Just in case you missed it, the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey is now LIVE! If you haven’t taken the survey already, now is a great time. For the first time in 7 years, you have a chance to be part of the largest survey of trans people in the United States. We hope you’ll take about 60 minutes to share your story and be a part of history.
If you are trans and plan to take the survey, here’s what you need to know:
The survey is open to people of all trans identities (binary and nonbinary), ages 16 and older, living in the United States and U.S. territories, regardless of citizenship status.
If you pledged to take the survey, you are not obligated to take the survey. Participation is voluntary. When you click on the link to start the survey, you will be asked to consent to take the survey.
The U.S. Trans Survey is an anonymous survey. Your response will be kept confidential and will not be used to identify you.
The time required to take the survey may vary, but make sure to set aside at least 60 minutes to take the survey.
The survey will be available in both English and Spanish.
Please let your trans friends and siblings know about the survey too!
The U.S. Trans Survey is a survey for trans people, by trans people. The 2022 U.S. Trans Survey is conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality in partnership with the National Black Trans Advocacy Coalition, the TransLatin@ Coalition, and the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance.
Phyllis Frye’s statusas the “grandmother of the transgender legal rights movement” was always partly the handiwork of her stalwart support system, second wife, Patricia “Trish” Dooley Frye, whom she was wed to for 47 years. Frye is now navigating life without Trish, who died in 2020.
“We had such a good love that I want love again,” Frye told Outsmart last year. “Not everybody [gets that kind of love].”
Frye is working to move on, taking heart that her legacy as a queer rights leader is being cemented as of late. A new book from historians Michael G. Long and Shea Tuttle, Phyllis Frye and the Fight for Transgender Rights, documents her momentous life and its instrumental role in trans liberation. Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frye is best known as a judge — in 2010 she became the first openly transgender judge appointed in the U.S. — but some of her most impactful work took place when she didn’t wield a gavel.
After becoming a lieutenant in the Army and marrying Trish, Frye came out as trans in the mid-70s, enduring non-stop harassment from her Houston-area neighbors. Instead of hiding from the world, the hate turned Frye into an activist, leading her to law school and an integral role in the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. “Her trans advocacy would give birth to a movement and she used the march organizing as a means of [achieving] that,” march co-organizer Ray Hill says. “The state of our collective movement in 1979 was one of uneven development of its component parts. The trans movement did not exist, except for Phyllis’s advocacy.”
Frye would be involved in subsequent marches on Washington for queer rights, lobbying for trans inclusion and becoming the first transgender person to speak at a national march for lesbian and gay rights. Frye understood the importance of language and advocated for years — mostly through her positions in the National Lesbian and Gay Law Association and its influential Lavender Law Conference — to add the T to the LGB acronym.
Frye’s contributions to the trans movement continued through the 1990s. Among her many accomplishments are the six annual International Conferences on Transgender Law and Employment Policy which she organized, hosted, and provided grassroots training for. Eventually, Frye established a practice in criminal defense. “By 2010, I had become senior partner of my firm with lawyers who were either LGBT or supportive,” she recalls.
That year, Frye became the first out transgender judge in the entire country, when Mayor Annise Parker picked Frye to be an associate municipal judge for the city of Houston. As an associate she worked part-time, which allowed her to continue to practice law “and head this firm that I had worked so hard to establish.”
In recent years, Frye would take on transgender clients from around the state who need legal help with name changes and other paperwork. “I do kids as young as 6 and adults in their 70s and all in between,” Frye says.
Even after Trish’s death and an onslaught of anti-trans laws and political rhetoric, Frye remains optimistic and emboldened, telling everyone in the legal profession, including judges like herself, to come out.
“You’re dealing with so much angst if you’re worried about what other people are going to think,” Frye recently told out Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg. “They’re going to think what they’re going [to] think anyway.”
A Thai businesswoman and transgender advocate bought the Miss Universe Organization for $20 million, making her the first woman to own the global beauty pageant in its 71-year history, her company announced Wednesday.
