How Voter ID Laws Impact Trans People--And Potentially Anyone!

 

I gave a briefing today to the Congressional Progressive Caucus on barriers to voting for LGBTQIA+ Americans. And I want to share these two maps.

The map in shades of red and pink shows voter ID laws. The states in the darkest two colors require photo ID.

The map in blue and tan shows states in which it is impossible (darkest blue) or extremely difficult (medium blue) for someone to change the gender marker on a driver's license or voting ID.

Note the very close relationship between the states that require photo ID to vote and those in which most or all trans residents will have a photo ID with a gender marker that doesn't match their lived gender. This puts them at risk of being harassed when they go to vote, and accused of voter fraud. Trans people therefore experience disfranchisement and the risk of prosecution when trying to vote in these states.

But it's not just trans people at risk. Cis lesbians and gay men who are gendertransgressive have long faced harassment, but can now be accused of being trans and of having a fraudulent ID. And cis straight people are at risk as well! If you've ever run into the "transvestigator community" online, you'll have seen that people who are deeply invested in gender policing seem to believe half of the population is secretly trans. Pope Leo is supposedly trans because he has a narrow jaw, revealing a "female skull!" Michele Obama is supposedly trans because she has "male shoulders!"

Many cis people may think that the laws and procedures that make it unsafe for trans people to show up at polling places will only impact a small number of people. Democratic politicians may not be talking about the disfranchisement of trans people because they think the number of transphobes is greater than the number of trans allies, so it's politically unwise to spend political capital on a small number of trans voters.

But this is wrong on two levels. One, on the level of civics and ethics: every American deserves their right to vote! But secondly, on the pragmatic level. The point of voter ID laws is intimidation and disfranchisement. To make every person of color with a non-Anglo last name fear they'll be accused of being "an illegal" at the polls, for example. And to put anyone who is not a walking gender stereotype at risk of being accused of having a fraudulent ID with the "wrong" gender marker on it--if the poll worker or some poll observer wants to harass them and deter or prevent them from voting.

This is an issue I think should be on everyone's radars.

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 also 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.

 

Creating Social Panics to Entrench Bias: A Brief History

Creating social panics about sexual problems that don't actually exist has been a favorite of reactionaries in the U.S. in response to civil rights movements.

In the 1950s, reactionaries claimed that ending racial discrimination would lead to white women getting sexually-transmitted infections from Black women in public bathrooms. If schools were racially integrated, they said, white schoolgirls would get syphilis from Black girls in shared school bathrooms.

 

These claims were racist and ridiculous. But many white people believed them, and this fear was harnessed to generate waves of resistance against racial integration.

In the 1970s, reactionaries claimed that prohibiting sex discrimination with the Equal Rights Amendment would mean that public restrooms could no longer be segregated by gender, which would lead to widespread rape of women by men.

 

The ERA would not have banned gendered restrooms--that was a lie. But bathroom panic was a main reason the ERA failed to pass.

In the 1980s, reactionaries claimed that protecting people from employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation would lead to gay and lesbian teachers and scout leaders sexually abusing children. Gay men were said to be pedophiles who would somehow be empowered to assault boys in bathrooms by employment nondiscrimination. A "crusade" against this was led by Anita Byrant, dramatically named "Save Our Children!".

 

This was homophobic nonsense. But masses of parents were filled with panic and hate, which slowed and reversed antidiscrimination efforts.

In the 2000s, reactionaries claimed that allowing same-gender marriage would destroy the American family and enable bestiality. Politicians equated same-gender marriage to claiming a right to marry a table--something only a society that had lost all sense could support. 

It was the reactionaries' assertions that were nonsensical. But between 1998 and 2012, 31 states passed state constitutional amendments banning same-gender marriage due to panic that the institutions of marriage and family would be destroyed by. . . marriages and families.

