There are almost no differences between young trans kids and young cis kids when it comes to the strength of their gender identity, new US research shows.
This finding, from researchers at the University of Washington, was true even for trans kids who have only recently come out and socially transitioned (changed their name, pronouns and gender presentation in terms of clothes and hair).
The researchers found that children who identify with the gender that they were assigned at birth (cisgender children) tend to gravitate towards toys, clothing and friendships that are stereotypically associated with their gender. And in the same way, regardless of how long they have lived as their gender, trans kids also gravitate towards the toys, clothes and friends associated with their gender.
“Trans kids are showing strong identities and preferences that are different from their assigned sex,” said lead author Selin Gülgöz, who did the work as a postdoctoral researcher at the UW and will start a new position this winter as an assistant professor at Fordham University. “There is almost no difference between these trans- and cisgender kids of the same gender identity — both in how, and the extent to which, they identify with their gender or express that gender.”
The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and followed more than 300 trans children in the US, as well as nearly 200 of their cisgender siblings and about 300 unrelated cisgender children as a control group.
“While in both groups there were, for example, some tomboys, on average, most transgender girls, like their cisgender counterparts, wore stereotypically feminine clothing, chose toys such as dolls to play with, preferred playing with female playmates, and identified themselves clearly as girls, and not boys,” said Kristina Olson, the study’s senior author.
“Thus the transgender group looked similar to the cisgender group in both the range of responses and the most common responses.”
The similarities among trans and cis children on the various measures were somewhat surprising, the researchers said, because trans children, unlike their cis counterparts, were for at least some of their life treated as a gender other than the one they currently identify as.
“We’re not seeing any increases or decreases over time in how strongly transgender children identify with their current gender,” Gülgöz said.
The study adds to previous research in this area that shows that a trans child’s gender identity is strong and consistent, whether it’s tested before or after the child has socially transitioned.
“Our data thus far suggest that the act of transitioning probably isn’t affecting gender identity one way or the other,” Olson said.
However, non-binary children were not accounted for in this study, and nor were trans people who come out later in life. The study also only included trans children who had at least some family support of their trans identity.
Whether these findings would extend to trans children whose parents refuse to affirm their gender is currently unknown, Olson cautioned.
In early October, the United Kingdom’s SkyNews ran a story about the “Detransition Advocacy Network,” a new charity founded by Charlie Evans, a former transgender man who detransitioned in 2018. Evans told SkyNews that “hundreds” of young trans people were seeking her help to return to their sex assigned at birth, and she said more resources are urgently needed for people experiencing post-transition regret.
“I’m in communication with 19- and 20-year-olds who have had full gender reassignment surgery who wish they hadn’t, and their dysphoria hasn’t been relieved, they don’t feel better for it,” Evans told SkyNews. “They don’t know what their options are now.”
Following SkyNews’ interview with Evans, news outlets across the U.K. and the United States covered the phenomenon of detransitioning. The BBC dedicated an hour to the topic on two of its flagship programs in late November, and right-wing outlets such as The Daily Wire and Breitbart covered the topic with an explicitly transphobic spin. New York magazine published a piece last month about another advocacy group for ex-trans people where one interviewee expressed concern that “many teenage women … have been convinced too quickly that the only solution is to change their sex.”
No one disputes that transition regret does exist and that there are trans people who return to the sex they were assigned at birth. However, trans advocates say some of the recent coverage around the topic portrays detransitioning as much more common than it actually is, fueling misconceptions about the gender transition process and painting trans people as just temporarily confused or suffering from a misdiagnosed psychological disorder. This misleading information, they say, can have serious real-world consequences, from misguided policy proposals to social stigma.
“I think the reason why detransition stories are popular in this given time is because it neatly fits into this idea that young people especially are being made to be trans,” Lui Asquith, a legal counselor for U.K.-based LGBTQ group Mermaids, told NBC News. “The media are conjuring up a panic about trans lives, and the first victims of that panic are the young people who are indirectly being told that they’re a phase.”
How common is ‘transition regret’?
There are an estimated 1.4 million transgender adults in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, and the U.K.’s Government Equalities Office “tentatively” estimates there are between 200,000 and 500,000 trans people in Britain and Northern Ireland.
While the information regarding how many trans people detransition is sparse, those who work with the trans community say it is uncommon. “The actual numbers around them are significantly low,” Asquith said.
“Are there risks to getting gender affirming care? Maybe. But are there risks for not getting gender affirming care? Definitely. And the risks of the latter usually outweigh the former.”
DR. JACK TURBAN
The information that does exist appears to corroborate Asquith’s claim. In a 2015 survey of nearly 28,000 people conducted by the U.S.-based National Center for Transgender Equality, only 8 percent of respondents reported detransitioning, and 62 percent of those people said they only detransitioned temporarily. The most common reason for detransitioning, according to the survey, was pressure from a parent, while only 0.4 percent of respondents said they detransitioned after realizing transitioning wasn’t right for them.
The results of a 50-year survey published in 2010 of a cohort of 767 transgender people in Sweden found that about 2 percent of participants expressed regret after undergoing gender-affirming surgery.
The numbers are even lower for nonsurgical transition methods, like taking puberty blockers. According to a 2018 study of a cohort of transgender young adults at the largest gender-identity clinic in the Netherlands, 1.9 percent of adolescents who started puberty suppressants did not go on to pursue hormone therapy, typically the next step in the transition process.
Misinformation about the transition process
Stories about detransitioning often include misinformation not only about the prevalence of transition regret, but also about transitioning itself, according to transgender health experts and LGBTQ advocates. They say misconceptions about the gender transition process — including at what age different procedures are even considered — are widespread.
