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      in US Politics

      I’d much rather share a ladies’ room with Sarah McBride than with Nancy Mace | Margaret Sullivan

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      Since the conversation, if you can call it that, about trans people always seems to come down to bathrooms, I am sure of one thing.I would much rather share a ladies’ room or a locker room with Sarah McBride than with Nancy Mace.McBride, of course, was just elected to Congress and, in January, will be the highest-ranking elected official in America who is transgender. The 34-year-old comes to the US House of Representatives after serving in the Delaware legislature; before that, she was the national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign.Mace, a member of Congress from South Carolina since 2021, has been on an ugly campaign in recent weeks clearly intended to belittle and marginalize McBride – and to get on TV as much as possible doing so. She has filed a resolution, and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, has given it his nod of approval, that would somehow force trans people to keep out of the congressional bathrooms that reflect their gender identity.“If you think this bill is about protecting women and not simply a ploy to get on Fox News, you’ve been fooled,” wrote Natalie Johnson, Mace’s former communications director. She added, pointedly, that a real effort to protect women would involve “a bill to bar Matt Gaetz, a sexual predator with an affinity for underage girls, from ever walking those halls again”. (Trump, as you know, tapped the far-right former Florida representative as his attorney general as part of this month’s parade of appalling cabinet choices. Gaetz later withdrew from consideration.)On Wednesday, McBride reacted with dignity to all the performative insults and abuse. She simply responded that she would follow the rules and that she’s in Congress to represent her Delaware district; I’m sure she’ll eventually find ways to continue her admirable advocacy.Mace, on the other hand, can’t be described as dignified. She’s running around pasting the word “biological” on restroom doors for photo ops, and snidely tweeting in McBride’s direction about International Men’s Day.And she’s getting plenty of the media attention she craves.On one level, this is all part of the unending circus of the Trump era.On a human level, it’s scary, wrong and damaging.“As a trans person myself, I’m really worried about where this is headed,” wrote Parker Molloy, who writes incisively about politics and media in her newsletter the Present Age. “I spend each day worrying about whether or not the healthcare that keeps me alive will remain legal, whether I’m going to face new restrictions on where I’m allowed to exist in public, what would happen to me if (god forbid) I wound up in prison for some reason, and whether or not my identity documents like my passport will be retroactively made invalid.”She added poignantly: “Now, more than ever, I feel alone.”Trans students may have it even worse. Again, it often comes down to bathrooms.A lot of children, especially transgender and gender-nonconforming children, avoid bathrooms all day, since that’s where the bullying can be most intense. Thus, advocates say, trans kids often are prone to urinary tract infections or eating disorders because they’ve avoided eating and drinking.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs for the right’s obsession with trans students on sports team, the vast majority have no unfair advantage on the playing fields (or courts, or pools). They are just trying to reap the same benefits of sports as do other kids – leadership, teamwork and friendship.The meanspirited and misinformed narrative about transgender people makes it difficult for them to feel cared about and to live full lives.But don’t try to tell that to Mace, whose preoccupation is not with kindness or decency, but with getting attention and winning the culture wars.As the Daily Beast reported last year, Mace’s staffers were given a handbook that outlined just how intensely this mattered to their boss; they were told to book her on TV multiple times a day, amounting to nine times a week for national outlets and six times a week for local outlets.In 2021, Mace depicted herself as supportive of LGBTQ+ rights. That was before the tide turned so forcefully and, as Philip Bump of the Washington Post put it, before “the Republican base had been fed a steady diet of anti-trans rhetoric, making trans issues fertile ground for anyone willing to engage in the fight”.Mace, clearly, is more than willing.If that means being cruel, then so be it. As writer Adam Serwer observed about Trumpian politics: “The cruelty is the point.”Meanwhile, vulnerable and marginalized people are made to suffer for trying to be true to themselves. And despite the progress shown by McBride’s election, the world around this milestone seems to be getting increasingly harsh.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      in US Politics

      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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      ‘This victory is a mandate’: rightwing groups ready with policy proposals for new Trump administration

