I cannot believe I did this ! But there I was on the surgery table, about to receive anaesthetics. And all the anxiety that had been building up suddenly became just too much.

I'm not quite sure why I did it yet. All I know is I tore up the consent document and started crying, crying without being able to stop.

The nurses have been very nice with me, they got me a warm blanket and were very gentle and supportive. The surgeon a little less so, I'm not sure he'll let me come back. He said the next spot they can offer me will be three years from now.

I still think I want to do this ? But not today. Not today. I don't feel capable of going through with it today. I felt like I was going to DIE on that table.

I think I need a therapist to process this. I don't understand my emotions at ALL yet.

as i expand service i have included in-community work but with some caveats to make my engagement here in Seattle and online be less transactional in-community with the goal being fully pro-bono for non-sexual teatimes and therapeutic roleplay. i have a significant number of younger trans women and trans femmes wanting services that aren't something anyone should need to pay to receive if they are in our community. i serve other's needs far less important. being loved and having care shown should be free. in my personal life, it's free. if you sit with me on the street i will love you right back.

that all being said I have a question for the world of trans people needing intimacy and considering talking with a fssw; what would you want non-sexually? like cuddling or sleepovers or loving touch? i already do teatime and some basic mommy roleplay and those are non-sexual with me gently enforcing return to those boundaries. i admit my need to nurture others and im hoping this also addresses my mommy dysphoria. i am almost a client as much as any trans person who is looking for my services. its a formalism because of this unique situation. i dont really know what else to do. i cannot have so many relationships without systematizing and i am not interested in exploiting a need that is common in our community. even if folks bring it right to me, asking. we are all so shaped by sacrificing ourselves and our bodies for love and intimacy.

i put on a grey wig and took some pictures and i caught trans people. more than i could have known i might catch.

**** edit Of course you can DM me, bbs! This is a sensitive and personal question.

If you like to serve, serve me.

Photo by Pete Alexopoulos on Unsplash

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

Last month, the Texas Republican Party held its biennial convention at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, where over 4,000 delegates assembled to elect new leadership, adopt an official platform, and set legislative priorities for the upcoming legislative session. Delegates overwhelmingly elected D'Rinda Randall as the new state party chair, carrying 25 of 31 Senate District caucuses in what political scientists described as a further rightward shift driven by the MAGA wing's primary victories. The platform attracted national attention, but one section of it went unnoticed: a set of anti-trans provisions that, if enacted, would be among the most draconian in the country—including a ban on all gender-affirming care up to the age of 26 that extends to legal name changes, an absolute prohibition on transgender people working or volunteering in public schools, and a ban on private businesses expressing any support for transgender people.

"Gender Identity Ideology in Schools: The official position of the Texas schools shall be that there are only two genders: biological male and biological female, which are immutable and cannot be changed. We support the total prohibition of so-called social transitioning. We oppose transgender normalizing curriculum, library materials, and pronoun use. We support the prohibition of transgender individuals from serving in any school district positions, including in volunteer roles, and mandate the exclusive use of pronouns corresponding to a person's biological sex at birth.”

Plank 116 of the platform goes on to call for banning any curriculum, library materials, or extracurricular offering that "adopts, supports, or promotes gender fluidity or transgender ideology" and prohibiting school staff from "engaging in sexualized drag activities, crossdressing, or transgenderism."

The platform also calls for the criminal prosecution of parents of transgender youth under child abuse statutes—something Governor Abbott has already attempted, directing the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate families of trans children in 2022. Plank 150 states: "Any agency, individual, or other entity promoting, performing, or facilitating gender-transitioning or gender-modification of a minor child shall be criminally prosecuted for child abuse and exposed to civil actions, enjoying no immunity regardless of profession, relation, or standing." Importantly, the platform does not stop at minors. Plank 149 extends its prohibitions to legal adults as old as 25, banning all gender-affirming "medical or mental health intervention for persons between the ages of 18 and 26," including not just surgery, puberty blockers, and hormones, but even "assigning name and/or pronoun changes.”

See the section of the platform here:

The platform also targets the private sector. Under the heading "Religious Freedom for Business," Plank 203 calls for removing laws that "force business owners and employees to violate their conscience, sincerely held beliefs, or core values"—providing legal cover for businesses to discriminate against transgender people. But for businesses that want to be supportive, the platform offers no such freedom. Plank 203(c) goes further than any state party platform in the country, calling for an outright ban on businesses expressing support for transgender people:

Lastly, the platform does not just target transgender people—it targets LGBTQ+ people broadly. Its section on homosexuality opens with a declaration that would not be out of place in the 1950s: "Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice." Plank 152 endorses conversion therapy for people of "any age with identity disorder or unwanted same-sex attraction"—a practice condemned by every major medical organization in the country. Plank 208 declares the party is "opposed to same-sex parenting, intentionally subjecting a child to the loss of their biological father or mother, and other non-traditional definitions of family." And Plank 211 calls for nullifying Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, stating it "has no basis in the Constitution." Taken together, the platform reads as a blueprint for rolling back not just transgender rights but decades of LGBTQ+ civil rights progress.

“I think the most concerning part is that the Texas GOP wants to cut off mental health support for trans people between the ages of 18 and 26. Because of AG Ken Paxton’s aggressive weaponization of the law, Texas is already the only state that bars that kind of mental health care from trans minors in direct violation of the Supreme Court’s recent conversion therapy ruling. Having been personally affected by the prohibition a couple years ago, it gives me chills to think of what will happen if the ban is extended even further,” says trans journalist Aleksandra Vaca, a resident of the state, in a quote provided to Erin In The Morning.

Many of these provisions are not new. The 2024 Texas GOP platform already declared homosexuality "an abnormal lifestyle choice” and already called for criminalizing anyone who facilitates youth transition. However, it is clear that the policy platforms are escalating in the Texas Republican Party. And the party has a track record of turning its platform into law—SB 14 banned youth care in 2023 and SB 8 restricted bathrooms in 2025. Transgender people in Texas, meanwhile, have to sit and wait to see which draconian policy from the platform gets implemented in 2027 due to a party that seeks to make the conditions of life impossible for transgender people.

