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I have no control over the ads that appear at this web-site.
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‘Pride Month 2023 Begins’
(1 Jun 2023)
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Dear Reader:
Social Murder.
Genocide.
It’s all the same.
This makes you happy, Drumpfian and Deplorable Trans Community of Florida.
Who is your next Target?
For all you proud Trans and LGBT DeSantis supporters, you can read these articles about what you are doing to destroy your own Trans Community.
Thank you for your excellent coverage of events, Zinnia!
– Sharon
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(https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10160373349821077&id=501331076&mibextid=Nif5oz)
Zinnia Jones
23 May 2023
Please share what is happening to us in Florida. Text of thread:
Yes – this is what is happening in Florida due to SB 254, which was signed into law on Tuesday 5/17/2023, taking immediate effect. This immediately cut off 80%+ of adult trans people in Florida from having their HRT refilled, because SB 254 uniquely prohibits only nurse practitioners from prescribing only gender-affirming medications.
This has already been in effect for 7 days now.
Trans adults in Florida have already been cut off from their HRT refills for a week now, including those of us who have been stable on these medications for years or decades.
This is VERY different from the general situation of trans youth care bans in 19 states, many still working their way through the courts.
This has *already* happened, to *all* of us: all trans adults in the third most populous state in the US.
The number of trans adults on HRT massively exceeds the sliver of the population that are under 18 and are prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy.
These laws, advanced under the pretext of ‘protecting children’, are now directly impacting a far larger group of people who are not children and are not subject to those pretextual concerns.
Other arguments about withholding public Medicaid funding for transition treatment also do not apply here: SB 254 does not even allow receiving this care through private insurance or paying cash out of pocket. The care isn’t simply not covered – the care itself cannot be provided regardless.
What is happening in Florida requires special attention above the situation of trans youth care bans nationally. This is having a vastly larger impact quantifiably.
It will have worse impacts qualitatively as well: adults are responsible for taking care of and protecting trans kids and making sure they do not hurt themselves.
Whereas as a trans adult, we have no one standing guard at the brink but our own self and the void to which we are accountable.
These are the facts as they stand right now. These are the facts as they have stood for a WEEK and NO ONE nationally is putting any attention on this because there are 19 trans youth care bans all across the country going on, along with everything else targeting trans people and the LGBT community broadly.
This is a specific harm that is happening now and has been happening for 168 hours.
It is not a hypothetical issue to raise awareness of, as if it were at the stage of some proposal that needs to be fought back. This has already happened and is happening right now. Active harm is happening until this law is rolled back.
For all of Florida’s history since the inception of the applicable regulatory and licensing bodies, nurse practitioners have been allowed to prescribe hormone therapy, testosterone blockers and other relevant gender-affirming medications.
That has been the case since I moved here in 2011. There was no reason why this wouldn’t be the case. It’s also the case in every other state.
This new law is a carveout of prescriptions when used for one purpose, gender-affirming care, from nurse practitioners specifically, in a way that has never been done before. It affects all ages.
It has immediately obstructed access to HRT prescription refills for more than 80% of TRANS ADULTS in Florida.
It has also prohibited first appointments for HRT via telehealth with in-state or out-of-state MDs or DOs – first appointments must be in person. This will require expensive and time-consuming travel that is beyond most trans people’s means: driving to Georgia from Florida can take 8 hours.
This was an intentional targeting of almost all trans adults in Florida, and the means by which we have received our generic, FDA-approved medications for years. And it included closing every possible door that would let us find another way to keep taking the medications we have taken for…
Well, for me it was 3,891 days when the clock stopped
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2.
(https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10160374492656077&id=501331076&mibextid=Nif5oz)
Zinnia Jones
23 May 2023
Since so many people were surprised to learn Florida has effectively banned any HRT prescriptions for nearly all trans adults – including those of us who have been taking this medication for years or decades – I made this illustrated chart explaining exactly how these new laws and policies affect us, and what you can do this weekend in Tampa to help us. PLEASE share this to help restore our access to our prescribed medications.
Text of diagram:
NO OPTIONS LEFT: Florida Adult Trans Care Ban
Interlocking Policies
Chart by Zinnia Jones, GenderAnalysis.net — current as of 5/23/2023
START HERE
Patient age:
Under 18/18 or over?
Under 18:
Care not available through any provider
S.B. 254
64B8-9.019, 64B15-14.014 F.A.C.
Patients receiving treatment prior to 5/17/2023 are grandfathered
18 or over:
Provider: MD/DO or NP/APRN/other?
NP/APRN:
NPs, APRNs and other providers cannot prescribe HRT for adults after 5/17/2023 (S.B. 254)
MORE THAN 80% OF TRANS ADULTS IN FLORIDA RECEIVE THEIR HRT PRESCRIPTION THROUGH AN NP/APRN
Trans adults have historically been able to receive prescriptions for hormone therapy from nurse practitioners and APRNs in every state without this ever being an issue.
Trans people were able to receive HRT prescriptions from NPs and APRNs in Florida for decades, until Wednesday, May 17, 2023.
MD/DO:
Date: Before 7/16/2023, or 7/17/2023 or later?
After 7/16/2023 or once emergency rules are issued:
MDs/DOs can write HRT prescriptions under rules and consent forms issued by BoM/BoOM (rules unknown until day of publication) (S.B. 254)
ADULTS -MIGHT- BE ABLE TO RECEIVE NEW HRT PRESCRIPTIONS FROM MDs/DOs BY MID-JULY
The Boards contain at least one member of the anti-trans Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM).
