World AIDS Day provides us the opportunity to support those living with HIV, unite in the fight to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and mourn those we’ve lost. Today, we’re thinking about all the progress we’ve made, and the work still before us.
This president is no ally of people living with HIV, who are disproportionately LGBTQ and people of color. His administration has proposed cutting global HIV-prevention programs and attacked health care services that people living with HIV rely on, including the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, and Planned Parenthood.
Just last month, we saw firsthand just how uninformed and callous the Trump orbit can be through Donald Trump Jr.’s despicable attack on people living with HIV.
Democrats are committed to ending the stigma and the epidemic. This year, House Democrats passed bills to lower prescription drug costs and protect access to the health care that those living with HIV deserve.
And Democrats fought to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act and to ensure it protects against discrimination based on HIV/AIDS status or perceived status, and of caregivers of people living with this disease. We stand in solidarity with those living with HIV and AIDS in America and around the world.
Nigeria has emerged as the world’s most dangerous country for LGBT+ travel in a new index of global LGBT+ safety released earlier this month.
The LGBTQ+ Danger Index ranks the 150 most-visited countries using eight factors, including legalised same-sex marriage, worker protections, criminalisation of violence and whether, based on Gallup poll findings, it is a good place to live.
Nigeria earned itself a ‘top’ score of -142 on the danger index due to its total lack of LGBT+ protections, alongside the criminalisation of same-sex relationships and propaganda.
Homosexuality is punishable by up to 14 years and, under Sharia law, the death penalty. Even the discussion of LGBT+ rights is outlawed in the strictly conservative country.
Nigeria was closely followed by Qatar with a score of -137, Yemen with a score of -128, and Saudi Arabia with a score of -126.
Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Saudia Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2017 (PAVEL GOLOVKIN/AFP/Getty)
If you’re currently planning your 2020 beach holiday, be warned – the popular tourist destinations of Barbados, St Lucia, the Maldives, Tanzania and Kenya weren’t far behind, each with scores of -100 or worse.
Same-sex relationships are illegal in 38 of the countries on the list. In others, such as China, Russia and Indonesia, homosexuality may be legal but censorship laws and lack of criminalisation of violence make them unsafe destinations for LGBT travel.
Sitting happily at the other end of the spectrum, Sweden came out on top as the safest country for LGBT+ travellers.
Swedes partying at the Stockholm Pride parade in 2016 (Erik Nylander/AFP/Getty)
Ticking all the boxes on same-sex marriage, discrimination and worker protections, adoption recognition, criminalisation of violence and a strong Gallup poll rating, Sweden earned a great safety score of 322.
Behind it were Canada, Norway, Portugal, Belgium and the UK, all of which are known for being incredibly welcoming to LGBT+ travellers.
Perhaps surprisingly, the US ranked far behind as the 24th safest country for LGBT+ travel. This is because there are no constitutional or federal protections for LGBT+ people in the US, and some states prohibit the “advocacy of homosexuality” in schools.
GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy organization, today released the following information to show a disturbing trend by anti-LGBTQ activists who have used anti-trans rhetoric and messaging to influence this year’s contentious elections across the country. The anti-trans ads reached Americans through many mediums and appear to have targeted electoral contests in Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia. But despite the onslaught of ads, LGBTQ candidates like Danica Roem and pro-LGBTQ candidates like Andy Beshear were able to win their respective elections.
THE ADS:
Nationwide: The same conservative PAC that is behind the Kentucky ads has cut a seriesof anti-trans spots that culminate in the message: “On Tuesday, November 5, vote against Democrats.” It is unclear where these will air.
Kentucky: A conservative PAC is running ads claiming that that the Democratic candidate for governor, Andy Beshear, is threatening opportunities for cisgender females athletes because he supports “a competitor who claims they are a girl.”
Louisiana: Ralph Abraham, GOP candidate for governor, is running ads stating, “as a doctor, I can assure you, there are only two genders.”
Mississippi: GOP candidate Tate Reeves has made anti-trans comments, insisting to the anti-LGBTQ American Family Association that trans rights would trample on religious freedom.
Donald Trump, Jr. used this anti-trans rhetoric just yesterday, and anti-LGBTQ activists are likely to continue using this tactic into next year’s critical 2020 elections. This anti-LGBTQ campaign is a similar strategy deployed by anti-LGBTQ activists in the 2004 elections, a successful effort which demonized marriage equality.
