Celebrating Going Bald on the Trans Day of Visibility

 

 

Here’s my announcement for the Trans Day of Visibility: I’m balding. And I love it!

Times right now for trans folks in the U.S. are not good. Really not good. But I’m not going to post about that today, because today we celebrate being visible. And you know what gets me seen the way I’d like to be seen? Well, the beard sure helps—but at 5’2”, a lot of people look down when they look at me, and you know what they see? My big ol’ bald spot, and the wispy tuft that is all that remains of the front of my hairline.

Now, I know a lot of men don’t like going bald. For some weird reason, going bald is framed as unmasculine and embarrassing by our culture (probably greatly influenced by capitalism, which loves to instill anxieties in people so it can offer expensive “cures”). Elon Musk and Donald Trump were both getting my hairline, and they both got transplants to make them feel more manly. (That is, they got gender-affirming surgeries.)

The idea that balding “unmans” you is very silly, because you know what causes male-pattern balding? Testosterone. Taking testosterone is what transformed me from a person with a thick head of hair and a low hairline with the opposite of a widow’s peak—a hairline I always hated—into someone who could feel gender euphoria as my hairline receded.

I study gender professionally, so I understand fragile masculinity intellectually, but I’ll never understand it viscerally. Men who are all hung up on being “alphas” and on nonconsensual dominance displays are generally yawning pits of insecurity, and it’s all so unnecessary! You’re a man because you understand yourself to be one, at a visceral level, and nobody can take that from you. Losing your hair certainly doesn’t take that from you.

And really, this business of cis men with fragile masculinity being horrified by going bald shows us how strangely people can conflate sex characteristics, gender identity, and gender expression. Those distinctions are obvious to me. My physical sex is intersex, as I’ve written about plenty. I identify as an intersex man—that’s my gender identity, who I know myself to be. But I’m not particularly interested in being masculine. I enjoy a more androgynous, flamboyant self-presentation. When my (also intersex, also trans) wife sees me dressed for the day, she has often said, “Good morning, you look very gay today.” And that makes me grin happily! That’s my ideal of gender expression.

There’s a claim made by TERFs that trans boys and men are really lesbians who are terrified by their cowardly internalized homophobia (or have homophobic parents who are forcing them to transition so that the parents can try to transform their reviled lesbian daughters into “fake” straight sons). I personally never identified as a lesbian during the many years I was forced to live as a woman (though I support and love my lesbian sibs!). For the record, I’m pansexual. And I look much more queer after transition than I did before it. That is a source of gender euphoria for me!

So: you know what makes me happy? Getting dressed in the morning, looking in the mirror as I tie my floral tie, and seeing my balding, bearded head.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility!

Why must I list the sex marker on my original birth certificate to get vaccinated?

 

A personal anecdote about going to the drugstore while trans. . .

I was born right after a vaccine for measles was introduced. In those early years of the vaccine, killed virus was used instead of live, and only a single shot was given instead of a series of two. So, the pre-Kennedy CDC urged people in my age bracket to get a modern MMR vaccine if there was a possibility of encountering measles (initially considered in terms of foreign travel or healthcare work). Now, medical news reports recommend that my age cohort get vaccinated.

So, I decided to get an MMR vaccine at my local Walgreens. I've been getting my vaccines at Walgreens rather than a nearby CVS because the Walgreens registration form to schedule a vaccine just asked me to indicate my "gender," while starting in the first Drumpf administration the CVS form began requiring that I check the "sex originally listed on your birth certificate." But recently, Walgreens started making the same registration demand.

I waffled over whether to ignore the new requirement and just list my lived gender. People of any gender get the same vaccines--they don't come in pink and blue sex-variants. There is zero medical reason for Walgreens to have to know my original-birth-certificate sex in order to vaccinate me. In any case, I was born intersex, and so my original binary birth certificate sex-marker was never accurate. And trans people living outside of large "blue" coastal cities receive medical care that is on average substantially worse in quality than that cis people receive in the US. When I am dressed, I currently have the privilege of being gendered correctly by strangers more often than not. Being balding and bearded thanks to testosterone access has a lot to do with that. Sometimes they recognize that I am transmasculine--but here in Wisconsin, sometimes they just presume I am a cis man. (Transmasculine people face a lot less scrutiny than do transfemmes, so my being 5'2" and pear-shaped can go overlooked fairly often.) Should I not try to conserve that privilege in interactions that could negatively impact my health? After all, I have dependents. . .