Anne Jakkapong Jakrajutatip, the CEO of the Thailand-based media company JKN Global Group, is a reality TV star in her home country, where she has appeared on local versions of “Project Runway” and “Shark Tank.” She also helped establish Life Inspired for Transsexual Foundation, a nonprofit transgender rights group.
Jakrajutatip said her company’s acquisition of the Miss Universe brand is a “strong, strategic addition to our portfolio.”
“We seek not only to continue its legacy of providing a platform to passionate individuals from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and traditions, but also to evolve the brand for the next generation,” she said in a press release.
The Miss Universe Organization, which was co-owned by former President Donald Trump between 1996-2015, was bought by Endeavor’s IMG in 2015. The organization will continue to be led by its current CEO, Amy Emmerich, and president, Paula Shugart.
Miss Universe, Harnaaz Sandhu of India, waves after being crowned Dec. 12 in Eilat, Israel.Amir Levy / Getty Images file
Following the deal with the JKN Global Group, Endeavor President Mark Shapiro said in a statement that he’s “proud of the progress the organization has made in becoming a more inclusive and powerful platform where women can advance both their business objectives and their cause-based work.”
Emmerich agreed, saying that JKN Global will help to further grow the organization.
“Despite having recently celebrated the organization’s legacy of more than 70 years, we are just getting started,” she said.
The Miss Universe pageant, which started in 1952, broadcasts in 165 countries. The pageant featured its first transgender contestant in 2018, when Miss Spain, Angela Ponce, competed for the crown.
A new study has found that most people who initiate gender-affirming treatment in their youth continue it as adults — undermining the argument by right-wingers that transgender people are likely to regret such treatment and even detransition, and that young people are not ready to make decisions about gender transition procedures, even though they do so in consultation with parents and doctors.
The study, from Amsterdam University Medical Center in the Netherlands, looked at 720 people who had been treated with puberty blockers and hormones at the center as adolescents and whether they continued with gender-affirming care.
“Most participants who started gender-affirming hormones in adolescence continued this treatment into adulthood,” says a summary of the study, which was published online Thursday by The Lancet. “The continuation of treatment is reassuring considering the worries that people who started treatment in adolescence might discontinue gender-affirming treatment.” “Most,” in this case, was 98 percent.
“To our knowledge, this study is the first to assess continuation of gender-affirming hormones in a large group of transgender individuals who started medical treatment with puberty suppression in adolescence,” the report notes.
“The key message [of the study] is that the majority of people who went through a thorough diagnostic evaluation prior to starting treatment continued gender-affirming hormones at follow-up,” Dr. Marianne van der Loos, a physician at Amsterdam UMC who coauthored the study, told The Daily Beast. “This is reassuring regarding the recent increased public concern about regret of transition.”
Gender-affirming care for youth is under attack from conservative politicians in the U.S. and elsewhere. Alabama and Arkansas have outlawed the provision of such care to minors, with the Alabama law carrying criminal penalties; both states’ laws are blocked while court cases against them proceed. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered that parents who allow their children to receive this care be investigated for child abuse; these investigations are also on hold because of a court case.
And U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican known for her outrageous statements and embrace of conspiracy theories, has introduced legislation that would make it a felony to provide gender-confirmation procedures to minors.
A Florida sheriff’s office has cleared an officer of wrongdoing after he was caught on a body camera footage choking a Guatemalan transgender woman and calling her “it.”
In November 2020, Sean Bush, a deputy from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO), said that a then-24-year-old trans woman named Jenny DeLeon had provoked his forceful arrest after she allegedly grabbed him by the wrist and knocked him off balance while he investigated a domestic disturbance on her property.
However, attorney Katherine Viker recently uncovered Bush’s body cam footage while conducting an unrelated allegation of another HCSO deputy using excessive force, The Huffington Post reported.