 

Now reactionaries claim that respecting trans students' lived genders will "destroy female sports," and laws that ban trans girls from playing sports with other girls have been introduced in over 30 states. You know what the real problems are? Sports for girls and women are underfunded and disrespected. And as for trans children and adults, we suffer poor health due to exclusion from gyms and athletic activity. Far from the mythic domination of sports, transfeminine girls and women are at particular risk from harassment and lack of a safe place to change or shower that keeps so many from being able to exercise where other people can see them at all, let alone compete in sports.

And then, somehow simultaneously with presenting trans girls as a threat to cis girls, reactionaries claim that their goal is to protect trans kids, who are said to be victims of terrible medical experiments, in which evil parents conspire with mad doctors to mutilate their bodies. Republican politicians are writing laws that hold no minor can understand what they are saying when they assert a trans identity--that it's like saying they want to be a dinosaur when they grow up. And they are pretending that evil doctors are pumping tots' bodies full of adult hormones and cutting up their genitals. None of this has any relation to reality. Nobody is doing genital reconstruction on kids (unless they are born intersex, and this is forced on them as infants, but that's another story). Nobody is giving adult hormones to elementary schoolers. 

The fact is that medical transition services for pre-pubertal kids consists of psychological support. Then, at adolescence, youths and their families are offered medication that simply postpones pubertal changes. This makes no permanent alteration to a youth's body--it just prevents bodily changes from taking place that cause despair. Some pubertal developments, like voice change in a transfeminine youth, are irreversible. Others, like breast growth in a transmasculine youth, can be surgically addressed, but that's much more invasive than simply postponing pubertal changes. That's why the American Medical Association supports puberty suppression for trans youth.

But if you look at commentary about these bills, there are masses of comments from enraged and panicked adults and fulminating politicians claiming that abusive parents are making monsters out of little children with scalpels and drugs. The reactionaries claim they are not motivated by bigotry, they just want to protect children. But  passing a law that states that a person's sex is "genetically encoded at the moment of conception" and "cannot be changed," as the law passed in Arkansas banning transition-related care for minors does, makes it clear that what this is really all about: enshrining the misgendering and rejection of trans people in law. The proposed law in North Carolina would even require schoolteachers to immediately inform a child's parents if they observe the minor exhibiting "gender nonconformity," making the policing of binary gender stereotypes a state employee duty.

Once again, we see a panic about sex and the cries of "what about the children!" being used to spread bigotry, dressed up in concern trolling. Anita Bryant claimed to be motivated by her "love of homosexuals" to be trying to save them by promoting homophobic discrimination. Transphobes today claim they are motived by care as well. But the fact that banning recognition and care for trans youth is likely to lead to increased despair and suicidality doesn't deter them at all, because "care" is not the real motivation here. Bigotry is, fanned into a firestorm by a social panic.

The thing you have to remember about sexual panics is that they are not spontaneous or random. They are purposefully generated by people with power to prevent social change.

We have to call out these manufactured panics for what they are. Putting current faux fears in the context of past ones can help make it obvious. So share these histories!

American Attitudes Towards Trans People Are Not Great

Americans seem to have the impression that LGBT people in the U.S. have more rights and get more respect than in most places. In particular, I've run into many Americans who think that trans rights have been advancing here at mach speed. If they're transphobic, of course, they frame this as some horrible threat to society that must be undone. But I've encountered a lot of cisgender Americans who understand themselves as generally supportive of the LGBT community who still say that the pace of change when it comes to trans issues has been so fast it's hard for them to keep up, so let's just slow down. The U.S. may be the most socially advanced country, but we don't need to get crazy.

Well, this fall an international study was conducted in 27 countries on attitudes towards trans people. And what it shows is that rather than being the most "advanced" in its acceptance of trans people, the U.S. population has a much more negative attitude towards trans people than the norm.

Consider these findings:

1. Americans are the most likely to say they would intentionally misgender trans people (call a trans woman "he," a trans man "she," and refuse to use any gender-neutral pronoun). For example, there are almost twice as many Americans who say they would intentionally misgender trans people than there are Australians or Canadians who say this.

