The American Psychiatric Organization strongly criticizes US state laws targeting transgender  people

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is deeply worried about the US state laws attacking LGBTQI+ people.

In a statement the organization says:

Our organizations, representing nearly 600,000 physicians and medical students, firmly believe the trusted relationship between a physician and their patient should never be jeopardized by the actions of policymakers, and a physician should not be criminalized or penalized for providing care.

Our organizations have consistently opposed any legislation or regulation that interferes in the confidential relationship between a patient and their physician and the provision of evidence-based patient care for any patient. Patients must be able to discuss health issues like reproductive care, family planning and gender-affirming care with their trusted physician to determine together what care is best for them.

We reiterate that all patients must have access to evidence-based, comprehensive medical care, and that physicians must be able to practice medicine that is informed by their education, training, and experience. This includes reproductive health services and information and gender-affirming care.

We are deeply concerned that legislation and legal opinions across the country will endanger patients and clinicians by allowing private citizens and policymakers to interfere in health care decision-making. The patient-physician relationship, not politics, is the backbone of medicine.

See also APA: Legislation to Criminalize Physicians, Jeopardize Patient-Physician Relationship Have No Place in Health Care

Janelle Monáe, nonbinary actor, songwriter and author, publishes science fiction book about queer and trans freedom

Janelle Monáe just came out publicly as nonbinary.  She has now published The Memory Librarian, a collection of short stories written together with other authors, all set in the android universe  presented in her EPs and albums.

Monáe presents androids as liberated beings threatening the status quo of a totalitarian society. It is not hard to see how they, their gender fluidity and their  power of imagination helps us understand the liberating role of LGBTQA culture today. 

They also help us understand why both right wing extremists and left wing transphobes do their best to stop them from freeing the world from the tyranny of sexism, racism and conformity.

Many of the characters are queer or nonbinary, including Seshet, who comes to love a trans woman named Alethia.

See also: Queer artist Janelle Monáe Dedicates Grammy Nominations to ‘Trans Brothers and Sisters’

Janelle Monáe’s First Fiction Breaks Open the Literary Space

On how “gender critical” activists, allied with right wing extremists,  are harming women and all LGBTQ people

The Irish author Aidan Comerford has written an interesting comment on JK Rowling’s journey from supporting same sex marriage in Ireland to welcoming both homophobic and transphobic bigots online.

“Gender critical radical feminists” (GC) AKA “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (TERFs) are the transphobes of the left.

You can read the whole thread here. Here’s an extract:

I speak to ex-gender critical people a lot (my DMs are open for that reason), and a lot of them were Leftists who cheered for Marriage Equality too, who found that as gender critical people they were expected to ally with people who they would have fought all their lives.

One ex-gender critical person describes how her eldest was upset with her for years, him telling her she had raised him not to speak like that about LGBT+ people, and she only understood why he was so upset when she heard her youngest repeat things she said about trans people.

Gender criticism, under the guise of women’s and LGB rights, actually radicalises people away from supporting women’s and LGB rights, and gets them using the language of the Alt Right, “Groomers” “Paedophile Enablers” “Perverts”, all the same words I heard people who were opposed to Marriage Equality use [in Ireland] in 2015. And I remember the same people calling us “ghouls” and “murderers” in 2018, during Repeal [a referendum legalizing abortion in Ireland]. 

 What “gender criticism” is at its heart is an incredibly successful campaign by the Right Wing to get vulnerable Leftists (women who have experienced abuse are especially vulnerable) to abandon their former implacable support of LGBT+ & women’s rights &, instead, stand with those who want those rights rolled back.

After losing out on Marriage Equality, the Right decided to use the T to drive a wedge into LGBT+ (and women’s rights) support, so now you have former Leftists shouting that Stonewall UK are a “pro-paedohpile” organisation, something only the Right were saying in 2015.

So now, when they introduce their “Don’t Say Gay” bills, you have (former) Leftists who would have cheered for Irish Marriage Equality in 2015, trying to argue FOR these sort of bills, something  they never would have dreamed of back in the day. That is radicalisation…

Top photo: Ruth Medjber

The “gender critical” and transphobic LGB Alliance is against British women

A new survey from Britain shows that Brits strongly oppose “conversion therapy” for both LGB people and for transgender people.