I found a stick. It's a pretty good stick. Say heyyy if you're trans and like a good stick. If you don't like sticks or prefer something else keep it to yourself. This is a stick appreciative space.

Fuck my butt.

just dont die. that's it. it will be confusing. dont hurt yourself if you feel alone. try to wait until you have some time to think and feel in a safe place. it's not your fault either. life is real hard sometimes and we are so soft and our lives are fleeting. we can break. things are not like everyone says. hang on, bbs. it might be a daily struggle to figure out what is happening inside and why but you can do it. you might not feel like you have a gender or a new feeling comes up that is unrecognizable and foreign. it can be much more confusing with loss of time and sense of identity assaulted but just hang on. hang on. hang on. im real sad rn and so confused myself but i can say that im holding on. just hold on.

So why are we always asking adults?

Archived version here

I need help finding ideas to openly promote Transgender people in my area. Bigger is better. This is because of the intersection between Trump's open and frankly violent attacks on my people and the fact that this is pride month. I am not in a place where I can safely out myself as even a supporter, I am not financially stable enough to move into a more accepting area and I live in an area that was already violent toward my people before Trump took power (Rural deep south USA). I have an idea that I think could cause a big scene but I want to hear your ideas for how to brazenly but secretly benefit the Trans and larger LGBTQ+ community before I commit. If you already have an idea, please do not read mine, just comment it so that it doesn't change. My idea will be the next paragraph.

There is an LDS Church that hosts a local Turning Point USA Youth Chapter on both student campus and the major highway. I was planning on painting a poster board the trans flag colors and writing "Radically pro Transgender" on it in the rainbow colors before placing the sign in the front of the Church at 3:00 in the morning on a Sunday. I dont think this would do much, but it would make me feel better that I am doing something practical against this system that has been trying to kill me for years and that I have only ever been able to watch. I am sick of never qualifying for revolutionary action simply because I am alone and hated. I want to do what I can organization may be impossible here (I have tried more times then I can count) but I will do what I can.

"With only one concern highlighted in our 2025 Unitary Authorities audit—and a mere four complaints documented across 382 public bodies nationwide in previous investigations—the data overwhelmingly contradicts the narrative that trans inclusion threatens the safety or dignity of single-sex spaces. In total, TransLucent has now submitted 444 FOI requests, covering over four years and found just 5 complaints about a trans woman using a single sex space".

“I was 12 talking about it, which I kind of regret because privacy was really blurred, [but] I was really unashamed of talking about it because I was a kid and I was like, ‘This is the way it is.’

“Now that I’m in America, there’s so much shame around sex, sexual education is such a taboo, and it’s such a weird climate right now, especially about trans kids in particular. They’re the enemy right now.”

“In this political climate, I’m happy I can stand for [the idea that] trans kids can transition and then be a grown-up and happy and make [those] choices. I made the right choices that I’m proud of to this day,” she continued.

Guess who was judiciously kicked from said trans discord? 🤡 look at me dance!

OK. Enough fooling around. Tell me, what you are doing and gonna do to fix, break, or grow anything at all?

My post about living in the forest, it got worse there.

I tried. In tried to call-in the folks who rescued me from the street and from their own volunteer host. None have the bandwidth for friendship with me. It wasn't until my interaction with the relocation group ended in a spectacular way did a meeting about restorative justice get scheduled. I wrote my victim statement.

No one calls me. No one believes me but my therapist. These rescuers aren't my friends like they say. No sisters showed up as friends and once aid ended ive been slowly ignored. Everyone is sick or busy. I'm just a rescue. I don't rate even tho it was their volunteer host. I heard "we told the whispernet" and general radio silence until I pushed to call-in anyone at all across my own network. One stranger replied but seemed unreliable. Another org member decided nah. The meeting was not inclusive. It left me feeling empty. It felt like I was there to convince them it happened. It's taken time to digest that I'm just another driver of policy and not a person here.

I finally cracked today and dropped 2 victim statements in a local trans activist discord. The one from Utah and the one here.

My daily life is now worse than in Utah. I'm in transitional housing that was misrepresented and I'm harassed every day in my room or in the shared spaces. My harasser calls the FBI every day to report me for gender terrorism. I should have killed myself in Utah like I planned.

I'm not going to try again. I'm ending my mutual aid and direct action. Folks I helped fucked us over by returning to Indiana and compromising their safehouse. I deleted almost everything. I need to find someone who will take Bear.

Between now and then, if you are in relocation spaces in the PNW or in the u.s. and want the statement I will provide it on request and vetting so act soon. If you know folks in these spaces, there are many, tell them too. These people are planning a trans refuge here. I'm alone hanging my ass out on this one until I wrap up. No one is standing with or beside me and I'm done standing alone.

Never fucking forget that justice delayed is justice denied. Ask yourselves why Huerta didn't disclose and who benefited from her silence. I don't even come close her caliber. I'm just some random asshole.

I'm using my voice one last time. The fuckers in the forest are watching this account.

Mir, Jess, you both are hunks of shit.

• Opal Wild

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8536301

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/50433

Colorado Supreme Court // Jeffrey Beall

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

Today, the Colorado Supreme Court ordered Children’s Hospital Colorado to resume gender-affirming care for transgender youth, ruling 5-2 that the hospital discriminated against transgender youth patients when it shuttered its care program earlier this year in capitulation to Trump. The decision reverses a district court that had ruled against forcing the hospital to return to care and directs that court to issue a preliminary injunction restoring care while the case proceeds. Children’s Hospital Colorado was one of roughly 40 hospitals across the country that capitulated to Trump administration threats and ended their trans youth care programs. In its ruling, the state’s highest court held that the hospital’s fears of federal retaliation could not override Colorado’s civil rights protections for transgender people.

The case began in December, when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued a declaration claiming that gender-affirming care for transgender youth was “neither safe nor effective” and warning that hospitals providing such care could be excluded from federal health care programs including Medicare and Medicaid. Children’s Hospital Colorado halted its program in January, and four transgender youth and their families sued under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. A Denver district court judge found that the families would likely prove they had been discriminated against and that their children faced irreparable harm, but denied them relief anyway, reasoning that forcing the hospital to resume care could provoke catastrophic federal retaliation. As we reported in April, the families appealed directly to the Colorado Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the Kennedy declaration was blocked in court for several violations of law.

