Pride Versus Prejudice

“You: an Achilles’ apple Blushing sweet on a high branch At the tip of the tallest tree. You escaped those who would pluck your fruit Not that they didn’t try. No, They could not forget you Poised beyond their reach.” —Sappho Happy Pride month, everyone. This year, sadly, calls upon us to remember the violent origin of the Pride movement—born spontaneously in response to anti-LGBTQ state violence, before spreading throughout the world as an international campaign for queer liberation—and living up to that legacy. Last year, I wrote a six-chapter-long essay to debunk various anti-trans talking points. In the introduction I called what we are currently living through a “Lavender Scare renaissance.” In 2021 and 2022 combined, there were a total of 327 anti-trans bills introduced throughout the United States, both on the federal and state level; 44 of them passed. Then there was a dramatic increase with 615 anti-trans bills introduced and 87 passing in 2023. In 2024, 701 bills were introduced with 51 passing. And last year, with the Republicans retaking federal power and ushering in the second Lavender Scare, the number of bills introduced skyrocketed again to 1,022, with 126 passing. So far in 2026, the number of anti-trans bills introduced is 793, with 55 already passed. All of these bills are designed to do serious harm. This can only be described as a legislative assault on all trans people. As if that isn’t sinister enough, the majority of these bills target children. Furthermore, the Trump administration is trying to export its anti-trans agenda to other countries. Given the ascendancy of the far-right in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, often with political platforms that blatantly ape Trump’s MAGA movement, that agenda might find fertile soil throughout the world. So, having dealt with the Right’s anti-trans arguments last year, let me mainly address the opposite group this year: my fellow leftists. Credit where it’s due, most people left-of-center support trans rights. However, given the barrage of murderous legislation, simply being in favor of trans rights becomes inadequate when—as is too often the case—we fail to make protecting trans people a priority. Too often are trans “issues” treated as a niche subject; an exotic topic not worth centering since it doesn’t concern the average voter. (The same reasoning is responsible for other blind spots; reparations for slavery, police brutality, and Native American rights come to mind.) This is flawed reasoning. It does concern the average voter because anti-trans legislation also harms cis women. Transmisogyny is often a mere Trojan horse for regular misogyny. Plus, I only need to mention the name Martin Niemöller to drive home the importance of defending the universality of all human rights. But even if it didn’t impact the average voter, treating trans rights as a secondary boutique topic betrays an ignorance of how dire things already are. So let’s discuss it. Here I won’t beat around the shrubbery: journalist Walker Bragman of Important Context published a piece last January, headlined “Experts Warn US in Early Stages of Genocide Against Trans Americans.” Two of the experts are former presidents of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). I think their words speak for themselves: “‘I am concerned about genocide against trans people in the United States in the near future,’ said Dr. Henry Theriault, who served as IAGS president from 2017 to 2021. … He cautioned that transgender Americans are more vulnerable than other groups due to their population size. Today, they make up roughly one percent of the total US population—a rough equivalent to Jews in 1933 Germany.” Furthermore, Theriault added that trans people could be targeted in destructive ways that doesn’t necessarily require mass violence: “the US might see policies aimed at making life ‘intolerable’ for transgender Americans to live authentically such that the suicide rate dramatically goes up. ‘There could be all sorts of things that we would do that are not like what’s happened in the past, but would still be destructive of trans people as a group,’ he said.” The other former IAGS president and founder of Genocide Watch, Dr. Gregory Stanton, told Bragman, “I think what they’re doing here is they’re trying to destroy a gender group. And so I do think it’s genocidal. I think that the objective here is literally, physically to destroy this group.” Genocide researcher Haley Brown “told Important Context that the bathroom bills effectively give non-state actors tacit approval to commit violence. ‘It’s always been about policing,’ she said, explaining: ‘It’s this idea that I am going to create and reinforce my ideal values of society and the state, down to the very physiological characteristics and features of the humans that exist within that state.’” Lastly, Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, founder and director of the Lemkin Institute—named after Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer who coined the term genocide in 1944—“said she believes the US is now in the ‘early-to-mid stages of a genocidal process against trans and nonbinary and intersex people.’ … ‘The genocidal process is really about destroying identities, destroying groups through all sorts of means,’ she said, explaining that even those that result in mass deaths have ‘started out with other techniques that are less violent—at the beginning.’” Earlier this year in March, the Lemkin Institute issued its third “Red Flag Alert” for a developing “anti-trans genocide in the USA.” Let me quote a substantial portion: The [Trump] administration has moved from identifying transgender people as a threat to the family and to the nation’s military prowess to claiming that transgender people constitute a cosmic threat to the spiritual health of the nation and the greatest direct threat to US national security in the world. Given these ideological developments, especially coupled with the increasingly hostile and draconian legislation against trans identities, the Lemkin Institute believes the United States is squarely within the early to middle stages of a genocidal process against trans people, the goal of which is to completely erase transgender people not only from public life but also from existence in the US and globally. …Currently, the genocide against trans people follows a pattern—denial of identity (pattern #9 in the Lemkin Institute’s Ten Patterns of Genocide)—that makes it more familiar to the colonial genocides against indigenous populations, including the residential/boarding school systems in North America and Australia, where indigenous children were “allowed” to go on living if they gave up their identities, including their languages. … This pattern of genocide will simultaneously criminalize their identity, so that expressions of it or institutions that reproduce it become characterized as threatening and corrosive to the body politic and warranting state violence and coercion. People who assert or support the denied identity then become criminal elements that must be eliminated. …In September 2025, President Trump issued an executive order describing supporters of the trans community as gender “extremists” and “domestic terrorists.” Building on this executive order, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a memorandum out in early December 2025 to federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies ordering them to investigate domestic terrorist groups, and explicitly including “radical gender ideology” as a form of domestic terrorism. …Beyond the language characterizing trans people as national security threats and violent domestic terrorists, some Republican politicians are also using religious language to portray their existence as a spiritually corrupting influence. During a mid-December press conference at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neil insinuated that transgender people posed a threat to the nation by “denying fundamental truths,” further stating that “at the root of the evils we face ... is a hatred for nature as God designed it, and for life as it was meant to be lived.” Such language both encourages societal violence against the group and justifies targeted state violence. It is a common tactic of genocidal campaigns to accuse targets of being against God and thereby to encourage the wider public to voluntarily participate in the genocide as a Godly act. The Alert goes on to describe in detail some of the legislative assaults: Over the first two months of 2026, we have already witnessed terrifying developments in Kansas and Indiana. In late January of 2026, the Kansas State Legislature passed a bathroom ban that includes a bounty for Americans who hunt and find trans people using the appropriate bathroom for their gender; anyone who encounters a suspected trans person in a bathroom can launch a civil suit against that person. Although this is the first statute of its kind, the Lemkin Institute would not be surprised if other states take inspiration. Such legislation encourages the harassment of trans people daring to exist in public by monetarily rewarding those who take part in the harassment. …As part of the same bill targeting the trans community, Kansas also invalidated the driver’s licences of anyone for whom the gender marker on their liscence does not match their sex assigned at birth. This cannot be read as anything other than an attempt to force trans people to out themselves, as those who want to continue driving will have to obtain a new driver’s licence with a gender marker that does not correspond to their lived reality. Such legislation also falls squarely within the pattern of denial of identity, as it forces trans people to choose between losing their ability to move around easily and identifying as a gender other than their own. The Lemkin Institute will not be surprised if the Trump Administration follows Kansas’s lead and invalidates passports where the gender marker does not correspond with one’s assigned sex at birth. In 2025, President Trump issued an executive order requiring new passports to correspond with sex assigned at birth, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in November of 2025. Any trans people who obtain new passports while this executive order is in effect will be forced to out themselves if they attempt to leave or re-enter the country, putting them at risk of harassment or violence. Forcible identification is a common tactic of genocidal projects and often precedes containment; it enables the genocidaires to easily track the targeted group. What is presented as a simple identifying marker on one’s ID or a badge worn on one’s clothes becomes a tool of control. The most well-known example of this is the yellow star badge Jews were forced to wear under the Third Reich. In Rwanda, identity documents specified whether the person was “Hutu” or “Tutsi”; during the genocide, these identity documents determined who lived and who died. Today, under Israeli apartheid, colour-coded IDs are used to control where Palestinians from different areas are allowed to travel or live. Republicans have not been subtle about their goals. At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, always attended by Republican