Three LGBT+ workers who were fired by Google during Thanksgiving week are alleging that they were dismissed by the tech giant because of their employee activism, and plan to file federal charges.
Laurence Berland, Sophie Waldman and Rebecca Rivers, who all identify as LGBT+, were fired duing the same week, along with another employee, Paul Duke, who is not LGBT+.
Google told its employees that the reason for firing the four workers was “clear and repeated violations of our data security policies”.
But the former Googlers, according to The Guardian, deny any wrongdoing and are alleging their dismissal was to send a message to stop workers organising and employee activism, which they say violates federal labour laws.
Waldman, who used to be Google software engineer, told the newspaper: “Google fired us not just to target us, but to send a message to other employees in the company.”
Berland added: “It’s not about us, but intimidating everyone else. They want us afraid, they want us resigned, and they want us cynical.”
Some of the group’s activism included using employee resource groups (ERGs) for LGBT+ employees to push for changes like equal benefits for same-sex partnerships.
Waldman said: “From the beginning, queer and trans people at Google have banded together to make sure we have great benefits and a strong community.
“A lot of us feel very directly that it’s us and people like us that are on the line [when it comes to the company’s ethical decisions]… Google is a lovely place to work if you are transgender and don’t care about what is going on in the world.”
She alleges that when she was suspended, before being fired, Google wiped her personal phone, meaning she lost pictures documenting her gender transition.
The group say that workers at the company are calling for a union, when just last month the New York Times reported that Google had “hired an anti-union consulting firm to advise management as it deals with widespread worker unrest”.
In a statement to CNN, a Google spokesperson maintained: “We dismissed four individuals who were engaged in intentional and often repeated violations of our longstanding data security policies, including systematically accessing and disseminating other employees’ materials and work.
“No one has been dismissed for raising concerns or debating the company’s activities.”
The U.S. government will start a national HIV prevention program that will distribute free HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis medication, or PrEP, to uninsured Americans at risk of acquiring the virus, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday. Activists, however, say the plan doesn’t go far enough.
Health Secretary Alex Azar called the new “Ready, Set, PrEP” program a “historic expansion of access to HIV prevention medication” and a “major step forward” in President Donald Trump’s Ending the HIV Epidemic plan, which was announced in February and seeks to reduce HIV transmission by 90 percent by 2030.
“Thanks to Ready, Set, PrEP, thousands of Americans who are at risk for HIV will now be able to protect themselves and their communities,” Azar said in a statement.
According to a risk index devised by the CDC, men who have sex with men should be advised to start PrEP if they have multiple risk factors, such as having more than one partner per month or being between 18 and 28. One risk factor — having condomless receptive sex once in the past six months — results in an automatic PrEP recommendation, according to the guidelines.
Azar noted that just 18 percent of the 1.2 million Americans who might benefit from HIV PrEP are actually taking the medication. That low level of access is in part because of the $2,000 monthly list price of Truvada and Descovy, the two Gilead Sciences drugs approved for HIV prevention, as well as the absence of a generic alternative. A generic version of Truvada is set to be released in September 2020.
This new national program is a win for activists, like those involved in the PrEP4All Collaboration, who have for years called for a national PrEP program to end the U.S. HIV epidemic.
However, the program has one glaring loophole: Ready, Set, PrEP does not cover the blood work required for PrEP, which advocates call “a barrier to PrEP access.”
The CDC’s 2017 PrEP provider guidelines state all sexually active PrEP users should receive multiple blood tests annually in order to initiate and continue taking PrEP. These tests can easily cost hundreds of dollars per visit, and with no federal coverage for them, it remains unclear how users would pay for them. In a conference call, Azar said community health centers could provide these tests for free, though this is not an official part of the government plan.
PrEP4All Collaboration member James Krellenstein said Ready, Set, PrEP leaves much to be desired, because it is “poised to repeat the errors of Gilead’s own Medication Assistance Program, which donated free PrEP to qualified uninsured individuals, albeit on a much smaller scale.”
“Similar to the HHS program, the Medication Assistance Program did not cover lab costs or associated clinical care,” Krellenstein wrote in an email. “As a result, people who access PrEP through the Medication Association Program were found to have a statistically significant lower rate of PrEP initiation and a longer time between PrEP prescription and initiation.”
While PrEP access is weak nationwide, there are areas where it is more widely used and supported by government health care services, like New York City and San Francisco. In those municipalities, the rate of new HIV infections has declined since the introduction of PrEP and is now reaching a level where there are few HIV-positive people who are at risk of transmitting the virus and few HIV-negative people who are at risk of contracting it.
HHS launched a website — GetYourPrEP.com — and a telephone number — 855-447-8410 — to help guide potential patients to PrEP resources.
The global fight against the human immunodeficiency virus is poised to make important advances thanks to three experimental HIV vaccines that are entering the final stages of testing at sites across the globe.
