Not Here in River City, Part III: Under Attack!

Part I & Part II

Over the past few years, transgender and nonbinary people have come under increasingly fierce and unrelenting political attack in the U.S. and elsewhere. Such hate-based attacks have been ongoing for decades; three people who have long wished to eradicate us are Janice Raymond, Paul McHugh, and J.K. Rowling—Google them! They have as individuals done us great damage by campaigning actively against us and our right to even exist—and none of the three knows fuck-all about transgender people. As bad as individual transphobes are, however, whether individually or as a big warped mass of hate, they are small potatoes compared to the carefully orchestrated attacks that have been rolled out against us over the past ten or so years.

By the mid-1990s I was certain that when the right came after us in an organized way—and I was sure it would—their points of entry would be feigned horror at the thought of transgender minors and equally fake concern about “protecting” women in bathrooms and in sports competitions. That is indeed what has happened. With access to abortion no longer a right at both a federal level and in more than thirty states (see Guttmacher), political and religious conservatives consider that battle won and have moved on to new targets—primarily us. We are, of course, just a gateway to future schemes to remove the civil rights and legal protection of gay men and lesbians, and they themselves are a gateway to attacks upon people with black and brown and red skins. For a time I thought the ultimate target was women, but it’s not. Once women are dealt with, pushed out of the workplace and public spaces and back into the kitchen, stripped of the right to vote or pursue jobs or higher education, and have once again become the property of their husbands, there is one final target—everyone—everyone—who is not mega-rich. The goal is to create a society of, by, and for, billionaires, and if they have to turn us all into biofuel on the way to that goal, so much the better. To test the waters, the Trump Administration has been deporting American citizens without the due process made manifest in the U.S. Constitution (Halpert, 2025).

I’m sure many who read this will think I am at best in error and at worst insane, but the roadmap to achieving this has been printed and distributed—literally. You own it to yourself to read Project 2025.

So—what has been done to us and against us? As I wrote in part two, things are moving so fast on the ground that I’m not even going to try to detail it, but here are just a few ways, with examples of how these political attacks have affected real people.

Attack: Denial of Public Access to Bathrooms

Access to bathrooms has long been an issue for transgender people, but now things are have come to a head. The U.S. Congress and nearly half of the states have placed legal restrictions upon the right of transgender and nonbinary people to use gender-consonant public bathrooms; a proposed national bill would ban trans bathroom use in all government facilities: courthouses, museums, libraries, national parks [see Movement Advancement Project (a) and (b)].

One Result: Effect on Trans Politicians

Since January 2, 2003, trans woman Zooey Zephyr has represented Missoula in the Montana House of Representatives. (Zooey is married to Erin Reed, who, by the way, is the single best source of information about the attacks against us. I urge everyone who reads this to subscribe to her Erin in the Moring Substack (https://www.erininthemorning.com/) and support her financially if you are able. Her work played a role in my decision not to provide a detailed list of the ways we are under attack—why duplicate her efforts?). Now back to Zooey.

When Zooey Zephyr spoke to the Montana legislature on April 18, 2023 about the damage multiple Montana anti-trans bills in progress would cause and criticized their supporters. She said, “If you are denying gender-affirming care and forcing a trans child to go through puberty, that is tantamount to torture, and this body should be ashamed,” [See Alfonseca, 2024]) Montana legislators banned her from the House floor for the remainder of her term. To their surprise, she was re-elected. She has been consistently and deliberately misgendered by her peers and the right-wing Montana Freedom Caucus. Of this, Zephyr said:

“To be frank, we’ve seen that cruelty continue to accelerate in the past two years,” she says, and “there are moments where you feel like you cannot stop it, like you are sort of standing arms outstretched in the ocean, just sort of at a loss to stop the pain that is hitting your community.”

            —Oliver, 2024

Legislators in the Montana House then attempted to pass a bill that would have banned Zephyr from using the bathroom at the State Capitol. Fortunately, it failed to make it out of the House Ruled Committee (Yurcapa, 2024).

U.S. Representative Sarah McBride (another trans woman) was not so lucky. Before she was even sworn in, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) filed a resolution “she said was targeted at Delaware Congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride, a Democrat, who First State voters elected to serve as the first openly transgender person in Congress.” (Mueller, 2025). And of course, as other Representatives soon would to McBride’s face, Mace deliberately misgendered her. House Speaker Mike Johnson forthwith instituted a policy that banned transgender women from using bathrooms and locker rooms in the Capitol that did not match the gender assigned at their birth. McBride said of all this, “Every day Americans go to work with people who have life journeys different than their own and engage with them respectfully, I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness.” (Mueller, 2025).