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      As Donald Trump prepares to move back into the White House, he’ll have a host of rightwing groups trying to influence his staffing choices and policy proposals, including the group behind Project 2025, despite Trump’s insistence they won’t be involved.Democrats repeatedly ran attacks on Trump over Project 2025, the conservative manifesto that its writers want to guide a second Trump administration. Trump tried to distance himself from it and from the group behind it, the Heritage Foundation, one of DC’s biggest thinktanks.The Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, congratulated Trump on his “hard-fought victory” that came despite the “sham” indictments and against a “relentless leftwing machine”.“The entire conservative movement stands united behind him as he prepares to secure our wide-open border, restore the rule of law, put parents back in charge of their children’s education, restore America to its proper place as a leader in manufacturing, put families and children first, and dismantle the deep state,” Roberts said.Other groups, namely the America First Policy Institute, have avoided the limelight that backfired on Project 2025 and instead worked behind the scenes to ally themselves with Trump and seek to influence his administration. Trump named Linda McMahon, the chair of the institute’s board, as a co-chair of his transition team, giving the America First Policy Institute a critical role.The institute, started in 2021 and stacked with Trump allies, said in a tweet that it “stands ready to support bold governance that puts Americans first”. It also shared a video clip with the former acting United States attorney general Matt Whitaker talking about deportations and sanctuary cities, key alignments with Trump’s policy goals.“This victory is a mandate to restore our nation to a place of safety, opportunity, and prosperity rooted in freedom,” the America First Policy Institute said. “Together, we’ll secure borders, strengthen the economy, & uphold the freedoms that define us – for a stronger future.”The institute has held trainings for people that could serve in the Trump White House and has a lengthy agenda published online, complete with plans for immigration, education, energy and elections. The New York Times recently reported that the group has “installed itself as the Trump campaign’s primary partner in making concrete plans to wield power again”.The heads of both the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation have roots in the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a state-based conservative thinktank. Brooke Rollins, CEO of the America First Policy Institute, ran the Texas foundation for 15 years, and Roberts was the foundation’s CEO before he was tapped by Heritage.Another organization, America First Legal, is headed by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller. It has been filing lawsuits that boost Trump and other conservatives on issues like election fraud, diversity programs, public records disputes and government overreach. Miller could return to the Trump administration, but it’s likely the group will remain an outside rightwing legal monitor to help the incoming president.What could Trump’s policies be?Project 2025’s sprawling “mandate for leadership” details in 900-plus pages how each government agency could be altered under a conservative president. The project includes a database of potential hires and a training program for those who could staff a Trump administration, though Trump’s team has said none of the people associated with Heritage’s staffing suggestions would be hired. That would be a feat, given the extensive reach the project had – it was signed on to by more than 100 conservative groups, and many of those who wrote chapters or otherwise contributed had played some kind of role in the previous Trump administration.The project’s biggest suggestion is to designate exponentially more federal government employees as political appointees rather than non-partisan civil servants. It also wants to downsize the government. Trump’s plan also involves downsizing the federal government, something he tried to start implementing near the end of his first term.The project suggests many ways to restrict immigration, both through beefed-up border security and through limiting legal immigration programs for groups like students and low-skilled workers. That’s another pillar for Trump, who made mass deportations a central theme of his campaign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn education, the project wants to get rid of the Department of Education and increase the use of vouchers that use public money for private schools – both of which Trump has suggested as well. Conservatives have sought the dismantling of the department for decades, so far without success.Most chapters of Project 2025 mention discarding any programs that promote LGBTQ+ rights and diversity. Trump has railed against these ideals on the campaign trail, promising to root out trans women from sports and in schools.Abortion access is one area where Trump and the project could differ, though Trump’s plans for abortion have been muddled. The project wants to end federal approval of abortion pills, track abortion data and root out anything that is seen as promoting abortion as healthcare. It doesn’t call for a direct ban on the procedure, and Trump has said he wouldn’t approve of one either, but many of these policies would make access significantly more difficult.The America First Policy Institute suggests many of the same policies, though it wants to go further than Project 2025 with federal employees, the New York Times notes, by making most federal workers at-will employees who would not receive civil service protections.Other ideas the institute has pushed include, according to the Times, “halting federal funding for Planned Parenthood and for mandatory ultrasounds before abortions, including those carried out with medication. It seeks to make concealed weapons permits reciprocal in all 50 states, increase petroleum production, remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients and establish legally only two genders.”A policy agenda pamphlet from the institute starts by discussing the Christian foundations of the US and imploring Christians to get involved in the government “before it’s too late”. The policy agenda for the pamphlet was written “through the lens of their biblical foundations and applications to provide Christians more information on the issues and solutions needed for the restoration of the nation”. More

