Forcing non-binary students to choose “male” or “female” on application forms leaves schools and colleges at “massive risk” of legal action, an expert has warned.
The forms that students pursuing further education must complete force them to choose a binary sex option – and non-binary students to misgender themselves.
This includes on the individualised learner record (ILR) that further education providers must fill in with a student’s information so they can access funding.
This is a policy set by the Education and Skills Funding Agency (EFSA), an “arms-length” official body sponsored by the Department of Education.
But the practice puts further education institutions at “massive risk” of legal action under the Equality Act 2010, said Emma Lambert of independent provider Dynamic Training.
“The ESFA’s old fashioned attitude to gender identities not only risks damaging the provider reputation, but it will undoubtedly end up in complaints and possibly legal action, which will be left with the provider to deal with,” Lambert told FE Week.
Dynamic Training, which provides apprenticeships for NHS nurses and skills courses for the Greater London Authority, asks its learners which pronouns they use and manually enters these into the documents.
However, Lambert explained, “there’s no way on the ILR system you can put anything other than male or female”.
She said she is “frustrated” by the lack of action from EFSA on this both because of the risk to providers and because she thinks “it’s wrong anyhow” not to allow students to select the correct gender for themselves.
Lambert added that Dyamic Training has raised this with EFSA multiple times, but only received non-committal answers.
Further education is the band describing education for students in the UK who are over the age of 16 but before degree-level, or higher, education.
Non-binary recognition part of ‘societal change’
While the Equality Act 2010 specifically protects those undergoing or proposing to undergo some form of gender reassignment, whether that protection extends to non-binary trans people has been unclear – until recently.
Last year, a landmark case won by a non-binary person against Jaguar Land Rover affirmed that non-binary and genderfluid people are protected from discrimination under the “gender reassignment” provision of the Equality Act 2010.
This progress, 11 years since the Equality Act was introduced, means it “seems timely for those characteristics protected by law to be reviewed and expanded in light of over a decade of societal change”, said Association of Colleges boss David Hughes.
Hughes added that while EFSA and the Department of Education are “working within limitations”, the challenge of including non-binary gender options on forms should not be “insurmountable”.
PinkNews contacted EFSA and the Department of Education for comment.
Protesters picketed Weill-Cornell, a private institution part of the New York Presbyterian Hospital system, earlier this month, demanding the hospital cease medically unnecessary surgeries on children born with intersex traits, and investigate a surgeon who conducts these operations.
Intersex people, or people born with variations in their sex characteristics, make up approximately 1.7 percent of the population. Surgeons popularized cosmetically “normalizing” surgeries on infants to remove gonads, reduce the size of the clitoris, or increase the size of the vagina. Intersex advocacy groups, as well as a range of medical and human rights organizations, have spoken out against the operations and called for regulation.
One type of procedure surgeons conduct reduces the size of the clitoris for cosmetic reasons. It carries the risk of pain, nerve damage, and scarring. Intersex activist Pidgeon Pagonis, who underwent one of these at age four without their consent, called the operation a “clit job,” emphasizing that it should be an individual’s choice to modify their body.
As survivors of this procedure began speaking up, it became controversial. Weill-Cornell’s pediatric urology chief, Dr. Dix Poppas, in 2007 published a medical article that attempted to disprove claims of nerve damage from his clitoral surgeries by touching the genitals of girls he had operated on with a “vibratory device” and querying what they felt.
New York Presbyterian, in response to questions from Human Rights Watch, said, “In all circumstances we will continue to put our individual patients’ life and safety first” but did not commit to ending the surgeries at their hospitals; Dr. Poppas did not reply to a request for comment.
All hospitals should end these harmful surgeries immediately.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has absolutely eviscerated transphobes everywhere, telling them they can “stay mad” or “grow up” after she was mocked for using the phrase “menstruating person”.
The trailblazing congresswoman isn’t afraid to speak out in support of LGBT+ rights – and she was quick to clap back when a newspaper mischaracterised her comments about menstruation.
“AOC calls women ‘menstruating people’ while explaining the female body,” read a screenshot of a headline from the Daily Mail that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shared to Twitter – and the much-loved congresswoman was having none of it.
“Not just women!” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “Trans men & non-binary people can also menstruate.
“Some women also *don’t* menstruate for many reasons, including surviving cancer that required a hysterectomy.”
She continued: “GOP mad at this are protecting the patriarchal idea that women are most valuable as uterus holders.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that trans and non-binary people have ‘always existed’
In a follow-up tweet, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez added: “Trans, two-spirit, and non-binary people have always existed and will always exist.
“People can stay mad about that if they want, or they can grow up.
Ocasio-Cortez’s incredible clapback has already been liked more than 70,000 times, while countless LGBT+ people rushed into the replies to thank her for standing up for the queer community.
Many also weighed in to applaud Ocasio-Cortez for drawing attention to the fact that not all women menstruate.
The story in question referred to Ocasio-Cortez schooling Texas governor Greg Abbott on the menstrual cycle, after he suggested that his abhorrent law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy “provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion”.
AOC pointed out that many would not know they are even pregnant at six weeks, being that their period might only be two weeks’ late at that point, which is not unusual.
“I don’t know if he is familiar with a menstruating person’s body,” she said. “In fact, I do know that he’s not familiar with a woman – with a female or menstruating person’s body, because if he did, he would know that you don’t have six weeks.”
