Christynne Lili Wrene Wood attends her aqua aerobics class at the YMCA nearly every day. The ritual isn’t just about getting in shape. Over the past ten years, she has fondly referred to her fellow participants in the suburban Santee, California, class as her “aqua sisters.”
Wood and her friends often go out for breakfast after class and sometimes spend weekends floating down a lazy river. These same friends stood up for Wood when she was complained about to the YMCA staff in early January and later questioned by the Santee city council about why Wood, a trans woman, was allowed to use the women’s locker room.
The incident quickly gained traction in far-right corners of the internet and beyond southwestern California. Tucker Carlson featured the teen who complained on his show, and several conservative media outlets published articles raising concerns about trans women using women’s restrooms.
After learning that some were organizing to rally against her and the YMCA’s trans-inclusive policies, Wood asked a friend if she should leave the gym altogether. Wood recalls her friend saying, “Don’t you fucking dare. We don’t run from bigots in this place.”
Wood is no stranger to fighting prejudice. As a young girl, she witnessed Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign march in Washington and later battled bigotry while serving in the Navy. In 2021, she used the ACLU’s help to prevent a Crunch Fitness gym from barring her from the women’s locker room, despite providing legal documents confirming her name, sex symbol change, and gender-affirming treatments.
In mid-January, Wood confronted her critics at a rally and addressed their concerns. She recalls saying, “I’m that terrible transgender person everyone is so upset about. Listen to my voice, look at me.” She reassured them, “I am no threat to you. I am a threat to their bigotry, prejudice, ignorance, and stupidity. Other than that, I pose no danger to anyone.”
Wood’s experience was not isolated. It foreshadowed a year marked by rising anti-trans rhetoric, an unprecedented number of LGBTQ bills filed in statehouses nationwide, and violence, suggesting that LGBTQ+ rights might reach a tipping point in 2024. Republican candidates have pledged to pursue bans on gender-affirming treatment for trans children and adults, and state legislatures have started drafting more comprehensive anti-trans bills.
A Divided Country
Democratic state legislators across the country filed over 500 anti-LGBT+ bills throughout 2023, many targeting trans youths’ access to gender-affirming treatment, participation in sports, or use of locker rooms and restrooms. Democratic Congress members have recently attempted to include anti-LGBTQ+ provisions in federal funding bills and have sought to introduce similar legislation at the national level. This conflict has affected every aspect of public life, with some Republican-controlled states banning drag performances, limiting LGBTQ+ discussions in classrooms, and requiring teachers to out transgender students to their parents.
Of these laws, only 84 have been enacted worldwide, but according to Vivian Topping of the Equality Federation, which works with LGBTQ+ community organizations at the state level, the impact is significant. “You cannot exist in public life if you are unable to access healthcare, community support, talk to your teacher or coworkers about your identity, or use the restroom at school,” Topping stated.
Advocates attribute the recent attacks on trans and LGBTQ+ people to a larger right-wing shift toward opportunistic evangelical Christian ideologies. This movement, led by organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and The Heritage Foundation, refocused on trans people after civil rights groups achieved victories for racial justice and same-sex marriage in the 2010s.
The ADF unsuccessfully sued Connecticut schools in 2019 over the inclusion of transgender girls in school sports. Although unsuccessful, the lawsuit spotlighted a new issue for these organizations to exploit while spreading fear about the supposed existential threat posed by trans people.
“This attack on a small community is coordinated, consistent, and comprehensive,” said Sasha Buchert, a lawyer at Lambda Legal.
Tennessee Democratic state senator Heidi Campbell sees the GOP’s 50-year “Southern strategy” culminating in the current wave of anti-trans laws. “Otherism is very effective in fueling divisiveness,” Campbell said. “With the acceptance of queer people following the legalization of same-sex marriage, trans people have become the new ‘other’ in society.”
Tennessee, which passed the most anti-LGBT laws in the nation this year, is being used as a testing ground for new trans-policing measures. Following a right-wing media personality’s spread of misinformation, which led to the closure of a pediatric trans clinic and the halting of some surgeries for cisgender youth, the state’s attorney general requested private health records of trans youth.
