[ The coordinated attack on trans rights in state legislatures
across the US is built on a foundation of hateful paranoia and
right-wing lies. But however unpopular anti-trans bills are, the human
costs are real: thousands are migrating from anti-tran]
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ANTI-TRANS BILLS ARE SWEEPING THE US DESPITE, NOT BECAUSE OF, PUBLIC
OPINION  
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Interview with Erin Reed by Doug Henwood
August 23, 2023
Jacobin
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_ The coordinated attack on trans rights in state legislatures across
the US is built on a foundation of hateful paranoia and right-wing
lies. But however unpopular anti-trans bills are, the human costs are
real: thousands are migrating from anti-tran _

LGBTQ activists protest outside U.S. Supreme Court., Photo by
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

 

Over the last year, some 540 anti-trans bills have been introduced in
states across the country — a stunning roster of hate.

Doug Henwood [[link removed]] recently
interviewed Erin Reed, a trans activist and journalist who runs the
Substack _Erin In The Morning_ [[link removed]],
on Jacobin Radio show _Behind the News_. They spoke about the
coordinated barrage of legislation, the migration it’s spurring, the
parade of lies spread by the Right about trans people, and reasons for
optimism on trans rights. You can listen to their conversation here
[[link removed]].

DOUG HENWOOD

You have a map of anti-trans legislation comparing December 2022
versus June 2023. It looks like there’s a hardening of the
differences between states — things are getting even more cleaved.

ERIN REED

That is a very good point to make, because so much of the analysis of
this anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ legislative push has focused on the
badness of the laws. And that’s important — these laws are
horrific in many states.

Map of state-by-state anti-trans legislation risk. (Erin In The
Morning)

But it’s also important to recognize that it’s not a uniform
movement. At least fourteen states have passed laws
that _protect_ people on the basis of gender identity, that offer
sanctuary from states that criminalize their care.

So, it is a hardening. We see half of the country moving in the
positive direction, and half of the country banning care and banning
people from bathrooms.

 

DOUG HENWOOD

I did some calculations based on your classifications. The worst
anti-trans states have a poverty rate almost two points higher than
the rest, and a life expectancy almost two years shorter. There’s a
high overlap with the ex-Confederate states, it seems, and states that
are both anti-trans and ex-Confederate have even worse numbers along
those lines. The ones you list as the safest have a considerably lower
poverty rate and a longer life expectancy. So there’s an interesting
contrast in the social indicators of these two sets of states.

ERIN REED

It is. I would also add that this is both a positive and a negative.
These states do protect the rights of people. They have public health
programs, they tend to have higher-end school systems, etc.

But a lot of the protective states are not super affordable to live
in. And so you have this situation where many of the states that are
criminalizing care have people who cannot move from those states
because they don’t have the resources to get up and leave.

I have also spoken to people that have left places like Tennessee and
Alabama who are now living out of vans in Massachusetts, for instance.
Passing laws that protect transgender people who are fleeing
persecution in the criminalizing states is a necessary and important
first step. But we also need to ensure that we are ready to take care
of the people who are leaving their home state.

DOUG HENWOOD

Do we have any sense of how much of that migration is going on? I’ve
seen reports of people leaving Florida, but how representative is
that?

ERIN REED

I’ve done a lot of research on this topic myself. The Associated
Press just released a story
[[link removed]] about
how there are massive wait lists in many of the states that protect
care and that safeguard people whenever they’re traveling over state
borders. We are already seeing hospital wait lists balloon for
gender-affirming care in protective states.

There was a recent study
[[link removed]] by
Data for Progress that shows that 8 percent of all transgender people
have already moved from their home state, with an additional 40
percent of transgender people considering it. Eight percent may not
seem like a large number, but in raw numbers, there are about 1.5
million to 3 million trans people in the United States according to
various estimates, and so that amounts to 130 to 260,000 transgender
people who have already fled from their home states.

DOUG HENWOOD

When did this anti-trans ball get rolling? What is the history of the
politics of this?

ERIN REED

Before I talk about the specifics of this particular moment, I want to
stress that the United States has a history of persecuting the LGBTQ
community every couple decades — from the drag bans of the 1950s
and ’60s
[[link removed]],
which gave us Stonewall; to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s; to the
ex-gay movement and the constitutional marriage amendments in the
2000s. And now twenty years later, they’re calling LGBTQ people
groomers and banning transgender care.

We saw in 2015 the gay marriage ban go down with
the _Obergefell_ decision, and they needed a new target within the
LGTQ community. Transgender people were ripe for the picking, and so
they ended up passing a law in North Carolina 2016: the bathroom ban.
This is what I look to as the seed of where we are today.

