Transgender / Transsexual

/ /

Darling of the “detransition” movement comes out again as transgender

,

Like the ex-gay movement that rose to prominence in the early 2000s and then came crashing down as leaders recanted their “conversions,” the detransition movement is showing similar signs of a crack-up.

Ky Schevers is just one of the prominent voices of the detransition movement to reconsider her choice to reject her gender evolution and publicly denounce transition. She began her transition in college but ended it after coming to the belief that gender dysphoria was a false idea caused by misogyny and trauma, a theory she shared widely in interviews and online.

Now Schevers – who is transmasculine and uses she/her pronouns – has regrets about her place in the detrans movement. From 2013 to 2020, she regularly wrote and made videos about her detransition. She was featured in several major publications – even interviewed by anti-trans journalist Katie Herzog – to promote the idea that transgender identity isn’t legitimate and that gender dysphoria was a mix of internalized sexism and trauma response for her.

But now she’s speaking out against the movement she once supported.

“Trans people deserve access to support, and it makes no sense to shut down people’s access to medical transition just because some people end up detransitioning,” she told Slate.

The number of people reporting detransition is small. According to a study this year from UCLA’s Williams Institute, 1.3 million adults in the U.S. identify as transgender, or 0.05 % of the population. Another 300,000 youth, ages 13-17, do so, as well.

Of those who transition, about eight percent report detransitioning, according to a 2015 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, and most – 62 percent – of that eight percent said detransition was temporary. A 50-year survey in Sweden revealed about two percent of the trans population regretted undergoing gender-affirming surgery.

Schevers said the detransition movement she helped spark became overtly transphobic and repressive and left no room for doubt or questioning individuals.

While she came to believe her own gender dysphoria was in check, it came roaring back over time. “My sense of being a woman unraveled, and I was feeling more like a dude or a gender weirdo,” Schevers said. “But I was fighting against these feelings because I’d built a life in the detransition community, and I knew a lot of the other women in the community wouldn’t be happy with it if I came out as trans.”

The detrans movement assigns a variety of reasons to what they consider the false concept of gender dysphoria and provides attendant solutions to the non-existent problem.

Detrans promoters liken the urge to transition to drug or alcohol addiction, encouraging sufferers to avoid triggers and commit to abstinence, concepts adopted from 12-step programs. They characterize dysphoria as internalized misogyny stemming from a lack of self-love. One theory, known as “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” describes being transgender as a social contagion spread among adolescent girls online, like accusations of witchcraft among young women at the Salem witch trials.

Schevers says of her own dysphoria, “I tried to explain it in a radical feminist framework, and find the root causes, and do everything to make these feelings go away, and that didn’t really work. The only thing that did work to make them go away was accepting them. I had to make a move to accept them.”

/ /

Anti-Trans Bills Also Harm Intersex Children

The spate of anti-transgender legislative proposals across the United States in recent years also threatens to undermine the fundamental rights of intersex children, Human Rights Watch, interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, and the SOGIESC Human Rights Initiative of the University of North Carolina Human Rights Law Program said today.

Map: Anti-Trans Legislation Across the United States Permits Rights Violations Against Intersex Children

MAPPING THE INTERSEX EXCEPTIONS

Anti-Trans Legislation Across the United States Permits Rights Violations Against Intersex ChildrenSEE IT HERE 

On Intersex Awareness Day, observed annually on October 26th, the groups introduced an interactive map that highlights how lawmakers across the US have included clauses in their bills that allow or encourage human rights violations against children born with intersex variations. Dozens of bills with intersex exceptions have been proposed, and so far three have passed into state law.

“State legislation in the US that targets transgender youth is also harming intersex youth,” said Erika Lorshbough, executive director of interACT. “When lawmakers propose and pass explicit exceptions for surgeons to operate on intersex bodies before the patients themselves can consent, it makes it clear that these bills are about erasing bodily diversity, not protecting anyone.”

“Intersex” refers to the estimated 1.7 percent of the population with innate bodily traits that do not fit conventional expectations of female or male bodies. Also known as variations in sex characteristics, intersex traits cause a person’s chromosomes, gonads or other internal reproductive organs, genitals, and/or hormone function to differ from characteristics that are “typically” male or female.

Children with intersex variations are often subjected to “normalizing” surgeries that are irreversible, risky, and medically unnecessary. These surgeries are performed without the patient’s consent, most often taking place in infancy or early childhood. Surgeries include procedures to reduce the size of the clitoris, create or enlarge a vaginal opening, reroute a working urethra, or remove the gonads. These surgeries are justified by decision-makers on the grounds that they will reduce stigma and prevent gender dysphoria, but they often have the opposite effects, and also carry risks of scarring, loss of sensation, lifelong sexual dysfunction, urinary incontinence, psychological trauma, and permanent sterilization.

