Recurrent panics fuel mobs. Everything old is new again...

Watching MAGA panic about the existence of trans and gender variant youth and by extension their elders, I realized I'd seen something very like this before. This is a country all too easily led into periodic hysteria about sex and gender, especially when it comes to actual children. Trump and the Republican Party are fanning the flames of fear for political gain.

Does this seem familiar? It certainly could. I remember when our culture in the 1980s was obsessed with the McMartin Preschool abuse trial. Something terrible must have happened ... or not. From a New York Times retrospective [gift] by Clyde Haberman: 

... Starting in 1983, with accusations from a mother whose mental instability later became an issue in the case, the operators of a day care center near Los Angeles were charged with raping and sodomizing dozens of small children. The trial dragged on for years, one of the longest and costliest in American history. In the end ... lives were undone. But no one was ever convicted of a single act of wrongdoing. 

Indeed, some of the early allegations were so fantastic as to make many people wonder later how anyone could have believed them in the first place. Really now, teachers chopped up animals, clubbed a horse to death with a baseball bat, sacrificed a baby in a church and made children drink the blood, dressed up as witches and flew in the air — and all this had been going on unnoticed for a good long while until a disturbed mother spoke up?

Still, McMartin unleashed nationwide hysteria about child abuse and Satanism in schools. One report after another told of horrific practices, with the Devil often literally in the details. ...

... Inevitably, perhaps, the mass frenzy over supposed Satanism and sexual predation invited comparisons to the Salem witch trials and to McCarthy-era excesses. Americans do seem prone episodically to this kind of fever. ...

Witness the widespread panic a few decades ago when people around the country convinced themselves that evil neighbors were handing children poisoned Halloween candy and apples embedded with razor blades. Arthur Miller highlighted this phenomenon in his 1953 play, “The Crucible,” which invoked the Salem trials to comment on a contemporary abuse, the scattershot McCarthy hunt for Communists ...

It seems to me obvious that Trump and MAGA are playing a very tired, very American, tune ...

So what's the other political party doing in response to MAGA's fantasies and bigotry? Far too often, cowering in closets. Most Democratic politicians are too timid to take on the assault on emerging medical science and anthropological understanding that the experience of many contemporary Americans is forcing into the light.

Parker Molloy, a Chicago media journalist, has some advice for timid Democrats:

There's a glaring omission in all the Democratic hand-wringing about trans issues: actual trans people. ... 

The disability rights movement has a motto: "Nothing about us without us." It's a simple principle that Democrats have completely abandoned when it comes to trans issues. Instead of talking to us about our lives and needs, Democratic strategists talk about us as an abstract political problem to be solved. ...

If Democrats actually bothered to have these conversations, they'd discover something ... we're not asking for much. We're not demanding special privileges or radical restructuring of society. We mostly just want to exist in public without harassment and access the same healthcare everyone else takes for granted. 

By and large, trans people are not demanding (who even asked for this?) that people announce their own pronouns or whatever corporate/HR nonsense Democratic politicians think trans people want...

Talk to trans kids and their parents, and you'll hear the same themes repeatedly: They want to use the bathroom in peace. They want to play sports with their friends. They want their teachers to use their names. They want to go to school without being bullied. They want to see a doctor when they need to. 

These aren't radical demands. They're the baseline expectations of any child in America.

Talk to trans adults like me, and the asks are similarly modest: Keep our jobs without discrimination. Update our driver's licenses to match our appearance. Access medical care our doctors recommend. Walk down the street without fear. Again, these aren't special rights. They're basic dignity.

But Democrats can't make these arguments because they don't know our stories. They've treated us as a constituency to be managed rather than human beings to be heard. They've let Republicans define who we are and what we want because they've never bothered to ask us ourselves.

This is more than just morally wrong; it's politically stupid. When you don't know the people you're supposedly defending, you can't defend them effectively. When you treat someone's existence as a political liability rather than a human reality, you've already lost the argument.

... they need to reframe the debate. Republicans aren't protecting children; they're weaponizing government to bully kids. They're the ones obsessed with bathrooms, genitals, and controlling people's bodies. Democrats should make them own that weirdness. ...

Democrats need to connect trans rights to broader freedoms. This isn't about special privileges or ideology. It's about the government staying out of personal medical decisions. It's about families, not politicians, making choices about their children's health. It's about the freedom to live your life without constant government surveillance of your gender.

These are winning arguments if Democrats would bother to make them.

... they need to tell human stories. Trans people aren't abstractions or political footballs. They're people's children, siblings, friends, and neighbors. When Republicans attack trans people, they're attacking real families in every community. Democrats need to make that real for voters.

.. Democrats need to show some backbone. Voters respect politicians who stand for something, even if they disagree. What they don't respect is cowardice. Running away from every fight Republicans pick doesn't make Democrats look reasonable. It makes them look weak.

Democrats have been down this road before. It leads nowhere good. You can't build a political coalition by constantly throwing people out of it. You can't inspire voters by standing for nothing. You can't protect some children by agreeing that others are disposable. ...

Get over yourselves, Dem politicians. If you can learn just enough to be real, people will respect you. Most of us aren't on the side of witch burners, soiling our pants and fleeing phantom dangers. You won't win the QAnons, but there are plenty of other people who might be willing to stop panicking, if you modeled some guts. 

Would you want Donald Trump deciding what your doctor can do for you?

 

Young trans and non-binary folk and their friends rallied yesterday outside Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto where institutional cowardice is retreating when faced with the Trump administration's bigotry. 

