this year, according to an analysis by NBC News. Governors in three states — Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee — have successfully signed such restrictions into law, though judges have prevented those measures from taking effect in Alabama and Arkansas.
The study lists several limitations, including that the data were collected through a school-based survey and, as a result, youths who don’t attend school were not represented. It also noted that youths were asked, “What is your sex?” and that response options were limited to female and male. It didn’t ask about respondents’ “sex assigned at birth” and didn’t include an additional question about their “gender identity,” which is an established research method for asking about gender identity. But the researchers creditedseveralstudies that found trans and gender-diverse youths are aware of the differences between their sex assigned at birth and gender identity.
A southwest Florida school district added warning labels to more than 100 books, many of which touch on issues related to race or the LGBTQ community.
Collier County Public Schools, a district that includes part of Naples, added the labels both on physical copies of the books and in Destiny, the district’s online catalog, according to the nonprofit Florida Freedom to Read Project. The top of the label, according to a photo shared with NBC News by Florida Freedom to Read Project, says “Advisory notice to parents” in capital letters.
An advisory notice to parents placed on over 100 books in public schools in Collier County, Fla.Courtesy Stephana Ferrell/Florida Freedom to Read Project
“This Advisory Notice shall serve to inform you that this book has been identified by some community members as unsuitable for students,” the label states. “This book will also be identified in the Destiny system with the same notation. The decision as to whether this book is suitable or unsuitable shall be the decision of the parent(s) who has the right to oversee his/her child’s education consistent with state law.”A sticker of the notice is on the front inside cover of the books, according to Stephana Ferrell, co-founder of the Florida Freedom to Read Project, which advocates against censorship in Florida schools. Ferrell said a media specialist in the school district shared photos of the labels with her in June.
After a series of public records requests about the labels, challenged books and the district’s creation of a committee that reviews school materials, Ferrell said she received a phone call from Elizabeth Alves, associate superintendent of teaching and learning for Collier County Public Schools.
Ferrell said Alves told her the district began adding the labels in February, after the district’s legal representative spoke with the Florida Citizens Alliance, a conservative group that last year issued a “Porn in Schools Report.” The report included a list of books that “promote gender self-identification and same-sex marriage” as well as titles that include “indecent and offensive material,” according to the group.
Alves defended the decision as “a compromise,” Ferrell said.
“I said, ‘It’s unfortunate, because this is a literary work. The sticker that they chose to put on there, the language that they chose, would make any reader who would otherwise pick up the book based on the cover and the description, it would make them think twice about reading the book,’” Ferrell said of her response to Alves.
Chad Oliver, a spokesman for Collier County Public Schools, confirmed that Alves spoke to Ferrell but denied that the warning labels were added in response to a conversation with the Florida Citizens Alliance.
“Based upon advice from the General Counsel, we placed advisory notices on books about which parents and community members had expressed concern and in accordance with the recently passed Parents’ Bill of Rights Law (HB 241),” Oliver said in an email, referring to a state law that allows parents to object to instructional materials.
A total of 110 books feature the advisory labels, according to PEN America, a nonprofit group that promotes free speech. This list, which PEN America shared with NBC News, has significant overlap with a list of at least 112 books that the Florida Citizens Alliance inquired about in a Dec. 11 email sent to Collier County Public Schools. Ferrell, who obtained the email through a public records request, shared a copy with NBC News.
Keith Flaugh, CEO and co-founder of the Florida Citizens Alliance, confirmed his group submitted a public records request about 112 novels in the district.
“Many of these contain sexually explicit and age inappropriate content,” which he said in an email is in direct violation of Florida laws on obscenity and the sale of harmful materials to minors. He also citeda 2017 law that the group helped draft that allows parents and any residents of the state to object to instructional materials and provide evidence for why they believe the material is inappropriate.
“Gender Queer” by Maia KobabeOni Press
Some of the titles that appear on both lists — and now have an “advisory notice to parents” warning label in Collier County Public Schools — include LGBTQ- and race-related books that have landed on banned-book lists across the country. These titles include “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe, “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson, and “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You” by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. The list also includes literary classics like “Beloved” by Toni Morrison and “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou.
Also included is the popular children’s book “Everywhere Babies,” a rhyming, illustrated book about what babies do. The illustrations include what could be interpreted as a few same-sex couples, but they are never identified as such in the text. The book first landed on a banned-book list in Walton County, Florida, in the spring, after the Florida Citizens Alliance included it in its 2021 “Porn in Schools Report.”
“It’s a really good example of just how extreme this is getting,” Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education programs at PEN America, said in a phone interview. Some of the images in the book are “assumed to be gay,” he added, and as a result some critics think they require a warning.
