Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan on Monday participated in a global LGBTI rights conference that took place in the Canadian city of Vancouver.Sullivan in video remarks at the 2018 Equal Rights Coalition Global Conference on LGBTI Human Rights and Inclusive Development said the U.S. “looks forward to exploring in concrete terms what we can do together to address criminalization of LGBTI status or conduct and the serious levels of violence and discrimination targeting LGBTI persons.”
“We are eager to discuss ways that the coalition can support and recognize governments and civil society activists who are pressing for positive reforms,” he said. “We encourage discussion on how the coalition can work collectively in global and regional fora and how we can better coordinate donor assistance.”
The Equal Rights Coalition, which officially launched in 2016, seeks to advance LGBTI rights around the world.
Canada and Chile currently co-chair the coalition that includes the U.S. and 38 other countries.
“This coalition, like our societies, is strengthened by our diversity,” said Sullivan in his remarks. “As deputy secretary of state, I have sought to strengthen and advance this issue not only overseas but also within the United States government. I’ve learned that accounting for diversity strengthens our own resolve and enables us to learn about innovative approaches that benefit all. Respectful dialogue yields positive outcomes. We value your active engagement, unique perspectives, and diverse views. Our collective success depends on it.”
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Scott Busby; Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert Moossy; Anthony Cotton of the U.S. Agency for International Development and three other State Department officials attended the conference. Hundreds of LGBTI rights advocates from the U.S. and around the world were also in Vancouver.
“I’m proud that our delegation from the United States includes senior representatives from the Department of State, Department of Justice and USAID,” said Sullivan. “We are striving to do better by sharing our own challenges, particularly in addressing bias-motivated violence targeting the LGBTI community and ensuring development assistance is truly inclusive.”
“Addressing the threats and unique human rights challenges of LGBTI persons will require our unflagging vigilance,” he added. “As our coalition works to uphold human rights and fundamental freedoms, the United States will remain a steadfast partner. We encourage a frank and honest exchange of views in the coming days and continued collaboration with our coalition partners to ensure that no one is left behind.”
Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland also spoke at the two-day conference that began on Monday.
“We are proud to advocate for rights around the world,” she said at the conference’s opening. “But we do that from an understanding that we are far from perfect here, that we have a great deal of work still to do in Canada.”
The conference began a day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau marched in Vancouver’s annual Pride parade.
Trudeau last November formally apologized to those who suffered persecution and discrimination under Canada’s anti-LGBTI laws and policies. LGBTI activists and members of Canada’s indigenous community are urging the Canadian government to do more to further address abuses committed against them.
Canadian MP Randy Boissonnault, who advises Trudeau on LGBTI issues, on Tuesday announced his government will earmark 1 million Canadian dollars ($765,828.70) for advocacy groups around the world.
The Canadian government late last week urged Saudi Arabia to release women’s rights activists who were arrested. The Saudi government on Monday announced the expulsion of Canada’s ambassador to the country and suspended new trade agreements with Ottawa.
The Trump administration continues to face criticism over a host of issues that include its anti-LGBTI policies in the U.S., its policy that effectively bans the citizens of five Muslim-majority nations from entering the U.S. and the continued separation of migrant children from their parents. The State Department nevertheless continues to publicly support LGBTI rights abroad.
Christine Hallquist leaned back in her swivel chair inside a private room at the Northshire bookstore and dialed up potential donors, trash-talking the plummeting approval numbers of Vermont’s incumbent Republican governor and touting her chances against her Democratic rivals. “It’s clear it’s for us to lose, which I won’t, ’cause I’m disciplined,” she assured one prospective contributor of the upcoming primary.
Beating her fellow Democrats and then defeating a sitting Vermont governor for the first time since 1962 are only the beginning. From there, Hallquist, a first-time candidate, plans to reverse the decline of rural Vermont and maybe even solve climate change.
All of this, Hallquist thinks, will be relatively easy, because she has already done the hardest thing she will ever do. In 2015, she began wearing a wig and a blouse to work, publicly coming out as a woman named Christine to her employees at the Vermont Electric Coop, the utility she had led for years as a man named Dave. It was the culmination of an eight-year gender transition that, after a lifetime of experiencing gender dysphoria, had filled her with dread at the ostracism she knew would follow.
“I was sure when I transitioned, I’d end up sleeping in a gutter somewhere,” she said.
But Vermonters greeted her transition with overwhelming acceptance, so she forgot about the gutter and began contemplating the governor’s office instead.
In April, she officially announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination from a dive bar in her hometown, becoming the first openly transgender gubernatorial candidate in the nation’s history.
In large parts of the country, the appearance of a viable statewide transgender candidate would have caused a political earthquake, but here, her transgender status has been largely an afterthought.
“It will be irrelevant in Vermont,” former governor Howard Dean, who recently offered Hallquist campaign advice over breakfast, told POLITICO.
Rather than making her gender identity a focus of her campaign, she is running, essentially, as a wonky technocrat. Her signature issue is a plan to revitalize rural Vermont by laying high-speed, fiber optic cable statewide. It’s a platform that plays to her record turning around the fortunes of the electric utility she ran until early this year.
That her transgender status has been relegated to a non-issue — in fact, she’s starting to wield it as an asset — is in part, a testament to the state’s longstanding progressive culture. Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery, the first to grant same-sex couples civil unions with full marriage rights, and the first to legalize same-sex marriage through its legislature, rather than by court ruling.
It is also a sign of the arrival of transgender Americans as a small but burgeoning political force.
***
That was on display at a July fundraiser for Hallquist in Washington, where a small group of supporters, many of them transgender, gathered in the rooftop lounge of an upscale apartment building off Dupont Circle. A group of trans donors gathering to support a transgender candidate is not something you would have expected to see in Washington even just a few years ago.