By way of the San Francisco Chronicle: 

The Trump administration has pushed to limit access to gender-affirming care for youths. In January, the president signed an executive order that directs federal agencies to prohibit hospitals and medical schools that receive some federal grants from providing gender-affirming care to children.

... Some Stanford patients received notifications this month that surgical procedures were being canceled, according to one parent of a child undergoing care for gender dysphoria at the gender clinic. ... The child had been receiving care at the clinic for more than a year, and the abrupt cancellation of the procedure is leaving the family scrambling to figure out how to get the care elsewhere. ...

... “The fear is we were totally blindsided by this and it has no legal basis, so I have no confidence or trust,” the parent said. “How do I know the other care will continue? That’s the biggest impact for us. The trust has been kind of taken away.” 

 

For all the fear in the moment, communities which have been rejected often remember they are FABULOUS!

Scenes from the gathering for the Trans March

We gathered in the sun at Dolores Park. The fog was nowhere about. Many are the years that Pride weekend at the end of June is one of the coldest in San Francisco. Not this time.

And the people came: joyous and determined.

When the world wants to erase you, delight in being together remains an antidote.

Trans youth have much to say ...

Trans youth and friends kicked off San Francisco's extended LGBTQIA+ weekend with a rally Thursday night on City Hall steps in response to the Supreme Court's Skrmetti decision allowing states to outlaw gender care for people under 18.

 

I asked this young person if I could photograph their sign. They agreed, so long as I didn't reveal their face.

There was defiance in the crowd ...

And earnest advocacy ...

And a goodly supply of allies. We are all in this together in the time of MAGA.

A rapid response to emulate

Democrats won another election in a somewhat unlikely (or at least divided) place on Tuesday. A Democrat evicted a longtime sitting GOP mayor in Omaha on Tuesday.

John Ewing Jr. was elected Omaha’s first Black mayor on Tuesday, defeating the city’s three-term Republican mayor, Jean Stothert, in a race where Democrats sought to tie her to President Donald Trump’s unpopular agenda — another warning sign for Republicans in a critical battleground area.

Omaha and its suburbs have played a unique role in national politics, as the “blue dot” in a conservative state that wields an unusual amount of power in presidential contests. Though Democrats outnumber Republicans in the city limits of Omaha, Stothert kept her seat over three terms by building a broad-based coalition that included the city’s many independent voters. But Ewing’s campaign and Democrats sought to tie her to economic uncertainty and anger about Trump, whom she backed in 2024.

Ewing said Tuesday night that his victory belonged to “every resident of the city of Omaha” and that his campaign had demonstrated that when voters unite around shared values “we can achieve remarkable things.” Washington Post.

Congratulations to Mayor Ewing!

Delving a little further into the Omaha election, there seems to have been more going on here than bounce-back, anti-Trump energy among frequent Democratic voters. We saw that in 2017 and we're seeing it again this year. When DJT is not on the ballot, he's poison for Republican candidates.

Stothert was a seasoned mayor; she'd been through past campaigns and she and her people thought they could appeal to an issue that divides Democrats: 

 As she campaigned for a fourth term, Ms. Stothert, who is the first woman to lead Omaha, emphasized her record on development and public safety. But she also waded into cultural issues by trying to make bathroom use and sports participation by transgender people a campaign issue. New York Times.

Mr. Ewing didn't want to engage, but the Nebraska Democratic Party came in with a counter attack:

Not  bad -- reveal voters obsessed with trans folk in bathrooms as the slightly prurient scolds they are. Apparently citizens of Omaha didn't want to go there.

This might not work everywhere, but it is better than Democrats running and hiding at the first mention of their transgender constituents.

Trans Day of Visibility 2025

As I walked up to the Teslatakedown protest on Saturday, I was greeted by this guy.

The Trans Day of Visibility weekend had begun. 

This is not an observance I know much about, so I looked up what the media advocacy outfit GLADD had to share about it.

International TDOV was created in 2010 by trans advocate Rachel Crandall. Crandall, the head of Transgender Michigan, created TDOV in response to the overwhelming majority of media stories about transgender people being focused on violence. She hoped to create a day where people could celebrate the lives of transgender people, while simultaneously acknowledging that due to discrimination, not every trans person can or wants to be visible.

Given that only a minority of Americans say they personally know someone who’s transgender, the vast majority of the public learns about trans people from the media, including TV, film, and news. This is a problem because, as shown in the Netflix documentary Disclosure, the media has misrepresented, mischaracterized, and stereotyped trans people since the invention of film. These false depictions have indisputably shaped the cultural understanding of who trans people are and have modeled, often for the worse, how the average person should react to and treat trans people in their own lives.

Evident in 2025 is intensifying vitriol and attacks against trans people led by a vocal but loud minority. ... That’s why it’s still necessary for trans people to be seen through authentic, diverse, and accurate stories which reflect the actual lived experiences of trans people; both for themselves and for the people who believe they’ve never met a trans person.

Trans people care about the coup against our country as much as anyone. Maybe more, in fact, being involuntary targets on the front lines...

• • •

For the Trans Day of Visibility, Aaron Scott, Episcopal Church Staff Officer for Gender Justice, preached a sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. I'm including short excerpts here which I hope retain its power for a broad audience; there's much more. Read it in full here.

... We are, in the end, a small community, very much under the boot of repression. And yet we continue to lead.

We speak for ourselves.

We set forth our own vision for what justice means for our people—trans and nonbinary people. 

... It’s a beautiful day to be alive.

