What have transgender kids learned from living in a bullied environment — what can they do for their families, what they want to do with their lives?
The experience I had in seven years was not an isolated one. To this day, transgender children no older than I was, and some who are even younger, are being bullied by school systems that are supposed to protect and nurture them, sacrificed in a culture war fabricated by a theocratic Republican party which insists on spouting unfounded claims about transgender students. A big lie is that trans people are more likely to commit sexual assault in a bathroom if they are allowed to use the facility with their gender aligned with their own.
I had become the agenda item and the subject of headlines not just in my hometown, but across the country. I was called a freak by the parents of the kids I grew up with at the school board meeting. They were willing to go so far as to cause hate on a child.
And you find that when you give young trans people this degree of autonomy over their own body and help them relieve off this massive weight that they’re carrying around, that suddenly they have ambitions, suddenly they have goals, suddenly they’re not just building friendships and being active in their schools and in their family, but they’re thinking through, well, gee, what do I want to do with my life? What are I hoping to accomplish as an artist? What creative ambitions do I have? What would I want to do in the future? What problems does the world have that I could help solve?
If this were just rhetoric, but action, then it would be one thing. What we are hearing at CPAC is what is happening in Republican legislative and governor’s mansions across the country. Hundreds of bills have been introduced over the past few years to regulate, to ban and to criminalize the lives of trans people.
One of the biggest themes I heard about was that it helped relieve dysphoria and also made trans people more self-sufficient, as well as showing that they improve in other ways when they have this degree of bodily autonomy. So for example, if they’re on antidepressants, they find that they can go off of them. If they’re on anti-anxiety medications, they find that they can go off of them. They improve their mental health. They improve in, oftentimes, even just their extroversion. They are willing to participate in the community. Their enthusiasm about school.
The best practices developed by the American Medical Association and other health organizations paved the way for me to become the person I was meant to be.
They are being banned, challenged or indefinitely delayed, while people who want to transition are put through several hoops and hurdles before getting access to treatment.
My case was a victory for trans students. The protections afforded by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 will be incorporated within the jurisdiction of Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. The Supreme Court declined to weigh in, allowing the decision to stand. All of the Fourth Circuit’s schools were required to adopt a policy for the needs of trans students based on the model policies set by the Department of Education.
The board was found in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and the US Education Amendments of 1972, a federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in schools, after four years of litigation.
This is greeted as an apocalyptic event in right-wing spaces. I find that in liberal spaces, I have to remind people that this happened. I remember seeing a poll before that case was issued that some 80 percent of the country thought it was already illegal to fire somebody because they’re gay or transgender. So I often have to remind people in liberal progressive spaces that this case even happened.
The Virginian Governor’s Model Policy for Age-Aware Gender-affirming Care for Transgender Youth is Not Enough
The election of Virginia’s Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, made the headlines because he ran on a platform that included targeted attacks against marginalized communities.
In February of 2022, about a week before he and Attorney General Ken Paxton faced a primary, they issued this letter, which was directed to the state’s child welfare agency to begin classifying the provision of age-appropriate gender-affirming care for transgender youth as child abuse. That does a few things.
And notably, Virginia’s model policy contains language permitting schools to go beyond the guidelines and institute even more restrictive rules, saying “Each school board shall adopt policies that are consistent with but may be more comprehensive than the model policies developed by the Virginia Department of Education.”
Gov. Youngkin is willing to ignore established federal and state law, and also guidance and best practices from leading authorities on the physical and mental health of children and young adults. Youngkin and his administration have couched discriminatory actions in language about protecting children, religious liberty and the rights of parents, but it is my belief that his real agenda is scapegoating a minority already under duress, in a cowardly bid to gain support from his base.
His gains will be temporary as long as he succeeds. Thousands of students walked out of school in Virginia to protest Youngkin’s proposed restrictions on trans students. Protests are continuing against this unjust proposed policy. The transgender community is not going away.
What We Don’t Know About Transgender Issues: A Critical Look at the Conservative Political Action Conference / Izra Klein, Pastor Gablian Branstetter
The Conservative Political Action Conference ended on Saturday. And this conference, if you don’t follow it, it’s a big deal every year because it is the clearest window into the id of modern conservatism. Politicians and media figures are part of it.
