oe Biden has promised tackle LGBT+ health inequality in his World AIDS Day message, proving once again that he’s a very different president to Donald Trump.
Ahead of World AIDS Day (1 December), the president issued a proclamationin which he said his administration was “focused on addressing health inequities and inequalities and ensuring that the voices of people with HIVare at the centre of our work to end the HIV epidemic globally”.
Biden “honoured and remembered” the “36 million people, including 700,000 Americans” that have been lost since the start of the AIDS crisis, and noted the impact of COVID-19 on access to HIV-related healthcare.
He said: “The pandemic has… interrupted HIV research and highlighted the work that still remains to achieve equitable access to HIV prevention, care, and treatment in every community — particularly for communities of colour, adolescent girls and young women, and the LGBTQI+ community.”
Biden pointed to his work so far to tackle HIV, including reopening the White House Office of National AIDS Policy that was shut down by Trump, and said that his administration would this week be “releasing an updated National HIV/AIDS Strategy to decrease health inequities in new diagnoses and improve access to comprehensive, evidence-based HIV-prevention tools”.
He added: “Ending the HIV epidemic is within our reach, and we are committed to finishing this work.
“On World AIDS Day, we rededicate ourselves to building on the progress of the last 4 decades; upholding and advancing human rights; supporting research, science, and data-driven solutions; expanding access to housing, education, and economic empowerment; and fighting stigma and discrimination.
“No one living with HIV should suffer the undeserved guilt and prejudice that too many continue to experience.”
In contrast to Joe Biden, Donald Trump never in four years mentioned LGBT+ people on World AIDS Day
Joe Biden’s World AIDS Day proclamation was in stark contrast with Donald Trump’s, with the former president failing to mention LGBT+ people four years in a row.
Trump, who during his time in office dismissed all members of the President’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, mentioned in his final proclamation last year that issued in “this deadly disease disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minorities”, but entirely failed to mention the impact on gay and bisexual men, who make up 69 per cent of all HIV diagnoses in the US.
The LGBT+ community also made up the overwhelming majority of victims of the AIDS crisis.
An Iowa law that prohibits Medicaid coverage for sex reassignment surgeries for transgender residents violates state law and the state constitution, a judge ruled in a decision made public Monday.
Judge William Kelly ordered the Iowa Department of Human Services to provide coverage for sex reassignment surgeries when ordered to treat gender dysphoria, a psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity. It often begins in childhood, and some people may not experience it until after puberty or much later, according to the American Psychiatric Association.
At least nine states across the U.S. explicitly exclude gender-affirming care in Medicaid coverage, while 24 states and Washington, D.C., explicitly include this type of care, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank. The remaining states have no explicit policy.
The ruling is a victory for Aiden Vasquez and Mika Covington, two Iowans represented by the ACLU of Iowa.
Aiden Vasquez.ACLU
Kelly said state and federal courts in the past 16 years have found that gender identity discrimination is a form of sex discrimination which is prohibited under civil rights laws. He also found the law violated the equal protection clause of the state constitution.
It is not challenged in the record that surgical treatment for gender dysphoria is a serious medical condition and the surgery is recommended for Vasquez and Covington by medical professionals as necessary and effective, the judge said. He said Medicaid coverage is fundamental to ensure the availability of that treatment for economically disadvantaged Iowans.
“Once the medical community determined that surgery is medically necessary to treat this health issue, the government lost its rational basis to refuse to pay for the surgery,” Kelly said in a ruling signed on Friday but posted publicly with online court records on Monday. “The law appears to draw an arbitrary distinction. So, there is no plausible policy reason advanced by, or rationally related to, excluding transgender people from Medicaid reimbursement for medically necessary procedures.”
Rita Bettis Austen, legal director of the ACLU of Iowa, called the decision “a historic win for civil rights” in Iowa.
“It recognizes what we’ve long known, that transgender Iowans must not be discriminated against, and that they are protected by the Iowa Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, as well as by the Iowa Civil Rights Act,” Bettis Austen said.