Over at Medium Katy Montgomery points out that the so-called “gender critical” (GC) movement (as in TERFs or “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”) are completely out of line with what British women want:

Most people who support trans rights are women, and most women support trans rights. Most people with GC views are men. This would be uncontroversial and unsurprising if it wasn’t for the fact that the GC movement’s main strategy is to present opposing trans rights as “defending women”. They aren’t, they are opposing women.

Indeed, the people who share the views of “gender critical” transphobes are mostly political extremists who want to reestablish traditional gender roles and take away the freedom of all LGBT+ people. 

Read all of Montgomery’s post here!

See also: “The British people support bans on both gay and transgender “conversion therapy”

Calling for the effective eradication of a minority group isn’t a ‘debate’

Daniel Sohenge,  a specialist in international refugee law who is working for an anti-trafficking charity takes a look at the bizarre ways transphobes are trying to look tolerant and openminded, while at the same time trying to eradicate a group of people that clearly exists.

Via twitter.

Eradication of a minority group is not “debate”

“I have been running through this one in my head all night and still can’t find the words to say it properly. A debate is nuanced, layered. There are complexities to be discussed. Calling for the effective eradication of a minority group isn’t a “debate”.

History is replete with examples of people who claimed that minorities “don’t exist”, are “fads” even that they are “less than human” or “perverts”. When you look back at those examples the people saying those things tend not to be on the right side of history.

For people who claim “it’s science” so often I do also wonder how they can’t see that when you have a minority which wasn’t really measured, or counted, suddenly being so you unsurprisingly get a greater jump when compared to data on other groups who were all along. 

Confusion

Are there things which confuse me? Yes, absolutely. This is not my area of expertise. So I talk to people, listen, read and learn as much as I can. Does the right of a minority group to exist confuse me? No. That is not confusing. 

If you want to argue it is about “equal rights” then what confuses me is how you can do so from the same platform as a woman who argues for a greater gender pay gap and another who claims period poverty doesn’t exist. I do find that confusing. 

I find the people who argue that it is homophobic to be trans or support trans people highly confusing. That’s particularly the case when you are aligning yourself with the same people who think bi-sexuals don’t exist either. 

I’m confused, after years of fighting to get people’s rights recognised, how quickly people will drop letters off “LGBTQ”, and how many more will be shed before those on that side of the “debate” are happy. 

Safety does not require exclusion

Women absolutely have the right to feel safe. Safety is rarely predicated on the need to eradicate another group though. I don’t know how to break it to you, but a lot of men are lazy. They aren’t “dressing up” or “changing their identity” to attack women. 

The data is pretty clear on this, sadly. If men are going to assault someone they aren’t waiting to change their gender to do it more often than not. A sign on a bathroom door is not the impenetrable forcefield so many seem to make out, again sadly. 

Standing with bigots

When the time comes and your grandkids, or whoever, look up at you and ask what you are proud about in your life, are you honestly going to wipe away a tear of happiness and with a wistful grin of nostalgia recount how you stood with bigots…

How you fought alongside people who ripped children from their families based on their identity and then prosecuted the parents. Will you look down and fondly recount your colleagues in this battle? The millionaire who belittles and bullies people online… 

The people who deliberately try and get the already eye-wateringly high number of trans individuals who commit suicide to rise even further. Those good family loving folks who want to see children tortured until they say they are what you want them to be. 

Perhaps you will reach under you bed, pull out an old shoebox and carefully remove an old phone so you can show them the replies to this question by @IndiaWilloughby and joyfully say how you made people feel unsafe in their own homes. 

Don’t know about you, but if any of my grandparents had done anything like that no amount of cash in a card would have made me want to hang around, but that is exactly what people are doing right now though. 

You cannot claim you are fighting for equality by discriminating against trans individuals. You cannot claim that you are defending rights by fighting for others to lose there’s. That’s not how things work. It’s not campaigning. It’s just bullying. 

The world’s complicated. There are grey areas. There’s nuance, and spaces where we need debate. Whether an already persecuted group should exist at all is not one of them. You don’t get to “just ask questions” or debate whether someone has the right to be alive.”