And what we saw at this year’s CPAC was that even as conservatism is on many issues at this moment of unusual internal division — what to do about economic policy and health care and Ukraine — about Trump — it is finding unity and purpose in attacking trans people. There is absolutely no subtext here.
And what he’s asserting in this book is he’s trying to illustrate and challenge all the ways in which transgender people’s voices are not taken seriously by the medical establishment, by the media, by the culture. What we demand is that it is not a good idea to challenge this world so much that it is threatening some of the myths of this world, or we are told to wait and see if we can pass a million tests and go through all these levels of gatekeeping.
And I think people who follow politics have a sense this is happening, but perhaps not of the scale and cruelty of these policies. I believe that there is more focus on hard edge cases in the mainstream press. What should be the rules around NCAA swimming meets? There are rare cases where someone transitions and regrets it. What kind of medical assessment and parental involvement should you need to access this kind of care as a minor?
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gillian-branstetter.html
A.C.L.U. and the Texas Children’s Rights Project: Insights into a Problem of a Family Policing Agency that Adopts a Gender-affirming Care
And I don’t think those questions are fake, and I don’t think they’re easy, and I don’t pretend to have the answers to them. It is important that we keep an eye on the reality that trans people face, which is that they are already suffering from terrible discrimination and difficulties, and they are just living their lives.
The A.C.L.U.’s Women’s Rights Project is managed by a Communications Strategist named Gillian Branstetter. And the A.C.L.U. has been very involved in tracking and fighting these policies. Branstetter has a unique sense of how this is coming together on the ground.
This followed a failure by the state legislature to codify the definition of child abuse by adding gender-affirming care to it. A bill was introduced in the state legislature in Texas in 2021 and ultimately failed. Governor Abbott was accused of this by his primary opponents. He began applying political pressure so that he would start to focus his attention on the care and provision in Texas.
The state family policing agency is mobilized by it. Advocates have been complaining for a long time that child welfare agencies have too much power. Poor, Black, Indigenous, and immigrant families get discriminated against when using this power. Our nation’s foster care system has high levels of representation for queer youth.
The first impact the directive has is in mobilizing that agency to begin investigating. And one of the first people they targeted is actually a client of ours who we are representing alongside the A.C.L.U. of Texas and Lambda Legal in one of two challenges to this directive, who was a DSPS employee themselves.
If you’ve ever worked with children in a field like education or a child care provider, you probably know that it’s mandatory to file a report if you have reason to suspect.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gillian-branstetter.html
How transgender girls are affected by the medical costs of gender-affirming care in the 21st century and what they want to do about it
And gender-affirming care is an individualized form of health care that includes counseling — talking people through their identities, helping them get a sense of who they are and who it is that they want to be, helping them move past the internalized shame that so much of our culture pushes on to transgender people, and assessing whether they might be ready or a good candidate for other medical interventions.
So when we’re talking about young kids, young prepubescent kids who have maybe started wearing a dress at school or growing their hair out, if they’re a transgender girl, young kids like that are never really accessing any permanent health care.
Young people who have presented as their lived gender for a while are more susceptible to use puberty blockers when they enter puberty. And these are — doctors usually describe them as a pause button — functionally pausing the signals that the body sends to begin developing some of these secondary sexual characteristics ranging from breasts and wider hips to facial hair and a deeper voice.
If you are looking for hormones that reflect your gender identity, you should talk to your doctor about hormone replacement therapy. If you are looking for masculinizing effects, testosterone will be one of them.
And then surgical care, which for anyone under 18 tends to be pretty rare and very much based around the needs of that patient. It can range from mastectomies, for example, if somebody has breasts that they don’t want, or a vaginoplasty, which is very hard to get and is called a reconstructive surgery, because it creates new breasts.
It’s very shocking to see that in modern political language. And it’s even more shocking to realize that what they’re looking for in these bills is not to end these treatments. They aren’t trying to end these treatments for everybody. They are specifically trying to end them for people who want them to rewrite their gender assignment so as to reflect who they know themselves to be. And yet, they’re protecting these other treatments.
