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    How did transgender children in the US become so politicized? | Moira Donegan

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    The politicization of transgender children in the US is one of the most astounding coups of propaganda and organized animus in recent history. Rarely has so much attention and rage been directed at such a minuscule number of people, and more rarely, still, have those people been the most vulnerable and blameless among us: kids and teens.The first state to pass a ban on transition-related care for minors was Arkansas, in April 2021; less than four years later, more than half of states have such a ban on the books. In 2016, North Carolina lost an estimated $3.76bn in revenue following boycotts after they passed a law banning trans people, including transgender students, from using appropriate restrooms in public facilities; now, 14 states have such bathroom bans on the books, and the boycotts have receded.These changes in public attitudes towards trans youth – from a broad if imperfect sentiment of tolerance to a widespread and politically weaponized attitude of hostility toward a small minority of kids – did not emerge by accident. It was the product of a deliberate, conscious effort to radicalize large swaths of the United States, and significant chunks of state policy, into a hostility towards a few children.That effort seems set to bear fruit now, at the US supreme court, in US v Skrmetti, a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the Biden Department of Justice challenging Tennessee’s HB1, a sweeping ban on transition-related care for minors that was passed in 2023. The law prohibits any puberty blockers or hormones from being prescribed for the purposes of gender transition, but it does not prohibit these medications from being prescribed for any non-transition-related purpose. A minor can be prescribed puberty blockers, for instance, if their doctor believes they are experiencing early onset, or “precocious”, puberty; they cannot be prescribed puberty blockers to delay the onset of a puberty that may change their bodies in ways they do not desire for gender identity-related reasons.That means, too, that a child assigned male at birth could access, say, testosterone treatment, but a child assigned female at birth could not. In oral arguments on Wednesday, solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar and Chase Strangio of the ACLU – the first trans attorney to argue before the supreme court – explained that this was a straightforward case of sex discrimination, and hence needed to be subjected to a heightened standard of judicial review under the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause.It will not be. A majority of the court’s conservatives seemed poised to uphold the ban on transgender healthcare, though for a variety of different reasons. Brett Kavanaugh made his usual mealy-mouthed paean to states’ rights, an argument he always makes in questions of federally guaranteed equality provisions, but not before extolling the hypothetical suffering of teenagers who may access gender-affirming care but then later come to regret it. (One wonders if there are any choices from his own adolescence that Brett Kavanaugh has come to regret.) Clarence Thomas and chief justice John Roberts, meanwhile, both advanced the idea that the physiological differences between male and female bodies could moot the equal protection clause’s reach, giving states broad leeway to regulate medicine in ways that would uphold gender hierarchy.For his part, Samuel Alito also seemed interested in the idea that states might have a right to effect gender discrimination via their regulation of medicine. He repeatedly cited the 1974 case Geduldig v Aiello, in which the supreme court ruled that states could discriminate on the basis of pregnancy, and that pregnancy discrimination was not sex discrimination – because even though only female people become pregnant, not all of them are pregnant all of the time. (At the time, Congress found the outcome in Geduldig so egregious that it passed a law clarifying that pregnancy discrimination does count as sex discrimination for the purposes of federal civil rights law, and the precedent was largely mooted, but Alito’s controlling opinion in Dobbs has revived it.)But Alito, true to form, did not confine his opining to the notion that discrimination against trans people does not count as sex-based discrimination: he went on to suggest that trans people are not quite real, peppering Strangio, in a scene that seemed intended to humiliate the trans attorney, with questions about whether trans identity was truly an “immutable” characteristic. For his part, Strangio responded with a dignity and respect that Alito’s line of questioning did not merit.It was not the only low moment. James Matthew Rice, the Tennessee solicitor general who defended the ban in court, repeatedly compared gender affirming care with suicide, as well as to lobotomies and eugenics. During his time, justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, with occasional assists from Elena Kagan, tried to chase Rice down on the inconsistencies in his own argument.Tennessee claimed, after all, that the law did not discriminate on the basis of patients’ sex, but rather on the basis of the purpose of their treatment; when the liberal justices pointed out that this was a distinction without a difference, because the purpose of the treatment was dependent on the patients’ sex, Rice simply repeated his assertion that there was a difference, there, somewhere. Jackson, in particular, worked to get Rice to explain his position for some time. He declined to.To call the Tennessee ban sex-neutral is laughable, almost insulting. The statute itself makes gender conformity its explicit justification in its text, saying that it aims to prohibit “sex inconsistent treatment”, or anything that “might encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex”. The law has long included sex role stereotyping within the purview of sex discrimination; Tennessee has sought to enforce sex roles, and sexed embodiment, with the force of the state. There is no good faith reading of the law that would allow it to withstand the scrutiny that the 14th amendment requires. But luckily for Tennessee, this is not a good faith court.

