Over the past six years, state legislatures have made it a priority to attack transgender youth. This year, we are witnessing a record number of bills proposed in states across the country with many moving quickly through the legislative process. Most of the bills propose doing two main things: (1) bar trans women and girls from women’s athletics; and (2) criminalize (or otherwise ban) gender-affirming health care for trans youth. The underlying goal of these efforts is to entrench in law restrictions on self-determination for all youth and ultimately to prevent people from being trans at all. They are animated through a well-funded and developed infrastructure that weaponizes misinformation about transness to capitalize on people’s fears of gender variance. If passed these bills will harm everyone. Here is what you can do to help:

1. Stay Informed. The state legislative process can be difficult to follow. Our government systems are deliberately opaque to limit our ability to understand the mechanisms of power that are always being enacted upon us. For a basic primer on how laws are made, read this explainer. To keep track of specific bills, follow the ACLU’s bill tracker, which is updated weekly with the status of all anti-LGBTQ bills pending across the country.
2. Inform others. These bills are able to move quickly and pass because people are not aware of all that is happening. Share information about where bills are pending, how people can engage their lawmakers and accurate information about trans people, our medical care and the aggressive and well-funded movements pushing this legislation. On sports, this resource debunks key myths about trans participation in athletics. This recent piece also explains the many flaws with the latest anti-trans discourse in sports. On the health care bills, share statements from major medical associations affirming the importance and medical necessity of health care for trans youth. There are statements from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. This article from pediatric psychiatrist Jack Turban is also a helpful explainer of the essential mental health benefits of gender-affirmation in trans youth.
3. Engage lawmakers. The most important thing you and others can do is to engage lawmakers where you live. To find out who represents you in your state legislature, you can type in your address here to find out your state senator and state representative. If you or someone you know lives in or owns property in a state with an anti-trans bills pending, contact your relevant lawmakers and tell them that you want them to vote no on any pending anti-trans bills. Generally you can leave a message or send an e-mail. It does not have to be long or detailed but should emphasize who you are, where you are from, and why you oppose the bills. But this can be as simple as “Hi, my name is X. I live in Y and you are my representative/senator. I am concerned about the harm to trans youth if you vote to pass [anti-trans bill X]. Please vote no. Thank you.” If you are outside a state with a bill pending you can always sign-up to phone bank through organizations like NEAT — check to see where volunteers are needed. When bills pass through both chambers of a state legislative body, there are often national calls on governors to veto the bill so make sure you stay up-to-date on what bills have progressed and whether there are veto campaigns you can join.
4. Donate resources. These fights are building and are relentless and take the hardest toll on trans people. Donate to local trans-led organizations whenever you can. The Trans Justice Funding Project (TJFP) is an incredible resource for finding local organization. Check TJFP grantees for organizations in your state. You can also donate to mutual aid groups supporting trans survival including bail funds. Your local ACLU affiliate is also an important resource for lobbying against anti-trans bills in your state.
5. Affirm those around you. Every day, part of our work is to love and care for each other. Those leading the movement to criminalize trans lives and eradicate transness are hoping to exhaust and demoralize us. We can always fight back by caring for each other, uncovering our long and beautiful history and sharing information and resources. This is a long fight and the coming years are going to be brutal. As we continue to push back the power of the state to control and surveil us, we are our own best resources and resistance.

On this first day in office, President Biden signed an Executive Order promising to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination under federal law. As I have written elsewhere, though important and meaningful, the Order merely affirms what Congress and the Supreme Court have already said, that LGBTQ people are already protected under federal law, and directs the administration to enforce those laws and written — something his predecessor refused to do.

Within minutes of signing the Order, the hashtag “Biden Erases Women” was trending. The idea behind that hashtag, likely originating in the UK and spreading through the powerful network of anti-trans voices and organizations online, is that by protecting trans people — trans women in particular — the President is harming non-transgender women. Nothing about this is accurate — as a matter of law, science, or practical reality — but these voices who claim to be silenced are, in fact, very loud. We have reached a point where the anti-trans rhetoric about ‘transness as harm’ is so deeply aligned with state power that across the US and the UK courts and lawmakers are buying into the idea that transness is itself a threat that should be eradicated. A recent high court decision in the UK has lead to the forced removal of health care for youth across England and Wales. A dozen states in the US have already introduced bills attempting to criminalize health care for transgender youth and bar youth from athletics.

Biden didn’t “erase” women but those who claim he has certainly want to erase trans people.

Behind yesterday’s hashtag and the past two years of anti-trans rhetoric and policy in the United States is the false claim that women and girls who are transgender are a threat to the integrity of women’s sports. Women like former tennis champion Martina Navratilova and Duke Law Professor Doriane Coleman have joined forces with anti-trans groups like Alliance Defending Freedom to attack legal protections for trans people under a false narrative of “protecting” women. Though they can point to only a handful of trans athletes who have had any success in sport over the past four decades, they claim that trans dominance in sport is “just around the corner”. Notably, trans women have been competing in women’s events at the NCAA, the Olympics, and elite international competition without any dominance or even notable competitiveness. In fact, no trans woman athlete has even qualified for the Olympics let alone won a medal.

Trotting out charts about the biologically-based performance differences between non-transgender men and women, the claim is that women and girls who are trans are equivalent to cisgender boys and men and should be excluded from women’s sport. But there are a few serious problems with their rhetoric, science and strategy.

First, the rhetoric. The starting premise of this and all anti-trans arguments is that women and girls who are transgender are *really* male. Claiming that being assigned male at birth makes one constrained to the category of man and the so-called biology of maleness for their entire lives is tantamount to erasing the embodied and lived experience of trans people. A woman who is trans is a woman. That she, just like many cisgender women, may possess physiological characteristics that we associate with maleness does not negate her womanhood. The assumption behind the anti-trans rhetoric is that there is a single biological characteristic that one can locate and name that demarcates the so-called biological line between the binary of maleness and femaleness. But the reality, thankfully, is much more complex, varied and beautiful. Our physiological sex characteristics, just like our expressive ones, are many and all exist on a spectrum.