Most people who express a need for health care treatments have a long road to travel before they can actually get them, that’s what that means. It is hard to get this care in rural areas of Texas.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gillian-branstetter.html
On Gender Dysphoria: How Do You Get What You Want to, and How You Can Get It Without Getting It?
Gender Dysphoria carries with it a number of other symptoms. And that can range from depression and anxiety to low self-esteem, down to poor academic performance, struggling to build healthy relationships with friends or their family, all the way up to suicidality. According to research, the rate of suicidality among trans youth is double that of their peers.
Foundationally. There was a long line of medical experts and doctors who worked with young people who took the witness stand and spoke about the benefits of affirming gender in young people in Arkansas where we were challenging the ban on gender affirming care. It is very abstract. I think it would be very hard for a lot of cisgendered people to understand what dysphoria is and how much it can impact your life and stunt your emotional development and your emotional growth.
And I think that sense of possibility is something that any parent would want for their young person. And the, at times, cartoonishly vile rhetoric around this care is very much meant to obscure that positive impact that it has on people and very much meant to obscure the pain of being denied it, particularly when you know that it’s an option that you could pursue.
As the number of these bans grows, a lot of young people are facing the reality that they will be homeless and penniless for a long time, and they have politicians who have never met them, and politicians who haven’t talked to anybody like them before.
And that sense of, for my trans friends, that sense of unbelievable wrongness between how you are seen and how you feel, that — I don’t exactly have a question here, but I just think it’s worth stopping for a minute that the intensity of it, from everyone I know who has gone through it, is I just think really hard to grasp if it’s not something that you’ve held yourself.
I think it can be hard — a colleague of mine, Rebecca Kling, has this metaphor of this giant bag of rocks that you’re carrying around your entire life. After a certain period of time, you tire out. And you either put down the bag of rocks or you stop going forward.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gillian-branstetter.html
Why it is child abuse to abuse puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or testosterone, when you’re a trans person and you don’t feel like it
And gender, because gender is assigned to you over the course of your entire life, because your family and your friends and strangers and institutions and everything from our economic order to police and our laws are assigning you gender, when that assignment doesn’t feel honest to who you are, it is a very inescapable sense. It is a complex sense.
There are a lot of trans folks who will be in their 40s before they even start asking themselves this. I have met trans people who came out in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. I think if you had lived next to a waterfall, and you heard the thundering sound of the water for an entire lifetime, you didn’t have to shout over that.
So how then does Abbott or Paxton, the attorney general, in these letters and opinions, make the argument — what is the foundation of the argument that it is child abuse to use puberty blockers or hormone therapy?
In terms of their willingness to just sweep aside the existing body of evidence and the actual reality of what this care is like, there’s a lot to learn here from how the anti-abortion movement has framed abortion care. You’ve seen it before, the same process of looking for any tail-end risk or hypothetical in which this care might have a negative consequence at all. And then using that to justify banning it.
So tell me about how intersex people play into this. Can you say what intersex means and where these conservative groups and some of these bills tend to stand on health care for that population?
I think that the risks of trans people accessing this care are huge in the cis gender imagination. I think it’s due to the fact that they don’t know how hard it is to live an authentic life when your body betrays you.
So what are some of those risks, speaking not here about the surgical interventions, which are, I think, pretty rare for minors, but the hormone and puberty blockers?
He looks at the risks of misuse and abuse of testosterone, a controlled substance. In the rare instance that somebody goes on from puberty blockers directly to hormone therapy, it may gradually increase their risks for osteoporosis. The report found that it will increase their risk of osteoporosis in their 50s, rather than their 60s.
In the space for medical care for transgender adults, there’s been an increasing move towards informed consent, which basically means that as long as this person is informed about the risks and effects of this care, we should trust their autonomy to access it. When you think that your own personhood is on the line, you are like we will cross that bridge, when I get to it, I guess. It would be so amazing to live into my 50s.
I think that a lot of these arguments are in bad faith because of the risks associated with health care. Many health care services are not affected by the bans and are not subject to legislation or litigation, because they are not related to child abuse.