In Monday’s decision, the court rejected the hospital’s central defense: that it had not discriminated against transgender youth but had simply declined to offer one category of treatment. The justices found that distinction meaningless, noting that the hospital continued to provide the very same medications, puberty blockers and hormone therapy, to cisgender youth while denying them to transgender patients. “Even without analyzing the disparate treatment between transgender and cisgender youth, CHC’s policy to suspend providing medical gender-affirming care explicitly discriminates against patients because of their gender identity,” the court wrote. “Gender-affirming care is inextricably intertwined with gender identity,” ruling that ceasing providing care was discrimination against transgender people and therefore illegal under state law.

The majority was equally direct in rejecting the hospital’s argument that it had merely been following the Kennedy Declaration. “Although CHC acted reluctantly and expressed no animus toward transgender patients, the action it chose to take in response to the Kennedy Declaration specifically targeted transgender youth patients,” the court wrote. “The Kennedy Declaration may have influenced CHC’s decision, but it doesn’t absolve CHC of responsibility.”

The most consequential portion of the ruling addressed whether federal threats could be allowed to override state civil rights law. The district court had reasoned that ordering the hospital to resume care would compel it to violate federal law. The Colorado Supreme Court flatly rejected that framing. “The trial court’s concern about opposing the public interest by ordering CHC to ‘violat[e] . . . federal law’ is also misplaced,” the court wrote. “Why? Because the Kennedy Declaration isn’t federal law.” The justices also refused to weigh the harm to transgender youth against the broader hospital population in raw numerical terms, a comparison the district court had used to side with the hospital. “We conclude that a Trinidad-style strict numerical comparison of affected individuals isn’t appropriate when the individuals seeking injunctive relief are part of a protected class and seeking an injunction because of discrimination based on that protected class,” the majority wrote. “Were it otherwise, minority groups would always lose. But that is not the law. On the contrary, that’s precisely why we have protected classes.”

The court found that the actual harm to transgender youth far outweighed the hospital’s speculative fears, describing in stark terms what the loss of care had done to the plaintiffs. “Petitioners and other transgender youth who sought such care from CHC were suddenly abandoned during a precarious time,” the court wrote, noting that the children had “experienced depression, and in at least two instances, suicidal ideation.” The justices detailed the case of one plaintiff, Danielle Doe, whose family had moved from Texas to Colorado for its protections for transgender people. “After learning that CHC could no longer provide her care, Danielle was hospitalized at CHC for a depressive episode,” the ruling states. “She wrote her mother a letter that expressed suicidal ideation, stating, ‘If I don’t see you again, I love you.’” By contrast, the court found the hospital’s feared exclusion from federal programs “speculative,” noting that no exclusion could occur without notice, hearings, and opportunities for judicial review, and that a federal court in Oregon had since declared the Kennedy Declaration unlawful and barred HHS from enforcing it.

Two justices dissented. Justice Brian Boatright, joined by Justice Carlos Samour, argued that the hospital had acted not because of its patients’ gender identity but because it faced “the risk of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding, which would threaten the viability of its entire hospital system.” The majority was unpersuaded, holding that a “reluctant” act of discrimination compelled by a “third party” remains discrimination under Colorado law. With the decision, Children’s Hospital Colorado joins a growing number of hospitals, including Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego and Children’s Minnesota, that have moved to restore gender-affirming care after initially halting it under federal pressure. The ruling also answers the question many public officials have been grappling with in terms of state anti-discrimination law: whether vague federal threats, unaccompanied by any law or court order, are enough to nullify a state’s civil rights protections. The Colorado Supreme Court’s answer was firmly: no.

A full copy of the ruling can be found here:

2026 05 18 Opinion

617KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

From Erin In The Morning via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8500566

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/49641

NYU Langone Health Site

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

Earlier this week, Erin in the Morning reported that the Texas Northern District Court issued criminal subpoenas to multiple hospitals, demanding “information” on every minor to whom they provided gender-affirming care to since 2020. NYU Langone, located in and around New York City, has been the first and only institution to publicly disclose the receipt of such a subpoena thus far. On Wednesday, Langone released the subpoena full.

We have published the subpoena at the bottom of this article. Here’s what it says and what it means for Langone patients and families.

Langone sent a message via their patient portal Monday night that it was told to hand over the names of “providers and others who were involved in offering such care at NYULH in that timeframe.”

It also said the Department of Justice wanted “information” on trans patients that it served, but it did not elaborate further on what that means. The message from Langone said it “was one of several institutions” that received a grand jury subpoena from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas.

While around two dozen institutions received subpoenas during ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi’s reign at the DOJ, these grand jury subpoenas are an escalation. Those issued by Bondi were civil in nature; these entail a criminal investigation, which introduces the prospect of jail time as both a punishment if someone is convicted of a crime and as a potential enforcement mechanism for the subpoena.

This newest revelation also shines a light on the increasingly common tactics of the Trump playbook: They cast a wide net and hope at least part of it will hold up in court.

Langone is located about 2,000 miles northeast of the Northern District of Texas, which is widely considered to be among the most conservative districts in the country. The choice to hold proceedings there was characterized by some experts as an abuse of the judiciary system.

“This is a blatant unlawful effort by the DOJ to intimidate providers of gender-affirming care to trans youth by engaging in judge and forum shopping,” Alejandra Caraballo, a Harvard Law instructor and trans legal scholar told Erin in the Morning, referring to the practice of bringing cases to districts that lawyers think will be most sympathetic to their cause.

Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told Sophie Hurwitz of Mother Jones that the subpoena is “a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate medical providers based on this administration’s ideological opposition to transgender people.”

“This,” Minter concluded, “is mafia-type behavior.”

However, hospitals, patients, and state actors can try to fight back. New York has rigorous shield laws that protect gender-affirming care patients and providers from out-of-state prosecution. It creates significant barriers to overreaching subpoenas, court proceedings, and law enforcement. How this applies to a federal case post-Trump is an emerging area of law, with many questions yet to be answered.

