A transgender man was attacked by two assailants Sunday night inside a Philadelphia 7-Eleven, according to his family.
The man stopped in the store around 9 p.m. after OutFest, an annual block party celebrating the city’s LGBTQ community.
Video surveillance footage from inside the gas station shows the 30-year-old being repeatedly punched and thrown onto the ground. Two of the victim’s sisters, who did not want to be identified, told WCAU, NBC’s local Philadelphia affiliate, that their brother was kicked in the head multiple times.
The victim was wearing a “Trans Lives Matter” sweatshirt, which his family believes may have caused the ambush.
“I’m very hurt that my brother is sitting very hurt with a broken jaw, eyes messed up and nobody helped him,” one sister said. “I just want the people to get caught.”
One worker who claimed he was at the store at the time of the incident told WCAU that he wasn’t sure how the altercation began.
The family said they reported the incident to the police, however the Philadelphia Police Department denied NBC News’ request for information regarding whether it planned to open an investigation into the incident.
Since 2014, the total number of hate crimes motivated by anti-LGBTQ bias has increased every year, rising 3 percent in 2017, according to the FBI. A separate survey from Gallup found that almost 17 percent of all reported hate crime victims are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
Trans people of color remain an especially vulnerable population. Since the beginning of 2019, at least 19 trans people have been killed, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
“What hope do we have to be ourselves if we can’t be out here and be ourselves?” the victim’s other sister told WCAU.
The U.S. isn’t the only country plagued by anti-trans attacks. According to a Home Office report released Tuesday, over the past year hate crimes against transgender people in England and Wales have risen by 37 percent. From April 2018 to March 2019, there were 2,333 reported hate crimes against transgender people, up from 1,703 the previous year.
For the first time, hundreds of sex workers marched through the streets of Stockholm calling for sex workers’ rights and the decriminalisation of the sex industry.
The sex workers’ rights protestors demanded that the government end the “harmful”, “unjust” and “stigmatising” criminalisation of sex work.
At the September 29 protest, activists urged the government to listen to their condemnation of the Swedish model – the sex-work law that criminalises sex workers’ clients and is broadly opposed by sex-worker organisations globally.
rans sex workers told PinkNews how the lethal combination of transphobic discrimination and the criminalisation of sex work puts their safety and survival on the line.
“Transgender people and queer people in general in Norway are still stigmatised and discriminated against to begin with,” says Lilith, from Norwegian sex workers organisation PION. “So we are as a community are often overrepresented in the sex industry.”
We are seen as the parasites, the monsters that the world needs to abolish.
“When the Swedish law criminalises our clients, it also creates this notion that we are a criminal enterprise. Yes, it only criminalises clients, but it creates this illusion that the whole sex industry is criminal. As such, we are seen as the parasites, the monsters that the world needs to abolish,” she says.
Placard at the march in Stockholm. (Twitter/SWARM)
Sex worker rights are human rights.
The Swedish – also called Nordic – model, which makes it illegal to buy sex, was hailed as progressive by feminist organisations when it was introduced in 1999. Versions of the law have since been introduced in other countries including Norway, Iceland, Ireland and Canada.
In 2016, Amnesty International said sex work has to be decriminalised worldwide, because the current models of partial criminalisation prevent the “realisation of the human rights of sex workers“.
Criminalisation impacts trans sex workers twofold, Dinah, from Trans United Netherlands, told PinkNews.
“Decriminalisation for trans sex workers is very important because we are already discriminated [against] and actually criminalised as trans people, we are very much on the forefront of being visible in society and then the only way that we can do work, many times, is sex work,” she says.
There is a double criminalisation – one on being LGBTIQ and one on being a sex worker.
“Criminalisation of sex work means that there is a double criminalisation, in fact. One on being LGBTIQ and one on being a sex worker.”
The protest in Stockholm was organised by sex-worker organisation Fuckförbundet. (Twitter/SWARM)
Trans sex workers vital to gay rights movement.
Red Canary Song is a New York-based, migrant sex-worker grassroots organisation that fights for justice and police accountability, after the death of Chinese massage worker, Yang Song, during a police raid in Flushing in November 2017.
The organisation’s director, Kate Zen, says that US anti-trafficking laws similar to the Swedish model increase policing of sex workers and “primarily harm migrants, trans, and street-based sex workers, while doing little to actually reduce the factors driving trafficking: poverty, migration laws, lack of adequate and accessible housing and healthcare”.