This is far from the first time that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has used her sizeable platform to stand up for LGBT+ rights.
In October 2020, she won praise from queer Americans when she used her mammoth Twitch debut to deliver a rallying cry for trans rights.
Speaking in front of hundreds of thousands of people, Ocasio-Cortez bellowed: “Trans rights!” into her microphone.
The congresswoman has become well known for her truly epic clapbacks and takedowns. In June, she won the hearts of pretty much everyone when she slammed Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene for calling her a “little communist” during a rally.
Proving that her sense of humour is perfectly pitched, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shared video footage of Greene’s rally speech and simply wrote: “First of all, I’m taller than her.”
For three years, Jesse Brace avoided getting care for their seizures after they experienced discrimination at an emergency room near their home in Lawrence, Kansas, in 2017.
They said they told the staff that they are transgender and nonbinary, that their name is different from their legal name and that they use gender-neutral pronouns.
“They refused to even so much as acknowledge this information, and not only did they not use [my pronouns], but they also sent me home without treating me for what I went in for,” said Brace, 25.
When they tried to get care elsewhere after that, they said, they had similar experiences, so they avoided care entirely.
Jesse Brace. Courtesy / Jesse Brace
In 2018, they began having seizures every day, so they started living in their car outside the Amazon facility where they were an assistant operations manager, because they couldn’t drive themself to work anymore.
In November 2018, they lost their job. “I lost my car soon after and ended up on the streets in the winter,” they said. “I was having hundreds [of seizures] a day and wasn’t even leaving where I was laying.”
They were homeless, living out of their car or on the streets, for over three years.
Brace’s experience in the ER — and the impact that health care discrimination had on their life — is something many trans people face and fear when they try to get care, according to a report released Wednesday by the Center for American Progress, or CAP, a liberal think tank.
Discrimination, among other factors, prevents trans people from seeking necessary care, which leads to health disparities that can affect many other areas of their lives, the report found.
The authors outline a road map of solutions, including legislative protections for LGBTQ people and better competency training for medical providers.
“The onus should not be on individuals,” said one of the report’s authors, Sharita Gruberg, vice president of the center’s LGBTQ Research and Communications Project. “It really should be on these institutions to do the right thing, and the resources and guidance is out there.”
Forgoing routine care after trauma
CAP’s report found that nearly half of transgender people — and 68 percent of transgender people of color — reported having experienced mistreatment at the hands of a medical provider, including refusal of care and verbal or physical abuse, in the year before the survey, which took place in June 2020.
Discrimination can then prevent people from seeking future care, the survey found: 28 percent of transgender people, including 22 percent of transgender people of color, reported having postponed or not gotten necessary medical care for fear of discrimination.
Brace got another job in May 2019, but they said they weren’t able to get consistent care again until May of this year. They said doctors in the area repeatedly told them that they were unable to take on new patients. It wasn’t until Brace was referred to a doctor who has a transgender child that they were finally able to obtain a primary care physician.
“I get panic attacks just making appointments,” they said. “I have no support whatsoever. Unfortunately, all health care around here is like this. There is no support for trans people, and so most avoid seeking care.”
Dallas Ducar, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, opened Transhealth Northampton, a trans-led organization that provides health care to trans and gender diverse patients in western Massachusetts, in May. Ducar said that as a health care provider and a trans woman, she knows there’s a dearth of affirming care for trans people across the country.
The Transhealth Northampton team. Courtesy / Dallas Ducar
She said many of Transhealth’s patients have gone without medical care for long periods of time. A patient who came in a couple of months ago had abnormal vital signs and had to be quickly taken to an emergency room because they were so sick, she added.
“It’s unfortunately not uncommon to see people who have experienced such high levels of discrimination and then forgo the routine visits, then perhaps even forgo an urgent care visit, which then turns into an emergency care visit,” she said.
The CAP report said harassment and discrimination “contribute to high rates of stress,” and — along with social determinants of health — make trans people “more likely to experience poor health outcomes.”
People will read about health disparities among trans people “and just think of that as something that, horribly, is associated with just like being trans, but actually a lot of these experiences have to do with being trans in a world that is constantly oppressing you and where you’re experiencing discrimination both interpersonally but also institutionally and in these broader systems,” said one of the report’s authors, Caroline Medina, a policy analyst at CAP.
The report cites the 2019 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that trans people were more than twice as likely as cisgender adults to be told they had depressive disorders.
Fifty-four percent also reported poor physical health at least one day in the previous month, compared to 36 percent of cisgender respondents, according to the CDC data. Trans people also have an increased likelihood of having asthma and developing cardiovascular disease, according to the CAP report.
The Covid-19 pandemic has also aggravated the health disparities trans people face: 1 in 3 reported having had suicidal thoughts during the pandemic, and 1 in 2 reported that their access to gender-affirming health care was curtailed significantly during the pandemic.
Ducar said barriers to care, particularly gender-affirming care like hormones, is “really, really harmful, and they add to the layers of discrimination that exists within the trans community.”
“On the mental health side, we are seeing folks with really complex issues — tons and tons of trauma — that’s coming to our doorstep,” she said. “We’re just seeing a lot of not only trauma, but complex PTSD specifically. These are people that have just been consistently burdened with the symptoms of PTSD, trauma just recurring. It’s really been terrible.”
