Black trans army veteran Jamel Young is suing the New York Police Department for their “dehumanising” treatment of him during what began as a routine traffic stop in 2019.
Young, 33, had driven to New York from Atlanta, with his girlfriend, in March 2019.
His ordeal began when, after dropping his girlfriend at a friend’s apartment, he began looking for somewhere to park.
When an unmarked NYPD car pulled him over, Young said he didn’t panic.
“I’m feeling like, OK, I didn’t do anything wrong, whatever this is I’ll take care of it,” Young toldBuzzFeed News.
But the US citizen said was still aware that as a Black man in the Bronx late at night, he needed to be careful. “The only thing on my mind is to comply,” he said.
It was after he disclosed to the police officers that he is transgender that the problems began.
According to Young’s lawsuit against the corrections department and the NYPD, filed last month, the police then misgendered, assaulted and sexualised him. Officers also dismissed his fears for his safety and failed to provide for his basic needs, Young alleges.
His case comes one year after New York City was sued over the death of Layleen Polanco, the Afro-Latinx trans woman who died in solitary confinement in Rikers Island prison.
After asking him “basic traffic stop questions”, police asked Jamel Young if he had a gun on him. He did – and though it was registered, what Young didn’t know was that he needed a separate license to take it out of Georgia.
He also didn’t know whether the gun was in the car with him or if it was in the bags he’d dropped with his girlfriend at his friend’s house. He says he also didn’t know that you need a different license to carry a gun on your person and in your vehicle.
The police – who arrest hundreds of tourists every year for bringing firearms to New York, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the country – placed him under arrest.
“I didn’t know or think that I was doing anything wrong, I thought I was doing everything completely, 100 per cent right,” Young said.
As police pulled him from his car, he panicked and told them he’s trans – hoping they’d be respectful. But instead, several officers grabbed his chest and crotch like they were “trying to confirm” that he’s trans.
Young also alleges another officer sexually assaulted him while transporting him to the police station.
His lawsuit also alleges that police officers joked about him being trans and called him “he, she, her, him, miss and sir” at various points in the night.
Young was taken to prison, where his problems continued. He said he feared for his life, and that when he asked his legal-aid lawyer what to do, he was told to tell officers that he was female.
“I felt worthless,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I felt like all those triggers that trans people try so hard to manage throughout the transition, all of it just exploded.”
The NYPD said in a statement: “NYPD recognises and supports the rights and dignity of transgender and gender non-conforming persons. We endeavour to treat all individuals with the utmost respect.
“This lawsuit will be reviewed in the normal course when service is effected.”
Jamel Young said he’s suing because he wants to see changes that will ensure the safety of transgender people in custody.
“I’m not asking for anything special. I don’t think I need to get coffee three times a day. I literally just need my safety,” he said.
A transgender man is suing the University of Maryland Medical System in federal court, claiming his rights were violated when his gender-affirming surgery was canceled by one of the hospital system’s subsidiaries.
Jesse Hammons was scheduled to have a hysterectomy in January at the University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson. The procedure, routinely performed on cisgender women at the same hospital, was deemed medically necessary for Hammons, who had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. However, about a week before the scheduled surgery date, the center canceled the procedure because it “conflicted with the hospital’s Catholic religious beliefs,” according to the lawsuit.
Plaintiff Jesse Hammons.Jason Chesnut / ACLU
“Defendants canceled the surgery based on a discriminatory and unconstitutional application of Catholic religious doctrine,” the suit states. “When they canceled Mr. Hammons’ medically necessary surgery, Defendants thus treated Mr. Hammons — as a man who is transgender — differently from nontransgender patients who require medically necessary hysterectomies for other medical conditions.”
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, claims that by canceling the surgery, the hospital violated the Constitution’s First and 14th Amendments and the Affordable Care Act’s ban on sex discrimination in health care.
‘Private’ or ‘taxpayer-owned’?
St. Joseph Medical Center, a historically Roman Catholic institution just north of Baltimore, was founded over 100 years ago and was fully acquired in 2012 by the University of Maryland Medical System. UMMS, which maintains that it is a private, nonprofit organization, received over $40 million in “state appropriations” in 2018, according to its most recent annual report, and Maryland’s governor appoints members of the UMMS board.
When UMMS acquired St. Joseph Medical Center, the hospital system vowed to retain the hospital’s “Catholic identity,” which today means it still follows the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, or ERDs, faith-based health guidelines that ban procedures like abortion, euthanasia and gender-confirmation procedures.
