Like the ex-gay movement that rose to prominence in the early 2000s and then came crashing down as leaders recanted their “conversions,” the detransition movement is showing similar signs of a crack-up.
Ky Schevers is just one of the prominent voices of the detransition movement to reconsider her choice to reject her gender evolution and publicly denounce transition. She began her transition in college but ended it after coming to the belief that gender dysphoria was a false idea caused by misogyny and trauma, a theory she shared widely in interviews and online.
Now Schevers – who is transmasculine and uses she/her pronouns – has regrets about her place in the detrans movement. From 2013 to 2020, she regularly wrote and made videos about her detransition. She was featured in several major publications – even interviewed by anti-trans journalist Katie Herzog – to promote the idea that transgender identity isn’t legitimate and that gender dysphoria was a mix of internalized sexism and trauma response for her.
But now she’s speaking out against the movement she once supported.
“Trans people deserve access to support, and it makes no sense to shut down people’s access to medical transition just because some people end up detransitioning,” she told Slate.
The number of people reporting detransition is small. According to a study this year from UCLA’s Williams Institute, 1.3 million adults in the U.S. identify as transgender, or 0.05 % of the population. Another 300,000 youth, ages 13-17, do so, as well.
Of those who transition, about eight percent report detransitioning, according to a 2015 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, and most – 62 percent – of that eight percent said detransition was temporary. A 50-year survey in Sweden revealed about two percent of the trans population regretted undergoing gender-affirming surgery.
Schevers said the detransition movement she helped spark became overtly transphobic and repressive and left no room for doubt or questioning individuals.
While she came to believe her own gender dysphoria was in check, it came roaring back over time. “My sense of being a woman unraveled, and I was feeling more like a dude or a gender weirdo,” Schevers said. “But I was fighting against these feelings because I’d built a life in the detransition community, and I knew a lot of the other women in the community wouldn’t be happy with it if I came out as trans.”
The detrans movement assigns a variety of reasons to what they consider the false concept of gender dysphoria and provides attendant solutions to the non-existent problem.
Detrans promoters liken the urge to transition to drug or alcohol addiction, encouraging sufferers to avoid triggers and commit to abstinence, concepts adopted from 12-step programs. They characterize dysphoria as internalized misogyny stemming from a lack of self-love. One theory, known as “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” describes being transgender as a social contagion spread among adolescent girls online, like accusations of witchcraft among young women at the Salem witch trials.
Schevers says of her own dysphoria, “I tried to explain it in a radical feminist framework, and find the root causes, and do everything to make these feelings go away, and that didn’t really work. The only thing that did work to make them go away was accepting them. I had to make a move to accept them.”
Anti-Trans Legislation Across the United States Permits Rights Violations Against Intersex ChildrenSEE IT HERE
On Intersex Awareness Day, observed annually on October 26th, the groups introduced an interactive map that highlights how lawmakers across the US have included clauses in their bills that allow or encourage human rights violations against children born with intersex variations. Dozens of bills with intersex exceptions have been proposed, and so far three have passed into state law.
“State legislation in the US that targets transgender youth is also harming intersex youth,” said Erika Lorshbough, executive director of interACT. “When lawmakers propose and pass explicit exceptions for surgeons to operate on intersex bodies before the patients themselves can consent, it makes it clear that these bills are about erasing bodily diversity, not protecting anyone.”
“Intersex” refers to the estimated 1.7 percent of the population with innate bodily traits that do not fit conventional expectations of female or male bodies. Also known as variations in sex characteristics, intersex traits cause a person’s chromosomes, gonads or other internal reproductive organs, genitals, and/or hormone function to differ from characteristics that are “typically” male or female.
Children with intersex variations are often subjected to “normalizing” surgeries that are irreversible, risky, and medically unnecessary. These surgeries are performed without the patient’s consent, most often taking place in infancy or early childhood. Surgeries include procedures to reduce the size of the clitoris, create or enlarge a vaginal opening, reroute a working urethra, or remove the gonads. These surgeries are justified by decision-makers on the grounds that they will reduce stigma and prevent gender dysphoria, but they often have the opposite effects, and also carry risks of scarring, loss of sensation, lifelong sexual dysfunction, urinary incontinence, psychological trauma, and permanent sterilization.
These surgeries have been deemed human rights violations by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Health Organization, and other authorities, but there have been only modest efforts in the US to regulate these operations. Recent legislative proposals that primarily target transgender youth often include provisions that expressly permit and sometimes encourage medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex youth.