In the end, I entered the sex originally listed on my birth certificate, for the same reason that my backpack features trans pins and I wear t-shirts with trans-celebrating graphics and I post about trans topics on social media. As someone who has the privilege of often being properly gendered by strangers, it's important for me to be out, and not leave the hard work of trying to navigate and lessen transphobia to those who don’t have that privilege.

Well. I went to get my shot. I filled out my paperwork at the counter (with "Sex: F" printed at the top right corner next to my name) and took a seat in the waiting area. Twenty minutes later, my name was called. I got up and started walking to the pharmacy tech—young, with feminine makeup and long hair. “No no,” she said, “I’m not calling you.” I looked at her for a moment, then went and sat down while she watched. “Next is Cary,” she articulated loudly. I got up again, and walked over. “Your name is Cary?” she asked dubiously. “Yes, that’s me,” I said. She looked down at the form on her clipboard, where my name sat next to the “F” marker. She looked at me. “OK. . .” she said, and led me into the little vaccination cubicle.

Once we were in and the door was closed and I sat down, she had to go over the checklist of prevaccination questions—all of which I had to answer already on the form—but first she said, with a stony look, “Sorry, Cary is a female name so I was confused.”  I have a standard routine in circumstances like this, bringing up actor Cary Grant, but she never heard of him. So with a smile I said I am old, and many names change in how they are gendered over time, almost always going from traditional men’s names to gender-neutral ones to names seen as quite feminine. Lesley. Beverly. Meredith. Lauren. Taylor. “Really? Beverly was a boy’s name?!” “Yep,” replied I.

She didn’t mention the gender marker, though she did glance several times at my chest. (I wear a binder.) She just went ahead and gave me my shot. But she looked uncomfortable the whole time. Who knows what she was thinking. I didn’t ask, because it was a socially awkward situation, and there were a batch of people awaiting their shots. Getting a simple injection is a short medical interaction, and hard to get wrong, so it’s not like this tech’s discomfort posed a substantial risk to me.

But many other medical interactions do put a person’s health or life at risk.

Folks who are trans, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming had been seeing improvement in the quality of our interactions with medical practitioners, but now that’s reversing, because institutions all over the US are caving and pre-complying with executive orders demanding disrespect for trans people that are all being legally challenged. And you see it even in the simplest of interactions, like going to get a shot at the local drug store, and having that experience become more uncomfortable.

It's important that we push back at things like this. There’s no reason to force people to misgender themselves to get a vaccination. Or to get a passport. The cruelty is the point, and we need a nation that is less cruel, not more! I know there are many worse things happening right now, from deportations to the attempt to destroy universities. But so much of our lives exist in little moments and short interactions. . .

This administration has turned a cold cultural civil war into a hot one, but we can mitigate that at least to some degree by being civil to one another. For example, if we’re unsure what’s going on with someone else’s gender when we’re dealing with their paperwork, we can just carry on being friendly and kind.

Do that!
 

Sarah McBride, Desegregating Hero

 

At a House of Representatives hearing yesterday on US relations with Europe, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Keith Self turned to give Delaware Representative Sarah McBride her chance to speak. (McBride is Congress' first transgender member.) Self called upon her as “the representative from Delaware, Mr. McBride.”

Without a beat, McBride replied, "Thank you, Madam Chair." She prepared to give her speech, but first Rep. Bill Keating, the ranking Democrat from Massachusetts, asked Self to correct himself, and when Self again introduced Sarah McBride as "Mr. McBride," Keating asked Self, "Have you no decency?" Self said business would now continue, Keating said not with him until Self properly addressed McBride, and Self said "This meeting is adjourned!" and huffed out.

 Yes, Keating white-knighted Sarah McBride, but she carried herself with great aplomb. She was prepared to do Congressional business despite her being harassed and disrespected by her own peers. She has maintained this coolness in the face of other misgenderings, other attacks, and a federal law being passed by Congressional Republicans to ban trans people from using Congressional bathrooms that match their lived genders--something passed solely to discriminate against her.

On social media, we saw the following comments afterwards:

Self posted, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” citing Trump’s executive order of January 20th.

McBride posted, "No matter how I'm treated by some colleagues, nothing diminishes my awe and gratitude at getting to represent Delaware in Congress. It is truly the honor and privilege of a lifetime. I simply want to serve and to try to make this world a better place.