Michael Schwartzberg, director of communications for the University of Maryland Medical System, told NBC News in an email that he would not comment on the specifics of pending litigation, but he disputed the claims of the ACLU, which is representing Hammons, that UMMS is “taxpayer-owned.”
“UMMS is a privately-held corporation (since 1984), and SJMC is a privately-held, not-for-profit hospital, and SJMC is mandated to abide by the ERDs,” Schwartzberg said, noting that all Catholic hospitals in the U.S. are bound by the ERDs.
“All physicians and advanced practitioners seeking privileges at UM SJMC agree to abide by the ERDs prior to the granting of privileges,” Schwartzberg said.
Joshua Block, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project and the lead attorney in Hammons’ case, disputed Schwartzberg’s characterization of UMMS as private, claiming that the medical system is de facto controlled by the state of Maryland. Citing its receipt of taxpayer funds and its largely governor-controlled board, Block argued that the UMMS is bound by the Constitution’s church-state separation.
Hammons’ complaint cites a 1995 Supreme Court ruling that found that Amtrak, being a government-created private corporation, had a responsibility to uphold the First Amendment.
In that ruling, Lebron v. National R.R. Passenger Corp., Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that when the federal government creates a corporation “and retains for itself permanent authority to appoint a majority of the directors of that corporation, the corporation is part of the government for purposes of the First Amendment.”
Block said that Hammons’ lawsuit “raises all the same fact patterns about sex discrimination against transgender patients in the context of transition-related surgery at hospitals, but it also has this added feature where it’s not just a private religious hospital but part of the University of Maryland hospital system.”
“So not only does it violate statutes against discrimination, but the Constitution — both the Equal Protection Clause and the Establishment Clause,” he said.
Block said the ACLU had the case ready soon after Hammons’ surgery was canceled in January but paused because of coronavirus court delays. He said June’s landmark Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia — which found that federal job discrimination protections extend to LGBTQ people — has only made the filing stronger.
“The landscape after Bostock certainly strengthens our claim under the ACA,” Block said, referring to a ban on health care sex discrimination contained within the Affordable Care Act.
The Trump effect
Even after the Bostock decision, the Trump administration is continuing its effort to reverse Obama-era transgender protections in health care.
Chase Strangio, ACLU’s deputy director for transgender justice, said the legal interpretation advanced through years of Trump administration policies — that sex discrimination bans in various laws do not prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity — won’t go away on its own.
“There’s nothing self-executing about the decision,” Strangio said of the landmark Bostock ruling. “Implementation of civil rights laws is a multi-year project always, because we have strong resistance to them.”
He said he expects that courts will be called upon to enforce the precedent-setting finding central to the Bostock decision: “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.“
A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general sued the Trump Administration on Monday, seeking to block next month’s implementation of a rule overturning Obama-era protections for transgender people against sex discrimination in health care.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, leading the group of 23 states, said the change affecting the Affordable Care Act’s anti-discrimination section would give health care providers and insurance companies carte blanche to refuse treatment based on factors such as gender identity.
James also raised concerns that women could be denied access to abortion under the revision, which takes effect Aug. 18, and that non-English speakers will be deprived of information through a change to requirements that insurers print materials in a variety of languages.
“This is just the latest attempt by President Trump and his administration to unlawfully chip away at health care for Americans after failing to repeal the ACA time after time,” James told reporters in a conference call announcing the lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court against the Department of Health and Human Services, secretary Alex Azar and civil rights chief Roger Severino, seeks an injunction to stop the rule from taking effect. The attorneys general argue it violates the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
A message seeking comment was left with a spokesperson for the department.
The Trump Administration pushed ahead with the rule change even after a Supreme Court ruling last month barring workplace sex discrimination against LGBT people, moving to show Trump’s religious and socially conservative supporters that he remains committed to their causes ahead of the November election.
Under the change, Health and Human Services said it will enforce sex discrimination protections “according to the plain meaning of the word ‘sex’ as male or female and as determined by biology.” That rewrites an Obama-era regulation that sought a broader understanding shaped by a person’s internal sense of being male, female, neither or a combination.
The lawsuit brought by the attorneys general is part of an expected flurry of lawsuits challenging the lawsuit, including one filed last month by the LGBT civil rights organization Lambda Legal. Such groups say explicit protections are needed for people seeking sex-reassignment treatment, and even for transgender people who need care for common illnesses such as diabetes or heart problems.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, both frequent Trump foes, assisted James in crafting the lawsuit. Becerra said implementing the rule while coronavirus continues to rage across the country is especially cruel.