“We have people that are using media to educate themselves, and media is picking and mixing what they want to highlight and what they want to conflate or exaggerate,” Asquith said. “It’s incredibly unhelpful.”
Dr. Stephen Rosenthal, medical director for the University of California, San Francisco, Child and Adolescent Gender Center, said before the onset of puberty, there’s “no role” for medical intervention in a person who might be transgender, something that is not always made clear in media coverage.
For a child who has not yet reached puberty, trans health experts recommend seeking mental health support, because even prior to disclosing a gender identity that is different than the one they were assigned at birth, trans youth can experience symptoms including depression, social isolation and suicidal ideation. While medical guidelines advise that prepubescent children do not undergo hormone interventions, they state that allowing trans youth to “socially transition,” which can include taking on a new name and wearing a different style of clothing, can greatly benefit a child.
“It’s letting your child be themselves and loving them for who they are,” transgender advocate Gillian Branstetter said of the guidelines regarding children who haven’t reached puberty.
Once the child starts to experience puberty, health experts — including those at the U.K.’s National Health Service and the American Academy of Pediatrics — recommend a puberty blocker, as experiencing puberty when suffering from gender dysphoria can be traumatic for trans youth. With age, gender-expansive youth can explore other options such as gender-affirming hormones and surgery.
There have also been misconceptions surrounding the safety and lasting impact of nonsurgical transitioning steps, like puberty blockers. In September, a false news story linking the use of puberty blockers to “thousands of deaths” went viral, thanks in no small part to the signal boosting of right-wing media outlets like The Daily Wire.
Dr. Jack Turban, a resident physician in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital who researches the mental health of trans youth, told NBC News that puberty blockers are actually a pretty low-risk way to provide care for gender dysphoric youth.
“Puberty blockers put puberty on hold so that adolescents have more time to decide what they want to do next. This is important because, while pubertal blockade is reversible, puberty itself is not,” he said. “It’s much more common to regret not getting puberty blockers than it is to regret getting puberty blockers.”
“With any intervention there are risks and benefits,” Turban said. “Are there risks to getting gender affirming care? Maybe. But are there risks for not getting gender affirming care? Definitely. And the risks of the latter usually outweigh the former.”
The consequences of misleading coverage
Advocates say that media coverage around transgender issues, and the public discourse it generates, can have a real-life impact on the lives of transgender people.
Branstetter, who as the former spokesperson for the National Center for Transgender Equality spent years speaking to the press and following coverage about transgender issues, said the media too often focuses on the “debate” over trans people’s validity, and does not pay enough attention to the struggles and joys of the trans experience.
“Decisions about newsworthiness are too often pinned to skepticism about trans people, or an assumption that your readers are more interested in whether trans people exist and not the actual experiences of trans people,” she said.
Asquith said coverage that questions the existence of trans identities can be particularly harmful to trans youth, an already vulnerable group that has an alarmingly high rate of attempted suicide and is subjected to disproportionately high rates of bullying and harassment. According to a 2017 National School Climate Survey by GLSEN, 44 percent of LGBTQ students reported feeling unsafe at school because of their gender expression.
“If one’s gender identity is different than that assigned at birth, if parents are being made to feel like that’s wrong,” Asquith said, “that is not OK.”
“The media need to take responsibility for that,” she added.
Misleading coverage has also provoked misguided policy proposals and political maneuvers disguised as genuine concerns for children’s health, according to LGBTQ advocates. Branstetter pointed to recent coverage about two Texas parents involved in a bitter divorce who disagreed over whether their 7-year-old is transgender. Following claims by the father that the child’s mother, a pediatrician, was trying to “chemically castrate” their child, Republican lawmakers in the state inserted themselves into the matter Gov. Greg Abbott ordered an investigation into the family, and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, went so far as to call parents who support their trans children “child abusers.”
Branstetter said that media coverage is tied to the bigotry that transgender people face in their daily lives. She pointed to the recently proposed bills in Texas, Georgia and Kentucky that would ban access to trans health care for minors, such as puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy, and said that media coverage has played a large role in making anti-trans proposals like them politically fruitful.
“Those very proposals, should they be enacted into law, have a body count,” she said. “It would be restricting health care as prescribed by doctors, it would be people crossing state lines in order to get the health care they need. It would not merely destroy lives, it would end lives. And all of that is based on false myths about who trans people are and what our health care entails.”
‘Wedge issues’
Some advocates say the burst of detransition stories is just the latest in a cycle of media narratives that, intentionally or not, fuel misconceptions and stir up anti-trans sentiment.
Tea Uglow, creative director for Google’s Australia-based Creative Lab, is one of those advocates. Earlier this year, she debuted a project titled “Yours Sincerely, The Fourth Estate,” an archive of headlines and articles containing the word “transgender” from various U.K. and Australian news outlets between August 2018 and August 2019. Uglow told NBC News that stories about detransitioning and transition regret are the latest example of a broader trend.
“What is very obvious over the last few years is how there have been different wedge issues at different points, like the bathroom debatesand then this very interesting thing about trans women in sports,” Uglow said. “It’s a pernicious cycle.”
In 2016, following North Carolina’s reversal of a Charlotte city ordinance permitting transgender people to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity, the debate over which restroom trans people should use was covered widely, with some of the coverage veering transphobic. As recently as November 2018, the trans bathroom debate was still being used in political ads. More recently, a slew of national victories by transgender athletes prompted a call for trans women to be banned from participating in women’s sporting events over concerns that they would make the playing field uneven.