We talked with Dr. Oliver, who wrote the guidelines for this care in the American academy of pediatrics. And one point he kept making is that this kind of care is a very, very highly individualized process.
If you look at the standards for it, you notice that the structure and sequence are built on discussions between the patient and doctors, if it is a minor.
Texas is saying, no, no, we don’t know anything better than you do, so if you go down the path of puberty blockers or other drugs, we’re going to functionally criminalize it. It is a striking assertion that the government knows best.
Everyone who has access to birth control knows that it is very individualized. Side effects can be carried by it. It can carry risks. And people hopefully trust you to manage those risks and to weigh them against your desire to not get pregnant, which, depending on who you’re talking to, is you rejecting your gender assignment in the same way that a transgender person is.
I don’t think anyone would describe the process of having an I.U.D. inserted in joyful terms, but people still do it because they want that degree of autonomy over their own body and over their own ability to write their life story for themselves.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gillian-branstetter.html
The A.C.L.U. Texas and PFLAG National, a transgender rights group, filed a federal court-injunction
Let’s ask where this particular directive stands now. You mentioned that the A.C.L.U. is in court on this — the A.C.L.U. Texas is, Lambda Legal.
One of the oldest L.G.B.T. rights organizations is PFLAG. And they specifically work with parents of young queer people. And they were one of the first organizations to really have — to mention gender identity in their official policies to protect transgender youth. And they have hundreds and hundreds of chapters across the country. I have gone to a lot of these and they are usually similar to support groups. They’re usually parents talking through what it means to have a young queer person, not just protecting them from discrimination and advocating for their rights, but also changing their own expectations for what life their child is going to lead based on their queer identity.
So we file on behalf of PFLAG National and receive an injunction on behalf of PFLAG National, so that if a family is a member of PFLAG national, they are protected under that injunction, which, in Texas, last I heard was somewhere around 600 families. Now, of course, what that means is that thousands of families are still exposed to this directive.
The actual number of cases opened is small, and it’s true. I heard it was under 20. The case was closed when a case was open. And that’s enormously relieving, in that it means whatever accusation Greg Abbott wants to make against them, these folks are being exonerated by the state agency.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gillian-branstetter.html
The American Principles Project, S.B.1029, is a Bill to Prohibit Children’s Gender Affirmation and Sex Absorption Surgery for Adults
When young people like me are trying to imagine a future world with them in it, the investigation is a major invasion into a family’s life.
So what you often hear is this is just about children. We’re trying to protect children from harm. Maybe they don’t know who they are yet. Maybe they’re influenced by something they saw on TikTok. Some of these bills are directed at adults.
S.B. 1029 in the Texas Senate would effectively ban gender affirming treatments for children but would also ban sex reassignment surgery for adults. So tell me a bit about the relationship between the legislation targeting children and the legislation we’ve seen in a bunch of different jurisdictions that includes adults.
And one of them is the American Principles Project. Over the course of the last few years, I have tried to warn politicians on the right that they need to be aware of the idea of going after trans people. And there was a report that Maggie Astor in The New York Times did, where she called up Terry Schilling, the group’s president, and he said, we do, in fact, want to ban this care for anyone of any age. And in his words, the purpose in going towards young people was, quote, “going where the consensus is.”
Now, one, I would challenge the idea that there is a consensus. A lot of these discussions are really bad faith because most of these groups, ALEC, are well-known in the right-wing circles for printing off this legislation and distributing it across states.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gillian-branstetter.html
The Social Gender Crisis and the 2024 Primary Field for Republicans in the House of DeSantis and the President of the House Minority Caucus
People with nonnormative sexual characteristics are called intersex people. Intersex can be a combination of hormones and sexual characteristics that are associated with one sex right next to another, or a combination of the two.
And often, when an infant is born and is presenting as intersex, the doctors will go to the parents and say, well, we can create a, quote, “normal genitalia” for them, and we find it’s best to do it now because later in life, who would want to grow up with a nonnormative body?
Right. Exactly. And I found the bill that was passed into law in Arkansas banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth that we have sued and blocked in federal court. And you find that across not just in folks in the family, but across how the right wing regards intersex folks.
