Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday he did not “recognize LGBT” and vowed to combat “perverse” trends which he said aimed to destroy the institution of family in the country.
Turkey’s government, led by Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted AK Party, has toughened its stance on LGBTQ freedoms in recent months, particularly while campaigning for this year’s elections in May.
Homosexuality is not a crime in Turkey, but hostility to it is widespread, and police crackdowns on Pride parades have become tougher over the years.
Speaking at an AK Party congress in Ankara, Erdogan, who has frequently labeled members of the LGBTQ community as “deviants,” said neither his party, nor their nationalist MHP allies, recognized the LGBTQ community.
“We do not recognize LGBT. Whoever recognizes LGBT can go and march with them. We are members of a structure that holds the institution of family solid, that strongly embraces the family institution,” he said.
“We will dry the roots of sneaky acts aiming to destroy our family institution by supporting perverse political, social and individual trends,” he told tens of thousands of flag-waving and chanting supporters.
After the United Nations General Assembly in New York last month, Erdogan complained that he was uncomfortable with the use of what he described as “LGBT colors” at the U.N., which at the time was decorated with bright colors promoting the Sustainable Development Goals.
On the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington this summer, a few Black queer advocates spoke passionately before the main program about the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ rights. As some of them got up to speak, the crowd was still noticeably small.
Hope Giselle, a speaker who is Black and trans, said she felt the event’s programming echoed the historical marginalization and erasure of Black queer activists in the Civil Rights Movement. However, she was buoyed by the fact that prominent speakers drew attention to recent efforts to turn back the clock on LGBTQ rights, like the attacks on gender-affirming care for minors.
And despite valid concerns around the visibility of Black queer advocates in activist movements, progress is being made in elected office. This month, Sen. Laphonza Butler made history as the first Black and openly lesbian senator in Congress, when California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed her to fill the seat held by the late Dianne Feinstein.
Rectifying the erasure of Black queer civil rights giants requires a full-throated acknowledgment of their legacies, and an increase of Black LGBTQ representation in advocacy and politics, several activists and lawmakers told The Associated Press.
“One of the things that I need for people to understand is that the Black queer community is still Black,” and face anti-Black racism as well as homophobia and transphobia, said Giselle, communications director for the GSA Network, a nonprofit that helps students form gay-straight alliance clubs in schools.
“On top of being Black and queer, we have to also then distinguish what it means to be queer in a world that thinks that queerness is adjacent to whiteness — and that queerness saves you from racism. It does not,” she said.
In an interview with the AP, Butler said she hopes that her appointment points toward progress in the larger cause of representation.
“It’s too early to tell. But what I know is that history will be recorded in our National Archives, the representation that I bring to the United States Senate,” she said last week. “I am not shy or bashful about who I am and who my family is. So, my hope is that I have lived out loud enough to overcome the tactics of today.”
“But we don’t know yet what the tactics of erasure are for tomorrow,” Butler said.
Butler is a bellwether of increased visibility of queer communities in politics in recent years. In fact Black LGBTQ political representation has grown by 186% since 2019, according to a 2023 report by the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute. That included the election of now-former New York Representatives Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres, who were the first openly gay Black and Afro-Latino congressmen after the 2020 election, as well as former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
These leaders stand on the shoulders of civil rights heroes such as Bayard Rustin, Pauli Murray, and Audre Lorde. In accounts of their contributions to the Civil Rights and feminist movements, their Blackness is typically amplified while their queer identities are often minimized or even erased, said David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, a LGBTQ civil rights group.
Rustin, who was an adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a pivotal architect of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, is a glaring example. The march he helped lead tilled the ground for the passage of federal civil rights and voting rights legislation in the next few years.
But the fact that he was gay is often reduced to a footnote rather than treated as a key part of his involvement, Johns said.
“We need to teach our public school students history, herstory, our beautifully diverse ways of being, without censorship,” he said.
An upcoming biopic of Rustin’s life will undoubtedly help thrust the topic of Black LGBTQ political representation into the public conversation, said Shay Franco-Clausen, a commissioner of Alameda County in California.
“I didn’t even learn about those same leaders, Black leaders, Black queer leaders until I got to college,” she said.
The film, titled “Rustin,” debuts in select theaters Nov. 3 and Netflix on Nov. 17.