Two other members were appointed by Ron DeSantis after they had submitted a letter to the Boards in favor of a trans youth care ban and in favor of anti-trans conversion therapy.
trans.sh/nemours
Before 7/16/2023:
Prescription type: New prescription or refill of existing prescription?
New prescription:
MDs/DOs cannot write new HRT prescriptions for adults until BoM/BoOM “emergency rule” state-written mandatory informed consent forms are published for use (any time before 7/16) (S.B. 254)
No trans adults seeking to start HRT can begin treatment after 5/17/2023 until these informed consent forms are available.
Trans adults in Florida have historically been able to start HRT at a time that their own provider determines is appropriate.
Existing prescription:
MDs/DOs can continue to renew existing HRT prescriptions for adults
Note: This remaining sliver is the only way trans adults in Florida can access their prescribed HRT as of 5/17/2023.
TAKE ACTION NOW:
LEARN more about how Florida legislators and state agencies inflicted this injury on the trans community: by hiring conversion therapists and a recognized hate group to write state policy. trans.sh/experts
HELP by giving to the Central Florida Emergency Trans Care Fund tinyurl.com/CFLTransFund
ACT to make your voice heard by the Boards of Medicine at their Joint Rules Committee meeting on the proposed mandatory informed consent forms for adults!
Saturday, June 1 2:45 PM
The Westshore Grand
4860 West Kennedy Boulevard
Tampa, FL 33609
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(https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10160376812241077&id=501331076&mibextid=Nif5oz)
Zinnia Jones
25 May 2023
Latest update, May 25 2023, on the status of the adult trans care ban SB 254 in Florida. It’s being reported by trans people across the state that over the past week they cannot reliably refill their existing prescriptions either. This now leaves no possible route for trans adults in Florida to be prescribed HRT or continue taking their long-term prescribed HRT. Absolutely none of this was the case for trans adults in Florida, ever, before last Wednesday. This is a direct infliction of harm on thousands of trans Floridians in the third most populous state in the country.
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(https://floridaban.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/sb254policymap-5292023.png)
FLORIDA BAN: Adult Trans Care Ban SB 254
Latest
SB 254 Policy Impact
FLORIDA HRT CRISIS: SB 254, effective May 17 2023, banned nearly all new HRT prescriptions and refills of existing prescriptions for trans adults, for up to 6 more weeks or until “emergency” state-mandated consent forms are published by the Boards of Medicine.
Trans care bans were never about “protecting children” — they were about making all trans existence completely impossible. See for yourself.
There are more than one million trans adults in the US.
1 in 14 just lost access to their HRT.
I’m one of them.
Until further notice, there is only one topic that Gender Analysis and the wider transgender community of Florida will be talking about: SB 254.
Why is everything about SB 254 right now? This is a de facto total adult trans care ban that has been in effect for 2 weeks since it was signed by a far-right governor with presidential ambitions, cutting off tens of thousands of trans adults in Florida from continuing to take their prescribed medications.
Text of Florida SB 254 enacted as Chapter 2023-90
“[SB 254] imposes new onerous written consent procedures for gender-affirming care for adults, and requires that all care must be provided by an in-person physician.” (ACLU of Florida)
“Genocide by attrition occurs when a group is stripped of its human rights, political, civil and economic. This leads to deprivation of conditions essential for maintaining health, thereby producing mass death. … Unlike genocide executed primarily by murder, genocide by attrition decimates group members by several methods, including creating conditions undermining physical and mental health that regularly result in death of part of the group and demoralization and atomization of the remainder.”
—Helen Fein, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Genocide at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (Fein, 1997)
Florida SB 254 has crossed the trans community’s red line
There is currently no possible or consistently reliable route for trans adults to obtain our prescribed HRT within the state of Florida under essentially any circumstances. This is a red line for all of us:
The trans community’s continued and uninterrupted access to our established, medically necessary prescriptions is not negotiable.
It is not acceptable for Florida’s trans adults to have our human rights violated by being forced to discontinue an ongoing medical treatment for even one single day. There is no tolerable amount of time for this ban to remain in place.
No individual provision of SB 254 can remain in effect to any degree. No component of these baseless and unprecedented restrictions is acceptable now or at any point – the effects of SB 254 must be mitigated totally.
The state of Florida has crossed this red line for two weeks at the time of this writing.
The only acceptable answer is the restoration of the pre-May 17 2023 status quo, and the resumption of uninterrupted prescriptions of HRT to adults under the previous community standards of care, via their existing providers. Under no circumstances will this change, and under no circumstances can this basic expectation be lowered to any degree.
Accepting the impact of forced medical detransition on our bodies is not an option, as this is known to cause real physical and mental harm to us.
“There’s no appropriate way to do that because it’s medically necessary treatment. The premise is flawed. … You can harm someone at whatever pace you want, but you’re still harming them.”
—Alex Keuroghlian, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (STAT News, May 26, 2023)
Leaving the state is also not a realistic or scalable option: Florida has the second-largest adult trans population in the country after California. 94,900-100,000 adult trans people are affected by this ban according to figures provided by the Williams Institute (Herman et al., June 2022) and SPEKTRUM Health gender clinics in central Florida.
The state of Florida cannot be allowed to make 100,000 people into internal refugees of the United States. That will never be an acceptable answer. This is our home.
What does “Make America Florida” look like for you?
