The United States has issued its first passport with an “X” gender marker, which denotes that someone is neither exclusively male nor female, the State Department said Wednesday.
This marks a milestone for nonbinary and intersex Americans, who make up an estimated 1.2 million and 4 million Americans, respectively, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, and interACT, an intersex advocacy group. An increasing number of intersex, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people have come out in recent years, but most of them have been unable to obtain IDs that accurately reflect who they are due to a patchwork of state laws across the country.
The State Department said that it expects to be able to offer the “X” designation to more people early next year.
The U.S.’ special diplomatic envoy for LGBTQ rights, Jessica Stern, called the moves historic and celebratory, saying they bring the government documents in line with the “lived reality” that there is a wider spectrum of human sex characteristics than is reflected in the previous two designations.
“When a person obtains identity documents that reflect their true identity, they live with greater dignity and respect,” Stern said.
The department did not announce to whom the passport was issued. A department official declined to say whether it was for Dana Zzyym, an intersex Colorado resident who has been in a legal battle with the department since 2015, saying the department does not usually discuss individual passport applications because of privacy concerns.
Zzyym (pronounced Zimm) was denied a passport for failing to check male or female on an application. According to court documents, Zzyym wrote “intersex” above the boxes marked “M” and “F” and requested an “X” gender marker instead in a separate letter.
Zzyym was born with ambiguous physical sexual characteristics but was raised as a boy, according to court filings. Zzyym later came out as intersex while working and studying at Colorado State University, and uses gender-neutral pronouns. The department’s denial of Zzyym’s passport prevented them from being able to travel to a meeting of Organization Intersex International in Mexico.
The State Department announced in June that it was moving toward adding a third gender marker but said it would take time because it required extensive updates to its computer systems. A department official said the passport application and system update with the “X” designation option still need to be approved by the Office of Management and Budget, which approves all government forms, before they can be issued.
The department now also allows applicants to self-select their gender as male or female, no longer requiring them to provide medical certification if their gender does not match that listed on their other identification documents.
The United States joins a handful of countries, including Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Nepal and New Zealand in allowing its citizens to designate a gender other than male or female on their passports.
Stern said her office planned to talk about the U.S.′ experience with the change in its interactions around the world and she hopes that might help inspire other governments to offer the option.
“We see this as a way of affirming and uplifting the human rights of trans and intersex and gender-nonconforming and nonbinary people everywhere,” she said.
It’s unclear how the policy change will affect state laws that do not recognize “X” gender markers. Twenty states and D.C. allow residents to use an “X” marker on their driver’s licenses, according tothe Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank.
States also have a mix of laws that regulate how someone can request a gender marker change on an ID. Twenty-two states allow people to decide what gender markers are appropriate for them — which is now the policy that the State Department will use — according to MAP.
That process, known as self-attestation, allows trans and nonbinary people to keep themselves safe, said Arli Christian, a campaign strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been pressuring the Biden administration to allow “X” gender markers on passports and advocates for laws that allow people to attest to their own gender.
“That is hands down the best policy for ensuring that all people have the most accurate gender marker on their ID,” Christian said.
The remaining states either require medical provider certification in order to update a gender marker, a court order and proof of genital surgery or they have an unclear law.
Anxiety. Depression. Stress. These are some of the emotions LGBTQ Americans experienced during the Trump administration, according to two recent studies. The reports, conducted independently, both landed on the same conclusion: There was a significant decline in the mental well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people while Donald Trump was president.
“Everybody’s worst fears came into reality,” Adrienne Grzenda, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA and lead author of one of the studies, told NBC News. “We were noticing this undercurrent of despair and hopelessness among our clients,” many of whom are LGBTQ.
While Trump is no longer in the White House, the ongoing introduction of anti-LGBTQ legislation in the states continues to expose LGBTQ people, especially children, to the risk of significant mental health consequences, according to some advocates and researchers.