“Migrant, black, brown, and trans sex workers are overrepresented in police arrests, and report rampant police violence, including sexual violence,” she says. “Ironically, these are also the groups of people that pro-police/anti-prostitution organisations say they want to help. Their help is clearly misdirected, and actually harming the very people who are most vulnerable in society.”
The leaders of LGBTQ movements in NYC during the Stonewall Rebellion were trans sex workers of colour.
“More than 50% of sex workers in the US say that they have turned to sex work in order to survive, pay for medical procedures, due to employment discrimination in other jobs. LGBTQ people are overrepresented in the sex industry, and the leaders of LGBTQ movements in NYC during the Stonewall Rebellion were trans sex workers of colour – Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson,” Kate says.
Dozens of sex worker organisations went to the protest in Stockholm on Sunday.
Henna, from sex-worker led activist organisation FTS Finland, says that Finnish sex workers went to the protest in solidarity with their Swedish colleagues “as well as any other colleague who is affected by the Swedish model”.
Listen to us, please!
“Be that trans sex workers or cis, both are affected by this model which doesn’t hear what the sex workers are saying. Listen to us, please!” she says.
Only one country in the world has listened to sex workers and decriminalised sex work – New Zealand.
The New Zealand model aims to uphold the human rights of sex workers and to decriminalise sex work. It was introduced in 2003.
While New Zealand’s approach appears to be moving towards ensuring safety for sex workers, other countries appear to be moving backwards.
Mimi, a trans migrant sex worker from French sex-work union STRASS, told PinkNews that laws criminalising clients – introduced in France in 2016 – are negatively affecting many trans sex workers.
“Especially those who are trans migrant sex workers, who face a lot of discrimination, especially when they are undocumented and working on the streets. Many of them face more insecurity, especially more aggression and more violence.
“More physical violence and any kind of attack, because right now, trans migrant sex workers need to isolate themselves in order to hide their clients from the police, and this is the reason, this is why they are more exposed to violence than before, because they are afraid that their clients will be arrested.
“This, and the fact that there are fewer clients, is a direct result of the criminalisation of the clients.”
Red umbrellas – the worldwide symbol of the sex workers’ rights movement – at the Stockholm march. (Twitter/SWARM)
Criminalisation increases police violence against sex workers.
Police violence as a result of the criminalisation of clients is also being experienced by sex workers in Ireland, according to Adi, from the Sex Workers Alliance Ireland.
Ireland brought in laws making it illegal to buy sex in 2017, but has only seen two clients prosecuted since then – while in that time “we’ve seen a 92 percent increase in violent crime against sex workers”, she says.
“In Ireland, and elsewhere, it’s impossible to find employment in any other field other than sex work – I’ve tried, over and over again, to find other types of work, but nobody’s willing to hire you,” Adi says. “And then in sex work, you’re constantly facing Gardaí harassment, which in my case resulted in my eviction from the premises in which I was working.”
LGBT+ people are overrepresented in the sex-work industry.
The widespread impacts of the criminalisation of sex work have catalysed the sex workers’ rights movement around the world. Luca Stevenson, coordinator at the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE), says ICSRE also joined the Stockholm protest “in support of decriminalisation of sex work”.
Many LGBTI people sell sexual services to survive.
“Most LGBTI organisations around the world – Transgender Europe, ILGA Europe, ILGA World – are supporting the decriminalisation of sex work. We know that many LGBTI people sell sexual services to live, to survive,” he says.
A faith-based Anchorage women’s shelter claimed victory Monday in a lawsuit against the city over a requirement that it accept transgender women.
The city has agreed to make permanent a judge’s recent order affecting the downtown Hope Center shelter, conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom and city attorneys said in documents filed Monday in federal court. In August, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason issued an injunction preventing the city from applying its gender identity law to the shelter.
The injunction showed the city it was unlikely to succeed in further litigation, Anchorage Municipal Attorney Becky Windt Pearson said. The consent decree filed Monday treats the shelter as a private accommodation, which means the public protection law does not apply to it, she said.
“We had a fairly clear message from the federal court through Judge Gleason’s order that she did not think that we would prevail in our argument that downtown Hope Center fell within the definition of public accommodation,” Windt Pearson said.
As part of the consent decree filed Monday, the city also has agreed to pay the shelter $1 in damages and $100,000 in attorneys’ fees and other costs.
Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the shelter, said the agreement was the right outcome.
“Faith-based nonprofits should be free to serve consistently with their beliefs and mission,” alliance attorney Ryan Tucker said in a statement. “The end of this case means the center can continue its critically needed work to help the vulnerable women it serves and fulfill its duty to do everything it can to protect them.”
The shelter operators sued the city and its Equal Rights Commission last year, months after a transgender woman complained to the commission that she was denied entry at the shelter. The lawsuit said homeless shelters are exempt from the local law and that constitutional principles of privacy and religious freedom are at stake.
The complaint with the commission was dismissed after the August injunction, according to municipal lawyers.
Alliance attorneys have said many women at the shelter are survivors of violence and allowing biological men would be highly traumatic for them. They said biological men are free to use the shelter during the day, adding there are other shelters in the city where men can sleep.
The plaintiffs maintain the person identified only as “Jessie Doe” showed up inebriated after hours in January 2018 and was not turned away because of gender. The shelter officials even paid for a taxi to take her to a hospital for treatment of a forehead wound from fighting at another shelter, according to alliance attorneys.
The same individual showed up the following day and again was denied entry, according to the motion for a preliminary injunction. Plaintiffs say they want the federal court to make clear that the shelter is not violating the law.
Alliance Defending Freedom also represented a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. In a limited decision, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the baker, but it did not rule on the larger issue of whether businesses can invoke religious objections to refuse service to gays and lesbians.
Aimee Stephens lost her job at a suburban Detroit funeral home and she could lose her Supreme Court case over discrimination against transgender people. Amid her legal fight, her health is failing.
But seven years after Stephens thought seriously of suicide and six years after she announced that she would henceforth be known as Aimee instead of her given name, she has something no one can take away.
“I’m happy being me,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It’s taken a long time.”
The Supreme Court will hear Stephens’ case Oct. 8 over whether federal civil rights law that bars job discrimination on the basis of sex protects transgender people. Other arguments that day deal with whether the same law covers sexual orientation.
The cases are the first involving LGBTQ rights since the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court’s gay-rights champion and decisive vote on those issues. They probably won’t be decided before spring, during the 2020 presidential campaign.
The 58-year-old Stephens plans to attend the arguments despite dialysis treatments three times a week to deal with kidney failure and breathing problems that require further treatment. She used a walker the day she spoke to AP at an LGBTQ support center in the Ferndale suburb north of Detroit.
“I felt what they did to me wasn’t right. In fact, it was downright wrong,” Stephens said, her North Carolina roots evident in her speech. “But I also realized it wasn’t just me, that there were others in the world facing the same tune.”
On the other side of the case is the R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, whose owner worries that a ruling for Stephens also would prohibit sex-specific sleeping facilities in shelters, as well as showers, restrooms and locker rooms. Congress can change the law to make explicit protections for LGBTQ people if it wishes, owner Thomas Rost says in court papers.
More than half the states do not prohibit discrimination in employment because of gender identity or sexual orientation, despite the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that made same-sex marriage legal across the United States. In Michigan, the state’s civil rights commission last year decided to interpret existing state law to protect LGBTQ people from workplace bias. But that wouldn’t affect Stephens, who was fired in 2013.
There’s no dispute over the sequence of events that led to the Supreme Court case. Stephens was once a Baptist minister in North Carolina and she said she always liked “comforting people in need.” She spent nearly six years as a licensed funeral home director and embalmer at the company’s Garden City, Michigan, location. Stephens came to work every day in a dark suit, white shirt and tie.
At the end of July 2013, Stephens met with Rost in the home’s chapel and handed him a letter in which Stephens revealed she had struggled with gender most of her life and had, at long last, “decided to become the person that my mind already is.” Stephens wrote, “As distressing as this is sure to be to my friends and some of my family, I need to do this for myself and for my own peace of mind and to end the agony in my soul.”
Following a vacation, Stephens said she would report to work wearing a conservative skirt suit or dress that Rost required for women who worked at his three funeral homes.
“He read the letter, folded it up and put in his pocket and we were basically done for that day,” Stephens recalled. Two weeks later, Rost and Stephens met again, briefly. “He handed me a letter and said this is not going to work,” she said.
The letter was a termination notice and the offer of a modest severance payment, Stephens said. She turned down the severance because it would have meant signing away her right to sue, she said.