The ACLU of Iowa filed a lawsuit in April against the state of Iowa challenging a 2019 law that allows Medicaid to deny payment for sex reassignment surgeries for transgender residents.
Vasquez and Covington initially sued in 2017 and a state court judge found the policy violated the Iowa Civil Rights Act and the Iowa Supreme Court in 2019 upheld that decision. The court concluded that Iowa’s Medicaid program may not categorically discriminate against transgender people seeking gender-affirming, medically necessary care.
Shortly after the court ruling, Republicans in the Iowa Legislature passed an amendment as part of a last-minute addition to a human services budget bill in response to the court’s ruling. That change stated that any government agency in Iowa may decline to use taxpayer money for “sex reassignment surgery” or “any other cosmetic reconstructive or plastic surgery procedure related to transsexualism, hermaphroditism, gender identity disorder, or body dysmorphic disorder.”
Vasquez and Covington, however, had to take their cases through the Department of Human Services system and apply for surgery, have it denied based on the new law and then again pursue a challenge in court. The Iowa DHS has since denied coverage to them. Vasquez is a transgender man who was diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2016 and Mika Covington is a transgender woman who was diagnosed with gender dysphoria and began receiving hormone therapy in 2015.
Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the bill into law in May 2019, arguing it only narrowly clarifies that Iowa’s Civil Rights Act does not require taxpayer dollars to pay for sex reassignment and other similar surgeries.
Reynolds’ spokesman Alex Murphy said she is disappointed by the ruling “and disagrees with the district court’s ruling on Medicaid coverage for transgender reassignment surgeries. We are reviewing the decision with our legal team and exploring all options moving forward.”
A group of parents in Wisconsin, US, have filed a lawsuit against their children’s school over a policy that allows students to go by their chosen name and pronouns without telling their parents.
The parents claim that by allowing children to use different pronouns or a different name, the school has violated their “fundamental constitutional right” to “raise their children”.
Studies have found that consistently using the correct name or pronouns for young trans people reduces the likelihood they will become anxious, depressed and suicidal. Attempting to persuade a child not to be trans, also known as “conversion therapy”, has the opposite effect and has been found to cause “severe psychological distress”.
The parents’ lawsuit is being brought by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian law firm that supports making consensual LGBT+ sex illegal and has been designated an anti-LGBT+ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2016.
Conservative non-profit Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, known for opposing trans student Gavin Grimm’s long-running legal fight to be allowed to use the boys’ bathrooms at school, is also backing the case. In August, after seven years of court cases, Grimm won $1.3 million in compensation for the school’s refusal to let him use the boys’ bathrooms.
“The Kettle Moraine School District has violated this foundational right by undermining and overriding parents’ decision-making role with respect to a major and controversial issue,” the lawsuit states.
It continues: “Specifically, the district has adopted a policy to allow, facilitate, and ‘affirm’ a minor student’s request to transition to a different gender identity at school – without parental consent and even over the parents’ objection.”
The lawsuit also cites Kenneth Zucker, a discredited Canadian doctor who was sacked from a gender identity clinic because of concerns about his attempts to “cure” trans children, referencing his 1995 book as evidence that “the causes of transgenderism and gender dysphoria are still largely unknown”.
The parents claim that one of them was “forced” to withdraw their child from the school in order to “protect [him] and to preserve their parental role”.
The lawsuit suggests that this 12-year-old is a trans boy, who, according to the legal filing, had begun questioning his gender in December 2020. After expressing his wish to “adopt a new male name and use male pronouns” at school – which his parents decided would “not be in their [sons] best interest” – the parents called the school to ask that staff continue using his legal name and female pronouns.
The principle of the school refused, saying that “school staff would refer to [him] using whatever name and pronouns [he] wanted while at school, even over [his] parents’ objection”.
This policy of “allowing minor students to socially transition to a different gender identity at school without parental consent, and even over the parents’ objection”, the lawsuit alleges, violates their rights as parents.
According to The Guardian, the school did not respond to requests for comment, citing the pending litigation.
Eight-time Jeopardy! winner Amy Schneider has explained her moving gesture of trans solidarity.