Less than one-quarter (24 percent) of Americans report having a close friend or family member who is transgender, according to the Public Research Religion Institute. This means for most people in the U.S. — and likely beyond — media coverage is the primary way they’re receiving information about the community. This is part of the reason Asquith said media outlets should be more aware of the impact their coverage could have on the trans community.
“It’s about media taking responsibility for the repercussions of the rhetoric that is out there,” Asquith said. “It is fueling hate.”
Turban has a prescription for those disseminating misleading information about trans people: Talk to the experts.
“What would be useful is if journalists and politicians reached out to doctors and physicians and researchers, people who actually know about this issue, rather than cisgender political pundits and people who don’t care for trans youth,” he said.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an appeal by a convicted murderer who filed a civil rights lawsuit because Texas prison officials denied her request to be considered for gender reassignment surgery.
The justices let stand a lower court’s decision to reject the claim by inmate Vanessa Lynn Gibson that denying the surgery request violated the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Gibson, 41, who is transgender, was assigned male at birth and has lived as a female since age 15. Gibson was incarcerated in 1995 for aggravated assault, then was convicted of murdering a fellow inmate in 1997. She is eligible for parole in 2021.
Court papers said Gibson was diagnosed in 2014 with gender dysphoria, which medical experts define as distress from the internal conflict between physical gender and gender identity. She has suffered from severe depression, engaged in self-mutilation and attempted suicide several times, court papers said.
Gibson was provided with hormone therapy, but Texas has no policy allowing for “irreversible surgical intervention,” according to the state.
Gibson sued in federal court claiming that by refusing to conduct a medical evaluation for gender reassignment surgery prison officials were deliberately indifferent to her serious medical needs, a form of banned cruel and unusual punishment.
The Supreme Court in 1976 ruled that a deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners violates the Eighth Amendment because it is an “unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain.”
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in March rejected Gibson’s claim. In the decision, Judge James Ho, an appointee of President Donald Trump, said it is not cruel to deny a treatment that no other prison provides.
A groundbreaking testicle transplant operation has taken place, raising hopes of potential future operations for transgender patients.
Several of the world’s leading experts in genital surgery performed the pioneering operation for an unnamed cisgender man in Belgrade, Serbia.ADVERTISING
The man was born without testicles due to a rare condition, leaving him reliant on injections to receive testosterone, similar to transgender men.
The six-hour operation saw a testicle transplanted from the patient’s twin brother, which will allow him to produce his own testosterone.
The two brothers, who now have one testicle each, are both doing well, transplant surgeon Dr Dicken Ko told The New York Times.
Testicle transplant surgery raises ethical questions over children.
The surgery, which is just the third known transplant of its type, could also have broader applications for transgender people, cancer patients and accident victims.
Testicle surgeries could present future ethical questions
However, testicular transplant surgery may also raise ethical questions in future, as patients who receive transplanted testicles may one day be able to father children who would genetically be descendants of the donors.
Dr Ko said: “The offspring is technically whose child? It raises much debate in the literature of medical ethics.”
Trans women’s genitals could be transplanted onto men.
Dr Branko Bojovc of Harvard Medical School told the New York Times that his surgical team has already received inquiries from transgender men hoping for a penis or testicle transplant.
Lead surgeon Dr Miroslav Djordjevic told the newspaper that he had developed a plan for performing penis transplants that could help transgender patients.
He said that the genitals of transgender women, which are currently often discarded during gender confirmation surgery, could potentially be repurposed for transplants.
The surgeon added: “We have to do this as soon as possible, to stop putting healthy organs in the garbage.”
The patient, a young cisgender US army veteran who lost his genitals during combat, received genitals from an unrelated deceased donor.
In that case, doctors decided not to transplant the donor’s testes due to the ethical concerns about potential children.
Transplant procedures have more potential complications outside of identical twins due to the prospect of organ rejection, but immunosuppressant drugs can lower the risk.
A transgender student’s fight over school bathrooms comes before a federal appeals court Thursday, setting the stage for a groundbreaking ruling.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta will hear arguments about whether a Florida school district should be ordered to allow students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.
Drew Adams, who has since graduated from Nease High School in Ponte Vedra, won a lower court ruling last year ordering the St. Johns County school district to allow him to use the boys’ restroom. The district has appealed, arguing that although it will permit transgender students to use single-occupancy, gender-neutral restrooms, it shouldn’t be forced to let students use the restroom of the gender they identify with.
The 11th Circuit could become the first federal appeals court to issue a binding ruling on the issue, which has arisen in several states. The ruling would cover schools in Florida, Georgia and Alabama, and could carry the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The 4th Circuit had ruled in favor of a Virginia student, but the Supreme Court sent the case back down for further consideration. That’s because the U.S. Department of Education, under President Donald Trump, withdrew guidance that said federal law called for treating transgender students equally, including allowing them to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.
Adams transitioned from female to male before starting his freshman year at the high school just outside Jacksonville. He said he used the boys’ restroom without incident for weeks until several girls complained. He and his mother eventually sued in federal court, winning an order after a bench trial that he could use the boys’ restroom.
Now a student at the University of Central Florida, Adams told The Associated Press in a phone interview Tuesday, “I really think it is going to take the courts to change it.”
The district argues that Adams is not a boy and that he should be excluded from the boys’ bathroom because those born as boys have “the right to be free from exposing one’s private and personal space and unclothed and partially clothed body to members of the opposite sex.”
The trial judge rejected this argument, finding that Adams would use a stall and that no breach of privacy would occur. “Plaintiff’s anatomy has no relevance to his ability to use the boys’ restroom,” wrote Adams’ lawyer, Tara Borelli of Lambda legal. “Defendant’s witnesses conceded at trial that Drew is treated differently because he is transgender, which is sex discrimination.”
