BROADview in Brief

In with the new...

Photo by Kajetan Sumila on Unsplash

I hope you all were able to enjoy some time off in December and have had an excellent start to 2024. I think there might have been a slight slowdown in gender news over the past weeks with so many people on vacation, but perhaps that’s just the cumulative impact of too much holiday grog on my perception of time and on my attention to the news.

Still, there was definitely some action! As the new year began, laws banning youth gender medicalization were due to go into effect in Idaho, Louisiana, and West Virginia--Idaho’s new law was then put on temporary hold by a federal judge until an ACLU lawsuit against it is settled, and, of course, the Idaho Attorney General plans to appeal the hold, and so the great world spins (as Tennyson might say…feeling the urge to extra carefully link sources for some reason).

Meanwhile, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine finally vetoed Ohio’s youth gender medicalization bill HB 68 last Friday, saying, “Ultimately, these tough, tough decisions should not be made by the government.” The bill would also have required male high school and college students to play in the male sports category, regardless of their gender identity. Instead, DeWine offered some administrative adjustments, including possibly banning gender surgeries on minors via new governor regulations and creating a registry of trans-medicalized patients. As a result, the Ohio House is returning early from its winter break to attempt to override the veto--if it gets a two-thirds majority vote in the House on January 10th, it will then move to the Ohio Senate for a similar vote. Some good analysis here from the LGBT Courage Coalition.

What else happened across the US?

• Legislators in the New Hampshire House passed a bill to ban gender surgeries on minors with bipartisan support. The bill now moves on to the New Hampshire Senate.

• Warning: Pig Violence. The Daily Mail reported that a transwoman/trans-identified male murderer has been serving a 50-year sentence in an Oregon women’s prison since 2015. I’m not sure if the interesting part is that housing prisoners by gender identity in Oregon has been going on for at least eight years, or if it’s the sheer horror of becoming pig chow that caused the Mail to root out this story.

• In Georgia, transwoman Robyn Casias filed a $3M lawsuit against AT&T for unlawful termination due to discrimination due to Casias’ gender identity.

• In California, the group bringing forward an initiative to require parental notification of school social transitions and ban youth gender medicalization is suing Attorney General Rob Bonta for calling it the “Restricting Rights of Transgender Youth Initiative” in ballot language. 

• Also in California, the new gender neutral toy section law is in force. I’ll head to Target this weekend and let you know what I see--fellow Californians, please share what you find out there! (Lisa, for her part, would rather that toys not be shelved according to gendered marketing, but welcomes your pushback).

• In North Carolina, ABC News reported that some trans-identified minors are placed in psychiatric care units based on their sex rather than their gender identity and that this “sometimes compounds trauma.” The teen patient featured in the article ends up at an out-of-state private residential treatment facility instead of a psych unit, so it’s difficult to draw conclusions from this one story. Do any psychiatrist readers want to weigh in with their thoughts? I keep thinking about Sage, the female Virginia high school student who was sexually abused after being placed in the male wing of a state juvenile facility. How is this playing out in public psychiatric units in other states? I have many questions…

• I want to note after my discussion of the Alliance Defending Freedom legal firm in the last In Brief that I overlooked that American College of Pediatrics v. Becerra is coming up for oral arguments in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. ADF is suing the Biden administration on behalf of the American College of Pediatrics and the Catholic Medical Association for requiring that doctors medicalize youth gender transitions despite any professional concerns and/or religious beliefs they may have. It should be an interesting case.

The big international gender news has been the World Health Organization’s decision to jump into the transgender healthcare guidelines business with a proposed list of 21 transactivists and clinicians who would make up the WHO’s “guideline development group.” The group members’ backgrounds have naturally raised the eyebrows of gender medical skeptics. According to the BMJ, however, the WHO has stated that “all views will be weighed on the composition of the guideline development group.” (I’m linking to a tweet image here because the BMJ article is paywalled—thanks for the subscriber heads-up!)

In other global news:

• Canada has awarded trans activist Morgane Oger the Meritorious Service Medal for being a “champion of diversity.” Oger led the charge to defund Canada’s oldest rape crisis center in 2019 when the leadership of Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter decided it would remain as the last female-only rape crisis service provider in Vancouver.

• Canada will also now require all federally regulated workplaces to provide free menstrual products in women’s, all-gender, and men’s bathrooms. The men’s bathroom piece is causing some discussion, but I would think plenty of Canadian women would deeply appreciate their male significant others bringing home extra supplies from work. It could be a win for Canadian practical romance and family life.

• In Australia, some psychiatrists have urged caution on youth gender medicalization, but some clinicians are pushing to make puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones more easily accessible to minors.

• Australian boxer Ebanie Bridges joined the international fracas over USA Boxing allowing trans-identified males to compete in female professional boxing, calling the decision “wrong on so many levels” and writing, “I don't care about 'political correctness' it's politically incorrect to have a man fighting a woman.”

• In the UK, Caroline Paige, the first trans officer to serve openly in the British Armed Forces, has been appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for “lifetime contribution to LGBT+ inclusion.”

Have an adventuresome weekend, please share your thoughts below and through this form, and I’ll see you next week!

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Thank you for the excellent research assistance from Alejandra Q.