Full twitter thread here!

Illustration: stellalevi

Leaked audio confirms Irish Genspect director as anti-trans conversion therapist targeting youth

Lee Leveille has written a very interesting article on how the anti-trans activist Stella O’Malley is using the pseudo-sciences of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” and “autogynephilia” in defense of conversion therapy.

It is a long read, but it provides a very useful into the way TERFs and conservative transphobes are organizing and developing their toxic narratives.

If trans people are to beat the bigots, we need to know how they think and work.

“Recorded audio of a Twitter Space from 2021 was released on YouTube last week as part of an ongoing feud between Genspect affiliates and self-proclaimed “gender industry abolitionists” who aim to eliminate all forms of gender affirming care. 

Within the Space Stella O’Malley, a prominent psychotherapist in Ireland facing allegations of conversion therapy and the director of Genspect (among other groups), reveals that she has made it her life mission to prevent trans youth from accessing any form of gender affirming care. 

In doing so, she inadvertently confesses to seeking to suppress or change trans youth’s gender identity, the very definition of gender identity change efforts (GICE, i.e. conversion therapy/practices), despite her past denials.“

Read it here: Leaked audio confirms Genspect director as anti-trans conversion therapist targeting youth

Illustration: Atlas Studio.

An ex-TERF writes about misogyny in “gender critical” feminist culture

“I’ve come to believe that the GC position is usually more about maintaining the gender polarity… than about protecting cis women.” 

Anastasia, a former “gender critical feminist”, has published a very interesting article on TERF ideology over at Substack. I do not necessarily agree with everything she says, but then again that shouldn’t be a goal in itself. The point is that her article brings in some very interesting perspectives on the way “gender critical feminists” think and on the public debate on sex and gender.

Read it all! But here is an extract to get you going:

GCs [”Grender Crtitical feminists”] will regularly ask trans women who focus on the social reality of transition ( i.e., the fact that if society sees you as a woman, you will be treated like one) what it means to “live as women,” as if this were some mystical idea and not just a description of how society works. 

GCs jettison the very concept of gender when they play this game, erasing how sex manifests on the social level altogether. 

This reveals not just a belief about the relevance of reproductive sex in people’s lives (something I agree with), but a deep-set inability to grasp with experiences outside of how the gender system conditions us to think about reality—people are unable to reconcile the possibility that social treatment does not flow necessarily from reproductive capacity. 

This leads to tropes like “we can always tell,” as well as minimization, if not outright denial, of the misogyny that trans women actually face. 

From a radical feminist perspective, I find the refusal to engage with the ways in which trans women are oppressed through the gender system inconceivable, since so much of it is exactly what we would predict: intense fetishization fed by marginalization in the sex trade, legal relics like the trans panic defense that were fashioned from the perspective of cis men and erase the degree to which sexual power dynamics play in men’s favor. 

Even the responses when these issues are brought up can also be disturbing in the way that they play into deeply misogynistic ideas, as it’s common for people to insist that trans women enjoy and welcome misogyny, especially when tied to male sexual interest, and thus cannot be harmed by it. It goes without saying that this sort of idea is the very basis of rape culture.

The longer you stay in GC spaces, the clearer it becomes that much of the opposition to the idea that trans women are women is more about framing trans identity as “fake” than anything else….

The fact that they usually simultaneously stress the irreversibility of medical transition should serve as a clue that something is amiss here ideologically—they recognize that a significant change has taken place, but at the same time, they refuse to acknowledge that it has any effect on a person’s social experience. 

This is a phenomenon I find difficult to understand, but the more I see it, the more I suspect it ties into a deep-set discomfort with gender categories being transgressed that can only be assuaged by insisting that deception must be involved. In other words, classic transphobia. 

This sort of tendency reveals that the GC claim that sex is immutable is often meant not just descriptively, but also prescriptively—people are not supposed to do anything that might threaten the sanctity of sex categories, hence the strange, often moralistic language surrounding medical transition (e.g., “healthy body parts,” preoccupation with what is “natural,” etc.).

Reflections on the gender debate.

Illustration: Ponomariova_Maria