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Here’s What Led to Tennessee’s Ban on Gender-Affirming Care

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      Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s announcement of a new transgender clinic in 2018 did little to draw attention to its practice. The four-paragraph news release amounted to a location, hours and the names of two senior staff members.The spotlight came four years later, when Matt Walsh, a conservative political commentator at The Daily Wire in Nashville, published a series of posts and videos about the clinic. Those posts said that a staff member there had privately characterized gender-affirming medication and surgery as “moneymakers,” and used caustic terms to describe the center’s treatments.The medical center, which is separate from Vanderbilt University, pushed back. In a statement at the time, the center said that the clinic’s mission was to serve a “high-risk population for mental and physical health issues” who “have been consistently underserved by the U.S. health system.”The medical center said that it had not provided care to children younger than 18 without the consent of a parent, and that it would not force any employee who disagreed with the care because of personal or religious beliefs to provide it.Conservatives called for an investigation into the clinic, and Republican leaders spoke at a rally Mr. Walsh organized in Nashville in October 2022 in opposition to gender-affirming care for children. When Tennessee legislators convened in January 2023, lawmakers designated a proposed ban on gender-affirming care as Senate Bill 1. The bill passed over objections from transgender people and most Democrats. More

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      Which States Have Passed Bans on Treatment for Transgender Minors?

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      The challenge to a Tennessee law before the Supreme Court this week traces its roots to the spring of 2021, when Arkansas became the first state to pass a law prohibiting gender-transition treatments for minors. Alabama followed in 2022. Tennessee’s was part of a coordinated deluge: Of 28 states where Republicans control the legislature, 24 now restrict doctors from providing puberty blockers, hormone therapies or surgery to transgender minors. Two more, New Hampshire and Arizona, ban only surgeries.Why the flood? In exploring the motivation behind Florida’s ban, one federal district judge, Robert Hinkle, concluded that some of the state’s lawmakers acted on “old-fashioned discriminatory animus.” But Republican lawmakers in many states have said that they are seeking to shield adolescents from a path that has become more common, with consequences they are too young to fully comprehend. Republican strategists, for their part, have said that elevating the issue was a winning strategy leading up to the 2024 election.United States v. Skrmetti, the challenge to Tennessee’s ban, is one of 18 filed over the last three years, with mixed results. The highest courts in two states, Texas and Nebraska, have upheld their restrictions. By contrast, two federal district judges — Judge Hinkle in Florida and Judge James M. Moody Jr. in Arkansas — struck down bans in those states. But their decisions are being appealed, and preliminary injunctions on enforcement of the bans in Alabama and Indiana, each issued by a federal district judge, were reversed by separate appeals courts. Eleven other cases are in various stages of litigation.How the Supreme Court rules on Skrmetti will almost surely affect how lower courts handle the challenges to similar statutes in states across the country. But the outcome may not be universal.“If Tennessee wins, the states will say ‘Skrmetti controls,’ and vice versa,” said Jim Campbell, chief counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal advocacy group that is helping to defend Idaho’s ban on transition treatments for minors. “And then the other side, the losing side, will say, ‘No, it’s actually different, and here’s why.’” More

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      A College Volleyball Team’s Season in the Spotlight Comes to an End

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      The San Jose State women’s team, which has a transgender player, lost to the tournament favorite Colorado State, concluding a season that transcended sports.After months at the center of a debate over a transgender woman’s right to compete in women’s sports, San Jose State University lost its conference championship volleyball game on Saturday, bringing a close to a roller-coaster season upended by an issue that has transcended sports.On a court not far from the Las Vegas Strip, the Spartans fell to the tournament favorite Colorado State University in the Mountain West Conference tournament, failing to advance to next month’s N.C.A.A. tournament, where the spotlight on the Spartans would have grown even brighter.The Spartans advanced to the final without having played in a single previous game at the tournament. It had a bye in the first round and moved straight to the semifinal, where its opponent, Boise State, for the third time this season boycotted the game in protest over the Spartans’ transgender player.That player has not spoken publicly, and The New York Times is not naming her because she has not publicly confirmed her identity. The university also has not confirmed whether the volleyball team has a transgender player, citing educational privacy laws.This is a developing story. Check back for updates.Pashtana Usufzy More

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      San Jose State’s Opponent Boycotts Game Over Transgender Player. Again.