The November 2020 body cam video shows DeLeon greeting Bush with a fist bump and then refusing Bush’s instruction for her to sit down. DeLeon then says that no one in the home called for him to come and asked Bush to go back to his patrol car. Soon after, she asks Bush to please stay six feet away due to COVID-19 concerns. She then tells the officer, “You’re so awesome. Thank you for your service.”
However, when Bush moves towards her car, DeLeon raises her arm and asks him not to touch the vehicle because of fears of possible COVID-19 transmission. Such transmissions are rare, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Bush then says, “Don’t touch me,” before grabbing the woman’s arm, shirt, and neck and pushing her to the ground in a chokehold. Bush then pulls out his stun gun as DeLeon says, “I’m epileptic!” Bush uses the stun gun on her, even though stun guns can trigger seizures in epileptic people.
Later on, he grabs her by the throat again and then shoves her into some plants before using the stun gun on her again. He then rolls her onto her stomach and began handcuffing her.
As two other deputies arrived, Bush tells them, “Just keep whatever it is down,” referring to DeLeon as an “it,” a dehumanizing transphobic slur.
After the HCSO received a complaint about Bush’s use of force and a slur, the office conducted an investigation which began on December 2, 2020. The investigation ended one month later, and by March 2021, the HCSO sent Bush a letter saying that it found neither evidence of “excessive or unnecessary force,” nor of Bush making derogatory remarks. It also called Bush’s chokehold “brief and unintentional.”
Chokeholds violate the HCSO’s use-of-force policy, according to its website. Bush remains an HSCO deputy.
In a statement issued last week, HCSO wrote, “Following review of body-worn camera video… it was determined that … the suspect continuously refused to follow commands on scene and was physically combative with the deputy…. The deputy unintentionally briefly used techniques that are not in line with HCSO’s procedures.”
After her interaction with Bush, DeLeon was charged with battery, battery on a law enforcement officer, depriving an officer of means of protection or communication, and resisting an officer with violence. She was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
One year later, DeLeon was fatally stabbed. A 40-year-old man named Damien Marshall has been arrested in connection to her murder. Marshall said he slept with DeLeon but denied killing her.
“You see the video; what they said happened compared to what actually happened is not true,” Viker told The Huffington Post in a statement. “The video is the best representation of what actually occurred. Videos don’t lie.”
Viker isn’t representing DeLeon’s family members. It’s unclear if the family will take any actions in response to the newly uncovered video.
A March 2020 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality found that half of transgender people reported discomfort with seeking police assistance. About 22 percent of trans people who had interacted with police reported police harassment, and 6 percent of transgender individuals reported that they experienced bias-motivated assault by officers.
The right-wing political views of the new head of Grindr are causing some users to delete the popular gay dating and hookup app.
The tag #DeleteGrindr is trending after news incoming CEO George Arison, 44, previously tweeted he was a conservative who supported some of the positions of then-President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Arison, who is gay, starts his new job October 19.
“FYI I am a conservative & agree with some Trump policies,” Arison wrote in a since-deleted tweet on February 28, 2020.
“Should totally run for President,” he wrote of Youngkin in a retweet dated February 24 of this year.
Arison appeared to express support for DeSantis in another retweet from January. In the retweet, he wrote that the man who championed the “don’t say gay” law was “not ideal” but agreed the Republican governor was “better-suited to advance a new, more comabtive [sic] and populist party.”
Users on social media responded quickly, calling out the past statements from Arison.
Another user called out Arison’s support for Youngkin.
Others indicated they were ditching Grindr.
Arison came to Grindr from e-commerce marketplace Shift Technologies, where he was CEO and cofounder.
In a statement to The Advocate about the issue, Grindr centered on Arison’s identity as a gay man, husband, and father.
“George is an out gay man, proudly married to his husband and the father of two children,” a Grindr spokesperson said. “George is passionate about fighting for the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ people around the world.”
Since a peak in August, the number of reported daily cases of the monkeypox virus has declined 85%.