The district argues that the trial judge “overextended” a 2011 decision by the 11th Circuit that found the state of Georgia had illegally discriminated against an employee of the state legislature by firing the employee when she announced her transition from male to female. The district also argues that a federal educational law that bans discrimination “on the basis of sex” doesn’t cover transgender people.
Borelli, though, say the law, called Title IX, does cover transgender people and that it’s impossible for the school board to carry out its desired policy without sex-based discrimination.
“These kinds of policies inflict suffering,” Borelli told the AP.
GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy organization, today released the following information to show a disturbing trend by anti-LGBTQ activists who have used anti-trans rhetoric and messaging to influence this year’s contentious elections across the country. The anti-trans ads reached Americans through many mediums and appear to have targeted electoral contests in Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia. But despite the onslaught of ads, LGBTQ candidates like Danica Roem and pro-LGBTQ candidates like Andy Beshear were able to win their respective elections.
THE ADS:
Nationwide: The same conservative PAC that is behind the Kentucky ads has cut a seriesof anti-trans spots that culminate in the message: “On Tuesday, November 5, vote against Democrats.” It is unclear where these will air.
Kentucky: A conservative PAC is running ads claiming that that the Democratic candidate for governor, Andy Beshear, is threatening opportunities for cisgender females athletes because he supports “a competitor who claims they are a girl.”
Louisiana: Ralph Abraham, GOP candidate for governor, is running ads stating, “as a doctor, I can assure you, there are only two genders.”
Mississippi: GOP candidate Tate Reeves has made anti-trans comments, insisting to the anti-LGBTQ American Family Association that trans rights would trample on religious freedom.
Donald Trump, Jr. used this anti-trans rhetoric just yesterday, and anti-LGBTQ activists are likely to continue using this tactic into next year’s critical 2020 elections. This anti-LGBTQ campaign is a similar strategy deployed by anti-LGBTQ activists in the 2004 elections, a successful effort which demonized marriage equality.
“The Trump Administration’s incessant attacks on transgender Americans have effectively spread across the country in 2019 state elections, and the public should expect this tactic to be used during critical elections next year too,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD’s President & CEO. “The assertions and misinformation in these ads have been debunked time and again, but this ‘top-down’ strategy by anti-LGBTQ activists will only be defeated when the community bands together and fights back.”
The anti-transgender dialogue comes as attacks on the trans community have skyrocketed. So far this year, more than 21 transgender women of color have been murdered, continuing a disturbingepidemic on the community. Further, President Donald Trump and his administration’s 130 attacks on the LGBTQ community have largely targeted the transgender community specifically, including denying trans Americans health care and banning trans people from serving in the country’s armed forces.
Below you will find background information from GLAAD on how anti-LGBTQ activists are using anti-trans language and messaging in their campaigns:
WHAT
With past LGBTQ political footballs like marriage equality no longer playable for them, some conservative candidates and groups are spewing anti-transgender rhetoric and using misinformation about trans people inlast-minute attempts to turn out voters in their favor. A similar strategy was made by the Virginia Republican Party and its candidates, who used debunked ads about immigration days before the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial elections.
WHY
With a president whose own anti-trans record is clear, statewide candidates are following the national party’s lead and using transgender people as a way to get out the evangelical vote.
WHO’S BEHIND THE ADS?
In Kentucky, it’s an organizational PAC called Campaign For American Principles, and in Louisiana and Mississippi, it is the Republican Party’s candidates’ own campaigns. However, the anti-trans push is a mainstream political position that is supported by virtually every conservative group, the vast majority of GOP elected officials, and the current Trump Administration. Which means we are more likely than not to see this push in GOP campaigns up and down the ticket across the nation through November 2020.
FACT VERSUS FICTION
Below you will find the type of anti-transgender rhetoric that is surely to pop up in future political ads across the nation through the 2020 political cycle.
Claim: There are only two genders.
Truth: Human biology is far more complex than a binary. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychiatric Association all agree that gender identity does not exist in a structured binary.
Claim: Trans women have an unfair advantage in sports.
Truth: This is false, and the so-called “unfair advantage” narrative developed only when transgender athletes began winning their competitions. As the NCAA states, there are about 150 to 200 student athletes who identify as transgender. However, they have not received attention because they haven’t won their matches. Organizations like Athlete Ally have also worked with scientists to confirm that a person’s gender identity does not impact their performance as an athlete.
Claim: Trans rights threaten religious freedom.
Truth: The idea that trans people are in conflict with any law, policy, or statute is 100% built around transphobia. Transgender people are religious and non-religious, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal. That’s because transgender people are simply people trying to live, work, and operate in society the same as anyone else.
DOES THIS CAMPAIGN TACTIC WORK?
There are two major differences between the most prominent anti-LGBTQ wedge issue, marriage equality, and this current anti-trans push.
(1) The Democratic Party is largely united in support of trans rights, something that was not true when the big anti-marriage pushes of the early 2000’s led to anti-LGBTQ electoral success.
(2) Public polling shows that a majority of American voters support trans rights, with many polls showing even a plurality of Republican voters hold favorable views.
Transgender women inmates in Colorado claim in a class-action lawsuit that they are targets of physical violence and sexual harassment because they are routinely housed with men.
About 170 transgender inmates are represented in the class with seven women named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed Friday in state court in Denver. Gov. Jered Polis and Colorado Department of Corrections officials are named as defendants.
The lawsuit alleges that because the women are held with men without safeguards, they are subjected to abuse and discrimination in violation of the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act.