Mary Miller, Republican Representative from Illinois, who has also been misgendering McBride, threw in a gratuitous deadname: posting that Self "is right to state the biological reality that [deadname] ‘Sarah’ McBride is a man. Enough with the lies. As God ordained and President Trump declared, there are only TWO GENDERS: Male and Female!"

 And the vile Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina and champion bigot, tossed in, "You know what’s indecent? A mentally ill man pretending to be a woman. Biology. Science. The Left should try it some time." 

As a reminder, the racists who fought against desegregation claimed that their Christian beliefs compelled them to do so. So did the bigots who opposed interracial marriage and later same-gender marriage. They always say God is on their side as they kick people in the face. And back when they were segregating bathrooms along racial lines, they claimed science proved this was imperative, citing eugenics.

Anyway, what really impresses me about McBride is her ability to keep her composure in the face of the provocations and bullying and disrespect. She knows--we all know--her attackers are hoping she gets angry and yells at them so they can paint her as dangerous and themselves as reasonable. And she certainly has justification to do so. (In fact, some trans people criticize her for not coming out swinging and getting in the faces of those harassing her, and for using the private bathrooms of Democratic colleagues rather than defiantly marching into the women's bathroom by the House Chamber.) But McBride is doing something much harder than punching back. She is winning the respect of average Americans watching these incidents on social media and the news. Her attackers look nasty and rude, and she looks reasonable, dignified, and unruffled.

We need all kinds of tactics to win battles for the rights of targets of discrimination. Some of those are confrontational, some of them are community building, some of them are legal challenges, and some of them are educational. But one of the hardest is to be among the first people desegregating an institution, be that baseball or a high school or the House of Representatives. Because all eyes are on you, and you have to keep your cool despite people screeching at you and harassing you and spitting on you, and show that you can play the game, or pass the tests, or do the job of legislating under that kind of pressure.

McBride's not rolling over! She calmly misgendered Self right back. But she was prepared to go right on doing her job representing the people who elected her. It was Self, the zero, who huffed out and left the business of Congress (which Republican Congresspeople seem oddly content to just abandon right now) undone.

Sarah McBride is an American hero.

By Exeutive Order: Trans People Don't Exist!

 

Hi! Your friendly local "gender ideology extremist" here, who isn't trans because there is no such thing as a trans person, you see. According to the new federal policy, recognizing trans people in their lived genders is "invalidating the true and biological category of 'woman,'” endangering them and "replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept!" Therefore, by executive order, the federal government has declared it will not recognize any change of legal sex, in order to protect women’s rights.

Ha, those cherished rights in the Equal Rights Amendment the new administration won't recognize?

Yesterday as promised, immediately after being inaugurated, the president followed the Steve Bannon Principle of "flooding the zone with sh*t." We all knew it was coming. He signed executive orders declaring he will send troops to the border, and ignore the Constitution by invalidating birthright citizenship. Orders withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, making us a rogue nation promoting pandemics and climate crisis. Pardoning the1600 convicted criminals who invaded the US Capitol four years ago. Strangling the IRS so it can't stop the ultrawealthy from cheating on their taxes. Declaring inclusion to be exclusion and equity to be discrimination. The list goes on! (Of course, the president wrote none of these orders. They were handed to him tied with a bow, in the form of the ultra-reactionary Project 2025, which he claimed never to have heard of while campaigning.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The tactic of “flooding the zone” is meant to instill panic and confusion, and to divide and conquer. Don't give in to that! There are so many bad things happening at once, and none of us can fight them all. The hope is that we'll therefore spend our time fighting one another over priorities, or just sit there paralyzed, with everything on fire. Instead, pick a fire to fight and do that, while calling out encouragement to people fighting other fires. And this will be a long fight, so pace yourself. Just do something! If you don't know where to start, ask people how you can help. If you can't think of what else to do and your energy is limited, you can always commit to making one phone call or writing one email every day, or every week. Contact a politician to let them know where you stand, or a community leader to let them know you see and admire what they are doing, or a person you see is suffering to send them emotional support. 

