The Kids Are Not All Right

A new wave of anti-trans legislation is here—and it's targeting the youth, says the LGBTQ+ civil rights lawyer Chase Strangio.

Feb 01, 2021

Photo: Chase Strangio by Nicolas Bloise.

1. There are two major trends of bills being proposed in state legislatures that target trans youth: One type of bill bars women and girls who are trans from women’s athletics and the other criminalizes gender-affirming healthcare for youth under the age of either 18 or 21.

Both of these types of bills at their core are aimed at advancing the argument that it is somehow dangerous to be transgender and that lawmakers must step in to stop young people from being trans. It feels very much like a eugenics project disguised as a “civil rights” project to “protect” cisgender women and girls.

On the sports side, there are two threads of argument that animate these bills. The first is focused on the idea that all trans women and girls will excel at sport because of some inherent, competitive advantage that flows from being assigned male at birth. The argument goes: trans people will enter the sacred space of women's sports and will displace cis women, causing women's sports to collapse.

This is based off of a number of faulty premises. The beginning premise of these arguments is always that men and boys are better, stronger, and faster than women and girls—and that there's no way that women can compete if people who these lawmakers consider to be "male" are in the mix. But this is simply not true for at least two reasons. First, and fundamentally, trans women and girls are women and girls and any attempt to classify them as or compare them to cisgender men and boys is wrong. The second is that trans women dominating in sports is categorically untrue on both a practical and scientific level. Women and girls who are trans have been competing in women's sports forever and are included in women’s sports at every level of competition around the world. And despite this, we have quite literally never seen trans dominance of any kind; the Olympics has had a policy of allowing trans women to compete openly in women's athletics in one way or another for over 15 years. An openly trans woman has never qualified for the Olympics, let alone won a medal. It's just untrue that there is some sort of dominance that emerges.

“In essence, there's a global movement to stop people from being trans—which is, at its core, a eugenics movement.”

Even assuming there were some advantages that flow from the influx of testosterone that comes from endogenous puberty of people assigned male at birth, the purpose of K-12 athletics is not exclusively about winning. Youth participate in sport for a range of social and emotional benefits—and taking that away from trans youth, who are already disproportionately vulnerable and isolated, is extremely damaging. And on a medical and scientific level, most trans young people who are able to participate in high school athletics are undergoing some form of medical transition, thus mitigating any testosterone-derived performance advantage.

The second thread of argument animating the anti-trans sports bills and indeed all anti-trans discourse is: You don't have the autonomy to self-determine who you are, so the state is going to come in and control the categories of women and girls and exclude people based on assumptions about their bodies. We're seeing a lot of rhetoric that anyone who doesn't fit the proper definition of “womanhood” is a threat to the category itself. Not only is this extremely damaging to trans people, it also has many damaging effects on cis women and girls. The majority of athletes in women’s sports are cis women and girls, and the more the state is empowered to police their bodies to determine who is properly “female,” the more all women and girls will suffer.

On the healthcare side, the mask is truly off, so to speak. These bills are explicitly about stopping people from being trans. They're proposed under the rubric of the medical care itself being "experimental" or harmful, even though every major medical association supports the care. So you have the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society, and the Pediatric Endocrine Society essentially saying this healthcare is necessary for trans young people and is critical to minimizing adverse mental health outcomes where the care is indicated. And yet, despite this medical consensus we are seeing a rejection by lawmakers of even the idea that parents and doctors are affirming trans youth. During legislative hearings, lawmakers (who are rarely, if ever, medical professionals) decry the “experimentation” on youth and argue that all young people should be guided back to living in their assigned sex. If you listen to the arguments, what they are saying is: the state should use the power of the criminal law to force people to be cis.

And while lawmakers claim the bills are necessary because youth can't consent to this particular medical treatment and don't understand the long-term implications on their bodies, the bills always exempt non-consensual surgical intervention on intersex infants. So while they are simultaneously criminalizing care like puberty blockers, which actually has no long-term physical effects on the trans young people who undergo the treatment, the bills allow irreversible and extremely harmful intervention on intersex infants for the purposes of "normalizing" their genitals. At their core, these bills are about enforcing norms of binary sex difference and not about protecting anyone. And the consequences of these bills, if passed, will be dire...and deadly.

In essence, there's a global movement to stop people from being trans, which is, at its core, a eugenics movement. And if we don't change the direction, if we end up in a position where states start passing these bills, it's going to be really catastrophic for trans young people.