When anti-trans advocates claim that all trans women and girls are boys and must compete on boys teams, they are, in essence, asking the state to coerce people into being cisgender. That is to say, if you tell a young person that they cannot be who they are and in order to enjoy the benefits of their education they must exist in accordance with their assigned sex at birth, then you are instructing the state to engage in a process of coerced conversion therapy. And all the science we have demonstrates that not affirming trans and gender expansive kids in who they are results in catastrophic mental health consequences including devastating rates of suicidality.

That sounds more like a eugenics project than a civil rights one.

Second, the science. The animating claim behind attempts to ban trans women and girls from sports is that being assigned male at birth gives one a lifelong physiological advantage in sports over individuals assigned female. Most advocates claim that the source of this “advantage” is circulating testosterone but the policy that many are advancing is to ban *all* trans women and girls from sport regardless of their testosterone levels, age of transition, sport, or level of competition. As with many anti-trans political movements, the definitions of “sex”, of “threat”, of “maleness”, shift to adapt to the overarching political goal of trans exclusion.

But even taking the central premise of their argument that testosterone bestows a physiological advantages on trans women and girls athletes, there are some serious flaws. The first is that we have no data on young trans athletes. The anti-trans advocates show data of performance differences between cisgender boys and girls (post-puberty) and apply them to trans women and girls. But our hormones are dynamic and so are our bodies. A cisgender boy who is affirmed in their gender, not experiencing discrimination or trauma will have a different experience of his body than a trans girl will. Trans women and girls are tormented, harassed and brutalized. This affects their cortisol levels, their overall well-being and their hormones. Though one’s self-identification may not correlate to athletic performance (though it may), certainly one’s experience of being trans in the world dramatically impacts the body and in turn how the body engages in and experiences sport.

And the other reality is that trans people are able to medically transition at younger ages meaning many never go through their endogenous puberty and none of the data related to a pubertal influx of testosterone is relevant to this population of women and girls who are trans. The irony, of course, is that the same advocates who claim that going through endogenous puberty as an assigned male gives one a permanent advantage in sport also want to make it a crime to receive pubertal suppression and other gender-affirming treatment. It starts to look like the project is not about protecting women and girls in sport but rather stopping young people from being trans at all.

Again, that sounds more like a eugenics project than a civil rights one.

Third, the strategy. So much of what emerges in these efforts to ban trans youth from sport is an impulse to regulate and control the bodies of all athletes. Yesterday, a reporter asked me the precise testosterone levels and medical regimen of two young trans women. Advocates are scrutinizing the bodies of high school athletes in an effort to police youth out of the category of “girl”. This, of course, is inextricable from the many ways all women athletes have been policed and discriminated against in sport for decades. In response to efforts to include trans women and girls in athletics, anti-trans advocates will pull images of women (presumably trans) who are tall or strong or muscular. The implied message — “look at these ‘women’ aren’t they *really* men.” But, of course, so many cisgender women are tall and strong and muscular and they, too, have been called “men” and “manly” and told they aren’t feminine enough to be women. The strategy of looking at an athlete’s body and scrutinizing what makes it not woman enough is going to hurt all women. It is especially hurting young trans women and girls now — many of whom have given up on the sport they love, lost any joy they did experience, and just want to disappear from the public harassment.

One young athlete that I worked with who used to love sport wrote one day, “I feel so much pain that my heart is turning numb. I cry so much I have no tears left. I try to be [a] happy person, I have no happiness left in me.” Relentless scrutiny of trans youth is hurting them deeply. They participate in sports because they love them and want to find a place to connect, feel joy and experience embodiment. These hashtags are becoming laws very quickly and young kids are going to suffer deeply.

No one is protected when trans youth are demonized, when they are kicked off the sports teams they love and their health care is criminalized.

There is no trans takeover of sports waiting around the corner, but how many young people will cry out, “I have no happiness left in me” while we perpetuate this false claim?

In the coming week much of our national attention will be focused on Super Tuesday primary voting and the domestic and global responses to COVID-19. But while these stories dominate our time, attention and resources, systemic attacks on trans lives will continue in many state legislatures. In the midst of critical national and global stories, we must not lose sight of what is happening locally.

Here is a rundown of states and issues to watch:

Arizona. On Monday, the Arizona House will likely vote on HB 2706. The bill would regulate girls’ and women’s athletics by imposing draconian standards on participation that will outright ban girls who are trans and intersex and subject all young women and girls to potentially traumatizing and invasive genital, hormonal and chromosomal sex verification testing.

What you can do? If you are an Arizona resident, contact your legislator and tell them to vote NO on HB 2706. Everyone — in and out of Arizona — should contact Arizona Governor Ducey and Senate President Karen Fann to make sure they stop HB 2706 if it passes out of the House. For updates and action items follow @ACLUAz.

What can you say? Raise the alarms using the hashtags #AZLeg and #NoHB2706 to tell lawmakers that this bill is a dangerous attack on trans lives, a major intrusion into the privacy of young girls and women, and alarming government overreach. The standards in the bill far exceed how sport is regulated at any level of competition anywhere in the world.

Alabama. Alabama is moving a series of dangerous bills that attack trans youth. First, companion bills in the Alabama House and Senate have passed out of committee that would make health care for transgender youth a crime. These are SB 219 and HB 303. These bills make it a felony to provide medically necessary health care for transgender youth. This means care that people rely on to survive will be cut off and kids will die. The bill also mandates that school counselors tell a parent or guardian if a young person is trans or questioning. This means kids could be forcibly outed and end up kicked out of the home. These bills are dangerous and on the move.

Alabama has also passed a sports bill like Arizona’s described above. That is HB 35, which is named the “Gender Is Real” (GIRL) Act.

What you can do? If you live in Alabama, contact your lawmaker and tell them to vote NO on all three of these bills. For anyone, tell Alabama leadership to stop these bills that includes: Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, Alabama Lieutenant Governor Will Ainsworth, House Speaker Mac McCutcheon, Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh. Use the hashtag #ALLeg and #ProtectTransKids and raise awareness about the bills. You can also follow @ACLUAlabama on social media.

What you can say? As with the Arizona bill you should note how the sports ban is going to hurt all women and girls and single out groups of people for discrimination. It is illegal and deeply harmful. And for the health care bill, the danger could not be more serious. These criminal bans fly in the face of everything we know about the medical needs of trans youth and young people will die if they can’t access the care that is proven to reduce rates of suicidality.