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      The women’s volleyball team at the center of a national debate over gender and sports advanced to the conference championship after Boise State refused to play.The San Jose State University Spartans women’s volleyball team, which is at the center of a national debate over the inclusion of transgender women in women’s sports, advanced to its conference championship on Saturday without having played a single game in the tournament.After a first-round bye, the team was preparing to play a semifinal match in the Mountain West Conference tournament scheduled for Friday, but the opposing team — Boise State University — refused for the third time to play the Spartans because of their transgender player.After Boise State beat Utah State University on Friday to qualify for the semifinal in Las Vegas, the players celebrated by cheering and hugging. They talked quietly in a huddle, then cheered again.Hours later Boise State released a statement that read: “The decision to not continue to play in the 2024 Mountain West Volleyball Championship tournament was not an easy one. Our team overcame forfeitures to earn a spot in the tournament field and fought for the win over Utah State in the first round on Wednesday. They should not have to forgo this opportunity while waiting for a more thoughtful and better system that serves all athletes.”It was the seventh time this year that a Mountain West team has backed out of a match against San Jose State out of protest over the transgender player, who declined an interview request through a university spokeswoman. Boise State, one of five teams to forfeit games against the Spartans this season, also forfeited two regular season games against them.Boise State’s decision to forfeit and lose a chance at the final has called even more attention to one of the most complex and polarizing issues of American life: whether a transgender woman can play on a women’s sports team.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s White House is filling with alleged sexual abusers … led by him