“The lawsuit claims that the CDOC has discriminated against transgender women solely on the basis of their gender identity and that these women have been subjected to unsafe situations, including severe sexual harassment, physical violence, and rape,” the Transgender Law Center, which filed the suit on behalf of the inmates, said in a summary.
Annie Skinner, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Corrections, said she could not comment on specifics of the lawsuit, but officials are working to create safe and fair incarceration for all offenders.
“Colorado has spent the last several years diligently working to develop and implement thoughtful and informed policies and procedures for the fair and respectful treatment of transgender offenders in our custody, and is considered a leader in this area nationally,” she said in an email.
“We work every day to find the best possible balance between the desire to protect the dignity of all offenders, with the need to ensure their safety.”
The lawsuit highlights the experiences of the named plaintiffs, including allegations by Kandice Raven, 30.
“Because she is a transgender woman in CDOC custody, she has been subjected to numerous brutal assaults, resulting in permanent injuries, including a rape in 2014,” the document states. “She has attempted suicide twice and attempted self-castration as a means to deal with her severe gender dysphoria.”
Jane Gallentine, whose age was not stated, has survived “several rapes,” including repeated attacks by a corrections officer, the lawsuit claims.
“One of her abusers forcibly tattooed his name on her neck to show everyone that she was ‘his property,'” it states. The allegation involves an incarcerated gang member, not the corrections officer, said Denver civil rights attorney Paula Greisen, a lawyer for the inmates.
Amber Miller, 32, was raped by a corrections officer and by male inmates, the lawsuit claims. After she reported one rape, “Amber was stripped naked by a group of male guards, handcuffed, and placed in the hole for weeks,” the suit says.
Because the transgender inmates named in the suit “present as women” and take hormone regimens, they’re often seen by male inmates and even some correction officers as vulnerable targets for crime, said Greisen, lead counsel on the case.
“Sex is a commodity in male prison,” she said. “These women are used as commodities.”
Rape by corrections officers of transgender inmates is under-reported because victims who step forward are often punished with strip searches and solitary confinement, she said.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, “necessary accommodations” and other corrective measures.
Greisen said most of the plaintiffs want to be incarcerated with women not according to their gender assigned at birth.
“What we want is for them to be held in safe facilities,” she said. “And although right now the policy is that their preference is given a priority, we don’t see it happening.”
The Transgender Law Center is based in Oakland, California.
Trystan Reese, a transgender man and community advocate, thought social media would be a great place to share his pregnancy story with the world. Little did he know, he would face several years of “extreme backlash” for doing just that.
“I was pretty excited for the opportunity to start to add more positive stories to the sort of public narrative around what it can mean to be transgender today,” Reese, whose pregnancy story was covered by NBC News and countless other news outlets in 2017, explained.
Biff Chaplow, left, and Trystan Reese before the 2017 birth of their youngest child. Kevin Truong
Over the past two and a half years, however, Reese — who lives in Portland, Oregon, with his husband and three children — has dealt with online transphobia and misinformation circulating about his family. One example of this pervasive harassment involves a photo of Reese while pregnant along with a transgender woman friend. This happy image, shared on Instagram by his friend, was then used without permission in a number of fake stories and memes that appeared across the internet. Reese said the intentionally cruel posts mocked and misgendered them both and falsely claimed his friend was the biological parent of Reese’s child.
“People assume that’s true and run with it, and share with their friends,” Reese said of the transphobic posts, which, after being flagged by NBC News, were removed by Facebook for violating its policies. “People send us ugly transphobic memes that have been made of the best moments of my life.”
Social media: A double-edged sword for trans community
Social media platforms have been vital spaces for transgender people to gather and form a community, according to Gillian Branstetter, a trans advocate and the former spokeswoman for the National Center for Transgender Equality. However, she added, the hostility they frequently face on these platforms make trans individuals more apprehensive about using them.
“The internet was life-changing for transgender people,” Branstetter said. “It’s critical that platforms are providing a safe place for transgender people to find community.”
Reese shared a similar sentiment, saying social media is “both the best thing that ever happened to the transgender community, and it’s also the worst.”
“We’re able to provide immediate, real-time, lifesaving support to transgender people and their families, any time of the day or night, but we are also open to more scrutiny and direct one-on-one harassment and abuse than ever before,” Reese said.
Trystan Reese, right, and Biff Chaplow with their children, from left, Riley, Leo and Hailey, in 2017.Kevin Truong
According to a recent report from the anti-bullying organization Ditch the Label and its analytics partner, Brandwatch, 1.5 million (or 15 percent) of the 10 million transgender-related comments on social media platforms over a three and a half year period starting in 2016 were found to be transphobic.
“The scale of it is quite frightening, and it was quite shocking,” Toryn Glavin, a transgender advocate at the London-based LGBTQ nonprofit Stonewall, said of the report’s findings. “The conversations, how nasty they’ve turned, and how we’ve seen society really kind of polarized in the last few years, and we’ve seen trans communities be one of the scape goats that are thrown under that bus.”
Brennan Suen, the LGBTQ program director for Media Matters, a progressive nonprofit that monitors and analyzes misinformation across U.S. media outlets, singled out Facebook as “one of the biggest bad actors.” He said much of the anti-trans rhetoric found on social media has been spread by far-right publications whose content has gone viral on the platform.
Suen accused the social media titan of “blatantly” allowing The Daily Wire, a popular news outlet founded by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, to break Facebook’s rules in order to make the site’s content go viral.
“If you look at an analysis of headlines with the word ‘transgender’ in them, the most engaged-with website on that issue was The Daily Wire,” Suen said. “It’s a very successful tactic for them.”
“They know that they can build outrage, they know that they can scare people, and they know that people don’t understand the issue very well,” Suen added. “So they can spread misinformation about [transgender issues], and also get a lot of clicks.”