So I want to go back to something you were saying about the politics of this a minute ago, which is that the way I’ve been thinking about the increasing centrality of anti-trans bills and rhetoric to the right, because it’s something that you’re seeing in the 2024 primary field for Republicans. It’s a big issue for DeSantis. It is a very telling issue for Donald Trump now, and we can speak about his administration on this.
Every right-wing legislature in the country has at least one of these bills. And it’s been a pretty quick move to the center of their agenda. And one of the ways I understand politics in this era is that we’ve been watching or living through this transition from — because politics is always changing as to what the core cleavages really are, what people will compromise on and what they won’t.
I think that the Republican Party was broadly understood in the 15 years that have since passed because they talked to social conservatives, but also spoke of economic conservatism. Corporate tax cuts is the actual non-negotiable. They told the Evangelicals what they needed to do to vote.
Over this period, it’s more or less flipping. And you now have the post-Trump Republican Party. There’s a lot of people who are kind of confused and often opportunistic on economics. But these questions of I would call it social gender hierarchical change — this question of the traditional hierarchies of American society have become really fundamental.
And there’s been a search for what is the issue that cracks this open. I believe there was a view of immigration. That was Donald Trump’s initial play. And it worked for him to a degree, but it’s actually not popular to be highly anti-immigrant in this country. And then particularly post-George Floyd, when there were the protests that had riot elements in them, you had a backlash on Black Lives Matter. That failed after that. In 2020, Joe Biden wins the election.
I am curious how you have understood the transition to the center of the Republican agenda when you are more knowledgeable about it than I am.
It’s interesting that you tease out this existing divide in the right between more economic concerns versus social conservative concerns. One, I think they have more similarities than they differ. Conservative economics tend to produce socially conservative outcomes.
Two, there’s been an interesting turn in right-wing politics over the course of just about the last decade where there’s been a lot of motivation and energy around the social conservative wing, this wing that’s devoted towards a explicit construction of what it means to be American along racial, gender, and class lines.
And likewise, before that, in 2004, in Lawrence v. Texas, when the Supreme Court found that the state could not criminalize same sexual relations, that was very much also founded in this private life, in this private space. It is about making sure that the government does not want to know what consenting adults are doing behind closed doors.
One of the first major tests for trans rights was done here. There were some previous fights around HERO, and we could talk to that history if you want. This was definitely the worst conflagration that gendered rights have had in a while.
And the bill was signed into law. And you quickly saw a number of corporations and large institutions like the N.B.A. and performers like Bruce Springsteen begin pulling events out of North Carolina. We’re not going to spend money in a state that supports this hate. And according to one analysis, this cost the state of North Carolina’s economy around $3 billion.
Pat McCrory lost the election because he focused on this issue at the expense of the rest of the state. And this caused a deep sense of frustration within the conservative movement. I think it was the beginning of what is known as woke capitalism, the idea that the culture has taken corporations with them and left our values behind.
So therefore, we can no longer trust the Chamber of Commerce crowd to act in defense of socially conservative actions. It was almost the end of what has been called fusionism, this idea of the libertarian-minded economic right and its ties to often more Evangelical, more socially concerned right.
Social conservatives begin to feel a bit left behind. Because the legislative agenda of the Trump administration was mostly about tax cuts, which don’t move them towards their goal of changing the American culture to reflect conservative values.
And an inflection point for this comes in 2020. 2020 was a busy year. You might remember it. I remember in June of 2020 the Supreme Court made a decision regarding three cases that were on behalf of people who were fired because of sexual orientation or gender identity.
The A.C.L.U. represented Aimee Stephens. She was a transgender woman in her 50s. She worked at a Michigan funeral home. She came out as a different gender. She explained in the letter that this is important to her. She was fired by the funeral home two weeks later.
The issue up for debate was not if the workers were discriminated against because of their gender, but rather if the other workers were gay. The debate focused on whether the workplaces were in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex discrimination, by discriminating against these employees on that basis.
And I think one of the reasons you see this massive reaction is because a lot of the legal victories on behalf of L.G.B.T. rights up to this point had very much hinged on the private life. So Obergefell and the right to marry, for example. The right to marry is about a right to privacy as well as equal protection, which is why bakeries need to make wedding cake for same sex weddings and websites need to host gay weddings.