‘Extreme’ and ‘frequent’ mental distress
A study scheduled to be published in the December issue of the journal Economics and Human Biology found that “extreme mental distress” — defined as reporting poor mental health every day for the past 30 days — increased among LGBTQ people during Trump’s rise and presidency.
The report, written by Masanori Kuroki, an associate professor of economics at Arkansas Tech University, compared the likelihood of extreme mental distress among LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people by using data on more than 1 million people interviewed from 2014 to 2020 for the government’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. https://iframe.nbcnews.com/9TzYQA1?app=1
This study found that the “extreme mental distress gap” between LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people “increased from 1.8 percentage points during 2014–2015 to 3.8 percentage points after Trump’s presidency became a real possibility in early 2016.” Even seemingly small increases in extreme distress are important, the study notes, because such distress is not common.
While Trump was not the first president to advocate and enforce policies widely considered anti-LGBTQ, his tenure followed the relatively pro-LGBTQ Obama presidency. The possibility of removing recently gained rights and protections “might be more damaging to LGBT people’s mental well-being than simply not having equal rights in the first place,” the study states.
While Kuroki’s report does include a cautionary note about attributing the increase in mental distress among LGBTQ people to the rise and presidency of Trump, he does note that “the findings do suggest that the Biden administration may have inherited higher rates of mental distress among LGBT people” than they would have “if Trump had not run and won the 2016 election.”
In his conclusion, Kuroki suggests that future research examine LGBTQ mental health under the Biden administration, which has already implemented measures to advance LGBTQ rights and protections.
“If presidents affect LGBT people’s mental health, then we should expect that the extreme mental distress gap between LGBT people and non-LGBT people to narrow under the Biden presidency,” he stated in his report’s conclusion.
Grzenda’s study used data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to measure whether the 2016 election and transition to the Trump administration led to a change in the number of sexual and gender minority (SGM) adults reporting “frequent mental distress” compared to cisgender, heterosexual respondents (frequent mental distress is defined as feeling depressed, stressed or unable to control one’s emotions during at least 14 of the last 30 days). Between 2015 and 2018, LGBTQ respondents reporting frequent mental distress increased by 6.1 percentage points, from 15.4 percent to 21.5 percent, while non-LGBTQ respondents reported a 1.1 percentage point increase, from 10.4 percent to 11.5 percent.
“A clear association exists between the 2016 election and the changeover to a decisively anti-LGBT administration and the worsening mental health of SGM adults, although a completely causal relationship cannot be fully established,” the report, published this year in the journal LGBT Health, states.
The effects, however, were not seen evenly among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.
“We’ve got to start looking at sub-populations more,” Grzenda said. “When we break it down, it was bisexual individuals and especially transgender individuals who were really hit the hardest.”
Grzenda said the differential impact on gender minority adults may be because of the Trump administration’s targeting of transgender rights and protections in military service, health care and access to public facilities. At the same time, the focus on lesbian, gay and transgender rights may have “exacerbated feelings of bisexual invisibilty/erasure,” and compounded existing stress for bisexual respondents.
The study, which had a sample size of nearly 270,000 adults, approximately 5 percent of them LGBTQ, states in its conclusion that its findings provide “data-driven support for advocacy efforts toward the implementation of unequivocal antidiscrimination protects on the basis of [sexual orientation and gender identity] across all domains of daily living, immutable to sudden political realignment.”
Grzenda, like Kuroki, notes that a definitive causal link cannot be drawn between the Trump administration and the decline in LGBTQ mental health with existing data, though both studies controlled for likely competing factors.
‘Bullying by legislation’
The effect of politics on LGBTQ mental health is not just relegated to the federal government and national policies. The spate of anti-LGBTQ legislation in statehouses raises concerns about other sources of mental health strain, particularly for young people.
From 2015 to 2019, 42 states introduced more than 200 pieces of anti-LGBTQ legislation, according to a recent study by Child Trends, a nonpartisan research institute, and the introduction of these measures were found to have negative mental health consequences on LGBTQ minors.