Some believe the erasure of Black LGBTQ leaders stems from respectability politics, a strategy in some marginalized communities of ostracizing or punishing members who don’t assimilate into the dominant culture.
White supremacist ideology in Christianity, which has been used more broadly to justify racism and systemic oppression, has also promoted the erasure of Black queer history. The Black Christian church was integral to the success of the Civil Rights Movement, but it is also “theologically hostile” to LGBTQ communities, said Don Abram, executive director of Pride in the Pews.
“I think it’s the co-optation of religious practices by white supremacists to actually subjugate Black, queer, and trans folk,” Abram said. “They are largely using moralistic language, theological language, religious language to justify them oppressing queer and trans folk.”
Not all queer advocacy communities have been welcoming to Black LGBTQ voices. Minneapolis City Council President Andrea Jenkins said she is just as intentional in amplifying queer visibility in Black spaces as she is amplifying Blackness in majority white, queer spaces.
“We need to have more Black, queer, transgender, nonconforming identified people in these political spaces to aid and bridge those gaps,” Jenkins said. “It’s important to be able to create the kinds of awareness on both sides of the issue that can bring people together and that can ensure that we do have full participation from our community.”
Black LGBTQ leaders are also using their platforms to create awareness about groundbreaking historical figures, especially Rustin. Maryland Delegate Gabriel Acevero and several LGBTQ advocates fought to get the only elementary school in his district named after Rustin in 2018. He has also urged Congress to pass legislation to create a U.S. Postal Service stamp depicting Rustin.
“Black queer folks have contributed to so many movements that we do not get acknowledgment for,” Acevero said. “And this is why we should not only ensure that our elders get their flowers, but we should push to have their names and statues built … so that they are not forgotten.”
Nebraska is requiring transgender youth seeking transition-related care to wait seven days to start puberty blocking medications or hormone treatments under emergency regulations announced Sunday by the state health department.
The regulations also require transgender minors to undergo at least 40 hours of “gender-identity-focused” therapy that are “clinically neutral” before receiving any medical treatments meant to affirm their gender identities. A new law that took effect Sunday bans transition-related surgeries for trans youth under 19 and also required the state’s chief medical officer to spell out when and how those youth can receive other care.
The state Department of Health and Human Services announcement that Republican Gov. Jim Pillen had approved the emergency regulations came after families, doctors and even lawmakers said they had largely gotten no response from the department on when the regulations would be in place. They worried that Pillen’s administration was slow-walking them to block treatments for transgender youth who hadn’t already started them.
“The law went into effect today, which is when the emergency regulations were put in place,” department spokesperson Jeff Powell said in an email Sunday to The Associated Press. “Nothing was slow-walked.”
The new regulations remain in effect while the department takes public comments on a permanent set of rules. The agency said it plans to release a proposed final version by the end of October and then have a public hearing on Nov. 28 in Lincoln, the state capital.
Grant Friedman, a legal fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska, said it’s helpful to have the rules in place so that new transgender patients can get care. However, he said, medical professionals already follow international standards for treating trans youth, making the Legislature’s intervention unnecessary.
“These are decisions to be made between patients, parents, providers,” he said after a transgender rights rally Sunday at the Nebraska State Capitol.
Nebraska’s ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors and its restrictions on other gender-affirming care were part of a wave of measures rolling back transgender rights in Republican-controlled statehouse across the U.S.
At least 22 states have enacted laws restricting or banning transition-related medical care for transgender minors, and most of those states face lawsuits. An Arkansas ban mirroring Nebraska’s was struck down by a federal judge in June as unconstitutional and will be appealed to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court, which also handles Nebraska cases.
During the signing ceremony for the new Nebraska law, Pillen suggested that children and their parents who seek gender-affirming treatment are being “duped,” adding, “that is absolutely Lucifer at its finest.” The state’s chief medical officer, Dr. Timothy Tesmer, is a Pillen appointee.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends gender-affirming care for people under 18, citing an increased risk of suicide for transgender teens.
Nebraska’s new regulations require that a patient’s parents or legal guardians be involved in any treatment, including the 40 required hours of therapy. It also requires at least one hour of therapy every three months after that care starts “to evaluate ongoing effects on a patient’s mental health.”
The seven-day waiting period for puberty blockers or hormone treatments would start when a doctor receives a signed consent form from a parent or legal guardian. Patients who are emancipated minors also could sign off on their own.