“This is a mean and unconstitutional rule in any context,” Becerra said. “But authorizing discrimination in our health care system at this time, when our nation is suffering through a pandemic, is unbelievably immoral.”
Anti-transgender Facebook content shared by right-wing news sources generated more engagement than content from pro-transgender or neutral sources combined, according to a Media Matters for America study of 225 viral social media posts.
That means the majority of Facebook interactions with those viral posts — over 43 million of 66 million shares, comments and reactions over the span of a year — were on items posted by anti-trans websites like LifeSiteNews, Daily Wire and Daily Caller, according to the report.
The majority of Facebook interactions with content about transgender topics were on items posted by virulently anti-trans websites.Media Matters for America
“Facebook users are getting a totally biased and factually inaccurate understanding of the multitude of issues that impact trans people,” said Brennan Suen, Media Matters’ LGBTQ program director and one of the study’s authors. Suen pointed to an October Pew poll showing that a majority of Americans get news from Facebook.
In total, seven of the top 10 sources for interactions on popular transgender Facebook content were anti-trans sites. Just three LGBTQ-oriented sources appeared in the top 10: PinkNews, Gay Star News and NBC Out.
LifeSiteNews, Daily Wire and Daily Caller dominated these interactions.Media Matters for America
Trans activist and writer Raquel Willis said she was unsurprised by the finding that Facebook interactions about transgender issues are dominated by sources that oppose transgender rights and degrade transgender individuals.
“Narratives that further our demonization, that further confusion, are still the ones that often carry the most weight in our society,” Willis said. “Blood is on the hands of the Mark Zuckerbergs and the people who don’t want to hold these platforms to a humane standard.”
“Actual lives of marginalized people are at stake,” she added.
Suen said anti-transgender content that “lies about best practice medical care for trans youth” could “enable adults to do harm to their own children and deprive trans youth of affirmation and care that can be life saving.”
“Transphobic discourse online contributes to this dangerous rejection of trans children, real world harassment of trans peopleand harmful policies — and it contributes to a social and political culture that continues to demonize and fail the trans community,” Suen added.
Facebook did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment on Media Matters’ findings.
The Media Matters for America study examined 225 articles, blog posts and videos about transgender topics that had 100,000 or more Facebook interactions and were posted from February 2019 to this February. The liberal nonprofit used the social media analytics website BuzzSumo to identify the viral transgender-related content.
Fifty-six percent of these 225 primarily English-language articles, posts and videos were published by right-leaning sources, the report found. Conservative posts comprised the top five most-interacted-with pieces of trans content and 14 of the top 20.
LifeSiteNews, Daily Wire and Daily Caller dominated these interactions. Stories about transgender participation in sports and medical care were particularly high ranking, generating about 37 percent of all interactions, the report found.
Suen said right-wing and anti-trans content flourishes on Facebook, in part, because the network has failed to fully crack down on “coordinated, inauthentic behavior,” which Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, defined as “when groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they are doing.”
Last October, Judd Legum, founder of the liberal news site ThinkProgress, reported in Popular Information that 14 large Facebook pages, like Conservative News (which has nearly 500,000 followers), all of which had no apparent link to the Daily Wire, would “exclusively promote content from the Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion.”
Following Legum’s investigation, Facebook pages like Conservative News, which had allegedly promoted Daily Wire’s content in a coordinated fashion, now contain a disclaimer: “Confirmed Page Owner: DAILY WIRE.”
In an op-ed published this month titled “Facebook Does Not Benefit From Hate,” the company’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, wrote, “When content falls short of being classified as hate speech — or of our other policies aimed at preventing harm or voter suppression — we err on the side of free expression because, ultimately, the best way to counter hurtful, divisive, offensive speech, is more speech.”
“Exposing it to sunlight is better than hiding it in the shadows,” added Clegg, a former deputy prime minister in the U.K.
Ever since Perriviia “Black Butterfly” Brown moved into her Memphis, Tennessee, apartment in 2015, she has been afraid to sit on her front porch. A Black transgender woman who is partially blind, Brown said she doesn’t feel safe in her neighborhood. She said she often deals with transphobic abuse when she ventures to the nearby grocery store.