“We can enter political space,” said attendee Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, who served as Barack Obama’s last director of LGBT outreach and was the first openly transgender White House staffer, of transgender people’s greater visibility in the electoral realm.
She observed that a transgender political community was beginning to take form more distinctly from the umbrella of the broader LGBT movement. “Just as siblings grow old together, we’ll find our different paths, but we’ll always be family,” she said.
While the LGBT rights movement has won an astounding series of victories across the Western world over the past two decades, transgender people remain among the most stigmatized and marginalized groups in Western societies, including the United States. Forty-one percent of respondents reported attempting suicide in one survey of transgender Americans, and young black transgender women in the U.S. are more than four times more likely to be murdered than their peers in the general population, according to an investigation by Mic.
For most of the 20th century, being transgender was considered a bizarre curiosity or a mental illness, when it was heard of at all, and openly transgender officeholders were unheard of. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a handful of openly transgender candidates won local elections, but it was not until 2006, with the election of Kim Coco Iwamoto to Hawaii’s board of education, that one won statewide office.
Iwamoto, who is running for Hawaii’s lieutenant governor this year, remains the only person to accomplish that feat. Hallquist appears to be only the third openly transgender candidate to even seek statewide office — the other being WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning, who ran for Senate in Maryland earlier this year — according to former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, president of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, which supports LGBTQ candidates and recently endorsed Hallquist.
“Christine will be a historic figure if she wins the nomination, whether or not she becomes the governor,” Parker said. “If she becomes the governor, she has the potential to be a role model for every trans kid in America.”
According to LGBTQ Victory Fund communications director Elliot Imse, transgender candidates are regularly subjected to whisper campaigns and other forms of discrimination, even within Democratic primaries. “We hear of people saying to influential party people that ‘Of course, I’m not transphobic, but we can’t let the transgender candidate win because general election voters would never vote for a trans person,’” he said.
When journalist Danica Roem, a transgender woman, ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates last year as a Democrat, the Republican Party of Virginia paid for campaign fliers that repeatedly referred to her with male pronouns, considered a slap in the face to someone who identifies as a woman.
But Roem went on to win her race, becoming the first openly transgender person elected to a state legislature and one of a record eight transgender candidates who won nationwide on Election Day last year (the other seven were municipal candidates).
According to Mara Kiesling, founder of the National Center for Transgender Equality and a Hallquist confidant, races like Roem’s illustrate that transgender candidates can overcome hang-ups about their identities by focusing on constituent needs. “Nobody’s looking for a transgender person to run for office,” Kiesling said. “They’re looking for somebody who will make their life better.”
In June, Roem traveled to Vermont to campaign with Hallquist, and offered similar advice. “When someone else wants to make that the narrative of the race, you acknowledge it and say, ‘Yes I’m trans and’ — in her case — ‘I happen to know a lot about our infrastructure,’” Roem said in an interview. “In my case it was, ‘Yes, I’m trans and I also know a lot about transportation.”
***
Other advice has been more tactical.
In the bookstore backroom in Manchester, Hallquist called around to potential donors with the help of commercial sales software called Phoneburner, which she called her “secret weapon” and which Roem turned her on to. Such tips are invaluable for a candidate who did not enter politics until late in life.
Born male in 1956 and raised as a boy named Dave in upstate New York, Hallquist made Vermont her home in young adulthood when her father’s job was relocated to Burlington.
She studied engineering, worked as a consultant and joined the Vermont Electric Coop in 1998, rising to become its CEO in 2005. Though her record on renewables is now being scrutinized for the compromises she made to keep rates down and the coop’s reliance on hydro- and nuclear power sources, it forms a core part of the rationale for her candidacy. It also, she argues, serves as a model for addressing climate change globally. During her time at the helm, she steered the utility from the brink of financial ruin and increased the share of its energy coming from carbon-free sources while limiting rate hikes.
That outward success masked inner turmoil.
Since childhood, Hallquist had felt she was a girl, a feeling her mother had warned her to keep to herself or risk being committed to an asylum. But it’s a feeling she never shook. Throughout her life, she found herself buying women’s clothing and wearing it in secret. She suffered from the pain and confusion of gender dysphoria even as she married a wife, Pat, and fathered three children.
Later in life, she came out as a woman to Pat, a discreet transgender support group, the rest of her family and eventually, in 2015, to the world. She began wearing women’s clothing and accessories in public, along with a wig. She also started hormone replacement therapy, reporting that she felt angry less often and began crying more.
Hallquist, 62, said Trump’s election a year later depressed her, but also helped inspire her to enter electoral politics earlier this year.
“Thousands of people have fought for freedom before me and died for freedom,” she said. “The least I could do is give up my retirement.”
Now, Hallquist is picking up politics on the fly. In Manchester, she spoke with enthusiasm about the details of a campaign “ground game” and rued a recent faux pas that led a deep-pocketed donor to cut her off. “I did a protocol violation,” she said, but declined to elaborate, other than to say, “You’ve got to give you high-value donors special treatment.”
Despite her novice status, she exuded total confidence at the bookstore in a sleeveless white blouse and thigh-length skirt. Between calls, she chatted with her communications director, David Glidden, about plans for her primary night gathering, emphasizing the need to find a venue that serves booze.
“People party a lot as you lose or win,” Glidden remarked.
“People are going to party because we won,” she said.
During her donor calls, Hallquist noted that the Republican governor’s slide in approval ratings — an astounding 38-point net drop between the first and second quarters of this year, in Morning Consult’s polls — has coincided with her entrance into the Democratic primary.
“I’m not taking credit,” she said between calls, but added, “If there hadn’t been a strong alternative in the race, maybe the drop wouldn’t have been as precipitous.”
In fact, Gov. Phil Scott’s popularity problems appear to be mostly about guns. He ran on a promise to impose no gun control measures, but after a school shooting scare in February, he signed a sweeping law in April that has angered his base and inspired a write-in Republican primary challenge.