In contrast, Bostock was very much about your public life. Suddenly, we are in the workplace. Somebody now has the right to be trans in the workplace, around other people. And there is the logic that the opinion, which was written by conservative golden boy Justice Neil Gorsuch, the logic of his opinion, it doesn’t take a whole lot of thinking to then apply it to all other laws, which prohibit sex discrimination, including Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education, or Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits sex discrimination in health care.
It is part of what has changed in the politics of this, that people don’t realise or admit it, and I would like to discuss that. You mentioned the quiet revolution here in the Obama administration, where policy became much more equal in this area. There are some very important cases that pushed forward non- discrimination.
The backlash was a response to the fact that the equilibrium was being pushed forward. It was being pushed towards justice. And that created a kind of opposite counter-reaction. If we have the data, we see that trans people are coming out more often and they aren’t told about it. But that we are seeing a rise in the number particularly of trans kids.
In your book, “Why We’re Polarized,” available in stores now, you reflect on how polarization is not inherently a negative thing. That, in fact, polarization is a necessity when moving forward on important progressive issues. And in fact, over the course of American history when there’s been consensus around an issue, it’s usually around an issue based on discrimination or an issue that we now look back on and are very glad that we had a controversy on and changed.
And I think one way to think about the second term of the Obama administration and what has often been referred to as the trans tipping point — Laverne Cox — it’s a cliché and writing on this topic that within the first two paragraphs, you have to mention Laverne Cox on the cover of Time Magazine in 2014.
The end of the consensus that was regarding trans rights was a great way to think about that. There was a cultural and political consensus that trans lives were not worth living and that trans bodies were not lovable.
Over the course of decades of advocacy, public education campaigns, and meeting with lawmakers, you begin to see that slowly creak open. And it’s one reason why if you’re over 30, you were raised in a culture which saw our existence as, if not an avid threat, then as pathetic, in a culture which portrayed us as ultimately as sickly eunuchs or decadent perverts.
And I’m a New York Times subscriber and that gives me access to The New York Times archive. And one thing I’ve been doing over the last few months is looking across the media coverage of an institution like The New York Times and finding the history of how the paper has regarded transgender people.
I want to go back then also to something else that happened in this period that you kind of touched on right around North Carolina, which is the North Carolina bathroom bill was not the only bill and not the only kind of social justice question, but I do think it was one of the first that began to open a wedge that is still not at all closed between the Republican Party and particularly major parts of corporate America.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gillian-branstetter.html
The Last Disney Vacation, and the Phenomenology of Corporate America: Realignment of the Republican Party with the State of the Art… And what do they tell us?
Disney had some special privileges in Florida which were taken away by Governor DeSantis in a week. I mean, Disney, which is one of the big namesake Florida employers.
Disney had criticized the Don’t say Gay Bill, which is very aimed at trans people, and that was over. The awakened corporations have been fighting around Black Lives Matter as a particular important part of our politics. But in an ongoing way, you really have it around these issues.
And it does seem to me to be forcing a weird realignment in the Republican Party, where a party that was known very much as the big business party, now, at least in some cases — obviously not in every — and there’s still plenty of deregulatory efforts and corporate tax cuts and all the rest of it swirling around the Republican agenda — but Ron DeSantis is going to run for president bragging about how he used the power of the state to punish a corporation —
For its speech. I think that it shows how much the Republican Party is committed to the issues right now. I was wondering if you were thinking about how it is forcing members of the Republican Party to choose sides and changing some of the traditional alignments.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gillian-branstetter.html
David against a Goliath: The Heather Has Two Mommies,” or “And Tango Makes Three”
Yes. So the Don’t Say Gay law, as it’s popularly known, the Parental Rights in Education Bill, prohibits discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade. Although, as we’re talking, a version was just introduced in the Florida House that would extend it up to the eighth grade. It is funny how that could happen.
The result is that queer teachers feel they need to hide who they are. The banning of books about queer people caused the pulling down of basic symbols of L.G.B.T. pride. So “Heather Has Two Mommies” or “And Tango Makes Three,” which is literally a book about gay penguins. And it very much is part and parcel with this goal of regarding queer identities as an ideology that’s being forced onto people.