Idaho. Last week the Idaho House passed two anti-trans bills that will likely be heard in the Senate the week of March 9, 2020. These are HB 500 and HB 509. Like the bills mentioned above, HB 500, is a draconian restriction on participation in athletics. HB 509 would bar any updates to birth certificates even though a court already struck down Idaho’s existing policy that had restricted changes to birth records. This means that HB 509 wholly contravenes an existing court order. Meanwhile, HB 500 would implement the most restrictive policy for athletic competition at any level of competition anywhere in the world overriding Idaho’s already restrictive policy that mirrors the NCAA rules but for K-12 participation.

What you can do? If you live in Idaho, contact your lawmaker and make sure they know that you want them to oppose these bills. For everyone, raise the alarms on both bills. Particularly make sure that Governor Brad Little and Senate Leadership know that these bills represent a dangerous attack on trans lives. Use hashtags like #IDLeg and #ProtectTransKids. You can follow @ACLUIdaho on social media for updates and action items.

What can you say? As with the sports bills elsewhere, note how dangerous it is to have the government intruding in people’s privacy to such a degree. The Idaho Attorney General also flagged how HB 500 raises serious legal concerns. For HB 509, it is a patently unconstitutional intrusion into the privacy and equal protection rights of trans people and is in violation of a court order.

Missouri. Missouri is considering three anti-trans sports bills, HJR 82, SJR 50, and HB 2718, as well as ban on medical care for trans youth, HB 1721. The medical care ban, HB 1721, will have a committee hearing on Tuesday, 3/3. It is important to keep mobilizing against these bills. Follow PROMO and ACLU of Missouri for updates and action items. There is a community teach-in on March 4 in St. Louis to help mobilize.

Tennessee. Tennessee has a full slate of anti-trans bills this session. Both the anti-trans sports bill, SB 2625/HB 2410, and the anti-trans medical care bill, HB 2576/SB 2215, have House hearings this week. The medical care bill is particularly sweeping and dangerous and would criminalize not just the provision of care but it would make it a crime for anyone to not disclose to a parent or guardian that their minor child is trans or questioning. The bill raises not only serious Due Process and Equal Protection concerns but also First Amendment compelled speech and overbreadth problems (as in, it criminalizes a range of protected speech and impermissibly forces people to speak). Follow ACLU of Tennessee, @ACLUTN, on all social media for updates and action items.

Bills are also pending in Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and elsewhere.

Here is a full list of pending anti-LGBTQ legislation.

Here is a resource page from the State Innovation Exchange on how to fight these bills.

If we do not stop these bills, we know people will suffer and likely some people will die. There is a lot to worry about right now and it is easy to feel overwhelmed. This is meant to give some more information and a roadmap for advocacy and to remind you that we will never stop fighting.

Onward.

I didn’t learn much about how government works at various levels until I was several years into being a lawyer. We are strategically withheld information about how laws operate on our lives to prevent us from advocating for change and maintaining agency over our bodies and our survival. I wrote the below just to share a quick primer for those who are interested on the different branches of government and how they are separately empowered to make the rules that impact our lives and our ability to survive.

I. Big picture structure of government

There are three branches of government at the federal level and in each state.

1. Executive — runs the administrative/enforcement side of government and includes the leader of the government.

a. On the federal side this is the President and all the executive agencies and staff (i.e., Department of Education (ED), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), etc.).

b. In the states this is the Governor and then the state level agencies (i.e, Department of Motor Vehicles, State Department of Health, etc).

2. Legislative — passes laws.

a. On the federal side we have Congress, which is made up of the Senate (2 senators per state) and the House (435 apportioned by population). House members are elected to two year terms and senators to six year terms. The leader of the majority party (party with more seats) in the House is called the Speaker of the House and in the Senate the majority leader is called the Senate President.

b. In the states there is a legislative body in each state, which usually includes a state senate and state representative body comparable to the federal House of Representatives (where there are two chambers it is called bicameral).

3. Judicial — courts interpret laws (in theory).

a. On the federal side there are:

i. 94 federal district courts. There is at least one district court in each state (which may have any number of judges) and some states have multiple. This is the trial court level where a case is generally first filed.

ii. 13 federal appeals courts. The states and territories are divided up into 12 circuits that hear appeals of district court decisions and also a “federal circuit”, which hears certain limited appeals. The circuits are the first through the eleventh and then the D.C. Circuit. Any final district court decision can be appealed to a circuit court as of right.

iii. 1 Supreme Court, which hears a limited number of cases and decides, which cases to hear through a process called certiorari (“cert”). When a party wants to be heard by the Supreme Court they petition for certiorari and the Court either grants or denies review. If the Court denies cert then the decision of the lower court stands. The Supreme Court denies most requests for review.

b. Federal judges are appointed for life after being nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

c. At the state level there is a parallel legal system that like the federal system has trial courts (sometimes multiple kinds of trial-level courts — criminal, civil, housing, family, etc.), appellate courts, and a state high court. Some states elect judges and others have appointment procedures that more closely mirror the federal system.

*City and county government

Within states, smaller subdivisions of the state may have their own judicial, legislative and executive branches. For example, school boards are often county-level executive bodies, city councils are city-level legislative bodies and then mayors are executive leaders of cities or towns. There may also be city or county level courts.*

II. Congress

Congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. The Senate is responsible for appointments to the federal judiciary (federal judges). Both the House and the Senate hold hearings to gather information into different issues that then inform their lawmaking. Senators and House members are broken up into committees and the committees will often conduct hearings — both to consider legislation, to have oversight over an particularly issue or the enforcement of a law, to investigate conduct of officials and federal agencies, and more.

Advocating for or against a federal bill:

A piece of proposed legislation will have bill sponsors in each chamber (House and Senate) who are pushing the bill. Then a bill will be introduced in one or both chambers and the majority can decide whether to schedule hearings in different committees. Once it a bill passes out of a committee it will either move to another committee or to the House or Senate floor. In order for a bill to become law it has to pass out of the House and the Senate and then get signed by the President.

Sometimes a bill can be amended during a committee markup (where the bill is debated among committee members) or on the floor of the House or Senate.

Most bills require just a simple majority to pass out of each chamber and then the bill goes to the President. The President can either sign the bill into law or veto the bill.