In response to requests for comment about Hallquist, the fall in approval rating, and the guns issue, Scott’s campaign manager, Brittney Wilson, wrote that Scott “had the most successful first term of any Governor in Vermont” and ticked off a list of fiscal accomplishments, but did not mention guns.
Vermont’s gun culture is such that gun control is thorny even in a Democratic primary. “I would prefer not talking about this issue,” Hallquist said.
But what is her position? Well, she owns five hunting rifles, which she doesn’t use because most of them she acquired a long time ago to teach her son to hunt, which she wasn’t very good at, anyway.
“I’m beating around the bush,” she said, and after some more explanation, “I’m really beating around the bush.”
Finally, she confided, “I would support regulating guns like we regulate automobiles, but I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s a little bit off the record,” Glidden chimed in.
On issues of economics and inequality Halquist speaks of her desire to support marginalized communities. But she also makes it a point to take issue both with rich people who loathe the poor and with those who blame all the problems of the poor on the rich. When I suggested that the latter sounds like an oblique critique of the state’s socialist senator, Bernie Sanders, she clapped her hands and let out a laugh, before regaining herself.
“I wouldn’t ever criticize Bernie,” she said.
What she would do is say Sanders’ rhetoric is inconsistent with the concerns of managing a state budget and making a state’s economy competitive with those of its neighbors: “He’s great on the national platform,” she said. “I don’t think it works from a governor’s standpoint.”
***
After wrapping up her calls in Manchester, Hallquist drove to the small town of Ludlow for an evening candidates’ forum.
On the second floor of Ludlow’s town hall, the race’s four Democrats held forth in front of a handful of campaign staffers and an audience of actual voters that numbered about a dozen (a showing that was “big for Ludlow,” Glidden claimed). A moderator wielded a rusty old cowbell to silence anyone who exceeded their allotted answer time.
On Hallquist’s right sat environmental advocate James Ehlers, a handsome and solemn silver-haired Navy veteran who counts himself an admirer of psychedelic guru Ram Dass and is running somewhere to the left of the state’s socialist senator.
Ehlers is considered Hallquist’s chief rival for the nomination. Hallquist had raised $132,000 through mid-July to Ehlers’ $50,000, and her statewide name recognition was at 41 percent in a recent poll, more than 10 points ahead of any other Democratic candidate.
She and Ehlers are not above taking swings at each other. “I celebrate Christine for the example she’s setting,” Ehlers said before the forum, “But fundamentally we’re very, very different people and that’s reflected in my lifetime of service to people and the planet and Christine’s decision to spend her time in the corporate world.”
Hallquist scoffed at the charge, saying she could have made more money in the private sector but chose to end her career leading the local electric coop instead. “If you’re going to be negative, try to get real shit out there,” she said the next day, adding that Ehlers “keeps shooting himself in the foot.”
To Hallquist’s left in Ludlow sat activist Brenda Siegel. A single mother with purple and yellow streaks in her hair, she often gets together with Hallquist after the forums to make fun of the other candidates, and themselves, at a local bar.
On Siegel’s other side side sat rising high school freshman Ethan Sonneborn, a precocious 14-year-old who has exploited a loophole in the state constitution to make himself a legally viable candidate.
Asked to reveal a surprising personal detail in her opening statement, Hallquist spoke of the annual week she spent with a friend in the wilderness of northern New York state in the dead of winter, telemark skiing and practicing cold-weather survival techniques for 22 years straight years.
Earlier, Hallquist had said that she believes those excursions were a way of coping with her gender dysphoria — going to the extremes of masculinity to resist her feelings of identifying as a woman. It’s the same reason, she hypothesizes, that a disproportionate number of transgender women serve in the military before transitioning.
In Ludlow, Hallquist’s transgender status came up only at the end of the night, when she recounted her experience of coming out and being embraced by Vermonters in her closing statement.
The next morning, Friday, Hallquist visited the offices of her hometown newspaper, the Morrisville News & Citizen, to face an hour of questioning from a trio of bearded journalists — Tom, Andrew and Tommy — as her son, Derek, a filmmaker, taped the sitdown for a forthcoming campaign video.
Huddled over a small conference table, Hallquist described her plan to wire the rural parts of the state with a high-speed, fiber optic network as “probably one of the most bold and visionary goals we’ve seen since the electrification of Vermont.”
Her transgender status was mentioned only when she was asked whether any “assholes” were attacking her for it. Very few, she said. Still, though Hallquist said her transgender status is not a relevant factor in the race, she is finding way to make it part of the rationale for her candidacy.
When it came up at the News & Citizen, she took the opportunity to argue that a transgender governor could help cement the state’s global image as an open and welcoming place.
“Vermonters should be thrilled that we’re continuing to perpetuate our wonderful brand,” she said.
As for the political downside, Hallquist points out that any Vermonters turned off by her gender transition would probably not be voting for a liberal Democrat anyways.
From the newspaper offices, Hallquist, Derek and Glidden strolled a few blocks to a cluttered three-room office space that serves as her campaign headquarters. A smattering of colorful sticky notes stuck to the walls reminded her how she wanted to campaign (“Pay attention to details”; “low ego”; “can dish and take it”) and commingled with a framed panoramic photo from a Phish concert.
While she plowed through more call time, Derek directed me to the family residence, a modest house perched on a fairy-tale piece of land off a gravel road overlooking a lake at the southern end of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
Pat had taken Derek’s two young children, 3 and 5, to visit relatives nearby. When Hallquist and Pat became grandparents, Pat decided she wanted her grandkids to call her Oma, the German word for grandmother. At the time, Hallquist was still navigating her transition and identified as “Whatever,” a term of her own making. Rather than Oma or Opa — the German word for grandfather — the grandkids called her “Owa.” They have not gotten to the point of asking about the unique term.