So the bathroom ban got passed in North Carolina. It barred
transgender people from bathrooms, and it resulted in an enormous
backlash. The NBA All-Star game pulled out, PayPal pulled out,
Deutsche Bank pulled out — it set back the anti-trans movement by
four years because no state wanted to pass these laws. But they licked
their wounds and moved on, and in 2020 we got the new wave: the sports
bans, the gender-affirming care bans, the birth certificate bans.

There are really good articles about this in the _New York Times_
[[link removed]] and CNN
[[link removed]] where
they interview people like Terry Schilling at the American Principles
Project, one of the organizations behind these anti-trans laws. They
speak very frankly about how they had to focus on sports because that
was an issue where they could get their foot in the door, and how they
focused on making these laws hit several states at the same time, so
they could avoid the fate of the North Carolina bathroom ban, which
had the enormous backlash.

DOUG HENWOOD

It does seem like a lot of this stuff is coordinated.

 

ERIN REED

Absolutely. The Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation,
and the American Principles Project are just three of the many names
that have come up in these conversations. There’s a heavy religious
motivation behind these laws done by groups like the Alliance
Defending Freedom, which wants to usher in a new age of Christian law
in America.

You can also tell that these laws are coordinated, because you see
several laws drop in several states at the same time, and they have
identical language. You can see how after certain court challenges
happen, they add a new provision to the law designed to make it harder
to challenge in court.

DOUG HENWOOD

How would you characterize the state of public opinion now? It seems
that the broad public isn’t necessarily on board with the full
agenda of the trans haters — many people seem to have a live and let
live attitude (which is not to minimize the threat of the haters). But
what would you say about the general drift of public opinion at this
point?

ERIN REED

There are various ways to frame the question: Are you in favor of
gender-affirming care for transgender youth? Are you in favor of
criminalizing gender-affirming care? Do you support trans people in
sports? Do you support laws protecting trans people from
discrimination? And I’ll be frank, the polls are all over the place,
depending on the wording.

What is constant is that whenever you ask people what the most
important issues are, or do you think your legislators should spend
time legislating on this stuff, transgender issues always end up at
the bottom. On top of that, people do generally support
nondiscrimination protections for transgender people, and they tend to
oppose criminalizing gender-affirming care for transgender youth and
adults.

But the biggest thing I want to highlight is that there’s a lot of
uncertainty in the polling because people don’t know much about
transgender care. A lot of people haven’t had to live the life of a
parent with a trans kid or as a transgender person themselves. So I
think most people understand their own limitations of understanding on
this. And they understand that it’s important to let these decisions
be undertaken by the doctors, the patients, and, in the cases of kids,
the family.

DOUG HENWOOD

There’s a line of argument that we just don’t know enough about
the effects of trans care on youth, and we need to be careful. What do
you say to that?

ERIN REED

We have decades of medical evidence around care. The very first trans
kid we have evidence of was back in the 1890s (and of course, trans
people go back much further). In the current era, we see, for
instance, research showing that puberty blockers lower the suicide
rate for transgender youth by up to 73 percent. These are real lives
saved. It lowers the depression and anxiety rate by 60 to 70 percent.
These are enormously helpful for the transgender youth who need them.

I want to make clear that I don’t disagree with being careful around
care. Being careful is extremely important. I think that allowing this
care to be individualized and personalized for every patient, rather
than having a blunt hammer approach, where care is outright banned, is
in the best interest of the kid and their medical care.

DOUG HENWOOD

The Right is keeping [“detransitioner” activist] Chloe Cole very
busy, but how common is detransitioning? How much regret do grown-ups
have over these procedures?

 

ERIN REED

There’s a lot of research on this as well. There was a recently
study that showed for gender-affirming top surgery — chest
masculinization surgery — the regret rate was almost nothing. I know
that gender-affirming care has seen regret rates of 1 to 3 percent,
and there have been studies on detransitioning that show that
detransition rates tend to be between 1 to 5 percent.

Detransitioner and anti-trans activist Chloe Cole speaks in favor of
Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Protect Children’s
Innocence Act, September 20, 2022. (Staff of US Representative
Marjorie Taylor Greene / Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s the important point: Whenever you see a detransitioner like
Chloe Cole testify against gender-affirming care, it’s very similar
to the ex-gays of the early 2000s, where they would say that being gay
was a choice and that they made the wrong choice and you should ban
gay marriage because of that. The reality is, of that 1 to 3 percent
of people that detransition, only 5 percent of those people do so
because they no longer identify as trans. Most of those people who
detransition do so because their families don’t support them
anymore, because they’re getting fired from their jobs, because they
can’t afford their hormones, because they can’t afford their
surgery, because they cannot obtain the care.