To prepare to move or stop a bill in Congress advocates can work directly with lawmakers and staff and at times testify at committee hearings on a particular topic or in support of or opposition to a particular piece of legislation.

When a bill moves through Congress and becomes a law, the committee hearings and testimony submitted and debate by members on the bill becomes part of the official legislative history of the bill and are relevant to courts when they are deciding cases over the constitutionality of the law or in a particular application of the law. For this reason, the discussion that takes place during the consideration of a proposed law is extremely important to the ultimate effectiveness of the law when considered by the courts.

Here is a straightforward description of moving a bill through Congress.

III. State Legislatures

Every state has a legislative (lawmaking) body like Congress that is responsible for passing laws that apply to the particular state. Every state also has its own constitution that is usually similar to the United States Constitution but can also be more expansive. A state law or constitution cannot offer fewer rights than the federal Constitution (or federal law on the same topic) otherwise it would violate the federal law and federal law always trumps state law when there is a conflict.

Every state legislature has a different calendar when it is in session. Most states convene every year but some do not. For example, Texas is only in session every other year. Other states have short sessions every other year and then longer sessions on the opposite years.

Like with federal laws, at the state level a bill has to pass through both chambers (House/General Assembly and Senate) if there are two chambers (Nebraska only has one) and then get signed by the Governor. If a Governor vetoes a bill, the legislature can override that veto in some cases. In some states it takes a simple majority to override (50% +1 in each chamber) and in other states it takes 2/3 (a super majority), which is a much harder threshold to meet.

Advocating for or against a state bill:

As in Congress, for a bill to become law in the states it must move through both chambers and then get signed. When drafting legislation or working with already drafted legislation advocates can with a sponsor in the legislature to get the bill into the best shape it can be. When advocates are aware of legislation they oppose, they likewise can work with legislative allies to identify a way to stop the bill.

Just like in Congress, state bills move through each chamber by going through different committees and then getting a vote on the floor. If a bill is amended in one chamber, and a different version of the bill had passed through the other chamber, then the bills have to be reconciled because the same version of a bill must pass both chambers before being passed onto the Governor. The chairs of each legislative committee (i.e., House Rules Committee) have a lot of power to decide when and whether a bill is heard. In some states every bill that is introduced gets a committee hearing but in other states a bill may get introduced and never heard.

Legislative leaders like the Speaker of the House and the Senate president also hold a lot of power in state legislative bodies. When trying to move or stop a bill it can be essential to try to lobby these party leaders. Advocacy also involves bringing constituents to meet with lawmakers and leaving information behind for lawmakers to understand our position.

IV. The Courts

The state and federal court systems are intended to provide a check on legislative and executive power and (in theory) protect minority interests. As noted above there are separate courts systems at the federal level and then within each state.

The Constitution of the United States specifies the types of cases that can be filed in federal court.

When advocates want to challenge either a state law or government or private action, they can assess whether the legal challenge is more appropriate in state or federal court.

State court actions are not removable or reviewable by the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, if all the parties reside in state and there are not federal legal questions raised by the lawsuit.

V. The Executive — Federal and State

Though state legislatures and Congress are responsible for passing laws, the executive branch of government often creates the majority of rules that directly impact our lives. This is done in a number of different ways.

The head executive at the federal level is the President and at the state level is the Governor of each state. The president and governors then have a staff and an office that is responsible for the affairs of their respective executive offices. The president and governor can also issue policies through executive order. At the federal level this is like the “Muslim Ban” which was a directive from Trump and at the state level like some non-discrimination Executive Orders that democratic governors have issued in states where the republican controlled legislature has not passed explicitly LGBTQ-inclusive non-discrimination laws.

Executive agencies also issue regulations implementing laws. At the federal level, a law called the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) requires certain administrative action to go through different steps for public commentary and review. For example, proposed regulations at the federal level must go through something called “notice and comment”. Individuals and organizations can comment on proposed regulations put out by different federal agencies. Under the APA, in certain circumstances an agency must notify the public of a proposed rule or change to an existing rule and then the public has a set period of time to comment on the rule. Then the agency considers the comments and issues a final rule explaining how they considered and incorporated (or not) the various comments from the public. States have comparable procedures for proposing and finalizing regulations.

Executive agencies can also issue sub-regulatory documents that may or may not have to go through any public comment period. For example, the Title IX guidance on transgender students from the Obama administration was issued by the agency and was not an official regulation. Many state identification document policies are sub-regulatory.

When an agency goes beyond its authority as authorized by an applicable law, there may be specific claims that can be raised in court to challenge the ways the agency went outside its scope of authority. Additionally agency action can be challenged in court as violating state or federal statutory law or the constitution.

Good evening.

I heard that this year is an anniversary. 50 years since the Stonewall riots as they are sometimes called. And because of this anniversary, we are told, we should pause longer, pride harder, remember differently.

But what is an anniversary if we mark time through historical narrative that only some people get to tell?

What is 50 years but a story of resistance that is framed by a perspective of what constitutes a beginning (but whose beginning? And in the service of what end?)

And this story is always constrained by the unrelenting gaze and lens of whiteness, cisness, maleness.

Our true story of liberation goes back to the beginning and transcends time and space. It is magical and messy and Black and nonbinary and unsettled. It rejects bodily and geographic borders. It is here with us today.

I honor Stonewall as a marker in a history of what made my life possible.

I also honor the riots that came before.

The riots in the streets, the riots in people’s hearts and souls and homes and families.

I honor the bisexual plus communities who fought and died for our collective liberation only to be erased from our narratives.

I honor the Indigenous people whose land we — those of us of European descent –stole.

I honor the memories and lives of the Black trans women murdered this month. And those murdered in the months that came before and those that came before stretching back to and before someone threw something at Stonewall.

I honor queer futures and queer pasts.

And I thank you.

I thank you for holding me on this stage tonight, for giving me this life I lead.

In return, this is what I give to you.

Next week, on June 26th, we will file a brief at the Supreme Court defending the simple proposition that LGBTQ people are protected from discrimination under federal law. It is a collection of words that sound in a language of power. Though it is a dangerous language; when reoriented toward our queerness, it is nonetheless a gesture of resistance that I share with you-a shield against violence.