The report notes that Crisis Text Line, a global nonprofit that provides free mental health texting services, saw an uptick in messages from LGBTQ youths in the four weeks after their respective states proposed anti-LGBTQ legislation.
“This suggests the bills are harmful whether or not they are passed,” Dominique Parris, director of diversity, equity and inclusion at Child Trends and lead author on the study, told NBC News. “We need to understand the full scope of what these laws do to young people.”
Among the most common types of anti-LGBTQ bills introduced during the 2015-19 timeframe were restrictions on single-sex facilities, the report states.
This year alone, there have already been over 200 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced at the state level, Parris said.
“Oftentimes the argument in support of [these bills] is to protect children, but what this research suggests is that that may not in fact be the outcome, and simply proposing this legislation may cause children distress,” Parris said.
“When there have been public policy decisions, we hear about that on our crisis line,” Amit Paley, the project’s CEO, told NBC News.
When Trump banned transgender people from the military, the Trevor Project saw an increase in trans and nonbinary people reaching out for crisis services, he said. This was not due to trans people necessarily wanting to serve in the military, Paley added, but because a powerful public figure was making judgments about their worth.
“Young people are listening,” he said. “When their message is discriminatory and hateful, that does have an impact.”
Trans and nonbinary youth are at particular risk for the most devastating consequences of mental distress, including suicide, according to Trevor Project research.
“That’s not because LGBTQ trans nonbinary people are born more likely to consider suicide,” Paley said. “It’s because of the discrimination, isolation and rejection they face.”
Paley said that Texas legislators this year have introduced dozens of anti-LGBTQ bills, many of which target trans and nonbinary people.
On Wednesday, a bill that would that would require student athletes to compete on sports teams corresponding to their “biological sex” advanced out of committee and heads toward a full vote on the state House floor where it is likely to pass. The bill advanced despite emotional testimony from parents and students regarding the toll such a law would take on trans children, something LGBTQ children’s advocates have been sounding the alarm about for some time.
“Trevor Project has received almost 4,000 calls, chats and texts from trans and nonbinary people in Texas this year,” Paley said. “This is effectively bullying by legislation. It is dangerous and it is wrong.”
‘Some steps forward and several steps backward’
Advocates hope LGBTQ mental health might improve under the Biden administration, which has made public statements and enacted policies in support of LGBTQ rights.
However, some, like Paley and Parris, worry about the message that certain signals — like the ongoing support for Trump among many Republicans, the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ state legislation and the failure to pass the Equality Act in Congress — will send to LGBTQ youth and adults.
“I think we are seeing some steps forward and several steps backward,” Paley said.
A unique, one-time treatment for HIV has been given the green light to begin human trials by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Excision BioTherapeutics can now begin using the gene-editing treatment, called CRISPR, to explore if the process could potentially function as a treatment for HIV. Their treatment, EBT-101, uses CRISPR to cut out several pieces of the HIV genome through a one-time treatment.
Daniel Dornbusch, CEO of Excision, said the clearance of EBT-101 “represents an important milestone” for the company and is the “result of years of commitment to developing a functional cure for individuals living with HIV”.
“Although antiviral treatments can manage HIV infection, they require life-long treatment, cause side effects and do not provide the possibility of a functional cure,” Dornbusch said. “We are grateful for the FDA’s engaged review and acceptance of the IND for EBT-101 and look forward to initiating the Phase 1/2 clinical trial later this year.”
Treatments do not cure HIV but can reduce the virus’ ability to reproduce in the body. This can reduce the amount of the virus in the blood to undetectable levels, which means HIV cannot be passed on.
HIV is managed through antiretroviral drugs, which stop HIV from replicating in the body. Antiretroviral therapy (ART) is a treatment for HIV which involves taking multiple medicines daily for the rest of a person’s life. According to the NHS, a combination of drugs is used because HIV can adapt quickly.
Dornbusch said it was important EBT-101 could work around the virus’ adaptability. He told Fierce Biotech that just making one cut means that the “virus can mutate around it”. So he explained that EBT-101 instead makes “multiple cuts to deactivate the viral genome”.