The department said in an online document meant to answer frequently asked questions that the waiting period would give patients and their families “enough time to weigh the risks and benefits of treatment.” Friedman said it’s not yet clear what the practical effect will be on patients getting care.
The same state health department document says that the required 40 hours of therapy would allow doctors “to develop a thorough understanding of a patient’s needs.”
But Friedman said the requirement is problematic because of a lack of mental health providers able to provide the therapy.
“It just adds an additional barrier to existing care barriers that already exist in our health care system,” he said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Monday to ban school boards from rejecting textbooks based on their teachings about the contributions of people from different racial backgrounds, sexual orientations and gender identities.
Newsom called the measure “long overdue.”
“From Temecula to Tallahassee, fringe ideologues across the country are attempting to whitewash history and ban books from schools,” Newsom said in a statement. “With this new law, we’re cementing California’s role as the true freedom state: a place where families — not political fanatics — have the freedom to decide what’s right for them.”
The bill takes effect immediately.
The topic of banning and censoring books has become a U.S. political flashpoint, cropping up in statesaround the country. Many of the new restrictions enacted by conservative-dominated school boards have been over textbook representations of sexuality and LGBTQ history.
The California bill garnered heightened attention when a Southern California school board this summer rejected a social studies curriculum for elementary students that had supplementary material teaching about Harvey Milk, who was a San Francisco politician and gay rights advocate.
A 2011 state law requires schools to teach students about the historical contributions of gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.
Newsom threatened the school board with a $1.5 million fine and the board later voted to approve a modified curriculum for elementary students that met state requirements.
The new legislation bars school boards from banning instructional materials or library books because they provide “ inclusive and diverse perspectives in compliance with state law,” according to a press release from Newsom’s office.
The bill cleared the state Legislature after intense debates about what role the state should have in curricula approved by local districts and how lawmakers can make sure students are exposed to diverse and accurate portrayals of history.
Democrats in the Assembly Public Safety Committee blocked the proposal earlier this year. Some lawmakers initially opposed it because they were concerned it could inadvertently punish victims of child trafficking.
After it was blocked, Newsom weighed in with his disapproval of the bill’s failure to advance, and lawmakers revived it. Republican state Sen. Shannon Grove, who authored the bill, later amended the bill to protect victims from being criminalized.
A Montana law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors is temporarily blocked, a state judge ruled Wednesday, just four days before it was to take effect.
District Court Judge Jason Marks agreed with transgender youth, their families and healthcare providers that a law passed by the 2023 Montana Legislature is likely unconstitutional and would harm the mental and physical health of minors with gender dysphoria.
The preliminary injunction blocking the law will remain in effect until a full trial can be held on the issue, but Marks has said he expects his decision will be appealed to the Montana Supreme Court.
“Today’s ruling permits our clients to breath a sigh of relief,” Akilah Deernose, executive director of the ACLU of Montana, said in a statement. “But this fight is far from over. We look forward to vindicating our clients’ constitutional rights and ensuring that this hateful law never takes effect.”
Montana is one of at least 22 states that have enacted bans on gender-affirming medical care for minors and most face lawsuits. Some bans have been temporarily blocked by courts, while others have been allowed to take effect.
All the laws ban gender-affirming surgery for minors. Such procedures are rare, with fewer than 3,700 performed in the U.S. on patients ages 12 to 18 from 2016 through 2019, according to a study published last month. It’s not clear how many of those patients were 18 when they underwent surgery.
In Montana’s case, transgender youth argued the law would ban them from continuing to receive gender-affirming medical care, violating their constitutional rights to equal protection, the right to seek health and the right to dignity.
Their parents said the law would violate their constitutional rights to make medical decisions for their children and two medical providers said it would prevent them from providing effective and necessary care to their patients.
“Montana’s ban is a direct assault on the freedom and well-being of transgender youth, their families, and their medical providers,” Malita Picasso, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberty Union, said in a recent statement.
The law sought to prohibit the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria, while still allowing cisgender minors to receive puberty blockers to treat early puberty or surgical procedures to treat intersex conditions.
Allowing the ban to take effect would cause irreparable harm to transgender minors who are receiving treatment, in part by exacerbating the anxiety and depression they feel because their body is incongruent with their gender identity, Picasso argued during a Sept. 18 hearing for the preliminary injunction.
The state countered that beginning the treatments put transgender children on a “path of no return.”