Schneider made her Jeopardy! debut on November 17, in the middle of Transgender Awareness Week. Since then, she has won the game eight times, earning $295,200 (£222,000) from her stunning victories.
She’ll soon compete in the annual Tournament of Champions, which sees the 15 top contestants of the year go head-to-head. A contestant must clock five consecutive wins to qualify.
In an interview with Newsweek, Schneider revealed she had been trying to get on the gameshow for more than a decade. She was finally accepted by the show last year, but her appearance was delayed by the pandemic.
After her fifth win, Schneider penned an op-ed in the outlet to mark her becoming the first trans person to qualify for the Tournament of Champions.
As well as elaborating on her strategy and admitting her surprise at her winning streak, Schneider wrote about the importance of transgender representation on TV.
“It was inspirational for me to see transgender contestants on the show before I became a contestant and I hope that I am now doing that same thing for all the other trans Jeopardy! fans out there,” she wrote.
“I hope I have given them the opportunity to see a trans person succeed. Until very recently trans people didn’t see themselves doing much out in the world, so to actually see something like this happen really opens your mind up to possibilities.”
For the Thanksgiving episode of Jeopardy!, which aired on 25 November, Schneider wore a Trans Pride flag pin.
Explaining her decision to wear it, she wrote on Twitter: “Thanksgiving is a holiday that is all about family. And that can be hard for anybody who has been ostracised or otherwise cut off from their family, a group which, sadly, still includes a disproportionately high number of trans people, especially trans youth and trans people of colour.
“So, it felt like a good time to show my membership in, and support of, a community that might be having a hard time right now.”
The only public gender clinic for young trans people in the US state of Texas has closed after attacks by anti-trans activists.
The move comes amid rising tensions in the state over gender-affirming care for young trans people, with transphobic activists targeting officials at the hospital where the gender clinic was based and accusing them of promoting child abuse.
The GENder Education and Care, Interdisciplinary Support program (GENECIS) was the first clinic of its kind in the Southwest, bringing mental health services, hormone specialists and young adult care together in one place.
GENECIS confirmed in a statement that existing patients would continue to receive treatment, but that while new patients referred into the hospital would be seen for diagnosis, including evaluation for gender dysphoria, they will not be offered puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy.
“Pediatric endocrinology, psychiatry and adolescent and young adult care coordinated through this program are now managed and coordinated through each specialty department,” the statement says, according to the Texas Tribune.
It continues: “We do not anticipate any interruption of care or services for our existing patients who already receive care with these specialty teams.
“The choice to remove branding for this care offers a more private, insulated experience for patients and their families.”
The GENECIS closure comes less than two months after officials at the Children’s Medical Center Dallas, where the program was based, told The Dallas Express that the service was vital for young people with gender dysphoria and was helping to reduce the “significant suffering and extraordinarily high suicide” rates among trans youth.
“With a suicide attempt rate of up to 41 per cent for children and adolescents with gender dysphoria, there is a need for comprehensive care for these youth,” officials were quoted as saying in an email to the Dallas Express.
The email continued: “Given the significant suffering and extraordinarily high suicide rate in these children, offering a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach is needed to help treat this medical problem.”
Anti-trans activists who had targeted GENECIS repeated many of the Republican talking points opposing gender-affirming healthcare for young trans people, including falsely claiming that it is dangerous, irreversible or experimental.
The fact that doctors trying to “save lives” by treating young trans people had been harassed is “heartbreaking”, said Ricardo Martinez, the chief executive of LGBT+ campaign group Equality Texas.
“Accessing healthcare can be a courageous act for many LGBTQ+ people because of how difficult it is to find providers who are knowledgeable about our needs and the poor treatment we have experienced by insurers and/or providers in the past,” Martinez said.
News of the gender clinic closing comes at the end of Trans Awareness Week, during which billboards reading “Protect trans youth” and “Trans lives are precious” were towed on trucks around Austin, Texas, in solidarity with trans Texans.
A settlement was reached Thursday in the nearly decade-old case of a Christian flower shop owner in Washington state who refused to provide a same-sex couple flowers for their wedding despite the state’s anti-discrimination laws.