2. Americans are three times more likely to say being trans is a mental illness than are citizens of Italy, Spain, Argentina or France.

3. Americans are more likely than study participants in any of the other surveyed countries to frame being trans as "sinful."

4. "Americans are the most likely to say that society has gone too far in allowing people to dress and live as one sex even though they were born another (36%), while people in Japan are least likely to agree with this sentiment (9%)."

So, you may hear people telling you that America is "way out there" when it comes to trans rights, and needs to slow down. In fact, the U.S. is dragging way behind the international community when it comes to accepting and supporting trans people.
Americans need to know that, step up, and do better.

A Red State is "Detransitioning" State Employees--Like Me

It's been close to a decade since I legally gender transitioned.

While it was a great relief to finally live authentically in the gender I knew myself to be, transitioning was a process both challenging and tedious. I needed to have my name and gender marker changed in so many databases. This meant awkward interpersonal interactions. (For example, when I went to get a driver's license issued with my new name and gender marker, the person staffing the front desk at the DMV, apparently seeing me as insufficiently manly looking after just a few months on testosterone, responded by exclaiming in front of the crowd waiting in line, "What are you, some kind of pre-op?!").  It meant educating and cajoling and placating administrators of multiple bureaucracies who had never personally changed anyone's gender marker in whatever system they administrated, and were disconcerted to be asked to do so. It meant presenting my court order of name change and state ID showing my "M" marker over and over again.

Running the gauntlet of getting my gender transition acknowledged and implemented took months. It was tiresome. But I managed it, and moved on with my life. As my appearance shifted under the influence of hormone therapy and most people got used to addressing me as "he," the levels of stress involved in just living my life as myself slowly dropped. There were ongoing battles that remained, like my fight against the ban on insurance coverage for transition-related care in the policies offered to Wisconsin state employees, but the legal hassles seemed mostly behind me. I could mostly breathe free and just go about my business.

And for a brief moment, things really started to look up. After eight years of fighting with no success for insurance coverage for the trans care my wife and I required, policy directives under Obamacare forced my state to say it would lift the ban on transition care. The exclusion was to be lifted on January 1, 2017. But in November of 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election, promising to repeal Obamacare and produce a total change in federal regulations. Now, my Republican governor and state legislature felt empowered to enact transpohobic policies. In December, the "Employee Trust Fund" or ETF--the agency administering all benefits programs for Wisconsin state employees--directed all insurers providing coverage to state employees to reinstate the ban on coverage for trans care.

For a family like mine, with two gender transitioners who had been waiting for many years to access additional care and get coverage for our HRT, that was more than depressing. But at least we saw it coming.

What came like a bolt from the blue was the notice I got a week ago.

It was a Friday afternoon. I'd just given a colloquium talk in my department. The week was winding down, and so was I, sitting in my office going through the day's pile of email--the usual questions from students about assignments and discussions about programming with instructors in the LGBT+ studies program I direct. Then I came across an email from my university human resource specialist, opening with a cheerful "Hello!" It informed me that ETF had changed their policy on gender transitioning in their system (which covers not only health insurance but all benefits, like disability, retirement plans, etc.). It stated that in order to "maintain a gender change," I had to provide additional documentation for myself and for my wife.

We were being detransitioned by the state, though I'd legally transitioned nearly a decade ago, and my wife started her transition in the 1990s. And we did not have the additional documentation demanded.

Reading this email caused an immediate feeling of shock at the attack on our identities. But let me note that reverting our gender markers to what they were years ago does more than emotional or psychological damage. And it impacts more than how others view our genders. For example, I have developed a neurological problem with my arm leading to partial loss of the use of one hand. I'll be seeing a neurologist in a few days--and a mismatch in my identification can mean denial of insurance coverage. That could be very costly to my family--but delaying needed medical care is costly in other ways.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Before I get to discussing the additional demands ETF is making, let me point out a very broad problem, and that is the idea that agents of the state can change one's legal status retroactively at any time. Imagine, for example, if the state decided that it wished to make it harder for people to get married, and so it imposed a new requirement--that in order to have a marriage recognized, residents would have to provide DNA evidence proving they and their spouse are not related (an expensive prospect). Then imagine that all married state employees were informed that their status had been reverted to single in employment databases and systems, because they had not complied with the DNA test requirement when documenting their marriages. That's not the way regulatory changes, mundane or shocking, operate--they are applied going forward, but not retroactively.

