Sometimes Outrage is Called For

 

Look, I avoid outrage-posting, because we live at a time in which outrage has been turned into a terrible currency, generated to glue us to our devices with indignation, which in turn generates polarization and despair.

But there is something worse than outrage, and that is the pooh-poohing of actually outrageous things.

This week, the US Supreme Court issued the terrible US vs. Skrmetti decision, holding that it is fine for states to ban trans youths from accessing as gender-affirming care he exact same medications and procedures that cis youths can and do access all the time to affirm their (cis) gendered comfort in their bodies and put off puberties that have started when they are not ready.

A large 2022 public health study found that accessing gender-affirming care reduced trans youths’ suicidal ideation by 73%. And trans adults who had accessed puberty blockers in youth have a reduced risk of suicide across their lifespans. There have been multiple related studies, but the Supreme Court said there wasn’t enough research to prove definitively that trans-affirming medical care provides benefits (ignoring what every major medical association has said). The Court also ignored the fact that all research studies on trans health that were being conducted in the US have been defunded this year by the Trump administration as “promoting gender ideology.” Ugh.

News of the Skrmetti decision has felt devastating to trans people of all ages, as it can be used to further erode trans rights for all of us. But it’s been a particular gut punch to trans youth, who have been declared in half of the US states to be deluded. Those state laws declare the proper treatment for that “delusion” to be requiring teachers and doctors and counselors to misgender them, and for any doctor or counselor who tries to provide them gender-affirming care to face legal punishment. Trans youth already face the highest levels of school bullying and parental rejection, which makes their risk of suicidal ideation terribly high—and now they face this decision on top of that burden.

On the same day that the Skrmetti decision was released, the Trump administration sent notice to the Trevor Project, which provides the suicide prevention services to LGBTQIA+ youths through the federally-funded 988 National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, to stop work. So trans young people thrown into despair by the Skrmetti decision will find the suicide hotline that is supposed to offer them aid cancelled in the same way as their hope of access to medical care.

That is terrible, as many people I’ve pointed this out to agree.

But I've also personally received substantial "oh calm down" feedback and seen a lot of the same on social media about the cancelling of the Trevor Project hotline. Here's some of the things I've been told or heard:

"This is misinformation. Nobody targeted the Trevor Project specifically; the cuts are just part of a cost reduction across the 988 service and the service will still be there, just streamlined a bit."

"This is old news from months ago. It has nothing to do with some coordinated attack on trans people. You're putting unrelated random old and new stories together and catastrophizing."

"I think cutting the Trevor Project from the national suicide prevention hotline is appalling! But in case you didn't notice, the Trevor Project serves LGBT young people. Where is your outrage about the gay and lesbian youth? Why do trans people insist on making this all about them?"

This pushback is quite disheartening, because this is absolutely a case in which outrage is appropriate. Yes, leaked documents from the Trump administration earlier did state that a cut to Trevor Project services would be coming, but the stated date was in 2026. The administration chose instead to send the stop work notice much earlier, on the day the Skrmetti decision was released—and that is no coincidence. Here is what Rachel Cauley, the spokesperson for the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, had to say about it: the Trump administration will not “grant taxpayer money to a chat service where children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by ‘counselors’ without consent or knowledge of their parents.”

Trivializing a suicide hotline as a “chat service” is vile and reprehensible, as is implying that the staffers aren’t truly counselors but something else—presumably “groomers” with malicious goals. But the fundamental message is the worst part. This spokesperson is literally saying that it is better to let trans kids kill themselves than to treat them respectfully in their identified genders.

Think about that.

And yes, this is specifically aimed at trans youth, as the Trump administration announcement states that the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline will “continue to serve LGB+ youth” after the termination of the contract with the Trevor Project, under its general 988 line, using its regular hotline staffers. And yes, it is absolutely true that this is bad for cis sexual-minority youth, who are losing the counselors specially trained to help them. But the administration is explicitly saying it will serve LGB youth but not trans youth, because supposedly there is no such thing as a trans person. And it is hoping by acknowledging the existence of cis sexual-minority youth to get cisgender LGB adults to be motivated by self-interest to distance themselves from trans people (most of whom are themselves queer, mind you; only about a quarter of people who have gender transitioned identify as straight or heterosexual). Please, cis members of the Pride community—don’t let them divide us and set us at one another! Because the bigots are definitely focusing on trans people’s rights now, which must be recognized—but they’ll be focusing their destructive aims at cis queer folks in due time.