“The Trump Administration’s incessant attacks on transgender Americans have effectively spread across the country in 2019 state elections, and the public should expect this tactic to be used during critical elections next year too,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD’s President & CEO. “The assertions and misinformation in these ads have been debunked time and again, but this ‘top-down’ strategy by anti-LGBTQ activists will only be defeated when the community bands together and fights back.”
The anti-transgender dialogue comes as attacks on the trans community have skyrocketed. So far this year, more than 21 transgender women of color have been murdered, continuing a disturbingepidemic on the community. Further, President Donald Trump and his administration’s 130 attacks on the LGBTQ community have largely targeted the transgender community specifically, including denying trans Americans health care and banning trans people from serving in the country’s armed forces.
Below you will find background information from GLAAD on how anti-LGBTQ activists are using anti-trans language and messaging in their campaigns:
WHAT
With past LGBTQ political footballs like marriage equality no longer playable for them, some conservative candidates and groups are spewing anti-transgender rhetoric and using misinformation about trans people inlast-minute attempts to turn out voters in their favor. A similar strategy was made by the Virginia Republican Party and its candidates, who used debunked ads about immigration days before the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial elections.
WHY
With a president whose own anti-trans record is clear, statewide candidates are following the national party’s lead and using transgender people as a way to get out the evangelical vote.
WHO’S BEHIND THE ADS?
In Kentucky, it’s an organizational PAC called Campaign For American Principles, and in Louisiana and Mississippi, it is the Republican Party’s candidates’ own campaigns. However, the anti-trans push is a mainstream political position that is supported by virtually every conservative group, the vast majority of GOP elected officials, and the current Trump Administration. Which means we are more likely than not to see this push in GOP campaigns up and down the ticket across the nation through November 2020.
FACT VERSUS FICTION
Below you will find the type of anti-transgender rhetoric that is surely to pop up in future political ads across the nation through the 2020 political cycle.
Claim: There are only two genders.
Truth: Human biology is far more complex than a binary. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychiatric Association all agree that gender identity does not exist in a structured binary.
Claim: Trans women have an unfair advantage in sports.
Truth: This is false, and the so-called “unfair advantage” narrative developed only when transgender athletes began winning their competitions. As the NCAA states, there are about 150 to 200 student athletes who identify as transgender. However, they have not received attention because they haven’t won their matches. Organizations like Athlete Ally have also worked with scientists to confirm that a person’s gender identity does not impact their performance as an athlete.
Claim: Trans rights threaten religious freedom.
Truth: The idea that trans people are in conflict with any law, policy, or statute is 100% built around transphobia. Transgender people are religious and non-religious, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal. That’s because transgender people are simply people trying to live, work, and operate in society the same as anyone else.
DOES THIS CAMPAIGN TACTIC WORK?
There are two major differences between the most prominent anti-LGBTQ wedge issue, marriage equality, and this current anti-trans push.
(1) The Democratic Party is largely united in support of trans rights, something that was not true when the big anti-marriage pushes of the early 2000’s led to anti-LGBTQ electoral success.
(2) Public polling shows that a majority of American voters support trans rights, with many polls showing even a plurality of Republican voters hold favorable views.
Transgender women inmates in Colorado claim in a class-action lawsuit that they are targets of physical violence and sexual harassment because they are routinely housed with men.
About 170 transgender inmates are represented in the class with seven women named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed Friday in state court in Denver. Gov. Jered Polis and Colorado Department of Corrections officials are named as defendants.
The lawsuit alleges that because the women are held with men without safeguards, they are subjected to abuse and discrimination in violation of the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act.
“The lawsuit claims that the CDOC has discriminated against transgender women solely on the basis of their gender identity and that these women have been subjected to unsafe situations, including severe sexual harassment, physical violence, and rape,” the Transgender Law Center, which filed the suit on behalf of the inmates, said in a summary.
Annie Skinner, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Corrections, said she could not comment on specifics of the lawsuit, but officials are working to create safe and fair incarceration for all offenders.
“Colorado has spent the last several years diligently working to develop and implement thoughtful and informed policies and procedures for the fair and respectful treatment of transgender offenders in our custody, and is considered a leader in this area nationally,” she said in an email.
“We work every day to find the best possible balance between the desire to protect the dignity of all offenders, with the need to ensure their safety.”
The lawsuit highlights the experiences of the named plaintiffs, including allegations by Kandice Raven, 30.
