BROADview in Brief: Against Normal

Who hates romance? We hate romance!

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· The biggest news arrived this morning: this piece from Pamela Paul in—can you believe it?—The New York Times.

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.

And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.

If you’re a gender world insider, you probably knew this was coming, and how hard it was to make it happen. Many people have sent op-eds on this subject to the paper and been turned down, leaving PP to shoulder the burden of telling these stories herself. Please show your support for nuanced reporting on a really difficult topic: letters@nytimes.com.

· Florida will require people renewing licenses to list their sex, not their gender identity. I see this being reported as banning transgender people from changing gender on their licenses, but I’d argue that what Florida DHSMV's deputy executive director, Robert Kynoch, wrote in his memo is reasonable: “Permitting an individual to alter his or her license to reflect an internal sense of gender role or identity, which is neither immutable nor objectively verifiable, undermines the purpose of an identification record and can frustrate the state’s ability to enforce its laws.” You don’t change your eye color on the license when you use colored contacts, right?

On the other hand, calling this “fraud” when people have become accustomed to identifying based on that internal sense, and consider it their civil right to do so, is inflammatory and cruel. A generation has been educated in these ideas and will need some time to adjust to, well, reality—the reality of sex.

Will this rule, as some pundits assert, increase the risk of violence against trans and nonbinary people? Is TSA likely to clock someone because they pass as female but have male listed on their license? Maybe not, but it’s going to cause some people to have to out themselves in ways they probably don’t want to if they’ve gone to the trouble to pass. On the other hand, so many people who identify as trans don’t pass—or are hard to read as one sex or the other—so I don’t know why the sex marker matters.

I have heard that in the past, many passing trans women did face violence when their sex was revealed, either via documentation or in sexual situations. And nobody wants a return to that. When we make laws to push back against existing ones that may have gone too far, we really ought to consider how they’ll affect the people they’re aimed at.

· This opinion piece by Ross Douthat really hit me: “…the other reason that liberalism is surviving its disconnect from what remains of American normalcy is conservatism’s inability to just be normal itself, even for a minute.”

…under the influence of progressive radicalism, institutional groupthink and coronavirus fears — the liberal establishment was untethering itself from American normalcy to a politically suicidal degree. Blue cities and regions were rerunning aspects of the left’s 1970s social program on fast-forward and generating spikes in crime and disorder. The Democratic Party’s economic agenda had yielded 1970s-style inflation. Joe Biden was elected as a moderate but was too aged and diminished to actually impose moderation on his party. And elite liberalism was increasingly associated with a mixture of Covid overreaction and ideological hysteria: Imagine a double-masked bureaucrat running a white-privilege workshop, forever.

And yet, he writes, some of that fever is receding as the right wing heats up, evidenced by “the very-online right’s bizarre reaction to the romance between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, a love story that’s united the two remaining pillars of our common culture: the National Football League and, well, Swift herself.”

The quest to make sense of the right’s anti-Swiftism has encouraged weak attempts to suggest that the Swift-Kelce romance is somehow subverting these traditionalist archetypes and modeling a more progressive idea of romance — that because she’s richer and more famous than he is and he respects her career, they’re basically one step removed from a Bay Area polycule or Brooklyn open marriage.

· I saw the movie All of Us Strangers last night, and it had the best definition of the popularity of the word “queer” I’ve heard. To paraphrase: for an older generation, queer was an insult, and gay (which once meant happy!) was without so much negative connotation. Now it’s the opposite. Young people grew up with “that shirt is gay,” meaning: bad. And queer, says the younger [gay] character, is more polite—doesn’t conjure up images of actual fellatio. Maybe that’s because so many “queer” people are heterosexual?

More from our pal Alejandra Q:

US News

· The Biden administration, along with families from Tennessee and Kentucky, have asked the Supreme Court to roll back state restrictions on pediatric gender affirmation.

· In a leaked audio conversation which included Republican lawmakers from both Ohio and Michigan, Michigan House representative Josh Schriver was noted as saying the following concerning gender affirmation: “My thing is, in terms of endgame, why are we allowing these practices for anyone? Why would we stop this for anyone under 18, but not apply this for anyone over 18? It’s harmful across the board.”

· Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton requested the medical records of Texan trans identified minors from a Georgia-based telehealth clinic. Last year, Paxton requested similar records from the Seattle Children’s Hospital, which filed a petition in response. 

· On Thursday, alumnae of the Kappa Kappa Gamma filed a lawsuit against the sorority’s leadership. A trans-identified member of the group, Tracy Nadzieja, is currently running for national president of the sorority which, alumnae allege, is in violation of the sorority’s identity as a single-sex Greek life entity. Kappa Kappa Gamma is the same sorority under fire for allowing a trans identified male, Artemis Langford, to join its University of Wyoming chapter.

· A pizzeria in New York State agreed to pay $25,000 to settle a case brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). It is alleged that the owner of the restaurant, along with some staff members, asked questions about their trans-identified female co-worker’s genital transition. They also allegedly said that their co-worker “wasn’t a real man.”  