The U.S. Supreme Court left intact the state court rulings against Barronelle Stutzman, the owner of Arlene’s Flowers in Richland, in July. Shortly afterward, Stutzman petitioned for a rehearing.
Stutzman withdrew her petition Thursday and agreed to pay a settlement of $5,000 to the couple, Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed.
“We took on this case because we were worried about the harm being turned away would cause LGBTQ people. We are glad the Washington Supreme Court rulings will stay in place to ensure that same-sex couples are protected from discrimination and should be served by businesses like anyone else,” the couple said in a statement. “It was painful to be turned away and we are thankful that this long journey for us is finally over.”
The case dates to 2013, when Stutzman refused to provide flowers for the couple’s wedding. She said it would violate her Southern Baptist beliefs and her “relationship with Jesus Christ.”
Using an argument similar to that of Colorado baker Jack Phillips in the hot-button 2018 Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Stutzman argued that her floral arrangements are works of art and that having to create them for same-sex weddings would trample on her freedom of expression.
A lower court ruled in 2015 that Stutzman broke a Washington law that bars businesses from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. The state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the couple in 2017 and then again in 2019, findingthat selling flowers for a wedding “does not inherently express a message about that wedding.”
Ingersoll and Freed will donate the $5,000 to a local chapter of PFLAG, an LGBTQ advocacy group, and they also plan to match the donation, Thursday’s statement said.
Last Saturday, Que Bell led a vigil for Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual observance to honor the memory of transgender homicide victims that began in 1999.
Bell has led these vigils before. He is the executive director of the Knights and Orchids Society, a nonprofit group based in Selma, Alabama, that supports Black transgender, queer and gender-nonconforming people, and he has been an advocate for more than a decade. But this year will be different.
“This is literally the first time that I’ll have to write down my best friend’s name for a TDOR celebration,” Bell said, using the initialism for Transgender Day of Remembrance. “It’s really going to hit differently.”
Bell’s best friend, Mel Groves, died Oct. 11 after having been shot multiple times. Groves, 25, a Black transgender man, was studying plant and soil science at Alcorn State University in Lorman, Mississippi. Just before he died, he was about to become the full-time community garden manager for the Knights and Orchids Society.
Mel Groves, a farmer from Jackson, Miss.Courtesy Mel Groves
But on Saturday, Bell will light a candle in Groves’ memory.
Groves is one of at least 47 transgender or gender-nonconforming people — and one of 28 Black trans people — to have died by violence in 2021, which has surpassed 2020 to become the deadliest year on record for trans people, according to the Human Rights Campaign, which has been tracking fatal anti-trans violence since 2013. A disproportionate number of the deaths have been in the Southeast.
State legislatures across the country this year have also considered a record number of anti-transgender bills — more than 100 — many of which target trans youths, specifically trans girls. Advocates say the rhetoric coming out of legislatures is connected to the violence, because it describes transgender girls as boys and vice versa and, in many cases, characterizes trans people as “predators”on sports teams or in bathrooms.
Transgender Day of Remembrance is also known as Transgender Day of Remembrance and Resilience — the latter part an effort to remind people that while trans people face disproportionate discrimination and violence, they are also leading grassroots efforts to make things better for their communities.
Deadnaming, misgendering and clearance rates
Bell said that he and Groves’ friends and family ultimately want the person who killed Groves brought to justice but that he doesn’t have confidence in the police investigation.
When the Jackson Police Department first reported on Groves’ death, it used his legal name and misgendered him, causing local news outlets to repeat the mistakes. Groves’ loved ones had to reach out while grieving his loss to ask news outlets to update their stories to reflect who Groves actually was. Some updated their stories; others said they couldn’t change them without confirmation from law enforcement authorities or Groves’ immediate family. https://iframe.nbcnews.com/nt4ufYW?_showcaption=true&app=1
A week after Groves died, Jackson police provided the same statement to NBC News that they first issued, which used his birth name (also known as deadnaming) and misgendered him. The police department hasn’t responded to a request for comment about whether it plans to update the statement.