Now, as for the new procedures for gender transitioning, there are three requirements listed by ETF. The first is that the employee must notify ETF directly, providing their old and new names, old and new gender markers, ETF ID number, and a declaration that they are gender transitioning. Previously, employees notified HR at their place of employment, and employer HR staff changed the gender marker directly in the benefits system. But now ETF will centralize control over implementing transitions, and maintain a database of gender transitioners. In essence, we are being required to register with the state. As a Jewish person who lost extended family in the Holocaust, I find this extremely creepy.

The second thing trans people are required to do is provide "proof of identity," such as a driver's license or military ID showing the new name and gender marker. That's what we had to do in the past, and my wife and I can easily produce our Wisconsin driver's licenses showing our names and most correct binary gender markers. But now ETF is demanding more.

We are now being required to produce a third item, "proof of gender." This is very strange, because a driver's license already provides state-recognized proof of one's gender. Requiring more serves no purpose other than to make it harder for people to get their identified genders recognized. And the new "proof of gender" items are difficult and intrusive items to get.

Let's look at the options. One is a court order of gender change. To get one of these is difficult, expensive, and in many states, like Wisconsin, requires a doctor to testify that one has had surgical sex reassignment. Now, some people cannot have such surgery for medical reasons. Others do not want it--they desire social recognition of their identified genders, not a program of body modifications. And nonbinary gender transitioners often find they are denied access to surgeries. But let me underline that in any case, the very surgeries that ETF is making necessary in order to have one's transition recognized it has also categorically excluded from insurance coverage. My wife and I have been waiting for years to access some surgical interventions that would make our lives easier on many levels, one of which is being able to access things like a court order of gender change. But we can't afford them without insurance coverage. It's a Catch-22, and seems deliberately cruel.

Well. Instead of presenting a court order of name change, another "proof of gender" is a US birth certificate showing the identified gender. Now, in bluer states than mine, amending one's birth certificate sex requires just a letter from a doctor or therapist attesting that a person under their care is gender transitioning. A few states with reactionary policies, like Ohio and Idaho, do not allow birth certificate sex to be changed for gender transitioners at all. But most states, like Wisconsin, will do it for people who have had sex reassignment surgery which is documented in some particular way--in Wisconsin, it's by a court order of gender change. So we're back to square one, for my family and for so many gender transitioners.

What else will ETF accept as proof of gender? Another option is a US passport showing the identified gender. My wife and I have been trying for months to get the documentation we need to get passports issued in our lived genders, but have run into difficulties trying to get certified copies of legal documents. Hopefully these problems will be resolved in time and the rules for gender transition and passports won't shift under us before then. But even if we had them, this option as provided by ETF is highly problematic. Their policy requires that for a passport to "count" as proof of gender, the original passport must be mailed to an ETF P.O. box to be examined. It's crazy to demand that someone hand over their passport, via ordinary mail, with no specified procedure for ensuring its safety, no description of how long it will be held, no contact information given for an employee to inquire about the location of their passport should they not receive it back in a timely fashion, and most of all no explanation as to why the original document has been demanded, rather than just shown to the employee's HR office. So, even if we did have passports, we wouldn't want to mail them off to ETF as required.

Finally, there's the alternative of mailing a letter from a care provider as "proof of gender." At first, this seems the go-to option. Letters from medical practitioners and therapists are employed in many transition contexts. But there are two problems with ETF's letter option. First, ETF will only accept a letter from someone with a doctoral-level credential. The clinic where my wife and I get our medical care is staffed solely by (very competent!) nurse practitioners, with masters-degree-level credentials. So our care provider isn't allowed to write a letter for us.