A recent report from Popular Information — a newsletter created by journalist, lawyer and ThinkProgress founder Judd Legum — found that 14 Facebook pages with a combined 7.5 million followers are exclusively posting articles from The Daily Wire, which regularly publishes anti-LGBTQ stories. The administrators for those pages claim to be unaffiliated Facebook users but appear to be centrally controlled by The Daily Wire, which would be a violation of Facebook’s community standards against inauthentic behavior. The pages frequently share the same articles simultaneously and help the conservative outlet’s content go viral. In September, The Daily Wire received 15,283 engagements per story on Facebook compared to 1,871 for The New York Time, 2,119 for The Washington Post and 6,824 for The Huffington Post, according to the Popular Information report.
In a statement to NBC News, Jon Lewis, the vice president of The Daily Wire, claimed the company has “always worked to comply with Facebook policy.”
“We do not believe that the audience for any page that we operate has been deceived as to Daily Wire’s relationship with these pages, nor did we intend any such deception; indeed, it would be exceedingly difficult to miss that all the posts were from Daily Wire,” Lewis stated.
“In an average month, less than 5% of our total Facebook traffic comes from pages other than Daily Wire or our talent pages — primarily Ben Shapiro,” he added, though NBC News was unable to verify his claims. “Facebook has announced a new transparency initiative, and like other publishers, we have been working to implement it on schedule.”
A Facebook spokesperson told NBC News the company announced the new transparency policy earlier this month that it is applying to the 14 pages exclusively promoting The Daily Wire’s content, but the spokesperson did not confirm how the policy would be applied or whether the pages would removed.
“Since the launch of our new page transparency policy, we are actively reaching out to and reviewing various/numerous networks,” the spokesperson stated.
The Daily Wire, however, is far from the only conservative outlet publishing transgender-related articles to Facebook that are false, misleading, blatantly transphobic or some combination of the three — and many of these stories have gone viral in recent months. Suen estimates that a large portion of the “millions” of engagements received by anti-trans articles — many of which he said paint trans issues as hostile to women and children — come from Facebook.
In September, a story first covered by the Catholic news outlet Lifesite News falsely claimed that hormone blockers used by doctors to delay puberty in transgender teenagers are linked to cancer. The story went viral on Facebook and Twitter and was covered by other conservative outlets, including the Christian Post and The Daily Wire. NBC News later published an article poking holes in these claims.
Then in late October, The Daily Signal, a “multinews arm” of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with a history of fighting against LGBTQ rights, and the Christian Post both circulated a story about a mother claiming to have lost her college-age children to what she described as “the trans cult” after they transitioned.
Earlier this month, a custody dispute between a Texas couple who disagreed about the gender identity of their 7-year-old child received widespread media attention, which eventually spilled over into state politics. Many right-wing media outlets falsely claimed the child’s mother, Anne Georgulas, a pediatrician, was forcing the child to live as a girl and to medically transition. Following the misleading coverage, a rock was thrown through Georgulas’ window while her children were asleep, and she was forced to close her business after dead animals were left on its doorstep, according to her representative, Karen Hirsch.
Transphobia goes beyond the far-right mediasphere. Katelyn Burns, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who is transgender, said she regularly deals with harassment on social media, most of it from “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” commonly referred to as “TERFs” or “gender critical feminists.”
Burns said an image of her and her two young children was mysteriously uploaded to a “gender critical” Reddit in 2017 that she described as a “hive” of virulent anti-transgender feminists. She said members of the group mocked her and her children’s appearances. She said moderators eventually removed the image after she contacted them.
Burns said online harassment is frustrating because anonymous abusers work together to bully trans people across social media platforms.
“Once the harassment starts, it’s really hard to stop it,” she said. “You just have to ride it out until it ends on its own.”
On Twitter and Reddit, also in 2017, a number of accounts circulated another photo of Burns alongside the term “autogynesmile,” a label adopted from “autogynephilia,” a widely criticized and controversial theory invented by sexologist Ray Blanchard that claims trans female identity is linked to a sexual fetish. According to Burns, so-called gender-critical feminists concocted the term “autogynosmile” to mock the way trans women look in selfies. At one point, Burns said, if you searched “autogynesmile” on Google, her picture would be among the first images to pop up.
A number of trans-exclusionary organizations purporting to be progressive feminist groups, including the Women’s Liberation Front, are joining forces with conservative groups to oppose trans rights and spread the narrative that trans activism is hostile to women’s rights. The Hands Across the Aisle Coalition, for example, is an alliance of self-proclaimed “radical feminists, lesbians, Christians and conservatives” who claim to be “tabling our ideological differences” in order to “oppose gender identity ideology.”
Heron Greenesmith, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, an organization that tracks anti-transgender rhetoric in mainstream media, said far-right organizations are leveraging gender-critical feminists, whose views Heron said do not reflect the wider feminist community, to give credence to anti-LGBTQ policies and agendas.
“Here in the U.S., mainstream Christian right and Evangelical right organizations have been platforming anti-trans feminists to give anti-trans advocacy the veneer of a much broader base of support than it actually has,” Greenesmith said. “This is a tactic that the right uses all the time: Find a minority member of a marginalized group who are willing to throw other marginalized folks under the bus, in the name of scarcity mindset.”
Whether it’s from the political right, left or center, online transphobia and the spread of false and misleading narratives can have dangerous, real-life consequences, transgender advocates say.
“There’s been a significant amount of research showing a close relationship between online violence and physical violence, and given the steep relationship of mistrust between transgender people and law enforcement, understanding the scope of the threat that people feel is critical,” Branstetter said.
