Overlapping rainbow labels (DK image library, uploaded by Onomastic)
Mother Jones dropped a crucial analysis this week:
Lede:
Hours after being sworn in for a second term, President Donald Trump used his constitutionally vested powers to define “man” and “woman.” In an executive order, he said his administration would recognize only two immutable, biological sexes, determined at conception, in the name of “defending women” from a rising scourge: “gender ideology”.…
Over the last decade, the fear of “gender ideology” has been used to mobilize right-wing movements from Argentina to Poland to Turkey. Now it’s a part of American parlance, too. It appeared in federal legislation in 2022, and Republicans have wielded it ever since to attack health care, picture books, and pronouns.
Mother Jones associate editor Schuyler Mitchell traces the poisonous phrase, "gender ideology" currently to be found all over right-wing propaganda in the U S. and elsewhere, way back to conservative Latin American Catholicism in the 1990s. Then,
In a 2004 letter to bishops, the Vatican decried homosexuality, railed against feminists for making women “adversaries” of men, and reaffirmed binary masculinity and femininity as the purest expression of God’s love. Any subversion of traditional gender roles wasn’t merely sinful. It wrought a culture, the Vatican said, that corrupted society at large. [Emphasis added]
In the same way, transphobes throughout the U.S. and UK are selling trans existence as a subversive idea bundled with other ideas they dislike. And as with the election-season charge that "Haitians are eating the cats," and the false claim that ICE is targeting dangerous criminal immigrants, right-wing mouthpieces keep trying to tie trans people to high-profile shooting incidents. Any group on Project 2025's "little list" is vulnerable to parallel treatment. We're all in this together.
I'd love to quote more, but respecting "fair use," will just encourage reading the whole.
To those readers who aren't trans, and may perceive trans issues as taking up too much space: I am sorry. Trans people are in moment-to-moment existential crisis, much like immigrants, not knowing what rug-pull will happen next but knowing our government wants them not to exist and is in a hurry to make that happen. The rest of us may have a little longer.
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Every single hate movement does this. They record the crimes of a targeted minority to further scapegoat them and push propaganda. Nazis did it with Jews. American white supremacists do it with Black folks. This is no different.
It's eliminationist propaganda.
— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) 2025-11-19T02:55:59.355Z
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They get the mainstream to play along by giving this obviously bs pretense about concern with crime statistics despite trans folks being such a small portion of the population to meaningfully affect it. Not to mention, the existence of trans men (which they don't acknowledge) cancels out overall.
— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) 2025-11-19T03:02:01.731Z
Random example of multivalent hate, one of far too many:
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NEW: Evanston has released video + reports surrounding a 10/31 incident where a CBP agent threatened to shoot people + another beat a handcuffed man.
We found some disturbing X posts from one of the feds, also seen in other viral videos. His name is Timothy Donahue, and it's now public record:
— unraveled (@unraveledpress.com) 2025-11-20T20:28:14.527Z
Both federal agents are seen in social media videos from the crash behaving aggressively, with Donahue pointing his service weapon at unarmed bystanders, and Parsons punching a handcuffed man on the ground. Agents reportedly also pepper sprayed onlookers, and detained three people in total before taking them to the Chicago FBI field office and then releasing them without charges
Unraveled has verified a social media account on X...belonging to Donahue. While not a prolific user, he has used the account to make disparaging remarks about women and trans people, share racist imagery, and cheer on hate crimes.
It all connects.
INTERRUPTION: Trying out the idea of a regular 7:30 p.m. Sunday column on LGBTQIA+ issues. This is the third of these experimental posts. Comments, additions, and other contributors welcome!
Next Sunday, Nov. 30, 7:30 p.m., will be as usual for the last Sunday of the month, LGBTQIA+ Literature. An amazing book about Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and his milieu in the Weimar Republic. Hirschfeld is best known today for his ground-breaking work with trans people, but it was so much more. Hope to do the book, and its subject, justice.