There are a lot of people who are going to need support, and that's just as important as more “political” action! When my government says I do not exist and am instead a deluded hazard, I roll my eyes. Oh, I know that this will have real and concrete negative impacts on my life, but I'm 60 and I have been here before. When I was a teen in NYC and started getting involved in what we'd call LGBTQIA+ politics today, my peers were queer street kids thrown out of their homes around the nation by their parents. They made their way to New York, where many of them were supporting their underage selves with sex work. Then HIV swept the country, and many of them died while politicians talked about “homosexuals” causing a plague, and speculated about putting us in concentration camps where we couldn't infect "the innocent." And so we fought for our lives and those of our friends--protesting with ACT-UP, yes, but also making memorial quilts and advocating with doctors and bringing food to the homes of the sick. 

As MLK would tell you, people don't gain rights by sitting quietly in their homes, hiding and waiting for those mistreating them to see the light and realize what they are doing is wrong. One has to take action--directly, yes, but also indirectly by supporting others.

I saw ACT-UP create change, and Queer Nation grow behind it. There were positive social shifts toward LGBTQIA+ acceptance! But progress sure wasn’t handed to us on a plate by the government. Reagan called queer folk mentally ill. Democrats weren’t much better. Bill Clinton passed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which forbade federal recognition of same-gender marriages if any state should decide to perform them. During the Bush years, a majority of the states passed laws or amended their state constitutions to ban such marriages. I joined thousands of others going door to door trying to convince voters not to support amending their state constitutions. We lost in my state. But we survived and kept fighting! And in 2015 we finally won marriage equality, after decades of struggle. 

So I can take a long view, personally. It’s the young people I worry about. It is so scary to be a trans youth today, and to see your state and then the federal government declaring you have no right to exist, are deluded, are a monster threatening cis girls. A decade ago, we were promising LGBTQIA+ kids that we’d protect them from bullying at school and that they were loved. Today, it’s the opposite, and I see a lot of college students feeling massively betrayed by the people who were supposed to be the wise adults in the room. These young people need us to fight with and for them, and they also need us to support them. To affirm that they are valid and beautiful and loved. 

We know these will be ugly times. But we can preserve beauty in them through love, as people have throughout history! Fight to preserve empathy for others, respect for yourself, justice, truth—in whatever way you can. Once more: none of us can hope to fix all of this. But all of us can do something. 

Take it from your local “gender ideology extremist!”

 

On Bots and Trolls Spreading Transphobia while Pretending to be Leftists

 

This is a photo that appeared in the NY Times today in the coverage of the Supreme Court hearing on a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors. (Just over half the states have passed such bans in the past few years, though a number of those are not yet in effect while lawsuits take place. Some of these states--like Tennessee--have made it impossible for adults to legally gender transition as well, by banning changing one's gender marker on a driver's license or birth certificate.) 

Considering this photo, what I want to point out is something I've heard basically no discussion of in the mainstream media, and that is a core tactic being deployed by those opposing trans people's civil rights. There are three main such groups that are real: politicians and influencers who generate outrage for attention, clicks, and votes; transphobes motivated by hate; and foreign nations who deploy social media bots to say provocative things in order to promote division among Americans and weaken the country. But there's a fake fourth group that you find all over social media, and portrayed in big media events like the protests outside the Supreme Court today.

And that fake group is "concerned leftists." Often social media posts state that they are being written by a "lifelong Democrat" who feels compelled to speak up because the party has gotten lost and gone too far. Then that "lifelong Democrat" asserts something outrageous as truth, like "Kindergarten teachers are sending children for sex changes!" This is intended to horrify centrists. Another claim is aimed at progressives: that gender transition is a nefarious rightwing plot to convert gay and lesbian youth into straight people. 

You see both of these forms of propaganda in this photo in the NY Times. Two pre-printed signs read "STOP TRANSING GAY KIDS." And another preprinted sign you can partially see claims that the protest group is "DEMOCRATS AGAINST PUBERTY BLOCKERS."

I am not saying that TERFs do not exist--cis women who espouse a radical feminism for cis women only, and who frame anyone who has or had a phallus as inherently evil. But realistically speaking, they are a small group. This contrasts with what social media threads on trans issues often look like, where it appears that a majority of people opposing trans rights are "lifelong Democrats" and "LGB people" who just have to speak up as the voice of reason, before trans rights renders Democratic politicians unelectable or erases the (cis) gay community.