94,900-100,000 adults cannot leave on short notice from our families and from the entire lives we’ve built as community members living peacefully in Florida until May 17, 2023. Bans on gender-affirming care for adults have a devastating impact on the trans community, far beyond any attack on trans healthcare seen to date. An estimated 16,200 trans youth in Florida are affected by the ban on gender-affirming care, and so are six times more trans adults.
In one day, Florida opened the single largest front in a nationwide fight.
15 states, including Florida, currently ban gender-affirming treatment for trans youth* – affecting an estimated 47,800 youth nationally (Movement Advancement Project, May 28, 2023; Herman et al., June 2022). Texas is soon expected to enact a trans youth care ban as well, which will raise the number of affected youth to 77,600.
This unprecedented wave of legislation targeting trans youth care built the foundation for what happened next: 94,900-100,000 more trans people instantly lost access to their medically necessary gender-affirming care. Now, one state, in one day, can act to harm vastly more trans people than ever before.
One day changed everything: Trans adults in Florida are being cut off from their existing prescriptions and forced to find other providers — who also cannot prescribe gender-affirming HRT right now.
The impact of SB 254 on all HRT prescriptions was immediate, highly disruptive, and comprehensive in its interference: After two weeks of this law being in effect, it has become clear from reports in the community that almost no trans adults in Florida are able to receive refills or renewals of even their existing prescriptions from many providers.
How did SB 254 cause this unprecedented degree and scope of mass medical harm and human rights violations? At Gender Analysis, we have made continuous efforts to gather information from providers, patients, and other stakeholders since SB 254 took effect, and our assessment of the law’s impact incorporates the best evidence available to us at this time.
The ruinous impact of SB 254 on trans adults and our providers:
Florida Senate Bill 254, signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis with immediate effect on May 17, 2023, has left almost all providers of HRT for trans adults – most of whom are nurse practitioners (NPs) and advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) – with no clear route for their established patients to continue accessing refills and renewals of their stable HRT prescriptions.
Trans adults who have been taking their prescribed HRT under the care of their provider for months or decades are now almost entirely unable to continue accessing their prescriptions.
This is a worst-case scenario for trans people of every age in Florida: forced medical detransition. That worst-case scenario has been a fact for two weeks.
An estimated 80% of trans adults in Florida are prescribed HRT from an NP or APRN. Prescribers other than MDs and DOs are uniquely prohibited by SB 254 from prescribing gender-affirming hormone therapy to adults, and cannot write new prescriptions or renewals of existing prescriptions.
No such prohibitions on NPs and APRNs prescribing HRT have ever been in effect in Florida or other states to date, and there is no basis for this arbitrary and disruptive new restriction. Nurse practitioners are practitioners and can prescribe medications in all 50 states in the same manner as physicians.
In every other state, and in Florida before May 2023, NPs and APRNs can and do provide HRT assessment, prescriptions, and monitoring according to the same established community standards as MDs and DOs.
Physicians prescribing HRT are in the minority of HRT-providing practitioners in Florida, and they will not be able to serve the vast majority of trans adults who are now capriciously forced to find a new provider.
Even MDs and DOs who previously provided HRT have now widely elected not to offer new HRT prescriptions or prescription renewals, due to ongoing uncertainty and potential ambiguity in the interpretation of the law.
SB 254 requires that MDs and DOs obtain in-person written informed consent from adult trans patients before initiating gender-affirming treatment, and specifies that this initial consent must be obtained using forms approved by the Florida Board of Medicine and Board of Osteopathic Medicine.
However, no such forms were approved prior to the enactment of SB 254, which directed the Boards to draft these forms within 60 days – any time before July 16. The next meeting of the Boards’ Joint Rules/Legislative committee, where members will discuss and likely adopt further restrictions on HRT for trans adults, is on Thursday, June 1 in Tampa.
In the interim, many physicians have interpreted this to mean that no new prescriptions or prescription renewals for gender-affirming HRT can be written until the Boards draft and approve these informed consent forms.
Trans adults in Florida also cannot start gender-affirming treatment via a telehealth provider.
Because SB 254 specifies that informed consent must be obtained in-person before starting HRT, adults in Florida wishing to start gender-affirming treatment cannot receive their initial prescription via a telehealth appointment.
This will impose new burdens on countless trans adults, such as lost wages from taking time off work, and the time and expense of driving most of a day or taking a flight out of state to receive one prescription.
All of these burdens will leave many of us unable to access this care or continue receiving our treatment at all, and these barriers were never imposed on any of us before May 17, 2023.
The existence of trans people is an innate feature of any human community: no jurisdiction can be allowed to become a ‘trans-free zone’.
As with cis people, trans people will always come into existence in any region, meaning that not one trans person can be abandoned to these brutal and torturous policies anywhere. We must fight this and we need you to fight alongside us until this emergency is resolved.
If this is allowed to happen to a hundred thousand trans adults in Florida, it is that much easier to allow this to happen to another hundred thousand of us: other states will realize this is an option on the table now, and you could be the next one to be forcibly medically detransitioned along with everyone else around you.
The entire country is softened up and ready to entertain that conversation now.
SB 254 has put everything at stake for everyone. You are in the sights of their Overton window as of May 17. There has never been a mass all-ages forced detransition on this scale – until now. Now it is a precedent and a model.
In 11 years of medically transitioning in Florida since the age of 23, I have never seen us face a crisis of this existential scale. Because this was dismissed as unthinkable, almost nobody thought about it – but everyone who told us that this would never happen to us was wrong. Are you being told right now that this will never happen to you? I cannot truthfully represent such a promise or guarantee to you. Neither can anyone else.