That’s the latest seven-day average data from the Centers for Disease Control, indicating a drop from 443 reported cases at the height of the outbreak on August 6, to 60 cases reported on October 12.
As of yesterday, 27,022 cases of the monkeypox virus have been reported in the U.S.
Experts attribute the drop to a variety of factors. The monkeypox vaccine, with an 85% efficacy rate, helped slow the virus down. Men who have sex with men reduced their partners following the rise of cases in the wake of large gatherings around Pride month in June. And the virus, spread by close skin-to-skin contact, was self-limiting, unlike the airborne coronavirus, finding fewer places to spread as potential hosts reduced their exposure and the vaccine proved effective.
Centers for Disease Control
Another factor was a change in communications strategy. As cases began to rise sharply, it became clear that the virus was disproportionally affecting men who have sex with men, but officials at all levels of government were reluctant to highlight the fact, fearing the stigmatizing effect of a virus mislabeled as a “gay disease.”
In the middle of July, the New York City Health Department debated a strategy calling for gay men to reduce partners, issuing a statement that counseled caution: “For decades, the LGBTQ+ community has had their sex lives dissected, prescribed, and proscribed in myriad ways, mostly by heterosexual and cis people,” the statement read. New York would offer direction cognizant of “how poorly abstinence-only guidance has historically performed with this disgraceful legacy in mind.”
“Telling people not to have sex or not to have multiple sex partners or not to have anonymous sex is just a no-go, and it’s not going to work,” longtime AIDS activist and Housing Works chief executive Charles King told The New York Times at the time. “People are still going to have sex, and they’re going to have it even if it comes with great risk.”
In San Francisco, local officials decided the data should do the talking, expanding eligibility for the vaccine to all men who have sex with men who’d had multiple sexual partners in the previous 14 days. On July 28, the city announced a public health state of emergency, in an effort to prompt a more urgent response from the federal government and to put the city’s most at-risk population on high alert.
New York City followed suit with their own monkeypox state of emergency, at about the same time the World Health Organization’s director general recommended that men who have sex with men should consider limiting their partners. The CDC highlighted that guidance not long after.
At the federal level, in the beginning of August, the White House enlisted Dr. Demetre Daskalakis to help lead the administration’s response to the growing crisis and rectify a stumbling rollout of the vaccine. Daskalakis, who is gay, responded with a strategy directly targeting the MSM community, through outreach at large events attracting gay men, and even participating in a live Grindr forum addressing the issue, with explicit guidance for men who have sex with men to reduce their number of sex partners.
The new messaging seems to have worked. According to the CDC, by the middle of August, men who have sex with men reported changing their behavior because of the monkeypox outbreak: 48% reported reducing their number of sex partners, 50% reported reducing one-time sexual encounters, and 50% reported reducing sex with partners met on dating apps or at sex venues.
Centers for Disease Control
“The strategy worked,” Daskalakis told LGBTQ Nation, describing what he calls “a three-part trick that always works in addressing outbreaks and epidemics: community engagement, science and political will.”
“I think that the really frank, direct information that we generated through governmental public health, and then saw the community alter, magnify, and contextualize, got out,” said Daskalakis. “Seeing people who reduced their behaviors that could potentially expose them to monkeypox was definitely a part of this.”
Daskalakis added: “What’s important is that you don’t associate a virus with an identity, but rather talk about the behaviors that are associated with transmission of virus, and make sure the right people know.”
“I think the Biden administration kind of got its act together, but it was slower than it should have been,” Supervisor Raphael Mandelman, who pushed hard for San Francisco’s monkeypox emergency declaration, told LGBTQ Nation. “It was not a pleasant exercise, seeing this health crisis that the federal government was not adequately addressing, and seeing how slow the country was to get this vaccine, that had already been discovered, distributed into people’s arms.”
But, says Mandelman, “It seems like the gays have done a good job of getting their monkeypox vaccines, and it seems like we’ve kind of turned a corner. I can say this cautiously.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said its policies prohibit any reference to LGBTQ people being “groomers,” a term for would-be child rapists that conservatives have applied to LGBTQ people and allies – especially teachers and doctors – this past year.