Apparently, Republican members of Congress lack the milk of human kindness.

Attack: Bans on Access to Gender-Affirming Medical Care

As I predicted some thirty years ago, the way in for organized efforts to remove transgender people from society came through  transgender children.

According to the Movement Advancement Project, performing best practice medical care for transgender youth is a felony crime in six states. Twenty-seven states ban best practice medication and surgical care for youth. Courts are blocking enforcement of bans in three states. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia protect access to transgender health care; eight states and five territories neither ban nor shield best practice medical care for transgender youth. I know that translates to 51 states, but look at the map and do your own counting. Life is too short to obsess about maths.

Best practice medical and surgical care is based upon the collective judgment of people who actually know and work with transgender people (adult and youth) and is based upon clinical evidence and scientific studies; this is best exemplified in the Standards of Care of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which are now in their 8^th version. For those who might be interested, I and co-editors Carolyn Wolf-Gould, Jamison Green, and Kyan Lynch have just published a book on the long and considerable history of this care.

In contrast, publications claiming medical care of transgender people is a new development and declaiming gender-affirming medical care rely upon long-disproved tropes and fraudulent and selection interpretation of often questionable data. A prime example of this is the U.K.’s 2024 Cass Review, a supposedly independent review of NHS England’s gender identity service. The author, Hillary Cass, a retired pediatrician with little experience with transgender people and their treatment recommended the abandonment of affirmative transgender medical care for children and young people in favor of psychiatric and social support to delay and (I am sure) prevent gender transitions. Cass’ review has been seized upon by England’s National Health Service to justify ending gender-affirming medical care for young people and has fueled right-wing attacks in the United States.

Paradoxically, Cass ignores more than a century of research and clinical experience and falsely claims there is a lack of scientific justification for gender-affirming medical care. That’s not true.

An article by no less than nine authors published by the Yale Law School concluded the following:

Section 1: The Cass Review makes statements that are consistent with the models of gender-affirming medical care described by WPATH and the Endocrine Society. The Cass Review does not recommend a ban on gender-affirming medical care.

Section 2: The Cass Review does not follow established standards for evaluating evidence and evidence quality.

Section 3: The Cass Review fails to contextualize the evidence for gender-affirming care with the evidence base for other areas of pediatric medicine.

Section 4: The Cass Review misinterprets and misrepresents its own data.

Section 5: The Cass Review levies unsupported assertions about gender identity, gender dysphoria, standard practices, and the safety of gender-affirming medical treatments, and repeats claims that have been disproved by sound evidence.

Section 6: The systematic reviews relied upon by The Cass Review have serious methodological flaws, including the omission of key findings in the extant body of literature.

Section 7: The Review’s relationship with and use of the York systematic reviews violates standard processes that lead to clinical recommendations in evidence-based medicine.

In other words, The Cass Report was a fraudulent study, and the authors of the Yale Law Review article so concluded. They also noted that echoing Cass herself, The Cass Review’s “known contributors have neither research nor clinical experience in transgender healthcare.”

As an aside, this is not the first time, nor even the second, that fraud has been used to shut down gender-affirming medical care. Psychiatrist Paul McHugh as much as admitted that Jon Meyer and Donna Reter’s notorious 1979 study purporting “no objective advantage” to gender reassignment was engineered to shut down the gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins University (McHugh, 1992). And I discovered, by reading Janice Raymond’s doctoral dissertation, that  quotes from her “subjects” that appear in both the dissertation and her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male were fraudulent. She had no subjects. Most of the quotes came verbatim from a letter written by Angela Keyes Douglas to the editors of the feminist newsletter Sister and reprinted on page 34 of the Fall 1977 issue of Dyke: A Quarterly magazine.

Conservative legislators are now getting their nerve up to pass state bans on gender-affirming medical care for adults.

Bans on affirming transgender care have been dramatically increasing over the past five or so years. For an overview, see Reuters’ The Rise of Anti-Trans Bills in the U.S. and the article by Erin Reed linked below.

One Result: Effect on a Texas Family

Bans on gender-affirming medical care have huge consequences for mental health, especially for minors and their families. “I’m seeing a lot more depression, anxiety, and suicidality these days” (Novotney, 2024, quoting Florida psychologist Gary Howell). Nowhere are things worse than in Texas, where a bill (fortunately unlikely to pass) would make identifying as transgender a felony (Yurcaba, 2025), where courts refuse to block anti-transgender laws (ACLU, 28 June, 2024), and where Attorney General Ken Paxton—a horrible I guess you could call him a man—has weaponized the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents who affirm their child’s gender (Melhado, 2023).