Dornbusch told PhillyMag that the trial will treat participants who are living with HIV and are already using ART to manage the virus. The participants will receive a single IV dose of EBT-101 over one to two hours and remain on ART for several months to measure the effectiveness of the treatment.
Then, the participants will stop ART while being monitored by medical professionals for their safety and wellbeing.
Dornbusch said the goal of the first trial is to demonstrate that the treatment is safe at all dose levels and to determine if subjects can remain negative after stopping ART.
“The goal, of course, is to find the first therapeutic to create functional cures for HIV,” he said. “The term ‘functional cure’ is an important distinction, as there will be no way to determine if EBT-101 will remove every viral genome from an individual, which is called a ‘sterilising cure’.”
He continued: “However, sterilising cures are not necessary, as the goal of the therapy will be for individuals to remain HIV negative by RNA testing, maintain normal levels of immune cells, and cease taking antiretroviral treatment – achieving a functional cure.”
In Ghana, home to a diverse array of religions, leaders of major churches have united in denouncing homosexuality as a “perversion” and endorsing legislation that would, if enacted, impose some of the harshest anti-LGBTQ policies in Africa.
In Nigeria, the umbrella body for Christian churches depicts same-sex relationships as an evil meriting the lengthy prison sentences prescribed under existing law.
And in several African countries, bishops aligned with the worldwide United Methodist Church are preparing to join an in-the-works breakaway denomination so they can continue their practice of refusing to recognize same-sex marriage or ordain LGBTQ clergy.
In the United States, Western Europe and various other regions, some prominent Protestant churches have advocated for LGBTQ inclusion. With only a few exceptions, this hasn’t happened in Africa, where Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Lutheran leaders are among those opposing such inclusion.
“They have always organized a group to maybe silence us or make the church disappear,” Omolo said. “They don’t want it to appear anywhere.”
Ghana, generally considered more respectful of human rights than most African countries, now faces scrutiny due to a bill in Parliament that would impose prison sentences ranging from three to 10 years for people identifying as LGBTQ or supporting that community. The bill has been denounced by human rights activists even as Ghanaian religious leaders rally behind it.
“Their role in perpetuating queerphobia and transphobia is clear and it’s very troubling and dangerous,” said Abena Hutchful, a Ghanaian who identifies as queer and co-organized a recent protest against the bill in New York City.
“The bill’s strongest supporters claim to be doing this in the name of religion,” says Graeme Reid, director of Human Rights Watch’s LGBT Rights Program. He called the measure “a case study in extreme cruelty.”
The lawmakers proposing the bill said they consulted influential religious leaders while drafting it. Among those endorsing it are the Christian Council of Ghana, the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference and the country’s chief imam.
“We don’t accept murderers, why should we accept somebody who is doing sex in a sinful way?” Archbishop Philip Naameh, president of the bishops’ conference, told The Associated Press. “If you take a stance which is against producing more children, it is a choice which is injurious to the existence of the Ghanaian state.”
The Christian Council — whose members include Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Anglican churches — considers homosexuality “an act of perversion and abomination,” according to its secretary general, the Rev. Dr. Cyril Fayose of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
“Homosexuality is not a human right and we reject it in all uncertain terms,” he declared earlier this year.
In Africa’s most populous country, the Christian Association of Nigeria has threatened to sanction any church that shows tolerance for same-sex relationships.
Such acceptance “will never happen,” Methodist Bishop Stephen Adegbite, the association’s director of national issues, told the AP.
Asked about Nigeria’s law criminalizing same-sex relationships with sentences of up to 14 years in prison, Adegbite said there are no alternatives.
“The church can never be compromised,” he declared.
Such comments dismay Nigerian LGBTQ activists such as Matthew Blaise, who told the AP of being manhandled by a Catholic priest distraught that Blaise wasn’t heterosexual.
“The church has been awful when it comes to LGBTQ issues, instead of using love as a means of communicating,” Blaise said.
In Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos, Catholic Archbishop Alfred Adewale Martins told the AP that Catholic teaching “recognizes in the dignity of every human person.” However, he said LGBTQ people who enter into same-sex relationships are leading “a disordered way of life” and should change their behavior.
Nigeria is home to one of the United Methodist bishops, John Wesley Yohanna, who says he plans to break away from the UMC and join the proposed Global Methodist Church. That new denomination, likely to be established next year, results from an alliance between Methodists in the United States and abroad who don’t support the LGBT-inclusive policies favored by many Methodists in the U.S.
Bishops Samuel J. Quire Jr. of Liberia and Owan Tshibang Kasap of the UMC’s Southern Congo district also have indicated they would join the breakaway.
The Rev. Keith Boyette, a Methodist elder from the United States who chairs the Global Methodist initiative, said the African bishops’ views reflect societal and cultural attitudes widely shared across the continent.
“Same-sex orientation is viewed negatively,” he said. “That’s true whether a person is from a Christian denomination, or Muslim or from a more indigenous religion.”
In Uganda, where many LGBTQ people remain closeted for fear of violence and arrests, there is a retired Anglican bishop who in 2006 was barred from presiding over church events because he voiced empathy with gays.
In decades of ministering to embattled LGBTQ people, Christopher Senyonjo said he learned that sexuality “is a deep, important part of who we are. We should be free to let people be who they are.”
“Ignorance is a big problem in all this,” Senyonjo told the AP. “When there is ignorance, there is a lot of suffering.”
In 2014, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed a harsh anti-gay law that, in its original version, prescribed the death penalty for some homosexual acts. Later that year, amid intense international pressure, a judicial panel annulled the legislation on a technicality.
However, a colonial-era law criminalizing sex acts “against the order of nature” remains in place.
Frank Mugisha, a prominent gay activist in Uganda, described church leaders as “the key drivers of homophobia in Africa.” Some Anglican leaders, he said, have deepened their hostility toward LGBTQ people in a bid to not lose followers to aggressively anti-LGBTQ Pentecostal churches.
In all of Africa, only one nation — South Africa — has legalized same-sex marriage. Even there, gay and lesbian couples often struggle to be accepted by churches, let alone have their marriages solemnized by clergy.
“People tell me, ‘I grew up in this church, but now I am not accepted,’” said Nokuthula Dhladhla, a pastor with the Global Interfaith Network, which advocates for LGBTQ rights within the religious sector.
She said some religious leaders are privately supportive of same-sex marriage, but reluctant to do so openly for fear of being sidelined by their more conservative peers.
South Africa’s Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, world-renowned for his opposition to apartheid, has been an outspoken supporter of LGBTQ rights.
“I would not worship a God who is homophobic,” he once said. “I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say ‘Sorry, I would much rather go to the other place.’”
Caroline Omolo, the activist pastor in Nairobi, said some Kenyan religious leaders blame LGBTQ people for the coronavirus pandemic.
“When we say we are still serving God, they don’t see something that’s possible,” she said. “They think it’s something unfamiliar and should be stopped.”
However, she said some faculty and students at Kenya’s theological schools support her LGBTQ church, which has about 300 members.
“The students, we call them the future generation, leaders of tomorrow,” she said. “When we have that population on our side, I believe there’s nothing that can shake us.”
Italy has voted down a bill to tackle hate crimes against women, LGBT+ people and those with disabilities, all in the name of religious freedom.
The bill – known as the Zan bill after the Democratic Party lawmaker and LGBT+ rights activist Alessandro Zan, who proposed it – was approved my the Italian parliament’s lower house last year.
The Zan bill, which would protect Italians from violence, hate speech and discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability, has caused a divide in the country since it was introduced, with critics insisting that it would infringe on religious freedom.
On Wednesday, Italy’s senate voted 154 to 131 to block further debate on the bill for the next six months, according to Reuters. Advocates of the bill fear it will now be impossible to pass it before the legislature expires in 2023.