Over the last several years, state governments across the US have been waging assault on the basic rights of transgender children and their families. Dozens of bills targeting transgender youth have been introduced in state legislatures. One form of these discriminatory bills seeks to ban or restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender young people. Some bills define gender-affirming care as unprofessional conduct, possibly affecting the licenses of physicians who offer such care, and others set criminal penalties for doctors as well as for parents who support their children in seeking the care that they need.
Many of these bills include an explicit exception for procedures performed on intersex children, usually described in these pieces of legislation as “children with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development” or “DSD,” which is a medicalized term for intersex variations widely viewed as pejorative. These provisions purport to ensure that doctors who perform genital and other surgeries on infants and young children with intersex traits are immune from prosecution and civil or professional penalties. These clauses are in the same laws that attempt to punish performing the exact same procedures on older transgender youth who are actively requesting such care.
“This map shows the cartography of legal attacks on intersex rights baked into anti-trans legislation across the US,” said Holning Lau, Willie Person Mangum distinguished professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Law. “Intersex children’s rights to health, bodily integrity, and human dignity are all threatened by this legislation.”
Intersex advocacy groups, as well as a range of medical and human rights organizations, have been speaking out in support of intersex children. There is growing consensus that these medically unnecessary nonconsensual intersex surgeries should end, and some countries have banned them. Nevertheless, some parents in the US continue to face pressure from surgeons to choose these operations when their children are too young to participate in the decision.
“Bundling the unconscionable assault on transgender children’s access to health care with provisions allowing for medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex kids is just two human rights violations for the price of one,” said Kyle Knight, senior researcher on health and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights at Human Rights Watch. “Transgender and intersex children are harmed when politicians use children’s bodies to uphold regressive ideas about gender and sexuality rather than protect everyone’s fundamental rights to bodily autonomy.”
In the fews days since Elon Musk closed his deal to buy Twitter, far-right users have started to celebrate what they hope will be the ability to freely use homophobic and transphobic rhetoric and make threats on the social media platform.
On Saturday, former UFC fighter Jake Shields, who has over 340,000 Twitter followers, appeared to be testing the boundaries of the company’s moderation apparatus by posting a photo of a drag queen smiling at a young drag performer with the caption, “This is a groomer.”
Shields added, “I was suspended for this exact tweet a month ago so we will see if Twitter is now free.”
The word “grooming” has long been associated with mischaracterizing LGBTQ people, particularly gay men and transgender women, as child sex abusers.
On Friday, conservative podcaster Matt Walsh, who describes himself as a theocratic fascist, lauded Musk’s acquisition of the company and encouraged his over one million followers to start misgendering trans people.
“We have made huge strides against the trans agenda,” Walsh tweeted. “In just a year we’ve recovered many years worth of ground conservatives had previously surrendered. The liberation of Twitter couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. Now we can ramp up our efforts even more.”
“Laws are changing and public opinion is changing,” Walsh, who held an anti-trans protest in Nashville, Tennessee, attended by thousands last month, continued. “We have done all of this intentionally. It was all part of the plan we laid out and executed.”
The day before, within hours of Musk’s Twitter acquisition, the far-right account Libs of TikTok — which has over 1.4 million Twitter followers and has largely built its following by mocking liberals — tweeted out a post with the word “groomer” written over a dozen times.
When asked by NBC News to comment on the post, Libs of TikTok said in message: “Hi Matt, unfortunately you have pronouns in your Twitter bio which automatically tells me I can’t take you seriously. Good luck with your story!”
The far-right celebration comes as homophobic and transphobic slurs and rhetoric have had a resurgence within Republican politics this year. Conservative lawmakers and pundits have repeatedly accused supporters of LGBTQ rights, critics of legislation like Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law (dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law) and drag performers of trying to “groom” or “indoctrinate” children.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment concerningseveral of the more high-profile tweets that included anti-LGBTQ slurs or sentiments.
Since the start of his takeover bid in April, Musk has emphasized that he will allow forlooser rules over what people can say on the platform. In May, he announced that he would repeal the permanent ban on former President Donald Trump’s account. (The former president was banned from the site in the days following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.)
For Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic who is trans and has over 57,000 Twitter followers, the effects of Musk’s takeover were immediate. Caraballo said she and several of her friends received a flood of transphobic messages within hours of Musk’s takeover Thursday.