This is a new and uniquely dangerous event in history and it is a singular point where I wish to emphasize as strongly as possible, drawing on any goodwill and trust you have ever had in me personally as Zinnia Jones or in the work of Gender Analysis: We need to stop this here. We need to stop it now — or we will lose everything. This is an emergency! We are calling for help!
How could this happen? It started when Florida hired a Gainesville hate group to help ghostwrite the state’s anti-trans policies.
Last August, Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) enacted Rule 59G-1.050 and excluded all treatment for gender dysphoria from state Medicaid coverage, including puberty pausers, gender-affirming hormone therapy, and gender-affirming surgeries. This rule, as well as the Florida Boards of Medicine’s March 2023 bans on trans youth care, were supported by the AHCA’s June 2022 Generally Accepted Professional Medical Standards (GAPMS) report, an anti-trans policy document unlike any other to date.
“The state’s attack on access to care for trans folks in Florida all started with this rule being promulgated by the Agency for Healthcare Administration (AHCA) which began on April 20, 2022. After AHCA determined that treatments for gender dysphoria were ‘experimental,’ that justification was relied upon by the Florida Boards of Medicine in promulgating their rules banning care for minors, and that same justification was also relied upon by the legislature in passing SB 254.“
—Simone Chriss, Southern Legal Counsel
This report was written by “experts” hired from outside the agency, working at the anti-LGBTQ hate group American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) in Gainesville, Florida – a fringe conservative religious group with 700 or fewer active members, not to be confused with the mainstream American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) which has over 67,000 members.
The American College of Pediatricians supports anti-LGBTQ conversion therapy and is closely tied to the conversion therapy group National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). ACPeds opposes marriage equality, LGBTQ parenting and adoption, all gender-affirming treatments and social transition, birth control, no-fault divorce, and abortion in all circumstances. In fact, this hate group has declared itself the enemy of most Americans and our country’s most important and cherished institutions:
“Threats to the College include the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), and the LGBTQ lobbying body, as well as mainstream medicine, psychology, academia, media, corporate America and nominal Christians, churches and organizations.”
—American College of Pediatricians 2017 board meeting minutes (WIRED.com, Doctors Behind Mifepristone Ban Called ‘Christians’ a Top Threat)
ACPeds leaders, committee members, and affiliates – including Quentin Van Meter, Andre Van Mol, Paul Hruz, and Michelle Cretella – were extensively consulted in crafting the Medicaid exclusion, providing “expert reports” and other materials intended to evaluate whether gender-affirming care should be covered. Internal documents from AHCA during the development of these reports even included dozens of pages of material apparently copied by Andre Van Mol from an earlier American College of Pediatricians internal document.
There’s one more problem: Quentin Van Meter, himself president of ACPeds, had already declared in court in November 2021 that their members all hold a fixed and unalterable commitment against “[s]aying in their professional opinions that these gender intervention procedures are the standard of care, are safe, are beneficial, are not experimental, or should otherwise be recommended”.
So how could this private religious organization develop an objective and evenhanded evaluation of evidence on gender-affirming treatment for a state agency, if they already knew the conclusion they always reach?
It turns out that wasn’t a problem at all for the governor’s office, the Florida Department of Health, state surgeon general Joseph Ladapo, or AHCA: documents revealed in court filings show that these agencies had already met in April and had even prepared a “policy pathway” that would end in “Care Effectively Banned”.
As a result of this and other extraordinary acts of bad faith, the state is now embroiled in a lawsuit over the Medicaid coverage exclusion, with arguments recently closing in the trial.
It wasn’t the first time.
Leaders of ACPeds had previously been commissioned by the anti-LGBTQ conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) to “refute” our internationally accepted treatment standards, the WPATH Standards of Care (SOC). The ADF offered $10,000-15,000 to ACPeds, including Quentin Van Meter and Michelle Cretella, to produce a rebuttal of the SOC “for use in litigation”, noting that this “should also benefit many other allies at State and Federal Level”.
Cretella had previously described herself and Van Meter as “devout Catholics with a knowledge of and respect for the natural law”, declaring their religious intolerance of all LGBTQ youth and of the Enlightenment itself:
“Make no mistake that the non-heterosexualizing and transgendering of children is a grave evil with no basis in science. … This is the inevitable culmination of the hubris which gave birth to the Enlightenment; the hubris that claimed we could replace God with human reason alone and keep both objective science and morality intact.”
—Michelle Cretella, executive director of the American College of Pediatricians
(A quick refresher: the Enlightenment age introduced “a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as natural law, liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.“)
Working backward from their desired legal arguments, the ADF even asked ACPeds to find evidence for a number of blatant falsehoods wielded against our community and our healthcare. The ADF wanted it to be true that being trans is just a “phase” and, preposterously, even “a common stage” for all cisgender adolescents – a claim that props up the dehumanizing hoax that being transgender is a transmissible social disease:
“Substantiate that it is normal during adolescence for children to go through a phase when they identify (to some degree) with the opposite sex. It is inappropriate (and could have psychological, medical, other harms?) to interpret this common stage as gender identity confusion that warrants treating a child as the opposite sex (in language, dress, appearance, etc), and pursuing more drastic measures like hormone therapy and genital change surgery.”
—American College of Pediatricians internal document, “Transgender Research Requests” (October 5-6, 2018)
The ADF went on to ask ACPeds for a made-to-order argument supporting the desired conclusion that gender-affirming treatment is unhelpful or even harmful to trans people:
“For those who have undergone hormone therapy and genital change surgery, a paper that says they are no happier (and perhaps worse off if the research supports it) even though they took these drastic measures.”
