Trans Formations Project Newsletter ∙ 7/29/22
This week, there’s been a bit of positive news as far as legislation is concerned, but there’s a lot of executive and state-level measures underway that suggest awfulness out of our usual suspects imminent for August. As always, ongoing active bills and contact information for all state representatives can be found on the TransFormations Project’s website.
In other news, bioethicist Florence Ashley has assembled a working document that can serve as a useful, convenient timeline of escalating hatred toward queer and trans folks over the past year–it’s hard to keep these details straight at times, and thus it’s a useful resource for anyone trying to trace this.
The Thing(s) We Won This Week
For once, we’ve got good legislative news! The Massachusetts legislature has passed House Bill 5090, titled, “An Act expanding protections for reproductive and gender-affirming care.” This bill explicitly amends the Massachusetts constitution to declare reproductive choice (i.e., abortion rights) and gender-affirming care as rights, as well as to provide protections for doctors from out-of-state lawsuits. It does not, however, protect patients in the same way. It should be also noted that it is possible that Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker (a Republican) may veto this bill, as such, it is not law yet. Keep eyes on this bill–let’s hope Baker values his credentials as a “moderate” enough to not make trouble about it.
Philadelphia also passed local-level laws protecting the rights of trans and non-binary students in schools, including protection from outing to parents and protection of name use and bathroom access, suggesting possibilities for local policy to be passed elsewhere.
Lastly, an article in The Texas Observer has unpacked and examined the role of skewed NYT coverage in supporting Texas’s protracted legal battle over its extralegal assaults on trans youth. Given the role of the media in fermenting transphobia, it’s important that this piece exists.
What the Heck Happened Last Week?
Nation-wide, what’s happened in the past two weeks requires a refresher. Way back in May, the Biden Administration began taking executive action to combat state-level assaults on queer and trans youth. One element of this push was a change in policy by the USDA in which Title IX protections now explicitly cover trans youth and gender identity. The US Department of Education has also clarified its position on this matter and introduced a proposed rule to align their Title IX policies with Biden’s protective directions. That particular policy is currently up and available for public comment (which predictably means it’s being flooded by TERFs and trolls). If you want to add your voice there and help drown out these types, you absolutely should right here. Both of these policies are grounded in the 2020 decision on Bostock v. Clayton County, a directive issued even by the extreme 6-3 SCOTUS which explicitly rules that “[l]aws that prohibit sex discrimination—including Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, as amended (20 U.S.C. 1681 et seq. ) . . . along with their respective implementing regulations—prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, so long as the laws do not contain sufficient indications to the contrary.”
These reminders are necessary because Republican Attorney Generals (including our dear friend and favorite man indicted of multiple felonies Ken Paxton) are undertaking actions to combat these policies. Led by Tennessee AG Herbert Slatery, a group of over 20 Republican AGs have filed a lawsuit over the USDA Title IX protocol–specifically because the USDA’s subsidization of lunch for students who require assistance to, y’know, eat food, has a clause in it that requires non-discrimination on the basis of sexuality, gender, and gender identity under that protocol. This is where we drop the editorial speak because that’s straight-up supervillain territory: “we don’t like that this program, necessary for disadvantaged literal kids to not starve, might incidentally feed a trans kid, so we’re suing you.”
If you live in the following states, congratulations! Your AG is party to this most on-the-nose of cruelties: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia.
You’ll note the conspicuous absence of Florida from that list!
It is sadly not for any good reason, because Florida has gone even further.
See, Florida has simply directed its schools to flat-out ignore the Biden Administration’s Title IX rules. Further, the memo stating this outright directs Florida schools to discriminate, and threatens schools who don’t engage in such discrimination! Now, we here (mostly) ain’t lawyers, but Alejandra Carabello is, and in her analysis, this is illegal as well as being immoral. See her analysis here, and the full text of the memo in question.
Florida in particular is cementing itself as the reigning champion of transphobia in the States, because of what’s coming in August. This ain’t a drill: Florida’s Department of Health (the same Department of Health who consulted with known conversion therapists, unqualified “experts” and hate groups to manufacture a “scientific” case against transitioning) will be meeting on August 5th, 8AM EST, at the Ft. Lauderdale Airport Marriot Hotel, in order to attempt to ban ALL gender-affirming care (whether for children or adults, but mostly children) in Florida. They will attempt to do this by submitting the “evidence” their medical board has assembled (or commissioned).
On the subject of that evidence, we should talk about its quality (or lack thereof), as it attempts to dismiss US federal guidance on the subject by claiming that evidence lacks quality–an argument which would have more weight if the science they describe as “low quality” wasn’t leagues better than the evidence they themselves rely upon.
Their “evidence” has been exhaustively reviewed, both by independent trans activists (see here and here), and more professionally by Yale Law Review, who have written a document and submitted a formal letter to FL Health over the issue, in collaboration with Yale’s School of Medicine, University of Texas, and University of Alabama-Birmingham.
We will provide a bare-bones summary of the objections to Florida’s evidence here.
Florida Health cites sources that have no scientific merit by authors whose alleged expertise has been disregarded by Federal Courts. Apart from relying on outright pseudoscience, Florida Health commissioned input from James Cantor, who admitted in a deposition that he has no relevant expertise for trans youth. Further, the report Cantor submitted to Florida is near-identical to that which he gave to said Federal court, a testimony for which he was apparently paid–and for which a known hate group (the Alliance Defending Freedom) claims credit. Florida also has in evidence a document by Quentin van Meter, president of a religious group calling itself the American College of Pediatricians, which opposes same-sex marraige, and advocates conversion therapy. Quentin is barred as an expert witness in at least one court, and his Florida document is also near-identical to a paid court testimony. This is all without pointing out the pseudoscientific and debunked claims regarding rapid-onset gender dysphoria that Cantor parrots, which have been thoroughly debunked and disregarded by relevant disciplines.
The report highlights that, if Florida Health’s standards for “quality” were universally held, virtually no existing common medical treatments would be available. They specifically highlight that cholesterol-lowering drugs and routine surgeries such as mammograms would have to be banned under the standards for quality Florida sets for trans-supportive research–standards which, it must be added, Florida Health does not apply to its own sources, most of which have lower sample sizes, less experimental designs, and less evidence for their claims than the studies they dismiss as “low quality.” By doing so, Florida Health falsely claims that there is no scientific evidence supporting gender-affirmative care.
The Law Review points out that the proposed policies FL Health aims to enact are flat-out unconstitutional and discriminatory. This should go without saying.
These are the bare-bone points of the report–but you absolutely should read the whole thing. We cannot quite encapsulate here just how sketchy Florida’s manufactured evidence base is. Read it, and remember, because they’re meeting over this next Friday.