“A child cannot possibly consent to the treatment that permanently and irreversibly changes secondary sex characteristics, nor can a child consent to future infertility and sterilization, future sexual dysfunction and a lifetime of hormone treatments and other forms of medicalization and resulting complications,” Assistant Attorney General Russell argued.
As Republican-led states have rushed to ban gender-affirming care for minors, some families with transgender children found a bit of solace: At least they lived in states that would allow those already receiving puberty blockers or hormone therapy to continue.
But in some places, including Missouri and North Dakota, the care has abruptly been halted because medical providers are wary of harsh liability provisions in those same laws — one of multiple reasons that advocates say care has become harder to access even where it remains legal.
“It was a completely crushing blow,” said Becky Hormuth, whose 16-year-old son was receiving treatment from the Washington University Gender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital until it stopped the care for minors this month. Hormuth cried. Her son cried, too.
“There was some anger there, not towards the doctors, not toward Wash U. Our anger is towards the politicians,” she said. “They don’t see our children. They say the health care is harmful. They don’t know how much it helps my child.”
Since last year, conservative lawmakers and governors have prioritized restricting access to transgender care under the name of protecting children. At least 22 states have now enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. Most of the bans face legal challenges and enforcement on some of them has been put on hold by courts.
All the laws ban gender-affirming surgery for minors, although it is rare, with fewer than 3,700 performed in the U.S. on patients ages 12 to 18 from 2016 through 2019, according to a study published last month. It’s not clear how many of those patients were 18 when they received the surgeries.
There’s more variation, though, in how states handle puberty-blockers and hormone treatments under the new bans. Georgia’s law does not ban those for minors. The others do. But some states, including North Carolina and Utah, allow young people taking them already to continue. Others require the treatments to be phased out over time.
These treatments are accepted by major medical groups as evidence-based care that transgender people should be able to access.
James Thurow said the treatment at the Washington University center changed everything for his stepson, a 17-year-old junior at a suburban St. Louis high school who is earning As and Bs instead of his past Cs, has a girlfriend and a close group of friends.
“His depression, his anxiety had pretty much dissipated because he was receiving the gender-affirming care,” Thurow said. “He’s doing the best he’s ever done at school. His teachers were blown away at how quickly his grades shot up.”
For its part, the center said in a statement that it was “disheartened” to have to stop the care. Its decision followed a similar one from University of Missouri Health Care, where the treatment for minors stopped Aug. 28, the same day the law took effect.
Becky Hormuth holds boxes containing testosterone in Wentzville, Mo., on Sept. 20, 2023. Jeff Roberson / AP
Both blamed a section of the law that increased the liability for providers. Under it, patients can sue for injury from the treatment until they turn 36, or even longer if the harm continues past then. The law gives the health care provider the burden of proving that the harm was not the result of hormones or puberty-blocking drugs. And the minimum damages awarded in such cases would be $500,000.
Neither state Sen. Mike Moon, the Republican who was the prime sponsor of the Missouri ban, state Sen. Justin Brown nor state Rep. Dale Wright, whose committees advanced the measure, responded immediately to questions left Thursday by voicemail, email or phone message about the law’s intent.
In North Dakota, the law allows treatment to continue for minors who were receiving care before the law took effect in April. But it does not allow a doctor to switch the patient to a different gender dysphoria-related medication. And it allows patients to sue over injuries from treatment until they turn 48.
Providers there have simply stopped gender-affirming care, said Brittany Stewart, a lawyer at Gender Justice, which is suing over the ban in the state. “To protect themselves from criminal liability, they’ve just decided to not even risk it because that vague law doesn’t give them enough detail to understand exactly what they can and cannot do,” Stewart said.
Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, the executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, said it’s not just liability clauses that have caused providers to stop treatment.
Across the South, where most states have adopted bans on gender-affirming care for minors, she said she’s heard of psychologists who wrongly believe the ban applies to them and pharmacists who stop filling orders for hormones for minors, even in places where the laws are on hold because of court orders.
“It’s hard to overstate the level of kind of chaos and stress and confusion it’s causing on the ground,” she said, “particularly … for people who live in more rural communities or places where even before a law went into effect, it still took quite a bit of effort to get this care.”
Her organization is providing grants and navigation services to help children get treatment in states where it’s legal and available. That system is similar to networks that are helping women in states where abortion is not banned get care.