It’s a beautiful day to exist, in flagrant defiance of executive orders. January 20th came and went and I still haven’t been whisked away to Oz—like the rapture, but for trans people only. I briefly wondered, “Am I not transgendering hard enough, if two whole months have gone by and I’m still stuck here in America?!”

And then I remembered myself, and I remembered: this is a sham. Because we have always been here and we are not going anywhere, ever.

We determine what justice means for us in our bodies, in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our churches, in our workplaces, in our country. And while we need everyone here to join with us in that struggle, we are the ones responsible for setting the vision. We are the experts on when we are free. Only we get to say when we are truly safe, truly honored, truly afforded our God-given dignity and rights. So thank you to every trans and nonbinary person here for the visions you put forward into the world. Thank you for standing in your power and your leadership.

... We will only get what we are organized to take. No powers and principalities are going to hand trans people our joy and our thriving ... out of their benevolence. That’s not how change happens. Change comes because we demand it, and we labor for it. So today we celebrate our joy—and tomorrow we get back to work organizing to defend our joy. Organizing to defend our young people. Organizing to defend our dignity. Organizing to draw in more and more people to stand with us, move with us.

And we can’t do all that on an empty tank, so today: We sing. We shout. We strut. We swagger. We rejoice in our trans-ness so that the memory of this joy can continue to carry us forward even in the hard times.

... Trans joy is not about marketing a false, palatable version of ourselves. It is about enjoying being alive and not dead.

... We do not exist to be respectable. We exist to be respected.

... The more that trans people stand in our joy and our full messy humanity without apology, the more powerful we become. That is why this day is important. The less afraid we are to live—even when there is so much to fear—the stronger we get.

An even more demanding #MeToo

In 1970, when federalized National Guard troops shot and killed students protesting the US war in Southeast Asia at Kent State University and Jackson State, pop singer and bard Holly Near offered a haunting lament and call to action: 

It could have been me, but instead it was you

So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two

I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs

A farmer of food and a righter of wrong

It could have been me, but in

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/holly-near-it-could-have-been-me-lyrics.html

It could have been me, but instead it was you

So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two

I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs

A farmer of food and a righter of wrong

It could have been me, but in

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/holly-near-it-could-have-been-me-lyrics.html

It could have been me, but instead it was you

So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two

I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs

A farmer of food and a righter of wrong

It could have been me, but instead it was you

And it may be me, dear sisters and brothers, before we are through.

But if you can work for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom

 

If you can work for freedom I can too

There was so much action in that spring that hundreds of campuses and some cities were closed down.

 

Once again, we are tested. Can we too work for freedom?

In organizing people, we've learned that if we can connect our personal stories to broader (and usually disempowering) features of our lives, we can form connections which turn into collective action. 

The historian and journalist M. Gessen -- an immigrant and trans -- bravely takes this tack in the NY Times: 

... I became stateless when I was 14 and my family left the Soviet Union. In exchange for granting my parents, my brother and me exit visas, the U.S.S.R. stripped us of citizenship. For nearly a decade after we arrived in the United States, instead of a passport I carried a long rectangular booklet called a refugee travel document. Not being able to fill in the blank when asked for my nationality added a layer of complexity to some otherwise simple transactions, like opening a bank account, but I was young, white, female and, in the parlance of this country, “legal,” so the difficulties I experienced were not excessive. They were just enough to make me feel precarious.

In the decades since, life for noncitizens in the United States has grown much more difficult. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have pushed immigrants to the margins of American society, cutting off access to public assistance programs, limiting pathways to legal status and ramping up deportations. The giant bureaucracy of “immigration courts” took shape, though it hardly resembles any court system that U.S. citizens would encounter.

Those of us who enjoy the privilege of not-yet-questioned US citizenship can be there with some of those whose status in the country is under threat. The weekend I attended a workshop by the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity with Bay Resistance introducing "accompaniment." Accompaniment connects people trying to the navigate the immigration maze with others willing to just go along to appointments and court dates. Nobody should be alone. 

Gessen continues, describing the attack on their very being:

... The Trump administration’s barrage of attacks on trans people can seem haphazard, but as elements of a denationalization project, they fall into place. In his Inaugural Address and one of his first executive orders, President Trump asserted that only two sexes exist: male and female, established at conception and immutable. Trans people, in other words, do not exist. Executive orders aimed at banning any mention of transgender people from schools, banning trans athletes from women’s sports, ordering a stop to gender-affirming medical care for people under 19, and barring trans people from serving in the military followed. ...

The State Department stopped issuing passports with the “X” gender marker and began issuing passports consistent with the sex the applicant was assigned at birth, even if the person had legally changed gender. ...

... Living with documents that are inconsistent or at odds with your public identity is no small thing. It can keep you from opening a bank account, applying for financial aid, securing a loan, obtaining a driver’s license, and traveling freely and safely inside a country or across borders. ...

 Let's take on and take up Gessen's conclusion:

... You know how this column is supposed to end. I rehearse all the similarities between Jews in Germany in 1933 and trans people in the United States in 2025: the tiny fraction of the population; the barrage of bureaucratic measures that strip away rights; the vilifying rhetoric. The silence on the part of ostensible allies. ...

... It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.

Gessen is correct. But also, if we dare to pay attention, it is happening to all of us, personally.  We mostly just don't know it yet. The regime wants us all rendered less human, less humane. Nobody should be alone.

Tortured and murdered

Perhaps we have to be grateful that the New York State Police still see evil when they meet it.