As Derek bobbed in the water off the dock out back, he recounted the family’s trepidation over his parent’s run (he now calls Hallquist his “parent,” occasionally reverting to habit and calling her “dad”). When Hallquist first began considering a run, she held a family conference call with Derek, her two daughters and her wife, Pat. They were concerned that entering the race, especially given the rancor in the current political climate, would expose them all to a flood of nasty transphobic attacks.
But Vermont’s political culture is notoriously genteel, and aside from some nasty remarks on social media, there have been few problems. Derek said he was worried that would change with the approach of the Aug. 14 primary and the heightened profile he expected his parent to take on if she wins it.
As it happened, Hallquist arrived home in the mid-afternoon, excited to announce that a teaser video for an upcoming news segment about her had been released on social media by the UK’s Channel 4 and that it was quickly racking up tens of thousands of views. She also revealed that the video was unleashing a torrent of online vitriol directed at her from men around the world.
During a swing through Washington at the beginning of the week, she had been advised to contact a specific FBI agent for help with the threats she would be expected to face if she wins the primary and gains widespread attention. Now that the wrong kind of attention had arrived early, she resolved to call the FBI agent that day.
But she did not seem scared, and she said she viewed the call to the FBI as a “precaution.”
Soon, Pat returned home with the grandkids, who greeted their father and their owa enthusiastically.
The threats became an afterthought as Hallquist talked about the possibility that Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden could stump for her if she wins her primary. Then she wandered off to push her granddaughter on a swing set out back.
Joe Biden’s foundation has launched a major campaign aimed at stopping parents from rejecting their LGBT kids.
Barack Obama’s former Vice President Joe Biden, a long-time supporter of LGBT rights, has made LGBT issues a core focus of the Biden Foundation, which was set up following his departure from the White House.
Biden today launched a campaign to raise awareness of “the importance of family acceptance in the lives of LGBTQ young people,” putting significant resources towards campaigns bolstering acceptance by families.The “As You Are” campaign launch is backed by a number of high-profile figures including Cyndi Lauper and former NFL star Wade Davis.
Biden said: “I’m so proud to announce that the Biden Foundation has launched a family acceptance campaign.
“We’ll use our resources to highlight the harms of family rejection—and lift up research, best practices, and personal stories to powerfully show the significant value of family acceptance.”
The Foundation added: “Today far too many LGBTQ folks continue to face rejection at home and discrimination in their communities. This kind of rejection leads to heartbreaking outcomes.
“Forty percent of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ. Many of them have been kicked out of their homes, or no longer find it safe to stay at home.
“Gay, lesbian and bisexual youth are five times more likely than their straight peers to have attempted suicide. 40 percent of transgender and gender nonconforming adults report having attempted suicide at some point in their lives. Most of them before the age of 25.
“Some parents subject their children to the vile practice of conversion therapy or pressure them to keep their identities secret. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
It adds “Stories like these have incredible power to inspire, to remind, to create communities, to heal families, to move us towards a culture of acceptance — not rejection. And we want to hear from you.
“If you are an LGBTQ person who has experienced rejection or acceptance we want to hear from you. If you are a parent we want to hear from you. If you are a teacher, a coach friend neighbor co-worker sibling or ally we want to hear from you, too.
“By sharing your stories — your stories, we can work together to change the culture and ensure a bright future for the LGBTQ young people in America.”
Dr. Caitlin Ryan, Director of the Family Acceptance Project said: “Our research shows that LGBTQ young people who are accepted by their families are healthier, have higher self-esteem and are much less likely to report depression, abuse substances or attempt suicide. Family acceptance is like a vaccine that protects their LGBTQ child with love and helps them deal more effectively with challenges, adversity and stigma.”
Judy Shepard, Co-Founder of the Matthew Shepard Foundation said: “No matter who you are, where you live, or how you pray, surely we can all agree that we ought to live in a society where all our young people are supported and affirmed. It’s not enough to change laws and policies. We have to change hearts and minds.”
Marsha Aizumi, author of “Two Spirits, One Heart” said: “As a parent who has been on a journey of acceptance, I know firsthand the importance and impact of being my son’s ally and champion. All of our children deserve the right and dignity to live their lives as authentically as possible. In sharing our stories of love and acceptance, we move closer to a safer, more peaceful world for all our children.”
Amit Paley, CEO & Executive Director of The Trevor Project said: “Family acceptance can save lives. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth are more than four times more likely than their straight peers to attempt suicide. And 40% of transgender and gender nonconforming adults report having attempted suicide at some point in their lives, most of them before the age of 25. That’s why it is so important to support LGBTQ youth and let them know that they are not alone.”
A judge who blocked name changes for transgender teenager is facing a lawsuit.
Judge Joseph Kirby, the Probate and Juvenile Court judge in Warren County, Ohio, is alleged to have denied legal name changes to at least three transgender teens.
He denied 15-year old Elliott Whitaker a legal name change at Warren County Juvenile Court in June, telling the teen to come back when he is 18.
State law does not require people to be 18 to secure a legal change of name, which is separate from legal gender recognition, but the judge ruled that the teen lacked the “maturity, knowledge and stability” to make such a decision.
Transcripts from the hearing show a bizarre line of questioning as the judge interrogated Whitaker about his bathroom choice, repeatedly referred to trans people using the wrong pronouns, and appeared to suggest Caitlyn Jenner was making kids transgender.
The judge had rhetorically asked if “all this” had started “when all of this stuff came out in the media”, referring to Jenner.
Two other teens, a 15 year old and a 17 year old, were also denied name changes by the same judge with identical orders.
In all three cases the teens had been receiving therapy and treatment for gender dysphoria, and doctors had supported their legal change of name.
The families of the three teens this week filed a joint suit against Kirby in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.
The suit, filed by Josh Langdon, LLC and Engel & Martin, LLC, alleges the judge’s actions amount to unconstitutional discrimination against the teens, claiming he treated transgender adolescents unfavorably because of their gender identity.