Zan described the outcome of the vote on Twitter as a “betrayal of a political pact that wanted the country to take a step towards civilisation”.
Gabriele Piazzoni, general secretary of of Italian LGBT+ rights group Arcigay, said that the state had “once again turned the other way” when it comes to homophobia and transphobia.
“We thank those who fought,” he added. “Shame on everyone else.”
The LGBT+ rights bill faced opposition from the Vatican and Italy’s far-right
The church feared prosecution for openly opposing same-sex marriage and adoption by LGBT+ families, and also opposed the bill’s requirement that Catholic schools would have to mark a day dedicated to fighting homophobia and transphobia.
The bill also faced fierce opposition from Italy’s far-right League party, with the party’s leader Matteo Salvini describing it as a “gagging law” which would mean that “those who think a mom is a mom and a dad is a dad” would end up in jail.
Andrea Ostellari, a League party senator and president of the Italian senate’s justice committee, managed to repeatedly delay the second vote on the bill.
According to The Guardian, Alessandro Zan said earlier this year that lawmakers who backed the bill were “being held hostage by a president who arbitrarily decides that the vote shouldn’t be scheduled because he belongs to a party that doesn’t want it”.
In a pattern that is becoming worryingly familiar around the world, the bill’s opposition also united anti-trans activists with the far-right.
In April, a group of 17 “feminist” and lesbian groups issued a joint statement against the bill.
Despite the bill aiming to protect Italians on the basis of both sex and gender, the groups declared that the term “gender identity” had been “weaponised against women”.
At the time, Zan rejected the letter, and responded: “To say that trans women are not real women is not acceptable.
“We are talking about people who are particularly discriminated against… Unfortunately, some statements by historic and radical feminists have the same content as the extreme right and religious fundamentalists.”
A sign displayed by a Tennessee franchise of the anti-LGBT+ fast food chain Chick-fil-A has gone viral for condemning discrimination… against anti-maskers and the unvaccinated.
The sign, pasted on the window of the Chick-fil-A in Franklin, Tennessee, reads: “We do not discriminate against unvaccinated, religion, race, sex, vaccinated, maskless, mask. All neighbours are welcome.”
When the message was shared on Twitter by anti-LGBT+ right-wing YouTuber Lauren Chen, social media users were quick to point out that “equating mask/vaccine policy with religion/ race/ sex is so fundamentally stupid”, and that one significant group was missing from the list.
One Twitter user wrote: “They don’t discriminate against sex, just sexual orientation and gender identity.
“Would you like a delta variant combo with your order today?”
The Chick-fil-A sign on discrimination is painfully ironic, considering the chain’s anti-LGBT+ stance
Chick-fil-A has donated millions of dollars to anti-LGBT+ organisations over the years, but in 2019 it announced a decision to end donations to organisations which discriminate against LGBT+ people.
The Chick-fil-A billionaire was found to be donating to the National Christian Charitable Foundation (NCF), the sixth largest charity in the US and the leader in the fight against the Equality Act, which aims to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
The money donated to the NCF, a donor-advised fund, then goes to other groups, some of which are at the forefront of the fight against passing the Equality Act.
In 2018, it gave a massive grant of $6,585,923 (£4,647,620) to the viciously anti-LGBT+ Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill Monday banning transgender athletes from playing on public school sports teams that align with their gender identities.
Abbott did not immediately comment on the ban. Rep. Valoree Swanson, a lead sponsor in the state House, has said it is “all about girls and protecting them” in the state’s University Interscholastic League.
“We need a statewide level playing field,” Swanson said on the House floor this month. “It’s very important that we, who got elected to be here, protect our girls.”
Although student athletes had been required to play on teams that aligned with the genders listed on their birth certificates, they could obtain court orders allowing them to change the gender markers and compete in interscholastic athletics.
Under the bill signed into law Monday, that option is no longer available.
Critics of the legislation have said that it is discriminatory and that its supporters haven’t been able to provide examples of transgender athletes’ competing unfairly in women’s sports.
