Only four people in the UK have formally complained about a trans woman entering a “single-sex” facility, an eye-opening report has revealed.
A report published by advocacy group TransLucent found that only four official complaints were documented across 382 public bodies since 2022.
Between 2022 and 2024, the group’s members submitted hundreds of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests across multiple investigations to local councils, NHS hospitals, domestic abuse refuges, and other major public authorities in England.
Just four people have complained about trans people using toilets. (Getty)
Its first investigation examining council-owned buildings such as swimming pools and leisure centres found that 35 of the 40 responses reported zero complaints about trans people using toilets, changing rooms, and other facilities, while the remaining five held no relevant records.
One council did cite a single complaint, but it was about a cisgender person in the “wrong” facility, not a trans person.
Its follow-up investigation, which examined public bodies in an area covering over 16.5 million people, found just two complaints – one about policy and another which Translucent said was about “perception rather than confirmed identity”.
Anti-trans outlets to blame for trans toilet myths, group argues
The findings contradict spurious claims that trans people must be excluded from so-called “single-sex” spaces for the safety of cisgender women and girls.
While there is no evidence backing up the claim, ‘gender-critical’ groups and governmental institutions routinely cite the “safety” of women and girls in justifying anti-trans rhetoric and policy.
Research, including the 2023 Femicide Census, regularly proves that the biggest threat to women’s safety is cisgender men. On average, one woman is killed by a man in the UK every three days.
‘Gender-critical’ groups typically try to use these statistics to proliferate transphobia by falsely claiming trans women are men, and thus are culpable in that violence.
Trans people have been targeted for violence because of bathroom bans and hateful policies. (Getty)
TransLucent wrote in its report that media coverage is often responsible for much of the disconnect between rhetoric and reality.
It argued that anti-trans outlets often create a “perception of widespread problems where none exist” by conflating hypothetical concerns with actual incidents.
As a result, it continued, organisations have felt compelled to implement restrictive bathroom policies based on fear of complaints rather than actual data.
“The term ‘single-sex spaces’ (for which there is no legal definition) has become politically charged, with its meaning shifting from practical safety considerations to ideological positioning,” they wrote.
“Our FOI data addresses this by focusing on recorded complaints – formal objections that organisations must document and investigate – rather than informal expressions of discomfort or political opposition to trans inclusion.”
TransLucent urged organisations to use the research as a foundation for policies “grounded in empirical risk data rather than hypothetical scenarios”.
“Behind the statistics are real people navigating daily life. Trans women using public toilets, accessing healthcare, or seeking refuge from domestic abuse are not engaged in political protest; they are simply trying to live safely and with dignity.”
A former New York Times editor has claimed the newspaper’s management is “militant” about their anti-trans views.
Trans journalist and campaigner Billie Jean Sweeney claimed senior staff members at the 175-year-old news publication’s shut down “all avenues” of internal criticism over its reporting of trans issues in the lead-up to the 2024 US election.
Speaking to Trans News Network, she said the organisation allowed staff to raise questions and criticisms over senior staff decisions through “Employee Resource Groups” but subsequently shut the groups down.
“One the things that happened was that [NYT chairman A.G. Sulzberger] kind of came around and gave a stump speech to every part of the paper, including the international desk,” Sweeney claimed. “He talked for 40 minutes about how we were going to cover the election ‘fairly’ and that sort of thing. The international desk wasn’t really that involved in the coverage of the election, so it was a little off-key for us. We were all like, ‘why are we talking about this?’”
New York Times chairman A G Sulzberger. (Getty)
Around the same time, Sulzberger reportedly gave a speech at the Reuters Foundation in March 2024 claiming the New York Times had “protected” young people through its coverage of trans youth.
Sweeney said things only escalated from there, claiming that pockets of dissent from NYT’s views on trans rights were silenced through “militant” actions such as the cancellation of internal forums for voicing opinions.
The American publication’s infamous trans reporting has routinely faced criticism from a variety of human rights groups, campaigners, and media watchdogs.
In 2023, a coalition of more than 100 LGBTQ+ organisations signed an open-letter accusing the New York Times of frequently publishing inaccurate and biased articles about trans people which, they wrote, endanger the rights and safety of the community.
Journalist Ari Drennen noted in 2023 that one of the outlet’s articles, which contained misinformation about trans youth care, had been used to justify a Missouri executive order heavily restricting gender-affirming care for trans under-18s.