“Because she is a transgender woman in CDOC custody, she has been subjected to numerous brutal assaults, resulting in permanent injuries, including a rape in 2014,” the document states. “She has attempted suicide twice and attempted self-castration as a means to deal with her severe gender dysphoria.”
Jane Gallentine, whose age was not stated, has survived “several rapes,” including repeated attacks by a corrections officer, the lawsuit claims.
“One of her abusers forcibly tattooed his name on her neck to show everyone that she was ‘his property,'” it states. The allegation involves an incarcerated gang member, not the corrections officer, said Denver civil rights attorney Paula Greisen, a lawyer for the inmates.
Amber Miller, 32, was raped by a corrections officer and by male inmates, the lawsuit claims. After she reported one rape, “Amber was stripped naked by a group of male guards, handcuffed, and placed in the hole for weeks,” the suit says.
Because the transgender inmates named in the suit “present as women” and take hormone regimens, they’re often seen by male inmates and even some correction officers as vulnerable targets for crime, said Greisen, lead counsel on the case.
“Sex is a commodity in male prison,” she said. “These women are used as commodities.”
Rape by corrections officers of transgender inmates is under-reported because victims who step forward are often punished with strip searches and solitary confinement, she said.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, “necessary accommodations” and other corrective measures.
Greisen said most of the plaintiffs want to be incarcerated with women not according to their gender assigned at birth.
“What we want is for them to be held in safe facilities,” she said. “And although right now the policy is that their preference is given a priority, we don’t see it happening.”
The Transgender Law Center is based in Oakland, California.
Trystan Reese, a transgender man and community advocate, thought social media would be a great place to share his pregnancy story with the world. Little did he know, he would face several years of “extreme backlash” for doing just that.
“I was pretty excited for the opportunity to start to add more positive stories to the sort of public narrative around what it can mean to be transgender today,” Reese, whose pregnancy story was covered by NBC News and countless other news outlets in 2017, explained.
Biff Chaplow, left, and Trystan Reese before the 2017 birth of their youngest child. Kevin Truong
Over the past two and a half years, however, Reese — who lives in Portland, Oregon, with his husband and three children — has dealt with online transphobia and misinformation circulating about his family. One example of this pervasive harassment involves a photo of Reese while pregnant along with a transgender woman friend. This happy image, shared on Instagram by his friend, was then used without permission in a number of fake stories and memes that appeared across the internet. Reese said the intentionally cruel posts mocked and misgendered them both and falsely claimed his friend was the biological parent of Reese’s child.
“People assume that’s true and run with it, and share with their friends,” Reese said of the transphobic posts, which, after being flagged by NBC News, were removed by Facebook for violating its policies. “People send us ugly transphobic memes that have been made of the best moments of my life.”
Social media: A double-edged sword for trans community
Social media platforms have been vital spaces for transgender people to gather and form a community, according to Gillian Branstetter, a trans advocate and the former spokeswoman for the National Center for Transgender Equality. However, she added, the hostility they frequently face on these platforms make trans individuals more apprehensive about using them.
“The internet was life-changing for transgender people,” Branstetter said. “It’s critical that platforms are providing a safe place for transgender people to find community.”
Reese shared a similar sentiment, saying social media is “both the best thing that ever happened to the transgender community, and it’s also the worst.”
“We’re able to provide immediate, real-time, lifesaving support to transgender people and their families, any time of the day or night, but we are also open to more scrutiny and direct one-on-one harassment and abuse than ever before,” Reese said.
Trystan Reese, right, and Biff Chaplow with their children, from left, Riley, Leo and Hailey, in 2017.Kevin Truong
According to a recent report from the anti-bullying organization Ditch the Label and its analytics partner, Brandwatch, 1.5 million (or 15 percent) of the 10 million transgender-related comments on social media platforms over a three and a half year period starting in 2016 were found to be transphobic.
“The scale of it is quite frightening, and it was quite shocking,” Toryn Glavin, a transgender advocate at the London-based LGBTQ nonprofit Stonewall, said of the report’s findings. “The conversations, how nasty they’ve turned, and how we’ve seen society really kind of polarized in the last few years, and we’ve seen trans communities be one of the scape goats that are thrown under that bus.”
Brennan Suen, the LGBTQ program director for Media Matters, a progressive nonprofit that monitors and analyzes misinformation across U.S. media outlets, singled out Facebook as “one of the biggest bad actors.” He said much of the anti-trans rhetoric found on social media has been spread by far-right publications whose content has gone viral on the platform.