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      New Yorkers Pass an Equal Rights Amendment Tied to Abortion Access

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      A ballot measure in New York designed to safeguard protections for abortion and for those most vulnerable to discrimination was passed on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.The measure, known as Proposition 1 and the Equal Rights Amendment, was intended to codify abortion rights in the State Constitution by including “pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes and reproductive health care and autonomy” as a protected class.The amendment bars discrimination based on an expanded set of conditions, adding ethnicity, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity and pregnancy. The State Constitution had only prohibited unequal treatment based on race, color, creed and religion.The measure was fiercely opposed by Republicans and anti-abortion activists including a Schlitz beer scion, who spent $6.5 million to defeat it. It was also opposed by the New York State Sheriffs’ Association, which warned that its protections against gender discrimination could create challenges for law enforcement.Democrats had hoped that the ballot initiative would help boost turnout by energizing voters who care about abortion rights. Public sentiment in New York appeared to be on the ballot’s side: A recent Siena College poll shows that some 69 percent of New Yorkers approve of the amendment.Republicans blanketed the airwaves with messaging against the proposal.Some of the most heated attacks centered on the protections the amendment would offer to transgender people — particularly transgender girls, who many Republicans believe should not be allowed to play on sports teams with cisgender girls.Much like abortion, protections for transgender people already exist in New York State law. The purpose of the amendment is to make it harder for any future legislature to make laws that would erode those protections.But opponents said the initiative would go further, claiming that it would allow children to obtain gender-affirming care without parental involvement and extend voting rights to undocumented immigrants. Neither is true, according to the New York City Bar Association. More

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      When Trump says he’s going to ‘protect’ women, he means ‘control’ them | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Could Republicans take away a woman’s right to a credit card?“Hello, I’d like a line of credit, please.”“Well, before we can even consider that, are you married? Are you taking a contraceptive pill? And can your husband co-sign all the paperwork so we know you have a man’s permission?”That may not be an exact rendition of an actual conversation between a woman and a US bank manager in 1970, but it’s close enough. Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, it was considered good business practice for banks to discriminate against women. It didn’t matter how much money she had – a woman applying for a credit card or loan could expect to be asked invasive questions by a lender and told she needed a male co-signer before getting credit. All of which severely limited a woman’s ability to build a business, buy a house or leave an abusive relationship.Then came the ECOA, which was signed into law 50 years ago on Monday. Banking didn’t magically become egalitarian after that – discriminatory lending practices are still very much an issue – but important protections were enshrined in law. A woman finally had a right to get a credit card in her own name, without a man’s signature.When things feel bleak – and things feel incredibly bleak at the moment – it is important to remember how much social progress has been made in the last few decades. Many of us take having access to a credit card for granted, but it’s a right that women had to fight long and hard for. Indeed, the ECOA was passed five years after the Apollo 11 mission. “Women literally helped put a man on the moon before they could get their own credit cards,” the fashion mogul Tory Burch wrote for Time on the 50th anniversary of the ECOA being signed.If feels fitting that such an important anniversary is so close to such an important election. While we must celebrate how far we’ve come, it’s also important to remember that progress isn’t always linear. Rights that we have taken for granted for decades can, as we saw with the overturning of Roe v Wade, be suddenly yanked away.Is there any chance that, if Donald Trump gets into power again, we might see Republicans take away a woman’s right to her own credit card? It’s certainly not impossible. Trump’s entire campaign is, after all, about taking America back. The former president has also cast himself as a paternalistic protector of women.