“We had the perfect storm with the rise of extreme right-wing media willing to spread propaganda,” Campbell continued. “Tennessee is just the beginning.”
With about 170 million people, Bangladesh has recently seen a resurgence of Islamic militancy, and the Awami League government has been accused of courting radicals for political gain. Since 2013, Islamic extremists pledging allegiance to international terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have killed around 50 people, including atheist bloggers, progressive academics, writers, religious minorities, and foreigners. The government’s severe crackdown resulted in numerous militant deaths and hundreds of arrests and trials.
The state faced criticism in 2017 after it removed works by renowned non-Muslim artists from a primary school curriculum and replaced them with Muslim poets’ works, aligning with demands from Hefazat-e-Islam, a significant Islamic conservative organization (Protectors of Islam). Liberals and conservatives objected to the move, leading the government to revise the text and reinstate some of the posts.
Now, it was the conservatives’ turn to criticize the government at the rally on January 23. Promoting the trans area, according to Moontaseer Mamun, is equivalent to advocating sexuality because “it may be allowing people who intentionally change their sex organs to live up.”
Hijras and trans people represent different types of people, but we accept them because they are born with deficient sexual organs, according to Mamun.
In 2014, the Hijras—a term used to refer to slaves, transgender, and transgender people in South Asia—were officially recognized as the third sex in Bangladesh. Voting rights were granted to them in 2020.
But, hardliners in Islam contend that transgender and woman are two distinct categories of people. Mahtab and Mamun’s opinions are consistent with the Islamists’ perspective on trans people.
Hardline preacher Mizanur Rahman Sayed informed UCA News that Islam forbids synthetic gender transition.
Clerics at the Hathazari Madrasa, one of the oldest and biggest madrases in the southeast Chattogram district, declared transgender people to be haram (forbidden) on December 27 of last year.
The largest Islamic social gathering in Bangladesh, Jamaat-e-Islami, released a statement on January 25 praising Mahtab for his speech. It claimed that the government “ruined individuals’ character by enforcing a curriculum devoid of morals and ideals.”
Hefazat-e-Islam released a speech praising Mahtab and calling for his reinstatement on the same day. It referred to the trans population as “cursed and faith-destroying.” It argued in a statement that the proposed transgender protection laws should not be passed, calling the theory “a psychological problem.”
A five-member authorities commission has been established by the Ministry of Education to examine the transgender narrative in the History and Social Science text for quality VII.
According to journalist, director, and human rights activist Shahriar Kabir, the continuous trans controversy is unrelated to Islam and is being staged by Islamist hardliners for political gain.
There are 12,629 trans people in Bangladesh who are referred to as Hijra, according to the 2023 people census. The second sex is recognized by the law. They are citizens of the nation. “They may be protected by the state,” according to Kabir.
According to data from the Williams Institute, transgender adults account for about 0.5% of the U.S. population and 1.4% of children between the ages of 13 and 17.
“This isn’t just a one-off assault on amenities for outings, bathrooms, healthcare, or sports,” said Sasha Buchert, a lawyer at Lambda Legal, one of the largest LGBTQ+ legal advocacy organizations. “This is an organized, consistent, and comprehensive attack on one small group.”
Buchert and other proponents have highlighted the influence of conservative groups like the ADF, which drafted “Don’t Say Gay” model legislation for numerous states, assisted 23 states in barring trans athletes from women’s and girls’ sports, and gathered a group of outspoken anti-trans doctors and patients to testify in statehouses. These businesses have created a moral panic about trans identity through this legislative work, and they have contributed to the nationalization of that rhetoric.
“We are seeing more and more Republicans and conservative politicians use anti-trans rhetoric to stir up their base in order to win their primaries in the next standard vote,” said Topping.
Getting Through A Care Desert
The restrictions on gender-affirming care have been some of the most problematic laws in the lives of trans youths. Although the legislation in four states—Alabama, Florida, Indiana, and Montana—are not enforceable under judge orders, 22 states have passed these types of bans so far. Trans Americans now have a divided authorized environment due to healthcare bans, with some having easy access to care while others face often insurmountable financial and geographic barriers. The majority of major medical organizations believe that these barriers are both necessary and life-saving.