Joseph McConville’s first memory of being online was at 13 years old when he started playing Neopets, a virtual pet game, at his home in Boynton Beach, Fla. At the time, he had no clue that just months later, the internet would suck him into the alt-right.
As a young, white man, McConville says he was taught to believe that he’d have everything he wanted.
He started to realize this dream wouldn’t come to fruition when he was pulled out of private school as his parents struggled during the 2008 recession.
McConville quickly graduated from kids games to popular social media sites like Myspace and Facebook. But it was when he found FunnyJunk.com in ninth grade that he started being exposed to alt-right content.
The website gave users the ability to upload memes and upvote popular content. When McConville began using it, he was initially exposed to dark humor and edgy right-wing memes.
He then migrated to 4chan, a website known for hosting anonymous, fringe, right-wing communities, where he started engaging with content used to stoke extremist meaning —pushing us vs. them narratives that alienated McConville from his multicultural South Florida community.
“Everyone else is wrong. … These guys are right. These guys get it,” says McConville. The deeper he got, the more anger he felt—especially towards transgender people.
“It’s all a psyop … there’s a big trans psyop to destroy manhood,” McConville remembers believing for nearly a decade. “It’s all about making men hate themselves, to become women, to weaken the American hegemony.”
McConville, now 30, eventually found his way out of the alt-right world around 2018 when he was deradicalized by a friend who had previously been a part of the community.
But since then, the pervasiveness of this thinking has grown. What was once conspiratorial thinking on fringe websites has now become commonplace. “The [2016] Trump election changed a lot of things, it all became serious,” McConville told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “You feel like, ‘Wow, we’re actually being listened to—we’re changing the mainstream talking points.’”
Transgender Americans have been one of the biggest targets of this alt-right rhetoric, and it’s effective. Since 2022, Americans have increased their favorability towards laws limiting protections for trans people and have become less favorable towards policies safeguarding them.
This change in public perception may be because of the growing claims that falsely link transgender people as perpetrators of mass violence and domestic terrorism. After Charlie Kirk’s death in September, these narratives reached a boiling point.
But how did Americans get taken to believe this anti-LGBTQ lie? And what does it say about how people can be brainwashed to hate?
Who’s Pushing the False Link Between Trans People and Domestic Terrorism?
One reason many Americans began to believe that trans people are more likely to be linked to terrorism is because trusted sources in mainstream conservative spaces are telling them it’s true. Even though the overwhelming majority of mass shooters are cisgender men, the Heritage Foundation, notably behind Project 2025, recommended the FBI create a category of domestic terrorism called Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism, which suggests transgender people pose an imminent threat.
“I think some people know that this is false, but push it,” Thekla Morgenroth, a professor of psychology at Purdue University, told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “It’s worth giving false information if you get people on your side and support your opinion, and I think that is malicious.”
Unlike when McConville was in the alt-right, many of the people behind the rhetoric today hold powerful positions in the government. After a shooting in August at a Minnesota Catholic school perpetrated by a transgender person, Rep. Lauren Boebert falsely said there was a “pattern of transgender violence in our country.” Trump officials and other members of Congress used this as an excuse to attack gender-affirming care. And Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice, has insisted that hormone replacement therapy played a role in the shooting, although officials do not believe the perpetrator was using hormones.
This narrative has bled into the mainstream media who are used to trusting government sources. Just a few hours after Kirk was pronounced dead, The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets picked up claims from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that the bullet case engravings pointed to a motive related to “transgender ideology,” a term coined by transphobic commentators. The bullet casings ultimately did not have any reference to transgender people.
Nevertheless, suspicions around this shooter being connected to the transgender community spread like wildfire.
Former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly posted a video titled “Megyn Kelly Reveals the Truth About the ‘Trans’ Phrases Found on Ammo of Gun Which Shot Charlie Kirk,” to YouTube on Sept. 11, 2025, where she falsely told over 4 million subscribers, “There’s a particularly high percentage [of transgender people] committing crimes these days and it is responsible and important to say so.” The video now has 2.1 million views and Kelly has not retracted these comments.
Her followers—who believed her false claims—began calling for extreme action in the video’s comment section. @WonkoTheDork wrote, “Trans insanity needs to end. I don’t care how, this has to stop.” And @kathleenbarton-m6c wrote, “As an American, I completely agree that this [Trans] movement needs to be completely eradicated.”