Suen accused the social media titan of “blatantly” allowing The Daily Wire, a popular news outlet founded by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, to break Facebook’s rules in order to make the site’s content go viral.
“If you look at an analysis of headlines with the word ‘transgender’ in them, the most engaged-with website on that issue was The Daily Wire,” Suen said. “It’s a very successful tactic for them.”
“They know that they can build outrage, they know that they can scare people, and they know that people don’t understand the issue very well,” Suen added. “So they can spread misinformation about [transgender issues], and also get a lot of clicks.”
A recent report from Popular Information — a newsletter created by journalist, lawyer and ThinkProgress founder Judd Legum — found that 14 Facebook pages with a combined 7.5 million followers are exclusively posting articles from The Daily Wire, which regularly publishes anti-LGBTQ stories. The administrators for those pages claim to be unaffiliated Facebook users but appear to be centrally controlled by The Daily Wire, which would be a violation of Facebook’s community standards against inauthentic behavior. The pages frequently share the same articles simultaneously and help the conservative outlet’s content go viral. In September, The Daily Wire received 15,283 engagements per story on Facebook compared to 1,871 for The New York Time, 2,119 for The Washington Post and 6,824 for The Huffington Post, according to the Popular Information report.
In a statement to NBC News, Jon Lewis, the vice president of The Daily Wire, claimed the company has “always worked to comply with Facebook policy.”
“We do not believe that the audience for any page that we operate has been deceived as to Daily Wire’s relationship with these pages, nor did we intend any such deception; indeed, it would be exceedingly difficult to miss that all the posts were from Daily Wire,” Lewis stated.
“In an average month, less than 5% of our total Facebook traffic comes from pages other than Daily Wire or our talent pages — primarily Ben Shapiro,” he added, though NBC News was unable to verify his claims. “Facebook has announced a new transparency initiative, and like other publishers, we have been working to implement it on schedule.”
A Facebook spokesperson told NBC News the company announced the new transparency policy earlier this month that it is applying to the 14 pages exclusively promoting The Daily Wire’s content, but the spokesperson did not confirm how the policy would be applied or whether the pages would removed.
“Since the launch of our new page transparency policy, we are actively reaching out to and reviewing various/numerous networks,” the spokesperson stated.
The Daily Wire, however, is far from the only conservative outlet publishing transgender-related articles to Facebook that are false, misleading, blatantly transphobic or some combination of the three — and many of these stories have gone viral in recent months. Suen estimates that a large portion of the “millions” of engagements received by anti-trans articles — many of which he said paint trans issues as hostile to women and children — come from Facebook.
In September, a story first covered by the Catholic news outlet Lifesite News falsely claimed that hormone blockers used by doctors to delay puberty in transgender teenagers are linked to cancer. The story went viral on Facebook and Twitter and was covered by other conservative outlets, including the Christian Post and The Daily Wire. NBC News later published an article poking holes in these claims.
Then in late October, The Daily Signal, a “multinews arm” of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with a history of fighting against LGBTQ rights, and the Christian Post both circulated a story about a mother claiming to have lost her college-age children to what she described as “the trans cult” after they transitioned.
Earlier this month, a custody dispute between a Texas couple who disagreed about the gender identity of their 7-year-old child received widespread media attention, which eventually spilled over into state politics. Many right-wing media outlets falsely claimed the child’s mother, Anne Georgulas, a pediatrician, was forcing the child to live as a girl and to medically transition. Following the misleading coverage, a rock was thrown through Georgulas’ window while her children were asleep, and she was forced to close her business after dead animals were left on its doorstep, according to her representative, Karen Hirsch.
Transphobia goes beyond the far-right mediasphere. Katelyn Burns, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who is transgender, said she regularly deals with harassment on social media, most of it from “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” commonly referred to as “TERFs” or “gender critical feminists.”
Burns said an image of her and her two young children was mysteriously uploaded to a “gender critical” Reddit in 2017 that she described as a “hive” of virulent anti-transgender feminists. She said members of the group mocked her and her children’s appearances. She said moderators eventually removed the image after she contacted them.
Burns said online harassment is frustrating because anonymous abusers work together to bully trans people across social media platforms.
“Once the harassment starts, it’s really hard to stop it,” she said. “You just have to ride it out until it ends on its own.”