Bell said police officials need to be more educated about what the trans community faces; otherwise, he said, they will be unable to solve the case. He recalled one officer’s public statement that he would investigate Groves’ death just like any other.
“That is totally avoiding the issue,” Bell said. “I want you to be knowledgeable enough to know that, when something happens to trans people, how your department should be reacting to it and how you can help, versus being so defensive about acknowledging that this happened because it was a trans issue.”
Bell said police need to understand that anti-trans violence is connected to discrimination and higher rates of homelessness, among other issues that trans people face, or “we’re never going to be able to solve the problem.”
Jaida Peterson, a transgender woman, was found dead in a hotel room in Charlotte, N.C., on April 4, 2021.AP / NBC News
Anti-trans fatal violence cases nationwide appear to have a lower average clearance rate — the percentage of cases in which someone has been arrested, charged and turned over to a court for prosecution — than fatal violence cases in general, said Brendan Lantz, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University.
Lantz and his research team at the university’s Hate Crime Research and Policy Institute are creating the first database to track fatal violence against the transgender community. Although the Human Rights Campaign and other nonprofit groups track such deaths, the database Lantz’s team is creating, which will date to 2012, also tracks characteristics of the offenses, victims’ background information, perpetrators’ information, handling by police departments (including whether victims were misgendered or deadnamed) and whether cases have been solved, among other information.
Preliminary data, which Lantz said are subject to change, show that the nationwide clearance rate for fatal anti-trans violence is about 44 percent, which is well below the national average of 60 percent to 70 percent.
Early patterns also show that there’s “very likely a correlation between the prevalence” of deadnaming or misgendering by police and the likelihood of clearing a case, he said.
Evidence is important when police are trying to solve a homicide, he said, “and if we’re not even using the correct name, obtaining that evidence isn’t particularly easy to do, right?”
“Witnesses are less likely to come forward, and a lot of issues enter the equation,” he said.
Transgender rights groups say anti-trans sentiment, reflected in bills considered in dozens of states, affects how trans people are treated, including by police. Police initially misgendered victims and used their birth names in reporting on 30 of the 46 known deaths, an NBC News analysis found.
Since 2013, about 80 percent of trans people in deaths involving trans people with available data were initially misgendered by the media or law enforcement, according to a report released Wednesday by the Human Rights Campaign. An NBC News analysis of this year’s cases found that victims in 73 percent of investigations were misgendered or deadnamed by police, compared to 59 percent of cases in which someone was arrested and charged.
‘A sense of survival mode’
Trans advocates say some policymakers and national advocacy organizations are quick to suggest police reform as a solution.
But while many of them agree that improving police competence and investigations is important, they say the strategy addresses the issue only after the fact — when people have already died.
That leaves many in the transgender community feeling unsafe, which has led some of them to take their safety and well-being into their own hands.
“When you get tired of depending on a system to protect you that you know was not designed to protect you or to support you, you realize that you’re literally wasting time and resources putting money into a system that is not going to change,” Bell said. “So instead … we decided to start investing in the things that we could tangibly change.”
Advocates like Bell say community organizations should be given more resources and support, because they know how to best keep their people safe and help them thrive — by providing them with gender-affirming health care, as the Knights and Orchids Society does, or housing, as a number of trans-led groups across the country do.
Mariah Moore, a national trans rights activist and a co-director of the House of Tulip, a nonprofit collective creating housing solutions for trans people in Louisiana, said: “It’s so important that we support community-led initiatives, because those folks leading those initiatives are actually folks who have that lived experience and are able to speak to the needs and actually distribute those resources directly to impacted community members.”
Trans United Leading Intersectional Progress, or TULIP, is a nonprofit collective creating housing solutions for trans people in Louisiana.House of Tulip
Bell echoed that sentiment with respect to funding for nonprofit groups. He said that many people support and know of national advocacy organizations but that the groups aren’t providing emergency housing or money for trans people.
“I’m committed to this work to always keep trans folks safe,” he said, adding that he has been evicted twice in the past because he has provided a place for people experiencing homelessness to stay, some of them as young as 13.