Children Were Forced to Torture Sam Nordquist, Prosecutors Say
Seven people are now charged with first-degree murder in connection with the death of Mr. Nordquist, a transgender man ... [gift article]

... The killing of Mr. Nordquist, who prosecutors have said traveled from his home in Minnesota to the Finger Lakes region of New York, where he was held captive and tortured, has prompted a national outcry over anti-transgender discrimination and violence.

... “To have two children have to participate in the beating of another human being, it’s deeply disturbing,” Kelly Wolford, an assistant district attorney in Ontario County, southeast of Rochester, said at a news conference on Wednesday....

... Mr. Nordquist was originally from the suburbs of St. Paul, Minn. Last September, prosecutors said, he traveled to New York to meet Ms. Arzuaga, who was living in Room 22 at a motel called Patty’s Lodge in Canandaigua, N.Y. The two had met online last year, according to investigators, and were in a romantic relationship.

According to the indictment, from roughly Jan. 1 to Feb. 2, Mr. Nordquist was kept in confinement, beaten, sexually assaulted and denied proper nutrition, among numerous other depraved acts. The torture, investigators said, eventually caused his death.

Ms. Wolford said that Mr. Nordquist’s body was then removed from the motel, wrapped in plastic bags and dumped on the side of the road in a field at a farm in nearby Yates County. Police discovered his body there on Feb. 12.

“In my 20-year law enforcement career, this is one of the most horrific crimes I have ever investigated,” Capt. Kelly Swift of the New York State Police said after the circumstances became public.

Donald Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk and their goons didn't kill Sam Norquist. But their vicious denial of the complexities of gender certainly eggs on disturbed people.

This story is going to turn out to be complicated, I'm sure. The lives of poor, young, Black people often are complicated. 

But no presidential proclamation can erase the truth of gender fluidity; the Trump administration executive order trying to do so is in a category with trying to declare the earth is flat ...

It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.  These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. ...

So says Donald. As in so many areas, he's on a collision course with truth.

Unity rally for transgender lives

 

Trans people and friends in the San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood yesterday asserted a straightforward message to the hostile Trump regime and to the world.

Trans people cannot be erased. And, as for so long, they know they must take care of their own. The rally of several hundred people was notable for making provision for disabled people and providing interpretation for the deaf.

 

One speaker reminded listeners of their indigenous roots here in Nuevo Mexico.

Professor of history Susan Stryker shared the story of the Turk Street site, where, in 1966, queer people fought police in what's remembered as the Compton Cafeteria Riot. 

Raise up their names! There are too many recent casualties of the war on Black Trans lives: Sam Norquist, Tahiry Broom, Amyri Dior, Ra’Lasia Wright. All were murdered in the month of February.

Despite the panic about gender variation which has seized our current rulers, trans and gender non-conforming people are not going to be erased. 

Take your choice of Trump/Musk crimes against our country; here's mine

Your blogger has a wide choice to write about in this moment of the Musk/Trump coup against the United States of America. What to highlight. ..?

Smart people -- correctly I think -- say the most egregious violation of what all Americans expect from our government -- supposedly ruling by and for the people -- is a billionaire's lawless intrusion on government databases. And, probably, that's a right instinct. But it is not something I know much about. Go to Don Moynihan for this.

Here I'll often focus on the injuries Trump's coup is doing to migrants. Immigration restrictionists wish to forget that people have always got around.

In any subject area, I'll bring up instances where I have something to share out of my life experience and study that I think more people should know about.

And I promise to chronicle, to the best of my ability, these monsters' assault on the humanity of people whose realities to do not conform to their myopic gender expectations -- transpeople, binary people, uppity women all round, the weirdos! 

Chris Geidner is a legal commentator who writes Law Dork. He reports a conversation with Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU's LGBTQ & HIV Project. They are both already engaged in litigation seeking to preserve the rights and dignity of transpeople against the onslaught.

LAW DORK: At one point, Minter really summed up the discussion: “We're under attack in a very terrifying way, but we do still have a lot of power, and how this story comes out does depend to a great degree on what we do right now.”

...  basically what we've had is a series of executive orders in the first two weeks of the Trump administration that started right from January 20 with the executive order defining — purporting to define — sex for the federal government, but, as we'll discuss, that also contained several other provisions that led to fallout across agencies.  ... There has already been significant litigation and even some court orders pulling back on some of this. 

SHANNON MINTER: ... this is an attempt to brutalize, humiliate and crush a tiny minority group [so] as to desensitize everyone. And I'll just say, if they can do this to transgender people, they can do it to you or to anyone, and they're already doing that. They're already coming after many other groups....

CHASE STRANGIO: ...  we're fighting this on the front of the states and the federal government, with huge implications for individual constitutional rights protected under the Reconstruction amendments, but also what the separation of powers will continue to look like.

LAW DORK: ... How are you all dealing, in advocacy organizations, with trying to talk with organizations and entities that have been providing care — not just in the medical care context, but anybody. As the education EO ripples out, as these funding questions ripple out, how are how are you talking with people about what they should be doing, what they can be doing, what they need to be doing right now? ...

STRANGIO: So, I would say sort of two main things: Trying to remind people that these executive orders are not self executing. President Trump on his own did not change the law. It did not become illegal to treat transgender people under the age of 19 when he signed that order on January 28 and, especially with the education EO, it's very important for people to understand, these are directives to federal agencies that in no way change people's legal obligations, and, in fact, as the California Department of Education rightfully came out and said, does nothing — the President doesn't have that authority. So we're trying to remind institutions and individuals of that fact. 

... I'm curious, Shannon, as well, how you're helping people understand the difference between an executive order and what their legal obligations actually are. 