While any of these three late-stage HIV vaccine trials — known as HVTN 702, Imbokodo and Mosaico — could fail, scientists say they are more hopeful than at any time since 1984, when Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler raised hopes by predicting that there would be a test-worthy HIV vaccine within two years.
This is “perhaps one of the most optimistic moments we have been in,” said Dr. Susan Buchbinder, director of the Bridge HIV research program at the San Francisco Department of Public Health and a chair of both the Imbokodo and Mosaico trials.
“We have three vaccines currently being tested in efficacy trials,” she said, “and it takes quite a bit to actually be promising enough in the earlier stages stages of trials to move you forward into an efficacy study.”
HVTN 702
The oldest ongoing HIV vaccine trial, known as HVTN 702, is based on a prior vaccine candidate, RV144, that was effective, but not effective enough. In 2009, the RV144 clinical trial released findings showing that the vaccine lowered the rate of HIV infections by about 30 percent. To this day, RV144 remains the only HIV vaccine that have ever demonstrated any efficacy against the virus.
While RV144, at 30 percent effective, did not suffice for global distribution, it pointed the way forward for vaccine researchers, who adapted RV144’s successes to create HVTN 702. Buchbinder said even a partially effective vaccine would be “a tremendous breakthrough,” and “would really have the power to change the trajectory of the epidemic.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID and a longtime advocate for a vaccine that is at least 50 percent effective, said he feels “even more strongly now” that a partially effective vaccine would be worth deploying. He said that is because prevention strategies like pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and treatment as prevention (TasP) “are being so successfully used, even in the absence of a vaccine, that if one or more of these vaccines look good, have a 50-60 percent efficacy, I think that’s going to be the game changer for turning the epidemic around.”
HVTN 702 completed enrollment this summer, and clinical results are expected in late 2020 or early 2021.
Imbokodo and Mosaico
Imbokodo, the second trial, began in five southern African nations in 2017 and completed enrollment of 2,600 women this summer. In southern African nations, heterosexual women are at extremely high risk of HIV infection.
“It’s almost unbelievable, but it’s true, women between the ages of 18 and 25 — the prevalence of infection is well over 50 percent,” Fauci said. “If ever you wanted to get a population that, if the vaccine works, you’re going to know pretty quickly, then you want to go in women.”
Unlike HVTN 702, Imbokodo uses “mosaic” immunogens, which are “vaccine components designed to induce immune responses against a wide variety of global HIV strains,” according to the National Institutes of Health.
“The presumption is that a mosaic is going to give you broader coverage,” Fauci said.
In November, the third vaccine trial, Mosaico, marked its informal start after the first study participant received an injection. Mosaico is based on Imbokodo’s unique mosaic immunogen approach.
Imbokodo and Mosaico are largely identical and consist of six injections, with slightly different vaccine formulations administered during the final two clinic visits.
In addition, while Imbokodo is only being tested in African women, Mosaico will recruit 3,800 gay men and transgender people for its clinical trials at 57 sites in the United States, Latin America and Europe. For any HIV vaccine, Fauci said there’s a need to prove it works in different at-risk populations.
Imbokodo completed enrollment of study participants this summer, marking the formal end of the recruitment process. Results from Imbokodo are expected in 2021, and results from Mosaico are expected in 2023.
Challenges ahead
Fauci noted that there has been a rapid pace of vaccine-related developments in recent years, with these three vaccine trials starting in 2016, 2017 and 2019.
“In all of these trials, intermittently the data and safety monitoring board takes a look at the data, and either says the data are so bad you have got to stop, or the data are so overwhelmingly good that you have got to stop,” Fauci said. So far, after several reviews of the data in HVTN 702 and Imbokodo, “there’s nothing there to say stop the study,” which happened in 2007 when a Merck vaccine trial was shut down after the monitoring board determined that it had no impact on prevention.
“None of these vaccines is a particularly simple regimen,” Buchbinder said, “so it’s going to require quite a bit of effort to deploy.”
“They require multiple injections, and so each one would require a minimum of four different doses in its current configuration,” Buchbinder said. But an effective vaccine could be a “stepping off point” to potentially create a simpler and more effective vaccine in the future.
And if these vaccine trials all fail, public health officials say enough tools currently exist to stop the spread of HIV — if only people would, or could, use them.
PrEP, the daily pill that prevents HIV infection, is safe and effective, but not enough people are using it to slow HIV transmission and end the epidemic. And successful treatment of people living with HIV results in an undetectable viral load that they cannot transmit the virus via sexual activity, known as “treatment as prevention” or TasP.
“It goes exactly to what I have been saying for years and years — if you implement the tools that you have, you will definitely see an impact on the dynamics of the epidemic,” Fauci said. “I have been talking about this for well over a decade. If you implement, the incidence is going to go down. It happened dramatically in San Francisco, and it is happening right now in New York.”
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.