“You have several multimillion-follower accounts basically declaring open season on trans people,” Caraballo said. “They’re immediately taking glee and joy in the fact of bullying trans people on the site, and they think that, that’s going to be OK now because Elon’s in charge.”
“This was never about free speech,” she added. “This is literally about their ability to bully people on the site, harass them and then direct their followers who they know are going to launch death threats.”
LGBTQ people already face disproportionate rates of online harassment. Roughly 1.5 million, or 15 percent, of 10 million online posts analyzed between 2016 to 2019 were transphobic, according to a 2019 report by anti-bullying organization Ditch the Label and its analytics partner, Brandwatch.
The report did, however, find that larger social platforms like Twitter and Instagram had the “lowest ratio of abuse to general discussion around trans issues, suggesting that people are using these platforms to spark a conversation and educate.” For Twitter specifically, the report found 12% of the discussion volume was transphobic, compared to 78% for YouTube.
Google, YouTube’s parent company, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Researchers from the Anti-Defamation League found that throughout 2020 and 2021, 64 percent of LGBTQ respondents said they experienced online hate and harassment, compared to 46 percent of Muslims, 36 percent of Jews and about a third of Black, Latino and Asian American respondents.
Caraballo admitted that “there really hasn’t ever been great moderation on Twitter.” However, she added, the company has better policies than most social media companies, including Gab and Parler, which are popular among conservatives.
“My worry is what we’ll see a gradual degradation of the moderation policy,” she said. “Even if nothing formal is changed, I can imagine in coming weeks or so it starts to get increasingly worse as changes and policies are starting to be implemented internally.”
Despite concerns, Musk vowed on Thursday that he would prevent Twitter from becoming a “free-for-all hellscape” and make it “warm and welcoming to all.” Musk also announced on Friday that the company would be “forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints” and will make “no major content decisions or account reinstatements” before the council convenes.
By Sunday, however, he tweeted and deleted what many described as an anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. The unfounded theory, which originated from a website that has a history of publishing false information, suggested that Pelosi’s assailant was actually a “male nudist hippie prostitute.”
Caraballo said that going forward, her biggest fear is that most Americans will become “exhausted” by what she predicts will become a “nonstop drumbeat” of anti-LGBTQ tweets.
“In a lot of ways, apathy is probably the most dangerous emotion at this point,” she said.
Less than two weeks before the midterm elections, the window for transgender voters to verify their identities for voting is closing fast.
Roadblocks for trans people to acquire accurate identification abound, while ID requirements to vote are getting stricter in a growing number of states. The predictable result will be fewer trans people voting in 2022, just as their rights are coming under attack from anti-LGBTQ candidates.
According to the latest research from UCLA’s Williams Institute, over 200,000 trans voters could be disenfranchised this November.
It could be worse. A 2015 study from the National Center for Transgender Equality reveals voter participation from trans people is higher than among all eligible voters, 54% to 42%, meaning more trans voters will manage to cast a ballot despite the barriers to their participation.
Trans people face numerous challenges in changing their official ID gender markers. The process can take time, money, and access to medical care that many trans people, particularly younger individuals, don’t have.
According to the Movement Advancement Project, 10 states require documentation from a medical provider in order to change a trans person’s gender marker. Eight states require proof of surgery, a court order, or an amended birth certificate. And ten states have “burdensome” or “unclear” policies on changing gender markers.
Changing a birth certificate to get a new ID can also present problems. 12 states require trans people to undergo some form of gender-affirming surgery before officials will revise a birth certificate. Four states don’t allow changing a birth certificate gender marker at all.
Name changes aren’t easy, either. Nine states require people to publicly post a name change request online, which can lead to harassment or violence.
“Such obstacles can impact voting in the 35 states that have voter ID laws,” according to the Williams study. “In these states, voters encounter additional verification requirements at the polls on top of federal standards for voter registration and eligibility determination. The strictest of these voter ID laws require voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polling place, and provide no alternative for voters who do not have a photo ID, or as is often the case for transgender voters, have an inaccurate photo ID.”
UCLA Williams Institute
According to the Williams study, “Transgender people who are Black, indigenous, or people of color, young adults, students, people with low incomes, people experiencing homelessness, and people with disabilities are overrepresented among the over 203,700 voting-eligible transgender people who may face barriers to voting due to voter ID laws in the 2022 midterm election cycle.”