I know many people who have detransitioned, and they would never
advocate against care. They want the care for themselves, but they
can’t get it because society’s too harsh on them right now.
You’re going to see a lot of people detransition in Florida in the
coming months, and that’s not going to be because they no longer
identify as trans. It’s because Florida bans medical treatment for
adults in most circumstances right now.

DOUG HENWOOD

Florida really is the most extreme of the states at this point.

ERIN REED

Yeah, at this point Florida is absolutely the most extreme. It’s
dangerous for LGBTQ people, especially trans people. About ninety-four
thousand transgender people live in Florida, and about 80 percent of
those people cannot obtain their hormones, and they have not been able
to obtain their hormones for the last three months. That’s because
of a law that essentially bars nurse practitioners from providing
care. On top of that, it requires these informed consent, medical
misinformation forms that are still being developed.

They’re also targeting trans people in bathrooms in Florida. For
instance, if I went to Florida right now, and I were to use the
bathroom that I’ve been using for the last five years that I feel
the most comfortable in, I could be arrested and put in jail for a
year.

DOUG HENWOOD

Yeah, that’s just absolutely appalling. Now, there’s a Swedish
study the anti-trans lobby likes to cite — what’s the story on
that?

ERIN REED

You’ll often hear in congressional testimony that the only study on
trans people that is high-quality is a Swedish study that says
transitioning increases suicide rates. The truth of the matter is that
the study, which came out in 2011
[[link removed]], looked at
trans people and what happened after transitioning from 1973 to 2003.
So this was a historical retrospective. It found that trans people
post-transition had a nineteen-times higher suicide rate than the
general population.

However, and the author stresses this, and it’s very important to
note, it was not comparing transgender people who can get care to ones
who can’t get care. It’s comparing them to cisgender people, who
don’t have all the violence, all the health care discrepancies that
trans people have in that time period. The reality is that in that
time, from 1973 to 2003, the vast majority of these trans people were
suffering. They were getting HIV and AIDS in the 1980s, they were
homeless, and prior to 2003, it was almost impossible to medically
transition. You had to spend about $12 to $20,000 just in therapy
visits before they would give you your first hormones.

And so in most of these cases, these people could not transition, and
therefore the rates were rather high for this population. Modern
studies, of which we have about fifty at this point, show that
gender-affirming care reduces suicidality by about 73 percent.

DOUG HENWOOD

I can understand in some sense the anti-trans people who are coming at
it from a religious point of view. They think you’re crossing
God’s law. But what about TERFS [Trans-Exclusionary Radical
Feminists]? It’s not a giant constituency, but how do you understand
what drives them to this point of hatred?

ERIN REED

It’s primarily an export out of the UK. It does not have a lot of
roots in American history. In the United States, a lot of the
opposition to feminism has been from a religious perspective, and so I
think that in the United States the anti-abortion movement is so
closely tied with the anti-trans movement — indeed, the very same
people are pushing both — that I feminists in the United States
clearly see those tie-ins. They see that the threat posed to one group
poses a threat to the other group.

In the United Kingdom, that religious antiabortion movement did not
develop in the way it did in the United States, though those tie-ins
are starting to develop. We’re seeing in the UK more pushes to ban
abortion, and we’re seeing those pushes come from anti-trans forces.
And I think people are realizing that the trans-exclusionary movement
in the UK is not congruent with the goals of feminism at large.

DOUG HENWOOD

Attitudes toward gay people softened as more straight people got to
know more gay people — their cousins, their kids. Do you foresee
something similar happening with attitudes toward trans people?

 

ERIN REED

Absolutely. In many cases these laws being pushed are contrary to
public opinion, especially among Gen Z and among millennials. These
two cohorts poll extremely high on LGBTQ acceptance and transgender
acceptance.

The majority of Gen Z and millennials know somebody personally —
they’re either friends or family with somebody who is transgender.
That’s not the case for some of the older cohorts, and I think that
will change over time as more of us come out.

I think that this radical push, using laws to target us, is a reaction
to that change. They are a reaction to the fact that trans people are
coming out in large numbers right now and that we are starting to see
increased acceptance.

_Erin Reed runs the Substack Erin In The Morning._

_Doug Henwood edits Left Business Observer and is the host
of Behind the News. His latest book is My Turn
[[link removed]]._

* Transgender Rights
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* government repression
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