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      Donald Trump was found civilly liable last year for the defamation and sexual abuse of the writer E Jean Carroll – just one of the more than 27 women who have accused him of sexual misconduct. In January 2025, he will again be president of the United States – the first to take office with a court-adjudicated history of sex crimes.And it seems he’s eager to pack the White House with people just like him.Four of president-elect Trump’s cabinet-level nominees have faced serious allegations of sexual misconduct, ranging from workplace sexual harassment to assault, and a fifth is embroiled in a sexual abuse-related lawsuit.As Americans brace themselves for Trump 2.0, it’s time to be clear-eyed about the Maga machine: a history of alleged sexual criminality isn’t a bug, it’s a central part of the hardware; an organizing principle that clarifies how Trump and those like him view their power and how they intend to wield it.Trump’s first choice for attorney general, the former representative Matt Gaetz, was concurrently under investigation by the Department of Justice and the House ethics committee for allegedly violating federal sex-trafficking laws and statutory rape. The disgraced representative also reportedly bragged about his sexual conquests and showed nude photos of women to his fellow lawmakers. On Thursday afternoon, Gaetz announced he would be withdrawing his name from consideration to avoid being a “distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition”, just hours before CNN published a report about a second alleged sexual encounter between Gaetz and a 17-year-old. (The age of consent in Florida is 18.)Gaetz’s withdrawal provided a brief moment of relief. But, still, Trump’s would-be cabinet is filled with alleged criminals, all of whom the president-elect has vociferously defended, and all of whom deny wrongdoing.Elon Musk, whom Trump has tapped for the made-up position of “efficiency czar”, reportedly exposed his penis to a SpaceX flight attendant in 2016 and offered to buy her a horse in exchange for sex. Musk’s company SpaceX paid her $250,000 in 2018 to settle the sexual misconduct claim. He was also sued this year by eight former SpaceX employees, who alleged that the CEO treated “women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size, bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter”.Then there’s the nominee for secretary of defense, the Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who was accused of sexually assaulting a staff member of the California Federation of Republican Women in 2017.In the police report that was filed at the time, and which was obtained by the New York Times, the unnamed woman told law enforcement that Hegseth had taken her phone and blocked her exit from his hotel room before assaulting her. Though Hegseth was never charged with a crime, he did enter into a nondisclosure agreement with the woman, which included a financial settlement.Robert F Kennedy Jr was accused of sexually assaulting Eliza Cooney, a former family babysitter, in the late 90s. Trump now wants him to run the Department of Health and Human Services.Finally, Trump’s pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, was recently named in a lawsuit alleging that she and her husband, Vince McMahon, failed to stop an employee from sexually abusing children in the 1980s and 90s, when the McMahons were running World Wrestling Entertainment. (An attorney for McMahon told CNN that the lawsuit is “filled with scurrilous lies.”)These picks feel comically brazen, like shots fired directly at the #MeToo movement, which erupted in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Trump, a man who has threatened to sue every one of his accusers and has openly bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” without their consent, is attempting to exact revenge on a movement designed to use the collective to force consequences for a handful of powerful predators.#MeToo was just one piece of a slate of shifting gender norms over the last decade. Now, we’re living in the middle of a backlash.Roe v Wade has fallen, a known sexual abuser is re-entering the Oval Office, and the very online far right has found a new slogan: “Your body, my choice.”In Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,she writes that these moments of backlash are not random. They are “preemptive strikes”, which “have always been triggered by the perception – accurate or not – that women are making great strides”.The perception that women were gaining status at the expense of men’s, combined with the real ways in which many men in this country are struggling economically, socially and mentally, has seemingly helped fuel the Trump campaign.Trump sneered at “childless cat ladies”, courted Joe Rogan listeners and crypto-bros, and trotted out Hulk Hogan to perform hyper-macho drag at the Republican national convention. The campaign deployed far-right influencers to wax poetic on X – which Musk owns – about the dangers of “toxic femininity” and mock the peeing habits of men who supported Kamala Harris.On election day, Trump senior adviser and noted white nationalist Stephen Miller tweeted a very particular plea: “Get every man you know to the polls.” After Trump’s win, the far right were out in full force celebrating what they clearly perceived not just as a win for their preferred political leader, but for their gender as a whole; they flooded X and TikTok with the phrases “your body, my choice” and “get back in the kitchen” and crafted supercuts of liberal women crying.Perhaps what Trump is counting on is that people who oppose the draconian agenda of his administration will be so exhausted by the piling horrors that they’ll get overwhelmed and give up – that all of the allegations will blend together and the backlash will become the norm. And yet, we know where a backlash brews, so does a resistance to it. More

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      I’m 16. On Nov. 5 the Girls Cried, and the Boys Played Minecraft.

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      On the morning after the election, I walked up the staircase of my school. A preteen was crying into the shoulders of her braces-clad peer. Her friend was rubbing circles on her back.I continued up the stairs to the lounge, where upperclassmen linger before classes. There I saw two tables: One was filled with my girlfriends, many of them with hollows under their eyes. There was a blanket of despair over the young women in the room. I looked over to the other table of teenage boys and saw Minecraft on their computers. While we were gasping for a breath, it seemed they were breathing freely.We girls woke up to a country that would rather elect a man found liable for sexual abuse than a woman. Where the kind of man my mother instructs me to cross the street to avoid will be addressed as Mr. President. Where the body I haven’t fully grown into may no longer be under my control. The boys, it seemed to me, just woke up on a Wednesday.What made my skin burn most wasn’t that over 75 million people voted for Donald Trump. It was that this election didn’t seem to measurably change anything for the boys around me, whether their parents supported Mr. Trump or not. Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. ​​We don’t even share the same future.I am scared that the Trump administration will take away or restrict birth control and Plan B — the same way they did abortion. I am scared that the boys I know will see in a triumphant, boastful Mr. Trump the epitome of a manly man and model themselves after him. I was 8 years old the first time he was elected. Now I am 16. I am still unable to vote, but I am so much more aware of what I have to lose.I have seen the ways in which many of the boys in my generation can be different from their fathers. The #MeToo movement went mainstream when they were still wearing Superman pajamas. On Tuesdays in health class, they learn about the dangers of inebriated consent. They don’t pretend to gag when a girl mentions her period or a tampon falls out of her backpack. They don’t find sexist jokes all that funny and don’t often make them in public.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trans Americans brace for Trump’s ‘sinister’ return: ‘It’s almost intolerable’