UCLA Williams Institute
Trans voters can seek help updating their state and federal identification with organizations like the National Center for Transgender Equality, which provides up-to-the-minute requirements for voter ID state by state, and other gender and name ID change information.
Voter ID laws are promoted by their primarily-Republican sponsors as a way to protect against voter fraud, a nearly non-existent problem in the United States, despite the hype. Both the American Civil Liberties Union and The Brennan Center for Justice have called voter ID laws a form of “voter suppression” that mostly disenfranchises Democratic voters.
“Regardless of whether you’re transgender, every eligible voter should be able to cast their ballot without fear of harassment or discrimination,” Olivia Hunt, policy director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, told LGBTQ Nation. “Onerous ID requirements are just one of the many strategies used to exclude marginalized people from participating in the political process. This kind of voter suppression is contrary to the guiding principles of American democracy, and is a blatant violation of the fundamental constitutional rights of all Americans.”
After five hours of tense testimony and protests, the Florida Board of Medicine voted Friday to start drafting a rule that would bar all minors in the state from receiving puberty blockers, hormone therapy or surgeries as treatment for gender dysphoria.
Florida’s medical board is the first in the country to pursue such a rule, but Florida is among a wave of states where officials have attempted to restrict gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.
By the end of Friday’s five-hour meeting, protesters began yelling “Shame!” at the board members, and some of them staged a “die-in” in the lobby of the Orlando International Airport, where the meeting was held.
Protesters stage a “die-in” in the lobby of the Orlando International Airport on Oct. 28, 2022.Courtesy Kat Duesterhaus
The vote is the latest update in a months-long effort led by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration to restrict transition-related care for people under 18.
The effort to restrict such care began in April, when DeSantis and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo issued nonbinding guidancethrough the Florida Health Department that sought to bar both “social gender transition” and gender-affirming medical care for minors.
Despite that support, Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration issued a report in June that “found that several services for the treatment of gender dysphoria — i.e., sex reassignment surgery, cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers — are not consistent with widely accepted professional medical standards and are experimental and investigational with the potential for harmful long-term affects.”
Just hours after the report’s release, Ladapo sent a letter to the Board of Medicine and asked it to establish a standard of care “for these complex and irreversible procedures.”
The board held its first meeting on the issue in August, and on Friday it officially voted to draft a ban on certain gender-affirming therapies for minors. The meeting began with expert testimony in favor of and against such care.
Dr. Michael Laidlaw, an endocrinologist in Rockland, California, cited often-criticized research that found 50% to 90% of children whose gender identity isn’t consistent with their assigned sex at birth grow out of the condition by adulthood.
“The basic problem with this treatment as I see it is: ‘What happens when you force a square peg into a round hole?’” he said. “You end up injuring or destroying the peg in the process.”
However, Dr. Meredithe McNamara, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine who treats transgender people between the ages of 10 and 25, told the board that the research Laidlaw cited and the June report issued by the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration are methodologically flawed.
“Neither of the authors of the state’s review is a subject matter expert,” McNamara said. “One individual is a dentist. The other is a post-doctoral fellow in biostatistics. At a bare minimum, the systematic review should be conducted by those who are qualified to assess the literature. I wouldn’t trust a dermatologist review of the literature on a neurosurgical procedure, for instance.”
After expert testimony, the board began the public comment period, which was scheduled to last two hours, according to multiple attendees.
The first nine attendees who spoke were in favor of restricting gender-affirming care for minors. Eight of them said they have detransitioned, or come to identify with their assigned sex at birth after having previously identified as trans. Only one of the eight had received gender-affirming medical care as a minor.
Chloe Cole, who described herself as an 18-year-old detransitioned female from California, said she began transitioning at 12 and received a double mastectomy at 15. At 16, she said, she realized she regretted her transition.
“All the talk about mental health, self perception, pronouns and ideology leads me to the question, why is a mental health epidemic not being addressed with mental health treatment to get at the root causes for why female adolescents like me want to reject their bodies?” Cole said.
The board also heard from the parents of transgender youths. Hope McClay, who has a 9-year-old trans daughter, said that she used to have to force her daughter to get short haircuts before she came out as trans.
“At one point she came up to me, at about three-and-a-half years old, and begged me, crying, and said, ‘Please, don’t make me be this way anymore. This is not who I am. I want to die,’” McClay said.