MINTER: ... I mean, you've captured it beautifully. And I think we should remember, most hospitals and clinics are continuing to provide care, but some, as you said, are complying in advance out based on fear and intimidation. I think it's just very important that we recognize, they're not the bad guys here. We've got to remember to keep the focus on where the trouble is coming from him. This is the president. ... he's doing it — just because he can get away with that, because transgender people are such a vulnerable minority. 

... But the real goal is to just do away with all checks and balances, to take power away from Congress, take power away from the Supreme Court, make Trump and Musk just be the unchecked rulers of our universe.

... They're saying they're not going to have any events celebrating MLK Day, and look at what's going on with the CDC where they're removing massive amounts of public health information from the website, everything about transgender people, but a lot of stuff just about women. At this point, acknowledging the existence of women as half the population in this country has been labeled as an unlawful DEI activity....

STRANGIO: To that, you can see how there's this very strategic move to cast human beings as ideologies. You see transgender people become gender ideology, and then that ideology can be attacked and eradicated in their mind. Of course, we as transgender people are going to continue to exist, in the same way they talk about individuals as DEI hires, as if they're not just using that as some code word for people of color or for women or for disabled people, and then weaponizing all of this language with very serious, material consequences. 

...  I don't want people to wake up three months from now and realize, "Wow, we should have stood up right on the first two weeks when they were attacking trans people, because now all of a sudden, I can't get my birth control, or my doctor doesn't know how to advise my child on adolescent health," and that's really where we're headed. ...

You can listen to the whole interview on YouTube. 

Not going anywhere ...

As anticipated, Donald the restored king has issued executive orders designed to legislate people who experience the fluidity of gender, broadly trans- and gender binary-folk, out of existence. 

Good luck with that. The World Wildlife Fund chronicles how commonly gender fluidity manifests among animal species. (Wonder if WWF' will submit in advance by taking that page down?)

But MAGA's got to try to create its own reality. Trump killed off several Biden executive orders, including one protecting transfolk in the military and another against discrimination based on gender identity. (Don't be surprised if those links die -- MAGA may not be able to erase transfolk, but it can probably corrupt the Federal Register.)

MAGA is going to do anything it can to make life hellish for people who live in gender non-conformity. Gotta have someone to project their insecurities onto when you are bullies and cowards.

Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte's Web gently explicates what's next:

... Once the discomfort over trans and non-binary people has been directly addressed through the full gamut of the resources of the federal government and every lever under Trump’s control has been pulled, his supporters will not only find their problems in life have not improved but trans folks are still very much around.

Their stubborn discomfort over trans people will never go away because trans people will never go away.

Trans and non-binary people exist all over the world and always have. In every nationality, every race, every ethnicity, every country, every culture, every religion, over thousands of years of recorded human history, all around the globe, you will find trans and non-binary people.

We have always been here, and we always will be. We are naturally occurring.

And it will be a crushing realization for a lot of non-trans people in this country when, after Trump has done all he says he will, their struggles are still present and targeting trans people both failed to remove their discomfort with our existence and alleviate their growing rage and desperation with trying to exist in a country that makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for working class families to survive.

So, yes, as strange as it may sound to many, I genuinely feel bad for these people. They have been sold a senseless narrative that revolves around a cruel solution to a non-existent problem that's used to assign blame for their struggles by someone who could not care less about their welfare.

I find that tragic.

Meanwhile, once again, trans people aren’t going anywhere.

I spent all of childhood and most of adulthood in deep anxiety, depression, anger, and denial over my gender identity. For many years, I prayed God would somehow heal me—would somehow cleanse me—of being who I am.

It took a long time to recognize being trans is a gift from God and that I am lovingly made in God's image, and for all the obstacles, I am never closer to God than in my full authenticity.

Trump can take that up with Her.

Yes!

Queers for the win

I have a counterintuitive opinion to share today.

All the visibility currently wreaking suffering on many trans people is going to be the prelude to eventual normalization of the underlying reality that a rigid gender binary simply isn't true of the human species. (Or, actually, many species.)

We're going to get there. Radical as this seems, we know how this works: first they try to kill you, then they kick you, then they meet you, then they let you live off in a corner, eventually you are just you. 

There are heroes along the way whose lives are teaching our society that trans folk exist and thrive. In the last month, I think of Delaware Congresswoman Sarah McBride who, for pure grandstanding spite, has been denied access by Republicans to the Congressional bathroom that agrees with her gender presentation. There is lawyer and advocate Chase Strangio who argued a doomed case for transgender adolescents and their parents before our regressive Supremes this month. 

But perhaps even more important in this process of trans and gender fluidity are the little local victories all over the country, when nonstandard people meet their neighbors and prevail. 

Here's a recent instance by way of The Advocate: 

It didn't pay off to neglect garbage pickup while campaigning on fear.

Craig Stoker, the executive director for Meals on Wheels in Odessa, won his November election for at-large City Council member with 56 percent of the vote — in the same county President-elect Donald Trump won 76 percent of the vote.

Stoker beat Denise Swanner by campaigning on infrastructure — specifically roads and garbage pickup — in contrast to the incumbent, whose campaign sent out mailers comparing the two's opposite positions by listing their only similarity as the fact that they are both in relationships with men.

... The Odessa City Council banned transgender individuals from using bathrooms, locker rooms, changing areas, showers, and similar public facilities that align with their gender identity after a contentious open meeting in October. Those who violate the ban could be convicted of a class C misdemeanor and receive a fine of up to $500, also giving legal standing to alleged victims to sue for damages up to $10,000 in civil court.