A lack of cultural competency
When trans people do try to seek health care, they can face discrimination or outright refusal of care, as CAP found. But even when they don’t experience discrimination, they are likely to see providers who don’t have the cultural competency to provide them with affirming care.
CAP’s survey last year found that 1 in 3 transgender people reported having had to teach their doctors about transgender people to get appropriate care, and 15 percent reported having been asked “invasive or unnecessary questions about being transgender” not related to their reasons for visiting.
The report cited a 2018 brief from the Kaiser Family Foundation that found that more than half of medical school curriculums lack information about unique health issues the LGBTQ community faces and don’t cover treatment beyond HIV prevention and care, “likely contributing to transgender people’s inability to access affirming care,” CAP wrote.
Alex Petrovnia, 24, a writer and scientific researcher living in central Pennsylvania, said that last fall, he had to report a primary care physician after a negative experience.
He was worried about how testosterone would affect a joint problem he was having, and he asked the doctor, who was still a medical resident, whether there was a form of physical therapy to help the problem. After a tense exchange, he said, the doctor told him, “I don’t know anything about this, because I’ve never had a patient like you.”
“I was trying to keep this interaction peaceable, and I replied with: ‘Yeah, I know. It’s really unfortunate that you’re not taught anything about trans people in medical school, and it’s just not a very well-known issue,’” he said. “And she looked me right in the eyes and she said: ‘I don’t think it’s that important. There aren’t many of you.’”
When he left, he tweeted about the visit so other trans people in the area would know not to see that doctor.
The medical practice reached out to him a few days later and asked what it could do better, Petrovnia said. When he returned to see a new, supportive primary care physician, “they told me that they sent the resident back to trans-inclusivity training and that they had instituted that for all of their residents going forward,” he said. “So that was very positive. … Being the squeaky wheel really actually made an impact and actually improved the situation theoretically for others.”
Petrovnia acknowledged that not everyone is able or willing to spark such teachable moments.
Mel Groves, 25, visited a primary care office in Montgomery, Alabama, in January when he had a cough, fever and lower body pains. When he was taken back for a full-body CT scan, he said, he had a decent conversation with the attendant who was pushing his chair. Groves said that when the procedure was over, however, the attendant’s tone changed. The attendant had apparently seen Groves’ chart and made a comment about his genitals, Groves said.
Mel Groves, a farmer from Jackson, Mississippi.Courtesy / Mel Groves
“I was taken aback,” he said. “It was shocking, to say the least.”
Groves said that he wanted to report it but that he was feeling too ill and overwhelmed, as he was working in the area temporarily. “I knew that that’s what I should have done, but at the time, I had a lot of stuff going on,” he said.
The health care system that oversees the primary care office where Groves was treated could not confirm his story, citing patient confidentiality.
‘The role falls on society’
CAP’s report outlines a number of policy recommendations that the authors said would help address health care discrimination against trans people.
One in particular is among the most pressing, the authors said: They recommend that the federal government create a rule to strengthen Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex and has protected trans people from discrimination in federally funded health care facilities.
“The protections in Section 1557 are so critical but are also a floor that we need to firmly establish and strengthen,” said Gruberg of CAP. She said it was great that the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights had announced that it would enforceSection 1557 to cover sexual orientation and gender identity, “but we’re also very worried about what that looks like, how strong these protections are going to be and the potential for religious exemptions to undermine them.”
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor issued a permanent injunction last week against the nondiscrimination protections in the Affordable Care Act, ruling in favor of religious health care providers who said the rules would force them to perform abortions or provide gender-affirming treatment against their religious beliefs. While Gruberg expects the decision to be overturned, she said “that threat is still there.”
The report’s authors also recommended that Congress and state and local governments increase funding for LGBTQ community health centers, which often fill the health care gaps that trans people face.
Groves was connected with an affirming primary care physician through the Knights and Orchids Society, a grassroots organization in Selma, Alabama, led by Black trans people. He drives about 4½ hours from his home in Jackson, Mississippi, to Auburn, Alabama, when he needs care.
Although groups like the Knights and Orchids Society have provided what Groves described as “life-changing” support, he said it’s ultimately up to the medical system and society to address pervasive issues like discrimination.
“We’ve always been here,” he said. “So I think that now the role falls on society and the medical professionals to educate themselves more. If that means more fellowships, more trainings, more professional development … I feel like that is single-handedly the best thing that we can do to foster better health care for trans people, is helping people to understand how to be inclusive, and then going forward from there.”
Like most LGBTQ families, my partner and I didn’t become parents in the most conventional way.
In fact, for most of my life, I never considered having kids! But when my partner and I got a call asking if we’d be willing to take immediate guardianship of our niece and nephew, we agreed to do everything in our power to create a loving home for these two children.
After years of visits from social workers, inquiries from investigators trips to the courthouse, and mountains of paperwork and fees, we had the privilege of becoming a forever family through legal adoption.
If you are considering adoption, here are 7 things you should know from my personal experience:
Adoption is a story of joy…
None of us will ever forget the day that our adoption was finalized. To know that we could truthfully tell these amazing children that we would always–ALWAYS–be their parents. It was a day of pure relief.
But in addition to those big milestones – Adoption Day, kindergarten graduation, first performance as a Russian dancer in The Nutcracker – it’s really the little things that bring the most joy. The simple moments are what get to me the most. When they reach for your hand because they’re scared (and you get to tell them it’s okay to be scared). When they learn a new fact and share it with you (did you know that elephants use mud to cool themselves down). When they ask a hard question that you don’t *totally* know the answer to (how DOES an apple seed know how to grow into a tree?!).