On Twitter and Reddit, also in 2017, a number of accounts circulated another photo of Burns alongside the term “autogynesmile,” a label adopted from “autogynephilia,” a widely criticized and controversial theory invented by sexologist Ray Blanchard that claims trans female identity is linked to a sexual fetish. According to Burns, so-called gender-critical feminists concocted the term “autogynosmile” to mock the way trans women look in selfies. At one point, Burns said, if you searched “autogynesmile” on Google, her picture would be among the first images to pop up.
A number of trans-exclusionary organizations purporting to be progressive feminist groups, including the Women’s Liberation Front, are joining forces with conservative groups to oppose trans rights and spread the narrative that trans activism is hostile to women’s rights. The Hands Across the Aisle Coalition, for example, is an alliance of self-proclaimed “radical feminists, lesbians, Christians and conservatives” who claim to be “tabling our ideological differences” in order to “oppose gender identity ideology.”
Heron Greenesmith, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, an organization that tracks anti-transgender rhetoric in mainstream media, said far-right organizations are leveraging gender-critical feminists, whose views Heron said do not reflect the wider feminist community, to give credence to anti-LGBTQ policies and agendas.
“Here in the U.S., mainstream Christian right and Evangelical right organizations have been platforming anti-trans feminists to give anti-trans advocacy the veneer of a much broader base of support than it actually has,” Greenesmith said. “This is a tactic that the right uses all the time: Find a minority member of a marginalized group who are willing to throw other marginalized folks under the bus, in the name of scarcity mindset.”
Whether it’s from the political right, left or center, online transphobia and the spread of false and misleading narratives can have dangerous, real-life consequences, transgender advocates say.
“There’s been a significant amount of research showing a close relationship between online violence and physical violence, and given the steep relationship of mistrust between transgender people and law enforcement, understanding the scope of the threat that people feel is critical,” Branstetter said.
Jari Jones and her girlfriend, Corey.Emma Tim
This relationship between online harassment and physical violence is real-life fear for Jari Jones, a black trans activist who recently starred along with her girlfriend, who is also trans, in the YouTube series “My Trans Life.”
“Media is very powerful, and if we allow that, allow hate, and allow violent behavior with words, people think it’s OK, and that creates an atmosphere of violence for trans people,” said Jones, whose YouTube show received many abusive comments that attacked her gender identity.
“People are more willing to attack a trans person, because they see it on TV, they’re more willing to attack a trans person or say whatever they want to a trans person or a queer person, because they see this online, nobody’s checking them for it,” she added.
According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, almost half of the survey’s 27,715 respondents reported being denied equal treatment, verbally harassed and/or physically attacked in the past year for being trans. And the FBI’s latest hate crimes report, which was released earlier this month, found a 34 percent increase in reported hate crimes against trans people from 2017 to 2018.
LGBTQ advocates, including Branstetter and Suen, say the persistent — and often unfairly depicted — focus on more polarizing issues, like trans women in competitive sports, deflect public attention away from the high-levels of discrimination and violence the trans community experience.
“There’s so many issues like access to housing, access to economic opportunities, being able to live without the threat of violence, that are never talked about or seen by a wide majority or a wide swath of the country,” Suen said.
Social media platforms say they have taken steps to limit hate speech and harassment, but many civil rights and anti-bullying advocates say they haven’t gone far enough.
In a statement to NBC News, a Facebook spokesperson said the company doesn’t allow “attacks based on gender identity, including violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, and calls for exclusion or segregation.” The spokesperson stated the platform removed “7 million pieces of content for violating our hate speech policy, of which we proactively detected 80 percent before people reported it to us” in Q3 2019.
In a June statement, YouTube stated that the company removes content if it determines “the primary purpose of the video is hate or harassment.”
YouTube allowed Steven Crowder, notorious for his anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, to keep his channel, which has over 4 million subscribers, but said it stopped the conservative pundit from running ads after seeing “the widespread harm to the YouTube community resulting from the ongoing pattern of egregious behavior.”
And earlier this month,YouTube removed a video from The Daily Signal in which Dr. Michelle Cretella, a pediatrician, stated, “See, if you want to cut off a leg or an arm, you’re mentally ill, but if you want to cut off healthy breasts or a penis, you’re transgender.” YouTube said it removed the video because Cretella’s statement violated its hate speech policy, according to news reports.
Cretella is the executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “a fringe anti-LGBT hate group that masquerades as the premier U.S. association of pediatricians to push anti-LGBT junk science.”
Katrina Trinko, editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal, accused YouTube of censorship in commentary published Nov. 5.