Cases in point: the legal art of self-defense
From them.us:
David Maltinsky, a former operations specialist who had worked at the FBI since 2009, was fired three weeks before he was set to become a special agent, according to a lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C. district court on Wednesday. Maltinsky is...alleging violations of his freedom of speech and right to equal protection under the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments.
...Maltinsky received a letter signed by Patel that said he had “exercised poor judgment with an inappropriate display of political signage” while working in the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office (LAFO). The only such “signage” in his office, Maltinsky claims, was a Progress Pride flag that was flown at the LAFO in 2021. The flag was given to him by his superiors in recognition of his past work with the Bureau Equality Committee, for which he received several internal awards, according to the suit. Maltinsky was then allegedly asked to sign a statement falsely acknowledging that he had resigned, which he refused.
This is indeed reminiscent of the "Lavender Scare" of the 1950s, in which right-wing politicians had civil servants driven out of the governent and made unemployable for being LGBTQ, or merely for being suspected of being LGBTQ, or for simple association with LGBTQ people, much as they did with alleged Communists...and indeed, associating these identities with Communism. (And here we go again.) The FBI only lifted its ban in 1995.
Everything connects.
Another necessary case of self-defense:
“What I’m here to talk about is the child abuse, grooming, conditioning, and indoctrination by sexual predators disguised as teachers and staff at Glen Cove Elementary,” [defendent Damon] Gettier said.
“We have five plus staff and faculty conditioning, grooming, and abusing children, and no one says a thing… The teachers and staff need to teach their curriculum and not their woke, progressive ideologies,” he said...
Glen Cove Elementary School Assistant Principal Tobie McPhail, who filed the lawsuit last month, referred to Gettier’s claims as false and harmful, having caused her emotional distress and damaged her career.
Btw, this was the Roanoke County, Va., school board. It's in the southwest part of the state, very "Red." As of 2020, about 97,000 people lived in Roanoke County (growing), 82% of them white (shrinking).
Other parents spoke at the meeting against LGBTQ+ people, but Gettier was the only one who named specific members of the staff and accused them of grooming children.
Self-defense of another sort:
As the 2024 presidential election ramped up,...Robyn McCutcheon saw the writing on the wall. The retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer applied for permanent residency in Kazakhstan, where she had served for many years and still had friends....
McCutcheon did not come out to State Department colleagues until she was in her fifties....There was...no way to know how anyone would react or if she could even keep her job.
In fact, when rumors of her identity began to swirl, she lost an assignment in Moscow. Her superiors felt information on her gender identity (which was available in her recent divorce filings) would make her vulnerable to Russian blackmail.
Now she is prepared to live in exile, perhaps indefinitely. Altogether one heck of a story.
But those still here in the States may face barriers to leaving at all:
Already, the Trump administration declared passports must show gender as registered at birth.
A convo here further clarifies the problems:
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This is basically making it so trans people who were adopted and had their birth records sealed cannot obtain a passport at all. This will also ensnare cis people who were adopted and have clerical errors on their records or are suspected of being trans.
— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) 2025-11-18T18:45:34.038Z
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You get a new birth certificate when you’re adopted, though. It has your new name and new parents. Both my kiddos got them. Only their originals are court sealed.
Now, because he was born in TX, my son can’t get his gender changed, just his name.
— Reese Ourso (@reeseourso.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T19:06:09.075Z
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So what even happens if you *do* have an original certificate but the information on it doesn't match your legal name, state issued ID, or social security information.
This is designed to ensnare *any* person they suspect of being trans who has an amended birth certificate.
— Power, The 📠🎄💃🏃♀️➡️🍷🏃♀️➡️🤮 (@agp.ceo) 2025-11-20T01:41:08.132Z
Right. And it will also "ensnare" cis adoptees whose original documents are sealed or otherwise unobtainable, even if a replacement was issued. Such a level of f*ckery. The use of double-binds is consistent with how they treat immigrants, of course.
Meanwhile, some electoral politics:
Maine:
Jordan Wood, candidate for Congress from Maine, was busy last week switching gears from a crowded field challenging Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) for her Senate seat to becoming the presumptive frontrunner to represent Maine’s 2nd congressional district.