“These warning labels are like something you might see on a cigarette package,” Friedman said. “They’re treating it like a controlled, alarming substance. This is literature for young people.”
Oliver said none of the books were removed from the district’s media centers and that parents were made aware of the labels in a districtwide email prior to spring break.
He added that the district is “very mindful and concerned with protecting the rights of all students and employees.”
“At no time were the members of the LGBTQ community a focus of the district’s review,” Oliver said. “Whether we are following new State laws or responding to concerns from community members, Collier County Public Schools is mindful of both U.S. Supreme Court precedent based upon the First Amendment principals, Fourteenth Amendment equal protection principles, and Florida Civil Rights Law.”
The Florida Citizens Alliance supported the Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law by LGBTQ advocates, which bans instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity “in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
Ferrell, a mom of two kids in Orange County Public Schools, said she’s worried about the message the label will send to parents about books that their child might love. For example, she said her son loves the series “The Bad Guys,” by Aaron Blabey, which has been challenged in Florida.
She added that the sticker doesn’t include a disclosure that it was placed there at the request of the parents and community members, and, as a result, it sends the message that the district agrees with the sticker’s sentiment.
“Now, I cannot go in there and make a decision for myself without seeing somebody else’s opinion on this book,” Ferrell said.
Oklahoma public schools have started requiring students from kindergarten to college to complete “biological sex affidavits” if they want to compete in school sports, in accordance with a state law that took effect earlier this year.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill in March that bans transgender student athletes in public elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and colleges from competing on the sports teams of their gender identity as opposed to their sex assigned at birth.
A photo of an affidavit required by Woodall Public Schools went viral Wednesday after Erin Matson, executive director of abortion rights group Reproaction, shared it on Twitter.
“This has nothing to do with encouraging girls to be athletes,” Matson wrote. “This is totalitarianism. It is the white nationalist agenda. The anti-LGBTQ agenda. The anti-abortion agenda. It is all the same agenda.”
The address on the affidavit matches Woodall Elementary School in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, about an hour southeast of Tulsa.
Ginger Knight, superintendent at Woodall Public Schools, confirmed via email that the district is required by state law to have students complete the form if they want to participate in athletics, but Knight had no additional comment.
After the governor signed the bill in March, Oklahoma was the 13th state nationwide to enact such a bill. Now, 18 states have enacted similar measures.
Nearly all of those states designate sports teams by sex assigned at birth as determined by the student’s birth certificate issued at or near the time of their birth.
Oklahoma is the only state so far to require an affidavit to prove a student’s assigned sex. If a student is under 18, the affidavit can be completed by a legal guardian or parent. Once a student reaches 18, they have to sign the affidavit themselves. The law requires that a new affidavit be completed ahead of every school year.
Two other states can require an affidavit or sworn statements in some cases.
In Kentucky, for example, a student’s assigned sex can be determined by their “original, unedited birth certificate” or via an affidavit “signed and sworn to by the physician, physician assistant, advanced practice registered nurse, or chiropractor under penalty of perjury.”
Under Idaho‘s law, which a judge blocked in August 2020, a student’s sex can be disputed. If that happens, the school can request that the student provide a form from their health care provider to “verify the student’s biological sex… as part of a routine sports physical examination relying only on one (1) or more of the following: the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.”
Proponents of trans athlete bans argue that they help ensure fairness for cisgender female athletes, while LGBTQ rights advocates say the measures violate the civil rights of trans people.
Some LGBTQ people on Twitter condemned Woodall Public Schools’ affidavits.
“With a notary requirement — this is not ONLY incredibly transphobic, but is going to have the impact of preventing lower socioeconomic status kids from participating,” one person wrote.
Another person wrote that requiring “notarized affidavits attesting to the genital composition of individual elementary schoolers is a disgusting invasion of privacy and is predatory and discriminatory.”
The Education Department issued guidance last year that said it will interpret Title IX, a federal law that protects students from sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools, to protect LGBTQ students from discrimination.
At the time, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona told ESPN that he understands concerns about fairness in sports, “but we do have a responsibility to protect the civil rights of students, and if we feel the civil rights are being violated, we will act.”
The Biden administration’s Title IX directive is on hold after a federal judge in Tennessee blocked it earlier this month, ruling that it would make it impossible for some states to enforce their own laws on transgender athlete participation and use of restrooms.
South Carolina became the seventh state last month to permit health care providers to decline to serve people if they feel doing so would violate their religious beliefs.
As a result, more than 1 in 8 LGBTQ people now live in states where doctors, nurses and other health care professionals can legally refuse to treat them, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank. In addition to South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Ohio and Illinois have similar measures in effect.
“The conflict between patient needs and religious directives has been a serious problem in the past, and I don’t see any sign of that issue being resolved quickly and easily.”