Note that ADF did not ask ACPeds to look for any research supporting the possibility that we are better off with gender-affirming care. Less than four years later, leaders of the American College of Pediatricians provided this legal product to their next customer: the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration.
Because of AHCA’s predetermined conclusion against gender-affirming care, and because of leaders of the American College of Pediatricians and others who served our state agencies a made-to-order right-wing argument in the guise of “professional medical standards”, thousands of trans adults in Florida are now being forcibly medically detransitioned by the provisions of SB 254.
What can we do for trans Floridians today?
Trans people are here in Florida for the long term: a mass exodus of 100,000 people and their families is not on the table, and we refuse to allow Florida to make us refugees within our own country. We know what’s needed in Florida to sustain a permanent transgender community through this crisis and beyond.
Those wishing to materially help trans people and our providers in Florida, as directly and immediately as possible, should donate to individual trans Floridians in need of help, and to our local gender clinics and nurse practitioners who are facing an unprecedented attack on their practices. Tens of thousands of trans people in Florida will continue to need routine healthcare such as:
Gender-affirming primacy care
Counseling, psychotherapy, psychiatric care and other mental health services
Assessment of gender concerns and referral letters for starting gender-affirming treatment
Blood tests for routine monitoring when starting or resuming gender-affirming hormone therapy
We currently recommend donating to SPEKTRUM Health Orlando and Melbourne, as this is the only fund we have been able to verify as allocating all donations directly to clinic operations and care for trans patients within Florida.
Donate here
We will continue listing additional funds as we assess their use and distribution of donations to the trans community and our providers. Gender Analysis is here in Orlando and ready to fight for the trans people of Florida. We’re not going anywhere.
* This includes: Florida (16,200 trans youth affected), Georgia (8,500), Idaho (1,000), Indiana (4,100), Iowa (2,100), Kentucky (2,000), Mississippi (2,400), Missouri (2,900), Montana (500), Nebraska (1,200), North Dakota (500), South Dakota (500), Tennessee (3,100), Utah (2,100), and West Virginia (700), totaling 47,800 trans youth affected by current bans (Herman et al., June 2022).
Note: Trans youth care bans in Alabama and Arkansas have been stayed pending appeal. Oklahoma’s trans youth care ban is subject to a binding non-enforcement agreement as of May 18, 2023 (Movement Advancement Project, May 28, 2023).
A Zinnia Jones special project.
Donate to support Florida’s gender clinics!
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Dear Reader;
Thank you for visiting this post today.
Please return for the next episode.
Thank you to the Resources who contribute to this page.
Acknowledgement and credit goes to those who create their news reporting, social media content, essays, and images provided for you here.
Please take note of the specific and the random memes and screen print images that may be attached to this article, that I present throughout this web-site. They add to the essence of this post
Please visit those references when I add them to these essays. The contributors work hard and tirelessly to bring about sense from the non-sense.
These posts being Public, I permit you to Share these contents at your own web-site or Social Media, with appropriate crediting.
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Thank you to T-central.blogspot.com for listing my ‘Slim and Me’ web-site with them. Please check them out for plenty of good resources.
(https://T-central.blogspot.com)
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This ‘SlimAndMe’ web-site is my primary Internet presence. You can occasionally read an alternate, abbreviated version of this post at my social media page:
(https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3121613181472859&id=100008726227817&mibextid=Nif5oz)
Sharon Nichols
24 May 2023
(https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3124840544483456&id=100008726227817&mibextid=Nif5oz)
Sharon Nichols
30 May 2023
Here are a collection of Trans and LGBT Pride Month memes and screen prints:
(https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3126651340969043&id=100008726227817)
(https://www.facebook.com/100008726227817/posts/3126651340969043/)
Sharon Nichols
1 Jun 2023
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Additional Resources:
1.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Arondeus)
Willem Arondéus (22 August 1894 – 1 July 1943) was a Dutch artist and author who joined the Dutch anti-Nazi resistance movement during World War II. He participated in the bombing of the Amsterdam public records office to hinder the Nazi German effort to identify Dutch Jews and others wanted by the Gestapo. Arondéus was caught and executed soon after his arrest. Yad Vashem recognized Arondéus as Righteous Among the Nations.
Arondéus was openly gay before the war and defiantly asserted his sexuality before his execution. His final words were: “Tell the people that homosexuals are not by definition weak.”
Early life
Willem Johan Cornelis Arondéus was born in Naarden, as the youngest son of an Amsterdam fuel trader.[1][2] His parents were Hendrik Cornelis Arondéus and Catharina Wilhelmina de Vries. He started working as an illustrator, designer of posters and tapestries and a painter. In 1923 he was commissioned to paint a large mural for Rotterdam City Hall.[1] During that same period, he illustrated poems by J. H. Leopold, Pieter Cornelis Boutens and Martinus Nijhoff. He admired the older Dutch designer Richard Roland Holst, as can be seen in his work. He did not attain much fame and lived in impoverished circumstances.
Around 1935, he gave up visual arts and became an author. The poems and stories he had written in the 1920s went unpublished, but in the year 1938 he published two novels, Het Uilenhuis (‘The Owls House’) and In de bloeiende Ramenas (‘In the Blossoming Winter Radish’), both illustrated with designs by Arondéus himself. The year 1939 saw the publication of his best work, Matthijs Maris: de tragiek van den droom (‘The Tragedy of the Dream’), a biography of the painter Matthijs Maris, who was a brother of the Dutch artists Jacob and Willem Maris. Two years later, Figuren en problemen der monumentale schilderkunst in Nederland (‘Figures and Problems of Monumental Painting in the Netherlands’) was published, again with designs by the author. At that date, however, Arondéus was already involved with the Dutch resistance movement.