“We are especially disappointed with YouTube’s decision because other social media platforms have allowed the video on their platforms,” Trinko wrote. “In fact, the video has more than 70 million views on Facebook. It might have even more if Facebook hadn’t temporarily removed it in July 2018. After our appeal to Facebook, it was quickly restored and remains on The Daily Signal’s page today.”
Last year, Twitter made “misgendering” and “deadnaming” users — referring to a trans person as their sex assigned at birth or by their given name, if different from their chosen name — against its hateful conduct policy. A number of users, including Meghan Murphy, founder of the Canadian radical feminist website The Feminist Current, were banned from Twitter for violating these rules. Murphy disputes she violated Twitter’s rules and unsuccessfully sued the company over the ban.
Burns said she has shielded herself from abuse on Twitter by subscribing to blocklists and by limiting her notifications to only accounts that follow her, but she said abuse has been more difficult to avoid on Facebook. After Burns wrote a viral story for Vox about “gender-critical feminists,” she said a Facebook user angered by the story tagged her in an abusive post on the platform, which then generated “hundreds” of abusive replies from other users. Burns said she reported the online harassment to Facebook, but the company said it would not remove the initial post because, as a journalist, Burns is considered a public figure.
“I couldn’t write again for like two weeks afterwards, because those people got in my head,” Burns said. “They say things, and you start believing it after enough people have said it.”
Reese said reporting abuse to Facebook feels “completely useless.”
“I flag them as hateful, I flag them as untrue, I flag them as bigotry,” he said, adding that the process is like “trying to use my thumb to stop a damn.”
Both Burns and Reese said they use social media to do their jobs, which makes abandoning these platforms impossible.
While preventing online abuse altogether may be impossible, Glavin said social media companies should join forces with trans people to help minimize the online abuse they experience.
“I think really the way forward for social media companies is to work with trans communities and to kind of sit down with trans communities and figure out what is happening, what is the current situation, what are the kind of things that they should watch out for, what are the signs and symptoms that that kind of transphobic bullying is happening, and then trying to build policies around that,” Glavin said.
Reese lamented that there does not seem to be a “coordinated interest” from social media companies in protecting the voices of trans people who are “desperately trying to tell our stories.”
“We’re desperately trying to answer all of our direct messages from trans youth who think they have no hope,” Reese said. “We’re trying so hard to do this positive, life-affirming work, and we’re doing it against brutal odds.”
A new tool makes it even easier to let your sex partners know—anonymously—that they may have been exposed to a treatable sexually transmitted infection (STI) and that they might want to get tested.
The free service, Tell Your Partner, is a fast, secure, easy-to-use notification system that doesn’t require you to share any of your personal information. Simply add phone numbers or email addresses for partners you’d like to notify and enter the infection(s) your partner(s) should get tested for. After you preview a sample message and confirm you’re not a robot, hit send.
How Tell Your Partner Works
Many people keep up with regular STI testing and treatment as part of a proactive sexual health plan. But with rising STI rates across the U.S., and higher rates among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, it’s clear that more tools are needed to slow the spread of STIs including gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis.
“Notifying sex partners about a recent infection makes it more likely that those partners will get tested, treated and not pass the infection along to anyone else,” said Jen Hecht, MPH, senior director of program strategy & evaluation at San Francisco AIDS Foundation and director and co-founder of Building Healthy Online Communities. “In that way, you’re also improving your own future health, by reducing the overall infection rate in the community.”
The site and mobile app were conceptualized and created by Building Healthy Online Communities(BHOC) in collaboration with YTH and the National Coalition of STD Directors (NCSD). Tell Your Partner is a modern version of inSPOT, the first online STI partner notification system developed by YTH, which sent e-cards anonymously to partners.
Last week, in advance of today’s International Trans Day of Remembrance, Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide released the annual results from its Trans Murder Monitoring research project, “to join the voices raising awareness of this day regarding hate crimes against trans and gender-diverse people, and to honour the lives of those who might otherwise be forgotten.”
The TMM project is devoted to the systematic collection, monitoring and analysis of reported killings of gender-diverse/trans people worldwide. It was established by TvT Worldwide in 2009, using data from 2008 onward.
This year’s update, which was published on the organization’s website November 11, reported 331 cases of reported killings of trans and gender-diverse people between October 1 2018 – September 30 2019.