“When we were notified of the allegations, it was as if the wind had been knocked out of us. We wanted to scream and cry, but we had no air,” the couple wrote in a statement approved by their lawyer. “Raising a transgender child in Texas has been one long political emergency.”

            —Sosin, 2022, Quoting Amber and Adam Biggle

In 2022, Public Broadcasting Service News described how Paxton’s policies affected one family. Amber and Adam Biggle—who once had Ken Paxton and his wife over for dinner—suddenly found themselves being investigated and at risk of losing custody of their children. Why? Because they have a transgender child in Texas, and they affirm their son’s gender identity.

The Biggles found out they were being investigated when they learned a case worker from DFPS was thirty minutes from their house. They managed to divert the protective service worker to Adam’s office for an initial meeting. A few days later, the case worker was looking through their kitchen cabinets. Fortunately, the investigator seemed sympathetic, but the Biggle family was rocked to its core. They rallied and began to secure attorneys who would work pro bono for Texas families and taught other parents how to prepare a “safe folder” of paperwork to show their skills as parents. “The Texas government has launched an effort to round up transgender children and send them off to a broken, overcrowded, and dysfunctional foster care system,” they wrote.

Attack: Sports Bans

Participation by trans athletes in organized spots has long been an issue, and here, perhaps, there is some logic to transgender women engaging in organized women’s sports. Men are demonstrably stronger on average than women. Morrow and Hosler (1981) systematically compared trained collegiate basketball and volleyball players to men untrained in these sports. They measured upper and lower body strength both in absolute terms and when men and women were matched in body size and weight. They found the untrained men in the study to be stronger than the trained women in both upper and lower body strength. They did not control for hormonal state; both androgens and estrogens are known to effect body strength. I know of no studies to date that compare the strength of transfeminine people with long histories of hormone therapy with cisgender women.

The issue of gender in organized sports came into sharp focus at the 1968 Summer Olympics when astonishingly muscled East German women’s swim team dominated, winning eleven of thirteen gold medals (see East German’s Doping Machine). Almost everyone suspected hormonal manipulation. Records of the German Democratic Republic released in 1993 revealed the existence of a “decades-long program of coercive administration and distribution of performance-enhancing drugs, initially testosterone, later mainly anabolic drugs, to its elite athletes” (Wikipedia, Doping in East Germany.) It’s important to know that the athletes were in no way at fault. They were “sworn to secrecy, deceived, or simply not informed about the drugs they were taking.”

The issue of transsexual women playing women’s sports exploded in 1976, when ophthalmologist Renée Richards was outed by Richard Carlson, the father of right-wing bloviator Tucker Carlson. As a result, the Women’s Tennis Association and The United States Open Committee required all female players to undergo a Barr body chromosomal test. Richards refused the test and was barred from playing in three tennis tournaments. She subsequently sued the United States Tennis Association for discrimination and won the case. Richard was all over the news for more than a year and appeared on several national talk show programs. As a result of all this, people all around the world became acutely aware of transsexual women  possibly participating in women’s sports; many cited the now tired trope that men would undergo sex reassignment in order to dominate in women’s sports (see Wikipedia, Renée Richards and Richards, 1983).

In the current ramp-up of anti-trans attacks, sports has been a hot-button issue exacerbated by the unresolved question of whether transgender women have a competitive edge over cisgender women. Twenty-six states ban transgender people from competing against cisgender people with the same gender identity (HRC: Sports Bans).

One Result: Attacks on a Cisgender Female Boxer

At the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, Algerian Welterweight Imane Khelif, beat Hungarian Anna Luca Hamoria; the decision of the judges was unanimous (Li et al., 2024). Khelif had previously been disqualified from a 2023 women’s event, but the IOC had cleared her to participate as a woman in the Olympics. Rumors that she had been assigned male at birth had bene circulating and Hamori had amplified them. When Khelif’s next opponent, Italy’s Angela Carlini withdrew mid-match and refused to shake Khelif’s hand, things got worse.

Khelif was pronounced female at birth, raised as a girl, and her identity papers are consonant, proclaiming her female since birth. The reason for her previous disqualification was because International Boxing Association officials said she failed a test due to the presence of a male chromosome—but failed to specify the test (Lei, et al., 2024). To date, no evidence has been presented to document that Khelif is anything other than what she was born and raised as—a cisgender woman. Nonetheless, a lot of people who know fuck all about fuck all have tormented her and her family and the International Olympic Community, insisting without evidence that she is a man (cf Pannett & Bisset) and deliberately misgendering here. Three of the most ignorant are famous: J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk, and Donald J. Trump—but there are thousands of others who presume to know she is male. I can’t speak to the venom that has landed in her inbox because of course I have access to it (and don’t want access), but I’m sure it’s far worse than what people are saying in social media—and that’s bad enough! Here is just one comment from Facebook to a March 9, 2005 post by Nadine Gutierrez. There are hundreds of anti-Khelif posts and thousands of hateful comments like this relatively mild one.