Moreover, a case from the Northern District of Texas is a particularly dire escalation, both because it is among the most hostile courts in the country towards transgender people, and because grand jury subpoenas are far harder to challenge than the administrative subpoenas that courts have quashed before.

But as seen with institutions like Rhode Island Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, some hospitals are finding ways to resist Trumpian attacks on care. State actors and patients themselves have also gone to court to combat federal encroachments on care and potential hospital capitulation—such as with Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Rady Children’s Hospital, both of which are in California.

For this newest case, here’s what we know so far.

1. **Doctors aren’t the only providers targeted by the subpoena.**The DOJ is requesting names of administrators, accountants, attorneys and even hospital volunteers involved in rendering gender-affirming care or billing for it through insurance.

Excerpts from the subpoena sent to NYU Langone.

2. **In addition to the names of providers, the DOJ wants the names and medical histories of every trans youth patient who received gender-affirming care from Langone since 2020. The DOJ also asserted that “de-identified information” is insufficient.**The request explicitly asks for patients’ names as well as any communications and “documents” relating to their care. This may include patient charts, medical and psychiatric notes, and detailed accounts of a patient’s medical history. It likely also includes sensitive information on patients’ families, such as addresses, and it directly asks for parental consent forms signed by caretakers.

3. **The Langone subpoena targets communications with and documents about pharmaceutical companies, drug manufacturers, and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH).**This isn’t surprising given the Trump Administration’s longheld assertion that “the gender industry,” as radical anti-trans activists call it, is some sort of wide-reaching apparatus tricking vulnerable children into needless medical procedures to turn a profit; further, it has fixated on WPATH, the premier organization for determining medical standards for trans people’s health care.

   The Federal Trade Commission hosted an event last year, as Erin in the Morning reported, laying out how it planned to target medical institutions—like hospitals, clinics, professional organizations, and drug manufacturers—by accusing them of medical “fraud.”

4. The subpoena interrogates matters of informed consent and any “medically unfavorable consequence” experienced by patients. This is emblematic of the administration’s wider efforts to gather data for the purpose of manufacturing scientific doubt about gender-affirming care—and empower those in the “detransitioner” political movement to sue their doctors, an endeavor that has mostly been unsuccessful thus far.

5. **The subpoena latches on to the term “sex-rejecting procedures,” an unscientific dogwhistle pushed by gender conservatives to describe and undermine gender-affirming care.**The term was popularized by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s screed against pediatric gender care, but one thing that makes this subpoena unique is that it also targets “voice modifications”—which could refer to surgical procedures to modify a person’s voice, but written this broadly, could in theory apply to simple voice training. It also calls affirming mental health care, such as psychotherapy, a “sex-rejecting procedure” when offered to transgender minors.

What comes next?

In short: We can’t know for sure.

Other hospitals may send out notifications to patients about the receipt of a subpoena in the coming weeks. New York’s shield law requires providers inform patients about any such pursuits within 30 days. For states without shield laws, the waters are murkier; criminal investigations are often much more opaque than civil ones. To this day, the full list of hospitals who received Bondi’s slate of administrative subpoenas is still not publicly known.

However, as per Law Dork’s Chris Geidner, even DOJ lawyers have acknowledged that the purpose of these subpoenas is to bully and intimidate hospitals and “to stop trans minors from being able to obtain gender-affirming medical care.”

This is a far cry from the concerns about medical “fraud” being touted by Trump propaganda. As per Geidner, one DOJ lawyer said, “[T]he policy is that the executive branch wants to reduce or eliminate gender-related care to minors [...] That [is what] this investigation is about.”

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

Nyu Gj Subpoena (1)

383KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

From Erin In The Morning via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8441411

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/48048

Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash

On Wednesday, the Trevor Project released a massive survey of LGBTQ+ youth, with one of the largest subsamples of transgender people of any survey previously recorded. The survey, which questioned 16,667 respondents, included over 10,000 trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer respondents. The survey found harsh experiences among LGBTQ+ people and especially transgender people, including high rates of bullying and harassment, difficulty accessing healthcare, and nearly a third of respondents saying anti-LGBTQ+ policies had made them or their families consider moving to a different state. Among the most significant findings, however, was the impact of access to gender-affirming care on transgender youth: transgender and nonbinary young people who wanted hormones to support their gender transition but were unable to access them were nearly twice as likely to report a past-year suicide attempt compared to those who were currently taking hormones.

"Transgender and nonbinary youth who reported being unable to access hormones to support their gender transition or expression were nearly twice as likely to report a past-year suicide attempt compared to those who were currently taking hormones (15% vs 8%)," reads the report. The finding is consistent with a growing body of peer-reviewed research linking anti-trans policies to worsening mental health outcomes. A 2024 study published in Nature Human Behavior—the first to establish a causal link between anti-trans laws and suicide risk—found that state-level anti-transgender laws increased past-year suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth by as much as 72%, with the highest increases among those under 18. The CDC's own Youth Risk Behavior Survey has documented similarly elevated rates, finding that over half of transgender high school students seriously considered suicide and more than a quarter attempted it during the rise in anti-trans legislation. Taken together, the evidence points in one direction: restricting access to gender-affirming care is harmful for transgender youth.

Difficulty in accessing hormones and suicide risk

Importantly, the survey also showed that the vast majority of transgender youth do not have access to or are not taking hormones or puberty blockers. Among transgender and nonbinary respondents aged 13-17, only 10% reported taking hormones to support their gender transition. Among those 18-24, the number rose to 44%, still less than half. Just 3% reported taking puberty blockers. These numbers run counter to the political narrative that transgender youth are being rushed into medical intervention. The reality, according to the survey's own data, is that the overwhelming majority of transgender minors are not receiving hormones or puberty blockers at all.

For transgender youth who do have access to care, there is enormous anxiety over whether it will continue. Of the transgender and nonbinary youth currently taking hormones, 87% reported being concerned about losing access. Ninety percent of all LGBTQ+ youth said recent anti-LGBTQ+ laws, policies, and debates caused them stress or anxiety, and 94% of trans and nonbinary respondents answered likewise. Worse, 32% of LGBTQ+ youth said these laws and policies had made them or their families consider moving to a different state altogether. That finding is consistent with broader migration data: a Movement Advancement Project/NORC poll found 400,000 transgender people had relocated since the 2024 election alone.