JENNY PIZER, LAMBDA LEGAL
Advocates and legal experts say the laws will further raise the barriers to health care for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer patients.
“We often are worried that the expansion of religious rights in these contexts will be taken as a license to discriminate,” said Jenny Pizer, the law and policy director for the LGBTQ legal advocacy group Lambda Legal.
Proponents of such legislation, however, say the measures don’t allow providers to discriminate against or target LGBTQ people.
South Carolina state Sen. Larry Grooms, who supported his state’s law, the Medical Ethics and Diversity Act, told NPR in June that “it’s based on procedure, not on patients.”
“This is America, where you should have the freedom to say no to something you don’t believe in,” he told NPR.
Although “religious freedom” or “conscience” measures, as they’re often called, don’t explicitly list LGBTQ people among those who may be refused treatment, advocates say that in practice they are affected disproportionately.
Ivy Hill, the community health program director for the Campaign for Southern Equality, which promotes LGBTQ equality across the South, said transgender people are among those who will be the most negatively affected.
“When we have laws in place that make it easier for providers to discriminate, of course it’s not going to do anything but make it worse,” said Hill, who uses gender-neutral pronouns. “The people who are already on the margins of the margins are going to be the ones who are most deeply impacted by stuff like this.”
Even before the new law went into effect,they said, many trans people they work with in South Carolina struggled to find gender-affirming health care providers in the state willing to help them gain access to hormone therapy, leading some of them to travel to North Carolina to get care.
Hill said doctors usually don’t tell trans people that they won’t treat them for religious reasons, which makes it hard to know how often it happens. Research has found that LGBTQ people, particularly transgender people, are more likely to face medical discrimination.
A study published in 2019 found that 16 percent of LGBTQ adults, or about 1 in 6, reported experiencing discrimination in health care settings. A 2020 survey from the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, found that 16 percent of LGBTQ people, including 40 percent of transgender respondents, reported postponing or avoiding preventive screenings because of discrimination.
Maggie Trisler, who works in tech, said she had a great relationship with her primary care provider in Memphis, Tennessee, for about a year and a half in 2016 and 2017. He asked her in-depth questions about her health and the band she plays in, and he said he was going to take his wife to see her play.
Then, in March 2017, Trisler came out to him as transgender, and she said he suddenly became very cold and told her he doesn’t “know anything about the standards of care” for transgender people. He began to blame pain she was having on her weight, she said.
“It suddenly went from the best doctor-patient relationship I’ve ever had to just the absolute least helpful, most frustrating that I’ve had,” she said.
Three months later, Trisler said, the doctor effectively — although not explicitly — told her he couldn’t see her anymore.
“He did say that he was deeply uncomfortable treating me with [hormone replacement therapy], he wasn’t comfortable providing HRT, and if I was seeking that elsewhere, then maybe I should seek medical care elsewhere,” she said.
Trisler added that she was lucky to have good insurance and that it was easy for her to change doctors, although she acknowledged that she is “coming from a rather privileged position” and that what was just a nuisance for her could have been a “critical roadblock” for others.
While LGBTQ people have long faced barriers to health care because of religious refusals, Pizer said, such religious objections can violate both state and federal law in some cases.
Pizer pointed to a 2005 case in which the North Coast Women’s Medical Care Group in Southern California denied infertility treatments to her client Guadalupe “Lupita” Benitez because she is a lesbian. The providers argued that it was within their religious rights to refuse to offer treatment to Benitez, but the California Supreme Court decided that religious rights protected under California law don’t excuse violations of the state’s nondiscrimination law.
The court found that when doctors are “practicing in a particular field and offering services generally, according to patient needs in their field, they can’t pick and choose among patients in ways that violate the nondiscrimination law,” Pizer said.
Pizer said the problem with laws like South Carolina’s Medical Ethics and Diversity Act is that they use broad language that doesn’t give examples of situations in which a religious objection in medicine would violate medical standards or federal law. Many hospitals, including some that are religiously affiliated, receive federal funding. As a result, if they were to provide fertility treatments to heterosexual people and not to LGBTQ people, they would violate Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which the Biden administration hopes to strengthen to better protect access to abortion and gender-affirming services.
Pizer said the issue is becoming more prominent and contentious as Catholic-affiliated institutions control an increasing proportion of the U.S. hospital system. As NBC News reported recently, more than 1 in 7 U.S. hospital patients are cared for in Catholic facilities.
“The conflict between patient needs and religious directives has been a serious problem in the past, and I don’t see any sign of that issue being resolved quickly and easily,” Pizer said. “A hospital that’s operating in a community to serve the community more broadly should not be imposing their religious beliefs on people that are not part of that faith or that are at the hospital for medical services, not religious services.”