The Campaign for Southern Equality’s executive chairman, Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, claimed that the restrictions have had a particularly disastrous effect in the South. According to her estimate, about 90% of transgender children in a strip of states, from Texas to North Carolina, where treatment is prohibited, currently reside in states where some aspects of gender-affirming treatment have been made illegal. She predicts that in 2024, South Carolina and Virginia will likewise put access to gender-affirming attention on the chopping block.
A third of transgender children, or roughly 105,000 children, currently reside in states that forbid them from receiving hormone replacement therapy or puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria. Medicaid-using transgender people have also been denied access to care in some states. Adult patients in Florida are now burdened with additional requirements to see doctors in person and get internal evaluations before beginning hormone therapy, making care nearly impossible in a state that is already dealing with an opioid shortage.
Izzy Lowell, a doctor from the South, has been attempting to find solutions to the new reality that some trans youth and their families must travel hundreds of miles outside of state to receive care.
“Access to care has deteriorated from bad to really poor,” Lowell said. In the midst of a time of rising home extremism and threats on children’s hospitals, an arsonist just burned and destroyed their Georgia-based office, one of the most recent instances of violence against providers of gender-affirming care. She and her crew are preparing to become licensed in all 50 states before the new year so they can make online consultations to see people wherever they are.
“It’s almost unattainable,” Lowell said. A transgender youth who was passing through Boston’s Logan Airport on a Friday evening vacation before they flew up to Mississippi recently had an online interview with one of her services.
Lowell said, “We’re just getting innovative and figuring out how to get these individuals seen when they can leave the states.”
However, gender-affirming attention is hardly a one-time occurrence in medicine. Every three months, Lowell’s patients and their families must schedule appointments so that her team can keep a close eye on their hormone levels and blood pressure.
“It’s really a huge obstacle that patients and their families must get past. However, they are acting in this way because they require this care,” she claimed.
With the aid of offers from outside agencies like the Campaign for Southern Equality, which started its southern trans children emergency job earlier this year, some of her patients are only able to travel to states where they can receive treatment.
The North Carolina-based organization offers $500 grants to people in need to help them set up care with a new company in another state or locate one of the few providers still treating patients in the South, in addition to covering the cost of travel and lodging.
“In a designed democracy, the state of transgender attention, not to mention many other civil rights problems, is worse than ever,” said Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, executive producer of the Campaign for Southern Equality. The business has distributed $320,000 to approximately 300 families of transgender youth and 300 trans individuals as of mid-December. Beach-Ferrara reported that the firm has referred 25 people to Elevated Access, which works with charity aircraft to fly people seeking abortions and gender-affirming care, in southeastern Texas and Florida, where it can be difficult to travel by car to a neighboring state.
These tactics, according to Beach-Ferrara, were developed after discussions with planners working on a related problem: making pregnancy more accessible in states where it has been outlawed or heavily restricted since last year’s abortion rights were overturned.
According to Beach-Ferrara, “people in the abortion access place received some of our very first mobile calling when we saw what was happening diplomatically.” In terms of personal liberation, people’s independence, and their ability to make their own decisions without interference from the government, these two movements are inextricably linked.
She stated that the organization will continue its quick, crisis response strategy “to build bridges to care” as she looks forward to the coming year. She and other supporters don’t think Republicans will stop attacking LGBTQ+ rights in the upcoming year.
She claimed that “in an established democracy, the state of trans treatment is worse than ever, not to mention many other civil rights issues.”
The Court Battles On The Horizon
The record number of LGBTQ+ individuals who have won tickets in races across the nation for school board, town council, president’s offices, the U.S. Senate, and more, however, gives some advocates hope.
Sean Meloy, a campaign manager and fundraiser for gay and transgender individuals through the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, said, “We love to state that we keep having rainbow ripples, that they keep coming.” Our prospects support freedom of choice and protection; they believe that the government shouldn’t meddle in your personal affairs, and voters have agreed with that.
The group listed 148 boldly LGBTQ+ applicants who were elected to the Virginia state Senate in November, including Fabian Nelson, a Black gay man, and government part Olivia Hill, Tennessee’s first transgender elected official.