In a statement Monday, Equality Texas, an LGBTQ advocacy group, said that if Texans “want to protect children, the goal shouldn’t be to prevent trans kids from participating in sports, but to give all kids the freedom to make friends and play without fearing the kind of discrimination many older trans people face on a daily basis.”
Intersex Awareness Day is Monday, October 26th, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the United States’ first public demonstration against infant surgery led by intersex people and their allies in Boston, MA at the annual conference of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Each year, intersex folks and allies around the world help raise the visibility of the nearly 2% of people born with intersex traits who are often made invisible due to medical erasure and discrimination. Intersex Awareness Day is about supporting members of the intersex community in living authentically and unapologetically!
We Need You!
If you’re intersex, we hope you’ll join us in showing your intersex pride by posting a selfie with the tag #iamintersex on your social media this Monday, October 26th (please also tag @interACT_adv!) to help us highlight the many faces of the community and to promote visibility and acceptance!
Not intersex? We still need you! We couldn’t make the advancements we are making without supportive allies, friends, and family members! Help educate and raise intersex visibility in your own networks. On October 26th, please post, share, and retweet info you see from interACT and other intersex organizations. Check out our #4intersexwebsite designed specifically for allies!
Promoting intersex visibility and rights takes money! Make a donation in honor of Intersex Awareness Day to support interACT’s ongoing work to raise visibility and change medical practices that harm intersex youth.
Nur Sajat, a trans social media personality and businesswoman who fled Malaysia, was allegedly sexually assaulted by religious officers.
The cosmetics entrepreneur fled the country in January after she was charged with breaking Sharia law by wearing a dress at a religious event in 2018. She faces up to three years in prison, which supposedly brought “contempt” to Islam.
The Washington Post reported Sajat was arrested on 8 September by Thai police for entering the country illegally, and a police official said the deportation process was underway.
Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, told the South China Morning Post that Sajat had been granted asylum but declined to specify the country. But Sajat announced on Monday (18 October) that she fled to Australia and was now safe from the threat of imprisonment.
She opened up about her harrowing journey in an interview with the New York Times. Sajat alleged she received a summons from the religious department of the state of Selangor, where her business is based, in January.
When she was inside the department, she claimed at least three men kicked her, pinned her down and groped her breasts. It was the same day she was arrested and officially charged in a Sharia court in Malaysia, she said.
Sajar explained that her mother, who witnessed the assault, confronted one officer about the incident. But the officer alleged it was a non-issue as he perceived Sajat as a man.
The New York Times said this account of the assault was corroborated by an activist who spoke to Sajat’s mother.
“They think it is justified to touch my private parts and my breasts because they perceive me as a male person,” Sajat said. “They didn’t treat me with any compassion or humanity.”
She made a police complaint after the incident. Local authorities in Malaysia said that a religious department enforcement officer was called in to give a statement. But no further action has been taken and the department refused to comment to the New York Times.
Sajat said she felt “protected to be my true self” and “to be free” the moment she received refuge in Australia.
“I felt trapped in my own country, where I was born, because of the laws there that criminalise me and consider me a man,” she explained.
She added that she felt like she’d been “scapegoated” to “distract from larger issues” in Malaysia, saying her case was “sensationalised because of my social media presence”.
“I was trapped and cornered in Malaysia because of the Sharia system,” she said. “My very being, my existence, was being questioned.”
She continued: “But I am very firm in my identity as a woman. This is who I am.”
Queer Malaysians routinely face discrimination under the country’s strict Islamic laws which penalise any form of “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” with a penalty of up to 20 years imprisonment and whipping.
Propose changes to the penal code could make this harsher and punish anyone who is deemed to “promote” LGBT+ lifestyles on social media as well as those who “insult” Islam.
AL, who is trans, non-binary and genderqueer, has been assaulted twice on public transport in the last 18 months – but they didn’t report either incident to the police.