Stephens took her complaint to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which agreed to sue the company. During the Obama years, the EEOC had changed its longstanding interpretation of civil rights law to include discrimination against LGBTQ people. The law’s Title 7 prohibits discrimination because of sex, but has no specific protection for sexual orientation or gender identity.
A trial judge ruled against her, but the federal appeals court in Cincinnati sustained the complaint. The court found that discrimination on the basis of transgender status is sex discrimination. The appeals court also separately found that Rost fired Stephens because of his sex stereotypes about Stephens’ appearance and dress.
The funeral home appealed, and the justices agreed to hear the case. Appeals courts in Chicago and New York issued similar rulings bringing sexual orientation under the rights law, while the appeals court in Atlanta declined to do so. The justices also will weigh in on that issue.
Rost’s family has been in the funeral home business since 1910. He testified that Stephens dressed in women’s clothing would be “a distraction that is not appropriate” for grieving families.
Rost declined an interview request, but his lawyer described him as a caring man whose service to clients is paramount.
“Tom has gone out and gotten groceries for widows who were incapable of doing it,” lawyer John Bursch said.
In firing Stephens, Rost was not trying to prevent her from dressing as she wants on her own time, Bursch said, though he declined to use female pronouns to describe Stephens.
“To say this is somehow rolling back respect for people is just a false premise,” Bursch said.
The issue, he said, is the extent of federal civil rights law. “It’s asking to have a right recognized which has never existed,” he said.
Congress has never expressly included sexual orientation or gender identity in Title 7’s prohibition on discrimination “because of…sex,” though pending legislation would do so. The bill’s prospects are slim.
The Trump administration has reversed course from the Obama administration and has sided with employers who argue that the civil rights law does not protect LGBTQ people. The change of position puts Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco in the odd position of representing the EEOC at the Supreme Court, where he will argue against the EEOC’s stance.
Trump’s election and his rollback of Obama administration policies allowing transgender people to use school bathrooms corresponding to their identity, and to serve openly in the military are major reasons why Stephens has persisted in her fight, even as her health struggles have mounted.
“With all the things that have come out, with the way that transgender people are being treated, basically trying to be forcibly erased from society, I have no regrets at all about it,” she said.
An individual who is born female but later becomes male and gives birth to a child should be legally regarded as a mother, England’s High Court ruled on Wednesday.
Fred McConnell, a transgender man, wanted to be recognized as the father of his son, who was born last year, on the official registration of the child’s birth but was told he would have to be registered as the mother.
He sought legal action to quash that decision, saying it breached his and his son’s rights but in a landmark ruling, Andrew McFarlane, President of the High Court’s Family Division, dismissed his claim and concluded that McConnell was the mother.
“It is now medically and legally possible for an individual, whose gender is recognized in law as male, to become pregnant and give birth to their child,” McFarlane said.
“Whilst that person’s gender is ‘male’, their parental status, which derives from their biological role in giving birth, is that of ‘mother.'”
McConnell, who was registered as female at birth, transitioned to live as male when aged 22, later undergoing a double mastectomy and testosterone therapy. Official details, such as his passport and health records, were amended to show his gender as male, court papers said.
In 2016, he suspended the testosterone treatment and became pregnant after undergoing intrauterine insemination fertility treatment using donor sperm, with the baby born in January 2018.
McFarlane said the issue had been “most properly and bravely” raised by McConnell and was an important matter for public debate, but related more to public policy than law.
“Down the centuries, no court has previously been required to determine the definition of ‘mother’ under English common law and, it seems, that there have been few comparable decisions made in other courts elsewhere in the Western World,” he said.
Police in Dallas say a transgender woman was seriously wounded after being shot several times and they are investigating the attack as a hate crime.
Investigators say a man driving a pickup truck pulled alongside the woman late Friday, yelled slurs about her gender identity and fired several times, striking her in the chest and arm.
Authorities say the woman’s injuries prevented her from speaking with them until Sunday when she relayed details of the shooting.
Police are searching for a red four-door pickup with large wheel rims, and released images and details of the crime on their website. The Dallas Police Department is offering a $5,000 reward for any information that leads to an arrest and indictment.