This brief will then travel before nine justices who will read hundreds of pages that all boil down to a simple question: is it because of sex when an employer fires someone for being LGBTQ?

Of course it is, is the answer.

How do you describe being trans or bi or gay or queer without referencing sex. It is our relationship to our sexed bodies and our sexed attraction or lack thereof that defines us as LGBTQ so it is discrimination because of our sex to fire us because of who we are.

It is a simple argument. A conservative argument.

But in law there is no principle. Because power knows no consistency. Nothing is certain but the fact that we live and breathe and always have.

This case, this story that we tell to 9 arbiters of our injustice, is neither a beginning nor an end. It is an offering.

And what does this all have to do with Stonewall and legacies of beautiful messy complex lives?

Each word we present before the Court holds the memory of our ancestors. Without their struggle to name themselves into existence, none of us could fight within these halls of power so that we might see them crumble.

I offer you the promise that I will never forget, each sleepless night, that we are vessels bringing our collective imaginations into spaces that were defined so that we would never enter them. And in those spaces I will leave behind the codes that tell a different story than the one people are expecting to hear. It is a story about how we are here to break open the cracks in the architecture of these structures: the physical ones that lock people away and the discursive ones that constrain our imagination.

On June 26th we will make a simple demand before a powerful body.

The demand will contain the multitudes of all the June 26ths that have come before, including that June 26th 50 years ago two days before a riot at the Stonewall bar.

In 50 more years someone might tell a story that begins on that day. It may say something like 50 years ago a bunch of lawyers filed a brief at the Supreme Court that changed the course of our history. That story will be wrong. Just like the story about Stonewall. Our stories don’t begin on certain dates. They don’t progress in a line toward a future that we can name. Our stories are bigger, messier, longer, and more transcendent than that.

We are beautifully queer and queerly beautiful. Our bodies cannot be captured by the language of our state nor can our liberation be contained by a historical narrative we did not write.

Let’s instead write our present. Let’s call upon our lineage and honor our dead. I grieve during this month as I celebrate and most of all as I fight.

May you honor your beautiful, messy, queer present and work to crumble the architecture of power that tries to kill us.

Thank you beautiful loves. I will see you in the multitudes of the magic we conjure.

One of the traumas of existing in this world can be the dismissal of our emotional pain. For trans people, this is a common theme in our lives: the insistence that we are responsible for our own pain — as if we chose it.

But we did not choose to exist in a world that hates us — you, non-trans people, chose to hate us and as a result, we struggle against the deeply internalized impulse to hate ourselves.

We are called freaks, snowflakes, “biological men” and “biological women”, not real, confused, sick, pathetic, and so many more things.

We are told, over and over, in small and large ways that we are not real. We are asked not to exist and literally killed for existing.

Whether it is the Family Research Council proclaiming that there is “no rational or compassionate reason to affirm a distorted psychological self-concept that one’s ‘gender identity’ is different from one’s biological sex” or Michelle Goldberg positioning trans existence in opposition to womanhood in the pages of the New Yorker or the bi-monthly op-eds in the New York Times questioning whether it is really wrong to feel uncomfortable around trans people, trans people are reminded that our bodies and lives are understood as a threat to others, a myth, something to be rid of or separated from.

Our identity is often written about with scare quotes — “gender identity”, “transgender” — and framed in opposition to something identified as real — biology, genetics, genitals. Every take on the realness of our lives, re-opens the deep and painful wounds we are daily trying to heal and embrace. Every take on our lives is a dismissal of our pain. Every debate over our existence is a rejection, compounding the lifetime of rejections and reinforcing the painful fear of our childhood selves that we are not worthy of life.

The statistics about trans lives are shared regularly — we face devastatingly high rates of employment discrimination, family rejection, school discipline and discrimination, homelessness, criminalization, suicidality, and incarceration. The rates are disturbingly higher for trans people of color, particularly women and femmes. But so often these statistics are just abstract numbers. What does it feel like to live them?

It feels like spending 30 minutes deciding where to go to the bathroom every single time you need to go. It means avoiding family events even where you are loved and accepted by your family because there are countless interactions with acquaintances that go something like “what happened to your other son?”, “didn’t you have two daughters”? It means spending years finding a home in your body only to be mocked by medical providers, questioned by strangers, rejected by lovers. It means being afraid that the more people write takes in the New York Times about trans lives, the more trans women will be murdered because society is continually validating the notion that it is okay to be angry that someone’s body doesn’t look how you might expect. It feels like worrying that someone will take your kid away from you because you are living your truth. It feels like anxiety that you will be fired, that you will be kicked at out of school, that you will be abandoned, or hurt, or killed because of who you are. It feels like so many things that no statistic could ever capture. It feels like a desperate cry to make it stop — to just for a moment feel the peace of getting to be your true, authentic, beautiful self without anyone judging you or questioning you or rejecting you or telling you that you are not real.

Please imagine the toll this takes.

So be an ally. Every day. Not just by sharing statistics or having a trans friend. But also by creating a world that rejects the idea that trans bodies and lives are anything other than the beautiful truths that they are.

When you are confronted with any public conversation about trans people, I urge you to do what author Imogen Binnie suggested a few years ago on Twitter: ask what the article/conversation would have trans people do. And “if the answer is something like ‘not be trans,’ please consider that most trans people have tried that and it didn’t work.” And if you are having a conversation in public or private that at its core is debating whether a person should exist, please re-consider the value of that conversation.

And to my trans family, I am sorry. I am sorry that we are living in a world that does not yet appreciate our beauty. I am sorry that you are hurting. I am also hopeful. I am also proud. I am also so grateful to be trans and to be with you in this community.

I don’t believe in tipping points or representation as revolution but I believe in you. I believe that you exist and that you are beautiful. I don’t know your pain or your trauma but I know my own and I am here to hold the truth of yours.

If you are hurting, tag another one of us in, let us sit by your bed or with you on the floor or on the other end of the phone. Or when you are alone with yourself, think of all the rest of us, loving you in our pained but beautiful corners of the universe. The truth is, we exist because we have collectively fought to be here. Our truth is more powerful that all of the hateful rejections.

I will choose every day to keep loving you and fighting for you.

Trans Lifeline can be reached at (877) 565–8860 in the U.S. and (877) 330–6366 in Canada.