bigwigs, right-wing commentator Michael Knowles famously said, “There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It’s all or nothing. … For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely. The whole preposterous ideology at every level.” The crowd roared and applauded. Additionally, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation—the far-right think tank that wrote Project 2025, the blueprint of the Trump administration’s policy goals—has admitted that the contrived outrage about trans athletes or bathroom bans are mere stepping stones to full eradication. While discussing the current policies targeting trans youths on a right-wing podcast, Roberts said: “where there continues to be disagreement is on what you do with adults. At Heritage, we believe that so-called transgender surgery is bad for anybody.” “How do you address this, though?” the host asked. “You outlaw it,” Roberts responded. “We often work toward an ultimate goal via incremental steps—sometimes people will call us radical incrementalists. We’re willing to take a quarter of the enchilada if we can keep working there.” When asked if trans adults should have their hormone medication taken away, Roberts said, “We like that idea, too. … So, if that’s the thing that policymakers can agree on left and right, Heritage would be fully supportive of that, knowing that ultimately we have an ideal position that would be much stronger than that.” In terms of scope, the Trump administration, along with their network of right-wing capitalists, have widened their crusade against queer people globally. ProPublica  journalist Lisa Song reported that the US delegates at the United Nations have repeatedly derailed meetings, “objecting to the word ‘gender’ in international resolutions and documents. … They delivered these statements during UN forums on topics as varied as women’s rights, science and technology, global health, toxic pollution and chemical waste. Even a resolution meant to reaffirm cooperation between the UN and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations became an opportunity to bring up the issue.” Song further wrote: The Trump administration’s insistence on litigating ‘gender’ complicates the already ponderous procedures of the UN. Many decisions are made by consensus, which could require representatives from more than 100 countries to agree on every word. Phrases and single words still under debate are marked with brackets. Some draft documents end up with hundreds of brackets, awaiting resolution at a subsequent date. At the June meeting on chemical pollution, delegates decided to form a scientific panel but couldn’t agree on crucial details about whether the panel’s purpose included “the protection of human health and the environment.” A description of the panel included brackets on whether it would work in a way that integrates “gender equality and equity” or “equality between men and women.” …Gender is a crucial factor in chemical safety … Pregnant people are uniquely vulnerable to chemical exposure and women are disproportionately exposed to toxic compounds, including through beauty and menstrual products. … The US has also staked out similar positions at UN meetings focused on gender. At a session of the Commission on the Status of Women in March, [US delegate] Jonathan Shrier … said the US disapproved of a declaration supporting “the empowerment of all women and girls” that mentioned the word “gender.” The phrase “all women and girls” in UN documents has been used as a way to be inclusive of trans women and girls. Shrier read a statement saying that several factors in the text made it impossible for the US to back the resolution, which the commission had recently adopted. That included “lapses in using clear and accurate language that recognizes women are biologically female and men are biologically male.” One of the US government events that Jonathan Shrier spoke at was co-sponsored by the Center for Family and Human Rights—also called C-Fam. Their own stated goal is “discrediting socially radical policies at the United Nations and other international institutions.” C-Fam supported the law criminalizing homosexuality with the death penalty in Uganda. They are funded by the same billionaires that finance the Heritage Foundation through conservative dark money networks like DonorsTrust, which also funds anti-abortion groups worldwide. One of the authors of Project 2025, Spencer Chretien (which sounds a lot like “cretin” to me), who worked at the Heritage Foundation is now a US delegate at the UN. He also spent his alloted time at a meeting of the UN Commission on Population and Development Goals to complain that a draft resolution on global health discussed ways of improving gender equality. Song writes that “the reflexive resistance to the word ‘gender’ is particularly noteworthy.” It is indeed astounding how deep the fanaticism goes: When the Trump administration cut funding for science last year, the research grants they singled out for cancellation all had the word “trans” in them. But most of these studies had nothing to do with transgender people. One study, for instance, was about transgenic mice—which refers to mice with altered genomes. Transgenic mice are used in cancer research or for curing genetic disorders. It seems the Trump administration simply typed the word “trans” into a search bar and cancelled funding for all the research projects that popped up. So, yeah, I’d call that “reflexive resistance to the word ‘gender.’” Naturally, the Supreme Court has joined in as well. Last year, Kaley Chiles, a therapist from Colorado, sued the state over their law banning so-called