“The first time, I was on a bus in east London,” they say. “It was quite crowded, and the woman who was sitting by one of the last two free seats had a bunch of flowers on it. When I asked her to move the flowers aside, she got very aggressive; she yelled at me that I was a disgusting pervert and a f****t, and when I tried to sit at the edge of the seat without moving her flowers she started hitting me on the shoulder.”
When AL asked her to “back off” she did, but continued loudly insulting them – until a woman a few rows behind “stood up loudly and put her in her place”.
I’m incredibly grateful to the woman who stood up for me,” AL says. “In all fairness to everyone else on the bus, they cheered loudly after she told off my aggressor.
“But she was the only one to take initiative.”
Trans hate crime reports quadrupled over the last six years
AL’s experience is sadly all-too common within trans and queer communities in the UK.
Reports of homophobic hate crimes have risen by 210 per cent over the last six years, according to VICE World News, while reports of transphobic hate crimes rose by 332 per cent in the same period.
In the UK, the law recognises five different types of hate crime on the basis of: race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or trans identity. Any crime can be prosecuted as a hate crime, the Crown Prosecution Service says, if the offender either demonstrates or has been motivated by hostility based on one of those five types.
Between April 2020 and March 2021, there were 2,588 reports of trans hate crimes in Britain – seven reports every day.
But those are just the incidents that were reported. AL didn’t report the abuse they experienced on the bus to the police: “The police are part of the problem, not the solution,” they say. “I can’t think of a situation in which I’d call the cops on anyone.”
The second time they were assaulted was also in east London, when they were leaving an underground station.
“A young woman who was sitting by the exit seemed upset at seeing me en femme, and tried to follow me asking loudly why I was dressed that way,” AL says. “When I told her that I wasn’t interested in having that conversation and left, she kept yelling and throwing things at my back.”
They add: “I’d been verbally assaulted and sexually harassed by men before, but I hadn’t had my physical boundaries violated before, and it was particularly devastating that it came from women.
“It made me feel that there’s no one you can feel entirely safe around.”
Seventy per cent said this was because they felt that the police could not help them. A third said they expected the police to be transphobic, while another third said they experienced too many transphobic incidents to be able to report them all.
‘The whole experience was very stressful’
Statistics paint a grim picture of life for trans people in the UK.
A report by trans-led organisation TransActual this month, “Trans lives survey 2021: Enduring the UK’s hostile environment“, found that 67 per cent of trans women, 63 per cent of non-binary people and 60 per cent of trans men have experienced transphobia on public transport. This figure rises to 75 per cent of Black trans people and trans people of colour (BPOC), and 70 per cent of disabled trans people.
Seven per cent of BPOC experience transphobia “every time” they take public transport, compared with one per cent of white trans people.
Similarly high numbers of trans people have been subjected to transphobic street harassment from strangers: 85 per cent of trans women, 73 per cent of non-binary people and 71 per cent of trans men.
Another non-binary person, John, told PinkNews that they didn’t report their experience of transphobic abuse on public transport to the police.
“I sometimes go out wearing a wig and light make up, but this one particular time on a train, I was going to Manchester,” John says. “This guy was just staring at me, and made me feel really uncomfortable and anxious so I moved seats, and he followed me.”
That in and of itself was “really odd and creepy”, John says, so they told him that he was making them feel uncomfortable and asked him to stop looking at them.
The man asked John why they were wearing a wig, and they replied that they didn’t need to explain that to him. The man laughed, and said: “You one of them, chicks with a dick?”
This made John “upset, shaking and anxious”, they say. “I said to him I was born with an extra X female chromosome and the way I feel and look has nothing to do with you and mind your own business please.”
But then “he got aggressive and said the most disgusting things ever… He was in my face, I felt so threatened and not sure what to do”.
A woman came to John’s rescue, telling the man to “mind his own bees wax” and to “sort your own life out before messing with someone else’s”. John reported the incident to the ticket man on the train, who asked if they wanted the transport police to be called.
“I said don’t worry about it,” John recalls. “I felt I was wasting their time, felt very anxious about the whole experience.