... “None of it was truly about me. It was their fear of losing a seat, losing an election, losing the title," Stoker continued. "I came into this campaign with the mindset that I'm going to have to rely on the work I've done in the community and the reputation I've built preceding me. That's all I got.”

When we fight, we win. Even in Texas.

Serious matters

The New York Times seems to think there's something entertaining, certainly unserious, about Republican South Carolina Congresscritter Nancy Mace trying to bar her new colleague Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride from the House bathrooms. As you might know, McBride is trans.

In Washington this week for new member orientation, Ms. McBride was still sitting through mandatory cybersecurity trainings, setting up her payroll, selecting district offices and learning how to introduce a bill when her new Republican colleague, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, announced plans to introduce a measure to bar transgender women from using women’s restrooms and changing rooms in the Capitol complex.

Ms. Mace did not try to pretend that she was doing anything other than targeting one individual with her resolution, even though it would apply to all employees and officers of the House.

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say,” she told reporters on Monday night. “I mean, this is a biological man.” She said that Ms. McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms — period, full stop.”

Nancy Mace is a a bigoted attention-seeking pig. Full stop. And should be confined to remedial kindergarten. 

Congresswoman Crockett knows what really matters -- as she usually does.

The NYT finds a Democratic Congresswoman who sticks up for McBride (there were others):

“There was no women’s restroom off the House floor until the 1990s,” said Representative Melanie Stansbury, Democrat of New Mexico. “For my female colleagues to go publicly after another colleague, and openly attack her, I find disgusting, disgraceful, irresponsible and anti-democratic. Why are you here in this institution?”

So the reporter gives the last word to a male Republican: 

Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, avoided questions about the news of the day. “I’m trying to avoid the great bathroom debate,” he said.

Very cute, the whole story. Except to the woman who has to live inside it. 

Presumably McBride has seen it all before. You don't win a statewide race for Congress without well-honed toughness. But the sheer lack of courtesy and willed ignorance from the Republicans reminds, as if we needed reminding, that these people aren't mature enough to be in government.

• • •

By far the most insightful effort to unpack the issues around transwomen participating in youth and adult womens' sports I've ever encountered comes from Parker Malloy. This is a terrific instance of READ THE WHOLE THING.

Since we're, once again, focused on the fraught matter of bathrooms, here's a section of this article I found particularly lucid: 

What laws around things like restrooms and restrictions on updating identifying documents do is to create a world in which trans people are obligated to out themselves as trans to people all day, every day. 

Should a trans woman have to announce to bouncers and bartenders that she’s trans before getting a drink? 

Should a trans man have to decide whether to break the law by using a men’s restroom or loudly signal to everyone in a restaurant that his birth certificate says “female” by walking into a women’s restroom?  

Because that’s what these bills are advocating for: a world where trans people have to essentially wear a big neon sign disclosing their medical history to everyone around them. That sort of extremely private information is not the type of thing strangers two tables over have any inherent right to know. If someone isn’t your doctor or romantic partner, there’s no legitimate argument for why that person has any right to know what kind of genitals you were born with. That’s just the truth.

When you create a legal system in which trans people are forced to repeatedly out themselves, you’re creating a system designed to never fully accept them as people.

In 2016, a Wisconsin school reportedly forced a trans boy to wear a bright green wristband to ensure that school security guards (who had been instructed to be on the lookout for “students who appear to be going into the ‘wrong’ restroom”) could catch him if he used the boys’ restroom. This is about surveillance and social exclusion.

As someone, not trans myself, who routinely gets yelled at by blue-haired ladies in public bathrooms -- accused of being in the wrong one for my apparent gender -- I feel this to my core. And, nowadays, at 77, in still-civilized California, I snap back at my accusers, politely if they seem merely confused, furiously if they are aiming to erase me. It's always been my schtick that "this is what a woman looks like -- get used to it." If I'm feeling accommodating, I'll cede that "this is one way a woman looks." There seem to be a close to infinite supply of these women with a bathroom problem. Now that is serious.

November 20 is the Transgender Day of Remembrance – a day to commemorate the transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming persons who are targeted and killed for living authentically and courageously.

Soul, empathy, and sport

I used to have no doubt about the unifying superpower of sports — how they turn strangers into teammates and teammates into family, how they make community out of motley spectators, how they raise the curtains for societal progress. I used to believe it was an imperishable kind of magic. I don’t anymore. Or rather, I can’t. Division has seized too much control. -- Jerry Brewer, Washington Post sports columnist

Mr. Brewer offers what is, so far, a four part series -- Grievance Games -- which illustrates why sometimes sports journalism is some of the most insightful social commentary around. 

“The first part of the project centered on exclusivity: who gets to play and who gets to lead,” [Arizona State sports historian Victoria] Jackson said. “In America, so many of the origins go back to White males controlling the access. The second part, and it’s still going, is inclusivity — people of color and women gaining access on the field and behind the scenes.

“That’s how sport reflects society, and the way it handles its own issues of exclusion and inclusion has a great influence.”

 ... For more than a century, American sports have manipulated politics for their benefit.

The most prominent leagues didn’t become lucrative entertainment giants because they kept the nation’s problems and politics from eating away at them. They succeeded precisely because they swallowed politics whole, turning the public craving for diversion into negotiating tactics to receive government subsidies and influence lawmakers to champion their most ambitious profit-boosting ideas, all under the guise of bringing people together.

When pressured to change, the gatekeepers return to where they have always gone in times of need, expecting the politicians and traditionalists to help them maintain their systems — while claiming to be apolitical. One group gets mocked and ordered to stick to sports. The other attempts, without apology, to stick it to sports.