Attorney Josh Langdon said: “Denying transgender children the ability to legally change their names until age 18 can lead to significant and irreparable harm, and increases their risk of being outed and bullied, having violence perpetrated against them, having depressive symptoms, and attempting suicide.
“The judge failed to consider the evidence presented by the families and doctors that the name change is in the best interest of the teenager and, instead, substituted his own skeptical views.”
Attorney Josh Langdon
The suit states: “[Plaintiffs] have been treated by the Defendant differently from others similarly situated without a rational basis for doing so. Judge Kirby violated the Equal Protection Clause’s prohibition against sex-based discrimination when the judge treated transgender adolescents unfavorably because of their gender identity.
“Judge Kirby has facially and intentionally discriminated against the Plaintiffs in violation of the Equal Protection guarantees of the 14th Amendment on the basis of sex and transgender status by depriving transgender adolescents the ability to change their name. Non-transgender adolescents are not deprived of this ability to change their names.
“Defendant’s actions deny transgender people, including Plaintiffs, access to legal documents and the ability to legally change their names.
“Defendant’s refusal to allow transgender children to change their legal name erects a barrier to the full recognition, participation, and inclusion of transgender people in society and subjects them to discrimination, privacy invasions, harassment, humiliation, stigma, harm to their health, and even violence.”
Judge Kirby was not available for comment.
Caitlyn Jenner previously slammed the official for invoking her in the decision.
She said: “It has come to my attention that a judge in Ohio thinks I’m brainwashing kids into being trans.
“For me, being trans has been a great gift. It’s been the most profound, growing experience of my life. But we’re in the thick of some very difficult, scary and dangerous times in our community, especially trans people of colour. Why anyone would choose to embark upon a trans journey if they don’t really feel that way is beyond me.
“My coming out publicly wasn’t to brainwash people, it was to let the mainstream world know we exist, we’re here and it isn’t a mental illness. I send a message to Elliot in Ohio – your identity is real, and we are behind you 100 percent to build a safer world.”
LGBT+ teenagers who are first-time offenders are more likely to have substance abuse or mental health problems than their heterosexual or cis-gendered peers, according to new research.
The study, carried out by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, suggests higher rates of stress among LGBT+ adolescents—often triggered by family problems or rejection by their peers—could be to blame.
The researchers emphasised that a teenager’s sexual orientation or gender identity alone does not put them at increased risk of breaking the law, as a range of factors contribute to offense rates.Dr Matthew Hirschtritt, lead author of the study, said: “Factors like peer rejection and family discord may contribute to impaired support networks and engagement in risky behaviour.
“It would be incorrect to conclude that sexual-minority status puts a youth at increased risk of offending.
“But if we compare court-involved sexual minority youth with court-involved straight youth, we see more severe psychological distress and a greater likelihood of child-welfare system involvement.”
For the study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Adolescent Health, researchers examined 423 first-time, non-detained offenders aged between 12 and 18 from a juvenile court in an unnamed Northeastern state.
Of these, 133—about a third of the group—identified as LGBTQ.
The teenagers had committed offenses ranging from underage drinking to breaking and entering.
Among the LGBTQ group, one in two had used alcohol, compared to one in four of the heterosexual and cis-gendered group.
They were also approximately twice as likely to use drugs, including cannabis, cocaine and injection drugs.
The LGBT+ group also reported poorer mental health, which meant they were at higher risk of self-harm.
Researchers called for better support of young LGBT+ first-offenders.
Co-author Dr Marina Tolou-Shams said: “We need cost-effective, tailored interventions so that adolescents’ first court appearances become an opportunity to prevent worsening of pre-existing health risks and further entrenchment in the justice system.”
Dr Hirschtritt added: “One-on-one support, group counselling and peer support may meet the needs of these adolescents without further stigmatising them.”
The Annual Bullying Survey, carried out by the charity Ditch the Label, found 43 percent of people within the LGBT+ community questioned have been bullied in the last 12 months.
More than 9,000 people aged between 12 and 20 were surveyed.
Of those within the LGBT+ community, nearly a third—31 percent—had attempted suicide because of their experiences and half of the respondents said they had self-harmed.
According to the Mexican news site ContraMuro.com and Forbes Mexico, a 248-room LGBT resort featuring five bars and three restaurants will open next year on or near (this is unclear) Cuba’s resort island Cayo Guillermo.
The “luxurious five-star” hotel is reportedly the project of MGM Mutha Hotels, which currently operates about two dozen resorts in Europe and India, and already has two locations in Cuba, including one on Cayo Guillermo.
According to the first report linked above, further details on the project will be revealed once Cuba’s National Assembly votes to reform the country’s constitution, which would include the legalization of same-sex marriage. The first draft of the reform was approved last week.
Since she transitioned in 1998, at the age of 16, all of Danni Askini’s identity documents have read “female.” But last month, when Askini went to renew her passport, her request was denied. Askini says the U.S. Passport Office told her she had “failed to disclose” that she was transgender and needed to provide proof of gender transition — after 20 years of having a passport that says she’s female.
“Make no mistake, this was an intentional action by the State Department to withhold recognizing my gender,” says Askini, who was eventually granted a temporary two-year passport that allowed her to travel from her Seattle home to Sweden. The activist and executive director of Gender Justice League needed to leave Seattle, she says, after a series of death threats posted on the anti-trans website Kiwi Farms, as well as threats from local alt-right groups in the Pacific Northwest. She’d had her most recent passport for 10 years, but it was up for renewal.
Askini’s battle with the U.S. Department of State — which oversees the Passport Office — began last month, and a June 29 tweet she posted about the ordeal went viral.
Just this week, another trans woman encountered the same problem.