Those opportunities to see your children grow into whole, complete humans with their own thoughts, ideas, and passions. That’s joy.
And finally, one of my absolute favorite things about being a parent is having the opportunity to share LGBTQ culture with them. Helping them build an enduring appreciation of drag. Feeling the freedom of getting to pick your own family, your own community, even your own name. All of the powerful, beautiful parts of our community– we get to pass those on to our children.
…and also one of loss
There is no way to get around the fact that your adopted children get to be in your lives because they do not get to be in the lives of their biological parents. While many adopted children will grow up to have no desire to know their biological parents, some feel a profound sense of loss or abandonment that they could not be raised by their biological parents, no matter how wonderful and caring their adoptive parents are.
It’s vitally important for adoptive parents to accept this pain in their children, to sit with it, to be empathetic, and to not take it as a personal rebuke to your parenting. Make sure that your kids have professional support throughout their childhood, and give lots of opportunities for them to share their feelings with you in a safe way.
Make sure that you have support as well, so you can process through the many feelings you may have– feelings of grief that you aren’t their biological parent or that you couldn’t have biological children. Feelings of anger towards their first family and what harmful experiences your children may have experienced while under their care. Feelings of love toward their first family for allowing you to raise their biological children.
Many complicated swirls of emotion may come up as you go on this journey, and you’ll need a place to put them all.
Parenting is not for the faint of heart
Your kid might not like you. You might not like your kid (all the time). Your kid might have severe emotional trauma. Your kid might do this annoying thing where he lies on the couch for two hours flipping a pillow over his head while the rest of you are doing dishes and vacuuming the floor and cleaning the tub.
When you become a parent, no matter how it happens, you’re not just signing up for the giggles and the tickles and the cooing sighs of a sleeping newborn. You’re also signing up for screaming babies and poopsplosions. And, after that, defiant teenagers who scream “I hate you!” and slam their door so hard the handle breaks and they have a panic attack because they can’t open their door anymore and they feel trapped. You’re signing up for their first heartbreak. For helping them deal with bullies… or BEING the bully. You’re signing up for a world of stupid, unsolicited advice and your own parents saying, “We never did that when you were a kid and you turned out fine!!!”
Despite what Instagram may tell you, parenting is not all fun and games. You’re going to mess up. You’re going to lose your temper. You’re going to yell at the lady in the supermarket who asks, “Are they REAL siblings?”
There are millions of ways to be a perfectly adequate parent. Don’t compare yourself to other parents. Be honest with your kids. Know that it’s hard for *everyone*, even the perfect families on social media.
There is no rush to start your family
When we became parents overnight in our mid-twenties, we had no idea what challenges were ahead of us. We were almost completely unprepared and had to make it all up as we went.
So any time a young LGBTQ person stands up at one of my talks and tells me that I’ve inspired them to start a family, and asks if I have advice for them, I always say the same thing: “WAIT!” Usually, the audience laughs, so I have to tell them that I am not joking.
People will tell you that you’re never really ready for parenthood. And while that’s true, there are times in life when you will be more ready! Parenting is already hard enough. Work to get your systems in place before making the leap: do your best to get your finances in order, make sure your housing is stable, and if you have a partner or partners, make sure they’re the people who truly want by your side for the next 18 years.
And above all, take the time to work on yourself and your own insecurities. If you didn’t have an ideal childhood, seek support and healing to process through it effectively so you don’t end up overcorrecting or taking your hurt out on your children. Whatever you wish your parents had worked on before they had you– you have a chance to work on those things for yourself.
Creativity, flexibility, and humility are essential
When our children first came to live with us, the eldest was nonverbal. There’s a whole section in my book in which I talk about the elaborate method I had to create so I could communicate with him – he wasn’t able to speak or share his opinions using words at all. We all had to be really creative to find solutions for their unique challenges. Many parents, especially adoptive parents, have to do the same. Build parenting solutions that work for the kids you HAVE, not the kids you wish you had.
It really does take a village
From kid supplies to legal help, our community was always there for us in ways we would never have expected. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, to invite people into your lives, to build an extended family around your actual family. Remember that most straight people have biological family around them! Grandparents help with babysitting so they can do date night, aunts and uncles help with school pick-ups so they can work late, and cousins are around for playdates and family dinners. LGBTQ people might not have that built-in support network, so we have to build it for ourselves.
Your “village” can come from outside your community as well. In fact, you can find allies anywhere – bosses may be willing to give you time off for court dates (even if that’s not covered in your PTO plan), lawyers may give you a discount on their legal fees, daycares may cut you some slack on registration costs. People want to help you form your family. Let them.
Also – sometimes you and your partner won’t see eye-to-eye. Joining a Facebook community of other parents raising their partner’s nieces and nephews (yes – there are groups this niche!) helped me keep my sanity while adjusting to the new situation. You can access vital resources and emotional support throughout your adoption journey by finding support groups for trans parents, for LGBTQ parents, for parents raising kids in open adoptions, or for whatever your specific situation is.
Love makes a family
I’ll never forget the day that we brought the kids to court for their official adoption day. Our close friends filled the courtroom and the judge, a bit taken aback by the crowd, asked, “Well who do we have here?” Our daughter Hailey, who was five at the time and didn’t understand court decorum, exclaimed, “It’s our Love Family!”