TrevorLifeline is open 24/7 at 1–866–488–7386, and TrevorChat and TrevorText via www.thetrevorproject.org/get-help-now.

I was a guest on the panel of “LGBT activists” brought in to engage with Joy about the blog and tweets. I was happy to be a part of a conversation about the dangers posed to the LGBTQ community from language that demeans our existence and the importance of embracing our evolution as people and thinkers in engaging with and coming to understand people who are different from ourselves. However, I am disappointed with myself for not pushing the conversation in some important directions and wanted to address that in a bit more depth here.

Coming out of that panel and stepping back to look at the Trump moment, I am troubled by the use of the rhetoric of “distraction” to absolve ourselves of accountability and reflection.

Yes, Trump, Pence, Sessions and the entire federal government are deeply invested in the eradication of trans existence. It is terrifying and I have devoted a considerable part of my professional life to fighting back against it. However, by situating the Trump administration as a lone and uniquely anti-LGBTQ phenomenon, we are compromising true visions for justice and ensuring our own complicity in the many complex forms of violence that long-predated Trump’s ascendance.

I appreciate Joy’s apology and accept it. But I wish I had done and said more when given the chance on Saturday.

I believe that Joy, like all of us, internalized a deep discomfort with LGBTQ people growing up and expressed that discomfort on various public platforms in childish, hurtful and, at times, hateful ways. I would never write her off for this and I certainly forgive her for hateful things she has done and said in the past. But though she has clearly grown, her work is not done. That she as recently as 2010 went after Ann Coulter — a person with unlimited substantive bases to attack — by calling her a man and using the anti-trans slur “shim” in reference to her, is enough to tell me that her trans-antagonism is a problem she has to continue to contend with. Even on Saturday when she apologized to Ann, she explained that “of course Ann is a woman.” Well, yes, of course. But that is not the problem. Women who are trans are also women. And the use of “shim” — a combination of “she” & “him” used to attack trans women — is painful and regardless of someone’s gender, using anti-trans language to attack anyone is inexcusable. And incredibly common still. I don’t see Joy as exceptional in any way. Liberals, progressives and radicals are all guilty of this. Including many who are quite self-righteously calling Joy out now. By tripping over ourselves with gratitude that we aren’t as bad as Trump we do a disservice to the work that remains within all of us.

This is where we compromise our true visions for justice. If the current federal government is our only, or even main, source of outrage we will be constrained by a quest to hold the line against the blatant racism, LGBTQ-phobia, xenophobia, misogyny that flows from this administration. And while this is a critical fight, only holding the line against Trump-style animus will do little to push us toward truly liberatory and redistributive visions of justice.

And in that vein, what troubles me most is what we did not address in the conversation on Saturday. From the anti-Muslim language in Joy’s blog to Joy’s cruel dismissal of Chelsea Manning’s torture while in pre-trial custody to the LGBTQ movement’s history of racism, as a panel of “experts” brought in to represent the LGBTQ community, we (or at least I) failed to contend with our own flaws in a deep way. So eager to accept her apology and condemn the Trump administration, we failed to consider that perhaps it is the banal recitation of anti-LGBTQ, anti-Black, anti-POC, anti-disabled, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-woman norms by so many of us on the left that allows for Trump’s policies to flourish. That we can today look back on the Bush administrations with nostalgia is an indictment of our facile engagement with our present context.

It is not a “distraction” to look within ourselves and our allies at the ways we have internalized and externalized the power dynamics that infuse our societal structures. Our conversation on Saturday revealed some critical ways we have failed to do this. We focused on the power of Obama’s support for the LGBTQ community in changing in hearts and minds but paid little attention to the decades of work led by mostly LGBTQ people of color — who lived and died by their truths — that pushed us to imagine more robust visions of justice. And even then, let us not forget that President Obama expelled Jennicet Gutiérrez from the White House pride event amidst cheers from the mostly white, cisgender crowd for calling out his mass deportation regime. Our search for heroes in the darkness of this present moment will contribute to our deeply American amnesia about the many forms of violence that our government exacts. President Clinton signed so many terrible laws in 1996 that led to the horrors we experience today. President Obama opened the door to the mass deportation surveillance state that the Trump administration is happy to exploit. And all of us have work to do to interrogate our investment in power, our consolidation of power, our fear of difference. This was an opportunity to do that and I didn’t get it right just yet.

Don’t get me wrong, I miss the Obama administration every day, but not because it was perfect or even just. It was neither. But in our harm reduction fights, it was much easier to distribute life saving resources against the backdrop of an administration that did not actively seek to destroy so many of us. The Obama years brought hope for a federal judiciary where we could push the law closer to justice, where we began to experience robust protections under federal law being explicitly enumerated in regulation, and where we saw in the White House a Black family who modeled love of each other in beautiful and transformative ways. All that feels painfully far away now and in our fear and trauma and nostalgia, it is easy to glorify what was while contending with what is currently. But I think the work is in not doing this.

The concept of “distraction” is deployed over and over to dismiss a focus on anything other than some big picture effort by the Trump administration to destroy democracy. But if so many things are just a distraction then aren’t we ceding the entire terrain of our lives to the main event that Trump wants us to contend with — him. And even more concerning, aren’t we uncritically hailing our democracy and “rule of law” without recalling that they are indeed deeply flawed systems that flowed from an investment in a chattel slave economy. Our “rule of law” supported slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, Muslim registries, mass incarceration and more subtly insidious structures like the notion of race discrimination against white people.

A 30-minute segment on MSNBC was not going to contend with all of this, of course. But for me it symbolized the way that we seek to hold up heroes without complicating our messy truths — how we want to fight a “real enemy” without looking at the enemies within ourselves. I am much more concerned about this than I am about what Joy wrote in her tweets or on her blog.

Joy was never my hero and she isn’t now but I do respect what she has to contend with as a brilliant Black woman in the public eye. She is not perfect because nobody is. And I wish we had pushed harder to engage with that reality and the work that comes from being human in the world. It does not surprise me that Joy may not recognize the former self that wrote those hateful words in her tweets and on her blog. I don’t recognize my 2006 self either. So much so that I could imagine believing that someone else wrote words attributed to me and investigating whether that might be true. I am not qualified to assess the nature of Joy’s claims of hacking or the public dialogue over journalistic standards of integrity. Outright lying to the public does seem disqualifying for a high profile journalist. But oversimplifying the nature of one’s voice in the service of power and obscuring the ever-shifting ways that journalistic bias seeps into reporting sounds wholly unremarkable to me.