Referencing Kirk as a martyr, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took it a step further, writing in a press release that “corrupted ideologies like transgenderism and Antifa are a cancer on our culture and have unleashed their deranged and drugged-up foot soldiers on the American people.”
The Social Psychology of Transphobia
Morgenroth thinks many people who endorse rhetoric around transgender domestic terrorism are threatened or afraid of otherness and of the breaking of traditional gender norms.
“People are very attached to the way that they think about gender because it gives them a sense of certainty—it gives them a sense of who they are and who they’re not,” they say.
Morgenroth says people come up with justifications for their discomfort, even if they don’t make sense.
“‘Here’s an explanation for why I should be scared. I’m gonna endorse that and I’m gonna believe that regardless of whether that makes logical sense or not,’” they told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “I think that’s what’s happening and why people are so willing to endorse these conspiracy beliefs or theories about trans people.”
Joseph Vandello, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida, says that when influential figures ramp up a threat, it triggers an emotional response of fear or anger, which leads to a desire to punish or exclude people.
“This is the same playbook that people were using against gay people going back to the 1970s or against other kinds of marginalized or minority groups like Jews,” Vandello told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES, referencing the gay panic of that era. “I think there’s this idea that if you frame the issue in terms of a threat, then it becomes an issue of moral protection of the community.”
Another One Down the Rabbit Hole
Vandello says many young men fall for anti-trans narratives because they confirm their place of privilege in the world and validate their insecurities. He coined the term “precarious manhood,” which is the idea that manhood is a social status that has to be won and can be lost. His research indicates that threats to one’s sense of manhood—like trans and queer identities—provoke not only insecurity, but aggression.
Ten years ago, Justin Brown-Ramsey became a case study of precarious manhood, lashing out when he began thinking that trans people were a threat. At 18 years old, and in search of an escape from his parents’ divorce, he started binge-watching YouTube lectures from Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist who’s best known as an outspoken anti-trans thought leader and has said that using someone’s preferred pronouns is the road to authoritarianism.
“He has a degree, he’s working at an institution, it seems like if that’s the kind of guy that has this opinion, I should probably also have that opinion,” Brown-Ramsey told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES.
This intellectualized version of transphobia appealed to the sense of insecurity Brown-Ramsey faced growing up in a household with strictly enforced gender roles.
Eventually, Brown-Ramsey became an active participant in anti-trans rhetoric. As an anonymous keyboard warrior, he’d fight in the YouTube comments against the #MeToo, feminist and trans rights movements.
Near the end of his senior year of high school, Brown-Ramsey brought this hatred into the real world against another classmate.
“They mentioned they were trans, and I recall always taking issue with that for seemingly no reason, and being just generally antagonistic about that,” says Brown-Ramsey, now 28.
He purposefully misgendered the student in class and started lashing out against friends, family and romantic partners until he was almost totally isolated.
“I think over time, the less acceptable my behavior was for people in person, the more it became acceptable to lean into the online version of that,” he says. “It went from those lecture videos to watching long rant videos about trans people and gay people, or seeking out stuff that was more 4chan-adjacent.”
Brown-Ramsey, who eventually left the alt-right after deeply engaging with U.S. history in college, believes he was manipulated to hate trans people because it helped him displace his anger about other elements of his life. “I think it was the fact that I was lower working class or lower middle class, and didn’t have an economic future ahead of me,” he says. “I was like, ‘Well if the world is that way then I just might as well be hateful and try to be more powerful than somebody.’”
Undercover in the Alt-Right
Anthony Siteman (Photo courtesy of Siteman, design by Sam Donndelinger)
This phenomenon of young men getting drawn in by alt-right algorithms fascinated 21-year-old Anthony Siteman, who started investigating online extremism ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
“My main goal was to understand how and why people became radicalized,” Siteman, a senior at Quinnipiac University, told Uncloseted Media.
Siteman immersed himself on right-wing sites like Rumble and Gab as well as encrypted messaging apps like Telegram where he joined channels that included Proud Boys. He noticed trends that draw people in: all caps text, red alarm emojis and inflammatory language, which all trigger a sense of urgency and concern.
He saw constant racist, sexist and transphobic language, but also violent videos and memes created from the livestreamed footage of the 2019 mosque shootings in New Zealand that left 51 people dead.