But there's something more insidious, and that is the content required in the letter. Transition letters are commonplace, and they follow a standard format intended to protect the private medical information of the gender transitioner. The care provider writing the letter makes only a general statement that "appropriate clinical treatment" has been provided. But ETF demands that the letter writer explain what that treatment was. This is none of their business! Moreover, ETF is staffed by bureaucrats and accountants, not medical personnel qualified to review such information.

There's no justification given for the letter to disclose such highly personal information. But given what we've just experienced in terms of retroactive de-recognition of our gender transitions, there's reason to fear. It may be that if certain medical procedures are not listed in the letter, even if the letter is accepted now, at some time in the future employees might find their gender transitions reversed in state records yet again.

Ugh.

So, I've been trying to mobilize my university HR to push back against the detransitioning of me and my wife in the benefits system, and against the imposition of onerous and atypical requirements future gender transitioners. A conference call is planned between ETF and HR administrators. We'll see what the outcome is, but one piece of information I have been given so far by the head HR administrator at my university is that apparently my wife and I are the only people to whom ETF directed a notice be sent that our gender transitions would be reversed unless we produced additional documentation, at least as far as he could determine.

There are two interpretations I can give this disconcerting bit of information. Both turn on the fact that I am quite open about being trans, run an LGBT+ studies program, and as an academic who researches intersex and trans issues, have been interviewed by the media numerous times to provide commentary on related news stories. The first interpretation is that some ETF staffmember has been tasked with identifying trans state employees to receive detransitioning notices, and as I'm simply particularly visible as a trans employee of the state, I and my wife were the first identified. And the other is that because I am a critic of transphobic policy initiatives, my family has been personally targeted in retaliation--which is a pretty unsettling possibility. I suppose there's a third scenario--that every other trans person who is a state employee or receives benefits as family member of a state employee presented their HR office with a court order of gender change or amended birth certificate when they gender transitioned. But given that there are almost 300,000 state employees, how hard it is to get those documents, and the fact that they were not considered necessary until now, this seems extremely unlikely. It's an anxiety-inducing situation to find oneself in under any interpretation.

In any case, the short story is this: around the US and the world, as trans rights have advanced, insurance coverage for transition care has become commonplace, while changing gender markers has shifted to being based upon gender identity, not any particular physical sex characteristic or its modification. States like Wisconsin were lagging behind the curve, but progress was being made. Yes, there were backlashes, like the flurry of so-called "bathroom bills," but under the Obama administration, these were federally identified as discriminatory.

But like so many things, a lot has changed fast. And trans people are among those finding themselves besieged.

And that's how I find myself facing detransition by an agency of the state.

Dear U.N. Ambassador: Gender Identity is Not a Sexuality

All around the world, people are being maltreated because they are born intersex, or they are trans, or they have a sexual orientation or identity that is in the minority. And LGBTI+ rights have become a battleground in international law. Representatives of nations including the influential Russia have been fighting at the U.N. against the idea that gender and sexual minorities should be protected, and continue to criminalize same-sex activity, gender transgression, and attempts to gender transition. It's important that the U.S. fight for the rights of sex, gender and sexual minorities.

So I was glad to hear today that the U.S. delegation to the U.N. is going to do this. Deputy U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Richard Erdman announced U.S."support for the rights and dignity of all individuals regardless of their sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity," even where those rights have not been recognized in international law. (Bans on "sodomy" are now against international law, but international law doesn't protect gender identity, nor does it recognize a right to same-gender marriage.)

It's great that the U.S. delegation to the U.N. is taking some action. What's not great at all is the language that has been chosen. The "U.S. government says it will begin using the term 'sexual rights' in discussions of human rights and global development" to refer to the rights of sex, gender and sexually marginalized people, and to the right to protection of "sexual and reproductive health."

I have to say, as an intersex trans person, this is highly problematic. Being trans is not about sexuality. (Neither is being intersex; unfortunately the U.S. government hasn't gotten around to considering the idea that intersex people have a right to physical autonomy.) 