The entire situation with Joy Reid’s blog and the response to it offer us an opportunity, though, to look deeper into how we all contribute to the nightmares that we face currently. We have a role to play in combating the complicity that makes it possible for some people to live while others are condemned to die. None of this is new and it is not a distraction to contend with the deep histories of injustice that are embedded in our institutions and within ourselves.

Below are the written remarks I delivered on November 13, 2017 at the Callen-Lorde Community Health Awards where I was humbled to be recognized. A modified version of these were spoken that evening.

Good evening, everyone.

Thank you all so much for being here to honor this incredible, life-saving, organization. And thank you to Callen-Lorde for this recognition.

What a challenging, humbling and beautiful time to be alive and to be doing this work.

Growing up, I had no sense that I would or could survive into adulthood. There was no map of a life that I could imagine living because I never felt at home inside my body.

I did not know as a child that one could be trans and like so many trans people, I felt betrayed by my body and keenly aware that I existed in a liminal space of both body and mind.

I have struggled with mental health crises, addiction, and experiences of suicidality.

I name all of this because these are the things we are taught to hide and be ashamed of. But my truth — this truth — I now understand makes me strong, beautiful, alive.

And of course I can name all of this because I have the privilege of having my pain and struggle integrated into my life rather than criminalized. I have been able to find beauty in the messiness of my existence, whereas far too many in our community — people who are Black and Brown, immigrants, disabled, poor, incarcerated — are left to internalize their existence as shame while others of us get to march in the streets with pride.

Indeed, the very freedoms we embrace and the wins that we celebrate have been forged at the margins by the most outcast among us — the trans women and femmes of color, bisexual and non-binary people, sex workers, and disabled people who have always put their bodies and lives on the line for the progress that the rest of us have enjoyed.

But we must not forget…

— The ashes of our queer family members scattered on the lawn of the White House in the 1990’s in protest of the government’s neglect of the AIDS crises,

— the bodies of our trans siblings of color being ravaged by violence today against the backdrop of resistance and organizing led by trans women of color,

— the collaborative visions of our bisexual leaders who brought trans people into our movements when others sought to exclude us

… together these bodily formations and movement histories are the lifeblood that sustains us today.

The sacrifices of others — mostly untold, too many forgotten — have allowed us to be together tonight, to envision a world where we can be embodied and not policed, where our love will be celebrated and not repressed, where our histories will be told in all of their complexity in the voices of the people who have lived them.

I have survived — as have so many of you — because I have been the beneficiary of white supremacy, of inherited resources, of my citizenship status, and my access to formal education.

I have had the health care, the housing, the employment, the education, the love, to live my truth.

But so many in our community — particularly trans, non-binary, bisexual and queer people of color still do not.

We are dying by suicide, by violence, by neglect, by incarceration, by illness.

This did not start with the election of President Trump nor will it end with his (hopefully near term) departure from office.

The premature deaths of our LGBTQ family members are the result of the systems that we have all put in place and the norms that we all reinforce.

In the coming year I hope to do the following and I hope that you will join me and build on these daily actions:

-Stop gendering body parts. There are no male bodies or female bodies and the myth of coherently sexed bodies is killing us.

-Center non-binary and bisexual+ people in our programmatic work and services because erasure is killing us.

-Stop talking about some bodies as “clean” and implying that others are dirty or that their bodies should be exiled. It is killing us.

-Give cash to people who need it for health care, bail, food, harm reduction. Poverty is killing us.

-Talk about addiction, drug use, and mental illness in connection to my own experience because shame and stigma and incarceration are killing us.

Thank you for seeing me, for honoring my work, and for devoting yourself to our beautiful community.

I will never stop fighting for the world that our beloved elders dreamed we could inhabit and I will be humbled always by all of you who have taught me how to dream creatively, demand boldly, and love fiercely.

Thank you.

I love award shows. I always have. Last night, watching the Emmy’s, I was struck again by how many white people are present on screen at any given moment, validating the centrality of whiteness (often mediocre whiteness) in our society.

Growing up queer and trans, I was keenly aware of how deeply I longed for representation of myself in popular discourse and imagery but even as I craved a version of my story, I never lacked for images of people, success, and celebration that looked like me and my family — that tracked the possibility of my life as it was laid out for me.

In recent years, these awards shows have rightly been called out by people of color for failing to honor and center the work of the many artists of color who work harder for less, build more creatively only to be appropriated, tell their stories of trauma only to be exploited by an industry and society run and controlled by white people. The hashtag, #OscarsSoWhite, highlighted this point and shed a public light (for white people) on the many ways in which people of color, particularly Black people, are erased from awards, honors, and celebration in Hollywood and across society.

I was waiting for the acceptance speech from a white person that recognized how their whiteness played a role in their success — since being white is the most powerful affirmative action this country relies on after all. Instead, in these moments we get mostly self-aggrandizing pseudo-reflections on how amazing it is to be recognized for one’s work. And of course, it is amazing, and I do not mean to begrudge these artists their tremendous achievements. I just wonder, particularly now as we navigate a period of consolidated power among organized white supremacists, isn’t it time to name our complicity in this structure? Or do we just re-post articles claiming that “Diversity Took Center Stage at the Emmys”?

Amazing, brilliant people of color were honored last night at the Emmys. Of course they were and should have been. That should go without saying but we are so far from a world in which people of color can expect anything close to resembling equity when it comes to opportunity, recognition or even basic health and survival. Meanwhile, so many white people were honored as we always are. I am not saying — though I am sure many will accuse me of this — that white people should not win awards or be recognized and celebrated. Instead, I am saying, shouldn’t we complicate the narratives and centrality of our white heroes and the ease with which they/we make their way into our homes, our minds, and our hearts?

No doubt the small platform that I have, the value of my labor and my words, are the product of my whiteness first and foremost. My white skin has given me not only the access to the education, professional opportunities and validation that I have experienced but also the belief, instilled in me from such a young age, that all of this was possible.