In sum, we can’t spend our lives in a continuous state of outrage, scrolling on our phones. That’s bad for our mental health, yes—but it also deadens people’s impulse to feel outrage when something egregiously abhorrent happens. We see how that has manifested this week, in people reacting to news of the cancelling of the Trevor Project’s national suicide prevention hotline services on the day of the Skrmetti decision. “This is misinformation! You’re catastrophizing by connecting unrelated new and old news items! This is a case of narcissistic trans drama demanding attention when all LGBTQ+ young people are equally harmed!”

Something truly hateful happened this week, and it is important that we treat it as outrageous—because outrage should push us towards action.

 

Don't Give Up Hope!

 

Just waving my little trans flag. Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled by a 6-3 margin that states have the right to ban puberty blockers and any other gender-affirming care being provided to minors. Its supposed reasoning was that the science is unsettled and the topic controversial, so the matter must be left to the states to decide how best to protect trans children.

 

The Court treated flawed, biased, and debunked research by transphobes that has been rejected by all of the major American medical associations as being as valid as reputable, peer-reviewed research. The "medical controversy" it centered is not a controversy within the reputable medical science community.

 

Nor did the Court mention that the Trump administration has cancelled the funding of every single scientific study of trans health, gender affirming care, and the experiences of discrimination of trans, nonbinary, and intersex Americans. (Such funding made up less than 1% of the NIH budget, but has accounted for half of all grant dollars cancelled.) How can such research be considered both vital and determinative by the Court, yet the fact that the federal government is doing everything it can to terminate any such research go unmentioned?

 

The Court also did not care that puberty blockers have been prescribed to thousands and thousands of children who are not trans for decades, with zero controversy, and that this continues today, again without controversy. Nor did the Court note that intersex children who do not request puberty blockers regularly have them imposed--and not only is this accepted by the transphobes who have banned trans care, but framed as obligatory.

 

And all of this is supposed to be to protect trans kids. The youths themselves are thus framed as having no true self-knowledge. The parents who see how gender-affirming care has markedly improved their children's mental health are told that states may hold they are wrong, and are actually abusively exposing their children to harm, when they are in fact doing everything in their power to protect their children's wellbeing.

 

This is not about the government protecting children. It is about the state controlling them, based on bigotry against people like them, like me, like my wife. Want a little proof? On the same day that the Supreme Court announced this decision, the Trump administration ordered the Trevor Project, which provides suicide-prevention hotline services to queer and trans youth, to cease its work. The cruelty is, as ever, the point. They want us to know they don't care if we die.

 

But I care! I see you, all you lovely trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and intersex folks out there, of every age. And so do so many other people! I wave my little trans flag for you. We cannot be erased--not by some ludicrous executive order, not by some wrongly-decided SCOTUS case, not by all the bigots who blather about their freedoms while blatantly denying freedom to others to live and love as their hearts urge them to do. 

 

Don't give up hope, and never stop fighting and shining!

They'll Marry the Dogs! They'll Marry the Cats!

 

 

Let's have some fun! 

It's Pride Month, June 2025, and this year's celebrations were supposed to be especially festive, because it is the 10th anniversary of the legalization of same-gender marriage in the US. That was ensured by the Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges in June 2015.

Unfortunately, those of us who stand under the Pride umbrella are feeling beseiged--especially those of us who are trans. The Trump administration has declared being trans to be "counter to biology," "deceptive," and a danger to women and children.  

Of course, attacks on our communities lead people to feel anxious and depressed. But it's important to remember that we've been attacked before, and we survived! We deserve to celebrate that during Pride Month. And one great way to celebrate is to look back to the claims that were made by the opponents of marriage equality--and have a good laugh. There were so many ridiculous claims made! True, they were taken seriously by bigots, and they got lots of media attention, and did us damage. But they failed in the end to win the day, and they have failed to stand the test of time.

Some day, we can hope, evil claims being made today--that respecting trans youth in their lived genders is child abuse, that trans women are really men wearing dresses to abuse cis women in bathrooms, that a nonbinary gender identity is impossible, that trans men are just cowardly women who can't stand up to misogyny--will be as obviously ridiculous to the general public as these silly claims about marriage equality are today.

So, here we go!

Claim 1: People would marry pieces of household furniture! Or dogs.

In January 2015, Republican candidate for Wisconsin lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefish stated in an interview that if we allow same-gender marriage, “at what point are we going to OK marrying inanimate objects? Can I marry this table, or this, you know, clock? Can we marry dogs? This is ridiculous.”

After ten years of national marriage equality, we can see that there has been no rash of people marrying clocks. And while the number of people thinking of dogs as their furbabies has grown, there has not been an upwelling of people marrying their dogs and calling them their sexy furspouses.

Claim 2: Fathers would marry their underage daughters! Or beasts of burden.

Back in 2004, popular evangelical Christian leader James Dobson fumed that if same-gender marriages were permitted, what was to stop "marriage between daddies and little girls? Or marriage between a man and his donkey? Anything allegedly linked to civil rights will be doable, and the legal underpinnings for marriage will have been destroyed.”