These surgeries have been deemed human rights violations by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Health Organization, and other authorities, but there have been only modest efforts in the US to regulate these operations. Recent legislative proposals that primarily target transgender youth often include provisions that expressly permit and sometimes encourage medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex youth.

Over the last several years, state governments across the US have been waging assault on the basic rights of transgender children and their families. Dozens of bills targeting transgender youth have been introduced in state legislatures. One form of these discriminatory bills seeks to ban or restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender young people. Some bills define gender-affirming care as unprofessional conduct, possibly affecting the licenses of physicians who offer such care, and others set criminal penalties for doctors as well as for parents who support their children in seeking the care that they need.

Many of these bills include an explicit exception for procedures performed on intersex children, usually described in these pieces of legislation as “children with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development” or “DSD,” which is a medicalized term for intersex variations widely viewed as pejorative. These provisions purport to ensure that doctors who perform genital and other surgeries on infants and young children with intersex traits are immune from prosecution and civil or professional penalties. These clauses are in the same laws that attempt to punish performing the exact same procedures on older transgender youth who are actively requesting such care.

“This map shows the cartography of legal attacks on intersex rights baked into anti-trans legislation across the US,” said Holning Lau, Willie Person Mangum distinguished professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Law. “Intersex children’s rights to health, bodily integrity, and human dignity are all threatened by this legislation.”

Intersex advocacy groups, as well as a range of medical and human rights organizations, have been speaking out in support of intersex children. There is growing consensus that these medically unnecessary nonconsensual intersex surgeries should end, and some countries have banned them. Nevertheless, some parents in the US continue to face pressure from surgeons to choose these operations when their children are too young to participate in the decision.

“Bundling the unconscionable assault on transgender children’s access to health care with provisions allowing for medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex kids is just two human rights violations for the price of one,” said Kyle Knight, senior researcher on health and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights at Human Rights Watch. “Transgender and intersex children are harmed when politicians use children’s bodies to uphold regressive ideas about gender and sexuality rather than protect everyone’s fundamental rights to bodily autonomy.”

/ /

Transgender voters risk losing their voice in 2022 midterms

,

Less than two weeks before the midterm elections, the window for transgender voters to verify their identities for voting is closing fast.

Roadblocks for trans people to acquire accurate identification abound, while ID requirements to vote are getting stricter in a growing number of states. The predictable result will be fewer trans people voting in 2022, just as their rights are coming under attack from anti-LGBTQ candidates.

According to the latest research from UCLA’s Williams Institute, over 200,000 trans voters could be disenfranchised this November.

It could be worse. A 2015 study from the National Center for Transgender Equality reveals voter participation from trans people is higher than among all eligible voters, 54% to 42%, meaning more trans voters will manage to cast a ballot despite the barriers to their participation.

Trans people face numerous challenges in changing their official ID gender markers. The process can take time, money, and access to medical care that many trans people, particularly younger individuals, don’t have.

According to the Movement Advancement Project, 10 states require documentation from a medical provider in order to change a trans person’s gender marker. Eight states require proof of surgery, a court order, or an amended birth certificate. And ten states have “burdensome” or “unclear” policies on changing gender markers.

Changing a birth certificate to get a new ID can also present problems. 12 states require trans people to undergo some form of gender-affirming surgery before officials will revise a birth certificate. Four states don’t allow changing a birth certificate gender marker at all.

Name changes aren’t easy, either. Nine states require people to publicly post a name change request online, which can lead to harassment or violence.

“Such obstacles can impact voting in the 35 states that have voter ID laws,” according to the Williams study. “In these states, voters encounter additional verification requirements at the polls on top of federal standards for voter registration and eligibility determination. The strictest of these voter ID laws require voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polling place, and provide no alternative for voters who do not have a photo ID, or as is often the case for transgender voters, have an inaccurate photo ID.”

UCLA Williams Institute

According to the Williams study, “Transgender people who are Black, indigenous, or people of color, young adults, students, people with low incomes, people experiencing homelessness, and people with disabilities are overrepresented among the over 203,700 voting-eligible transgender people who may face barriers to voting due to voter ID laws in the 2022 midterm election cycle.”