“I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not,” Trump said at a rally on Wednesday. “I’m going to protect them.”Of course, we all know what “protect” really means in this context: it means “control”. Should he become president again, Trump and his allies seem intent on massively expanding the power of the president and eliminating hard-won freedoms. Conservative lawmakers and influencers want to control a woman’s access to reproductive healthcare. They want to control the sorts of books that get read and the type of history that gets taught. They want to control how women vote. They want to control whether a woman can get a no-fault divorce. They might not take away women’s access to credit, but they will almost certainly try to chip away at a woman’s path to financial independence.Elon Musk denies offering sperm to random acquaintancesA recent report from the New York Times alleges that he wants to build a compound to house his many children and some of their mothers. “Three mansions, three mothers, 11 children and one secretive, multibillionaire father who obsesses about declining birthrates when he isn’t overseeing one of his six companies: It is an unconventional family situation, and one that Mr Musk seems to want to make even bigger,” the Times notes. Apparently, in an effort to do this, he has been offering his sperm to friends and acquaintances. Musk has denied all this. This joins a growing list of sperm-based denials. Over the summer, he denied claims in the New York Times that he’d volunteered his sperm to help populate a colony on Mars.Martha Stewart criticises Netflix film that ‘makes me look like a lonely old lady’The businesswoman was also upset that director RJ Cutler didn’t put Snoop Dogg on the soundtrack: “He [got] some lousy classical score in there, which has nothing to do with me.”JD Vance thinks white kids are pretending to be trans so they can get into collegeLike pretty much everything the vice-presidential candidate says, this is insulting and nonsensical. Rather than having advantages conferred on them, trans people in the US are subject to dehumanizing rhetoric and laws that want to outlaw their existence. Meanwhile, it is well-documented that there are plenty of privileged children whose parents spent a lot of money so their kids could pretend to be athletes to get into college.What happened to the young girl captured in a photograph of Gaza detainees?The BBC tells the story of a young girl photographed among a group of men rounded up by Israeli forces. In her short life, Julia Abu Warda, aged three, has endured more horror than most of us could imagine.Pregnant Texas teen died after three ER visits due to medical impact of abortion banNevaeh Crain, 18, is one of at least two Texas women who have died under the state’s abortion ban.Sudan militia accused of mass killings and sexual violence as attacks escalateThe war in Sudan, which has displaced more than 14 million people, is catastrophic – particularly for girls and women. In a new report, a UN agency said that paramilitaries are preying on women and sexual violence is “rampant”. And this violence is being enabled by outside interests: many experts believe that, if it weren’t for the United Arab Emirates’ alleged involvement in the war, the crisis would already be over. The UAE, you see, is interested in Sudan’s resources. Meanwhile, the Guardian reported back in June that UK government officials have attempted to suppress criticism of the UAE for months.The week in pawtriarchyYou’ve almost certainly heard of the infinite monkey theorem: the idea that, given all the time in the world, a monkey randomly hitting keys on a typewriter would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Now, two Australian mathematicians have declared the notion im-paw-ssible. Indeed, they only found a 5% chance that a single monkey would randomly write the word “bananas” in their lifetime. Meanwhile, the Guardian notes that Shakespeare’s canon includes 884,647 words – none of them “banana”. More