Friday’s shooting follows three fatal attacks on transgender women in Texas this year — two in Dallas. Weeks after her beating was caught on tape, Muhlaysia Booker, 23, was found shot dead in Dallas on May 18, and a 33-year-old man was arrested in connection with her death and the deaths of two other women. Chynal Lindsey, 26, was found dead in a Dallas lake on June 1, and a 22-year-old man was arrested as a suspect in her killing. Tracy Single, 22, was killed in Houston on July 30, and a 25-year-old man was arrested in connection with her death.
The issue of violence against transgender women of color has become an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign. At an LGBTQ Presidential Forum in Iowa on Friday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., drew attention to the violence faced by transgender women of color by reading their names as part of her opening statement.
Two other Senate Democrats running for president, Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey, have used their social media platforms to speak out on the issue, and Booker brought up the issue in the Democratic debate in Miami in June.
“We do not talk enough about trans Americans, especially trans African Americans and the especially high rates of murder right now,” Booker tweeted soon after that debate. “It’s not enough just to be on the Equality Act, we need to have a president who will fight to protect LGBTQ Americans every day.”
The 19th reported killing of a trans American this year alone took place on Friday in Kansas City, Kansas, and has been named by loved ones and activists as Ja’leyah-Jamar.
The victim was identified as in their 20s and was shot to death on the corner of North 60 Street and Leavenworth Road, according to Kansas City Police Department news release.
Law enforcement were called to investigate a shooting at 2:38pm in the outer town area, filled with auto repair shops and community churches. They arrived to find the injured victim in the middle of the road.
Jamar was quickly taken to hospital and tended by medics. But died shortly after from her injuries, the release stated.
While authorities have not released a name of the victim, family, friends and activists identified her.
The victim was, according to local police, killed on the corner of North 60th Street and Leavenworth Road.
Family and trans activists mourn the loss.
Adriana Sanders, the victim’s cousin, posted on Facebook: “Ja’leyah-Jamar didn’t ask for this life… No one can control who they love, God made us to live and love and to grow.
“It’s not our fault as a transgender woman or a homosexual man to want to live a normal life, wanting to be in love, have a family, build your own legacy and, because a man could not accept who he was as himself and an individual, he felt the need to take my cousin’s life,” she wrote, according to The Advocate.
Local LGBT+ advocates have also joined in mourning the loss of yet another trans woman of colour in a country experiencing an alarming epidemic of transphobic cruelty.
“Another black trans woman was killed in Kansas City this weekend!” activist Merrique Jenson posted on Facebook.
“Kansas City is one of the epicentres of violence towards trans women of colour, particularly black trans women, in this country!”
Jenson was one of the first to confirm the identity of the victim, claiming she had corroborated with local trans women who knew Jamar “directly”.
“While she is still being misgendered and misidentified by most [Kansas City] media outlets, community advocates have already begun to share updates as we learn more.
“I encourage agencies with social, political and financial power to do something about this.”
The 32-year-old, who enjoyed make-up, dancing in front of the mirror, and once talked of adopting a child, became the 11th reported trans woman of colour to be killed in the US this year. She was found by locals murdered across the state line in Kansas City.
PinkNews have contacted the Kansas City Police Department for further information.
Police release photos of unidentified man and vehicle sought in connection.
Investigators released a photograph of a suspect last week.
They described the man as a person of interest on a news release, as well as two photos of a vehicle – a white 2006 Pontiac G6 with Kansas tag 038 LXW.
The vehicle was found near 13th Street and Euclid Avenue.
Moreover, the suspect was reportedly last seen walking west from that location.
Anyone with information is urged to call the Kansas City Police Department’s TIPS Hotline at (816) 474-8477.
19 trans people killed in 2019.
Jamar is the latest victim of a spectre of violence against trans people, in particular black trans women.
The Human Rights Campaign excoriated Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson over a report that he disparaged transgender people in meetings with staff this week.
“Ben Carson has spent his career in politics expressing disgust toward the existence of transgender people,” Alphonso David, president of the LGBTQ advocacy group, said late Thursday.
“From his comments on trans people in the military to his support for a proposal that would literally permit emergency shelters to turn away trans people who are homeless to his unqualified support for a White House that has made attacking trans people a mantra, it is hardly surprising that Ben Carson would blatantly dehumanize trans people in his official capacity,” David said.
David was responding to a Washington Post report Thursday that Carson had expressed concern about “big, hairy men” trying to use women’s bathrooms. Carson also “lamented that society no longer seemed to know the difference between men and women,” during a visit to San Francisco this week, the Post reported, citing agency staffers.