2. It can seem confusing to learn about the real-time momentum of the anti-trans movement if you haven’t been paying very close attention. On the one hand, we are living in an era of more trans cultural visibility than ever before. We are also coming off of two major Supreme Court wins for LGBTQ+ folks—marriage equality (Obergefell) and employment discrimination being outlawed (Bostock). A more recent headline—that President Biden has reversed a Trump executive order which barred trans people from serving openly in the military—also helped to fuel a media narrative that we are trending towards progress.

The reality is that the current anti-trans legislative and litigation landscape is very much a backlash to the progress we’ve seen for the broader LGBTQ+ community. Unfortunately, unlike with other issues related to the community (think: Masterpiece Bakery), trans-specific causes tend to get less awareness, funding, and media coverage. This lack of funding and coverage is compounded by the fact that many of these fights are being fought at the state level. However, if we lose at the state level, then challenges to these bills will have to be litigated in a Trump-stacked federal judiciary all the way up to to the Supreme Court—which is now, thanks to the rushed appointment of conservative Amy Coney Barrett—almost certain to be hostile to LGBTQ+ causes.

None of this emerged out of thin air. It is truly part of a long and well-organized campaign to expel LGBTQ+ people from public and civic life in the US. A lot of how we got to where we are today is a backlash to progress that (mostly white and wealthy) cis LGB people were able to achieve over the past decade. We had the Supreme Court ruling for marriage equality in 2016, and that was the culmination of massive investment of the LGBTQ+ movement’s resources and yet, there was no preparation for the inevitable backlash, which was always going to target trans people. Post marriage equality, we saw the emergence and proliferation of the anti-trans bathroom narrative and all of the anti-trans bills targeting trans youth in schools in 2016.

That year, HB2 in North Carolina passed, and then 50 other bills trying to bar trans kids from the bathroom were introduced across the country. It was devastating. Thankfully, after regrouping some, the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement started to take back some power and began to win fights over access to the restroom in the state legislatures between 2016 and 2018. We also began to win at the ballot. We stopped the ballot initiatives targeting trans youth in schools and trans people going to the bathroom in Anchorage in 2018, in Montana and Washington in 2018, and then in Massachusetts in 2018.

But ever well-funded and powerful, the anti-trans movement shifted focus—now, to targeting trans youth in sports in 2019, based off of the anti-trans discourse that escalated in the UK around this time. Here is where you really start to see this narrative around the “takeover of sports by trans women and girls” come into popular discourse (even though trans women and girls had been competing in sports for decades). This coincides with a secondary movement to take health care away from trans young people that begins in the UK and started to spread into the anti-trans movement in the US.

“We need to elevate what is happening and raise awareness about the aggressive and well-funded movement that is trying to stop people from being trans.”

Our dear friend JK Rowling and the other UK TERFs [trans exclusionary radical feminists] have really built a powerful network of anti-trans discourse that aligns with state power and the existing imperatives to enforce sex binaries through governmental power.

All of these factors coalesced at the beginning of 2020 to create the proliferation of these bills targeting trans kids in health care and in sports. Due to the pandemic, many state legislatures adjourned early, so one silver lining is that we emerged from state legislative sessions with only two anti-trans bills passing (and both thankfully have already been blocked in court). But since then, with the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock, Joe Biden’s election, and the early adjourning of last year’s sessions, we are beginning 2021 in a perfect storm of anti-trans backlash hell. The stakes truly could not be higher.

3. Right now, there are crucial things we can do to help protect trans kids. We can (1) elevate information about these proposed laws on social media, as well as share, follow, and elevate trans voices; (2) donate to trans-led organizations and the ACLU, which is leading many of these battles in state legislatures and in court; (3) examine the ways in which we talk and think about sex and bodies so we can be more inclusive in our daily lives and communities.

We all have a role to play here, whether we live in one of these states where the bills are passing or we don't. If we live in one of these states, it's critical that people contact their lawmakers and urge them to vote no on any piece of anti-trans legislation. It can be as simple as just leaving a voicemail or a sending an email and explaining that these bills are harmful, don’t represent you or your state, and you want your lawmakers to focus on things that help everyone. [For more information, see the graphic here.]

If you are not in a state that is currently considering an anti-trans bill, you still have a critical role to play! We need to elevate what is happening and raise awareness about the aggressive and well-funded movement that is trying to stop people from being trans. We have not passed a “trans tipping point.” We are at a crossroads and we have to invest in mobilizing if we are going to take back power.

So much of this work happens in our everyday lives. Every social norm that we reproduce around sex and bodies has the immediate effect of fueling these laws. That could be as simple as every time we ask a pregnant person whether they're having a boy or a girl, or assuming that children who are boys behave one way or have bodies that look one way, and girls behave a different way and have bodies that look a different way. These assumptions are so central to how we organize our thinking in our society, but they have real material consequences for so many people who, for whatever reason, fall outside of those binaries. From our ways of engaging with each other in the world to our ways of engaging with policymakers at the state and federal level, we all have a lot of work to do.