The slur has increasingly been used by conservatives to oppose LGBTQ content in schools and gender-affirming care for transgender youth, leading to an increase in threats and harassment.
However, Facebook has continued to make money from at least 150 ads using the slur, even though the media watchdog group Media Matters alerted Meta to the issue. These ads have been seen over one million times, Media Matters reported.
On September 6, Media Matters told Meta about 134 ads using the slur. Meta removed only 40 of the ads from their platform. Now, Media Matters has discovered 19 more ads using the slur. Collectively, the advertisers paid Meta $13,600 to display these ads.
One ad, purchased by the conservative student group Turning Point USA featured a tweet from conservative pundit Candace Owen stating that she has “no patience for this child groomer movement.” The ad read, “Protect your kids.”
Another ad from The Dallas Express, one site of many in a right-wing propaganda network, purchased an ad referring to the anti-trans group “Gays Against Groomers” as an “an organization against the sexualization, indoctrination, and medicalization of children.”
New Jersey’s Holmdel Republican Party ran an ad asking people to support political candidates who “publicly state their opposition to the States [sic] new sex education curriculum which sexualizes our children to advance the agenda of groomers.”
Yet another ad by Republican Illinois state senate candidate Philip Nagel featured him stating that he is “fed up and pissed off with the sick perversion that is being pushed on our children” by “a political class full of pedophiles and groomers.”
Meta has also allowed several ads falsely linking LGBTQ rights to “the supposed normalization of pedophilia in society.”
Kayla Gogarty, deputy research director at Media Matters, told The Daily Dot that Meta’s policies against the slur don’t apparently matter.
“Those are just empty words when we see them turn a blind eye to the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric on their platform,” Gogarty said. “It’s really just another instance of Meta putting profit and engagement over the safety of its users.”
Jamie Lee Curtis is opening up about the struggles her daughter and other members of the transgender community face on a daily basis.
While speaking about her career as a scream queen and “Halloween Ends” in an interview with Spanish publication Cadena SER, the actor, 63, revealed that the emotions she displays in her films come from a genuine source of fear.
Curtis described herself as “incredibly emotional” and said that she has had so much success in the horror genre because her reactions are “real.” She explained that her sensitivity allows her to draw on real-world problems and dangers that are facing our society today.
“There are real threats,” she said in a conversation with the outlet published on Oct. 10. “I have a trans daughter. There are threats against her life, just her existence as a human being. There are people that want to annihilate her, and people like her.”
During her interview, Curtis compared transphobia to fascism. She said, “Like we haven’t learned what the result of that is. The extermination of human beings. That is terrifying.”
Referring to herself in the third person, she continued, “So Jamie Lee Curtis is scared, and you should be too.”
The “Knives Out” star ended her response by encouraging people to speak out against transphobia.
“Jamie Lee Curtis has a voice, and she’s trying to use it, and you should too,” she said. “And that’s how we change things is we think about them, we learn about them, and then we use our voices to bring attention to them and to fight against them.”
Last year, Ruby and her famous mom spoke to People about her coming out to her parents.
“It was scary — just the sheer fact of telling them something about me they didn’t know,” Ruby recalled. “It was intimidating — but I wasn’t worried. They had been so accepting of me my entire life.”
Ruby sent her mom a text after initially planning to share the news with her parents at their Los Angeles home. Curtis said there were “tears involved” after her daughter came out to her.
Curtis shared that she has made mistakes while also being supportive of her daughter.
“It’s speaking a new language,” she told People at the time. “It’s learning new terminology and words. I am new at it. I am not someone who is pretending to know much about it. And I’m going to blow it, I’m going to make mistakes. I would like to try to avoid making big mistakes.”
In May, Ruby tied the knot with her partner Kynthia in a cosplay ceremony held in Curtis’ backyard.
The proud mother officiated the nuptials and gushed about the wedding on Instagram.