I'm all for sexual and reproductive health. Sexual orientation should be protected. These issues can certainly be linked together under the banner of sexual rights. But sticking trans people in there as a sort of afterthought actually does us damage. It winds up further entrenching damaging beliefs about us: that people gender transition due to some sort of sexual kink, and that how we have sex and thus the status of our genitalia is what defines who we "really are."

We've been explaining for years that gender identity is not a sexuality, but even people who are trying to act as allies seem only to half-hear us. It's good to hear our U.N. deputy ambassador use the phrase "sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity". . . but then that gets collapsed into "sexual rights," which is not good to hear at all.

One more time, people: gender identity and sexuality are different things.

On Trans Gender Identity and the "Intersex Brain"

Once upon a time, in the fairly recent past, people often asked what made a person gay or lesbian—taking the perspective that homosexuality was a pathology that needed explanation. Various theories were proposed: psychological (could a domineering mother and passive father be the cause?); moral (was it a failure to embrace “traditional Christian family values”?); and biological (was there some hormone imbalance or brain abnormality at fault?).

Today, when someone comes out as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, the question of etiology is rarely raised. Lesbian, gay and bisexual rights advocates are much less likely to spend their time tossing back at the homophobic the questions, “What made you straight? When did you realize you were straight? Could you do something to change your heterosexuality if you tried?” Sexual orientation is generally treated as a fact, something that is not pathological and that requires no etiological explanation.

Back in the 20^th century, however, many advocates for “gay rights” sought to find a physical cause for homosexuality. They hoped that finding proof that there was some immutable, biological reason for homosexuality, beyond the individual's control, would lead to greater social acceptance. In fact, it was political activism, not scientific discoveries, that led to the social shift to viewing LGB people as a minority deserving of protection from bigotry. But for a while, many “gay rights” activists were focused on finding proof that there was such a thing as the “gay brain,” and research on the topic persists today. The size of the hypothalamus of gay men has been argued to be more similar to straight women's than straight men's. It's been posited that straight men and lesbians have brains with a right hemisphere slightly larger than the left, while straight women and gay men have balanced brains.

Implicit behind these arguments is a belief that gay men are in some way effeminate, and lesbians masculine. But LGB activists scoff at this belief today—the idea that gender expression relates to sexual orientation now seems offensive and ridiculous. So while scientific research continues to look for ways in which gay male brains are “feminine” and lesbian brains are “mannish,” LGB rights advocates no longer pay much attention.

We've not come to this point, however, in the struggle for trans gender rights. Trans people today are making strides, but we're now in the position LGB people were decades ago. We face a great deal of discrimination and disgust from the cis gender population, and we are constantly asked, “What made you trans? Was it psychological trauma, is it that you don't respect traditional Christian family values, or is there something wrong with you medically?”

And just like lesbian, gay and bisexual people in the 20^th century, trans people today face such virulent bigotry that many trans people hope finding scientific proof that there is some immutable, physical reason for trans gender identity, beyond the individual's control, will lead to greater social acceptance. Today many trans activists are eager to trumpet neurological studies that purport to show that the brains of trans men are more like the brains of cis men than of cis women, or that the brains of trans women are more like those of cis women than cis men.

It was the philosopher Descartes who first argued that the brain contains localized areas that control the body. He declared that the soul occupied the pineal gland—a theory sounds ridiculous today, when we know that the pineal glad is more prosaically the structure that secretes melatonin. But today, many trans people (it must be clear by now that I am not one of them) are looking for a brain structure housing gender identity. They argue that people are born with a “brain sex,” and that if this “brain sex” differs from the individual's genital sex, they suffer from an intersex condition that must be treated via gender transition.

I am deeply uncomfortable with this intersex theory of gender dysphoria. While I know from personal experience that it gives some trans people great comfort, and while I worry about seeking to demolish what others feel is their life raft, I want to lay out my objections.