“I just stay in the house and mind my business,” Brown, 46, told NBC News. “If I have someone come over, they just have to come over on the inside. I would love to entertain on the outside, but it’s … so violent out here, and you don’t know who likes you and who don’t like you, and you don’t know if they got a hatred against trans women.”
Despite her fear, Brown considers herself lucky to have a home. A 2018 Human Rights Campaign report noted that 41 percent of Black transgender respondents reported experiencing homelessness at some point in their lives, a rate five time higher than the general U.S. population.
“If you are experiencing the intersection of racism and transphobia that leads to social and economic marginalization without access to some kind of permanent housing support, it’s going to be very difficult to fight to try and access that stability that a lot of people in our country take for granted.”
DYLAN WAGUESPACK
But thanks to a recent campaign that has raised over $250,000 to build a small neighborhood of 20 “tiny homes” for Black trans women and nonbinary people in the Memphis area, Brown may soon own her own home — one with a porch where she can sit outside unafraid.
“Tiny homes” are a rising trend made popular with reality TV shows like HGTV’s “Tiny House Hunters.” Seen by some as a path to affordable, minimalist living, tiny homes are pre-made studio structures, sometimes converted from sheds, that cost a fraction of the price of a traditional home.
The project is the brainchild of Memphis-based My Sistah’s House, which helps Black transgender women and nonbinary people access safe housing. The small nonprofit also helps individuals with bail assistance and the legal processes around transitioning.
In June, the group launched a GoFundMe page and quickly exceeded its $200,000 goal in a matter of weeks, according to My Sistah’s House cofounder Kayla Gore.
Since its founding in 2017, My Sistah’s House has provided temporary shelter to those in the Memphis area but has struggled to help them access permanent housing, Gore said. Many of the organization’s clients have been turned away from homeless shelters due to their transgender identity, she said, adding that long-term housing projects are necessary to lift the Black trans community out of an endless cycle of homelessness and poverty.
“It’s been super overwhelming to see the support that’s coming in so fast and so rapidly,” Gore said. She hopes the project will serve as a model for other advocacy organizations that want to help trans people own their own homes.
Transgender homeownership
Homeownership is low among transgender people: The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, which included interviews with nearly 28,000 trans individuals across the U.S., found 16 percent of transgender respondents reported owning their homes, compared to 63 percent of the general public at the time.
My Sistah’s House is among a handful of trans-led, grassroots groups that are working to create long-term housing solutions for Black trans women and nonbinary people in the South.
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
In Atlanta, a campaign called the Homeless Black Trans Women Fund, organized by trans activist Jesse Pratt López, has so far raised over $2.7 million of its $3 million goal to create secure, long-term housing for Black transgender women. In Louisiana, Trans United Leading Intersectional Progress, or TULIP, is more than halfway to its goal of raising $400,000 to purchase and restore a six-bedroom house (to be named “House of Tulip”) that will provide a pathway to home ownership for trans and gender-nonconforming people in New Orleans.
“Housing really is this first thing that is such a necessity for people to be able to access all of these other things,” according to Dylan Waguespack, co-founder of TULIP and public policy director for True Colors United. “If you are experiencing the intersection of racism and transphobia that leads to social and economic marginalization without access to some kind of permanent housing support, it’s going to be very difficult to fight to try and access that stability that a lot of people in our country take for granted.”
‘There’s so many roadblocks’
The low rate of homeownership and high rate of homelessness for transgender Americans are connected to the disproportionate discrimination, unemployment and incarceration they face, which can all cascade into a cycle of poverty, according to advocates.
Rebeckah Hill, a Memphis-based rapper, is familiar with this cycle of poverty. A Black trans woman who has experienced homelessness on and off since her early 20s, she has been unable to get her name and gender updated on her government ID, find a stable job and secure housing, or even build the credit necessary to qualify for her own home.
“I can’t get into an apartment now,” she said. “I’m 31 years old. I’ve never had my own place to stay.”
Black trans people have an unemployment rate more than three times that of the general population, and half of these individuals reported “feeling forced to participate in underground economy for survival,” according to a 2018 American Psychological Association report. When people turn to the “underground economy,” which includes sex work and drug sales, they then risk going to jail or prison, and a criminal record is often another barrier to obtaining long-term housing. According to the U.S. Transgender Survey, the rate of Black trans women who were incarcerated in the course of a year was 10 times the rate of the general public.
In May, Hill was incarcerated on a pending drug case. After a week in jail, she was bailed out by the Official Black Lives Matter Memphis Chapter and My Sistah’s House, which also helped her find a room in a temporary rental. Having a felony on her record, she said, has made it difficult for her to qualify for public housing and climb out of the cycle of poverty.