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      This weekend, Atticus Sparks plans to attend a six-hour concealed weapons permit class. He’s not a gun person, but as an 18-year-old trans man, he’s concerned he might someday need to own one, “just in case”. Since Donald Trump’s election, Sparks has faced online threats of violence and sexual assault from the president-elect’s supporters.View image in fullscreen“Hopefully I won’t ever need a gun,” Sparks, who lives in South Carolina, said. “But everyone here is so pro-gun. I work across from a gun store, and I always see people carrying around loaded rifles.”Along with taking his concealed carry class, Sparks faces the more banal tasks of making sure all of his documentation is in order. This week, he met with an advocate about getting his name legally changed but was told that due to the sluggish pace of family court, he probably won’t get a court date until next summer.An existential threat, and a bureaucratic nightmare: for trans people across America, Trump’s victory represents a terrifying acceleration of the discriminatory policies that conservative lawmakers have already put in place in states across the country.Republicans spent almost $215m on anti-trans ads this election. (Sample line: Kamala Harris “is for they/them – not you”.) Trump’s official platform, Agenda 47, promises to “cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children” and “keep men out of women’s sports”, a reference to trans women and girls playing on teams that correspond to their identity.The president-elect has also proposed a ban on federal funding for gender-affirming care, and said he would push schools to “promote positive education about the nuclear family” – shorthand for an emphasis on conservative Christian gender roles and values in public classrooms.Experts and advocates warn that Republican control in Washington DC could roll back LGBTQ+ rights decades, threatening trans healthcare, marriage equality and the overall safety of the queer community.Facing this new reality, Alex, a teacher in Texas, reached out to a crisis hotline three times in the past week. “It’s sort of the most depressed I’ve been in a long time,” he said. “It’s like you get used to tolerating a certain amount of not OK, and having to hide and sort of being pushed down, but it feels like it’s hit a level where it’s almost intolerable.”Though some of Alex’s co-workers know he is trans, his students do not. He considers himself “stealth” at work, which means he conceals his trans identity to fit in with cisnormative standards. (Because of this, Alex used a pseudonym in this piece.)“The big thing people don’t recognize is that they most likely have interacted with a trans person without knowing,” Alex said. “I use the men’s locker room at the gym every morning, and no one gets hurt or upset. I guarantee for every single person, [Trump’s victory] is going to impact someone they love, or the loved ones of someone they love, and they just don’t know it.”View image in fullscreenThe Trevor Project, a non-profit focused on suicide prevention efforts for LGBTQ+ youth, reported a 700% increase in calls, texts and messages to its crisis hotline after election day. Youth experiencing thoughts of depression, self-harm and suicide are encouraged to contact the organization – though, according to 19th News, there are “long hold times at an especially vulnerable time for LGBTQ+ people”.Corinne Goodwin, executive director of Eastern PA Trans Equity Project, wrote in an email that since the election, the non-profit had seen a 600% increase in calls to its infoline for people seeking resources and support. Attendance at peer-led support groups rose by 200%, and requests for assistance with gender or name change markers increased by 1,000%.The day after the election, Goodwin said, the group received a call from a transgender person who lives in a very rural part of Pennsylvania. The caller said that four of their neighbors had come to their house the night before, pounding on their front door and threatening to assault them for being transgender. The person called the police, who refused to investigate, citing no proof of an incident.“This is an example of what many transgender people fear, that not only will their rights be reduced or taken away, but that the most reactionary elements in our society will feel emboldened to harm them,” Goodwin wrote.In Rochester, New York, Javannah J Davis leads Wave Women Inc, a non-profit supporting underserved Bipoc trans and gender non-conforming individuals. “The challenges are going to get worse before it gets better,” she said. “People are scared. That’s the main feeling going through the community: fear.”Davis says her goal is to help as many trans people as possible navigate the serpentine process of legally changing their names before the end of the year.Mike, a trans man in his 60s, leads support groups in Pennsylvania. “People talk about moving to another country, but the reality is that’s just not realistic,” he said. (Mike used a pseudonym and did not want his exact age printed to prevent being identified by his employer.)Sparks, the 18-year-old, plans to move to a state that allows greater access to gender-affirming care. This year, South Carolina banned access to care for trans youth, also prohibiting public funds such as Medicaid from being used to provide healthcare