Even at that early age, she already knew that biology doesn’t dictate familial relationships. She will always be surrounded by a constellation of people who love her, support her, and will go to the ends of the earth to make sure she has what she needs to thrive in this world.
Whether your family is you and your collection of houseplants, or three parents and a gaggle of foster children – what makes a family is love.
Trystan Reese, author of How We Do Family: From Adoption to Trans Pregnancy, What We Learned about Love and LGBTQ Parenthood, launched into the public eye as “the pregnant man” in 2017 when the story of his family’s unique journey gained international media attention. He was invited to give closing performances for The Moth Mainstage in Portland, Albuquerque, and Brooklyn; a video of the Brooklyn event has garnered over 2.5 million views. As interest in his family’s story grew, Trystan partnered with many major media outlets, including CNN, NBC, People, and Buzzfeed.
Trystan is an established thought leader, educator, and speaker, focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion. He is a professionally trained anti-racism facilitator and has been organizing with the trans community for nearly two decades. The founder of his own consulting firm, Collaborate Consulting, Trystan provides customized training solutions for individuals, organizations, and communities that are interested in social justice. He is married to his partner Biff and they live in Portland, Oregon with their three kids: Lucas, Hailey, and Leo. They are very happy.
It’s been 13 years since Thomas Beatie sat down for his first TV interview and told Oprah — and the world — how he could possibly be pregnant, as a man.
Today, the concept of a transgender man giving birth is hardly novel, although research, education and awareness are still severely lacking. But society has come a long way, and so has Beatie. The father of four, now a stockbroker in Phoenix, spoke to TODAY Healthabout how he thinks the trans community benefited from the media attention his pregnancy garnered, and how he and his family are doing today.
“When my story came out, there wasn’t a single person in the public eye as a transgender man — most people had never heard of it,” Beatie, 47, said. “It was a first exposure for a lot of people. And then on top of that, they can give birth! I think exposing the importance of fertility for trans people was a huge eye-opener.”
Thomas Beatie and Nancy Beatie at home May 29, 2008 in Bend, Ore.Kristian Dowling / Getty Images file
In 2008, after he wrote an essay for The Advocate about his pregnancy — a piece he wrote, he said, because he was desperately seeking advice from anyone who had been in his shoes, and fearful that his daughter would be taken away by authorities — Beatie’s story spread around the world. Photos of Beatie cradling his stomach — a bare, enlarged, pregnant stomach — went viral. Requests for TV and magazine interviews rushed in. He wrote a book about his experience titled “Labor of Love,” became the subject of multiple TV specials and even went on to star in a French reality show.
“Everything was a whirlwind,” he said. “But I still don’t regret it.”
After having his first child, Susan, in 2008, Beatie went on to give birth to two more children with his then-wife, Nancy Beatie. The couple separated in 2012, and in 2016 Beatie married his second wife, Amber, who worked at the daycare his children attended. They had a baby together in 2018, to whom Amber gave birth.
Today, Beatie and his family live a relatively quiet life in Phoenix, although Beatie occasionally takes on public-speaking jobs or small acting roles (maybe you saw him as an extra in a U-Haul commercial). His older children — now 11, 12 and 13 — split their time between his house and their mom’s house, about 10 miles away. When they’re all home, they swim together in their pool, play checkers and test out new recipes.
“We’re on this keto kick right now, so we’re trying to make cool dishes together,” Beatie said. “We’re going to make some healthy ice cream.”
Beatie and his ex-wife with their three children at an amusement park in Sweden in 2011. Today the children are 11, 12 and 13.Christopher Hunt / Getty Images file
Yet, more than a decade after his first pregnancy made national headlines, Beatie said he still hasn’t been able to fully shake the “pregnant man” moniker.
“I thought I melted back into society, that I could just walk down the hall and be anonymous,” he said, referring to the halls of his financial office building. But soon enough, word got out about his public past, he said. Not that he minds, exactly.
“I don’t see anything wrong with being a pregnant man,” Beatie said. “I was so proud to be a dad, and I’m still proud to be a dad. I’m so proud that I was the one to bring my kids into the world. It’s kind of like a badge.”
Mostly, he marvels at how much the world, while still very much flawed, has changed since his story was in the spotlight. This was a time before most people understood the concept of gender identity and what it means to be transgender, let alone etiquette for speaking to or about someone who’s part of the trans community. Beatie recalled being misgendered and “deadnamed” by the media and being the butt of talk show jokes. When Beatie sat down for an interview with Barbara Walters, the news icon referred to one of his maternity photos as a “disturbing image.”
“It was really hard when my story came out,” Beatie said. “People were saying things on TV and in the media that if they came close to saying today, they would be immediately fired. I’m just in shock about how wild, Wild West it was back then.”
Despite the challenges of sharing his story and the fame it spawned, Beatie does not regret talking about his pregnancy experience publicly and said he hopes by doing so that he made things a bit easier for the trans men who came after him.
“I wanted to make sure that for my family, and for other people, that this was going to be something that’s doable, that our laws would respect it,” Beatie said. “So I did feel an obligation to continue to fight. I wasn’t about to lay down and say, ‘All right, fine, call me a woman.’”
Yet he acknowledges that even if public perception of his personal experience has shifted, there is still plenty more work to be done to support trans people hoping to start families — more training among health care providers, equitable access to fertility treatments and parental leave, for starters.