“There’s so many roadblocks,” Hill said. “It makes my head hurt.”
A landmark Supreme Court ruling issued last month found that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits workplace discriminationbased on sexual orientation and transgender identity. While the decision was welcome news to LGBTQ advocates, Gore noted that many Black trans women still lack access to quality education and job training that will help them begin a decent-paying career that would in turn allow them to qualify for an apartment or mortgage.
“A big portion of the folks that we serve participate in survival sex or sex work, therefore, they don’t have verifiable income,” Gore said. “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.”
Currently, federal law does not explicitly prohibit discrimination based on gender identity in private housing, and at least 25 states do not have state-level protections against such discrimination, according to Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank. While an Obama-era rule protects transgender people from discrimination in federally funded housing, the Trump administration announced it intends to reverse this measure, which could result in trans women being assigned to men’s homeless shelters.
Trans women who cannot access stable housing often seek shelter in hotel rooms, according to Hill, who said hotel managers often turn them away “because we’re automatically assumed to be sex workers.”
Even when trans people meet the requirements to qualify for an apartment, they frequently report dealing with discrimination from housing providers, advocates say. According to the 2015 National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 19 percent of respondents reported being refused a home or apartment, and 11 percent reported being evicted due to their gender identity or gender expression. A 2017 Urban Institute study that relied on paired testing found that housing providers were less likely to tell transgender people about rentals. The study found that rental seekers in the Washington, D.C., metro area who told housing providers they were trans were less likely, on average, to be informed about available rentals than those who didn’t.
When Brown applied for her Memphis apartment five years ago, she said she presented as a man to avoid any potential discrimination.
“It made me feel nervous, it made me feel like I’m doing something wrong, and it made me feel like I was an outcast,” she said. “I had to play the role that they wanted me to play, the role to just give me a place to stay.”
Recent studies indicate that the lack of access to secure housing and employment often puts Black trans people at a dangerous crossroads where they are vulnerable to violence. Between January 2013 and July 2020, Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, has tracked at least 180 cases of trans and gender-nonconforming people being violently killed in the U.S., with trans Black women accounting for approximately 70 percent of the deaths.
The violence Black trans women endure is directly related to housing insecurity, Gore said, adding that the COVID-19 pandemicwill likely exacerbate the situation.
“That’s because we’re trying to maintain our housing, so we’re doing things that may be a little risky in order to survive and make sure that we do have housing,” she said.
Hill knows this violence firsthand. “I’ve been stabbed in my chest. … I have been shot. I have been through a lot,” she said.
At the end of June, Hill became homeless again after her landlord raised her rent. But through My Sistah’s House’s tiny-homes campaign, Hill hopes to soon have a house to call her own.
“I still have an opportunity to do what it is that I want to do,” said Hill, who hopes to build a career as a musician. “Stability right now would be overwhelming for me. I’m crying now, because it feels so good and sounds so good.”
Last year, the House of Representatives passed the Equality Act, a federal bill that would broadly modify existing civil rights legislation to ban discrimination against LGBTQ people in employment, housing, public accommodations, jury service, education, federal programs and credit, but the law has been held up in the Republican-controlled Senate.
In the absence of federal protections that would make it illegal for both private and federally funded housing providers to discriminate on the basis of gender identity, including homeless shelters, there is no universal safety net that protects Black trans people from the cycle of poverty, advocates say.
“We’ll never be able to eliminate discrimination; it will happen,” Waguespack said. “What we do need is recourse for people who experience it; we need access to justice for those folks, and we need federal, state and local dollars to be moving to folks who are actively working to make housing solutions available to communities that experience this kind of discrimination.”
‘We might have our own town’
My Sistah’s House is currently in negotiations to purchase a plot of land in the Memphis area, where the 20 tiny homes will be installed, according to Gore. The next step, she said, is to purchase the homes (at about $10,000 each) and work with a contractor to ensure they meet building codes. The group also plans to raise additional funds to complete the homes’ interiors and furnish them.
“If it’s successful, we might have our own town in a minute,” said Gore, who hopes to have the project complete by the end of 2020.
In the meantime, Brown imagines how her future tiny house will be adorned: pink and white siding with a black butterfly painted on the side, a rose bush and a swing where she can sit on her front porch with friends.