“That comes out of a sense of survival mode,” he said. “I don’t have a lot, but what I do have I want to share with the folks who are like me who also don’t have.”
In neighboring Georgia, Toni-Michelle Williams, the executive director of the Atlanta-based Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative, a Black trans- and queer-led organization that builds community safety through organizing and leadership training, said the group has supported more than 160 people through its Taking Care of Our Own Fund, which provides funding for emergency bail, housing, health care and other needs.
The group provided the support with less than 3 percent of $15 million, Williams said, which represents this year’s budget increasefor the Atlanta Police Department.
“Just imagine what we could do for our communities — Black trans and queer folks, sex workers, formerly incarcerated people — with at least 3 percent of that funding,” she said. “I definitely just want to encourage people to continue to push and to join our side around what it means to reallocate funding from these large institutions that have so many resources. Our communities are in need of them.”
Looking ahead, Bell said he’s determined “not to lose another Mel.”
“I want to do everything I can to make sure that we don’t have any more Mel Groves — that we don’t have another person who slips through the cracks, that for whatever reason we have the resources to make sure that folks have a fighting chance,” he said.
A memorial was held for Mel Groves in Jackson, Miss., in October.Courtesy TC Caldwell/The Knights and Orchids Society.
He added that he feels as though he has done a disservice to trans people who have been killed in the past. “Because what I don’t want people to remember about Mel is that he was the 39th person murdered,” Bell said. “And that’s often what happens when we lose somebody, is that the tragedy of their death is highlighted over their legacy, their purpose and all the good things that they have contributed to the world during their time.”
He wants people to remember that Groves was a promising scientist and that his professors bragged about him and his research after his death. He loved Nat King Cole, he had a smile that made people want to talk to him, and he always offered to share food with his friends.
People living with HIV could be at long last “liberated” from a “burdensome” daily pill regimen, as a new long-lasting injectable is approved for use in Britain.
In news dubbed “brilliant” by a leading HIV activist, the NHS has been given the go-ahead to roll out injections taken every two months to manage the virus.
Currently, people living with HIV are offered antiretroviral medicines that must be taken every day to suppress the virus – usually one to four daily pills. Effective treatment reduces a person’s viral load – the amount of virus in their blood – to an undetectable level.
When the virus is undetectable, it cannot be transmitted, and a person with HIV can live a long, healthy life.
The new treatment approved by England and Wales’ National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and the Scottish Medicines Consortium on Thursday (18 November) is a combination of two jabs taken every two months.
Around 13,000 people will be eligible in England, NICE estimated.
HIV jabs will do away with the ’emotional burden’ of daily pills, says leading activist
Many people struggle to take the tablets they need to keep HIV at bay, Matthew Hodson, executive director of HIV outreach charity NAM aidsmap, told PinkNews. The stigma around HIV can discourage people, while others may simply forget.
“Taking daily pills becomes an emotional burden,” Hodson said, “a constant reminder that their health is at risk without medication.
“For some, who are unable to be open about their need for HIV treatment, it can create considerable obstacles to necessary adherence required for HIV medication to be effective.
“For many, a switch to injections just six times a year will be a liberation.”
HIV works by slipping into the human genome and tricking the machinery of white blood cells into making copies of HIV. As white blood cells are the body’s natural defenders, this weakens people’s immune systems.
The two injectables, cabotegravir and rilpivirine, work by suppressing how many HIV particles are in the blood, their viral load. It makes the viral load so low that the virus cannot be detected or even transmitted between people.
The jabs are just as effective as currently available oral drugs, clinical trial results have shown.
Both medicines have been licensed by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, which carries out safety checks on drugs that pass clinical trials.
Now that they have been recommended by NICE draft guidance , they can receive crucial funding from local health authorities.
“It is important that HIV treatment continues to adapt and innovate to ensure that as many people as possible can benefit,” Hodson added.
“Effective treatment means we can now enjoy the same life expectancy as those without the virus and we can no longer pass HIV on during sex; getting treatment to all people with HIV in a way that supports our circumstances holds the key to ending this epidemic.”