“Pissed me off big time. Beat up on a women? [SIC]/ Oooo…big man!

—Lori Connelly, Retired from Keystone Electrical Manufacturing. Her feed is rife with COVID and electrical vehicle conspiracy theories, doctored photos of left-wing politicians, and, of course, Jesus-uh. Please don’t deluge her with the same kind of hate she seems to like to dole out. Let’s be better than her.

Needless to say, Imane Khelif’s life and her career as a boxer have been turned upside down—needlessly and without evidence. How much worse do you think this would be if it were to happen to a child in primary or high school?

Bathroom bills and sports bans are resulting in increased rates of harassment in bathrooms not only to trans women, but to cisgender women because someone decides they must be transgender. This has always been a problem, but it began to ramp up since 2016, when North Carolina  tried and failed to pass a  trans bathroom bill. I assure you, things are far worse now. (Lopez, 2016).

This article has become long, and I’ve not even begun to describe the horrifying consequences of Donald Trump’s anti-trans Presidential Executive Orders. I’ll save that for installment four. I’m thinking of titling it Executive Disorder.

Works Cited

Alfonseca, Kiara. (2024, 6 November). Rep. Zooey Zephyr, Transgender Legislator Censured in Montana, Wins Reelection. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/rep-zooey-zephyr-transgender-legislator-censured-montana-wins/story?id=115525910. (Accessed 26 April, 2025)

American Civil Liberties Union. (2024, 28 June). Press Release: Texas Supreme Court Refuses to Block Law Banning Health Care for Texas Trans Youth. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/texas-supreme-court-refuses-to-block-law-banning-health-care-for-texas-trans-youth. (Accessed 26 April, 2025)

Cass, Hillary. (2024). The Cass Review: Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report. https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/. (Accessed 26 April, 2025).

Douglas, Angela. (1977, Fall). Letter to the Editor. Dyke: A Quarterly, no. 5, p. 34.

East German’s Doping Machine. Ethics Unwrapped. McCombs School of Business. https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-study/east-germanys-doping-machine. (Accessed 27 April, 2025.

Gharahdaghi, N., Phillips, B.E., Szewczyk, N. J., Smith, K., Wilkinson, D.J., & Atherton, P.J. (2021,15 January).Links Between Testosterone, Oestrogen, and the Growth Hormone/Insulin-Like Growth Factor Axis and Resistance Exercise Muscle Adaptations. Frontiers in Physiology 11:621226. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2020.621226. PMID: 33519525; PMCID: PMC7844366.

Guttmacher. Interactive Map: US Abortion Policies and Access After Roe.https://states.guttmacher.org/policies?gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAAD-Q3tpgUFu-Ockvp7Qr8O0OMrGKr&gclid=EAIaIQobChMImsPM3NDpjAMV60hHAR3CFCsUEAAYASAAEgIxWvD_BwE. (Accessed 21 April, 2025).

Halpert, Madeline. (2025, 28 April). Three US Citizen Children, One with Cancer, Deported to Honduras, Lawyers Say. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g8yj2n33yo. (Accessed 28 April, 2025).

HRC: Sports Bans. https://www.hrc.org/resources/state-maps/sports-ban. (Accessed 27 April, 2025).

Lei, David K., Burke, Minyvonne, & Abdelkader, Rima. (2024, 3 August). Imane Khelif Wins Fight and Declares “I Want to Tell the Entire World that I am a Female.” NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/sports/totally-unacceptable-gender-identity-dispute-surrounding-boxers-lin-yu-rcna164995. (Accessed 28 April, 2025).

Lopez, German. (2016, 19 May). Women are Getting Harassed in Bathrooms Because of Anti-Transgender Hysteria. VOX. https://www.vox.com/2016/5/18/11690234/women-bathrooms-harassment. (Accessed 28 April, 2025).

McHugh, P.R. (1992). Psychiatric Misadventures. American Scholar, 61(4), 497-510.

McNamara, Meridithe, et al. (2025). An Evidence-Based Critique of “The Cass Review” on Gender-affirming Care for Adolescent Gender Dysphoria. Yale Law. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/18/hilary-cass-report-and-the-trans-rights-debate. (Accessed 26 April, 2025).