“I think a lot of people are still pigeonholed, thinking that if you want to be transgender, you have to completely get rid of all your (reproductive) organs,” Beatie said. “There needs to be discussions about fertility, preservation. Being transgender, you shouldn’t have to lose your right of having a family. You’re entitled to be happy and have a family and be respected.”
Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth will welcome an artwork featuring casts of the faces of 850 trans people.
For the artwork, 850 Improntas (850 Imprints), Mexican artist Teresa Margolles will cast the faces of 850 trans people in London and beyond.
The proposed sculpture would highlight people whose “lives are often overlooked”, many of them sex workers, forming one of the world’s highest-profile public art commissions.
The casts will be arranged around the fourth plinth to create a Tzompantli, a skull rack from Mesoamerican civilisations used to display the remains of war captives or sacrifice victims.
Due to London’s weather, Margolles expects the casts to wear away and eventually disintegrate, leaving behind “a kind of anti-monument”, she told the Guardian.
The current artwork featured at Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth is Heather Phillipson’s The End – a giant replica of whipped cream topped with a cherry, a fly and a drone – which will be on display until September 2022.
Following that will be a sculpture by Samson Kambalu, which is inspired by a 1914 photo of African independence hero and preacher John Chilembwe with English coloniser John Chorley. The sculpture will highlight Chilembwe, making him larger-than-life while Chorley remains life-size, who is wearing a hat in an act of defiance of a colonial rule that forbade Africans from wearing hats in front of white people.
Kambalu and Margolles’ artworks were chosen by the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group after a public vote of nearly 17,500 people.
Ekow Eshun, the chair of the group, said it received more public votes than ever.
An already married couple are planning a beautiful “re-wedding” after one spouse came out as a trans woman.
Jae and Rayna Harvey, of Somerset, England, first got married in 2018 in Texas, where Jae is from, but shortly after the wedding Rayna came out as a trans woman.
Rayna told The Mirror that she had been suppressing her true self since she was 11 years old, and that she felt hugely “liberated” after coming out while on their honeymoon in Wiltshire.
The couple are now planning a “re-wedding” to celebrate their love now that Rayna is out, and Jae said: “There’s a bit of a disconnect when we think back to our first wedding as I feel, ‘Well, Ray wasn’t there?’ and I want her in my wedding.
“What I want more than anything is for her family to see her walk down the aisle and for her to have her day – I got to have mine with all my bells and whistles, so now it’s her turn.”
Rayna said that since coming out as trans, she has received “absolutely incredible support” from everyone in her life, including her 93-year-old nan, who buys her “granddaughter” cards on special occasions.
Jae added that at the “re-wedding”, set to take place in Somerset’s Quantock Hills next September, both brides will be “wearing beautiful black dresses” as part of “an all-black and white theme with white, pink and red roses” symbolising rebirth.
In a message to Jae recently shared on Instagram, Rayna said: “Wife, words will never be able to explain how much of a difference you’ve made to my life, I owe most of who I am to you and the time you invested to teach me and to help me get where I want to be.
“From doing my photoshoots, helping me with what goes together clothes wise, holding my hand and reassuring me, to just loving me and being my wife, you’ve got it all, and I’m so so lucky to be loved by you.
“Here’s to another lifetime of love, laughs and happiness.”
Dr Michelle Telfer, who represented Australia in gymnastics at the 1992 Olympic Games, has described how she “made herself a big target” by becoming a global leader in caring for trans kids.
In a short documentary for ABC News In-depth, Telfer explained that after the end of her gymnastics career at the age of 18, she was inspired to become a doctor by those who had treated her various sports injuries.
She said: “I was trying to decide between doing paediatrics or doing psychiatry. And then in paediatrics, I found adolescent medicine, which is that perfect combination of paediatrics and mental health… I’d found the place I wanted to be.”
In 2012, after returning from maternity leave, Telfer took a job as the head of adolescent medicine at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne.
She oversaw various services for young people, but her life changed forever when she was asked to lead the hospital’s gender clinic for children.
“I was asked to take over this group of trans children in their care, and I jumped at it,” she said. “I’d never met a trans child before I started this job.”
One of the first children she met with, she was, was named Oliver.
She continued: “I said to Oliver, ‘How do you know that you’re a boy? When did you start thinking about yourself as a boy?
“He was 10 at the time, and he told me his story… It was such a beautiful story.
“And I thought, ‘I can help this child have a boy’s body. How many people can do that?”
Oliver went on to receive hormone treatment when he was 15, with the consent of both of his parents. Now 18, he told ABC News: “I’m in my final year of high school. I’m hoping one day to study medicine, cardiothoracic surgery or something similar.
“I’m really optimistic about my future. I’ve huge ambitions I want to do a lot of good in this world. And I think that, you know, I wouldn’t be in that place, I wouldn’t be able to have those dreams, if I didn’t receive support from Michelle.”
Another of the kids in Telfer’s care, a trans teenager named Isabelle, also appeared in the film. She said: “I don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t have Michelle and the Royal Children’s Hospital with me. I think I’d equate a large part of my being alive at the moment to them.”
Right-wing newspaper The Australian has written “nearly 50” articles about Michelle Telfer.
But, despite the huge satisfaction she gets from helping kids to be their true selves, as the “debate” over trans people’s right to exist gets louder, Michelle Telfer has has become a “target”.
“There have always been critics,” she said.