“We don’t see the politics of the privileged,” Jackson said. “We only see the politics of those challenging privileged authority.”

A statue of Jackie Robinson was cut off at the feet by a White man who claimed he'd "stolen it for scrap metal" in Wichita in 2024

At the beginning of the modern era of there was Jackie Robinson who broke the color line in Major League Baseball in 1947: The trailblazer’s story symbolizes the pain and resilience of America. Can the reality outlast the myth?

How we remember Robinson says much about how we view America. It symbolizes our cruelty and our glory, our pain and our resilience. It’s the most important tale in our sports history, a breakthrough of incalculable moral, cultural and financial proportions.

[Robinson] wrote: “There I was the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps it was, but then again perhaps the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

Brewer calls contemporary sports media to account: The media’s role in fracturing sports: As societal grievance divides sports fans, will media members meet this moment or get trampled by it?  Brewer has much to say about the enterprise of which is he is part.

... The pursuit of truth now competes with the desire for attention. It’s no contest, sadly. Instead of reporting, instead of wondering and scrutinizing, instead of building trust and gaining insight and providing context, we exhaust too many diminishing resources to facilitate screaming. There is seldom enough fresh information to react to, so we regurgitate arguments, only louder, all in the name of provocation. ...

... At worst, it creates “a grievance industry for fans who love sports but hate the people who play them.” That’s the perspective of Dave Zirin, a journalist and author who lives at the intersection of sports and politics [at the Nation.] ...

... “In some ways, I think the evil empire has kind of won,” [ESPN commentator Robert] Lipsyte said. “I think sportswriting has gotten a lot better, but I think there’s no real call for it anymore. Fans don’t really want real journalism. They don’t want to read the truth about their entertainers. They really don’t want to read the truth about how predatory everything around sports can be. They used to have to listen, but there are institutions happy to give them exactly what they want.”

Brewer's struggle with sports journalism's infirmities moves naturally on to the hot topic of the moment: The panic over trans sports inclusion: In the fight over transgender participation in U.S. sports, the right to play is simply an opening act. In this extraordinary installment, Brewer cuts to the heart of what competiton means to any athlete, a struggle to be one's best self.

Before the hate, she changed in peace, transforming out of her body and into herself. She started to look the way she felt. She saw it in her breasts, hair, skin, muscles, fat, bones. She knew the person in the mirror.

Then she would go to the track — her refuge — and experience a different reality. As she ran, her legs would not fire the way they once did. She could not shift gears. She did a standard 150-meter acceleration drill, progressing from jog to stride to sprint every 50 meters. Her calf muscles begged her to stop. After the workout, she struggled to walk. She did not know this person.

“I could feel how abysmally slow I was,” she said. “It started to take a mental toll.”

So she did what athletes do. She spent more than a year adjusting to the effects of the gender-affirming hormone therapy. She relearned her body — every movement, every twitch — amending a lifetime of instincts. She dared to compete again. In December, at a college invitational, she had the nerve to win again.

Immediately, the success thrust her into the fiercest political battle in American sports. Sadie Schreiner became the latest exception made to seem like a widespread threat: a transgender women’s sports standout. ...

Brewer doesn't claim to know what it means that some people who've been born with one set of anatomy might feel themselves fully alive only when identifying with a different or even apparently constrasting gender. But he's not going to claim they don't exist among athletes and try to throw them out of the human family. He can see them as humans -- such a little thing -- and so huge too.

The links in the article are all gift links -- read Grievance Games for yourself.

Cretinous and disgraceful

Kevin Drum's shtick is tamping down excessive anxiety among his comrades on the loosely liberal side of the political spectrum. But not on this topic; he's disgusted by the stupidity and cruelty of too many of his credulous fellow citizens. The damage to young humans must take precedence.

Click to enlarge.

Moral panics like this one generally produce nothing but misery and oppression, and the campaign against gender-affirming care is headed down the same road. It's one thing to display some caution toward procedures that haven't been heavily studied and still have unknown consequences—this is happening in some European countries—but it's quite another to ban them altogether out of bigotry and ignorance. That's what the militant zealots in Alabama are doing, along with their militant zealots in two dozen other states.

In the absence of strong evidence in either direction, decisions like these should generally be left up to the patient, their doctor, and their parents. They're the ones best able to make case-by-case judgments. At most, given the current state of our knowledge, states might be justified in mandating a few guardrails (counseling, time restrictions, etc.). But that's it. Banning gender affirming care entirely for minors—the only age at which certain procedures can be done—is nothing more than jumping on the bandwagon of never-ending ugliness that has broken out in the Republican Party in the age of Trump. It's cretinous and disgraceful.

Witch hunts seem to be a recurrent theme of U.S. life. The 1980s saw the great Satanic Panic which inspired terrified parents to dig under daycare centers searching for hidden tunnels where ritual abuse was practiced. Eventually, after childcare workers were put on trial and many cases collapsed, that alluring madness faded. A few people spent many years in prison for "crimes" that have been understood never to have happened. Might the attractiveness of the theory have had something to do with the enormous increase during that decade in the proportion of women with children working outside the home and so the increase in daycare facilities?

Today we live amid a gender-fluidity panic. Beating up on trans kids, trans-curious kids, and their parents is in vogue. How many victims will be left in the wake of ignorant fears, weaponized by Republican political gain?