The survey comes amid an unprecedented wave of attacks on transgender youth and their ability to access care. Over the last two years, the Supreme Court has greenlit a suite of anti-trans policies, including in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld state bans on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Several states, all Republican-controlled, have now banned such care. The Trump administration has gone further still, issuing the Kennedy Declaration to threaten hospitals' federal funding for providing care—a policy that caused more than 40 hospital systems to shut down their trans youth programs. Meanwhile, anti-trans pseudoscience groups are attempting to launder misinformation about care and push conversion therapy-like practices at major medical conferences. This survey cuts through the false claim by the far-right that their efforts are somehow protective of youth. Denying transgender youth who want hormones clearly does not help them, but rather, is associated with nearly double the rate of suicide attempts.

Gender-affirming care saves lives. A Cornell review of more than 51 studies found that such care significantly improves the mental health of transgender people. One major study reported a 73 percent drop in suicidality among trans youth who began treatment; another found a 40 percent reduction in actual suicide attempts in the previous year. Research published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in April 2024 showed puberty blockers sharply reduced depression and anxiety. Abroad, a German review backed by 27 medical organizations endorsed gender-affirming care for youth, and a recent French medical consensus did the same. The evidence has driven a historic resolution from the American Psychological Association—representing 157,000 members—formally condemning bans on trans care.

“Given the current climate in our country, it comes as no surprise that many LGBTQ+ young people are reporting high rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidality. Similar to previous research, this national survey demonstrates that LGBTQ+ youth experience these negative mental health outcomes not because of who they are, but because of how they are mistreated by others,” said Jaymes Black, CEO of The Trevor Project, in a press release. “These young people report they are being bullied, discriminated against, and debated about by politicians simply for being themselves. While many of these results are difficult to read, this year’s data point to a hopeful reality for LGBTQ+ youth in the U.S., too: When LGBTQ+ young people report they have welcoming and supportive communities, spaces, and people in their lives, their risk for attempting suicide lowers significantly. As adults and allies, this is our call to action: we must continue to vocally and visibly show the LGBTQ+ young people in our lives that they belong, exactly as they are.”

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

From Erin In The Morning via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8479606

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/48379

Valerie Plesch / Bloomberg via NBC News

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

Last night, Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted preliminary injunctions in two parallel cases—Endocrine Society v. FTC and World Professional Association for Transgender Health v. FTC—enjoining the Federal Trade Commission from enforcing civil investigative demands against the two leading medical organizations on transgender health. The judge ruled in both cases that the FTC likely violated the organizations' First Amendment rights and engaged in unlawful retaliation against them for their protected speech supporting gender-affirming care. Boasberg further found that the Trump administration and the FTC had pursued the organizations based on "extensive evidence of animus" and "wafer-thin justifications" for their demands. For now, the private communications, internal deliberations, and member information of these two organizations are protected from the Trump administration's escalating campaign of government censorship and retaliation against the medical institutions that support transgender people.

"On this preliminary record, with extensive evidence of animus and wafer-thin justifications lacking evidentiary support, [the Court] finds that WPATH is likely to demonstrate a causal link between its protected speech and the FTC's issuance of the CID,” said the judge in the WPATH ruling. In the parallel Endocrine Society ruling issued the same day, the judge went likewise found similar violations: "The Court finds the same systemic targeting of proponents of medical treatment for gender incongruence at work here. The Society is the latest casualty in some Executive Branch agencies' bid to investigate hospitals, medical providers, and charitable organizations that support transgender health. The CID's focus on academic and medical speech, combined with the FTC's paucity of logic or evidence pointing to a genuine investigation, confirms the conclusion that the CID was likely issued for a retaliatory purpose."

The cases center on Civil Investigative Demands—administrative subpoenas the FTC issued to both organizations in January 2026, demanding sweeping and unprecedented access to their internal operations. The FTC ordered the organizations to turn over decades of internal communications about their clinical guidelines on gender dysphoria, every educational and advocacy material, every financial record, and the names of every member who had ever helped develop claims about gender-affirming care—potentially thousands of people. The CID to WPATH alarmingly reached back to 1979, the year WPATH was founded. The CIDs are part of a sprawling Trump administration campaign to suppress speech about transgender people and crush the institutions that provide it: the Kennedy Declaration, which drove more than 40 hospital systems to shutter their trans youth programs before a federal judge vacated it as unlawful last month; CMS proposed rules that would bar Medicare and Medicaid-receiving hospitals from providing such care entirely; and DOJ subpoenas to hospitals across the country, which federal judges have repeatedly quashed as "smokescreens" for retaliation. The FTC's CIDs were the latest weapon in that campaign.

The organizations challenged the demands in federal court. Last night, they won. Boasberg ruled that the CIDs were retaliation against WPATH and the Endocrine Society for their protected speech in support of gender-affirming care, and that the FTC's campaign against them was rooted in extensive animus. Among the evidence the judge cited to show extensive animus towards transgender people was: Trump's executive orders denouncing gender identity as "subversive" and "false ideology" and labeling gender-affirming care "mutilation"; FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson's pre-appointment memo pledging to "fight back against the trans agenda" and investigate "the doctors, therapists, hospitals, and others" providing such care; senior FTC staff publicly accusing medical associations of "malpractice" and calling journalists covering trans issues "partisan morons"; and the FTC's July 2025 workshop "The Dangers of 'Gender-Affirming Care' for Minors," at which speakers called gender dysphoria "science fiction" and "the foundational fraud" and described their work as a "battle of good versus evil." The judge also noted that one workshop participant—who explicitly recommended investigating medical associations to make them "start losing members" and "lose revenue streams"—was subsequently hired by the FTC.

