Confronting a pair of dangerous arguments as trans people remain under attack

On protecting transgender people's lives and dignity in the face of this week; Matt Yglesias's "compromise"; and Jesse Singal, Michael Powell, and Kevin Drum's anti-advocacy cry.

On Monday, a federal appeals court held that the state of Alabama likely could make it a felony for anyone to prescribe or administer hormone therapy to transgender 18-year-olds as part of treatment for their gender dysphoria. As a result of the ruling, a longstanding injunction against that provision would end and Alabama could enforce its ban for now as litigation continues.

[Update, 6:15 p.m.: As this article was being written, a state court judge in Missouri, in a two-page opinion, denied a request to put that state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors on hold. The law will, absent other court action, go into effect in three days, on Monday, as reported by St. Louis Public Radio.]

Next Friday, a different federal appeals court will hear arguments over the constitutionality of Tennessee and Kentucky’s bans on gender-affirming medical care for minors. That court has already let those laws go into effect during the appeal.

Until this week, those bans had been losing in court. In fact, every federal district court to hear a case over these bans has halted enforcement of the laws. But, Monday’s appeals court ruling followed full argument and, while technically a ruling on a preliminary injunction, the primary component of that decision is the likelihood of the challengers’ success on the merits of their claim — and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that such claims are likely to fail. The fallout could include a reversal, at least temporarily, of injunctions against bans on gender-affirming medical care for minors in Florida and Georgia, as they are both within the Eleventh Circuit.

That doesn’t mean all hope is lost, not at all.

[Update, 6:45 p.m.: As this article was being written, a state court judge in Texas granted a request to put that state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors on hold for now in a seven-page ruling, as reported by the Texas Tribune.]

The Eleventh Circuit’s opinion ignored or downplayed much of the evidence that has been convincing to district court judges reviewing these cases, gave more credit to Alabama’s witnesses and evidence than other judges have given, and distinguished (read: ignored) key relevant cases in a manner that should not find success more broadly.

Nonetheless, the appeals court ruling — and the reality that goes along with it — is the context of this week.

The context of this year and last is that many states have passed similar bans, including four other states that, like Alabama, make the provision of such care a felony crime. In all, 22 states have passed such bans, although Arizona’s ban only includes surgical procedures, not hormone therapy.

As the Movement Advancement Project details it, “Bans on best-practice medical care represent one of the most extreme and coordinated political attacks on transgender people in recent years.”

The bigger picture might be even worse. According to the ACLU’s 2023 legislative tracker, 78 anti-LGBTQ bills have been passed into law this year across 22 states.

In Judge Barbara Lagoa’s opinion for the court in the Eleventh Circuit, she wrote that one of the plaintiffs, the mother of a transgender child, testified at trial that “she was afraid that her child would commit suicide if the [hormone therapy] treatments were no longer available.”

Over the next 33 pages, Lagoa explained why, in the court’s view, Alabama could nonetheless pass a law banning those treatments.

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The “compromise” argument

The same day that Lagoa issued that opinion for a three-Trump-appointee panel of the Eleventh Circuit, Matt Yglesias wrote a lengthy piece, ultimately, criticizing Democrats for being unwilling to “compromise” on transgender rights.

He goes through a bunch of moves to suggest that’s not what he’s doing, but when you brush away the filler, that is his argument — pointing to Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, and F.D.R.’s “compromises” as a model and arguing that today’s progressives and, increasingly, Democratic Party elites are “more interested in ideological purity and uncompromising moral stands.”

The problem with his argument is two-fold: first, he uses poor historical examples, in which the compromises were a matter of moving forward more slowly, and, second, he ignores the vast majority of the legislation being passed today, focusing solely on sports — and even framing that in an anti-trans way.

Yglesias writes of the civil rights movement, from F.D.R. forward as such:

Throughout it all, the civil rights movement was pressing for more, and there were always people urging them to be more moderate and more compromising, saying “you’re going too fast.” And they rejected that. But they also clearly weren’t totally uncompromising, either. They treated all kinds of half-measures as meaningful and lots of deeply flawed politicians as worthy of support. There was no categorical distinction between civil rights and economic issues; it was all politics.

This is setting up a false analogy. The proper analysis here is not the Civil Rights Era. This isn’t a matter of righteous questions about a too-slow forward movement. This is an issue of rapid backwards movement. Similar with his discussion of Howard Dean and civil unions in 2000 before Massachusetts became the first state with marriage equality in 2004. 1996’s Defense of Marriage Act, arguably, was a backward step, but it was putting in place limits against something — same-sex couples’ marriage rights — that were not legal in any state at the time. (This is relevant shortly.)

This leads to Yglesias’s second flaw. He ignores the key questions of the day, instead focusing solely on transgender people’s participation in school sports — which he characterizes as a view, from the perspective of a Texan, that “student athletes should play on chromosomally-appropriate sports teams.“

Of course, there was no reason why Yglesias had to describe even that issue in the way his hypothetical Texan might characterize it, but, putting that aside, he is ignoring far more damaging legislation and laws that are already causing significant harm.

Photo by Karollyne Videira Hubert on Unsplash

This is not simply about student athletes. This is about a decision to use the arm of the state (of several states) to pull back existing rights — in some cases criminalizing people for doing things that have been legal for decades and in others putting people’s professional licenses in jeopardy if they continue to exercise those rights.