Resistance movement
In 1942, Arondéus started an underground periodical called the Brandarisbrief. In 1943, the Brandarisbrief merged with another publication called De Vrije Kunstenaar. Through the merger, Arondéus met Gerrit van der Veen, the editor of De Vrije Kunstenaar.[2] In the resistance, van der Veen specialized in forging identity cards.[2] As a result, Arondéus also became involved in creating forged documents,[1][2] along with lesbian resistant Frieda Belinfante.[3] A major detriment to the success of these forgeries was the Municipal Office for Population Registration as its existence made the forgeries less useful, since their legitimacy could be checked against the registration lists and determined to be fakes. Arondéus and van der Veen, along with a number of associates, developed a plan to destroy the registration office.[2]
Their attack, which took place on 27 March 1943,[1][2] was partially successful, and they managed to destroy 800,000 identity cards (15% of the records[4]), and retrieve 600 blank cards and 50,000 guilders. The building was blown up and no one was caught on the night of the attack. However, due to an unknown betrayer, Arondéus was arrested on 1 April 1943.[1] Arondéus refused to give up the rest of his team but his notebook was found, and as a result, a majority of the group were also arrested.[2] Belifante was the sole person from the group to have survived, forcing her to take on a man’s identity and go undercover.[5]
On 18 June 1943, Arondéus was tried and sentenced to death, along with 13 other men who participated. Two of the group received clemency, but the others were executed on 1 July 1943.[1][2] Arondéus pleaded guilty and took the full blame, which may be why two young doctors were spared from execution and given custodial sentences instead. Before his execution, Arondéus made a point of ensuring the public would be aware that he and two other men in the group, Bakker and Brouwer, were gay, asking either a friend or his lawyer (accounts vary) to: “Tell the people that homosexuals can be brave!”[6]
Legacy
In 1945, after the liberation of the Netherlands, Arondéus’s family was awarded a posthumous medal by the Dutch government in his honour.[1] In 1984, he was awarded the Resistance Memorial Cross.[2] On 19 June 1986, Yad Vashem recognized Arondéus as Righteous Among the Nations.[2]
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2.
(https://www.texastribune.org/2022/12/14/ken-paxton-transgender-texas-data/)
Texas attorney general’s office sought state data on transgender Texans
The behind-the-scenes effort by Ken Paxton’s office to obtain data on how many Texans had changed their gender on their licenses came as he and other Republican leaders in the state have been publicly marshaling resources against transgender Texans.
MOLLY HENNESSY-FISKE,
THE WASHINGTON POST
DEC. 14, 2022
9 AM CENTRAL
HOUSTON — Employees at the Texas Department of Public Safety in June received a sweeping request from Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office: to compile a list of individuals who had changed their gender on their Texas driver’s licenses and other department records during the past two years.
“Need total number of changes from male to female and female to male for the last 24 months, broken down by month,” the chief of the DPS driver license division emailed colleagues in the department on June 30, according to a copy of a message obtained by The Washington Post through a public records request. “We won’t need DL/ID numbers at first but may need to have them later if we are required to manually look up documents.”
After more than 16,000 such instances were identified, DPS officials determined that a manual search would be needed to determine the reason for the changes, DPS spokesperson Travis Considine told The Post in response to questions.
“A verbal request was received,” he wrote in an email. “Ultimately, our team advised the AG’s office the data requested neither exists nor could be accurately produced. Thus, no data of any kind was provided.”
Asked who in Paxton’s office had requested the records, he replied: “I cannot say.”
The behind-the-scenes effort by Paxton’s office to obtain data on how many Texans had changed their gender on their licenses came as the attorney general, Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republican leaders in the state have been publicly marshaling resources against transgender Texans.
Abbott signed a bill last year banning transgender youths from participating in school sports that align with their gender identity at K-12 public schools, and earlier this year he ordered the state to investigate the provision of gender-affirming care as potential child abuse. State lawmakers have already proposed more than a dozen anti-LGBTQ measures ahead of the next legislative session in January, including criminalizing gender-affirming care and banning minors at drag shows.
Public records obtained by The Post do not indicate why the attorney general’s office sought the driver’s license information. But advocates for transgender Texans say Paxton could use the data to further restrict their right to transition, calling it a chilling effort to secretly harness personal information to persecute already vulnerable people.
“This is another brick building toward targeting these individuals,” said Ian Pittman, an Austin attorney who represents Texas parents of transgender children investigated by the state. “They’ve already targeted children and parents. The next step would be targeting adults. And what better way than seeing what adults had had their sex changed on their driver’s licenses?”
Alexis Salkeld Garcia, 34, of Austin, a trans woman who changed the gender listed on her driver’s license from male to female a year and a half ago, said the attorney general’s office inquiry made her feel “terrified.”
“It’s very specifically targeted, and the one person I don’t want knowing about my gender status is Ken Paxton,” said Salkeld Garcia, a software engineer who worries state officials might try to switch the gender listed on her driver’s license back to male.
“I don’t want a cop pulling me over and knowing I’m trans. That is why I changed my gender marker extremely quickly” after transitioning, she said.
Paxton’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
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3.