“Having my own key, just turning my own door into my own home,” Brown said of what she looks forward to the most, “and sitting outside on the porch enjoying the fresh air and the butterflies and just smelling fresh air and freshness and freedom that I can own my own home.”
At least four transgender people lost their lives in the space of a week, as trans homicides in the US reach the highest pace ever.
According to The Human Rights Campaign, at least 21 transgender or gender non-conforming people have been killed by violent means so far this year, nearly matching 2019’s total of 27.
The organisation says it has “never seen such a high number at this point in the year” since they began tracking this data in 2013, and other advocates across the US are horrified by the pace of “rampant and repeated” murders.
“It is ridiculous that we have to continue to hashtag our friends’ names and add them to a list of names to be memorialised every year, and that we expect it,” Carter Brown, executive director of National Black Trans Advocacy Coalition, told USA Today.
“We expect it because too many trans women of colour are continuously being murdered and beaten with minimum or no consequence being brought to the assailants.”
The deadly week began with the loss of Merci Mack, a 22-year-old Black transgender woman shot in the head in Dallas, Texas on June 30. She was initially misgendered and deadnamed by police and local media.
Mack’s death was followed by that of Shaki Peters, a 32-year-old Black transgender woman found dead in Amite City, Louisiana on July 1. Then came the murder of Bree Black, a 27-year-old Black transgender woman who was shot dead in her home in Pompano Beach, Florida, on July 3.
The fourth killing was that of Summer Taylor, a 24-year-old white non-binary person who was hit and killed by a car while participating in Seattle’s Black Femme March on July 4.
Transgender women of colour are known to suffer the highest levels of violence as they fall at the unfortunate intersection of transphobia and racism.
Systemic problems like homelessness, unemployment and lack of access to healthcare make trans people more susceptible to violence, but the actor and trans activist Laverne Cox believes the stigma around cis men’s sexual attraction to trans women is also a part of the problem.
In an interview with Buzzfeed last year, the Orange is the New Black star said: “I think the people who are attacking trans women, what I say to men, is that your attraction to me is not a reason to kill me.
“There’s this whole myth that trans women are out there tricking people and deserve to be murdered, and that’s not the case.
“There’s been a market for trans women in the realms of dating and sex work for a very long time, we don’t have to trick anyone.”
She encouraged cis women to have conversations with the men in their lives about trans people: “We have to lift the stigma around attraction to trans people, and we have to lift the stigma around trans people existing,” she said.
Non-binary people in Oregon will now be able to change the gender marker on their birth certificates to reflect their identity, an appeals court has ruled.
The verdict came when Oregon’s Court of Appeals overturned a 2019 decision that barred people from changing their legal gender to non-binary.
The appeals court sided with Eugene resident Jones Hollister, 53, who has been petitioning to have their gender legally recognised since 2017.
“I am thrilled,” Hollister said. “To have a ruling and to have a really affirming statement by the court, I’m speechless. I can barely talk because I keep crying every time I think about it. I’m just so excited.”
The appeals court said that a judge has the “authority to grant the requested change of legal sex”, without the need for a doctors note, and not restricted to just male or female.
“Rather, the new sex designation must affirm the petitioner’s gender identity whether that is male, female, or non-binary,” the appeals court ruled.
Hollister said of their need for legal gender recognition: “I’ll have a legal piece of paper that says that the gender that I know I am and have always known that I am is legally recognised.
“Every time I’m given a piece of paper that makes me choose male or female, neither of them is accurate.”
“We submitted the appeal in the fall and… I don’t even know what to say. I’m still giddy,” Hollister added.
Hollister’s lawyer, Lorena Reynolds, worked with Basic Rights Oregon and the ACLU on the case.
Kieran Chase from Basic Rights Oregon said the ruling is critical.
“We’ve existed since humanity has existed. We know what is true about ourselves and having the court see and affirm that is really, really important,” Chase said.
Oregon already allowed X gender markers on ID documents.
It was already possible to use the X gender marker on driving licenses and passports in Oregon, but those changes are administrative, and not reflective of a person’s legal gender.
California prison officials are staring down yet another lawsuit from a transgender woman who says she was abused in custody.
C. Jay Smith, 59, filed a federal lawsuit last Monday alleging that staff members at San Quentin State Prison, just north of San Francisco, refused to investigate reports she had filed after having been sexually abused and that they retaliated against her. Smith alleges that the campaign went so far that guards falsely accused her of serious violations, potentially adding 10 years to her sentence.