New York-based technology researcher Janus Rose says she’s had her passport, with a female gender marker, since November. But recently she finalized a legal name change, and sent in paperwork along with her current passport to renew the document with the new legal name. It seemed like a simple formality, until she received a phone call from a passport processing center in South Carolina.
“She basically told me that even though the government had changed my gender marker in the last year, that was a mistake,” says Rose. The passport official told Rose that the State Department should not have allowed her to change her gender on the document — and that the medical documentation she’d supplied at the time was invalid.
“This letter is something my clinic has been using as a boilerplate for years for so many people,” Rose says. “The clinic says I’m the first person to get a rejection.”
Rose had successfully changed the gender marker on her passport in 2017 using a letter signed by the nurse practitioner at her clinic. The clinic, she says, told her they’ve never encountered a person being told that that letter is invalid or that they need to have it written by an M.D. instead.
“It seems pretty clear that even if the policy hasn’t changed, something has changed in terms of guidance on how to enforce this — because it’s being enforced differently now,” says Rose.
According to the State Department’s policy, a person seeking a gender change on a passport must submit an ID “that resembles your current appearance,” a recent passport photo, proof of legal name change if applicable, and a “medical certification that indicates you are in the process of or have had appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition.”
In response to an emailed request for comment, a State Department official said the department doesn’t comment on individual applications — but provided more context on the gender change policy in general.
“Every applicant who applies for a U.S. passport undergoes extensive vetting of their identity, claim to U.S. citizenship and entitlement to a passport,” said the State Department official. “When a passport applicant presents a certification from a medical physician stating that the applicant has undergone or is receiving appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition, a new passport will be issued with an updated gender marker. Sexual reassignment surgery is not a prerequisite for updating the gender marker in a passport and documents proving sexual reassignment surgery are not required.”
The State Department did not respond directly to a question about why someone’s gender marker would be “revoked” after already being changed years ago.
Rose says she’s frustrated that a simple name change turned into a reevaluation of the validity of her gender.
“I spoke to someone the other day, a cis person, who had their legal name changed and it was fine,” says Rose. “There was no asking for additional documentation or proof. She literally did the same thing just the other day. That’s what this is about. A cis person can go in and make this simple change, and a trans person cannot.”
Askini, in contrast, was disturbed by the fact that the State Department even knew she was transgender. In her specific case, her legal gender transition was granted by a judge when she was still a minor — and in relation to a sex trafficking case and a safety effort to conceal her identity, all of the child welfare records were sealed at the time.
“None of my documentation would disclose my trans status,” says Askini. “No databases that are local, state, or federal should note my gender as anything other than female.”
Askini believes the only reason she was eventually granted a temporary passport is because Seattle-based congresswoman Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s office put direct pressure on the passport agency on the well-known activist’s behalf.
“I believe that the Trump Administration or someone in the Seattle Passport Office has targeted me politically and politicized the process for obtaining passports,” says Askini. “Their actions and statements are NOT consistent with the actual letter of the code related to trans people.”
Rose has similar suspicions. Though she’s careful to steer clear of “the temptation to blame everything on Trump,” and notes that trans people have faced bureaucratic discrimination for years, she says it feels like a very sudden change has occurred at the State Department.
“It seems like they’re applying a different standard of enforcement to these cases now. I’ve never heard of a person having a problem changing their name on a passport until now,” says Rose.
Although the State Department did not directly respond to a question asking whether there had been a recent change in policy or internal guidance mandating new enforcement rules, a change would hardly be surprising. Since Trump took office, his administration has altered existing transgender-inclusive guidelines at the Department of Education, the Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Census, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Even the Centers for Disease Control was instructed in an internal memo not to use the word transgender — along with terms like “diversity” and “evidence-based.” It’s not unfair to say the Trump administration has stopped just short of outlawing transgender people entirely.
“I think there’s an internal policy change to make it as difficult as possible for trans people,” says Rose. “The goal is to create friction. They can’t change all these laws right away, but they can make it really hard.”
The couple are fundraising to raise money as a reward to whoever helps them identify the sender (GoFundMe)
A lesbian couple from Minnesota have spoken out about receiving anonymous hate letters containing threats towards their daughter.
Angie and Jaime Mace, from St Peter, have launched a GoFundMe page to raise money to give as a reward to whoever helps them identify the sender of the letters, which contain extreme anti-LGBT language.
On the GoFundMe page, the couple wrote: “Please help us find a terrorist who is making death threats based on sexual orientation, race and gender in Minnesota. We need to raise reward money that will encourage witnesses to come forward with information that will lead to the arrested and prosecution of this criminal.“I am a proud resident of St. Peter, Minnesota. I am a married lesbian with a child. My wife grew up in St. Peter, while I transplanted here over 15 years ago. We have not encountered deliberate acts of discrimination, until late last year.”
The couple then explained how they received two letters in the space of a month which threatened to “destroy our home, shoot and kill us.”
“Both letters made direct threats to stalk and kill our child,” they added, posting the two letters at the end of the fundraising page.
“Your house could be torched, a gun could be used to eliminate you,” one letter reads.
It continues: “Oh, and your poor daughter! She must be so embarrassed to have you for parents! She needs to look out behind her back also… I know where she goes to school!”
Although the letters have been analysed by police and investigators, no fingerprints or DNA have been recovered.
The couple wrote on their fundraising page: “The person who wrote the letters took precautions to avoid getting caught. It seemed as though the investigation was at a stand still for several months.”
“What kind of person does this? What kind of person can sleep at night after threatening to kill innocent children? A person that belongs behind bars, that’s who!”
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Earlier this year, another lesbian couple received a letter which threatened them and their child, which is also being investigated by police.
The Maces said they had received an “outpouring of support” from people all over the world after posting one of the letters on Facebook.
“It really reinforced that the words of this bigoted idiot are not the words of the majority,” they wrote.
“We need to find this terrorist. To do that, we need to raise reward money to offer to anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest of this criminal. This person must be caught and brought to justice.