Hodson said he hopes such innovation can be brought to pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, the drug which when taken correctly prevents people from acquiring HIV.
“Many of the barriers to effective PrEP use are down to the need for daily pills – or the two-one-one on-demand strategy for cis men who can plan their sexual activity,” he explained.
“Injectables, implants and even very long-lasting pills are all in the pipeline, and these could have a huge impact on our ability to prevent HIV.”
A lawsuit filed Tuesday challenges North Carolina’s requirement that transgender individuals who want to update their birth certificate undergo “sex reassignment surgery.”
Lambda Legal, a leading LGBTQ civil rights group, filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina on behalf of three transgender North Carolinians: Lillith Campos, a 45-year-old woman who lives in Jacksonville, and two minors — “C.B.” a 16-year-old boy from Chapel Hill, and “M.D,” a 14-year-old girl from Carrboro. (The names of the two minors have been altered in court documents to protect their privacy.)
Lillith Campos.Lambda Legal
“As someone who can’t afford surgery, it’s demoralizing and dehumanizing that my birth certificate doesn’t reflect who I am,” Campos said at an online news conference Tuesday morning. “Having incorrect documentation makes me feel like a second-class citizen.”
She added that the current policy forces trans people to out themselves, “even if they don’t feel safe doing so.”
According to the filing, a birth certificate that aligns with an individual’s gender identity “is a critical and ubiquitous identification document,” vital to accessing employment, education, housing, health care, banking, credit, travel and many government services.
For children, lawyers for the plaintiffs argue, birth certificates are often the only form of government identification they have, and are required for enrollment in school, recreational sports and summer camp.
“My daughter is a 14-year-old girl and the state’s requirement for surgery is unrealistic and creates a barrier for my child to have a normal childhood,” M.D.’s mother, Katheryn Jenifer, said at the news conference.
“Not having an accurate birth certificate has exposed my daughter to discriminatory treatment and exclusion in school, sports and other places,” she added. “No child should go through life knowing the state doesn’t recognize her as who she is.”
Jenifer said M.D. saw the case as a chance “to be the voice for kids like her that maybe don’t have support like she does.”
“She knows this could bring unwanted attention,” she Jenifer added, “but she feels it’s important enough that she wants to be a part of it.”
While the state imposes a surgical requirement, designated as “sex reassignment surgery,” the suit maintains it doesn’t provide a legal definition for the phrase.
“The decision is left to the subjective whims of each clerk,” it reads, resulting in “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement of the statute — rendering the statute unconstitutionally vague.”
Lambda Legal Senior Attorney Omar Gonzalez-Pagan called the surgical requirement “inconsistent with standard medical practice” and said it presented “a significant barrier — sometimes insurmountable — to many transgender people, particularly those who may not be able to afford gender confirmation surgery, or who may not want or need it.”
The litigants argue the surgical requirement violates their constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the 14th Amendment, as well as their First Amendment guarantee to freedom of speech.
Rather than financial compensation, Gonzalez-Pagan said, they’re seeking an acknowledgement that the surgical policy is unconstitutional and a requirement that the state allow trans people to update their birth certificate without surgery.
In addition to attorneys with Lambda Legal, the plaintiffs are being represented by the North Carolina firms Baker Botts LLP and Brooks Pierce McLendon Humphrey & Leonard LLP.
Mandy Cohen, the secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, has been named as a defendant, along with Assistant Secretary of Public Health Mark Benton and ClarLynda Williams-DeVane, state registrar and director of the North Carolina State Center for Health Statistics.
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment on the lawsuit.
According to Lambda Legal, 34 states allow individuals to update the sex designation on their birth certificate without surgical intervention.
In fact, surgery is not required to update the gender marker on a North Carolina driver’s license, just a form from a health professional affirming their client’s gender identity.
Fourteen states still have a surgical requirement to change gender markers on birth certificates.
West Virginia requires a court order to amend the gender designation on a birth certificate, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality. The state’s Vital Registration office will not issue a new birth certificate, instead striking through the existing name and gender and typing the new information above.
