It’s impossible to know what’s going on in America at the best of times, but what I do know is that, right now, it ain’t at all good for transgender people.
Or for the disabled, black people, women, refugees – anyone Trump can ‘other’ as being a DEI hire.
Somehow, trannies have managed to become the fifth most significant threat to the new administration, and it seems they will do everything they possibly can to wipe us out altogether, all with maximum visibility, talking points, and posts on X. In the last two weeks of the presidential election campaign, MAGA spent $US180m on TV advertising in Pennsylvania alone and 42% of that money was spent on anti-transgender attack ads the content of which was simply vile
Our mere existence was challenged on Day One with the edict via executive order that the US now only recognises two sexes and that every person much produce proof of their sex as identified at birth to gain an official ID including a passport – and that’s it.
Sport is out, along with transgender healthcare – especially for the young – and so is a career in the military.
There are no doubt others as well,
We’re such a threat to women’s sport that, when President of the NZAA Charlie Baker was called before congress to talk about college sports betting he was ambushed by two republican senators who only wanted to grill him about transgender athletes in college sport. After talking for a while about the law and after increased pressure he finally told them exactly what they didn’t want to hear, that, while there are 510,000 athletes registered with NCAA, less than ten of them were transgender.
Ten.
That’s it, less than 0.002% are transgender which I would suggest is a bloody pathetic attempt at the takeover Trump says is happening. Outsport confirms this at 0.003% when the numbers are spread over the past decade which gives the lie to the commonly stated talking point that its getting much worse and all because of Lia Thomas.
Ludicrous in the extreme.
In his long speech to congress, transgender women and girls in sport featured six times. He introduced Riley Gaines and lied about her claim to fame. NBC reported his speech as follows: “President Donald Trump mentioned the transgender community half a dozen times throughout his address to Congress on Tuesday, though trans people make up an estimated 1% of the U.S. population.
Less than 15 minutes in, he noted that he had signed an executive order declaring that the federal government will only recognize two unchangeable sexes, male and female, and another order banning trans women from participating in women’s sports.
He then introduced Payton McNabb, who played volleyball in high school in North Carolina and, Trump said, planned to play sports in college until “her girls’ volleyball match was invaded by a male.”
Trump said the player “smashed the ball so hard in Payton’s face causing a traumatic brain injury, partially paralyzing her right side and ending her athletic career.”
It’s still unclear whether the player who spiked the ball and hit McNabb during the September 2022 match was trans. McNabb has said in interviews that she and her teammates were aware of a trans player on the team, but that player’s name has not been shared and she has not spoken to the press. Since then, McNabb has become a paid national advocate for state laws prohibiting trans students from playing on school sports teams that match their gender identities. She testified in favour of such a measure in North Carolina, which passed and took effect in August 2023.
Trump then said trans women are hurting other sports, referring to a case in which a trans woman finished a long-distance cycling race and set a record by five hours, beating a cisgender woman. Trump appears to be referring to Austin Killips, a trans woman cyclist who did win the 800-mile Arizona Trail Race in May.
Trump used the same reference before signing the executive order banning trans women and girls from playing in female sports. Killips responded in an op-ed for the Guardian, noting that she did set a course record, though the previous record was held by a man, who had broken a record set by a woman before him.
Killips said the reason she was interested in the event was because it was co-ed and argued that Trump had used her as a scapegoat.
However, Trump on Tuesday said her record — which Killips said has since been broken — is “demeaning for women and it’s very bad for our country.”
Trump brought up trans issues again about 20 minutes into his speech, in what many on social media have described as one of the most bizarre moments of the address. He said Elon Musk was helping to find wasteful government spending, including “$8 million for making mice transgender.”
It’s unclear exactly what Trump was referring to, though it appeared to be a subcommittee hearing led by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., last month titled “Transgender Lab Rats and Poisoned Puppies: Oversight of Taxpayer Funded Animal Cruelty”, In her opening remarks, Mace referred to a report last year from the White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog organization that aims to stop government spending on animal testing, that found more than $10 million in taxpayer funds had been “wasted to create transgender mice, rats, and monkeys in university labs.”
The report included eight studies that received funding from the National Institutes of Health, with most of them studying the effects of hormone therapy on wound healing. One studies the effects and estrogen on wound healing, with the goal of improving care for trans people and developing new approaches for treating millions of patients with chronic wounds.
Another uses mice to study how oestrogen and anti-testosterone therapy affects immune response to an HIV vaccine. Trans women are disproportionately affected by HIV, with one study from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention finding that 42% of transgender women surveyed in seven U.S. cities in 2019-2020 were HIV positive.