Jari Jones and her girlfriend, Corey.Emma Tim
This relationship between online harassment and physical violence is real-life fear for Jari Jones, a black trans activist who recently starred along with her girlfriend, who is also trans, in the YouTube series “My Trans Life.”
“Media is very powerful, and if we allow that, allow hate, and allow violent behavior with words, people think it’s OK, and that creates an atmosphere of violence for trans people,” said Jones, whose YouTube show received many abusive comments that attacked her gender identity.
“People are more willing to attack a trans person, because they see it on TV, they’re more willing to attack a trans person or say whatever they want to a trans person or a queer person, because they see this online, nobody’s checking them for it,” she added.
According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, almost half of the survey’s 27,715 respondents reported being denied equal treatment, verbally harassed and/or physically attacked in the past year for being trans. And the FBI’s latest hate crimes report, which was released earlier this month, found a 34 percent increase in reported hate crimes against trans people from 2017 to 2018.
LGBTQ advocates, including Branstetter and Suen, say the persistent — and often unfairly depicted — focus on more polarizing issues, like trans women in competitive sports, deflect public attention away from the high-levels of discrimination and violence the trans community experience.
“There’s so many issues like access to housing, access to economic opportunities, being able to live without the threat of violence, that are never talked about or seen by a wide majority or a wide swath of the country,” Suen said.
Social media platforms say they have taken steps to limit hate speech and harassment, but many civil rights and anti-bullying advocates say they haven’t gone far enough.
In a statement to NBC News, a Facebook spokesperson said the company doesn’t allow “attacks based on gender identity, including violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, and calls for exclusion or segregation.” The spokesperson stated the platform removed “7 million pieces of content for violating our hate speech policy, of which we proactively detected 80 percent before people reported it to us” in Q3 2019.
In a June statement, YouTube stated that the company removes content if it determines “the primary purpose of the video is hate or harassment.”
YouTube allowed Steven Crowder, notorious for his anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, to keep his channel, which has over 4 million subscribers, but said it stopped the conservative pundit from running ads after seeing “the widespread harm to the YouTube community resulting from the ongoing pattern of egregious behavior.”
And earlier this month,YouTube removed a video from The Daily Signal in which Dr. Michelle Cretella, a pediatrician, stated, “See, if you want to cut off a leg or an arm, you’re mentally ill, but if you want to cut off healthy breasts or a penis, you’re transgender.” YouTube said it removed the video because Cretella’s statement violated its hate speech policy, according to news reports.
Cretella is the executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “a fringe anti-LGBT hate group that masquerades as the premier U.S. association of pediatricians to push anti-LGBT junk science.”
Katrina Trinko, editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal, accused YouTube of censorship in commentary published Nov. 5.
“We are especially disappointed with YouTube’s decision because other social media platforms have allowed the video on their platforms,” Trinko wrote. “In fact, the video has more than 70 million views on Facebook. It might have even more if Facebook hadn’t temporarily removed it in July 2018. After our appeal to Facebook, it was quickly restored and remains on The Daily Signal’s page today.”
Last year, Twitter made “misgendering” and “deadnaming” users — referring to a trans person as their sex assigned at birth or by their given name, if different from their chosen name — against its hateful conduct policy. A number of users, including Meghan Murphy, founder of the Canadian radical feminist website The Feminist Current, were banned from Twitter for violating these rules. Murphy disputes she violated Twitter’s rules and unsuccessfully sued the company over the ban.
Burns said she has shielded herself from abuse on Twitter by subscribing to blocklists and by limiting her notifications to only accounts that follow her, but she said abuse has been more difficult to avoid on Facebook. After Burns wrote a viral story for Vox about “gender-critical feminists,” she said a Facebook user angered by the story tagged her in an abusive post on the platform, which then generated “hundreds” of abusive replies from other users. Burns said she reported the online harassment to Facebook, but the company said it would not remove the initial post because, as a journalist, Burns is considered a public figure.
“I couldn’t write again for like two weeks afterwards, because those people got in my head,” Burns said. “They say things, and you start believing it after enough people have said it.”
Reese said reporting abuse to Facebook feels “completely useless.”
“I flag them as hateful, I flag them as untrue, I flag them as bigotry,” he said, adding that the process is like “trying to use my thumb to stop a damn.”
Both Burns and Reese said they use social media to do their jobs, which makes abandoning these platforms impossible.
While preventing online abuse altogether may be impossible, Glavin said social media companies should join forces with trans people to help minimize the online abuse they experience.
“I think really the way forward for social media companies is to work with trans communities and to kind of sit down with trans communities and figure out what is happening, what is the current situation, what are the kind of things that they should watch out for, what are the signs and symptoms that that kind of transphobic bullying is happening, and then trying to build policies around that,” Glavin said.
Reese lamented that there does not seem to be a “coordinated interest” from social media companies in protecting the voices of trans people who are “desperately trying to tell our stories.”
“We’re desperately trying to answer all of our direct messages from trans youth who think they have no hope,” Reese said. “We’re trying so hard to do this positive, life-affirming work, and we’re doing it against brutal odds.”
Last week, in advance of today’s International Trans Day of Remembrance, Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide released the annual results from its Trans Murder Monitoring research project, “to join the voices raising awareness of this day regarding hate crimes against trans and gender-diverse people, and to honour the lives of those who might otherwise be forgotten.”
The TMM project is devoted to the systematic collection, monitoring and analysis of reported killings of gender-diverse/trans people worldwide. It was established by TvT Worldwide in 2009, using data from 2008 onward.
This year’s update, which was published on the organization’s website November 11, reported 331 cases of reported killings of trans and gender-diverse people between October 1 2018 – September 30 2019.