The judge also ruled that the CIDs were designed to chill protected speech regardless of whether the FTC ever pursued formal enforcement. "The CID and the accompanying threat of future enforcement sit as a Sword of Damocles suspended over Plaintiff's head," Boasberg wrote. "To mix weaponry metaphors, the Society alleges that the FTC is using its investigative demands as a cudgel, 'inflict[ing] concrete and ongoing injuries that suppress speech,' regardless of any later enforcement action." The judge grounded that conclusion in a recent D.C. Circuit ruling, Media Matters for America v. FTC, in which the appellate court blocked another retaliatory FTC subpoena—that one targeting the progressive media watchdog group over its reporting on advertisements appearing next to white nationalist content on Elon Musk's Twitter platform. Citing that precedent, Boasberg wrote that Congress would never have intended to give an agency "license to run roughshod over a party's First Amendment rights." With that, he blocked the FTC from enforcing the subpoenas against WPATH and the Endocrine Society while the cases proceed.

"WPATH welcomes the Court's decision to grant our request for a preliminary injunction against this unlawful and retaliatory investigative demand by the FTC. We are hopeful that this preliminary injunction will prevent further harm to the First Amendment rights of WPATH and its members. For more than 50 years, WPATH has been committed to developing guidelines informed by established scientific standards, expert consensus, and patient-centered values. WPATH's dedication to this mission and the patient population it serves remains unwavering," WPATH said in a emailed statement Thursday evening.

"The D.C. District Court ruling is an important victory that recognizes medical guidelines are a valued resource that allow doctors to support patients in making decisions about their care. This ruling sends a powerful message that government efforts to pressure the medical and scientific community to abandon evidence-based practices are not permissible. In addition to affirming the Endocrine Society's First Amendment right to speak freely on matters of public health, the court recognized the chilling effect the government's actions have on the Society's work and the harm to public interest. This decision is a helpful step in ensuring the Endocrine Society can continue to advance endocrine health and patient well-being by providing clinicians with medically sound, evidence-based information," the Endocrine Society said in its own statement to the Advocate.

A third parallel case—brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which received its own CID from the FTC on the same day as WPATH—remains pending before Judge Christopher R. Cooper, another Obama-nominated judge on the same D.C. District Court.

You can find the WPATH and Endocrine Society rulings here:

Endocrine Society Memorandum Opinion

308KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Wpath Memorandum Opinion

199KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

**From Erin In The Morning via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/46731818

I started this as a review of the book "It came from Something Awful" by Dale Beran, as part of my quest to understand online harassment in the context of Gamergate and the rise of alt-right. It turns out this topic overlaps with other points of interest right now, for instance the age-verification moral panic, and the TERF talking points of J.K. Rowling. This lead me to the question, what is this term "identity" we use so broadly, in such politically volatile phrases like "gender identity" and "identity politics".

The book describes the trajectory from 4chan to the first Trump administration. The author was also the executive consultant for the documentary "The antisocial network". Reading the book I was initially more interested in the early days of 4chan, rather than Beran's exercises with interpretations based on Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt. I admit I skipped pages and pages of those, because I was bored to death, and his cursory semantic simplifications painfully sucked my mind void.

However on the second part I started disliking his work more and more. At some point he introduces the idea that Tumblr was 4chan's "evil sister". Beran although he is validating transgender people's identities seems to be squarely right wing and he discreetly shows his allegiance to the alt-right. So perhaps his simplistic semantics on consumerism and identity were not simply innocent exercises in critical theory, but could have the potential of being weaponized. If not the author himself then others certainly have done so. The modern fascist narrative has it that young people spend an excessive amount of time online, in echo-chambers that make them think they are cats and dogs, or "another gender than they really are", and there is an "epidemic" and a "social contagion", by the same people who don't believe neither in "germs" nor "such a thing as a society".

And it all boils down to that multifaceted word "Identity". It can be as specific as a government issue identifying document, or as vague as the contents of a troubled teen's diary (or online musing for that matter). As passing as a pop culture fad, or as stable a glorified national identity. Yet very few people have seriously tried to even define what it is.

Why does the right avoid the definition of identity?

The basis of the 4chan-Tumblr comparison was all about identity: the genetic pariah identity on one side, the one who has accepted and endorsed the narratives of masculine identity as a law of nature; on the other, the silly women who have endorsed what corporate marketing department had brainswashed them into: embracing different identities, exploring different identitites, wear and then toss different identities as decorative tags.

But what is identity? Is it a T-shirt with punk-band logo that we can one day just forget and put on the corporate uniform of "business casual"? A set of descriptive labels one ascribes to oneself? Or is it a deep sense of self-hood?

The right has investments in their own identities too. What about the masculine identity, often willing to kill if it is threatened, or national identity, that is ready to commit atrocities for matters of pride? Let's stay with national identity for a second. It requires nationalist schooling and a police state to inculcate. Enforcing a different national identity on anyone is broadly understood an act of cruel oppression. But the right is bound to eliminate everything "psychological", thus it needs to reduce national identity to a spontaneous expression of one's genes. This requires romantic narratives that reinforce the illusion of genetic continuity, and well defined racial groups as natural kinds. In the current climate of the anti-transgender moral panic we tend to forget that one of the greatest grievances of the right has been the abandonment of racial theories by anthropologists and historians alike. And in order to get back to their patriotic narratives they have no choice but to undo all science.

From debunked race science to MAGA political strategy

Debunked race science was quite popular on 4chan a decade ago, and now it is part of the fascist US Government's agenda. Beran hardly mentions the racism involved in the phenomena he discusses (for good measure, compare with the book "The Cruelty is the Point" by Adam Serwer, which makes the case that racism is the best explanation of the rise of Trump, and it is also written around Trump's first term). What is now hot in 4chan? Last week's special in '/sci/' was whether phrenology and physiognomy were "fine" sciences that were tossed away due to "political correctness". Many comments agree. This is typical. Psychology and psychiatry are painted as the greatest hoaxes and enemies, resounding the Nazi notions of "Jewish disciplines". Many people thought this to be unremarkable, sharing themselves the debunked premises of naive empiricism, until they were shattered too by the anti-science Trump administration, regardless of their status as disciplines of astrophysics, meteorology, climate change science, etc.

But it is also funny to read this book, which was written to explain Trump's first presidency, under the light of the recent revelations about 4chan's /pol/ origin and function. There is now evidence that Steve Bannon as a right wing strategist saw the potential of mass manipulation and contacted Jeffrey Epstein to introduce him to Christopher Poole. Poole very soon after that conceded to allow '/pol/', the neo-nazi, racist-science board that is now said that paved the way to the second term of Donald Trump. In fact some say that he was re-elected by the generation who were at one time the troubled, sexless teens finding their identity on 4chan. The author accounts for Steve Bannon's sponsoring of Milo Yiannopoulos as an early alt-right agitator, but he is unaware of how well connected Bannon was, and what was in fact generating the phenomena he describes.