My first objection is a scientific one: gender identity and gendered behavior are deeply complex. They are no more located in the hypothalamic unciate nucleus than the soul is located in the pineal gland. If many of ares of the brain are involved in something as comparatively simple as speech, how many more must be involved in matters as complex as sense of self?

A second objection relates to the entire field that Cordelia Fine names “neurosexism.” Basically, the entire field of neurological study of sex differences is pervaded by sexism and flawed by a teleological approach: “We know that men are good at math, logic and sport, while women are good at nurturing and communicating, so let's pin these to some brain differences we can locate.  This will show that politically-correct resistance to the idea of eternal gender roles is pointless.” By linking claims to trans rights to this body of science, we're tying ourselves to gender stereotypes and a regressive social agenda.

A third objection is that the brain is a very “plastic” organ, meaning that it changes over time. For example, when a deaf person communicates via sign language, different areas of the brain are “recruited” to process communication than just those used for oral speech. Furthermore, early and late learners of sign have different patterns of brain activation when they observe another person signing. In other words, the brain, like other parts of the body, is affected by life experience and use--it varies greatly from individual to individual, and for one individual over time. Even if we were to find that trans men resemble cis men in their patterns of brain use, this would not mean that such a similarity is inborn. It would just mean that trans people have life experiences similar to cis people who share their identified sex, cultural norms, and gendered behavior.  This is certainly proof that we experience our gendered identities and lives in the same way cis people do.  It is not proof that trans people are born with intersex brains.

Another objection I have is to the foundational premise at hand: that trans men and cis men are uniformly masculine in their gendered behavior and style, and hence distinct from feminine trans and cis women. In fact, there are plenty of men, cis and trans, who are nurturant parents, or who like the color pink, or who are bad at sports. There are many women, cis and trans, who are dominant athletes, have bad verbal skills, are excellent at spatial relations, or who hate primping. Furthermore, plenty of trans people are nonbinary in identity, which can't be explained in the least by this dyadic, reductionist framework.

I also object as someone who is intersex by birth to the framing of trans identity as an intersex condition. The difficulties faced by intersex people can indeed relate to gender identity, since children born intersex today are forcibly assigned a dyadic sex at birth, and often subjected to sex reassignment surgery to which they cannot consent. If the child grows up not to identify with the sex to which ze was coercively assigned, gender dysphoria results. But no test has ever been developed that can determine what the eventual gender identity of an intersex person will be—not in the brain, the chromosomes, the gonads or the genitals. And the issues intersex people face center on forced sex assignment in childhood--something which advocates of the intersex brain thesis tacitly support when they argue that since trans status arises from an intersex brain, it "must" be treated medically. Like many intersex people, I boggle resentfully at the idea held by some trans people that intersex people are “lucky,” have a privileged relationship to the medical community, or are free from stigma in our lives. The belief that being categorized as intersex would lead to advantages, which causes some trans people to frame trans identity as an intersex condition, is deeply flawed.

Finally, I would argue that this entire issue is a distraction. Remember that it was not the discovery of a brain area “causing” homosexuality that led to the relative successes of the LGB community in gaining civil rights. It was activism that led to those gains. The belief that if differences could be shown to be inborn, liberation would result, seems hopelessly naïve to me. Bear in mind that for many decades, scientists argued that women should not be permitted to vote or attend college because their brains were too small. More starkly, consider the Holocaust, which was founded on a belief in inborn racial inferiority.  Some intersex conditions can be detected prenatally, but this has not led to more widespread acceptance of intersexuality.  When these conditions are detected, doctors typically offer to terminate the pregnancy.

For all these reasons, I urge people not to hitch the wagon of trans rights to the idea of inborn, dyadic, neurological differences. Brains are extraordinarily complex and shaped by culture and experience over time. Gender identities are multiple, gender roles constantly evolving, and gender expression varies widely from individual to individual. Intersex people face huge obstacles, and framing us as the lucky group to be emulated denies our suffering.

The solution to transphobia is not neurology, but political activism.