· Shelly Lamb, a trans-identified male employee, is suing Kansas prisons. Subsequent to gender transition, Lamb allegedly "was singled out for disparate treatment, and treated less favorably than non-transgender employees" at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility.

· On Tuesday, conservative watchdog Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco over its transgender guaranteed income program. According to the suit, the program violates the Equal Protection clause of the California constitution.

· On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction blocking a law that would prevent the state’s doctors from providing minors with “gender-affirming” interventions. The law, which passed in April 2023, will remain blocked until a lawsuit opposing the law is resolved.

· Two Kentucky legislators (Rep. Sarah Stalker, D-Louisville and Rep. Adrielle Camuel, D-Lexington) filed a bill to undo Senate Bill 150, which passed the general assembly in 2023. Senate Bill 150 bans minors from receiving "gender affirming" interventions.

· Maine lawmakers have rejected a proposal that would have prohibited the state from cooperating with law enforcement from states where pediatric gender affirmation is banned and who are investigating minors seeking treatment.

· Krista and Todd Kolstad from Glasgow, Montana were accused by child protective services of “kidnapping” their 14-year-old daughter after she began to identify as a transgender boy.

· On Friday, Sadie Schreiner, a trans identified male runner, broke two women's records at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).

· On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio said it plans to challenge the state’s new law banning pediatric gender affirmation.

· On Tuesday, The Texas Supreme Court heard the first oral arguments in a case dealing with the constitutionality of Texas' Senate Bill 14. The bill, which took effect Sept. 1, prohibits doctors in the state from providing hormone therapies or surgeries to minors

· On Tuesday, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed a law which made his state the latest to regulate bathroom access for transgender people. Other states to have done this include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, North Dakota, and Oklahoma.

· West Virginia Governor Jim Justice formally endorsed the ‘Women's Bill of Rights.’ The aim of this bill is to make women's sports exclusively female. Riley Gaines sat by Justice’s side during the endorsement.  

· Sympathy for the Devil: Autogynephilia as Psychic Retreat, by Joe Burgo. There’s no one-size-fits-all explanation for why some men become autogynephilic.

· No, There’s No ‘Epidemic’ of Anti-Transgender Violence: Human Rights Campaign’s own data suggest trans Americans suffer a homicide risk that’s actually less than the U.S. average. The 2023 Epidemic Of Violence report focuses heavily on the most serious kind of violence: homicide. In this regard, the authors identify a grand total of 33 “transgender or gender non-conforming” Americans who were killed over the one-year time period ending on November 20, 2023 (a date that, since 1999, has corresponded to Transgender Day of Remembrance.)

International

· The New Zealand government-appointed Midwifery Council plans to erase the words “woman” and “mother” from its scope of practice, to be replaced by the term “whānau” (a Māori word which broadly translates to family). These changes are opposed by 90% of respondents to a feedback document released by the council.

· UK parents voiced concerns over a 4-year-old boy who was allowed to join a Church of England primary school as a girl. The boy's sex  was hidden from his classmates and parents claim that the students were eventually traumatised to learn the truth. Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, and Kemi Badenoch, the Women and Equalities minister expressed concerns regarding the issue and vowed to intervene, with Badenoch claiming that trans ideology has ‘no place in primary schools.’

· A UK tribunal ruled that Jo Phoenix, a professor of criminology at The Open University who was labelled “the racist uncle at the Christmas dinner table” due to her gender-critical beliefs, was “constructively unfairly dismissed and suffered post-employment victimization.” The tribunal also found that The Open University subjected Phoenix to “direct discrimination because of her gender-critical beliefs; harassment because of her gender-critical beliefs; wrongful dismissal; and post-employment harassment.” Employment lawyer Yvonne Gallagher, commented on the case: “This is another in a string of recent tribunal cases that have found in favor of individuals who have been subjected to detriment for expressing so-called gender-critical views; ie, the assertion that sex is real and immutable and cannot be changed. Such beliefs were held by the EAT in the case of Forstater v CGD Europe to amount to protected beliefs for the purposes of the Equality Act. The case serves as a very clear reminder that individuals who hold protected beliefs are protected under the Equality Act from unlawful discrimination arising because of those beliefs.”

· UK Labour party leader, Keir Starmer, promised attendees at a LGBT+ event in Parliament that a future Labour government would 'implement a full, trans-inclusive, ban on all forms of conversion therapy' if he were to become Prime Minister.

· Female pool players submitted a “letter before claim” to the World Eightball Pool Federation and Ultimate Pool Group accusing the governing bodies of sex discrimination.

· Surf brand Rip Curl suffered costumer backlash after featuring Sasha Jane Lowerson, a trans-identified male professional longboarder, on its social media. Consumers called for a boycott using the slogan #StopReplacingWomen and the social media post has since been removed. On Wednesday, the brand broke its silence on the topic: “our recent post has landed us in the divisive space around transgender participation in competitive sport,” a spoke person said.

What else happened this week? Please leave word in the comments!