“You don’t go into this area of medicine without being warned about becoming a target. And I’ve certainly made myself a very big target.”
“From August, 2019, to the current time, The Australian newspaper has written nearly 50 articles about me and my work,” said Telfer
“The newspaper is inferring that clinicians like me are harming children, that it’s experimental, that the care is novel, and that they’re potentially mentally ill and they’re not really trans.”
In 2020, following fierce lobbying by right-wing media and anti-trans campaigners for a “national inquiry” into health care for trans kids, Australia’s health minister Greg Hunt referred the issue to the Royal Australasian College of Physicians.
The college shot down the idea of an “inquiry”, instead calling for greater access to gender-affirming services for trans kids.
However, even after the statement in support of her work, Telfer said the articles in The Australian continued and she began to struggle with anxiety.
Finally at the end of her tether, last year Telfer submitted a 42-page complaint to the Press Council over The Australian‘s coverage.
Despite everything, Telfer remains “absolutely optimistic about the future”.
“I know that what we’re doing is the right thing,” she said.
“Society has for hundreds and hundreds of years tried to ignore and dismiss trans people. But now that we’re affirming them, look at what they can do.”
Before the coronavirus pandemic tore through the U.S., resulting in nearly 600,000deaths and a slew of collateral damage, transgender people across the Southeast were participating in self-defense classes catered specifically to them. The courses, organized by LGBTQ advocacy group Campaign for Southern Equality, had one goal: to teach trans people to protect themselves should they be the target of an attack.
The campaign saw the classes as a necessity, with trans Americans facing disproportionate levels of violence — including record levels of reported fatal violence against the community.
“When folks are being attacked and murdered, helping with a name change doesn’t really do much good if we can’t keep our people alive,” Ivy Hill, the community health program director for the Campaign for Southern Equality, told NBC News.
Now, as it seems the worst of the pandemic may be in the rearview mirror for the U.S., Hill hopes these classes will resume — either through their own organization or local grassroots groups. While the damage spawned by Covid-19 is slowing down, the violence faced by transgender Americans — particularly trans women of color in the South — appears to be accelerating.
This year is on track to be the deadliest on record for transgender Americans, with at least 28 trans and gender-nonconforming people fatally shot or violently killed so far, according to the Human Rights Campaign, which has been tracking trans deaths since 2013.
2021 is outpacing 2020, when the group recorded a record 44 trans people killed due to violence. By this time last year, the group had tracked 13 trans deaths. Of this year’s 28 known transgender victims, 20 were trans women of color (16 of them Black trans women), and 14 were killed in the South. https://iframe.nbcnews.com/UdlwyyS?app=1
The disproportionate violence trans Americans face in the South, and more specifically the Southeast, is due to a combination of issues, according to advocates. These factors, they say, include a lack of discrimination protections, a flurry of recently introduced anti-LGBTQ state bills, high rates of poverty and a host of cultural factors. To combat this dangerous brew, local and regional advocacy groups, like the Campaign for Southern Equality, say they are working to fill the void left by their states to ensure trans people have some form of protection where they live.
‘Institutional violence’
The Southeast in general is a hostile region for the transgender community due, in part, to “institutional violence,” according to Austin Johnson, an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio’s Kenyon College, who studies the trans community. Trans people face high barriers to health care and housing in the region, and state legislatures in recent years have put forward “persistent attacks” against the community with bills that seek to limit the everyday rights of trans people, he explained.
Add in the high rates of poverty in the region, along with religiosity that promotes a very conservative view of gender roles and sexuality, he said, and there is a combination of factors that contribute to the violence. https://iframe.nbcnews.com/YGXPfXs?app=1
“I think those kinds of norms, all of those intersect with the kind of economic deprivation, educational deprivation, we have in the South, and so when you have all of this deprivation, in terms of the different institutions, it’s going to affect every group,” Johnson said. “When there are some groups that are more disadvantaged, it’s going to affect them. So I think that’s why we’re seeing these really drastic rates of negative outcomes for LGBTQ people and trans people in particular in the South.”
Although there is a disproportionate number of reported killings of transgender people in the South, it does not mean the region is inherently more deadly, according to Eric A. Stanley, an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
The true number of trans people lost to violence each year is unknown, due in part to the lack of a national database to track anti-trans violence, police misgendering victims in official reports and some victims’ closeted status. Absent that, Stanley said, it is impossible to truly judge the regionality of anti-trans violence in proportion to other areas of the country.
“I don’t think anywhere is necessarily safer, as the kinds of anti-trans antagonism that propels so much of the harm is any and everywhere,” Stanley said.
Stanley did note, however, that the Southeast is “less resourced” when it comes to combating violence against the transgender community — and the LGBTQ community more broadly — due to the relatively high poverty in the region and the lack of a social safety net.
Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi — three Southeastern states — are also home to the highest homicide rates in the country, further adding to the climate of violence that trans people face in everyday life.
‘Dehumanized’ by state legislatures
Outside of housing and basic needs, transgender Americans only recently received federal protection from being fired for their gender identity, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia. Besides that, there are no federal discrimination protections in other areas of life for trans people, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank.
Hill said trans people’s inability to safely access public spaces without fear of discrimination — and the issues being debated in state legislatures aimed at rolling back the rights of trans people — have created a climate that has “dehumanized” the trans community. That combined with a lack of legal protections such as nondiscrimination ordinances leaves trans people vulnerable and easy targets of violence.