Attorney General Bailey Launches Tip Line for Reports of Questionable Gender Transition Interventions
Mar 23, 2023, 11:26 AM
AG Bailey
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – In an effort to protect children, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced today that his office has launched an online form where those who have experienced harm from gender transition interventions or witnessed troubling practices at transition clinics in Missouri can submit their concerns. This tip line stems from an investigation that Attorney General Bailey launched into a St. Louis pediatric transgender center that has been accused by a whistleblower of using experimental drugs on children, distributing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without individualized assessment, and even giving children these life-altering drugs without parental consent.
“As Attorney General, I want Missouri to be the safest state in the nation for children. After receiving an alarming affidavit from a credible witness on child abuses allegedly occurring within a pediatric transgender clinic in St. Louis, I knew we had to take action and look into these allegations,” said Attorney General Bailey. “To that end, I have set up a tip line that parents can use to tell their stories as my office continues to investigate whether the Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital has broken the law. No stone will be left unturned during the course of this investigation.”
Victims or their parents are encouraged to reach out to the Attorney General’s Office if they believe that they or someone they know have been subject to illegal or abusive behavior surrounding gender transition intervention procedures.
The form to submit concerns can be found here:
https://ago.mo.gov/file-a-complaint/transgender-center-concerns
Information on Attorney General Bailey’s ongoing investigation into the St. Louis transgender pediatric clinic can be found here:
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4.
(https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/6-may-1933-looting-of-the-institute-of-sexology/)
6 MAY 1933:
LOOTING OF THE INSTITUTE OF SEXOLOGY
On 6 May 1933, the Institute of Sexology, an academic foundation devoted to sexological research and the advocacy of homosexual rights, was broken into and occupied by Nazi-supporting youth. Several days later the entire contents of the library were removed and burned.
The institute was initially occupied by The German Student Union, who were a collective of Nazi-supporting youth. Several days later, on 10 May, the entire contents of the library were removed to Berlin’s Bebelplatz Square. That night, along with 20,000 other books across Germany, they were publicly burned in a symbolic attack by Nazi officials on their enemies.
Book burning after looting of the Institute of Sexology
Founded in 1919, the institute had been set up by Magnus Hirschfeld, a world-renowned expert in the emerging discipline of sexology. During its existence, thousands of patients were seen and treated, often for free. The Institute also achieved a global reputation for its pioneering work on transsexual understanding and calls for equality for homosexuals, transgender people and women. Hirschfield himself was a passionate advocate for homosexual rights and had long appealed for the repeal of Paragraph 175, the law that criminalised homosexuality in Germany.
Jewish, gay and outspokenly liberal, Hirschfeld was an obvious target for the Nazis, and the seizure and destruction of the institute on 6 May took place only three months after Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany. During the attack and subsequent book burning, Hirschfeld was working in Paris. He saw the burning of his own library in a news report at the cinema. Among the texts thrown onto the bonfire at the Bebelplatz was Heinrich Heine’s Almansor, in which the author noted:
‘Where they burn books, in the end they will burn humans too’.
After the attack on the institute the Nazis continued their persecution of gay men by expanding and enforcing legislation that criminalised homosexuality. In 1935, just weeks after the death of Hirschfeld in Paris, Paragraph 175 was redrafted to prohibit all forms of male homosexual contact. In total, around 50,000 gay men were detained under these draconian laws. Once confined in jail, they were routinely exposed to inhumane treatment for their sexuality. Around 10,000 to 15,000 were also deported to concentrations camps, where many were forced to wear a pink triangle, and subjected to castration and medical experimentation. Over half of these prisoners would die from the extreme conditions they were subjected to in the camps. Even after the end of the war, Paragraph 175 was not repealed and many gay men remained in prison for years to come.
Rudolf Brazda was the last known concentration camp survivor deported specifically for homosexuality. He endured 32 months of forced labour.
NAZI PERSECUTION
Learn more about the Nazis’ persecution of groups they believed threatened their ideal of a ‘pure Aryan race’, including gay, disabled and Roma people.
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Please read this important Additional Resource:
(https://theconversation.com/how-the-nazis-destroyed-the-first-gay-rights-movement-80354)
How the Nazis destroyed the first gay rights movement
While these developments didn’t mean the end of centuries of intolerance, the 1920s and early ‘30s certainly looked like the beginning of the end. On the other hand, the greater “out-ness” of gay and trans people provoked their opponents.
A French reporter, bemoaning the sight of uncloseted LGBTQ people in public, complained, “the contagion … is corrupting every milieu.” The Berlin police grumbled that magazines aimed at gay men – which they called “obscene press materials” – were proliferating. In Vienna, lectures of the “Scientific Humanitarian Committee” might be packed with supporters, but one was attacked by young men hurling stink bombs. A Parisian town councilor in 1933 called it “a moral crisis” that gay people, known as “inverts” at that time, could be seen in public.
“Far be it from me to want to turn to fascism,” the councilor said, “but all the same, we have to agree that in some things those regimes have sometimes done good… One day Hitler and Mussolini woke up and said, ‘Honestly, the scandal has gone on long enough’ … And … the inverts … were chased out of Germany and Italy the very next day.”
The ascent of Fascism
It’s this willingness to make a blood sacrifice of minorities in exchange for “normalcy” or prosperity that has observers drawing uncomfortable comparisons between then and now.
In the 1930s, the Depression spread economic anxiety, while political fights in European parliaments tended to spill outside into actual street fights between Left and Right. Fascist parties offered Europeans a choice of stability at the price of democracy. Tolerance of minorities was destabilizing, they said. Expanding liberties gave “undesirable” people the liberty to undermine security and threaten traditional “moral” culture. Gay and trans people were an obvious target.