But there’s one key difference: gender-affirming care is ongoing.
For 12-year-old Tate Dolney in Fargo, North Dakota, continuing care means traveling to neighboring Minnesota for medical appointments. “It’s not right and it’s not fair,” his mother, Devon Dolney, said at a news conference this month, “that our own state government is making us feel like we have to choose between the health and well-being of our child and our home.”
Hormuth’s son is on the waiting list for a clinic in Chicago, at least a five-hour drive away, but is looking at other options, too. Hormuth, a teacher, has asked also her principal to write a recommendation in case the family decides to move to another state.
“Should we have to leave?” she asked. “No one should have to have a plan to move out of state just because their kid needs to get the health care they need.”
In the meantime, the family did what many have: saving leftover testosterone from vials. They have enough doses stockpiled to last a year.
Several Catholic priests held a ceremony blessing same-sex couples outside Cologne Cathedral on Wednesday night in a protest against the city’s conservative archbishop, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki.
Their protest was triggered by Cologne church officials’ criticism of a priest from Mettmann, a town near Duesseldorf, who in March had held a “blessing ceremony for lovers” — including same-sex couples.
Officials from the Cologne archdiocese, which Mettmann belongs to, had reprimanded the priest afterward and stressed that the Vatican doesn’t allow blessings of same-sex couples, German news agency dpa reported.
The blessing of same-sex couples on Wednesday was the latest sign of rebellion of progressive believers in Germany’s most populous diocese with about 1.8 million members.
Several hundred people showed up for the outdoor blessing service for same-sex and also heterosexual couples. Waving rainbow flags, they sang the Beatles hit “All You Need Is Love,” dpa reported. A total of about 30 couples were blessed.
The German government’s LGBTQ commissioner called the service an important symbol for the demand to recognize and accept same-sex couples in the Roman Catholic Church.
“It is mainly thanks to the church’s grassroots that the church is opening up more and more,” Sven Lehmann said, according to dpa. “Archbishop Woelki and the Vatican, on the other hand, are light years behind social reality.”
Catholic believers in the Cologne archdiocese have long protested their deeply divisive archbishop and have been leaving in droves over allegations that he may have covered up clergy sexual abuse reports.
The crisis of confidence began in 2020, when Woelki, citing legal concerns, kept under wraps a report he commissioned on how local church officials reacted when priests were accused of sexual abuse. That infuriated many Cologne Catholics. A second report, published in March 2021, found 75 cases in which high-ranking officials neglected their duties.
The report absolved Woelki of any neglect of his legal duty with respect to abuse victims. He subsequently said he made mistakes in past cases involving sexual abuse allegations, but insisted he had no intention of resigning.
Two papal envoys were dispatched to Cologne a few months later to investigate possible mistakes by senior officials in handling cases. Their report led Pope Francis to give Woelki a “spiritual timeout ” of several months for making major communication errors.
In March 2022, after his return from the timeout, the cardinal submitted an offer to resign, but so far Francis hasn’t acted on it.
Germany’s many progressive Catholics have also been at odds with the Vatican for a long time.
Several years ago, Germany’s Catholic Church launched a reform process with the country’s influential lay group to respond to the clergy sexual abuse scandals, after a report in 2018 found at least 3,677 people were abused by clergy between 1946 and 2014. The report found that the crimes were systematically covered up by church leaders and that there were structural problems in the way power was exercised that “favored sexual abuse of minors or made preventing it more difficult.”
The Vatican, however, has tried to put the brakes on the German church’s controversial reform process, fearing proposals concerning gay people, women and sexual morals will split the church.
On Wednesday night, just across from the hundreds of believers celebrating the blessings of same-sex couples, there were also about a dozen Catholics who demonstrated against the outdoor service, dpa reported. They held up a banner that said “Let’s stay Catholic.”
A federal appeals court is considering cases out of North Carolina and West Virginia that could have significant implications on whether individual states are required to cover health care for transgender people with government-sponsored insurance.
The Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in cases Thursday involving the coverage of gender-affirming care by North Carolina’s state employee health plan and the coverage of gender-affirming surgery by West Virginia Medicaid.
During the proceedings, at least two judges said it’s likely the case will eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Both states appealed separate lower court rulings that found the denial of gender-affirming care to be discriminatory and unconstitutional. Two panels of three Fourth Circuit judges heard arguments in both cases earlier this year before deciding to intertwine the two cases and see them presented before the full court of 15.