Even though he entered this project to learn about indoctrination, sometimes he felt his own views slipping. “ I was really questioning myself and what I believed,” he says, adding that he had to turn to his professor to keep him grounded. “They make you really question all of reality.”
“Social media companies are feeding people more extreme content, more emotional content,” Vandello says. He explained that emotionality is what has made the online alt-right successful at manipulating users against transgender people.
Siteman agrees: “ It’s always framed about fear, anger, and just some sense of belonging.”
The Way Out
Siteman believes that to exit these spaces, people outside the alt-right should use empathetic communication to help those in their network who have been radicalized.
For Brown-Ramsey, it was a professor that pulled him out.
“Unlike online spaces, where I curated the information that I wanted to see, and the algorithm fed me more of the same bigoted, hateful content, college was perhaps the first time I was required to engage with media outside of my usual diet,” Brown-Ramsey published in an essay about his experience.
Brown-Ramsey had to read books aloud in class like “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” which detailed the abolitionist’s experience being born into slavery. “The narrative turned a mirror onto me and, in upsetting detail, showed me that my inclinations toward antagonizing those who looked, acted, or believed differently than myself [were the same beliefs that] led to Douglass’ dehumanization,” he wrote.
“That trajectory is really just me learning, ‘Why should I be at odds with a trans person if both of us work crappy jobs and can’t pay our bills?’ Obviously, that’s not who I should be angry at, but it took a while to get around to that,” Brown-Ramsey says.
In a blow to LGBTQ+ rights, a federal court ruling concluded that teachers have the right to out LGBTQ+ children to their parents.
On 22 December, US district judge Roger Benitez ruled that federal law allows school employees to notify parents of “gender incongruence”.
Benitz added that the decision to inform parents of their child’s gender identity rests with the teacher.
The order also prevents school districts from “misleading” parents and prohibits employees from “directly lying to the parent, preventing the parent from accessing educational records of the child, or using a different set of preferred pronouns/names when speaking with the parents than is being used at school”.
In the appeal court paper, state attorney general of California, Rob Bonta, wrote that the ruling, if it hadn’t been halted, would “create chaos and confusion among students, parents, teachers, and staff at California’s public schools”.
Bonta added that it would go against “longstanding state laws that protect vulnerable transgender and gender nonconforming students”.
The current state law bans school districts from requiring parent notification, following a handful of school districts across the state that implemented policies forcing teachers to notify parents if students have expressed non-cisgender or non-heterosexual identities.
It also prevents school districts in California from firing teachers who choose not to disclose the sexuality of their students to parents.
Trans people could be able to update their email address with their new name under an upcoming Gmail update.
The world’s largest email provider is reportedly rolling out a new function which will allow users to update their “gmail.com” addresses.
The email service, operated by Google, currently forbids users with a Gmail handle from changing their email address.
However, according to the blog 9 to 5 Google, an updated section to its support page suggests developers are “gradually rolling out” a change which will allow addresses to be changes.
The new section, which is currently only present on Google’s Hindi support pages, reads: “If you’d like, you can change your Google Account email address that ends in gmail.com to a new email address that ends in gmail.com.”
When users change their email address, the old handle will reportedly become an ‘alias’ address, meaning that emails sent to the old address will automatically forward to the new one.
Google notes that users who change their address will be unable to create a new email address for 12 months and will be unable to delete the new handle.
If fully implemented, the change could allow trans users to remove their deadname – a name commonly given to them at birth which may not match their correct gender identity – from their email address without having to create a completely new account.
While Gmail currently allows users to change their display name on emails, the current inability to change the actual email handle to remove a user’s deadname is a common problem among people in the community.
One individual complained about the restriction in a post on Reddit, saying they were reluctant to make a new account given how much they have stored on Google’s services such as Google Drive or Google Contacts.
“I think I’d rather not have any trace of my deadname publicly visible, but I’m not sure if I should get rid of my whole account or just try to hide it behind a proxy email,” they wrote.
Members of the Google Pixel Hub Telegram group commended the change, with one user writing it would be “huge if true.”
“Many of us have had Gmail since the beginning when we didn’t know it would matter this much,” they wrote. “Many others got their accounts as kids under the same lack of realisation, and some people have changed their names.”
While the changes aren’t fully live yet, 9 to 5 Google noted that news on the update came earlier than expected.