This is about bans on transgender medical care as I’ve described — which are already reaching into adult care in Florida. This is about barring even discussion of LGBTQ lives in schools and public libraries. This is about forced outing of students exploring their gender identity to parents who might respond horribly. This is about people being banned from using restrooms in schools and in broader public spaces that correspond not only with their gender identity but also with their outward appearance.

Yglesias doesn’t address any of that because it’s much easier to see why this isn’t about not compromising on some idealistic policy desire. It’s about letting trans people live their lives. And, because he ignores it, he doesn’t need to explain how he would compromise on those issues.

Finally, Yglesias, even within his example, ignores that advocates and activists — long before right-wingers and then many so-called mainstream Republicans decided to make this an issue — had been engaged in compromises. Those compromises — laid out in detailed rules decided upon by sporting associations at all levels for when and under what requirements trans people could participate in sex-specific sporting events — had been established over decades, ever since Renee Richards successfully fought in court for the right to participate in the U.S. Open in August 1977.

Again, so much of this is about taking what were private, optional decisions and creating a statewide governmental requirement or ban — sometimes with criminal penalties attached.

All of that wasn’t enough, though, Yglesias has to utterly distort reality to explicitly blame progressives for this wave of anti-LGBTQ laws, writing that “if progressives take the view that identity issues are fundamental moral principles and are too important to brook any compromise, that encourages people with the non-progressive view to see it the same way.”

When, in reality, from before the Supreme Court even decided the marriage equality case of Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, right-wing forces had decided that they were going for transgender people next.

Eight years and one Donald Trump presidency later, including his judicial appointments, here we are.

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The anti-advocacy “argument”

And yet, in the face of all that, a trio of men on the internet Thursday decided to attack GLAAD — the LGBTQ media advocacy organization founded in 1985 — for … advocating.

Jesse Singal, who has established himself as one of the leading “just asking questions” journalists to push anti-transgender narratives from a claimed “unbiased” perspective; Michael Powell, who apparently was hired by The Atlantic this summer; and Kevin Drum, whose name I hadn’t heard for some time before Thursday, went on an irrational, uninformed, ignorant, and ultimately dangerous tirade about the advocacy organization.

Some of the arguments advanced by people like this — and by Singal and articles from the New York Times specifically — have been used by anti-trans lawmakers and others to justify their anti-trans legislation. Much has been written about that already. This is just addressing this week’s side-argument against pro-trans advocacy. It is, in its way, a potentially dangerous escalation of their efforts and I want to highlight it now.

Before we go further, let’s be clear: I do not always agree with GLAAD. Personally, I was quite frustrated when I found out that their letter about the New York Times‘s treatment of transgender issues was issued on the same day and in a way that allowed it to be conflated with a more narrow letter from former and current New York Times contributors (of which I was a signatory). That said, they’ve done a ton of great work and changed the way Americans see LGBTQ people. Literally.

So, what happened? The New York Times published another article that has drawn ire from GLAAD — and many others, including journalist Evan Urquhart for Assigned. GLAAD went back to the Times, as it had when it sent the letter, with a mobile billboard calling on the Times to “stop questioning trans people’s right to exist and to access medical care.”

Powell, however, decided to share with the world that he had no idea how to engage, as a journalist, with an advocacy organization, quote-retweeting GLAAD’s post and writing, “When working on 2022 article about transgender athletes & elite sports, I called GLAAD. Their officials tried to tell me who I should NOT interview and that I should not ‘platform’ tennis great and gay pioneer Martina Navratilova because her views ran counter to their line.”

Honestly, until I saw Singal backing him up, I just thought this was an embarrassing tweet and would have ignored it. But, since this went further, let’s be clear: Powell called an advocacy organization and a year later is complaining that the advocacy organization advocated.

Of course, he’s using Navratilova’s name and credentials to suggest that he and Navratilova get to decide GLAAD’s mission — and that that mission is apparently to promote and urge the platforming of every queer person in the world.

That is either incredibly uniformed or obnoxiously manipulative.

Powell called up an organization whose mission includes supporting accurate reporting about transgender people in the media, and (per Powell’s claim) that organization urged, as part of that discussion, that a person who has regularly expressed anti-trans views should not be platformed. That … makes sense.

Powell, as a journalist and not an employee of GLAAD, could then take that information and do what he wanted with it, keeping in mind their advocacy.

Enter Singal.

“I am confident more stories will come out about GLAAD's behind-the-scenes efforts to manipulate journalists and skew coverage with false and exaggerated claims. As an activist group, that's their right, but it's also our right to expose them and call them out for it,” he wrote in amplification of Powell’s claim.

This is just the same thing with the added layer of pushback and likely with knowledge of the fact that he knows he has a dedicated anti-trans audience now who might not otherwise had seen Powell’s boogeyman claim. Notably, it suggests that he might be the one publishing “more stories” about advocacy by an advocacy organization. At the least, he is certainly encouraging other like-minded individuals to do so with this.

Finally, enter Drum, who replied to Singal.

“GLAAD's aggressiveness is fairly typical of trans activists, isn't it?”

On Monday, a federal appeals court held that the state of Alabama likely could make it a felony for anyone to prescribe or administer hormone therapy to transgender 18-year-olds as part of treatment for their gender dysphoria.

The idea that driving by The New York Times building in Manhattan with a mobile billboard and otherwise doing their jobs merits an accusation of “aggressiveness” in the midst of such reality is, as I wrote last night, disgusting.