She said she and her family have consulted with medical professionals on medical care for their daughter, and they have found that allowing her to go through male puberty would be “psychologically damaging.”
“So we do not make these decisions lightly, but these are the decisions that should be made by the families, not by the state, and not by a board,” McClay said.
Jude Spiegel, the only transgender person to testify at Friday’s meeting, read the names of 17 trans teens who died by suicide “over living in a world that refused to acknowledge or accept them.”
With about 45 minutes left in the public comment period, board member Dr. Zachariah P. Zachariah said only one more person would be allowed to testify. The crowd protested, and he offered to provide an email where they could share their testimonies.
At one point, an audience member yelled that trans youths would suffer if the board voted to bar care: “The blood is on your hands!” To which Zachariah responded, “That’s OK.”
Emile Fox, a trans nonbinary person from Orlando who uses “they” and “he” pronouns, said they signed up to testify and weren’t able to, which frustrated them after the first eight people who testified were all in favor of restricting care, but none of them were from Florida.
“What was so appalling to me is how obviously staged this all was,” Fox said, adding that the board members didn’t appear to know that much about gender-affirming therapies. “They’ve been fed a narrative, and they ate it up.”
A spokesperson for the board said the committee “heard from subject matter experts and allowed for members of the public to speak on the issue at today’s workshop.”
“The content of public comment is not ‘stacked’ by Boards,” the spokesperson said in an email Saturday. “Any members of the public who were unable to provide comment can submit written comment via email to BOMpubliccomment@flhealth.gov within 24 hours of the conclusion of the workshop. These comments will be included in the rulemaking record and reviewed just as all other public comments.”
After the public comment period, the board attempted to come up with a rough draft of a rule. Initially, members considered making trans youths who were already receiving gender-affirming medical care exempt from the ban if they underwent an informed consent process, but they decided to cut that proposal.
Then, in a rushed exchange that attendees described as confusing, Zachariah pushed for a vote even as some board members asked for the proposal to be read aloud once more. He then said the motion was passed without saying what the final tally was.
Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Orlando, said that there would be another meeting on Nov. 4 at the Holiday Inn, Disney Springs, to discuss the drafted rule, and then there would be a 28-day approval process that would include additional time for public comments.
She believes the timing of the rulemaking process — just ahead of the election — is intentional.
“It’s so clearly intentionally designed to create a news cycle that further polarizes and politicizes gender-affirming care to distract from the affordable housing crisis, to distract from the impact of Hurricane Ian and property insurance rates,” she said. “We have some actual real problems to solve, big health disparities that we need to address and yet, instead of talking about those real-life concerns, trans issues are going to be front and center, and that’s truly designed to continue to divide us.”
Just in case you missed it, the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey is now LIVE! If you haven’t taken the survey already, now is a great time. For the first time in 7 years, you have a chance to be part of the largest survey of trans people in the United States. We hope you’ll take about 60 minutes to share your story and be a part of history.
If you are trans and plan to take the survey, here’s what you need to know:
The survey is open to people of all trans identities (binary and nonbinary), ages 16 and older, living in the United States and U.S. territories, regardless of citizenship status.
If you pledged to take the survey, you are not obligated to take the survey. Participation is voluntary. When you click on the link to start the survey, you will be asked to consent to take the survey.
The U.S. Trans Survey is an anonymous survey. Your response will be kept confidential and will not be used to identify you.
The time required to take the survey may vary, but make sure to set aside at least 60 minutes to take the survey.
The survey will be available in both English and Spanish.
Please let your trans friends and siblings know about the survey too!
The U.S. Trans Survey is a survey for trans people, by trans people. The 2022 U.S. Trans Survey is conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality in partnership with the National Black Trans Advocacy Coalition, the TransLatin@ Coalition, and the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance.
Phyllis Frye’s statusas the “grandmother of the transgender legal rights movement” was always partly the handiwork of her stalwart support system, second wife, Patricia “Trish” Dooley Frye, whom she was wed to for 47 years. Frye is now navigating life without Trish, who died in 2020.
“We had such a good love that I want love again,” Frye told Outsmart last year. “Not everybody [gets that kind of love].”
Frye is working to move on, taking heart that her legacy as a queer rights leader is being cemented as of late. A new book from historians Michael G. Long and Shea Tuttle, Phyllis Frye and the Fight for Transgender Rights, documents her momentous life and its instrumental role in trans liberation. Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frye is best known as a judge — in 2010 she became the first openly transgender judge appointed in the U.S. — but some of her most impactful work took place when she didn’t wield a gavel.