She uploaded multiple pictures from Ruby and Kynthia’s special day. Next to a photo of the newlyweds embracing, Curtis cheered, “YES THEY DO AND DID! MARRIED! RUBY and KYNTHIA 5/29/2022.”
Ruby and her sister Annie Guest, 35, joined their mom for the red carpet premiere of “Halloween Ends” on Oct. 12. The film will be Curtis’ final appearance in a horror franchise that has spanned decades.
Curtis posed alongside her two daughters as the trio all held hands. The actor posted a photo of the three of them on Instagram. The caption said, “My family. Proudest mother. Loving support.”
During the past week, Curtis has been promoting her upcoming film and also using her platform to address societal issues. She stopped by TODAY on Monday and condemned Kanye West’s recent antisemitic tweets.
In a tweet that has since been removed from Twitter, West, who goes by Ye, wrote that he planned to “go death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” The tweet received backlash across social media platforms.
Curtis said she “burst into tears” after seeing the hateful message. “I woke up and burst into tears. Defcon 3 on Jewish people? What are you doing?” she said.
She called his tweet “abhorrent” and said she hopes the rapper “gets help.”
“It’s bad enough that fascism is on the rise around the world,” she told Hoda Kotb. “But on Twitter, on a portal, to pour that in? As if Jewish people haven’t had it hard enough?”
West’s Instagram account has been restricted for other problematic posts and a spokesperson for Twitter confirmed on Oct. 9 that his account has been locked for violating the social media platform’s policies.
Virginia governor Glenn Younkin has insisted his trans student bathroom ban isn’t “controversial”, despite widespread outrage.
The Republican proposed the policy – which disallows trans students to use bathrooms corresponding with their gender – in September.
He claimed during an interview on CNN’s State of the Unionon Sunday (9 October) that it was designed to allow parents to make decisions for their child.
n fact, along with making bathroom access dependent on gender assigned at birth, Youngkin’s policy proposal states that schools should defer to parents on names, nicknames and “pronouns, if any” for their children, as well as any “social transition”. It also suggests that schools should out trans students to their parents.
“I just think the idea that we’re going to have policies that exclude parents from their children’s lives is something that I have been going to work on since day one,” Youngkin said.
“We campaigned on it. We empowered parents to make decisions with regards to [COVID-19] masking in Virginia. We have empowered parents to make decisions with regards to curriculum that fits their families’ decisions.”
As well as instructing students to use the bathrooms of the sex written on their birth certificate, the policies also prohibit preferred pronouns and given names without express consent from parents.
Youngkin describes these policy changes as fixing “a wrong” with previous guidance allowing for schools and institutions to decide on policies for specific students.
“The previous administration had a policy that excluded parents and, in fact, particularly didn’t require the involvement of parents,” he said. “Children don’t belong to the state, they belong to families.
“And so, in these most important decisions, step one has to be to engage parents, not the exclusion of a trusted teacher of an advisor, but to make sure that parents are involved in their children’s lives.”
Regardless of how significantly Youngkin believes in his policy changes, the assertion that the legislation is uncontroversial is not true, given the amount of pushback he has received from activists and allies.
Senate Democrats lambasted the move in a joint statement reported by The New York Post, saying they were “an outright violation of Virginian’s civil rights.”
Democratic delegate Mike Mullin called the new policy “absolutely shameful” in a tweet that criticised “calls for the misgendering and outing of children in schools where they’re supposed to be safe.”
Additionally, thousands of Virginia students from nearly 100 schools walked out of school on 28 September to protest the policy, saying that they are fearful of how the new policy could affect them.
“We want our school districts to stand up for us and support us and say they’ll reject these guidelines,” 16-year-old Lauren Truong told The Guardian after she lead fellow schoolmates in a walkout.
Additionally, high school senior Natasha Sanghvi said to NBC Washington that the group decided to hold the walkouts “as a kind of way to disrupt schools and have students be aware of what’s going on.”