I have been thinking lately about how many white lawyers are celebrated as heroes of civil rights struggles. Indeed, I was particularly struck a few years ago reading a passage in a book about the fight against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), praising a particular white federal judge who had played a role in mentoring various lawyers and judges involved in the fight for marriage equality. This same judge, cast as a hero in this one story, I knew, had also spoken some of the most anti-Black words to a Black defendant during a plea colloquy that I have ever read and return to with some regularity as a reminder of the anti-Blackness inherent in our legal system. The judge said to a young man she was sentencing to a lengthy prison term:

“I have grappled for years, and particularly for the last four years…with the fate of young men like you…Hypermasculinized, enamored of guns, violent, thuggish. Almost all of you had terrible upbringings as a result of the awful decisions made by your parents, starting with the decision, which really wasn’t ever much of a decision in the first place but more like an afterthought, to have you at all when they were incapable or unwilling to take care of you.”

One story’s hero, is another story’s anti-hero. This judge who very likely was a figure for good in a story about marriage equality, unabashedly told a young Black person facing prison time from her position of nearly unmatched power that he should never have existed at all.

I will never forget these words, not because I feel superior to the Judge who spoke them, but because they are a reminder to me to stay ever-vigilant about the intoxication of power so easily accessed by white people.

We are all the flawed product of our flawed society and system. Our task, as white people, I believe, is to be relentless in our evaluation of white supremacy’s hold over us and expose it at every turn.

I return to the W.H. Auden poem that has served as my guide, introduced to me first by Vijay Prashad at the Riverside Church in Harlem and again last week by Mariame Kaba on Twitter:

“All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.”

One of the many lies of white supremacy is that we are always deserving of our power, our good fortune, our status as celebrated hero. The truth is, we might be, but just as often, we stumbled into our power, are propped up into it, because it serves a larger purpose in the process of maintaining white supremacy. That does not make us bad, I don’t think, it just makes us beneficiaries of unending gifts that we do not deserve.

So, to my fellow white people, a reminder that our heroes are racist too. Let us hold ourselves accountable to the full complexity of the people we revere and lift up. And still, don’t forget to love one another. Because the closing line of Auden’s poem is searing in its prescience.

Too many lives are lost because we perpetuate the lies of white supremacy without accounting for our complicity within it. To love deeply, is to expose those lies and love still and love harder.

I could not look away from the smiling images of the fourteen year-old trans boy who seemed to exude promise and joy — even if that joy was somewhat tempered by a familiar pain.

He was perfect. And he was gone.

The images were recurring on my Facebook timeline because this beautiful, young, soul had died by suicide last month. I saw myself in him, though I never found the strength to come out in childhood. It took me well into my twenties when I was in law school and dreading the idea of pursuing such a gendered career path in the disguise of my assigned birth sex, to admit to myself that I am trans.

And now here I was, almost thirty-five years old, and by the grace of God still navigating the endless pain, joy and beauty of this life, looking at yet another trans young person lost to suicide. Another person who had the love of family, the support of a community, but who nonetheless battled the demons that torment us and found his only solace in the idea of moving on from this life. I have those demons too. I have battled them for as long as I can remember. And even today as I write this, with all that I have in my life, there are days that I wake up and wonder who I am and where I fit into the complexities and pains of life. Then I put on my headphones, I read the wise words of my friends and heroes, I lean into the uncertainty and I find my way through to a place of relentless commitment to life, love and advocacy for my community, for my family.

There is so much I want to say to my younger self and to the young people struggling like I did. And it doesn’t sound in the refrain of “it gets better.” In some ways and for some people, it simply doesn’t. But, it can get different.

To my younger self I would say:

You find a path through your demons, you find strength and beauty not despite of them but because of them. Your experiences navigating the dark pain of questioning your place in the world help you to embrace the pure joy of finding a place, of discovering your passions, your people, your beauty. You strengthen your connections to your family of origin the more you claim your truth, you build a chosen family, you have a child, you fall in love and experience heartbreak, you find a career that gives you life and purpose, and you see beauty in the body and identity that you spent so much of your life wanting to destroy.

For much of my life the sight of my own reflection would make me physically ill. It would send me into a depression and the persistent need that I felt to crawl outside of myself limited any vision I had for the future. There was no future I could see because I could not see myself aging in the world.

And I felt that self-rejection within my white, thin, blue-eyed body, celebrated in so many ways by society. I knew then and understand even more now that the pain and vulnerability that I felt are magnified beyond compare when one’s body is marked for destruction by society because it is Black, brown, disabled, fat. We exist within bodies that we are told, in varying ways and to varying degrees, are grotesque, disposable, unlovable. This happens through the inherited and systematic trauma of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, transphobia, ablism. It happens on purpose. It happens and people die because of it.

I lived because of privilege and chance and love.

I did not know that I would find a truth inside my darkness. But I did. And that truth is a beautiful truth that connects me to so many people who have come before me, who are living alongside me, and who will no doubt come after me, like the young people I hope will find hope amidst their demons.

I have not lived the neat life that I envisioned as a pre-requisite to adulthood. I do not make all the right decisions or always handle myself with grace. I have tormented and rejected myself over and over again. But somehow through that I learned that our trans bodies are beautiful in all their permutations and manifestations. I learned that holding up the history of our community is a gift that I will never stop paying forward. I learned that pain and messiness and self-doubt can actually be our path towards light, happiness, and confidence.

I learned that I have a place in the world.

It is not lost on me that that the lawmakers that stand up and defend legislation that would seek to ban trans people from public life are sending clear messages to trans people that we do not have a place in the world.

Texas House Speaker Joe Straus is right to be concerned that his state’s proposed anti-trans bills would mean the death of trans Texans on his watch. The stakes could not be higher. In the coming weeks, lawmakers will again descend on Austin with an agenda to torment, demean and exclude people who represent a perceived threat to the social order they so desperately want to maintain — immigrants, trans people, people who seek control and autonomy over their bodies and reproductive choices.

To my younger self and the younger people watching this and other debates over our humanity, I say, you are beautiful, you are perfect, and the very demons that haunt you may just be your gift.

And to the lawmakers in Texas and elsewhere who seek to eliminate us, you will not succeed. We are too resilient, too committed, to inspired, and to loving to ever give in or give up.

See you in Austin and anywhere else you seek to attack us.