Different legal advocacy organizations have fought a significant portion of the fight for access to care and other civil liberties in court. Many of the health treatment and toilet bans were immediately blocked by district courts, but the ACLU and other LGBTQ+ organizations were successful there.
The district court’s decisions this year have been so unanimous that the courts have listened to both sides and in person, and they have found that their justifications for the bans simply don’t hold water. According to Buchert, this is almost jaw-dropping.
She added that by appointing progressive judges who won’t let their personal beliefs influence their decisions, the Biden administration has been successful in “really shifting and repairing the judiciary.”
The struggle to ensure equal protection under the law is still going on, though, with some Trump-appointed conservative judges occupying the 6th and 11th loop appeals courts, which serve seven states across the South and Midwest. Federal appeals courts overturned lower court rulings in the fall and permitted restrictions on gender-affirming children care to take effect in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama. For LGBTQ+ people and their families, the lack of persistence breeds confusion.
“An order may be part of a legislation, and then the stay is lifted and goes back,” according to the prescriptive process we are currently witnessing. Therefore, some services follow that and others do not, according to Beach-Ferrara. “It just becomes a really challenging atmosphere for people to navigate.”
The ACLU of Tennessee asked the Supreme Court to hear a case involving the country’s ban on gender-affirming treatment in November. The decision to accept the case has not yet been made by the court.
Challenges and Language
According to proponents, reporting and news about trans people, like the media’s outrage and concern over Wood using a locker room, can significantly affect not only how the public perceives and treats them, but also the laws governing their access to resources.
Due to accounts like LibsOfTikTok and others, there has been a spike in misinformation about LGBTQ+ individuals on social media this time. Numerous bomb threats and intimidation have affected institutions, hospitals, and libraries. In 2023, campaigning groups have documented more than 700 cases of anti-LGBT violence.
For his project, Assigned Media, journalist and author Evan Urquhart tracks anti-trans media and provides examples of suspicion about trans personality as well as the main players in the movement against transgender identity across the media scenery. He has refuted claims made by former Fox News host Megyn Kelly that trans men and boys are linked to cancer, and he has given a Washington Post report of an anti-trans activist important context.
Urquhart notes that there is widespread regret over the move after reading a drumbeat of articles in The New York Times that questioned the effects of puberty blockers on bone health.
Urquhart remarked, “When they began this war against transgender children, especially with blowing up every little thing… about transgender people, acting as if they were coming from another world, like they never heard about how side effects, diagnoses, or an informed consent process, that was really deeply disturbing to me.”
The Times’ reporting pushed “inaccurate stories” and misinterpreted the technology, according to a response from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which offers advice on how to treat trans people. Additionally, a letter denouncing the newspaper’s policy of trans youngsters and their obstacles to gender-affirming care was published in January by roughly 1,000 New York Times contributors. Eventually, The New York Times defended its coverage of trans people, saying it was “important, seriously reported, and sensitively written.”
Wood has seen both the good and the bad of increased media attention since she was made the focus of a right-wing battle, which was close to one year ago. Although she has been the target of some violent threats, she claims that her group has
embraced her. She joined San Diego County’s PFLAG, was recognized as a “hero of pride” in the pride parade this year, and assisted in bringing trans-affirming books to the neighborhood college library.
She was invited to Florida in October to join hundreds of other protestors against the state’s bath restrictions, which forbids trans people of all ages from using restrooms in public places like schools. A district judge eventually denied their request to halt the restrictions, but she joined five trans activists as plaintiffs in the first legal challenge to state laws.
She remarked, “After all this happened, society hasn’t caught fire.” “This is only intended to be a form of extreme prejudice that this certain political party has accepted because they have nothing else to sell but anger, lies, and misconceptions.”
For Lowell, the doctor, she almost pays attention to the news period, primarily for her own mental health, and rather concentrates on ensuring that patients are aware of how to get treatment.
When HuffPost spoke with her, Lowell was about to join with a transgender woman person who was 24 years old. Even though Georgia’s exposure to gender-affirming attention was currently protected, she was eager to talk about her treatment options.
Lowell remarked, “She knows I’m not leaving, and she knows that before I stop treating her, she’ll come to prison.” “We’re just taking it as it is and working around it to get folks what they need because I never could have predicted any of this thing.”