for transgender people of any age.View image in fullscreenSouth Dakota also restricts access to gender-affirming care for trans youth. So, in some ways, the morning after the election was “just another day for them”, says Morgan Peterson, a 25-year-old administrative assistant at Transformation Project, which serves trans people in the state.Peterson, who is non-binary, says many clients decided to move next door to Minnesota, a state with better healthcare options. “For me, I’m not on hormones, and I’m very fortunate, so I’m pretty determined to stay here and fight for people,” they said.Zaya Perysian, a 22-year-old content creator from Los Angeles, renewed her passport this week. She has no plans to leave the country and considers herself somewhat buffered by her state’s blue status. But she wants to be prepared, just in case.“It seems like we’re in the early stages of something much darker for the future of this country when it pertains to minority communities,” Perysian said. “The last time Trump won, we were like, ‘It’ll all be fine,’ and it mostly was. But this time, it’s different. There’s something that feels so sinister behind it. A lot of us just want to be prepared because you never know what type of legislation they are going to try to pass to erase us from public society, or history.”Kendall, a 47-year-old from Pennsylvania, planned to marry her partner next summer. They imagined a big, fairytale wedding, maybe in Europe. But as the election approached, the couple, both trans women, decided they didn’t want to take their chances. They feared a Trump presidency could signal the end of marriage equality. They eloped in September.“We had a few people over to our apartment and did it,” Kendall said. (She asked to use a pseudonym due to fears for her safety.) “We did it in our living room. People asked, ‘Was it nice?’ We tried to play it off like we wanted something intimate, but the real reason is we needed it to be legal.”Now, Kendall wonders: “God knows how long we’ll be allowed to be married.”Shane Whiteside, who is 30 and lives in South Carolina, also hopes to make it legal with his fiancee before Trump’s election. “I told her, I know we didn’t want to rush this, but I’m absolutely terrified that if I don’t get married to you right now, the state is not going to let me, because they’ll take away same-sex marriage,” he said.View image in fullscreenIn the days after the election, some lawmakers and pundits scapegoated transgender people for Kamala Harris’s loss. Such messaging echoes past retrograde thinking from John Kerry’s failed 2004 bid: at the time, politicians on both sides blamed the loss on the senator’s support for civil unions.The US representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told the New York Times: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”Trans individuals are already more likely to experience gender-based violence, poverty, and housing insecurity than cis Americans. Comments like Moulton’s add to the pain they feel as they prepare for a hostile administration.“It’s really a bunch of bullshit coming from both sides when it pertains to trans people,” said Perysian. “We’re just exhausted. We’re just trying to find our own American dream here, and unfortunately our future in this country has become less and less bright. I’ve heard a lot of trans people say that after this election, it feels like our best days are behind us.”Now, trans individuals cling to any shreds of hope they can find. Alex felt it when his co-workers hugged him the morning after Trump’s win. Mike feels it at his trans support group. Kendall feels it when she watches old clips of Mr Rogers being a good neighbor.Sparks relates to a quote he saw on social media this week: “For every bigot, there’s going to be an ally.”“Community and trans people don’t just go away,” Sparks said. “They may take it out of schools and stuff, but it’s not like we’re going to disappear. We just won’t have a word for what we’re feeling because they won’t teach it to us.”For Perysian, though, “It’s not about hope. It’s more about waiting and seeing.” More

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      in Elections

      Why We Got It So Wrong

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      Let me ask you a few questions:If the Democrats nominated a woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among female voters than the guy who ran in her place four years before?If the Democrats nominated a Black woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among Black voters than the white candidate who ran in her place four years before?If the Republicans nominated a guy who ran on mass deportation and consistently said horrible things about Latino immigrants, would you expect him to do worse among Latino voters over time?If the Democrats nominated a vibrant Black woman who was the subject of a million brat memes, would you expect her to do better among young voters than the old white guy who ran before her?If you said yes to any of these questions, as I would have a month ago, you have some major rethinking to do, because all of these expectations were wrong.In 2024, Kamala Harris did worse among Black voters than Joe Biden did in 2020. She did worse among female voters. She did much worse among Latino voters. She did much worse among young voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More