A senior HUD official disputed the account in a statement to the Post.
“The Secretary does not use derogatory language to refer to transgendered individuals. Any reporting to the contrary is false,” the official said.
Carson’s department earlier this year signaled that it would propose a rule to allow HUD-subsidized homeless shelters to consider a person’s sex or gender identification in determining whether they can be admitted.
Three people, including a transgender woman, were attacked in Portland, Oregon, in what police say may be a bias crime.
The assault happened in a downtown parking lot around 2:30 a.m. Thursday, and the assailants had fled by the time officers arrived, Portland police said in a statement.
“There were elements of the crime that possibly met the criteria for a Bias Crime,” Portland police said in the statement, which also asked anyone with information to come forward.
In Oregon, bias crimes are defined as any criminal act in which a person is targeted because of race, color, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity or national origin, Portland police said.
KGW reported that Thursday’s incident occurred a week after another transgender woman, Marla Standing-Owl, said she was attacked while driving for the ride-sharing service Lyft on Sept. 6 in Portland.
Standing-Owl said she was attacked by a male customer she picked up from a hotel who was drunk and told her “you’re nothing but a man.”
“I told him I don’t need bigotry in my car and that’s when he snapped,” she told the station. Standing-Owl said that the man punched her repeatedly while she was driving and that she pulled over and used pepper spray on the assailant before he ran off.
Exposure to “conversion therapy” — efforts by a secular or religious professional to change a transgender person’s gender identity — is associated with thoughts of and attempts at suicide, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
Dr. Jack Turban, the study’s lead author and a resident physician in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said it was the first study “to show that gender identity conversion efforts are associated with adverse mental health outcomes, including suicide attempts.”
Turban said that previous reports showing the negative effects of conversion therapy, also known as “ex-gay therapy” or “reparative therapy,” have focused on efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation.
But this was novel, he said, because of its large sample size — over 27,000 transgender people responded to the survey — and its broad approach to identifying past efforts to change participants’ gender identity.
Seventy-one percent of respondents recalled speaking to a religious adviser or secular therapist about their gender identity, and of those, roughly 20 percent said these interactions involved efforts to change their gender identity from transgender to cisgender.
“The rate of previous suicide attempts among transgender people in the United States is extremely high, with 41 percent reporting that they have had that experience,” said study co-author Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, director of the National LGBT Health Education Center at The Fenway Institute and the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Gender Identity Program.
“What this new study shows is that transgender people who are exposed to conversion efforts anytime in their lives have more than double the odds of attempting suicide compared with those who have never experienced efforts by professionals to convert their gender identity, he said.
Turban said one of the most alarming findings from the study was the even higher risk of psychological distress for those who reported exposure to conversion therapy during childhood. Those who were subjected to the practice before age 10 were four times more likely to report lifetime suicide attempts than the general transgender population, according to the findings.
“This is important because some experts continue to advocate for gender identity conversion efforts for young children,” Turban said in a statement. “We hope our findings contribute to ongoing legislative efforts to ban gender identity conversion efforts.”
Currently 18 states, along with the District of Columbia, ban the practice of conversion therapy on minors. And nearly every major health association — including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics — has spoken out against the practice.
“The term ‘conversion therapy’ is a misnomer,” Keuroghlian noted. “It suggests that conversion efforts are a legitimate therapeutic practice, even though we are finding that this practice is associated with significantly increased risk of harm, including serious psychological distress and potentially fatal suicide attempts.”
The study found no difference in the outcome based on whether the effort to change a person’s gender identity was conducted by a religious adviser or secular professional. According to the findings, the vast majority of conversion therapy is conducted by secular professionals, like psychologists or counselors, with religious efforts accounting for roughly a third of all conversion therapy efforts reported by this cohort.
“Current training of mental health clinicians in the U.S. does not usually include gender-affirming care as standard curriculum,” Keuroghlian said. “We hope this study will inspire clinical training programs to revise their standard curricula.”
“All clinicians need to be trained in concepts and terminology related to gender identity, how stigma is related to mental health disparities and best practices for gender affirmation grounded in scientific evidence,” he added.
This latest study builds on previous work published last month by Turban, Keuroghlian and their colleagues that found nearly 200,000 transgender people in the United States have been exposed to conversion therapy at some point in their lives.