C. Jay Smith.Medina Orthwein LLP
A 36-page complaint filed in U.S. District Court for Northern California claims that staff members at the prison “used threatening and coercive tactics to try to get her to withdraw her allegations.”
“Ms. Smith’s case demonstrates that the ‘Me Too’ movement and the protections it has provided to women needs to also find its way to the violence and state-initiated torment transgender people face behind CDCR’s prison walls,” the suit says, referring to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Smith has lived almost her entire life as a woman, according to the complaint. She knew she was transgender at 10 years old and started to transition as a teenager, the suit states. But after she was sentenced to 25 years to life with the possibility of parole, she has spent the entire term — now more than two decades — housed in men’s prisons.
Her complaint alleges that from the time she arrived at a CDCR Reception Center in 1998, officers “allowed multiple men in custody to rape Ms. Smith repeatedly over four consecutive days.” Research has found that sexual abuse of transgender women in prison, especially those housed in men’s facilities, is not uncommon: A 2010 study published in Justice Quarterly, which was cited in Smith’s complaint, found that 59 percent of trans women in men’s lockup facilities had experienced at least one instance of sexual assault.
The 1998 assaults weren’t the only time Smith says she was a victim of sexual violence. Smith said she was again violently raped in 2013, shortly after she arrived at San Quentin, by an unknown assailant who “attacked from behind,” according to the lawsuit.
Not knowing the identity of her attacker “caused her to subsequently experience even more severe symptoms of PTSD,” the complaint alleges, referring to post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Ms. Smith has been the target of indecent exposure and lewd sexual acts by many men in custody,” her complaint states. “She has also been verbally harassed and called homophobic and transphobic slurs by staff — including medical and custody staff — on numerous occasions. The repeated sexual assaults and harassment aggravated Ms. Smith’s PTSD, resulting in her placement in outpatient or inpatient mental health treatment for the majority of her incarceration.”
Smith said she became the target of a campaign of harassment by officers at San Quentin when she tried to speak up about the violence. Her cell was “ransacked” and guards left the doors open to allow “other people in custody to steal her property,” the lawsuit says.
“Defendants then caged Ms. Smith like an animal, verbally berated her, threatened her with physical assault, sexually harassed and assaulted her,” the complaint alleges, adding that she was targeted with false reports of rules violations.
Among them was a charge of possession of a deadly weapon after officers reported her for having a graduation statue in her cell, her complaint says. The statue, she claims, had been a gift from a friend years earlier as motivation to complete her GED program. If she is found guilty, Smith could face 10 more years behind bars.
According to the suit, the “campaign of torture and retaliation” alleged against Smith “sent a message” to transgender women who are sexual assaulted in prison: “Do not report sexual violence or safety concerns or you, too, will be targeted.”
Smith’s lawsuit partly hinges on the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA, a 2003 law to stop sexual assault behind bars. It requires state prisons to house transgender prisoners case by case with either men or women after asking them where they would feel the safest. It also mandates that prison staff members immediately report and document knowledge or suspicion of sexual harassment or assault.
Smith’s attorneys, Jen Orthwein and Felicia Medina, argue that cases like Smith’s illustrate why many transgender survivors do not report sexual assault behind bars.
The CDCR “knows that there’s widespread PREA violations, and what it does is it uses [disciplinary] process[es] against folks who are the most impacted, such as C. Jay, who is a transgender woman of color, because she reported sexual assault,” Medina said in an interview. “She was set up.”
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Smith is at least the sixth transgender or gender-nonconforming prisoner to have sued the state or its officials in recent years. Candice Crowder, a trans woman, sued in 2017, alleging that guards isolated her in solitary confinement after she reported having been raped at Corcoran State Prison. Crowder’s case was settled for an undisclosed sum. Isaac Medina, a trans prisoner at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, sued the state last year claiming that corrections officers regularly sexually harassed and threatened him. The case is ongoing.
Three gender-nonconforming people sued the state in November 2017, alleging that the CDCR refused them medical treatment and denied them the opportunity to file grievances after they were sexually assaulted. An amended complaint was filed in 2019, and the case is still being adjudicated.
In a statement to NBC News, a spokesperson said the department “cannot comment on pending litigation.”
“CDCR is committed to providing a safe, humane, rehabilitative and secure environment for all people housed in the state’s correctional facilities and has policies, practices and procedures in place regarding the screening, housing and treatment of incarcerated transgender people,” Deputy Press Secretary Terry Thornton said in an email. “CDCR maintains a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment, sexual violence, and staff sexual misconduct. This policy applies to all offenders, all CDCR employees, all volunteers and all contractors.”