Fascist strategists who want to manipulate teens into being recruited as their stormtroopers don't want them to read psychology. They don't want them to even think about identity exploration. They want them to think about a great past that was clean-cut and uncomplicated. They instill fear for the novel and the unknown. They cultivate the worship of a leading personality (The_Donald) as an expression of their own self. The author attributes the endorsement of Trump by the nihilistic youth on 4chan to his promise of "winning", that resonated well with those convinced they are losers. Heck, you don't want any of these sheeple going to fucking therapy, do you? (Some analysis suggests that No Nut November was also a fascist psy-op. Good authoritarians know that it is important to control sex in order to manipulate people.)

We should not forget we are talking about teens here. The author describles 4chan and Tumblr as opposites in the following way: The former, a counterculture suspicious of the assimilation of every other counterculture by corporate marketing departments. So suspicious that it denied all values (1990s nihilism leading to the aughts "layers of irony"). The latter (Tumblr goes to college), privileged customer on route for the next reshuffle of the middle class, Karening the fuck out of their universities to cater to their self-serving values, just like customers asking for fancy tops on their expensive fair-trade coffee, rejecting the expensive commodity if it is not exactly to their liking.

Theories of Identity

There is no real treatment of the notion of identity, and it is no accident that there is a fair amount of psychological theory on identity. For instance older theories have it that (self) identity crisis is a developmental stage, emerging in adolescence, and resolution of said crisis can take different forms: among which foreclosure - endorsing a given identity; moratorium - extended exploration of identities and difficulty committing to one; and other states of identity, but I cite as most relevant the ones the author implies by his descripton of 4chan versus Tumblr. So, for example, Lily Alexandre recently revisited her 2021 video about the "millions of dead genders" of Tumblr. The extended vocabulary of genders is a matter of what fits best, and what grows on each person. (For instance "trans girl" has no real semantic difference from "transgender woman", it is just preferred by some people and not by others, as a self-descriptor). We have also seen the understanding of identity as a "set of self-descriptor labels" in another essay: The one on Hans Georg Moeller, who also hinted to the same problematic notion of "social contagion due to being extremely online" and over-obsessing with labels. As Alexandre points out, being trans and/or gay, and/or autistic, comes with doubt, denial, and other coping mechanisms, and young people coming to terms with their body and their gender might have given rise to this extended vocabulary. And that's OK. We need those safe spaces for people to figure themselves out.

The case for assertively protective third places

Gender diverse youth (but also youth in the spectrum, youth going through trauma and mental health issues, youth in high risk homes, and others) can go through exploration, and internet communities will provide a safe space for exploration, for which there is a healthy amount and a less healthy amount. Support networks both on- and off- line are critical determinants of what this amount is. Discussing Tumblr, the author makes the void argument that the "radical acceptance of all identities" is as bad as 4chan's toxicity.

Radical acceptance is a prerequisite for both safety and growth. And his argument, typically a last resort of teacher's pets in philosophy lectures, takes the form of the self-referential paradox: "Boohoohoo. They don't accept those who are not radically accepting every identity". Some journalist wrote a couple years ago stated that GenZ is the most accepting of LGBT. "But they are intolerant of those who are not as acccepting, and this is a paradox they are unwilling to acknowledge. Curious. We are very intelligent". Well, all these people missed a critical lesson in logic: self-referential propositions are prohibited (Russel & Whitehead). And a lesson in history: If you let the intolerant in, you will have a nazi bar (Karl Popper, paraphrased by me).

You see the results: radical acceptance leads to places like Blahaj. Safe no matter what. If you want to be safe you can go there. Live and let live, or get the fuck out. 4chan, on the other hand, chased out furries and other weird subcultures, ostracized Anonymous as too leftist, to end up being manipulated into being a literal nazi bar celebrating the suicides of trans people. And serving as a breeding ground for the global rise of fascism. Yet the author presents perceived safety as a matter of "feelings", devoid of the scientific "reason" that is needed in academic departments. "This is unsafe because we say we feel unsafe", he says.

Milo Yiannopoulos and the manufactured free speech crisis in academia

The author is somewhat lenient to the academic educators, but he thinks should use their authority to reprimand the rowdy students. Their hesitation, Beran says, is understandable because they regularly debate fine points and often have to shift their previously held beliefs under the light of new arguments and/or evidence. However this isn't by accident. Rather it is the exact series of paradigm shifts that have cause academia to "have a liberal bias". This is the very process fascists want to undo, and the real reason they are not simply anti-democracy but inherently anti-science. It goes back to first principles. Nevertheless not all cognitive shifts are created equal, but as soon as they happen in the realm of the social or the psychological, the fascist crowd will find a strong advocate in these very same departments: the privileged, male-dominated, and aggressively gatekeeped "hard" sciences, echoing the sexist "reason/feelings" antithesis.

Many forget that before the manufactured "free speech crisis" around Yiannopoulos or TERFs at campuses, we had agitators like UCSB's Tooby and Cosmides and neoliberal talking head Daniel Dennet fighting "Science Wars", way before "Culture Wars", brandishing a hardcore flavor of rape-enabling genetic determinism and social darwinism, targeting social studies and humanities, and attacking population genetics for challenging the notion of race. As early as the Reagan era, the right has been targeting universities, considered as breeding grounds for Democratic voters, legislators and judges, in their strive to achieve total deregulation and corporate unaccountability.

Your critique of identity politics can be either radical or just concern trolling

But the author takes a "vantage centrist" position. Let's forget all this relevant background. Let's not go deep into what cognitive shifts in science are. Let's not go too deep into all this. Let's stay on online youth subcultures, 4chan and Tumblr. It was the latter, according to him, that "went to college". But he poses as a serious journalist, who has outgrown 4chan, and had a brief passage through Tumblr, before getting himself a college education. He distances himself from the toxic cesspool. He uses extravagant and outlandish specimen of college identity politics as straw-men ("are babies dressed up as Mulan racist?"), saying that there are serious problems of social injustice that are neglected. "Identity politics" is painted as simply performative despite the fact that he is literally writing about the Black Lives Matter era, and the discussion around systemic injustice was everywhere. Most notably it was the subject of critical race theory, a future target of another right wing moral panic, which served as a preliminary stage of Trump's second term.