After becoming a lieutenant in the Army and marrying Trish, Frye came out as trans in the mid-70s, enduring non-stop harassment from her Houston-area neighbors. Instead of hiding from the world, the hate turned Frye into an activist, leading her to law school and an integral role in the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. “Her trans advocacy would give birth to a movement and she used the march organizing as a means of [achieving] that,” march co-organizer Ray Hill says. “The state of our collective movement in 1979 was one of uneven development of its component parts. The trans movement did not exist, except for Phyllis’s advocacy.”
Frye would be involved in subsequent marches on Washington for queer rights, lobbying for trans inclusion and becoming the first transgender person to speak at a national march for lesbian and gay rights. Frye understood the importance of language and advocated for years — mostly through her positions in the National Lesbian and Gay Law Association and its influential Lavender Law Conference — to add the T to the LGB acronym.
Frye’s contributions to the trans movement continued through the 1990s. Among her many accomplishments are the six annual International Conferences on Transgender Law and Employment Policy which she organized, hosted, and provided grassroots training for. Eventually, Frye established a practice in criminal defense. “By 2010, I had become senior partner of my firm with lawyers who were either LGBT or supportive,” she recalls.
That year, Frye became the first out transgender judge in the entire country, when Mayor Annise Parker picked Frye to be an associate municipal judge for the city of Houston. As an associate she worked part-time, which allowed her to continue to practice law “and head this firm that I had worked so hard to establish.”
In recent years, Frye would take on transgender clients from around the state who need legal help with name changes and other paperwork. “I do kids as young as 6 and adults in their 70s and all in between,” Frye says.
Even after Trish’s death and an onslaught of anti-trans laws and political rhetoric, Frye remains optimistic and emboldened, telling everyone in the legal profession, including judges like herself, to come out.
“You’re dealing with so much angst if you’re worried about what other people are going to think,” Frye recently told out Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg. “They’re going to think what they’re going [to] think anyway.”
A Thai businesswoman and transgender advocate bought the Miss Universe Organization for $20 million, making her the first woman to own the global beauty pageant in its 71-year history, her company announced Wednesday.
Anne Jakkapong Jakrajutatip, the CEO of the Thailand-based media company JKN Global Group, is a reality TV star in her home country, where she has appeared on local versions of “Project Runway” and “Shark Tank.” She also helped establish Life Inspired for Transsexual Foundation, a nonprofit transgender rights group.
Jakrajutatip said her company’s acquisition of the Miss Universe brand is a “strong, strategic addition to our portfolio.”
“We seek not only to continue its legacy of providing a platform to passionate individuals from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and traditions, but also to evolve the brand for the next generation,” she said in a press release.
The Miss Universe Organization, which was co-owned by former President Donald Trump between 1996-2015, was bought by Endeavor’s IMG in 2015. The organization will continue to be led by its current CEO, Amy Emmerich, and president, Paula Shugart.
Miss Universe, Harnaaz Sandhu of India, waves after being crowned Dec. 12 in Eilat, Israel.Amir Levy / Getty Images file
Following the deal with the JKN Global Group, Endeavor President Mark Shapiro said in a statement that he’s “proud of the progress the organization has made in becoming a more inclusive and powerful platform where women can advance both their business objectives and their cause-based work.”
Emmerich agreed, saying that JKN Global will help to further grow the organization.
“Despite having recently celebrated the organization’s legacy of more than 70 years, we are just getting started,” she said.
The Miss Universe pageant, which started in 1952, broadcasts in 165 countries. The pageant featured its first transgender contestant in 2018, when Miss Spain, Angela Ponce, competed for the crown.
A new study has found that most people who initiate gender-affirming treatment in their youth continue it as adults — undermining the argument by right-wingers that transgender people are likely to regret such treatment and even detransition, and that young people are not ready to make decisions about gender transition procedures, even though they do so in consultation with parents and doctors.
The study, from Amsterdam University Medical Center in the Netherlands, looked at 720 people who had been treated with puberty blockers and hormones at the center as adolescents and whether they continued with gender-affirming care.