This is tactical. It is an attempt to convince people on the left that vast swaths of their fellow-travelers oppose gender transition. It is an attempt to move the Overton window to make overt transphobia seem the "normal" position on the left. And its effectiveness can be seen in how little it is noticed and discussed--even though it's hardly new. For example, an organization that played a key role in rolling back the rights of trans youth in Britain is the "LGB Alliance." Supposedly, this is a group of cis gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals who believe gender transition is a mental illness, and one that endangers the existence of LGB people by destabilizing sexual orientation. In fact, the organization is allied with neo-Nazi groups and American anti-LGBT groups, and says opposing same-gender marriage isn't homophobic. Oh--and a poll of people who joined the organization found that the vast majority of the members were straight. It's classic false-flagging, hiding the wolf in sheep's clothing.

As for the NY Times, they keep publishing opinion pieces in exactly this vein, by people who present themselves as LGB progressives who feel morally bound to take a stand against trans rights in the name of sanity, protection of the vulnerable, and preserving the future of the Democratic party. Ugh.

It is important for cis folks on the left to be aware of this tactic. Don't just take it at face value when you read some social media comment that a person spewing transphobic statements is the "lifelong Democrat" they claim to be. Don't believe that there is some huge movement by the cis gay community to ban gender transitions. Do be aware that there are trolls and bots trying to make you believe that you are behind on the trend of people like you reassessing their acceptance of trans folks.

It is important for all of us to be aware of how we can be manipulated!

On Flat Earth Studies, "Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria," and Bad Science

[Illustration by MidJourney]

In the past couple of years, almost half of the states in the US have banned the provision of gender-affirming care for minors. This explosion of transphobic legislation keeping trans youth from working with care providers who support them has been based on two central myths. 

One of these myths is about what sorts of care trans youths access. This panicky myth is that little kids are walking into clinics and being hustled into "mutilating surgeries" and dosed with "experimental and dangerous drugs." (The reality is that most of the care received by gender-dysphoric young people is supportive talk therapy, with a modest subset of patients accessing puberty-suppressing drugs that have been prescribed without controversy for many years to cisgender youths. Surgeries on trans youths are very rare, and most of these are chest reconstructions on 17-year-old trans boys. A vastly larger number of cisgender 17-year-olds get plastic surgeries on their chests every year to support their gender identities, as they are cis boys unhappy with the breast tissue they have grown, or cis girls unhappy with small or uneven breasts.)

But I want to talk to you about the second myth, which is that children are being rushed into medicalized gender transitions when in fact they have "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" caused by "social contagion." The claim is that teens go online and read that it is cool to be transgender, and decide to go along with the fad. Or a cool kid at their school transitions and gets social attention, so they say they're trans too. Then they are hurried into the "medical transition complex" with tragic results because this was just a passing immature delusion of theirs. The proof is that their parents report that their child was "normal" and gender-conforming, until one day they suddenly declared they were transgender and wanted to use a new name and pronoun and transition.

If you have ever tried to support a young trans person, it will be patently obvious to you that this is false. Coming out as trans is really scary for young people. Trans youths face a whole lot of stigma and harassment at school, and at home they may (rightly) fear that their parents will reject them. Only a third of trans minors report having parents who accept them in their identified genders. For this reason, trans youths often try to hide their identities from their families, and conform to their parents' desires for how they present themselves. So when they finally decide they can't hide anymore and must come out, or someone outs them, their unsupportive parents are shocked. As the senior mental health practitioner quoted in this Scientific American article states, “It is not [an issue of] rapid-onset gender dysphoria. It’s rapid-onset parental discovery.”

"Rapid-onset gender dysphoria" is not a real diagnosis. It has been rejected as such by the American Psychological Association. But again and again, when bills banning access to gender-affirming care have been debated and passed by state legislatures, "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" has been cited as proving the ban was necessary. This remains the case as we speak.

This brings us to the central point I want to make as a social scientist, and that is the problem of terribly bad "scientific reports" being generated and occasionally even published in academic journals, specifically in order to promote bigotry and conspiracy theories. The claim made by those who deploy these studies is, "You say science supports providing gender-affirming care to minors? Well, your science is wrong, and we have good science on our side! Your science is produced by corrupt gender ideologues and big pharma! Ours is produced by brave independent researchers!" And transphobic politicians are happy to dismiss the position of 98% of experts in the field, so long as they are handed some published study they can enter into the record.

And that is why it is important to note that one of the two "scientific studies" cited all the time now when transphobic bills are passed (because these two managed to get published) has now been retracted by the journal that published it, The Archives of Sexual Behavior. The reason the journal retracted the article is because the "researcher" who collected the data did not go through the required step of protecting the study subjects and getting their informed consent. But really, that is the tip of the iceberg.