“Please give what you can and ask your friends to do the same. We are scared. This seemed to start as an isolated incident, but has progressed to include other innocent families. This needs to stop and this criminal needs to know s/he is not above the law. Help us bring justice to ‘small town rural Minnesota.’”
An anti-LGBT+ Christian legal advocacy group has asked the US Supreme Court to review a ruling that bans employers from discriminating against transgender people on religious grounds.
Alliance Defending Freedom filed a petition to the court last week, which means that the Supreme Court, if it decides to go ahead and hear the case, now has the option to rule whether the country’s civil law right prohibiting sex discrimination in the workplace also includes discrimination based on gender identity.
This Court of Appeals ruling was issued after a transgender employee from Detroit was fired by her employer because she is transgender.
Aimee Stephens was fired from her job at a funeral home after coming out as trans to her boss.
She took her case all the way to the Court of Appeals with the support of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC], after a district court dismissed her legal challenge, claiming that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act gave the funeral home an exemption from the federal law – Title VII – of the Civil Rights Act, which covers sex discrimination in the workplace.
However, the Court of Appeals overruled this district court decision, saying that sex discrimination includes discrimination against trans people – and that there is no exemption under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
“Discrimination against employees, either because of their failure to conform to sex stereotypes or their transgender and transitioning status, is illegal under Title VII,” Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote for the Court of Appeals.
(Mark Makela/Getty Images)
“Discrimination against employees, either because of their failure to conform to sex stereotypes or their transgender and transitioning status, is illegal under Title VII,” Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote for the court.
“The unrefuted facts show that the Funeral Home fired Stephens because she refused to abide by her employer’s stereotypical conception of her sex.”
A representative from the ACLU, who argued the case for Stephens, said at the time that it was “an exciting and important victory for transgender people and allied communities across the country.”
A community march in Amsterdam, where the 22nd International AIDS Conference was held. Photo by: Matthijs Immink / IAS
AMSTERDAM — The fight to end HIV/AIDS was given a boost by a star-studded week of presentations, panel sessions and the occasional protest at this year’s International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam. However, tensions within the community remain, and with few new funding pledges announced, there are questions about how to translate strong rhetoric into action.
Some 16,000 stakeholders from more than 160 countries gathered in the Dutch capital last week for AIDS 2018, the conference’s 22nd edition and one of the biggest events in the global health calendar, featuring sessions on the latest HIV science, policy, and practice.
Held under the theme of “Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges,” the real story of this year’s conference was the growing realization that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is in crisis, with 1.8 million new infections in 2017. There are also alarming spikes in new HIV cases among key groups including adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa and drug users in eastern Europe and parts of Asia, according to recent figures from UNAIDS. At the same time, development assistance for HIV dropped $3 billion between 2012 and 2017, according to a study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
“The feel is definitely less congratulatory than past conferences and more sobering,” Rachel Baggaley, coordinator for HIV prevention and testing at WHO, told Devex, but added that it was good to see the community responding with force. The activist spirit which has defined the fight against AIDS in the past was never far away, she noted, with many sessions interrupted by campaigners.
“It is very positive to see the AIDS movement hasn’t gone away … I went feeling rather down and have come away challenged and inspired; there’s a lot of things we must do and a lot of people who continue to take this [AIDS agenda] forward,” she said.
One protest challenged the leadership of the U.N.’s dedicated AIDS agency, UNAIDS, with more than 20 female campaigners interrupting Executive Director Michel Sidibé — who has been criticized for his response to a sexual harassment scandal — during his address on stage at the opening plenary. Sidibé insists he has made changes and has resisted calls to step down, but his presence was a source of controversy.
The key now will be turning the strong rhetoric and passion seen throughout AIDS 2018 into action on the ground, according to youth HIV activist Mercy Ngulube.
“We are all going to build bridges this week … but where is your bridge going to lead us? Don’t let your bridge be a bridge to nowhere,” she said during the opening plenary.
A Devex team was on the ground throughout the week and rounds up the key takeaways.
1. Target key populations
Attendees agreed that, without drastic change, the world will see global HIV targets missed and a possible resurgence of the epidemic. But Peter Piot, founding executive director of UNAIDS and now director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, warned the targets themselves could leave key populations even further behind.
Speaking on Thursday, Piot reminded the audience that the 90-90-90 targets set by UNAIDS in 2014 will miss 27 percent of HIV patients. The framework calls for countries to get 90 percent of people living with HIV diagnosed; 90 percent of those diagnosed to be accessing treatment; and 90 percent of people on treatment to have suppressed viral loads by 2020.
“The 90-90-90 targets are actually 90-81-73,” he said, adding that “what the future of the epidemic is going to be determined by is the 10-10-10” — those not hit by the targets.
The 10-10-10 is likely to be made up of key populations including sex workers, men who have sex with men, LGBTI groups, people who inject drugs, and young people — all of whom are less likely to access HIV services due to social stigma, discrimination, criminalization, and other barriers, Piot said. These groups currently account for 47 percent of people with new infections, according to UNAIDS data.
Reaching these key populations was high on the agenda last week. Dudu Dlamini, a campaigner for sex workers’ health and rights who was awarded the Prudence Mabele prize for HIV activism during the conference, spoke to Devex about the need to decriminalize sex work in order to remove barriers to HIV services for sex workers.
Leading HIV scientists also put out a statement in the Journal of the International AIDS Society about laws that criminalize people with HIV for not disclosing their status and for exposing or transmitting the disease. Such laws, which exist in 68 countries, “have not always been guided by the best available scientific and medical evidence,” it said, and when used inappropriately can reinforce stigma and undermine efforts to fight the disease.