The third and fourth studies mentioned in the report examine the effects of hormone therapy, with one specifically focused on how testosterone affects fertility and whether infertility related to testosterone can be reversed if a patient stops taking it.
The remaining studies are reviews and editorials on improving studies and clinical support for LGBTQ patients.
The White House released a statement about Trump’s comment Wednesday that referenced most of the above studies and a few more, including one that examines the effects of gender-affirming testosterone therapy on breast cancer risk and treatment, and another that studies the role of estrogen plays in how gender influences asthma. None of the studies the White House referenced were specifically focused on “making mice transgender,” but rather on the health effects of hormones.
About an hour into his speech, Trump introduced January Littlejohn, a Florida mom who sued her child’s school district for allegedly creating a plan to allow her child to use a different name and pronouns at school without Littlejohn’s knowledge, which Trump described as “child abuse.”
A judge dismissed Littlejohn’s lawsuit in 2022, after the school district amended the internal support plan for her child. The court also said her claim couldn’t meet the high burden to show that what the school did had violated her parental rights. Littlejohn has appealed.
Her 2021 complaint against the school district states that she was in contact with the school about her child’s “confusion” about the child’s gender. She and her husband agreed to have the child work with a school counsellor temporarily, according to the complaint. When the child asked to go by a different name and they/them pronouns ahead of the 2021 school year, Littlejohn and her husband said they wouldn’t make those changes at home but told the child’s math teacher that the child could use the requested name as a nickname, according to Littlejohn’s complaint.
The teacher asked if Littlejohn would like her to share the nickname with other teachers, according to the complaint, which added that Littlejohn did not authorize the teacher to share the nickname.
Additional emails obtained by CNN and the Tallahassee Democrat reportedly show that, in response to the teacher’s question about whether she should share the child’s nickname with other teachers, Littlejohn wrote, “Whatever you think is best or” the child “can handle it herself.”
Littlejohn later told the teacher she appreciated her support and that she was going to allow her child to “take the lead on this,” CNN reported.
In an emailed statement, Littlejohn said that at the time of the emails, she was referring only to the use of a nickname.
“We were not supporting the denial of our daughter’s sex and would have never imagined the creation of a formal transition plan where our daughter would meet alone in a room with three adults who asked her questions that would absolutely impact her upbringing and safety, such as which sexual identity would be assigned to her, which restroom and locker room she would be authorized to would use and whether she would room with males or females on overnight field trips,” Littlejohn said.
She added that she “never would have expected that we, as parents, would be cut out of such personal and consequential decisions.”
Littlejohn’s case has been used by conservatives to lobby for state legislation supporting parents rights to information about how their children are identifying at school and barring schools from referring to students with a different name or pronouns without their parent’s permission. Five states have enacted legislation that will require school staff to notify parents if a student asks to use a different name or pronouns, which critics refer to as “forced outing” legislation.
Just after introducing Littlejohn, Trump noted that he had signed an order “to cut off all taxpayer funding to any institution that engages in the sexual mutilation of our youth,” using inflammatory language to describe transition-related medical care, which is supported by major medical associations in the U.S. That order has since been blocked by two federal judges.
He went on to say that he planned to ask Congress to pass a bill “permanently banning and criminalizing sex changes on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body,” in effect denying the existence of trans youth.”
It should come as no surprise to discover that he lied about all of this because that’s what he does. He lies.
Gaines lied and was exposed by the media.
Littlejohn lied and was caught out by the courts.
Mace has made a name for herself by attacking Sarah McBride, the only transwoman in Congress, and losing every time.
As for the farce around transgender mice …
This is definitely an ongoing challenge but it’s not new and it’s certainly not the first-time attempts have been made to erase us completely. Transpeople tend to get lost in the horror and the hoohah of the Holocaust, but Hitler and his Third Reich tried it’s best to erase us too, and ultimately failed.
Be aware that much of what follows can also apply to today (and no doubt to tomorrow as well).
In 1930s Nazi Germany, transgender people were persecuted, prosecuted, barred from public life, forcibly de-transitioned, imprisoned, and even killed in concentration camps.
We were largely stripped of our legal status by the Nazi state, no different to what the Trump administration is trying to do to us in the US today.
In 1823, German playwright and poet Heinrich Heine published Almansor: A Tragedy. In it he wrote ‘where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.’
This always takes my breath away because its happened before and because it’s also happening now. Yes, in distant Trump world, but here too.
Look no further than Destiny Church. The rhetoric is identical.
While the Heine quote is certainly true to the narrative he was writing, it also eerily heralds events that were to take place exactly one hundred years later in the Fatherland.
And beyond.
Almansor is a tragic love story between an Arab man and Donna Clara, a Moroccan woman who’s forced to convert from Islam to Christianity. Shakespeare does the same to Shylock – he’s forced to convert from being a Jew to being a Christian thereby losing his claim to eternal life.