Danny “Dusse” Siplin, a 33-year-old Black transgender man who was reported missing last Tuesday, was found dead Friday in Rochester, New York.
Police do not suspect foul play but are still investigating, according to local media. “There does not appear to be any criminal intent involved with Siplin’s death,” police said, as quoted by TV station WROC. Anyone with information is asked to call 911.
Siplin’s body was found near the Genesee River Gorge, and his vehicle was found on Upper Falls Bridge with the motor running, the doors closed, and his wallet inside, TV station WHEC reports. He had spoken on the phone to his mother, Tracey Riley, Tuesday morning and said he wanted to take a ride and see the snow, but he would be back to drive her to work, as he usually did, the station notes. He never returned.
Most local reporting misgendered and deadnamed Siplin, but activists and friends in the area have identified him with male or gender-neutral pronouns. He is being remembered fondly.
He was involved with the Avenue Blackbox Theatre in Rochester, a company that focuses on the stories of LGBTQ+ people, BIPOC, and other marginalized populations. In a Facebook post, the theater group, known as Ave for short, called Siplin “a member of our Ave family” and a “truly special individual.”
A blogger at a site called Hisenseoxdescribed Siplin as “a cherished family member, a friend, and a presence that brought meaning and joy into the lives of those around him.”
The Western New York Ballroom Alliance posted on Facebook, “Danny’s presence, spirit, and impact will never be forgotten. This loss is deeply felt, and we stand in love, solidarity, and remembrance with everyone mourning today.”
“Whenever I saw Danny or spoke to them it was always positive vibes,” Tamara SweeTii King wrote on Facebook. “Always wanting to put something together for the community.”
A trans employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) is suing the Trump administration over its anti-trans executive orders and policies, which the employee says violate federal civil rights law.
Sarah O’Neill, a data scientist at the intelligence agency, has disputed the legality of Executive Order 14168, which was signed by Donald Trump in January following his return to the White House for his second term and stated that the US would henceforth only recognise “two sexes, male and female” and these are “immutable”.
The executive order, titled ‘Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’, claimed so-called “ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex” have “used” the law to “eradicate the biological reality of sex”.
Trump went on to state his administration will “defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male”.
O’Neill’s lawsuit, which was filed at the U.S. District Court in Maryland, says Trump’s executive order “declares that it is the policy of the United States government to deny Ms. O’Neill’s very existence”.
She said since the executive order was signed her workplace has revoked its policy recognising her as a trans person and her “right to a workplace free of unlawful harassment,” whilst also “prohibiting her from identifying her pronouns as female in written communications” and “barring her from using the women’s restroom at work”.
O’Neill believes the order contravenes Section VII of the Civil Rights Act 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on characteristics such as race and sex, and its later amendments which included gender identity and sexual orientation.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his legal opinion at the time: “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.
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“Consider, for example, an employer with two employees, both of whom are attracted to men. The two individuals are, to the employer’s mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is a man and the other a woman.
“If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague.
“Or take an employer who fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally penalises a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth.
“Again, the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision.”
The ruling went against Trump’s then-first term administration which intervened in the case to argue Title VII provisions should only apply based on the “ordinary meaning of sex” as either male or female and not cover sexual orientation or gender identity.
O’Neill’s lawsuit argues, as quoted by the Associated Press: “The Executive Order rejects the existence of gender identity altogether, let alone the possibility that someone’s gender identity can differ from their sex, which it characterizes as ‘gender ideology.’”
She is seeking for her workplace protections and rights prior to the executive order to be restored alongside financial damages.
The department announced Friday that it has referred the hospital to the Office of Inspector General for “for failure to meet professional recognized standards of health care as according to Secretary Kennedy’s declaration.” If the department concludes the hospital violated the policy, it could lose its Medicaid and Medicare funding.
Cited in the referral is the agency’s announcement from earlier this month that it is proposing to ban the lifesaving care for those under age 18, and to prevent both Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program from covering the treatment.
While the HHS does not have the legal authority to implement either policy, a bill criminalizing gender-affirming care for trans youth and another bill banning Medicaid from covering the care were approved by the U.S. House of Representatives also in December. Both bills now head to the Senate, where it is unclear if they have the support needed to pass.