conversion therapy—which is essentially the “pray the gay away” approach but with a clinical polish. Conversion “therapy” has been shown to harm children. In an absolutely scathing review of the case (called Chiles v. Salazar), The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal wrote: Chiles challenged the law on First Amendment grounds. She is a “talk therapist” and argued that the First Amendment protects her right to talk about whatever the hell she wants, including, apparently, debunked, unsound, unscientific, and harmful medical practices. From a certain point of view, you can see Chile’s point. The First Amendment protects “speech,” and telling children wrong and horrible things about themselves is, technically, speech. I do not know why people would want to use their speech to abuse children, but the First Amendment does and arguably should protect your right to tell little kids that they suck. But Chiles is not using her First Amendment rights to menace children as an ordinary citizen out in the wild. She’s not shouting “Hey, stop being gay!” at little kids unfortunate enough to hit a baseball into her yard. She’s doing it from her position as a medical professional with a liscence from the state of Colorado. That means that when she tells kids to stop being gay in a therapy session, she’s not merely expressing her personal view or those of her god; she’s speaking as an expert recognized by the state of Colorado. Colorado, like other states, has a right to regulate what licensed professionals can say to make sure that the treatments they’re providing represent the best and safest ideas the medical and scientific community has come up with. That is the point of requiring medical professionals to get a license in the first place. Or rather, states had a right to regulate the speech of licensed professionals until the court’s ruling in Chiles v. Salazar. In his majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch ruled that medical professionals have an absolute free speech right, just like everybody else, even when they are speaking as a medical professional. … Gorsuch basically erased the distinction between Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Dr. Dre. That’s why the decision will have such a large impact—even beyond the torture Gorsuch thinks it is acceptable to subject LGBTQ+ children to. The new free speech right Gorsuch has invented will potentially destroy the entire concept of medical licensing. … The whole point of medical licensing boards is to distinguish acceptable medical viewpoints from conjecture and bunk—and that does, often, require regulating what doctors can and cannot say. You can’t, for instance, tell a child … to start smoking cigarettes to fit in with the other kids at school. You can’ tell a kid who is falling asleep in class to buy some cocaine and have a bump in the bathroom during free period. You can’t do these things even if you are a talk therapist and all you do is talk about it instead of prescribing the smokes or the coke. You can’t give medical advice that is wrong, no matter how much you pray that it is right. …Thanks to this ruling, a medical license means… nothing going forward. Getting the advice of a doctor is now the same as asking the Internet or tuning in to “Dr. Phil.” According to the Supreme Court, doctors have just as much of a First Amendment right to offer untested and untrue medical theories as politicians, Uber drivers, or your grandma from the Old Country. This ruling will damage the quality of healthcare for all Americans. And it was made because a quack therapist in Colorado really wants to spew abusive claptrap at LGBTQ+ kids forced to sit on her gross couch by their parents. It’s stunning, really, whenever you step back and contemplate how much harm this country is willing to endure in order to protect bigotry. The US Supreme Court isn’t the only institution harming scientific independence and integrity. In the United States and Europe, right-wing politicians have increasingly politicized what are supposed to be impartial scientific institutions. While conservatives in the United Kingdom have spearheaded these efforts, they were first inspired by Florida Republicans. In Florida, members of the Board of Medicine and Board of Osteopathic Medicine are directly appointed by the governor. Unsurprisingly, then, the far-right Republican governor Ron DeSantis has stuffed these medical boards with fanatics. These boards then voted to abandon the standards of care developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and the Endocrine Society for treating gender dysphoria. Nikole Parker, director of Equality Florida, told The Intercept that “The Boards of Medicine and Osteopathy are stacked with DeSantis political appointees, choosing to put their politics over peoples’ lives.” This model inspired conservatives in the UK. In 2020, the British government commissioned an inquiry for the National Health Service (NHS) to provide recommendations about transgender care for adolescents. The review was chaired by Dr. Hillary Cass—a pediatrician with no experience treating trans people—and was consequently dubbed the “Cass Review.” In the years following the review’s publication in 2024, it emerged that Hillary Cass and her team fostered close connections with Ron DeSantis’ foot soldiers in Florida. Furthermore, several members of Cass’ advisory team were linked to an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. Conservative Cabinet Minister Kemi Badenoch has said that placing “gender-critical men and women in the UK government,” mostly “in Equalities and Health,” made the Cass Review possible. The Review itself was instantly castigated by virtually the entire scientific community. A large group of experts at Yale Law School’s Integrity Project lambasted the Cass Review. Here are the points outlined in the executive summery:  “The Cass Review does not follow established standards for evaluating evidence and evidence quality.”  “The Cass Review fails to contextualize the evidence for gender-affirming care with the evidence base for other areas of pediatric medicine.”  “The Cass Review misinterprets and misrepresents its own data.”  “The Cass Review levies unsupported assertions about gender identity, gender dysphoria, standard practices, and the safety of gender-affirming medical treatments, and repeats claims that have been disproved by sound evidence.”  “The systemic reviews relied upon by the Cass Review have serious methodological flaws, including the omission of key findings in the extant body of literature.” In the conclusion, they write: The Cass Review was commissioned to address the failure of the UK National Health Service to provide timely, competent, and high-quality care to transgender youth. These failures include long wait times—often years—and resulting delays in timely treatment by skilled providers. Instead of effectively addressing this issue, however, the Review’s process and recommendations stake out an ideological position on care for transgender youth that is deeply at odds with the Review’s own findings about the importance of individualized and age-appropriate approach to medical treatments for gender dysphoria in youth, consistent with the international Standards of Care issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the Clinical Practice Guidelines issued by the Endocrine Society. Far from evaluating the evidence in a neutral and scientifically valid manner, the Review obscures key findings, misrepresents its own data, and is rife with misapplications of the scientific method. The Review deeply considers the possibility of gender-affirming interventions being given to someone who is not transgender, but without reciprocal consideration for transgender youth who undergo permanent, distressing physical changes when they do not receive timely care. The vast majority of transgender youth in the UK and beyond do not receive an opportunity to even consider clinical care with qualified clinicians—and the Review’s data demonstrate this clearly. Other medical organizations concurred. The Cass Review was rejected by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, the Canadian Pediatric Society, et cetera. Canadian doctors criticized the review’s conclusion that there is no evidence demonstrating the efficacy of gender-affirming care because there are no randomized clinical trials. “There is actually a lot of evidence, just not in the form of randomized clinical trials,” one doctor told CBC. “That would be kind of like saying for a pregnant woman, since we lacked randomized clinical trials for the care of people in pregnancy, we’re not going to provide care for you.” And in Europe, when new medical guidelines were developed by 26 medical and psychotherapeutic organizations from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, they explicitly rejected the Cass Review. They first took issue with the secrecy around who served on the advisory board (likely because they were hiding the connections to anti-LGBTQ hate groups). They then rejected the recommendation to treat gender dysphoria with only psychotherapy, noting that “None of the studies” cited by the Cass review itself “were able to show a reduction in gender dysphoria through psychotherapy.” Hillary Cass herself has since blamed gender dysphoria in young adults on the consumption of pornography and railed against the American Academy of Pediatrics in response to being criticized by them, accusing them of being a “left-leaning organization.” Yet despite all this, the Cass Review is cited frequently by right-wing governments as justification for banning gender-affirming care. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cited it when he threatened to withhold federal Medicaid funding to any hospital that performed “sex-rejecting procedures.” This move was blatantly illegal. Section 1801 of the Social Security Act clearly states:  Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize any Federal officer or employee to exercise any supervision or control over the practice of medicine or the manner in which medical services are provided, or over the selection, tenure, or compensation of any officer or employee of any institution, agency, or person providing health services; or to exercise any supervision or control over the administration or operation of any such institution, agency, or person. Federal judges have already invalidated this policy, in part because it was based on the Cass Review which they said doesn’t stand up to judicial scrutiny, but that hasn’t stopped hospitals from complying in advance to preserve their funding. There are legal battles ongoing throughout the United States after trans people or their families, or sometimes state attorneys general, sued hospitals that stopped providing gender-affirming care. Meanwhile in England, Kier Starmer’s Labour government has gone above and beyond compared to the Tories. When Kemi Badenoch said “The Cass Review would never have been commissioned under a Labour government,” she was apparently right: Starmer has produced an even more absurd document. Published last March, the NHS England report supposedly exposed gender- affirming care as being ineffective. But, as journalist Erin Reed observed: Instead of conducting one or two comprehensive reviews