Tennessee law specifically prohibits amending sex on a birth certificate “as a result of sex change surgery,” a policy Lambda Legal is also currently challenging. Like transgender North Carolinians, though, trans residents in Tennessee can change the listed gender on their driver’s licenses and state identification cards without surgery.
In an email to NBC News, Gonzalez-Pagan said the decision of when and where to bring a challenge “depends on multiple factors, including our assessment of the law and whether we have encountered people affected by these policies that are willing to step up and take on such a challenge.”
The goal, he added, is to eradicate each of these barriers one by one “and to have one victory build upon the other.”
North Carolina has been a nexus point for LGBTQ equality in recent years: In 2016, after Charlotte passed an ordinance expanding its existing nondiscrimination protections to include gender identity and sexual orientation — including allowing transgender people to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity — the state’s General Assembly held a special session to pass House Bill 2, nicknamed the “bathroom bill.”
That measure prevented any municipality in the state from adding sexual orientation or gender identity to nondiscrimination laws, effectively blocking Charlotte’s efforts and sparking national boycotts that were projected to cost the state billions in lost revenue.
HB 2 was eventually repealed in 2017 as part of a compromise that placed a three-year statewide moratorium on nondiscrimination ordinances. Since then, Charlotte and several other cities have updated their nondiscrimination policies to include LGBTQ people.
And just last month, the state’s lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson made national headlines and faced calls to resign after a video surfaced showing him describing the LGBTQ community as “filth.”
“There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality — any of that filth,” Robinson, the state’s highest Republican executive officeholder, said in a clip from a June speech at a Baptist church.
A group of students passionately protested after a transgender classmate reported an alleged assault – only for the police to claim no assault took place.
Students gathered outside of Berlin High School in Berlin, Wisconsin on 9 November after a 14-year-old transgender boy was allegedly cornered in the boy’s bathroom by fellow students and told to pull down his pants and lift up his shirt.
According to local news reports, the pupil also said that he’d been sexually assaulted “several times” in the same bathroom over the past couple of weeks but had been “afraid to come forward right away”. He told Action 2 News: “They were surrounding the stall door and one was recording through the peek hole, and they saw my bottom half and after that I stood in the stall crying.”
Police in the small town, which has a population of just 5,524, have since come under fire after their investigation found that the student was not assaulted.
“After multiple interviews and examining the associated evidence of the alleged assault, our investigation discovered no physical assault or attack against the alleged victim took place,” the Berlin Police Department told Action 2 News.
Unsatisfied with the police response, the trans pupil’s friends and supporters then staged a viral walkout the following day, with senior Amber Olmstead explaining to Action 2 News: “We sat there for a while and we were trying to get our questions answered, and we were kind of getting blown off and they were trying to get us inside, but we wanted this to be public, we wanted people to see us, hear us.”
Another student, Autumn Peterson, said: “There’s been a big past of assault and homophobia in our school, and it just needs to come to an end.”
The viral video in support of the transgender teen, which has over 300,000 likes on TikTok and over 8,000 comments, shows a crowd of teenagers chanting “trans lives matter” and waving placards while Donald Glover’s protest anthem “This Is America” plays in the background.
One commenter said: “F**k. That poor kid. That is still my worst fear and to face that as a child must have been devastating, I hope he’s alright.”
A second person commented on the video saying: “These stories are really tough on me having been the recipient of an assault that nearly left me dead back in the late 80s I had hope that by the time I was 60 these would be rare.
“This has to stop, but the propaganda regarding anyone that can be ‘othered’ needs to stop first.”
In a statement to Action 2 News, superintendent Carl Cartwright wrote: “The Berlin Area School District is aware of a student walkout in response to allegations of a student assault at the high school. The Berlin Area School District is committed to the success of all students in a safe learning environment and we take such allegations seriously.
“The school district is cooperating with local law enforcement who are investigating this situation. The district is also conducting its own investigation. Because of the ongoing investigations, the district is unable to provide additional details at this time.”
Berlin Police are asking anyone to call them at (920) 361-2121 if they have direct information about a recording taken in the bathroom.