Democratic state attorneys general from 18 states and the District of Columbia filed a joint lawsuit challenging the HHS declaration last week, asserting the order “exceeds the Secretary’s authority and violates the Administrative Procedure Act and the Medicare and Medicaid statutes.”
“The Kennedy Declaration is procedurally defective. At minimum, Secretary Kennedy and HHS cannot circumvent statutorily mandated notice and comment requirements by changing substantive legal standards by executive fiat. Congress has not given the Secretary the authority to define the professionally established standard of care,” the suit states, adding that “Congress expressly prohibits ‘any Federal officer … to exercise any supervision or control over the practice of medicine.’”
Washington currently has a “shield” law protecting access to gender-affirming care for youth. HB1469, passed in 2023, prevents health care providers licensed in the state from being prosecuted by other states where the care is criminalized, including protecting them from having to provide documents or patient information even upon subpoena.
Seattle Children’s Hospital has already successfully blocked a subpoena from the Justice Department seeking patient information. It also filed a lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxtonin 2023 after his office served the hospital with a demand for the information related to the number of Texas minors treated, their diagnoses, the medications prescribed, and advice on how to wean a patient off the treatment.
The University of Oklahoma said Monday that the graduate teaching assistant who assigned a failing grade to a student for a psychology essay on gender stereotypes will “no longer have instructional duties” at the university.
A graduate teaching assistant for an online psychology class was “arbitrary in the grading of this specific paper” and therefore will “no longer have instructional duties,” the university said in a statement. It is not immediately clear whether the teaching assistant faces further disciplinary action or is still on leave.
“We are committed to teaching students how to think, not what to think,” the university said. “The University will continue to review best practices to ensure that its instructors have the comprehensive training necessary to objectively assess their students’ work without limiting their ability to teach, inspire, and elevate our next generation.”
The university did not name the teaching assistant, but it appeared to be referring to Mel Curth, who NBC News previously reported gave the paper a zero. Curth did not immediately reply to a request for comment Tuesday.
Curth recently gave Samantha Fulnecky, a junior on a premed track, a zero on her essay about gender stereotypes for an online graduate psychology class.
The assignment asked students to write a 650-word response to a scholarly article about gender expectations in society, according to screenshots shared by Turning Point USA’s local chapter.
Fulnecky wrote in her essay that the scholarly article bothered her, and she described how God created men and women differently, according to the screenshots.
“Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth,” she wrote.
Curth, who is transgender, gave Fulnecky a failing grade because her “paper … does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive,” according to the screenshots.
A crowd gathers at the administration building at the University of Oklahoma on Dec. 5 to chant at a protest and march supporting the graduate assistant who graded Fulnecky’s essay.Doug Hoke / The Oklahoman via USA Today Network
Protests and counterprotests have flared up on campus in response to the failing grade. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, called on the university’s governing board to get involved. And the issue has drawn national attention from conservative politicians and activists in recent weeks.
In the statement, the university said Fulnecky appealed the grade and filed a claim of religious discrimination.
Fulnecky’s grade appeal “was decided in favor of the student, removing the assignment completely from the student’s total point value of the class, resulting in no academic harm to the student,” the university said.
The university added that it had investigated Fulnecky’s religious discrimination claim but would not release the results of its investigation.
Curth had already been placed on leave in connection with the failing grade.
Fulnecky did not immediately reply to a request for comment Tuesday. On Monday, she reposted the university’s statement on her Instagram story and captioned the post “huge win.”
Simone de Beauvoir is one of the most influential feminist philosophers of all time, with The Second Sex (1949) defining many elements of second-wave feminism. In recent years, her work has been twisted to support the biological imperative agenda pushed by prominent anti-trans figures in their most inflammatory books and blog posts.
Beauvoir scholar Megan Burke sought to set the record straight and prove that Beauvoir’s work supports an ethics of trans affirmation. That’s precisely what they have achieved in their gripping new book, Becoming A Woman: Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Trans Existence.
When Burke originally sat down to write the book, the anti-trans reading of Beauvoir was not on their radar. Instead, they had envisioned a more positive project.
“I just kept thinking about trans and non-binary existence through the lens of Beauvoir’s existentialism,” Burke says. “I was writing more about gender as a life project, as a Beauvoirian and as an existentialist.”
That intention remains; however, as Burke worked on their project, they encountered anti-trans applications of Beauvoir’s work and felt compelled to respond.