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      ‘Take these attacks seriously’: journalist Imara Jones on the dangerous rise of anti-trans political ads

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      Imara Jones was filming a documentary on a road trip in California when she took a break to scroll the news. A story about state lawmakers in Idaho banning transgender girls from playing on female sports teams at public schools caught her attention; it was the second anti-trans legislation that Jones had seen passed in 2020. She turned to her producer and told her that they needed to look into “this anti-trans stuff”. Dozens of similar bills were introduced in statehouses throughout the nation soon after.A year later, Jones launched her podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality to look into the religious extremists, conservative political groups and billionaires pushing an anti-trans agenda.Since then, the urgency of her work has only grown. Republicans have spent more than $65m on anti-trans television ads in recent months, according to the New York Times, despite the negative impact that they have on trans people’s safety and wellbeing, and scant evidence of its effectiveness in swaying voters. And in 2023 and 2024, more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced each year.On her podcast, Jones – a Black trans journalist and founder of the platform TransLash Media – investigates the anti-trans industry with a conversational tone, all while centering the voices and experiences of trans people. “I have a belief that when you see the same thing happening in different parts of the country at the same time, that that’s something to look into,” Jones said. “I think that coincidence is always great as a fertile ground for journalism and for looking under the hood about what’s going on.”In the first episode of this year’s season, Jones looks at how the paramilitary group Proud Boys uses anti-trans rhetoric to stoke political upheaval. Far-right militia groups have grown at unprecedented numbers in recent years, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), while political violence in general has also increased.For trans people, such rhetoric can lead to increased violence against them, as well as suicidal ideation. A recent report from the LGBTQ+ advocacy group The Trevor Project found that suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth increased by up to 72% in states that enacted anti-trans laws.“We know that trans people overall have been facing more violence since there’s been an uptick in anti-trans rhetoric in terms of hate crimes,” Jones said. “So we know that there is an impact on people’s safety and wellbeing solely because of the [public] conversation.”Jones hopes that through her work, that the press and political leaders will begin to see anti-trans rhetoric as a serious threat to democracy and community safety.“The biggest solution is to take these attacks seriously,” Jones said, “to understand the way in which they are being deployed for paramilitary violence, for political violence, to destabilize communities, to undermine democratic conversations politically, to take votes away”.A ‘trans moral panic’Anti-trans ads are being deployed by the Republican party now due to the tightness of the presidential election, according to Jones. During their September debate, for instance, Trump attacked Kamala Harris’s 2019 comments about her support of gender-affirming surgery for imcarcerated trans people. “Anti-trans issues work the best in really tight elections where the margins are really close and you’re just trying to convert one or two votes per precinct, and that’s enough to help you win,” Jones said.Another reason why anti-trans ads are particularly salient now is because the GOP is using them to court voters who supported the Republican candidate Nikki Haley, who ran on an anti-trans platform, she added. Many of those voters are suburban women who lean Republican, but sometimes vote Democrat in local elections. Both parties are now vying for their votes. “Harris is making a play for the Nikki Haley voter, and there’s some indication that she is gaining enough ground to maybe get her over the top,” said Jones. “That’s exactly the type of population that would be receptive to anti-trans messages.”Christian nationalists and rightwing politicians view trans people as collateral damage as they strive for political wins, according to Jones. And bundled in with anti-trans rhetoric is opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. A “trans moral panic” among the far-right has led to an uptick in legislation that bans both DEI policies and trans protections, said Emerson Hodges, a research analyst for the intelligence project at the SPLC. At the Intelligence Project, Hodges tracks hate and extremism through in-person and online monitoring.“Anti-LGBT groups that are in alliances with trans-exclusionary groups also push what they call ‘viewpoint diversity’ to roll back DEI protections in state houses and in corporations,” said Hodges. Billed as the inclusion of various perspectives in an argument, viewpoint diversity is problematic because it promotes this false narrative that DEI is a threat to white Christian men,” he said, “and they utilize that to push these anti-trans, anti-LGBT bills”.Along with an increase in suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary people, anti-trans legislation can lead to violence against trans people of color, said Hodges. Twenty-seven trans people have been killed this year, according to HRC, with 74% of them being people of color and 48% being Black. “When we look at these trends of violence towards trans people,” Hodges said, “it’s important to remember that those trends of violence are affected by legislation and the politicization of trans affirmation.”While Jones began her podcast in 2019 to highlight the dangers of anti-trans legislation, she hopes to one day celebrate the lives of trans people. But first, political leaders must work toward creating a society where trans and gender nonconforming people can live without the fear of violence.“We would love to focus on telling all of the good news and the positive stories that surround trans people from all walks of life and all backgrounds,” Jones said. “But the world’s gonna have to cooperate a little bit to allow us to do that.” More

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      Vance Tells Rogan: Teens Become Trans to Get Into Ivy League

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      Senator JD Vance of Ohio criticized what he called “gender transition craziness,” spoke dismissively of women he claimed were “celebrating” their abortions and said that studies “connect testosterone levels in young men with conservative politics” during a three-hour episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” that was released on Thursday.Mr. Vance criticized transgender and nonbinary people at length during the conversation, saying that he would not be surprised if he and his running mate, former President Donald J. Trump, won what he called “the normal gay guy vote.” And he suggested that children in upper-middle-class white families saw becoming trans as a way to improve their odds of getting into Ivy League colleges.“If you are a, you know, middle-class or upper-middle-class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, like, obviously, that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle-class kids,” Mr. Vance told Mr. Rogan. “But the one way that those people can participate in the D.E.I. bureaucracy in this country is to be trans.”Mr. Vance hit on a number of culture-war flashpoints and conservative cultural grievances as he spoke for more than three hours on Mr. Rogan’s immensely popular podcast, the latest in a series of interviews that he and Mr. Trump have done on podcasts aimed at young men. Mr. Rogan’s show is likely to be one of Mr. Vance’s most-watched campaign appearances: Mr. Rogan has 14.5 million followers on Spotify and 17.6 million on YouTube, many of them young men.At one point, Mr. Vance suggested that liberal women were publicly celebrating their abortions — “baking birthday cakes and posting about it” on social media — a notion Mr. Rogan pushed back on.“I think there’s very few people that are celebrating,” Mr. Rogan said.Mr. Rogan challenged Mr. Vance on abortion rights.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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      U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says

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      The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care.An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment.The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care.But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview. Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.“They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.That conclusion seemed to contradict an earlier description of the group, in which Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.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