2. Prevention pay off
With new infections standing at 1.8 million last year, the recent UNAIDS report describes a “prevention crisis.” Traditionally, prevention has received only a tiny proportion of HIV funding, with the bulk going toward treatment. But there was a new buzz around the prevention agenda at this year’s event, in part driven by excitement around oral pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, which can prevent HIV infection among those at high risk. The antiretroviral medication has been successfully rolled out in North America, western Europe, and Australia, and has been shown to help reduce new infections among men who have sex with men.
WHO’s Baggaley said PrEP had “energized the prevention agenda.” However, questions remain about the feasibility of rolling it out in low-income countries, and about its efficacy for women.
“There is a prevention crisis and we need to find better ways of addressing it,” said Christine Stegling, executive director of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance. But while PrEP is a promising tool, a full approach to prevention needs to include a range of methods, combined with interventions that tackle human rights issues and gender inequality, she said.
3. A youth bulge
It was impossible to miss the strong youth presence at this year’s AIDS conference, which organizers said had a larger number of young people attending than ever before, and featured dozens of youth-focused events. This is linked to a growing recognition that adolescents face a disproportionately high risk of becoming infected with HIV, especially in Africa where the population is set to rapidly increase, and where new infection rates are on the rise among young people.
Ugandan youth advocate Brian Ahimbisibwe, a volunteer ambassador for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, said: “Without the youth, the future of all these conferences, and more importantly [of] services and programs, [is] compromised.”
However, 28-year-old Tikhala Itaye, co-founder of women’s rights group Her Liberty in Malawi, said the youth voice had not been fully integrated and that young people were still being “talked at” during many of the sessions, as opposed to being listened to.
“There’s now acceptance that young people need to be at the center … they do have the demographic weight and power to influence issues around HIV,” she said, but “you still find the different youth events happening in different rooms … Why aren’t we all coming together as one to build the bridges and have a global voice?”
Signs at the 22nd International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Photo by: Marcus Rose / IAS
4. The need for integration
A number of sessions talked about the need to integrate HIV programming, which has traditionally been siloed due to having its own funding streams, into broader health care. This was a key message of The Lancet Commission report on strengthening the HIV response published ahead of the conference, and was also the message delivered by WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus during the opening plenary.
“We have not truly helped a child if we treat her for HIV, but do not vaccinate her against measles. We have not truly helped a gay man if we give him PrEP but leave his depression untreated … Universal health coverage means ensuring all people have access to all the services they need, for all diseases and conditions,” he said.
Baggaley said integrating HIV into the broader health agenda posed both “an opportunity and also a challenge and risk for those populations most marginalized,” explaining that key populations currently served by externally funded nonstate health services could see their assistance diminished under UHC if the country in question did not believe UHC includes key populations or had punitive laws against gay men or sex workers, for example.
There was much discussion around the need to combine HIV and tuberculosis efforts, especially in the run up to the first U.N. high-level TB event in September. TB is the number one killer of people with HIV, who are up to 50 times more likely to develop it, according to WHO.
Speaking in between interruptions from the crowd, former U.S. President Clinton highlighted the need to address HIV and TB in tandem during the closing plenary and called on world leaders, notably India which has the highest TB burden, to attend the upcoming U.N. TB meeting.
“If you think … anyone ..that we can possibly bring the developing world to where we want it to be by abandoning the fight against HIV/AIDS and the collateral struggle against TB, you need to think again,” he said.
New findings from the Sustainable East Africa Research in Community Health program, presented during the conference, showed positive results from a community-based program which combined HIV testing and treatment with other diseases including TB, diabetes, and hypertension. The findings of a three-year randomized controlled trial in Kenya and Uganda showed that communities receiving testing and care for HIV alongside related conditions saw nearly 60 percent fewer new TB cases among HIV-infected people and that hypertension control improved by 26 percent.
5. Medical developments
Concerns about GlaxoSmithKline’s so-called “wonder drug” dolutegravir, which a study recently suggested might be linked to serious birth defects among children in Botswana, sparked debate amongst conference goers about whether potential mothers should be prescribed the drug.
WHO already advises that women of childbearing age wishing to take the antiretroviral have access to effective contraception, and will be re-evaluating its guidance as new evidence emerges, Baggaley told Devex. But there are concerns the agency could introduce blanket restrictions for women of childbearing age, which would force them to take other antiretroviral drugs that have worse side effects. The controversy could also lead to delays in the rollout of other forms of the drug, such as a pediatric version.
The conference also featured new data from the APPROACH study, which is evaluating the safety of several different HIV vaccines currently undergoing clinical trials in the U.S., East Africa, South Africa, and Thailand — but researchers admitted a vaccine will take years to develop.
6. The Trump effect
The shadow of U.S. President Donald Trump’s beefed-up “global gag rule,” otherwise known as the Mexico City Policy, loomed large over the conference, and a number of sessions discussed how it is negatively affecting HIV programs. Unlike previous iterations of the policy — which restricts U.S. funding to non-U.S. organizations that offer services related to abortion — Trump’s version is applied to almost all U.S. global health assistance, including PEPFAR.
Santos Simione from AMODEFA, an NGO that offers sexual health and HIV services in Mozambique, said his organization had lost U.S. funding due to the gag rule and was forced to close half of its youth clinics, which offered sexual and reproductive health services alongside HIV testing, counseling, and antiretroviral therapy.
“We could not provide condoms … testing … we just stopped everything,” Simione said.
Participants also spoke of a chilling effect, whereby organizations have stopped offering services that may not actually be prohibited under the rule, and raised concerns about PEPFAR’s staying power within a hostile Trump administration.
Meanwhile, there was heated debate about arrangements for the next conference, which the International AIDS Society has said will take place in San Francisco, California, in 2020. The decision has been met with fierce opposition and threats to boycott the event from AIDS campaigners who say many key population groups affected by HIV will have difficulties attending due to strict immigration policies. In 2009, former U.S. President Barack Obama lifted a restriction banning people with HIV from entering the country, but sex workers and people who use drugs still face legal challenges entering.