“I started to encounter in various forms and ways the uptake of Beauvoir in anti-trans ‘feminist’ uses, I started to become really annoyed and frustrated and concerned about how non-scholars of Beauvoir were circulating Beauvoir, but in really popular venues.”
Beauvoir was an existentialist, concerned with how we define ourselves within society. In The Second Sex, she reckons with the way that women were defined not by their own merits, but by their otherness to men, with men as the default gender. The book includes perhaps Beauvoir’s most famous line: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
Trans people have long seen Beauvoir’s statement as affirming of their genders, but anti-trans campaigners claim that this is an error. In Becoming A Woman, Burke highlights an interview comment where the “gender critical” writerKathleen Stock decried this reading of Beauvoir, saying, “I don’t think she had any conception of how that phrase would be used, but it set in motion a chain of thought and processes. That sentence is used all the time to justify the idea that trans women are literally women, or even that gender identity makes one a woman.”
Burke argues that claims like Stock’s, including those that cherry-pick additional quotes from Beauvoir, misunderstand the philosopher, her view of the world, and the way that many terms are used within a philosophical framework.
“I wasn’t aware that she was being used in this way as much as she was until I started those initial encounters,” Burke explains. “And the more I dug in, the more that became kind of the way into this more positive project.”
In the book, she puts it like this: “What these turns to Beauvoir share is the claim that, for Beauvoir, to be a woman is a matter of sex, not gender. One of the more notable references to Beauvoir appears in the well-known and controversial blog post by the author of the Harry Potter series on June 10, 2020. It is often the case that gender-critical discourse turns to Beauvoir to insist that real women are born women, which delegitimises trans existence.”
For the anti-trans reading, “becoming” a woman is a social destiny proscribed on women at birth as part of their biology. But Burke explains that the words “born” (used here in the sense of “being”) and “becoming” have more specific meanings in philosophy, and that Beauvoir’s position as an existentialist casts these ideas in a light that the anti-trans argument misses.
“There’s a classic distinction in philosophy between born and becoming, being and becoming,” they explain. “And for Beauvoir as an existentialist thinker, that’s just the difference between an inherent nature, being born with a fixed essence, and something that unfolds in the creation of one’s existence. And that’s the becoming part. For Beauvoir, the becoming piece isn’t merely about self-formation; it concerns how we create ourselves in the world, shape our identities, and get to choose who we become. The anti-trans people are just mapping female and male onto this thing you’re born as that can’t change. And for Beauvoir, that’s just not the case.”
The anti-trans interpretations aren’t limited to the one famous line. A wealth of other comments by the philosopher are distorted or misunderstood to advance an exclusionary agenda. For example, in an essay titled “How Simone de Beauvoir Got Me Cancelled,” Susan Picard complains that no one wanted to publish her anti-trans book. Picard cites several Beauvoir quotations to support the claim that the philosopher would endorse an anti-trans reading.
Picard smugly points to the line “No woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex,” claiming that pro-trans Beauvoirians “looked away in embarrassment” when asked to explain how that wasn’t a clear refutation of trans identities.
Burke offers a markedly different interpretation of this quotation.
“Beauvoir is using ‘sex’ as a phenomenon. So that particular sentence is to reckon with one’s position in this world that they are in. Anti-trans people think trans and non-binary folks are saying ‘We are beyond our bodies.’ And I actually think that’s not at all the claim that’s being made. It’s ‘I am of this body, and something else is becoming for me.’ And that, I think, is exactly what Beauvoir means. To say that ‘I am not situated in the way you say I am.’ To ignore how one is in the world and the body one inhabits, yes, that would be bad faith. But I think where this goes awry in the way this gets levied at trans and non-binary folks is to say, ’you’re just ignoring the fact of your body as you are in the world.’”
“To say a trans woman is saying, ‘I’m situated beyond my sex so I can become a woman,’ is just a complete misreading of the phenomenal unfolding of her life. And to say that Beauvoir is saying you can never be situated beyond your sex of this world, I think completely ignores what she is gesturing to as a feminist future in her conclusion, which is that she says, ‘yeah, there might still be men and women, but it’s a might.’”
“Where I think that reading of that sentence goes wrong is it’s both rooting sex as a thing that never changes, and more importantly, is just saying, ‘trans folks are being disingenuous,’ when actually I think trans folks are being quite Beauvoirian.”