UCLA Williams Institute

Trans voters can seek help updating their state and federal identification with organizations like the National Center for Transgender Equality, which provides up-to-the-minute requirements for voter ID state by state, and other gender and name ID change information.

Voter ID laws are promoted by their primarily-Republican sponsors as a way to protect against voter fraud, a nearly non-existent problem in the United States, despite the hype. Both the American Civil Liberties Union and The Brennan Center for Justice have called voter ID laws a form of “voter suppression” that mostly disenfranchises Democratic voters.

“Regardless of whether you’re transgender, every eligible voter should be able to cast their ballot without fear of harassment or discrimination,” Olivia Hunt, policy director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, told LGBTQ Nation. “Onerous ID requirements are just one of the many strategies used to exclude marginalized people from participating in the political process. This kind of voter suppression is contrary to the guiding principles of American democracy, and is a blatant violation of the fundamental constitutional rights of all Americans.”

/ /

Take the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey

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 [email protected] Coalition, and the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance.  

If you have any questions, please reach out at [email protected] 

Again, thank you so much for being part of this important survey. We’re excited to see the results! 

Click here to take the survey! 

/ /

Meet the Grandmother of the Trans Legal Rights Movement

Phyllis Frye’s status as 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.”

/ /

Most Who Begin Gender-Affirming Care as Youth Continue: Study

,

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.

The University of Oklahoma Medical Center and its Children’s Hospital have ceased providing gender-affirming care to young people because of a new state law that made that a condition of the institution receiving federal funds under the American Rescue Plan Act. Florida is seeking to ban gender-affirming care for youth and has already banned Medicaid funding for this care, whether for adolescents or adults.

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.

/ /

Shocking video shows officer choking an unarmed trans woman twice on her own property

,

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.

/ /

Jamie Lee Curtis says her transgender daughter has faced death threats

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. 

https://iframe.nbcnews.com/51MyXFD?_showcaption=true&app=1

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. 

/ /

Virgina governor says reviled trans school policy is all about parents’ rights

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 Union on 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.”

/ /

Vanderbilt to pause gender-affirming surgeries for minors

Officials at Vanderbilt University Medical Center announced Friday that they are pausing gender-affirming surgeries for minors in order to review their practices.

The news, delivered in a letter sent to a lawmaker who has demanded an end to the surgeries, was publicly released Friday afternoon. It comes amid mounting political pressure from Tennessee’s Republican leaders — many of whom are running for reelection — who called for an investigation into the private nonprofit hospital after videos surfaced on social media last month of a doctor touting that gender-affirming procedures are “huge money makers.” Another video showed a staffer saying anyone with a religious objection should quit.

None of the politicians could point to a specific law that the hospital had violated, and no agency to date has committed to an investigation. Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s office said they had passed their concerns to the Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, but his office has not commented on whether he is looking into the Nashville-based hospital.

“We are pausing gender affirmation surgeries on patients under age 18 while we complete this review, which may take several months,” wrote C. Wright Pinson, VUMC’s deputy CEO and chief health system officer.

The GOP-dominated Legislature is scheduled to reconvene in January, and many lawmakers have vowed to introduce legislation further limit gender-affirming treatments. If successful, it’s unclear if VUMC would be allowed to resume gender-affirming surgeries for minors, regardless of their internal review.

“We should not allow permanent, life-altering decisions that hurt children,” Lee tweeted late Friday. “With the partnership of the General Assembly, this practice should end in Tennessee.”

According to Pinson, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health recently changed its recommendations for transgender treatment, which helped prompt the need for a review.

On average, VUMC has provided five gender affirming surgeries to minors every year since its transgender clinic opened in 2018. All were over the age of 16 and had parental consent, and none received genital procedures.

Recommended

OUT POP CULTUREDwyane Wade explains how daughter Zaya keeps the ‘hate out’ of social media

OUT POLITICS AND POLICYLawmaker complaint forces Tennessee pride festival indoors

“The revenues from this limited number of surgeries represent an immaterial percentage of VUMC’s net operating revenue,” Pinson wrote.

Emails provided to The Associated Press through a public records request show hundreds of Tennesseans reached out to the governor’s office in support of shutting down VUMC’s transgender youth health clinic, with some asking him to call a special legislative session to address the issue. Others asked if he could suspend the licenses of the doctors who work at the clinic.

A few criticized Lee for not taking harsher steps earlier when he signed legislation banning doctors from providing gender-confirming hormone treatment to prepubescent minors.

Only a handful defended the clinic’s services, with some saying the transgender health care they received had been life-saving.

‹ 1 2 3 4 ›»