Neither the retracted study nor the earlier study published in 2018, which coined the term "rapid-onset gender dysphoria," actually studied trans young people. Instead, they looked at posts in online groups made up of parents who opposed their children gender transitioning, and surveyed parents in these groups. This means the data they gathered was biased and invalid. 

The retracted study had two authors--one being a controversial psychologist who has been publishing long-critiqued homophobic and transphobic claims for years, Michael Bailey. (Bailey, for example, has framed being gay as a disorder that should be cured, prevented, or selectively aborted.) The second author was not actually a psychologist or academic at all. She used the pseudonym Suzanne Diaz, and is the mother of a gender dysphoric child who was a member of the group for parents who opposed allowing minors to gender transition from which she gathered surveys.

Now, let's be clear: it is ok for people to study subject pools with whom they sympathize! Doctors who are cis white men are "allowed" to study cis white men patients; jazz-aficionado sociologists are "allowed" to study jazz musicians. But researchers need to disclose their social position and potential conflicts of interest. They are supposed to lay out what potential biases they may have. And if 98% of researchers say XYZ, while the author's conclusion is that XYZ is wrong and in fact the opposite is true, they absolutely must acknowledge this and make a convincing argument for why the scientific consensus is incorrect. 

Most of all, surveying people from a group for flat-earth believers cannot tell you if the Earth is truly flat and not a globe. You have to study the actual Earth for the research to come to a valid conclusion. And academic journals should not be publishing invalid articles. This is especially true when those articles are being published in order to support a political campaign, and will impact the lives of thousands, unlike most scientific journal articles, which will only be read by a small pool of academics.

I am glad the Bailey and Diaz article was retracted. But it did great damage in the few years in which it was in print. We have to do a much better job of reviewing submissions that contradict scientific consensus. Sometimes a consensus can be wrong, and careful studies should prove that! But the burden of proof should be a high one, and publishing an article concluding that people may fall off the edge of the Earth based on interviewing people in Facebook groups for flat-earthers does not meet that burden.

 

The Extent of the Assault on Trans Rights in Florida

This is a status report for you on just how bad things are now for trans people in Florida. It is so much worse than most Americans are aware.

The school year is about to start up. Schools must implement HB 1069, which requires public K-12 schools to adopt the policy that “a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex.” They must also enforce HB 1521, which requires people in public buildings, including schools, to only use bathrooms and locker rooms designated for the binary sex they were assigned at birth, and a ban on trans girls and women playing sports in their lived genders.

For K-12 teachers, using a pronoun or title (like Mr. or Ms.) that doesn't match the binary sex assigned at birth is an offense punishable by suspension of their teacher's license. Using a bathroom that does not align with their sex assigned at birth is banned. What the punishment will be is determined by the school district. But the Florida State Board of Education has instituted a policy that state university professors who use a bathroom not matching their birth-assigned sex twice must be fired.

K-12 teachers are not allowed to mention LGBTQ+ issues. If a student talks to them about being trans, they have to report it to the student's parents. Students cannot use any name other than their full legal name on their birth certificate without signed parental permission. And parents are only allowed to give permission for students to use nicknames that are gendered to match the child's sex assigned at birth. Students cannot join a school gay-straight alliance without signed parental permission.

Passed but currently under litigation is a bill that goes beyond "merely" banning providing gender-affirming care to people under 18. It makes the provision of such care a felony and requires the revocation of the medical license of any doctor who provides it. As a result, many Florida clinics have ceased providing any trans care, including to adults. This bill declares a parent's bringing a child to a doctor for trans-affirming care to be child abuse, with the threat of taking children from their supportive parents. And it allows divorced parents in other states who do not have child custody, but who claim that the parent with custody is allowing or intends to allow the child to access gender-affirming care (i.e. that parent accepts the child's trans identity) to kidnap the child, take them to Florida, and have the Florida court issue a new child custody order taking precedence over the prior order in another state.

It is truly horrendous. This is segregating trans people out of public life, legally detransitioning educators, equating acknowledging that LGBTQ+ people exist with pedophilia, censoring knowledge, tormenting children, denying people healthcare, and fostering kidnapping. And a batch of states are right behind Florida in this evil.

People need to know how bad things are, because people they love are going to be burned by it.

 

Why the Deluge of Transphobic State Laws?

OK, what is this thing?