While only a part of Burke’s project in Becoming A Woman, the refutation of this anti-trans application of Beauvoir’s work is crucial, both for the trans community and for Beauvoir’s legacy. “People might encounter Beauvoir’s name because they read some famous person’s blog, which is really troubling. And I don’t want that to be a part of Beauvoir’s legacy. And I also don’t want that kind of misreading of her circulating, because as I say at the beginning of the book, if we turn to a philosopher to justify the truth about something, that’s the kind of justification that can have a lot of power. It’s not even an engagement with her work, but just an engagement with her, I think, as a figure of some sort to mobilise and to justify anti-trans views.”
When it comes to Burke’s ethics of gender affirmation, they think too many people are starting with the wrong question. “I’m just really concerned about the focus on, ‘What are trans people?’ It’s not a really interesting question, but I find it to be a really violent one. It’s not asked of people who can comfortably conform to the norm. The ‘What are you?’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘Where does this come from?’ What is, in philosophical terms, the metaphysics: ‘What’s the essence of being trans?’ You must continually justify who you are. But in most cases, it’s not important. I want to say that ethics, primarily, is how we are with one another, and that matters more than the what.”
For Burke, if we can move beyond the “what” and “why” of trans people and accept that we exist, it highlights the threat posed by the anti-trans movement and can help to find a way to develop a better community.
“If we can just focus on the ‘how,’ if that can be the centre of the conversations, then we can get somewhere else together, and we can create different forms of sociality. And I think that’s actually what’s at stake. And whether or not anti-trans movements and the people behind them know this consciously or not, that’s also what all anti-trans legislation is about. It’s about legislating how we are together and what we become. So, it’s like now we have legislation about what biological sex is, but that also legislates how we now get to be in spaces together. Let’s focus on the how: How do we want to be together in the world? And I think this is actually the threat of trans life and trans possibilities to dominant structures.”
In building out this ethics, Burke looked at the claims that anti-trans thinkers were making about Beauvoir and their claims that her ethics are aimed at protecting cis women. Disagreeing with that, Burke says that in writing Becoming A Woman, they sat back and asked, “Well, what are her ethics of gender, using gender as we use it today, for how we understand and become who we are? And I’m thinking about that as I’m also thinking in relationship to how trans folks articulate the ethics of gendered life in relationship to self-determination and gender freedom, and in particular to that idea of affirming my gender, so one of the things that I’m doing in this book is taking seriously that gender affirmation is an ethical project.”
But for Burke, talking about gender affirmation means throwing out the term “gender identity” and all the baggage and weight that it has developed in political conversations. They suggest that understanding of gender leads to a hunt for a ‘true’ gender that limits what people can actually become in our society: “I think that when we stop looking for a rooted being, which is what I guess I think gets ushered in from the gender identity discourse is like: this is who you are, this is who you’ve always been. So you’re going to become that, and then it better work, and you better stay fixed in that position. And if you don’t, then we’ve gotten it all wrong.”
That, Burke argues, leads us into political conversations about detransition in ways that are rarely helpful. But they also have a solution: “I’m actually saying, let’s not affirm gender identity either, but let’s affirm gendered existence. And I think that that’s a term that we get from Beauvoir that helps, again, shift the terrain.”
“There’s a whole different way to understand what gender affirmation means. Let’s talk about what it means to affirm someone as an ethical project of their existence, which might mean, at a different time, that we affirm who they are differently. And that, I think, is exactly what Beauvoir means by becoming. So, does that mean becoming is messy and fallible, and we might make mistakes about who we become? Sure. That’s exactly what Beauvoir is saying as an existentialist. This might be who you are right now. You might become something else in a month, in 10 years, in 15 years.”
“And is it ethical to affirm that becoming? Yes.”
In their book, Burke discusses the importance of moving away from the “third-person authority over gender” toward the “trans first-person authority.” That space for affirming self-determination in relation to a gendered existence is a crucial part of this ethics.While it’s essential to support and affirm trans people, Burke is suggesting that there are problems when we see gender identity as a static thing that must be found and then held on to tightly. For Burke, the more helpful approach is to affirm gendered existence, where gender is a life project, and to recognise that, if it changes, that is part of the journey.
Ultimately, they say “life can have regrets, but those regrets can be affirmed, and you can become someone else. And so that’s what I’m trying to do with the ethics of gender affirmation.”