Tara Borelli, senior attorney at Lambda Legal — the organization representing transgender people denied services in both states — said excluding the coverage is a clear example of discrimination outlawed by the 14th Amendment.
“The exclusion here is actually quite targeted, it’s quite specific,” Borelli said in court, arguing that a faithful interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and the equal protection clause ensures transgender people coverage.
“One of the most important things that a court can do is to uphold those values to protect minority rights who are not able to protect themselves against majoritarian processes,” she said.
Attorneys for the state of North Carolina said the state-sponsored plan is not required to cover gender-affirming hormone therapy or surgery because being transgender is not an illness. Attorney John Knepper claimed only a subset of transgender people suffer from gender dysphoria, a diagnosis of distress over gender identity that doesn’t match a person’s assigned sex.
Knepper said North Carolina’s insurance plan does not discriminate because it does not allow people to use state health insurance to “detransition,” either.
In updated treatment guidelines issued last year, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health said evidence of later regret is scant, but that patients should be told about the possibility during psychological counseling.
West Virginia attorneys said the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has declined to issue a national coverage decision on covering gender-affirming surgery.
Caleb David, attorney for the state defendants, said West Virginia’s is not a case of discrimination, either, but of a state trying to best utilize limited resources. West Virginia has a $128 million deficit in Medicaid for the next year, projected to expand to $256 million in 2025.
“West Virginia is entitled to deference where they’re going to take their limited resources,” he said. “They believe that they need to provide more resources towards heart disease, diabetes, drug addiction, cancer, which are all rampant in the West Virginia population.”
Unlike North Carolina, the state has covered hormone therapy and other pharmaceutical treatments for transgender people since 2017. “That came from a place of caring and compassion,” he said.
In June 2022, a North Carolina trial court demanded the state plan pay for “medically necessary services,” including hormone therapy and some surgeries, for transgender employees and their children. The judge had ruled in favor of the employees and their dependents, who said in a 2019 lawsuit that they were denied coverage for gender-affirming care under the plan.
The North Carolina state insurance plan provides medical coverage for more than 750,000 teachers, state employees, retirees, lawmakers and their dependents. While it provides counseling for gender dysphoria and other diagnosed mental health conditions, it does not cover treatment “in connection with sex changes or modifications and related care.”
In August 2022, a federal judge ruled that West Virginia’s Medicaid program must provide coverage for gender-affirming care for transgender residents.
U.S. District Judge Chuck Chambers in Huntington said the Medicaid exclusion discriminated on the basis of sex and transgender status and violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, the Affordable Care Act and the Medicaid Act.
Chambers certified the lawsuit as a class action, covering all transgender West Virginians who participate in Medicaid.
An original lawsuit filed in 2020 also named state employee health plans. A settlement with The Health Plan of West Virginia Inc. in 2022 led to the removal of the exclusion on gender-affirming care in that company’s Public Employees Insurance Agency plans.
Gender Justice on Thursday announced the state district court lawsuit in a news conference at the state Capitol in Bismarck. The lawsuit against the state attorney general and state’s attorneys of three counties seeks to immediately block the ban, which took effect in April, and to have a judge find it unconstitutional and stop the state from enforcing it.
State lawmakers “have outlawed essential health care for these kids simply and exclusively because they are transgender,” Gender Justice attorney and North Dakota state director Christina Sambor told reporters. “They have stripped parents of their right to decide for themselves what’s best for their own children. They have made it a criminal offense for doctors to provide health care that can literally save children’s lives.”
The bill that enacted the ban passed overwhelmingly earlier this year in North Dakota’s Republican-controlled Legislature. Republican Gov. Doug Burgum, who is running for president, signed the ban into law in April. It took effect immediately.
“Going forward, thoughtful debate around these complex medical policies should demonstrate compassion and understanding for all North Dakota youth and their families,” Burgum said at the time.
Tate Dolney, a plaintiff and 12-year-old transgender boy from Fargo, said gender-affirming care helped his confidence, happiness, school work and relationships with others.
“I was finally able to just be who I truly am,” the seventh-grader told reporters. “It has hurt me all over again to know that the lawmakers who have banned the health care don’t want this for me and want to take it all away from me and every other transgender and nonbinary kid who just wants to be left alone to live our lives in peace.”