I need to do more thinking about this, but it's been hard, because the stunning flood of transphobic state laws (over 500 introduced this year and it is only April) has been kind of like standing under a waterfall. It's hard to think and write when you can't grab a full breath.

But I do have an idea that I need to flesh out. And, speaking of fleshing out, this is a slime mold, drawn to order by the AI MidJourney. Maybe it reminds you of something?

Slime molds are creepy entities that are actually a mass of single-celled organisms joined together temporarily to make up a more complex, large body that can move, seek out food, and reproduce. And oddly, I think they can help answer a key question. 

How can you possibly get that many transphobic bills and laws in four months?

So here is my thought: Donald Trump gave us a human embodiment of an alternative type of politician: one not interested in governing (much too boring! geeky! compromising! a beta male thing! contemptible!). Trump instead wanted the presidency as a platform for celebrity that could generate the two things he desires--adulation and monetary profit. And he would get those not by "being presidential," but by being outrageous, a WWE character delivering constant drama. He would provide aggrieved conservative fans of patriarchy and whiteness with the thrill of a ringside seat as he smacked down their perceived enemies and kicked them in the face. "The libs" would howl and cry, and Trump fans would drink their delicious tears and get a sadistic thrill.

His fans roared and applauded. But for the rest of us, it was ghastly. Not just painful, as we got kicked at, but tacky and gross. Trump was the embodiment of that "Calvin peeing" car window decal, taking a whizz on the dignity and ideals of American democracy as he bullied the vulnerable.

Around a third of Americans could not get enough of the Trump Show. Not all Republicans--there was a sector who found him exhausting and distasteful. They just hated Team Blue and stayed loyal to Team Red, in some weird sports metaphor of how democracy operates, even when the quarterback was a schmuck.

In the end, Trump lost his bid for re-election--let us thank the stars.

But thousands of little politicians out there are fans who aspire to be the next Trump. There are some big names, like the governors DeSantis of Florida or Abbott of Texas, or the federal Representative and professional troll Marjorie Taylor Greene. But most are pipsqueaks unknown on the national stage. Representatives in state legislatures whose names are barely recognized in their home districts, let alone intoned on the national news. They aspire to Trumpish fame, but come across as impotent caricatures, posing on tacky Christmas cards with the whole family wearing matching outfits and matching semiautomatic rifles. They are mere amoebae.

And that's where the slime mold metaphor comes in. These tiny state representatives aspire to stomp like a giant, smashing norms of civility and hearing shrieks. So they have given up their vaunted individuality to do it. The ameoba-politicians have merged into legislative slime molds. Slime molds do not have brains, but these legislative conglomerates do not need a brain to act: there are PACs and "think tanks" out there that have come up with a plan and drawn up model legislation. They provide the ostensible brain.

The reason this is so destructive for trans people is that those entities acting as brains have fixated on us as the safest target to throw to the lions. Sure, there is action on other culture-war targets, like demonizing immigration and terminating education about racism as supposedly harming white children and violating “parental rights.” But abortion has proven an electoral losing topic, and of the various marginalized groups to kick at, trans people are deemed the smallest, least-supported group, so the safest one to stomp. 

So these national culture-war organizing brains have sent the same message to all the Trumpy slime molds in state legislatures at once: here are the bills to pass. Ban support of trans kids as child abuse.  Ban trans youth from playing sports as an attack on cis girls. Ban use of Medicare by adult trans people. Ban discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation in schools as "sexualizing children." Force schoolteachers and counselors to out trans kids to their parents. Shift the Overton window, and in time you can ban all gender transition and roll back protections for LGBQA people, but don't worry about that yet. Just merge and Hulk up and smash trans people, and you can be that big orange kaiju you so long to be!

And now all these red state legislatures are passing a flood of nearly-identical transphobic bills.

That's my basic read of the situation. A slime mold metaphor.

Drag Bans 40 Years Ago and Today: The Case of Annie Lennox

 

This is the video for the 1982 Eurythmics song Love is a Stranger. It became a hit on MTV in the US in 1983--and then got pulled by the station.

The video starts out with Lennox in this classic femme "blond bombshell" look, but a minute into the video, she pulls off the blond wig, revealing slicked-back short red hair. By the end of the video, she is also sans lipstick and wearing butch mirrored sunglasses and a suit and tie.