Twenty-two states do not have public accommodation nondiscrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people from being discriminated against in public places due to their sexual orientation or gender identity, and 20 do not have such protections when it comes to housing, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Many of these states are clustered around the Southeast.
In addition, only 15 states — none in the Southeast — have laws that make it illegal for a defendant to claim the victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity contributed to their violent actions, known as the “gay/trans panic” defense.
“I think for a lot of us, what people kind of miss is just how dangerous or scary it can be just to move through public space, which is something that other folks who are cisgender generally don’t even have to think about,” Hill, who lives in South Carolina, said of being trans in the South.
A number of Southeastern states have recently passed bills that restrict the rights of transgender Americans. Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Tennessee all passed bills that bar trans student athletes from competing on sports teams that match their gender identity.
Tennessee enacted an additional law that compels businesses to display signs that read, “This facility maintains a policy of allowing the use of restrooms by either biological sex, regardless of the designation on the restroom,” if transgender people are allowed to use bathrooms that match their gender identity. The state also enacted a law that restricts access to gender-affirming care for trans minors.
State bills targeting transgender people that did not pass in 2021 will likely be introduced next year, advocates warn. Advocacy groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, say serious political change must happen on the federal level to help stem the tide of rising anti-trans violence.
HRC President Alphonso David said one of the most important things that can be done to help protect trans Americans is for Congress to pass the Equality Act. The federal legislation would explicitly create LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections in housing, credit, education, public spaces and services, federally funded programs and jury service.
“It is heartbreaking to see violence against transgender and gender-nonconforming people across our country,” David said in a statement. “The Equality Act that will provide legal recourse to incidents of discrimination, discourage discrimination, and work to reduce stigma against transgender and nonbinary people nationwide.”
In addition, HRC cited actions the Biden administration took — such as reinstating the Equal Access Rule that allows people to access Department of Housing and Urban Development-funded housing without discrimination based on their gender identity and encouraging the Education Department to enforce Title IX with protections based on gender identity — as tangible solutions to help the trans community.
Some advocates, however, are not optimistic about additional national actions, especially given the slim majority Democrats hold in Congress. That’s why groups like the Campaign for Southern Equality continue to focus on lobbying state legislatures and supporting more local, grassroots efforts.
‘Robust community of grassroots work’
A number of queer advocacy groups in the Southeast say they are filling in the gaps left by the federal, state and local governments.
Organizations like Atlanta-based Southerners on New Ground are dedicated to keeping reports of anti-transgender violence in the news to ensure the public is aware of this ongoing issue.
“Those folks are amplifying their voices and amplifying their stories,” Johnson said of advocates sharing the stories of trans people lost to violence. “I wonder if we didn’t have this robust community of grassroots work, that we wouldn’t even know many of their names.”
In Charlotte, North Carolina, the trans community has been racked by violence. Two Black women, Jaida Peterson and Remy Fennell, were killed in the span of two weeks in April. Ash Williams, an organizer with Charlotte Uprising and the House of Kanautica, which both support the local Black trans community, said the groups’ main goal has been to get money in the hands of struggling trans people so they can find stable housing. After Peterson’s death, the groups raised over $20,000 for trans people of color. Williams said if they had this kind of funding year-round, it may have saved Peterson’s life.
“We believe that how we are organizing is certainly in the spirit of what we understand to be happening across the country, which is, we hope, some kind of cultural awakening that says trans people matter and Black lives matter,” Williams said.
Thousands march during a Transgender Resistance Vigil + March in Boston on June 13, 2020. Barry Chin / Boston Globe via Getty Images file
However, he added, distributing funds so the community members can take care of each other only goes so far when there is limited access to health care and other necessary services.
“Because of the way that power structures are, regular people have to show up,” Williams said. “And one of the things that we hope to be able to do is to get people mobilized and to show up for the trans folks where they live.”
Several groups in the Southeast are organizing to provide vulnerable trans communities with essential needs, such as housing, where they say state institutions have failed to provide a path to safety.
“A big portion of the folks that we serve participate in survival sex or sex work. Therefore, they don’t have verifiable income,” Kayla Gore, co-founder of My Sistah’s House, told NBC News last year. “So that’s the reason that they can’t get housing or they’re underemployed, in a sense that they don’t necessarily have access to equitable jobs that will provide them an income that is enough to obtain stable housing.”
My Sistah’s House also provides emergency housing in an effort to keep the local trans population safe in the immediate term.
House of Tulip in New Orleansis renovating a multifamily home in hopes of creating a pilot program to house 10 transgender people facing housing insecurity. The group, according to its website, also plans to establish a “separate space that can serve as a community center” where transgender people have a safe space to visit, access resources and get a hot meal or shower. H
House of Tulip said 1 of every 3 trans people in Louisiana faces homelessness, emphasizing the need for immediate housing as well as investment to help trans people find long-term housing arrangements.
Trans United Leading Intersectional Progress, or TULIP, is a nonprofit collective creating housing solutions for trans and gender-nonconforming people in Louisiana.House of Tulip
Johnson said local grassroots groups in the Southeast have come to realize in the absence of institutional help, they have to rely on each other for survival.
“When you have that kind of community building, it’s empowering, and people are not going to just roll over and expect this treatment that they’re getting,” Johnson said. “Also, they’re going to honor those who they’ve lost in their community, because they have people to rely on.”