Mother Devon Dolney said Tate was previously severely depressed and angry, but with the care “went from being ashamed and uncomfortable with who he is to being confident and outspoken,” a “miraculous” change.
North Dakota’s ban has led the family to travel farther for Tate’s appointments, now in neighboring Minnesota, she said. The family has considered moving out of North Dakota, she said.
Politicians “have intruded on our lives and inserted themselves into positions that they have no business being involved in,” father Robert Dolney said.
The law exempts minors who were already receiving gender-affirming care, and allows for treatment of “a minor born with a medically verifiable genetic disorder of sex development.”
But the grandfather clause has led providers “to not even risk it, because that vague law doesn’t give them enough detail of exactly what they can and cannot do” — an element of the suit, Gender Justice Senior Staff Attorney Brittany Stewart said.
North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley told The Associated Press he hadn’t seen the lawsuit’s filing, but his office “will evaluate it and take the appropriate course.”
Bill sponsor and Republican state Rep. Bill Tveit told the AP that he brought the legislation to protect children.
“I’ve talked to a number of people who are of age now and would transform back if they could, and they’re just really upset with their parents and the adults in their life that led them to do this, to have these surgeries,” Tveit said. He declined to identify the two people he said he talked to, but said one is a college student in Minnesota that he became acquainted with while working on the bill.
North Dakota’s law criminalizes doctors’ performance of sex reassignment surgeries on minors with a felony charge, punishable up to 10 years’ imprisonment and a $20,000 fine.
The law also includes a misdemeanor charge for health care providers who prescribe or give hormone treatments or puberty blockers to minors. That charge is punishable up to nearly a year’s incarceration and a $3,000 fine.
Opponents of the bill said sex reassignment surgeries are not performed on minors in North Dakota, and the ban on gender-affirming care would harm transgender youth, who are at increased risk for depression, suicide and self-harm.
At least 22 states have now enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, and most of those states face lawsuits. A federal judge struck down Arkansas’ ban as unconstitutional, and a federal judge has temporarily blocked a ban in Indiana.
Mexican transgender rights activists Kenya Cuevas and Andrea Luna sat in front of their longtime friend Paola Buenrostro’s pink grave in Mexico City.
“You don’t have to pay rent anymore. You will have your own home now,” Luna sadly joked to her late friend, a transgender woman slain in front of Cuevas in 2016.
Buenrostro will be the first woman to be moved to a mausoleum a short distance away entirely dedicated to transgender women that was inaugurated on Thursday. Many of the dead transgender women were victims of hate crimes.
Built in Iztapalapa, the most populous borough of Mexico’s capital, the burial site is the first one of its kind in the country. In some cases, no relatives claimed their bodies. Some died of natural causes, while others suffered violent deaths. Cuevas wanted them all to have a dignified resting place.
“Thank you Paola, because in your name we were able to reach an important milestone for the trans community,” Cuevas told a cheering crowd during the official inauguration.
A small altar with an image of trans woman Paola Buenrostr in the newly opened mausoleum for trans women in Mexico City, on Sept. 14, 2023. Eduardo Verdugo / AP
Mexico currently has the world’s second highest toll after Brazil for the killings of transgender people, with 25 transgender women slain from January to July 2023, according to the LGBTQ rights group Letra S.
From 2017 to July 2023, at least 586 murders of LGBTQ people were recorded by the group. More than 58% were transgender women.
Cuevas became an activist in 2016, when her friend Buenrostro, a fellow transgender sex worker got into a client’s car and was fatally shot multiple times.
Cuevas managed to grab the man and held him until police arrived, but despite multiple witnesses to the killing and a video that Cuevas took with her phone, the man was released from custody a few days later.
She soon quit sex work and founded the organization Casa de Muñecas to campaign for protections for transgender women. The organization founded the mausoleum.
The burial site will have space for 149 women, including Buenrostro and Indigenous transgender rights activist Guadalupe “Lupilla” Xiu, who died alone on Sept. 9 after having fled her native Oaxaca and suffered torture and kidnapping.
Of the 60 transgender women who Cuevas has accompanied after their deaths, 48 have already been handed over to their families. Twelve other bodies will soon be exhumed from graves with the help of the capital’s Attorney General’s Office and moved to the mausoleum.
“Today, after a long time, I feel this is an act of reparation,” said Cuevas.