of the evidence for hormone therapy in trans adolescents, they split the question into 10 separate reviews—fragmenting by exact pharmacological combination (estrogen alone, testosterone alone, estrogen with GnRH analogues, testosterone with GnRH analogues, GnRH analogues alone) and then splitting each of those again by whether the patient identified as binary or non-binary. The result was 10 artificially narrow reviews, each searching for a hyper-specific patient population that most published research was never designed to capture. Studies that didn’t perfectly match a given review’s narrow criteria were excluded—even if they contained data directly relevant to the question of whether hormones help trans youth. As a result, 97% of full-text screenings were excluded from the result. The review indeed included a mere 17 studies of the 547 they assessed—a 97% exclusion rate. As if that wasn’t egregious enough, this also excluded 98% of NHS England’s own transgender patients. Yes, NHS England’s hatchet job of the data excluded the treatment pathways 98% of their own patients took. It beggars belief. But it gets crazier. As Erin Reed wrote:  Even after excluding 97% of all screened studies, several of the surviving studies still showed statistically significant benefits—including reductions in anxiety and depression. To discount those findings, the reviewers turned to the GRADE system, a framework that rates the certainty of evidence on a scale from high to very low. Under GRADE, observational studies—which make up the vast majority of all pediatric research—automatically start at “low” and are routinely downgraded further. Every surviving study was rated “very low certainty.” But Gordon Guyatt, the McMaster University researcher who literally coined the term “evidence-based medicine” and helped develop the GRADE framework itself, has forcefully rejected this use of his work. In a 2025 interview with STAT News, Guyatt called using systematic reviews to justify banning gender-affirming care “egregious and unconscionable.” As Guyatt has explained, a low GRADE rating is not a finding that a treatment doesn’t work—it is a technical classification reflecting the type of study available, not the direction or strength of the results. Observational studies, which form the backbone of nearly all pediatric medicine, automatically receive low GRADE scores regardless of their findings. Importantly, over 90% of medicine lacks “high-quality evidence” as classified by the GRADE system, which explicitly does not bar medical care that relies heavily on individualized approaches. However, despite this farcical clownery, these “studies” were used as justification for NHS England’s banning of hormone therapy for people under 18. This assault on trans healthcare has already produced devastating effects. In 2024, the UK government released the Appleby Report, which purported to show that trans youth suicides hadn’t increased following the outlawing of trans care. However, upon close examination the Appleby Report engages in the same tactics as the aforementioned NHS report; it artificially narrowed the dataset. When the Good Law Project filed a freedom of information request to get raw data from the NHS-funded National Child Mortality Database, they found that trans youth suicides rose dramatically after their healthcare was restricted. Particularly after the decision by the High Court in Bell v. Tavistock to block gender affirming care for trans children under 16, there was a fivefold increase in trans youth suicides in the immediate aftermath. I would add that the restrictions or blockages of gender-affirming care are only half the explanation for this; the other half is the cultural assault. Let me take an illustrative case: In the US state of Kentucky there was only 1 trans athlete. Her name is Fischer Wells and she likes to play field hockey. When she was 12, she organized an amateur hockey team and recruited her friends and classmates to join it. A year later, state Republicans passed a law criminalizing trans athletes in the state—which in practice only targeted Fischer. As the Washington Post reported, “Kentucky’s lone transgender athlete can’t play on the team she helped start.” Similarly in England, one trans woman was barred from playing with an amateur cricket club, which played entirely for fun, after the England and Wales Cricket Board forbade trans athletes from playing. “When I heard the news, I was completely heartbroken—as were my friends, teammates, and opponents,” she told the Good Law Project. “It was so upsetting to be ripped away from playing for the team I’d been part of for so long.” Now, thankfully neither her nor Fischer has committed suicide. But it takes a headstrong kid with a good support system to survive a legislative and rhetorical bullying campaign from the State—sometimes targeting only them specifically. Yet in the Right’s endless vulgarity, trans youth suicides are often held up by anti-trans fanatics as “proof” that these kids are too mentally ill to be taken at their word that they’re trans. They create a world that’s openly hostile to them, and then use their suffering as a justification to keep going. Well done, Beelzebub. I know that most people won’t read it but last year Human Rights Watch published a massive report, 98 pages long, titled “‘They’re ruining people’s lives.’” If I could force you to read the whole thing, I would. Given that I probably can’t, here’s one excerpt from section 7, “Impact of Executive Actions by the Trump Administration”: Esther, the mother of a 15-year-old trans boy living in a state with a ban on gender- affirming care, described how her