And finally, donate to local trans groups in different states. Obviously, you can donate to the ACLU so we can keep fighting the bills in the state legislatures and litigating these cases but ultimately, we win in the long-term when we invest in local power and leadership.

There are so many of these bills, and the trans people fighting them are exhausted. The legislative debates themselves are so painful to listen to. They're premised on the idea that trans people aren't real, or trans people are a threat. We can and should throw some coins at the local groups who not only have to contend with state legislatures that are holding maskless, in-person hearings but then have to put their welfare on the line to hear their government representatives debate their existence.

To stay up to date on the fight, you can follow Chase Strangio on Twitter.

Further Reading:

How We Can End the Violence Against Trans Women of Color [Raquel Willis, Out]
Legislation Affecting LGBT Rights Across the Country [ACLU]
It’s Time for a New Transgender Tipping Point [Tre’vell Anderson, Out]
Caster Semenya: The Athlete in the Fight of Her Life [Michelle Garcia, Out]
TERFS, Explained [Katelyn Burns, Vox]

Three Quick Things

Review: 'Promising Young Woman' Is A Showcase For Carey Mulligan : NPR — A still from *Promising Young Woman*, which was reviewed this week in *The New Yorker.*

The Cultural Mirror of Hamilton: I recently stumbled upon this review of The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, a play by Ishmael Reed billed as “a corrective to the revisionist missteps of the Broadway musical, Hamilton.” I must admit that I have never seen Hamilton (I could never afford or acquire tickets!), but I find its cultural arc to be really fascinating. The way I see it—and please, tell me if I’m getting this wrong, theater geeks—the show aired during the Obama era, where it was warmly received for its contemporary and inclusive approach to portraying American history. Then, when Trump first took office, the show was heralded for its pro-immigration storylines—particularly when the new Vice President, Mike Pence, showed up to Broadway for a viewing. (Hamilton, welcome to #theresistance.) And now, after years of Trump, there’s been (or at least it seems there’s been) a cultural awakening to the very revisionist history that most of us (read: white people) were taught about America in the first place—which sort of makes the revisionist history of Hamilton feel tone-deaf by comparison. With the nail in the coffin of American Exceptionalism—thanks to our bungled coronavirus efforts and our fall from grace on the national stage due to Trump’s chaos—Hamilton’s rosy outlook on our country’s founding principles is now facing a pretty brutal backlash, at least from what I can sense on Twitter. It seems to be the perfect parable for just how much the American (liberal) consciousness has shifted over the past six years. The question is: What will the outlook on Hamilton be one year into the Biden administration?
Speaking of criticims! I really enjoyed the film Promising Young Woman starring Carey Mulligan, which I thought was worth the premium price I paid on iTunes. In fact, I liked it so much that I spent the better part of this week arguing with a dear friend who absolutely hated it. The movie is a twist on the typical rape-revenge trope we see in film and television, and the plot is indeed full of surprises. Luckily, redemption was on my side when the brilliant Carmen Maria Machado weighed in on the film for The New Yorker. “Rape does not go away when you refuse to say it. Euphemisms are death. And so is revenge, in the end,” she writes. Give it a watch and let me know what you think.
With all of the time spent indoors, I’ve become slightly obsessed with tracking the sunrise, sunset, and the moon—and thus, getting obsessed with viewing the Full Moon. One little ritual I’ve committed to for each Full Moon is indulging in a bath, which I never used to do. However, after one hour of relaxing in some warm water mixed with Herbivore Coconut Milk Bath Soak, I can assure you that bathtime is something I now look forward to—lunar cycle or not. If you need some TLC, I highly recommend.

Now Reading: This week, I finished The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell, which was a delicious journey into a world of the queers and the women vs. “the men.” The delightful poetry and illustration made for quite the nice reading break. I finally made my way through the final part of Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollack, a book that came shipped to me from my friend Tourmaline, complete with a Tarot deck. (Watch out, world.) I also finished Modern Man in Search of a Soul on audio, which was my introduction to the work of Carl Jung. Alas, I am still making my way through the I Ching, but I also started Cosmos & Psyche, a book about an astrology skeptic’s immersion into the universe.

Parting Words:
“This is a massive world, and there is no part of it that I have seen. I’m always looking for it, wanting to hear it, see it, feel it. That’s what life is — it’s to live and to learn from. The day we cease to explore is the day we begin to wilt. So now when people ask what’s next for me, I say, ‘I’m just waiting for the next one.’”
—Cicely Tyson [via InStyle]

Religiously Blonde

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