It's a gender-queering video. That was true of a lot of the other British synthpop videos that were in heavy rotation in the early 80s on MTV, from bands like Culture Club and Adam and the Ants. But the wig-removing reveal had been a classic of "female impersonator" drag shows intended for mainstream audience consumption since the 1920s. And leaders of American conservative evangelical Christian congregations gave sermons about the evil of MTV destroying teens' morals that used the Eurythmics' video as key evidence of depravity. They presumed Annie Lennox was a man in drag, called this degeneracy, and generated outraged letter-writing campaigns from congregants to MTV.

So the station pulled the video, bowing to this pressure and announcing the decision that "crossdressing men" were not suitable material for their programming, which children could view.

Residents of Britain thought this was hilarious: proof both of Americans' backward religious prudery, and ignorance, since Annie Lennox was assigned female at birth.

The Eurythmics' response was initial disbelief, followed by Lennox publicly stating that she was not in fact a man, though it shouldn't matter. But MTV agents said she needed to prove it. Lennox was rightly affronted (were they implying she should undress for them?). Eventually she had a certified copy of her birth certificate mailed to MTV, and after more internal debates among corporate staff, the Love is a Stranger video was put back into the broadcasting rotation.

The thing is, while the outraged evangelicals of 1983 were incorrect about Annie Lennox's birth-assigned sex, they were not wrong about her being in drag. The entire video is an exploration of femme drag and masculine drag.

And here we are, 40 years later, with US state legislatures in red states enacting laws against drag, because minors might see it, and that would supposedly be intolerable "grooming" activity, "sexualizing innocent children."

What I'd point out is that the whole MTV fracas just made the video more popular. The irony is that people shouting "don't say gay!" all the time are saying "gay" all the time, leading kids to have schoolyard conversations about what it is that these adults say they shouldn't hear about. All the public discussion about not letting minors gender transition means that more young people than ever are aware that this is a possibility, giving them tools to articulate their own gender identities. 

Let's be clear: it also terrifies kids to see the rage and hate on adult faces aimed at people like them. It is very scary to come out as a youth, with adults screaming that they will not allow you rights.

And it's pretty depressing that gender-policing bigots on the political right are not only engaging in the same activities they were 40 years ago, but now they are spewing hundreds of state bills and laws banning books, forcing teachers to misgender their students, banning trans kids from participating in healthy athletics, etc. etc. etc.

This is driving a whole lot of people, whether young or adults, into the closet. But that closet is now huge! A third of the students at my midwestern university identify as something other than a cis straight person, even if many of them are only out about that in private spaces and trusted social circles.

And in those secure spaces they are doing what Lennox did in this video of 40 years ago: defying the gender police.

Considering an Ancient Transgender Saint

This is Euphrosyne of Alexandria, a saint in the Catholic and Greek Orthodox faiths. St. Euphrosyne was assigned female at birth, in the year 410, and was raised as a girl. But at age 18, Euphrosyne, with the assistance of two monks, entered a monastery, with shaved head and wearing men's garb, and became known as Brother Smaragdus. Smaragdus was highly respected for achieving a "perfect ascetic life." He was understood by the monastic community in which he lived for 38 years to be a eunuch. Those to whom he provided spiritual counsel included his own father, who did not recognize him. But on his deathbed, Smaragdus confessed his identity to his father, and asked his father to bury him so his secret would be preserved. His father was so moved by this revelation that he gave away all his possessions and became a monk himself, living in the cell that his child had occupied before him.

Miracles were reported to take place at the tomb. Then people learned that Smaragdus was also Euphrosyne. Did the church then revile this miracle-worker? No. They canonized this gender-transitioning person as St. Euphrosyne, framing them as a woman who had lived as a man in order to preserve "her" celibacy and in service to God.

The Greek Orthodox prayer to St. Euphrosyne is, "The image of God was faithfully preserved in you, O Mother. For you took up the Cross and followed Christ. By Your actions you taught us to look beyond the flesh for it passes, rather to be concerned about the soul which is immortal. Wherefore, O Holy Euphrosyne, your soul rejoices with the angels."

This is not a modern story of medicalized gender transition. And how Smaragdus/Euphrosyne understood themself, we cannot know. But what we can say is that the contemporary claim that Christianity requires people to live in the sex they were assigned at birth contradicts Christian history. And not just church history, but the contemporary practice under which people pray to St. Euphrosyne today. It is the interior soul that matters, not the flesh, says the prayer--and changing lived genders is one way to reveal that.