community had changed: “Three or four years ago, it wasn’t cool to be mean. It wasn’t cool to be transphobic. Now it’s totally socially acceptable to be mean, to make hateful jokes, to have uneducated opinions and spread them around.” Deteriorating Mental Health When Liza, a 27-year-old trans woman, died by suicide just days after the 2024 US presidential election, her mother, Terry, said her daughter was consumed by the political climate leading up to the election, which she described as “a huge detriment to her mental health.” She continued, “There was a huge correlation between her well-being and what was going on in politics. Trump’s anti-trans agenda was so much more open and blatant than it was in 2016.” When Donald Trump won the election, Liza’s mental health deteriorated, Terry said. Just over a week later, Liza ended her life. Terry recounted her experience visiting Liza just a few months before the election: “She made us food, and I took her shopping. She asked me to go to Goodwill and help her pick out clothes. We were bonding as mother and daughter, and I’m so thankful for that time,” she recalled. “I finally felt like she was safe, she had something to live for. She was starting to blossom—wanting to travel, wanting to connect with people. I thought, she’s finally starting to live.” Jenny, a 17-year-old trans girl in a state with a ban on gender-affirming care, said: “It’s scary to think about what my future is going to look like. Even if I go to a blue state for college, I might not be safe. There’s so much uncertainty. Will I ever have access to care? Will I be able to live as myself? That anxiety is always with me.” She explained that while state-level attacks on trans rights were already distressing, she used to feel a measure of protection from federal leadership: “I used to have that federal safety blanket. Now it feels like every level of government is turning against us. It’s hard to feel safe in your own country, in your own community and it’s terrifying.” Paulette, the mother of an 8-year-old trans girl in a state with a ban, described her reaction following the announcement of new anti-trans policies: “I couldn’t believe it was all happening so fast. There was so much support for these horrible policies.” In the wake of the election, she reflected on having previously shared her daughter’s story online: “I thought I was doing the right thing by sharing our story, by helping people understand. For a while, it felt like it was working. People were supportive. They knew her, and she was the only trans kid they knew. But now I look back and wonder: ‘Did I endanger her?’ I never imagined we’d end up here. I never thought I’d be deleting [from social media] anyone I didn’t know personally out of fear they’d report us or dig up old photos from before her transition. I just never thought we’d move so far backward.” Jenny added: “Supportive groups and lawmakers have kind of shunned away from talking about trans people. They’ve chosen to fight other battles. It’s really sad to see people who claim to be allies, who say LGBTQ rights are part of their platform, and then do nothing to protect us.” Paulette echoed this sentiment: “I just imagine someone showing up on our doorstep to do a genital check, pulling our child out of our home, and having no power, no one to call. There’s no one left who supports trans kids and stands up for trans rights in these places of power.” Threats to Healthcare Access …Esther … said her son continues to receive treatment at a local clinic because the facility has maintained care for youth who were already enrolled before the ban took effect. She noted: “The clinic has changed a lot since Trump came into office. They’ve expressed fear to me. They won’t do Zoom [calls] anymore and don’t want to be publicly visible. It’s like being an abortion provider—there’s real fear about being targeted or even shot.” Esther added: “If he had no access to care—if he was forced to go through female puberty, to be called ‘she,’ to grow breasts and hips—that’s not him just having to tough it out. That’s not living. He couldn’t walk into school like that.” Her son, Mark, said, “I honestly can’t imagine a world where I wasn’t like this, because that’s always who I’ve been.” Jenny, … who currently travels out of state to receive care, stated: “I’ve been lucky enough to still get care, but I might not have that in the next few weeks or months. And that’s really scary to think about. If I got off blockers and estrogen, I’d start to go through male puberty. My voice would deepen, I would present more masculine. I can’t imagine living like that and not having access to something that makes me be able to present how I feel on the inside. I don’t know how I would live with that. I’d have to move out of the country, do anything to get access to that. I can’t imagine a world without gender affirming care and it’s horrible to think about.” Fortunately, we won’t ever live in a world without gender-affirming care. In the end, these people will never win. But that doesn’t mean that our victory is easy or automatic. And the harm that’s done in the meantime, and the suffering inflicted, is real. Keep strong, everyone. We will persevere. Figuring that Pride Month is, after all, supposed to be a celebration, let me end on a lighter note by sharing one of my favorite sapphic poems, “For Willyce” by Pat Parker: “When I make love to you i try   with each stroke of my tongue to say i love you to tease i love you to hammer    i love you to melt i love you & your sounds drift down oh god!      oh jesus! and i think - here it is, some dude’s getting credit for what     a woman     has done, again.”