Melhado, William. (2023, 15 March). Texas AG Paxton Pushes Court to Reconsider Injunction Halting Investigations into Affirming Care. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/15/ken-paxton-transgender-youth-dfps-investigations/. (Accessed 26 April, 2025).

Meyer Jon K. & Reter Donna J. (1979, August). Sex Reassignment. Follow-up. Archives of General Psychiatry, 36(9):1010-1015. doi: 10.1001/archpsyc.1979.01780090096010. PMID: 464739.

Morrow J.R. Jr., & Hosler,  W. W. (1981). Strength Comparisons in Untrained Men and Trained Women Athletes. Medicine & Science in Sports and Exercise., 13(3), 194-197. PMID: 7253873.

Movement Advancement Project (a). Bans on Transgender People Using Public Bathrooms and Facilities According to their Gender Identity. https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/nondiscrimination/bathroom_bans. (Accessed 21 April, 2025).

Movement Advancement Project (b).  Nondiscrimination/LGBTQ Youth: Bans on Transgender People’s Use of Bathrooms & Facilities In Government-Owned Buildings & Spaces. https://www.lgbtmap.org/img/maps/citations-bathroom-facilities-bans.pdf. (Accessed 21 April, 2025).

Movement Advancement Project (c). Bans on Best Practice Medical Care for Transgender Youth. https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/healthcare_youth_medical_care_bans. (Accessed 26 April, 2025).

Mueller, Sarah. (2024, 20 November). U.S. House Speaker Institutes Bathroom Ban Aimed at Delaware’s Transgender Congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride. National Public Radio: WHYY. https://whyy.org/articles/sarah-mcbride-bathroom-ban-united-states-house/. (Accessed 26 April, 2025).

Novotney, Amy. (2024, 3 June). “The Young People Feel it”: A Look at the Mental Health Impact of Transgender Legislation. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/mental-health-anti-transgender-legislation#:~:text=%E2%80%9CI’m%20seeing%20a%20lot,these%20bills%20are%20being%20passed.. (Accessed 26 April, 2025).

Oliver, David. (2024, 12 December). Zooey Zephyr on Trans Rights and the Fight to Use the Bathroom. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2024/12/12/zooey-zephyr-transgender-rights/76905162007/. (Accessed 26 April, 2025).

Pannett, Rachel, & Bisset, Victoria. (2024, 15 August). What to know about Olympic Boxer Imane Khelif’s Cyberbullying Complaint. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2024/08/15/imane-khelif-cyberbullying-complaint/. (Accessed 28 April, 2025.

Raymond, Janice. (1979). The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-male. Boston: Beacon Press.

Reed, Erin. (2025, 18 April). Over 850 anti-LGBTQ+ Bills Filed in 2025; Most in History. Erin in the Morning. https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/over-850-anti-lgbtq-bills-filed-in. (Accessed 26 April, 2025).

Richards, Renée with John Ames. (1983). Second Serve: the Renée Richards Story. New York: Stein and Day. (Accessed 27 April, 2025).

Sosin, Kate. (8 March, 2022). This Texas Family is Being Investigated Because their Child is Trans: “I Don’t Know Where it’s Safe.” PBS News. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/this-texas-family-is-being-investigated-because-their-child-is-trans-i-dont-know-where-its-safe. (Accessed 26 April, 2025).

Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People. (2025). World Professional Association for Transgender Health. https://wpath.org/publications/soc8/. (Accessed 26 April, 2025).

The Rise of Anti-Trans Bills in the U.S. (2023, 19 August). Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-HEALTHCARE/TRANS-BILLS/zgvorreyapd/. (Accessed 26 April, 2015).

Wikipedia; Doping in East Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_East_Germany. (Accessed 27 April, 2025).

Wikipedia: Project 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025. (Accessed 27 April, 2025).

Wikipedia: Renée Richards.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9e_Richards. (Accessed 27 April, 2025).

Wolf-Gould, Carolyn, Denny, Dallas, Green, Jamison, and Lynch, Kyan (Eds). (2025). A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States: From Margins to Mainstream. New York: SUNY Press. https://sunypress.edu/Books/A/A-History-of-Transgender-Medicine-in-the-United-States. (Accessed 26 April, 2025).

Yurcaba, Jo. (2024, 3 December). Measure to Ban Trans Montana Lawmaker Zooey Zephyr from Women’s Bathroom Fails. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/measure-ban-trans-montana-lawmaker-zooey-zephyr-womens-bathroom-fails-rcna182733. (Accessed 26 April, 2025).

Yurcaba, Jo. (2025, 10 March). Texas Bill Would Make Identifying as Transgender a Felony Punishable by Jail. NBC News.

Category: Transgender Opinion, Transgender Politics