He brings over $1 million to the fight from his Senate campaign.
And then there is:
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"to run for Congress in New York’s Eighth Congressional District, which is currently represented by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)"
On the other hand, reportedly neither Mamdani nor AOC are in his corner, so....
www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/11/gay-...
— Clio2 (@clio2.bsky.social) 2025-11-23T19:59:34.160Z
...IDK how significant this candidacy is likely to be.
A couple reactions to the story, on Bluesky, took me a little aback.
One person (while posting a link to the LGBTQ Nation piece):
But why are we focusing on him being gay? He's much more than gay.He's 27 yo. A Black/ African Caribbean. And he's Socialist Democrat.
[The article says all that!]
And then her first commenter goes:
Cause LGBT nation is covering the story but I agree
["Don't mention the war!"] *
*If you know Fawlty Towers
Oh, well, someone is always being weird on the internet.
Solidarity
Multiple cisgender women have turned down spots on a list of the top female cyclists in the U.K. because the organization compiling the list banned trans women.
BAM!
We're all in this together.
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Trans people have exhaustively detailed the links between the anti-trans and anti-abortion movements, we warned that transphobia was a wedge issue for the religious right to roll back women's rights, only for us to be ignored, and of course UK TERFs are setting their sights on abortion.
— Casey Explosion (@caseyexplosion.bsky.social) 2025-11-21T12:55:19.278Z
International affairs
As you know, this last Thursday was Transgender Day of Remembrance.
Dr. Christy Pérez reminds us that the names so solemnly recited are an undercount.
The candles burn brightly in New York and Los Angeles, but their light too often stops at the border.
The silence that follows is not neutral; it is a form of colonial violence in death that mirrors the erasure trans people endure in life.
When we examine how these lists are assembled, we begin to see the problem. In many countries, identifying a victim as trans can endanger surviving friends or family. Police reports often misgender victims. Journalists lack the vocabulary (or the courage) to call transphobia by its name. English-language media rarely translate stories published in Spanish, Portuguese, Tagalog, or Swahili. The result is that when TDOR arrives, we recite only a fraction of the truth.
A moving testament and needed corrective.
More connectivities
Pardon, please if some of this seems random. I find it rather difficult to organize all this material on a phone about 2 inches (poetic license) wide. Brainy as you are, I'm sure no one needs it done perfectly. :-)
Health care
Three years after the release of the first comprehensive roadmap to address difficulties faced by family caregivers of older adults and people with disabilities, the Trump administration has quietly erased transgender caregivers and caregivers of color from a list of underserved or hard-to-reach populations, The 19th has exclusively learned.
Dozens of changes were quietly made this year to the National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers, which was first released in 2022 after years of work by government officials and community stakeholders.
Vaccines
More Drumphemism:
.
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The HHS report on gender affirming care released it's updated report showing they stacked its authors with anti-trans hate-group affiliated members, several of whom aren't even doctors with any sort of clinical experience. They selected their own ideologically friendly peer reviewers.
It's a joke.
— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) 2025-11-19T20:45:27.244Z
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The Washington Post Editorial Board is literally praising Trump's pseudoscientific "review" which deadnames trans people and which was constructed by numerous hate group talking heads as being good science.
God how far it has fallen.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
— Erin Reed (@erininthemorning.com) 2025-11-20T19:11:30.202Z
Hater of the Week
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"I just say, ‘You know, it’s hard for me to care about Riley Gaines tying for fifth when my swim coach is accused of raping my teammates.”
Gaines never talks about her teammates who were raped by her coach that she supported.
www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) 2025-11-20T14:17:45.814Z
The parlous state of the UK
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The UK is considering a policy that would effectively segregate trans people from society. It would bar trans people from "single sex spaces" even when they use the facility of their sex assigned at birth.
This is a full on policy of segregation without even the benefit of separate facilities.
— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) 2025-11-19T22:29:20.514Z
In other words, you are damned if you do and damned if you don't.
And New Zealand now going along :-(
Despite everything, let us demand a little frivolity when we can get it. Frivolous poll follows (based on a comment last time):