The complete update is reproduced below:
“On the occasion of the International Trans Day of Remembrance (TDoR), which is held on 20th of November 2019, the Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide (TvT) team is publishing the Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) research project update to join the voices raising awareness of this day regarding hate crimes against trans and gender-diverse people, and to honour the lives of those who might otherwise be forgotten.
The TDoR 2019 update has revealed a total of 331 cases of reported killings of trans and gender-diverse people between 1 October 2018 and 30 September 2019. The majority of the murders occurred in Brazil (130), Mexico (63), and the United States (30), adding up to a total of 3314 reported cases in 74 countries worldwide between 1st of January 2008 and 30th of September 2019.
Stigma and discrimination against trans and gender-diverse people is real and profound around the world, and are part of a structural and ongoing circle of oppression that keeps us deprived of our basic rights. Trans and gender-diverse people are victims of horrifying hate violence, including extortion, physical and sexual assaults, and murder. In most countries, data on murdered trans and gender-diverse people are not systematically produced and it is impossible to estimate the actual number of cases.
Violence against trans and gender-diverse people frequently overlaps with other axes of oppression prevalent in society, such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, and anti-sex worker sentiment and discrimination. TMM data shows that the victims whose occupations are known are mostly sex workers (61%). In the United States, the majority of the trans people reported murdered are trans women of colour and/or Native American trans women (85%), and in France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, which are the countries to which most trans and gender-diverse people from Africa and Central and South America migrate, 65% of the reported murder victims were migrant trans women.
More about the project can be found on our TMM report 2016.”
Since beginning the TMM project, TvT has registered the murders of 3317 trans and gender-diverse people worldwide. The killings are merely catalogued as reports of murdered trans and gender-diverse persons, without further classification, because (according to the TvT website), “The classification of the murder of a trans/gender-diverse person as a hate crime is often difficult, due to a lack of information in the reports as well as the lack of national monitoring systems.”
TvT Worldwide, an ongoing, comparative qualitative-quantitative research project initiated by Transgender Europe (TGEU), serves gender-diverse/trans people’s movements and activism by seeking to provide an overview of the human-rights situation of trans and gender-diverse persons in different parts of the world and to develop useful data and advocacy tools for international institutions, human-rights organizations, the trans movement, and the general public. Besides the TMM, their work is divided into two additional sub-projects: one, dedicated to legal and social mapping, surveys existing laws, law proposals, and actual legal and health-care practices as well as diverse aspects of the social situation relevant to gender-diverse/trans people; another, a Survey on the Social Experiences of Trans and Gender-Diverse People, addresses experiences of both Transphobia and Transrespect in communities around the world.
A transgender woman said she was “humiliated and traumatized” after she was forced to remove her makeup with hand sanitizer for her driver’s license photo.
Jaydee Dolinar told NBC News that after her purse was stolen, she made an appointment at the Fairpark Driver License Office in Utah to obtain a replacement license last Wednesday. She said she brought the required documents to the appointment and “was fully prepared to have to say my dead name,” since she is currently in the process of changing her gender marker and legal name on her paperwork. A “dead name” describes a trans person’s given name, if different than the name they choose to go by.
Jaydee Dolinar said she was forced to remove her makeup with hand sanitizer when taking a picture for her driver’s license.Courtesy
What Dolinar was not prepared for, however, was that after taking a picture with makeup, she would be instructed by another employee to remove it for a second image.
“I was told my wearing makeup would be confusing to the system,” Dolinar, 33, said. “The employee said because my appearance didn’t match my gender, it wouldn’t be able to be picked up by the facial recognition software.”
Dolinar, who is a full-time doctoral student in archeology at the University of Utah, said that because she wouldn’t have time to reschedule the appointment and because people were watching her, she felt “forced” into taking off her makeup.
“I asked what I should do, and they handed me the hand sanitizer and wipes,” Dolinar said. “The whole thing was terrible and traumatic. I had to take it off right then and there and I felt as a trans woman, I had forced myself to get clocked.”
After removing her makeup, Dolinar took a second picture. This time, her makeup was smeared. She said she tried to “smile while crying.”
Neither the Fairpark Driver License Office nor the Utah Department of Public Safety Driver License Division responded to NBC News’ requests for comment, but Sue Robbins, chair of the board of directors of Transgender Education Advocates of Utah, said this is not the first time an incident like this has occurred. According to Robbins, two other transgender women were required to remove their makeup for their drivers license pictures in 2015, prompting her organization to provide training and a video about “how to treat trans people.”