What happened next shows the whiplash speed with which the progress of a generation can be thrown into reverse.
The nightmare
One day in May 1933, pristine white-shirted students marched in front of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Research – that safe haven for LGBTQ people – calling it “Un-German.” Later, a mob hauled out its library to be burned. Later still, its acting head was arrested.
When Nazi leader Adolph Hitler needed to justify arresting and murdering former political allies in 1934, he said they were gay. This fanned anti-gay zealotry by the Gestapo, which opened a special anti-gay branch. During the following year alone, the Gestapo arrested more than 8,500 gay men, quite possibly using a list of names and addresses seized at the Institute for Sexual Research. Not only was Paragraph 175 not erased, as a parliamentary committee had recommended just a few years before, it was amended to be more expansive and punitive.
As the Gestapo spread throughout Europe, it expanded the hunt. In Vienna, it hauled in every gay man on police lists and questioned them, trying to get them to name others. The fortunate ones went to jail. The less fortunate went to Buchenwald and Dachau. In conquered France, Alsace police worked with the Gestapo to arrest at least 200 men and send them to concentration camps. Italy, with a fascist regime obsessed with virility, sent at least 300 gay men to brutal camps during the war period, declaring them “dangerous for the integrity of the race.”
The total number of Europeans arrested for being LGBTQ under fascism is impossible to know because of the lack of reliable records. But a conservative estimate is that there were many tens of thousands to one hundred thousand arrests during the war period alone.
Under these nightmare conditions, far more LGBTQ people in Europe painstakingly hid their genuine sexuality to avoid suspicion, marrying members of the opposite sex, for example. Still, if they had been prominent members of the gay and trans community before the fascists came to power, as Berlin lesbian club owner Lotte Hahm was, it was too late to hide. She was sent to a concentration camp.
In those camps, gay men were marked with a pink triangle. In these places of horror, men with pink triangles were singled out for particular abuse. They were mechanically raped, castrated, favored for medical experiments and murdered for guards’ sadistic pleasure even when they were not sentenced for “liquidation.” One gay man attributed his survival to swapping his pink triangle for a red one – indicating he was merely a Communist. They were ostracized and tormented by their fellow inmates, too.
The looming danger of a backslide
This isn’t 1930s Europe. And making superficial comparisons between then and now can only yield superficial conclusions.
But with new forms of authoritarianism entrenched and seeking to expand in Europe and beyond, it’s worth thinking about the fate of Europe’s LGBTQ community in the 1930s and ‘40s – a timely note from history as Germany approves same-sex marriage and on this first anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges.
In 1929, Germany came close to erasing its anti-gay law, only to see it strengthened soon thereafter. Only after a gap of 88 years are convictions under that law being annulled.
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More Additional Resources:
1.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933)
Hitler’s Enabling Act
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2.
(https://youtu.be/h8foOUPctfA)
Tony Guida
‘Lavender Scare ‘
Interview: 14 Jun 2019
With guest Josh Howard.
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3.
When LGBT was illegal.
A Stonewall Inn veteran recalls the riots that sparked an LGBTQ revolution
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4.
(https://fb.watch/barQDSp7-7/)
(https://fb.watch/barIjyiiJe/)
Liberal Redneck – Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” Bill
Trae Crowder
10 Feb 2022
Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill.
(https://fb.watch/barLmWBYUW/)
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5.
(https://fb.watch/b9kHgtNZ6H/)
Daily Show
11 Feb 2012
Freedom Convoy Compares Vax Mandates to Holocaust
(https://fb.watch/b9kRR6xT07/)
(https://fb.watch/b9kSQSY5OD/)
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6.
(https://youtu.be/BVUs4dS30c0)
PBS Frontline
Trump’s American Carnage #3910
Arizona PBS HD
ADD TO FAVORITES:
DESCRIPTION
From his first days as president to his last, how Trump stoked division, violence, and insurrection. Trump’s siege on his enemies, the media, and even the leaders of his own party, who for years ignored the warning signs of what was to come.
Broadcast In: ENGLISH
Duration: 0:56:46
HD
ADDITIONAL AIRINGS
3:00am, 02/02/2022 | Arizona PBS HD
SET A REMINDER
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‘Drumpf’s Presidency ended in a violent assault on American Democracy. Drumpf stood at the Capitol on his Inauguration, lighting the fires that would become the Insurrection. Elected leaders looked on – unable to stop Drumpf or unwilling to see the coming violence and the Insurrection. Carnage that Drumpf vowed to end was just beginning. ‘ ‘Drumpf stirred chaos and violence. Violence worked.
– Narration
‘WE are led by Stupid People! ‘
– Drumpf (his speech)
‘American people were angry. They saw Drumpf fighting for them. ‘
– Corey Lewendowski, R-Drumpf
‘Drumpf’s a Race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. Tell Drumpf to go to Hell. ‘
– Senator Lindsey Graham
‘We have a Con artist in Drumpf in the Republi-con Party. He’s made a career telling lies. ‘
– Senator Marco Rubio
‘Drumpf is a pathological liar. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. ‘
– Senator Rafael Cruz
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7.
John Oliver discusses Trans Rights, Trans children participation in school sports, ROGD, and other issues, Republi-cons and Christian Con-servatives opposed to the existence of Trans people.
(https://youtu.be/Ns8NvPPHX5Y)
Last Week Tonight
16 Oct 2202
Transgender Rights
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