Think about that, it’s big stuff, and think about who’s doing the book burning,
Even though Heine’s chronicle was written in 1823, and his original depicts the burning of the Qua’ran which took place in Granada in 1492, his iconic quote is even now engraved in the grounds of Berlin’s Opernplatz commemorating the horrifying Nazi book burning of 1933 in Berlin, exactly one hundred years later.
By way of context, on 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power as Chancellor of Germany. His government immediately cracked down on all transgender activities leading, on 6 May 1933, to a group of student members of the National Socialist German Students League marching to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft with a view to burning all the books, PhD theses, research papers, and anything else they could find that would result in doing maximum damage to this freakish minority.
And all to the accompaniment of a brass band oompahing away.
The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Researching the Science of Sexuality) was an early, private, not-for-profit research foundation established by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1919. It was the first research centre of its type in the world.
The Institute campaigned, on progressive and rational grounds, for LGBT rights and tolerance at the start of the first homosexual movement that flourished in interwar Weimar culture. The Institute published the long-running journal Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen and Hirschfeld built a unique library on gender, same-sex love, and eroticism at the institute during the years 1919 to 1933.
The institute pioneered research and treatment for various issues relating to gender and sexuality and offered education on these matters to both health professionals and laypersons.
After the Nazis gained control of Germany in the 1930s, the institute and its libraries were destroyed by these youth brigades who burned its books and documents in the street as part of a government censorship programme.
After failing to find Hirschfeld, who was abroad, the students proceeded to shout ‘Brenne Hirschfeld!’ (‘Burn Hirschfeld!’) while ransacking and vandalizing the Institute, tearing pictures from the walls, pouring inkwells onto carpets, and destroying exhibitions while the band played outside.Some students posed for propaganda photos amidst the destruction.
It all sounds very January 6 to me.
That afternoon, the Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s Storm Troopers, whoseprimary purpose was to provide protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, and to disrupt the meetings of opposing parties, arrived, and systematically confiscated the Institute’s materials, including thousands of books and documents from its library and archive – just like Trump’s Oath Keepers, Groyper Army, Boogaloo Bois, Last Sons of Liberty, America First, and Proud Boys, all just like Hitler’s goons, rabid white nationalists, an Aryan Brotherhood, except, of a different generation, of the late 20th and early 21st century rather than the lead up to World War II.
Maybe we’re all living through the lead up to World War III – and it’s all the fault of us trannies.
Imagine that: our own holocaust, only smaller.
The only documents spared by the Sturmabteilung were the thousands of medical questionnaires collected by Hirschfeld, either because the Institute’s staff managed to convince the Sturmabteilung that the documents were simple medical profiles, or because there were physically too many to carry out of the Institute. Dora Richter, a German trans woman and the first known person to undergo complete male-to-female gender affirming surgery was long believed to have been murdered in the attackuntil a paper trail of her life after 1933 was unearthed showing that, in 1933 she moved to Prague and in 1946 to Bavaria where she lived until 1966 when she finally passed away.
The Institute closed, and never reopened
Four days later, on 10 May 1933, as many as 25,000 of the institute’s books, many of which contained unique insights into transgender history and medicine, were burned in nearby Bebelplatz Square.
Following the closure of the Institute, some of the staff fled Germany for the safety of exile, A few of the Institute’s former personnel, including Erwin Gohrbrandt, turned to collaboration with the Nazi regime. Ludwig Levy-Lenz and Erwin Gohrbrandt were the first surgeons to perform sex reassignment surgery with vaginoplasty on some transgender patients – a pioneering experimental achievement at the time. Two of their best-known patients are Dora Richter and Lili Elbe.
Gohrbandt joined the Luftwaffe as a medical advisor and later engaged in human experimentation at Dachau concentration camp where transgender people like the ones he once treated are known to have been held as prisoners and murdered. Levy-Lenz, who was married to a Jewish woman, fled to Paris in 1933 to escape the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In the run-up to the 1936 Olympic Games, he believed that German anti-Semitic politics would relax and so he returned to Germany, only to further emigrate to Egypt in 1937. There he was able to open a cosmetic surgery practice. In 1939 he was stripped of his German citizenship.
There’s no doubt transgender people were imprisoned and murdered in concentration camps, though the exact number killed is unknown. According to historian Laurie Marhoefer, ‘The Nazi state reserved its worst violence for trans women.’
According to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the German government ‘brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures.’
We’ve survived in the past, and we will again. We track back to 7000BCE and, old though he is, even Trump can’t do that.
What’s really sad though, is that this government in Aotearoa New Zealand is heading in exactly the same direction.
dykiegirl 