The complete update is reproduced below:
“On the occasion of the International Trans Day of Remembrance (TDoR), which is held on 20th of November 2019, the Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide (TvT) team is publishing the Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) research project update to join the voices raising awareness of this day regarding hate crimes against trans and gender-diverse people, and to honour the lives of those who might otherwise be forgotten.
The TDoR 2019 update has revealed a total of 331 cases of reported killings of trans and gender-diverse people between 1 October 2018 and 30 September 2019. The majority of the murders occurred in Brazil (130), Mexico (63), and the United States (30), adding up to a total of 3314 reported cases in 74 countries worldwide between 1st of January 2008 and 30th of September 2019.
Stigma and discrimination against trans and gender-diverse people is real and profound around the world, and are part of a structural and ongoing circle of oppression that keeps us deprived of our basic rights. Trans and gender-diverse people are victims of horrifying hate violence, including extortion, physical and sexual assaults, and murder. In most countries, data on murdered trans and gender-diverse people are not systematically produced and it is impossible to estimate the actual number of cases.
Violence against trans and gender-diverse people frequently overlaps with other axes of oppression prevalent in society, such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, and anti-sex worker sentiment and discrimination. TMM data shows that the victims whose occupations are known are mostly sex workers (61%). In the United States, the majority of the trans people reported murdered are trans women of colour and/or Native American trans women (85%), and in France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, which are the countries to which most trans and gender-diverse people from Africa and Central and South America migrate, 65% of the reported murder victims were migrant trans women.
More about the project can be found on our TMM report 2016.”
Since beginning the TMM project, TvT has registered the murders of 3317 trans and gender-diverse people worldwide. The killings are merely catalogued as reports of murdered trans and gender-diverse persons, without further classification, because (according to the TvT website), “The classification of the murder of a trans/gender-diverse person as a hate crime is often difficult, due to a lack of information in the reports as well as the lack of national monitoring systems.”
TvT Worldwide, an ongoing, comparative qualitative-quantitative research project initiated by Transgender Europe (TGEU), serves gender-diverse/trans people’s movements and activism by seeking to provide an overview of the human-rights situation of trans and gender-diverse persons in different parts of the world and to develop useful data and advocacy tools for international institutions, human-rights organizations, the trans movement, and the general public. Besides the TMM, their work is divided into two additional sub-projects: one, dedicated to legal and social mapping, surveys existing laws, law proposals, and actual legal and health-care practices as well as diverse aspects of the social situation relevant to gender-diverse/trans people; another, a Survey on the Social Experiences of Trans and Gender-Diverse People, addresses experiences of both Transphobia and Transrespect in communities around the world.
A transgender woman said she was “humiliated and traumatized” after she was forced to remove her makeup with hand sanitizer for her driver’s license photo.
Jaydee Dolinar told NBC News that after her purse was stolen, she made an appointment at the Fairpark Driver License Office in Utah to obtain a replacement license last Wednesday. She said she brought the required documents to the appointment and “was fully prepared to have to say my dead name,” since she is currently in the process of changing her gender marker and legal name on her paperwork. A “dead name” describes a trans person’s given name, if different than the name they choose to go by.
Jaydee Dolinar said she was forced to remove her makeup with hand sanitizer when taking a picture for her driver’s license.Courtesy
What Dolinar was not prepared for, however, was that after taking a picture with makeup, she would be instructed by another employee to remove it for a second image.
“I was told my wearing makeup would be confusing to the system,” Dolinar, 33, said. “The employee said because my appearance didn’t match my gender, it wouldn’t be able to be picked up by the facial recognition software.”
Dolinar, who is a full-time doctoral student in archeology at the University of Utah, said that because she wouldn’t have time to reschedule the appointment and because people were watching her, she felt “forced” into taking off her makeup.
“I asked what I should do, and they handed me the hand sanitizer and wipes,” Dolinar said. “The whole thing was terrible and traumatic. I had to take it off right then and there and I felt as a trans woman, I had forced myself to get clocked.”
After removing her makeup, Dolinar took a second picture. This time, her makeup was smeared. She said she tried to “smile while crying.”
Neither the Fairpark Driver License Office nor the Utah Department of Public Safety Driver License Division responded to NBC News’ requests for comment, but Sue Robbins, chair of the board of directors of Transgender Education Advocates of Utah, said this is not the first time an incident like this has occurred. According to Robbins, two other transgender women were required to remove their makeup for their drivers license pictures in 2015, prompting her organization to provide training and a video about “how to treat trans people.”
“Trans people should be able to live our lives the way they feel,” Robbins said. “The license should match the way a person presents on a regular basis and reflect their regular appearance, so to make them present differently is discriminatory.”
Robbins said Transgender Education Advocates of Utah plans to work with the office again to “discuss a path forward” and prevent a similar incident from happening again.
“It was just cruel. I didn’t expect that lack of humanity,” Dolinar said. “I’m a human being just like everyone else. Have some humanity.”
The National Center for Transgender Equality ranks Utah’s drivers license gender change policy with a “C,” stating that there are “burdensome process requirements,” such as needing to provide an updated passport or birth certificate. For reference, a state with an “A” grade does not require provider certification, while a state with an “F” grade requires either proof of surgery, a court order or an amended birth certificate.
Beyond Utah, there have been similar incidents noted in West Virginia, where two transgender women were reportedly told in 2014 that they must appear as male in their license photos, and in South Carolina, where a transgender teen was reportedly told to wipe off their makeup in 2015. In San Francisco, a DMV employee allegedly sent a trans women a letter, calling her an “abomination” in 2010.