On that account, he is not different from this pick me girl, who says to her primarily young white male audience: "Anyone remembers cultural appropriation? What was that about? No one talks about it now" and "you put the real issues under the table" by whitewashing your speech. And they are right to an extent: Identity politics is not even left-wing, and it is whitewashing inequality. Media representation and vocabulary can only go so far.

But people like these make a misleading argument that can appeal to feelings of social injustice in anyone: There are real problems and we are just covering them up. Then are you folks ...radicals? You want to tackle on systemic racism and sexism on the institutional level, and you think political correctness is hypocrisy? So are you organizing a general strike? Are you following the leadership of black trans women in organizing said general strike? (No, you think these are just made-up labels, save the racial supremacy).

What do you do about those "Real issues" then? Are you urban guerillas? Probably just whining about political correctness ruining comedy, appropriating the term free-speech to justify bullying and other oppressive speech and non-speech acts.

This concern trolling by the alt-right is a very insidious stance to take, and one I could never see without the weight carried by the dismissive and expansive use of the term "political correctness" that you can now find everywhere. In the end of the day, these tirades conclude that the "problems", never named as systemic racism and sexism are to big or too embedded to tackle with. It is like they're saying "At best we should go-slow about them, for the time being do-nothing, not even using verbal assurances that we acknowledge these disparities are really there. This makes us free thinkers."

Wait. Where do these methods come from?

There are some serious questions on demographics here. Are all our problems really down to a couple million NEETs? Then there are the methodological issues. This idea of identity crisis as a manifestation of capitalist consumerism flows around in sociology. The argument goes, in the medieval times you had less identity crisis, then you have post-WW2 fears of nuclear annihilation, and many more roles you can choose from due to the technology advancements. Then you also have counterculture and you can choose an identity that is utterly adversarial to the mainstream society you grow up in, although there is a lot of interest in these fields to show that after all the home culture is inescapable and all foreign or opposing elements are assimilated by it.

These methods claim they focus on the systemic instead of reducing macro phenomena to the individual. But what they really do is analyzing the society as if it was an individual in-therapy, or taking an idealized individual and interpreting its meaning-making, or even taking oneself as the specimen, a product of their own culture, and presenting their own meaning making as a general one. I am not trained in sociology, but these are the options I have seen in practice in similar studies.

As far as his academic endeavor is concerned, I think his treatment of counterculture is incomplete unless he outlines the definition and characteristics of "identity". Caelan Conrad dissects a segment in Rowling's manifesto that leads many people to claim that she is a trans man in denial, and gay shows that the excerpt in question is masterfully crafted to frame the very definition of being trans as a manifestation of teenage angst, and therefore forming a circular argument. Rowling's obvious sleight of hand is that it leaves out gender identity and gender dysphoria, therefore comparing apples and oranges: trans teenagers are not anxious cis teenagers. A hint at trans men being women trying to escape patriarchy and taking the bait of "transgenderism". Central in Rowlings argument, and by extension all transphobes, and it is a denial of identity, a denial that trans people exist, and this has several vile consequences in itself: that trans people should be eliminated and those pushing the idea of gender identity are enemies of the state. Scary stuff!

Conrad points out that if identity is something deeply engendered with the self, and it is very important to correctly develop and protect, or it is a superficial optics and style endeavor that you can turn on and off. If identity is profound and permanent, no cis person can ever be tricked into being trans. The infamous Money experiments, often weaponized by the right, can in fact be read as evidence of the permanence and inevitability of some innate gender identity. And vice versa. If identity is not permanent and escape-able, then cherished religious and national identities can also be trivial and temporary. This is an endgame for the whole philosophical outlook of right-wingers. But there is a timing parameter to it as well. Young adolescents will explore their identities and gender diverse or gay and queer youth will exist, and if they don't have safe third places for it you will just have a medieval and/or fascist society.

What does this mean for self identity

Identity exploration by gender diverse young people has lead to a new moral panic that is bleeding through to legislation for age verification and mass censorship. As they did with the bathroom moral panic, advocates dismiss this panic with the (correct but understated) fact that exploration does not make kids queer, it just provides more broad and appropriate vocabulary to get know oneself. Yes, but this goes over the heads of the legislators and PTAs. There is a moral panic that will lead to censorship of places like the Fediverse, criminalization or de facto elimination of safe spaces. We now see the first steps of using the detransitioner playbook for autistic people, targeting another demographic whose lives are supported by these spaces.

Foreclosure, the fascist brand of approved adolescence identity, is going to be force-fed to us, as a route to the romanticized 1950s. There is an army of Brownshirts out there called ICE, and soon diverse identity and expression of any kind will be targeted, shoving all normalized people into non-pseudonymous, corporate platforms where each and everyone of their beliefs and attitudes will be algorithmically surveyed and manipulated. This is why it is important to scrutinize and read between the lines of similar white male authors pushing the ideas supporting and refining the premises of right-wing media circuses and moral panics, by diluting nuances and popularizing strawmen.

Their work is silently influencing a number of oblivious centrists and inoculates them to more nuanced analyses provided by activists and advocate organizations, thus establishing a silent majority that will stand on the fence in such critical legislations as trans youth health care and age-verification. Behind the petite-burgeois annoyance of multiple gender labels on niche social platforms, there is a similar reactance to multiple music genre labels. "This is too much information for me, I miss the simpler times when there was only rock, pop, disco, and jazz". The only difference being, if you apply your simplistic attitude to identity normalization you have a rotten, prescriptive society that crushes people for being different. Which is what the MAGA right wants.

Opinion: In an increasingly hostile world, New York City subway nights become a space where trans women of color keep each other in view and safe.

cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/australia/p/827602/australian-psychological-society-supporting-the-mental-health-and-wellbeing-of-transgender-a