“Most participants who started gender-affirming hormones in adolescence continued this treatment into adulthood,” says a summary of the study, which was published online Thursday by The Lancet. “The continuation of treatment is reassuring considering the worries that people who started treatment in adolescence might discontinue gender-affirming treatment.” “Most,” in this case, was 98 percent.
“To our knowledge, this study is the first to assess continuation of gender-affirming hormones in a large group of transgender individuals who started medical treatment with puberty suppression in adolescence,” the report notes.
“The key message [of the study] is that the majority of people who went through a thorough diagnostic evaluation prior to starting treatment continued gender-affirming hormones at follow-up,” Dr. Marianne van der Loos, a physician at Amsterdam UMC who coauthored the study, told The Daily Beast. “This is reassuring regarding the recent increased public concern about regret of transition.”
Gender-affirming care for youth is under attack from conservative politicians in the U.S. and elsewhere. Alabama and Arkansas have outlawed the provision of such care to minors, with the Alabama law carrying criminal penalties; both states’ laws are blocked while court cases against them proceed. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered that parents who allow their children to receive this care be investigated for child abuse; these investigations are also on hold because of a court case.
And U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican known for her outrageous statements and embrace of conspiracy theories, has introduced legislation that would make it a felony to provide gender-confirmation procedures to minors.
A Florida sheriff’s office has cleared an officer of wrongdoing after he was caught on a body camera footage choking a Guatemalan transgender woman and calling her “it.”
In November 2020, Sean Bush, a deputy from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO), said that a then-24-year-old trans woman named Jenny DeLeon had provoked his forceful arrest after she allegedly grabbed him by the wrist and knocked him off balance while he investigated a domestic disturbance on her property.
However, attorney Katherine Viker recently uncovered Bush’s body cam footage while conducting an unrelated allegation of another HCSO deputy using excessive force, The Huffington Post reported.
The November 2020 body cam video shows DeLeon greeting Bush with a fist bump and then refusing Bush’s instruction for her to sit down. DeLeon then says that no one in the home called for him to come and asked Bush to go back to his patrol car. Soon after, she asks Bush to please stay six feet away due to COVID-19 concerns. She then tells the officer, “You’re so awesome. Thank you for your service.”
However, when Bush moves towards her car, DeLeon raises her arm and asks him not to touch the vehicle because of fears of possible COVID-19 transmission. Such transmissions are rare, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Bush then says, “Don’t touch me,” before grabbing the woman’s arm, shirt, and neck and pushing her to the ground in a chokehold. Bush then pulls out his stun gun as DeLeon says, “I’m epileptic!” Bush uses the stun gun on her, even though stun guns can trigger seizures in epileptic people.
Later on, he grabs her by the throat again and then shoves her into some plants before using the stun gun on her again. He then rolls her onto her stomach and began handcuffing her.
As two other deputies arrived, Bush tells them, “Just keep whatever it is down,” referring to DeLeon as an “it,” a dehumanizing transphobic slur.
After the HCSO received a complaint about Bush’s use of force and a slur, the office conducted an investigation which began on December 2, 2020. The investigation ended one month later, and by March 2021, the HCSO sent Bush a letter saying that it found neither evidence of “excessive or unnecessary force,” nor of Bush making derogatory remarks. It also called Bush’s chokehold “brief and unintentional.”
Chokeholds violate the HCSO’s use-of-force policy, according to its website. Bush remains an HSCO deputy.
In a statement issued last week, HCSO wrote, “Following review of body-worn camera video… it was determined that … the suspect continuously refused to follow commands on scene and was physically combative with the deputy…. The deputy unintentionally briefly used techniques that are not in line with HCSO’s procedures.”
After her interaction with Bush, DeLeon was charged with battery, battery on a law enforcement officer, depriving an officer of means of protection or communication, and resisting an officer with violence. She was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
One year later, DeLeon was fatally stabbed. A 40-year-old man named Damien Marshall has been arrested in connection to her murder. Marshall said he slept with DeLeon but denied killing her.
“You see the video; what they said happened compared to what actually happened is not true,” Viker told The Huffington Post in a statement. “The video is the best representation of what actually occurred. Videos don’t lie.”
Viker isn’t representing DeLeon’s family members. It’s unclear if the family will take any actions in response to the newly uncovered video.
A March 2020 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality found that half of transgender people reported discomfort with seeking police assistance. About 22 percent of trans people who had interacted with police reported police harassment, and 6 percent of transgender individuals reported that they experienced bias-motivated assault by officers.