Thornton said the department “has not been served with this lawsuit.”
Data show that transgender people face extraordinary rates of violence in prisons and jails. A 2015 report by the Justice Department found that 35 percent of transgender prisoners said they had been sexually assaulted by staff members or other prisoners in the past year. And an NBC News investigation this year found that of 10 trans women interviewed at the California Institution for Men in Chino, nine reported having been sexually assaulted while incarcerated.
– “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling is back in the spotlight after stating on Twitter that young people are being “shunted towards” hormones and surgery that may not be in their best interests, and comparing the measures to “conversion therapy.”
“Many, myself included, believe we are watching a new kind of conversion therapy for young gay people, who are being set on a lifelong path of medicalization that may result in the loss of their fertility and/or full sexual function,” Rowling tweeted.
Rowling was responding to a July 4 post by Twitter user @TrinerScot, who called out the author for ‘liking’ a post by Twitter user @Manaxium that claimed hormone prescriptions were “the new antidepressants.”
“Yes they are sometimes necessary and lifesaving, but they should be a last resort – not the first option. Pure laziness for those who would rather medicate than put in the time and effort to heal people’s minds,” read the post.elated
The post by @TrinerScot read: “Who had money on JK Rowling pivoting to supporting those who call people who take mental health medication ‘lazy’? I take daily medication to function, this sentiment is beyond offensive, it is actively harmful to millions.”
In the first of 11 tweets, Rowling began her response to @TrinerScot with: “I’ve ignored fake tweets attributed to me and RTed widely. I’ve ignored porn tweeted at children on a thread about their art. I’ve ignored death and rape threats. I’m not going to ignore this.”
“When you lie about what I believe about mental health medication and when you misrepresent the views of a trans woman for whom I feel nothing but admiration and solidarity, you cross a line,” Rowling continued.
Rowling goes on to write about her “own mental health challenges,” and expressed concern over young people with mental health issues “being shunted towards hormones and surgery when this may not be in their best interests,” before tweeting about conversion therapy. Rowling quotes a BBC documentary and a number of studies on the subject.
“None of that may trouble you or disturb your belief in your own righteousness. But if so, I can’t pretend I care much about your bad opinion of me,” Rowling concludes.
Responding to Rowling’s tweet, transgender model and activist Munroe Bergdorf tweeted, “J.K. Rowling is not a scientist. She is not a doctor. She is not an expert on gender. She is not a supporter of our community.
“She is a billionaire, cisgender, heterosexual, white woman who has decided that she knows what is best for us and our bodies. This is not her fight.”
Rowling has been in the news in recent weeks for her views on the trans community, and has faced considerable backlash.
Almost eight in 10 Gen Z transgender people have only come out online and are still closeted in real life, according to a report by Tinder.
One year on from the introduction of its orientation feature, which allowed daters to pick up to three sexual orientations to find better matches, Tinderhas conducted research into Gen Z attitudes towards LGBT+ issues.
Gen Z, described in the Tinder research as 18 to 25-year-olds, were more likely than other age groups to use the orientation feature, were most likely to include more than one sexual orientation, and were more likely to choose more than one gender descriptor.
Of the 3,453 Gen Z Tinder users surveyed, one third said they had become more open to dating different genders within the last three years, and one fifth said they would explore polyamory.
But despite this openness towards gender identity and sexual orientation, the generation still faces difficulties with living authentically in real life, with just 13 per cent of LGBT+ Gen Z users saying they had come out to family and friends.
A huge 78 per cent of Gen Z transgender people surveyed said that they have been open about their identity online, but not with people in their real lives. Forty-one per cent of those who identified as gender fluid said the same.
The internet has become a safe haven for Gen Z, and 71 per cent said online platforms had allowed them to connect with others, and three quarters said dating apps help them to get to know themselves better.
While 86 per cent believe their generation is more tolerant that their parents’ generation, they are clear that there is more work to be done.
Forty-three per cent said they needed better education and guidance on LGBT+ issues, with more than a quarter using TV and movies to educate themselves, and almost a third learning from social media and influencers.
Tinder’s orientation feature is available in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, India, Australia and New Zealand, but the dating app has said it will now be rolling out the function globally.
Elie Seidman, CEO of Tinder, said: “Our younger members, Gen Z, are leading the way to a more inclusive world and we know that with our scale, we can help make a difference with our product.”