One reason he picks this fight with Disney is so he can keep telling the story that he has been telling for a long time. He is demonizing the young queer kids instead of making them feel bad about who they are, the parents that fear their kid will get in trouble if they mention that they have two mothers, or the teachers that feel like they have to leave the state altogether.
He picked the fight and then chose the frame for himself. And he’s positioning himself as the David against this Goliath, when it is, in fact, he himself who is the empty-headed bully wandering around the playground and smashing kids face into the dirt.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gillian-branstetter.html
The Rise of Openly Trans People: From Wilde to Homintern, From Pre-Stonewall to Present Day, and the Future of Lives and Death
One question I have about it is whether or not it’s getting worse and better at the same time, which is to say we’ve been talking about, particularly red states, where a lot of, I think, quite terrible legislation is being proposed and where the rhetoric has gotten very vicious. And I don’t think that can be discounted.
But there are also blue states that have been, I think, and some of them trying to move in the opposite direction. Is there any place that is brighter to you? There are places that are looking like there isn’t any bottom, that you can look up to, at the same time we are seeing scapegoating and demonization. I’m not sure if the metaphor works.
There is a different kind of future. If you follow the places that are getting worse, there will not be places that are more hopeful to you.
The number of openly trans people has been rising in younger generations, and the word Openly is important here. One, I think that matches the rise in L.G.B. identification over the decades. When public schools stopped hitting kids for writing with their left hand, suddenly there was a huge surge in left-handedness identification, people are fond of citing this chart around left-handedness.
I know that there are a lot of people who are afraid to say they have gender Dysphoria because they see it on a video and want their breasts removed. That’s not what I see when I see trans people gathering online.
I see the breaking of geographic boundaries that used to separate us. That trans people are, of course, very naturally gravitating towards people who are like-minded, who have similar experiences, because, believe it or not, the world still doesn’t greet transgender people with absolute joy.
And it’s very hard to find people who share that experience, especially in a lot of rural areas across the country. And the internet has this interesting place in trans history as this ultimate gathering space where we can share experiences, share wisdom. Because one of the ways that trans life is deemed unlivable and impossible is we are all isolated from one another.
I’m going to start with a book by Gregory Woods called “Homintern.” And it is a history of queer life and culture pre-Stonewall, from the trial of Oscar Wilde up to just really right before the sexual revolution. And it is this incredibly rich, entertaining, vibrant history of people making space for themselves when, as many people who grew up queer did, they thought they were the only one, including finding community before they even really had the language to describe queer identities. It’s a fantastic history that includes love notes and cocktail napkins, police reports and gossip. It is very juicy in parts.
And it’s just fascinating to think, how did the arrest of Oscar Wilde, one of the world’s most famous playwrights, change how the media and politics regarded gay people? What was Josephine Baker learning from the drag queens of Harlem and Washington? How did George Orwell come to think of his own homophobia?
The book by Federici is called Caliban and the Witch. Silvia Federici is a really seminal feminist thinker, was a major figure in the wages for housework movement. And “Caliban and the Witch” is about a pandemic followed by a labor shortage, followed by a revanchist movement to assign rigidly strict gender norms onto people that targets queer people and women especially.
The Black Death was a vaccine-preventable disease. The witch hunts were a long period of time in Europe when women and queer people were hunted and killed because of things they did like offer abortions or contraceptives.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gillian-branstetter.html
A Psychoanalytical Lecture on Monsters and Microscopic Symmetries: Paul Preciado and Mixing by Efim Shapiro
And then third, I’m going to recommend a little book called “Can the Monster Speak?” by Paul Preciado. He is a man. And this book “Can the Monster Speak?” is a lecture he gave in front of this esteemed group of psychoanalysts.
The show is produced by a group of people: Emefa AgaWou, Annie Galvin and Jeff Geld. Fact-checking by several people. Mixing by Efim Shapiro. The music was written by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Annie-Rose Strasser is the executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio. And special thanks to Dr. Jason Rafferty, Lisa Black, Carole Sabouraud and Kristina Samulewski.