As queers have long insisted, we are everywhere

Tim Mak was reporting from the war in Ukraine for NPR until that network laid him off in March in response to funding shortfalls. The former DC journalist and US Army combat medic decided he wasn't done. So he has stayed on in that invaded country and launched a substack, The Counteroffensive, promising: 

Readers will come with me to cities all across Ukraine, tasting the soups made by Ukrainian cooks, meeting the heroic animal shelter volunteers in frontline cities, and listening to patriotic Ukrainian music that’s making a comeback.

You will also experience the cruelties of war: walking through bombed out cities with Ukrainian soldiers; late-night conversations in a bomb shelter with a four-star general; observing war crimes that the Russian military and Putin are responsible for.

Pursuant to that mission, along with his journalist friends, he followed a story -- and get a rude reminder of our domestic culture war.

Editor’s note: This week we posted a story highlighting a trans activist in Ukraine; after all, Russia cited LGBTQ+ rights as a reason for the war. We didn’t anticipate the negative reaction: more than 1,000 readers unsubscribed, and we lost paid subscribers as well.

For a publication that is just two months old, it was devastating. We work seven days a week to grow our audience. However, we believe that subscriber numbers don’t mean anything if we don’t hold true to our values. We will continue to highlight marginalized communities and the people you don’t hear about in other outlets.

The Counteroffensive offers both paid and free subs. Check it out. 

• • •

Over the past weekend, the Episcopal Church commemorated the life and witness of the civil rights activist and legal innovator, the Rev. Pauli Murray. Decades before Rosa Parks, Murray refused to move to the back of a segregated bus and was arrested for her pains. 

While in law school at Howard University in DC during World War II, she participated in sit-ins demanding service at a lunch counter that refused to serve Black people. (I think we can assume Murray would have viscerally recognized the threat to all public accommodation laws implicit in the Supremes' recent decision exempting a website designer from the legal obligation to serve all comers.) 

NAACP lawyer and future Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (he's May 17 in the Church calendar) called Murray's writing "the 'Bible' for civil rights litigators." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited Murray for developing the legal underpinnings for Equal Protection law -- which is all we've got in the absence of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Late in life, Murray followed a calling to be ordained a priest, one of the first set of women to take up the vocation in 1977.

Murray enjoyed a long, complicated friendship with First Lady and human rights agitator Eleanor Roosevelt; the fragments in the previous couple of paragraphs derive from the short bio of Murray posted at the National Park Service site for one of ER's residences. 

That site attempts honestly and honorably to present one of the puzzles the amazing Pauli Murray sets for us in our current state of understanding of who people are (and who they were) to themselves:

Pronouns, Gender, Pauli Murray

Terminology and language referring to LGBTQ communities, gender expression, and gender identities is different today than it was in Pauli Murray’s lifetime. Murray self-described as a “he/she personality” in correspondence with family members. Later in journals, essays, letters and autobiographical works, Pauli employed “she/her/hers'' pronouns and self-described as a woman. Scholars use a range of pronouns when referring to Murray: “he/him/his” pronouns (Simmons-Thorne), “they/them/theirs” pronouns (Keaveney), “s/he” pronouns (Fisher), and “she/her/hers” pronouns (Rosenberg, Cooper, Drury). We don’t know how Pauli Murray would identify today or which pronouns Pauli would use for self-expression. This remains an ongoing discussion in the National Park Service, but we do recognize that pronouns matter.

Exactly. We don't know how Murray might have engaged with the possibilities of expanded understandings of sex and gender. But I think we can be sure she would have engaged forthrightly and bravely.

Not much love at present in the city of Saint Francis

If you are into that sort of thing, there are multiple options for watching video of Banko Brown being shot by a Walgreens rent-a-cop after a shoplifting episode on San Francisco's Market Street. There followed an altercation in which Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony pummels and chokes the young man, then fires on him after Brown goes out the door. Our D.A. thinks there's no provable crime in that execution. Here's a succinct report:

It has come out that the Walgreen's security contractor, Kingdom Group Protective Services which employed the guard, had recently changed its policy: 

Guards were instructed “to engage in ‘hands-on’ recovery of merchandise,” according to the report. “The guards … were to actively work to retrieve or recover any stolen items once it was clear that the individual who concealed the items intended to leave the store without paying.”

Anthony told the police officer interrogating him after the shooting that “we can ask for receipts if we suspect if somebody’s steals or something. I was in my right to ask that individual … um, if they paid for those items. In fact, I seen ’em stealing, so …”

So this was more than an untrained cosplay cop jacked up from a scuffle, turning his gun on a mouthy perp. Anthony had been ordered to play the badass. There's one heck of a wrongful death civil suit coming here. Brown's family has hired attorney John Burris who has spent a career fighting these cases.

In the Guardian, we learn who was lost when Banko Brown was killed: 

In a statement released through the Young Women’s Freedom Center, a local non-profit group where Brown was a volunteer organizer, they argued: “In a city like San Francisco, where so many have to make tough decisions to meet their basic needs, arming stores with the pass to use armed force will result in much more tragedy.

Julia Arroyo, co-executive director of the group, which has demanded an end to armed guards at retail stores and increased investments in housing and resources for trans and queer youth, said in a statement on Monday: “We do not need to see the video to know that Banko Brown’s killing was unjustified. Armed force is not a justified response to poverty. Young people, especially Black and trans youth who experience poverty, deserve love, care and the resources they need to survive and thrive. Banko deserved to live. He deserved to be protected and cherished. He deserved housing and to have his basic needs met.”

This city can do better. Better than responding in frustration about a Downtown economic cycle in the doldrums, increased misery on the streets, assertive young transfolks, and an incompetent political D.A. who excuses a vigilante death sentence for shoplifting.