You can see that the theme of equating allowing same-gender marriage with allowing marital bestiality came up again and again. They'll marry the dogs, they'll marry the donkeys! (A paler cousin of this claim can be perceived in today's MAGA framing of progressive women as unmarriageable crazy cat ladies who perversely prefer felines to men, like witches.)

Then there's the claim that men would be allowed to marry little girls, potentially incestuously. Let me just note that in 2024, the Republican Missouri legislator who introduced a state bill to ban gender-affirming care for minors argued during a debate on that bill that 12-year-olds should be permitted to get married, if they got pregnant. . .

Claim 3: There would be mass marriage fraud!

In 2014, Georgia Republican Chairwoman Sue Everhart asserted that if same-gender marriage were allowed, there would be a tidal wave of marriage fraud as straight people faux-married one another: “You may be as straight as an arrow, and you may have a friend that is as straight as an arrow. Say you had a great job with the government where you had this wonderful health plan. I mean, what would prohibit you from saying that you’re gay, and y’all get married and still live as separate, but you get all the benefits? I just see so much abuse in this it’s unreal. I believe a husband and a wife should be a man and a woman, the benefits should be for a man and a woman. There is no way that this is about equality. To me, it’s all about a free ride.” 

This is just so silly! First of all, straight people were always able to straight-marry someone they didn't love in order to get insurance benefits and tax benefits. And as that comes without homophobic stigma, it was and remains much more likely. Anyway, conservative pro-marriage groups today praise the idea of marrying or staying married to someone you’re not in love with as morally superior to being single, and advocate for marital benefits as a way to help encourage this. 

In any case, there's been no surge of straight-arrow men marrying one another for the tax benefits.

Claim 4: Straight married couples would cease to be monogamously faithful to one another!

The anti-LGBTQ+ political action group the Family Research Council argues this today, based on a 2003 Vermont study of civil unions cited repeatedly by opponents of LGBTQ+ rights. The FRC writes that the study found “79 percent of heterosexual married men and women, along with lesbians in civil unions, reported that they strongly valued sexual fidelity. Only about 50 percent of gay men in civil unions valued sexual fidelity.”

You’d think this would make the FRC embrace lesbian couples, but no—instead, they say gay men’s acceptance of polyamory will contaminate straight people if gay men can get married. And monogamy is the foundation of marriage, and marriage is the foundation of the family, and families will cease to exist if polyamory is legitimated! It's just a series assertions connected by illogical leaps that is somehow supposed to convince readers that undoing Obergefell and making same-gender marriage illegal again will somehow make man/woman couples more committed to monogamy. 

Claim 5: Being married to women lowers men’s testosterone, which is good, and which can’t be replicated by men marrying men!

This is another claim still being alleged by the FRC today. It’s based in strain of evangelicism that sees Christian worship and "traditional Christian" marriages of breadwinning men to stay-at-home wives as civilizing and domesticating men from their antisocial, un-Christian impulses. Meanwhile on the manosphere side of the MAGAverse, being in a “traditional marriage” is claimed to raise men’s testosterone and make men more powerful and dominant as they should be. This relates to the obsession of the manosphere with the idea that masculine men are endangered today due to low testosterone caused by feminism/big pharma/soy/whatever. That obsession is pervasive and well-documented. 

So, this FRC claim is in conflict with the most predominant contemporary conservative US ideology about testosterone as the liquid essence of MAGA virility, to be ever maximized. It's sort of sweet, almost, in its holding on to the idea that it is good for men to be gentled by love and religion into gentlemen. Why love for another man can't have the same effect is just flat-out ignored as a question, though. It seems to presume the same thing the manoverse GigaChad-lovers presume: hang around girls and your testosterone will fall, making you less aggressive and dangerous. It just frames that as civilized rather than as contamination by girl cooties.

So, in sum: opponents of marriage equality claimed that if same-gender marriages were legitimated, people would all start marrying animals, committing incest, and being wed to inanimate objects. It would make straight people cheat on their spouses, or just marry other random straight people to get a larger tax deduction. And it would lead to overly-high testosterone rates. 

This list isn't exhaustive, and there were plenty of other claims. Queer parents would sexually abuse their kids, or turn them homosexual. Disdain for the supposed laws of God and nature would lead to disdain for the law of the nation, and crime would explode! Straight people would lose all interest in marriage, period, and procreation would cease! Humanity would die out as a species!!

Today, it seems so clear how silly all of these arguments were and are. 

And that's something to celebrate! May the bigoted claims being lobbed at us today seem as bizarre and archaic a decade from now.

Happy Pride.