“Trans people should be able to live our lives the way they feel,” Robbins said. “The license should match the way a person presents on a regular basis and reflect their regular appearance, so to make them present differently is discriminatory.”
Robbins said Transgender Education Advocates of Utah plans to work with the office again to “discuss a path forward” and prevent a similar incident from happening again.
“It was just cruel. I didn’t expect that lack of humanity,” Dolinar said. “I’m a human being just like everyone else. Have some humanity.”
The National Center for Transgender Equality ranks Utah’s drivers license gender change policy with a “C,” stating that there are “burdensome process requirements,” such as needing to provide an updated passport or birth certificate. For reference, a state with an “A” grade does not require provider certification, while a state with an “F” grade requires either proof of surgery, a court order or an amended birth certificate.
Beyond Utah, there have been similar incidents noted in West Virginia, where two transgender women were reportedly told in 2014 that they must appear as male in their license photos, and in South Carolina, where a transgender teen was reportedly told to wipe off their makeup in 2015. In San Francisco, a DMV employee allegedly sent a trans women a letter, calling her an “abomination” in 2010.
As Chick-fil-A expands globally and into more liberal parts of the U.S., the chicken chain plans to change which charities it donates to after years of bad press and protests from the LGBT community.
Beginning next year, Chick-fil-A will move away from its current philanthropic structure, Bisnow has learned. After donating to more than 300 charitable organizations this year, the Atlanta-based fast-food chain will instead focus on three initiatives with one accompanying charity each: education, homelessness and hunger.
“There’s no question we know that, as we go into new markets, we need to be clear about who we are,” Chick-fil-A President and Chief Operating Officer Tim Tassopoulos said in an interview with Bisnow. “There are lots of articles and newscasts about Chick-fil-A, and we thought we needed to be clear about our message.”
When transgender people undergo sex-reassignment surgery, the beneficial effect on their mental health is still evident — and increasing — years later, a Swedish study suggests.
Overall, people in the study with gender incongruence — that is, their biological gender doesn’t match the gender with which they identify — were six times more likely than people in the general population to visit a doctor for mood and anxiety disorders. They were also three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants, and six times more likely to be hospitalized after a suicide attempt, researchers found.
But among trans people who had undergone gender-affirming surgery, the longer ago their surgery, the less likely they were to suffer anxiety, depression or suicidal behavior during the study period, researchers reported in The American Journal of Psychiatry.
Surgery to modify a person’s sex characteristics “is often the last and the most considered step in the treatment process for gender dysphoria,” according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
Many transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals “find comfort with their gender identity, role, and expression without surgery,” but for others, “surgery is essential and medically necessary to alleviate their gender dysphoria,” according to the organization.
While the new study confirms that transgender individuals are more likely to use mental health treatments, it also shows that gender-affirming therapy might reduce this risk, coauthor Richard Branstrom of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm told Reuters Health by email.
Branstrom and colleague John Pachankis of the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut found that as of 2015, 2,679 people in Sweden had a diagnosis of gender incongruence, out of the total population of 9.7 million.
That year, 9.3 percent of people with gender incongruence visited a doctor for mood disorders, 7.4 percent saw a doctor for anxiety disorders and 29 percent were on antidepressants. In the general population, those percentages were 1 percent, 0.6 percent and 9.4 percent, respectively.
Just over 70 percent of people with gender incongruence were receiving feminizing or masculinizing hormones to modify outward sexual features such as breasts, body fat distribution and facial hair, and 48 percent had undergone gender-affirming surgery. Nearly all of those who had surgery also received hormone therapy.
The benefit of hormone treatment did not increase with time. But “increased time since last gender-affirming surgery was associated with fewer mental health treatments,” the authors report.
In fact, they note, “The likelihood of being treated for a mood or anxiety disorder was reduced by 8 percent for each year since the last gender-affirming surgery,” for up to 10 years.
Transgender individuals’ use of mental health care still exceeded that of the general Swedish population, which the research team suggests is due at least partly to stigma, economic inequality and victimization.
“We need greater visibility and knowledge about challenges people are confronted with while breaking gender and identity norms,” Branstrom said.
Dr. Joshua Safer, executive director at Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York City, told Reuters Health by email, “If anything, the study likely under-reports mental health benefits of medical and surgical care for transgender individuals.”
Safer, who was not involved in the study, said the fact that mental health continued to improve for years after surgery “suggests (surgery provides) extended and ongoing benefit to patients living according to gender identity.”
