More than 100 transgender men have entered the Miss Italy pageant this week, according to an activist leading a protest against recent comments by the pageant’s organizer, who said trans women wouldn’t be allowed to compete.
The comments came after another European pageant, Miss Netherlands, crowned its first transgender winner, Rikkie Valerie Kollé, this month. About a week later, Patrizia Mirigliani, the official organizer of Miss Italy, told an Italian radio station that Miss Italy wouldn’t allow trans women to compete.
“Lately, beauty contests have been trying to make the news using strategies that I think are a bit absurd,” Mirigliani said, according to the Italian news outlet Il Primato Nazionale.
She added that Miss Italy has historically allowed only people who were assigned female at birth to enter, “probably because, even then, it was foreseen that beauty could undergo modifications, or that women could undergo modifications, or that men could become women,” according to Il Primato Nazionale.
Trans activist Federico Barbarossa, who lives in Bari, a town in southern Italy, said that he became angry when he saw Mirigliani’s comments but that he was “also kind of amused by it, because I was like, ‘Yeah, well, I was assigned female at birth, but they would reject me because I look like a boy, and they would consider me as a boy,’” he said in an interview with NBC News.
Barbarossa decided to enter the pageant under his deadname, or the name he was given at birth, as a form of protest in solidarity with trans women. Barbarossa shared a screenshot of an email he received confirming his registration on Instagram, and then the local LGBTQ nonprofit group he works with, Mixed LGBTQIA+, shared his entry on Facebook with a statement encouraging other trans men to do the same.
The campaign went viral online, Barbarossa said, and he estimates that more than 100 trans men have entered the pageant so far. He said some told him they haveeven been called to selections, which is the next step in the process to find contestants across the country.
Miss Italy organizers “really have to go through every single application,” Barbarossa said. He hopes the protest will “maybe lead them to think better next time.”
“I like to think I’m a little part of Italy’s progress in this sense,” Barbarossa said.
Mirigliani and Miss Italy organizers didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
More beauty pageants have started to include trans women in recent years. In 2018, Angela Ponce became the first trans woman to compete in the Miss Universe pageant. Then, in 2021, Kataluna Enriquez became the first trans woman to compete in the Miss USA pageant after she was crowned Miss Nevada. Some countries, such as Mexico and Thailand, have held separate beauty pageants for trans women.
Federico Barbarossa.Courtesy Federico Barbarossa.
Barbarossa said he thinks beauty pageants try to exclude trans women in part because they simply don’t understand them or have false ideas about what it means to be trans.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is investigating after a deputy threw a transgender man to the ground, punched him and held him down as the man called for help. During the encounter, which was caught on recently released surveillance video, the man could be heard telling the deputy that he couldn’t breathe and at one point said, “You’re going to kill me.”
Emmett Brock, 24, told NBC News he was driving home from his job as a teacher in February when he passed a deputy who appeared to be having a heated conversation with a woman on the side of the road. Brock said he gave the deputy the middle finger as he drove by, and that a patrol vehicle started following him, but the deputy never turned on the vehicle’s sirens or lights.
Emmett Brock.Courtesy Emmett Brock
He said the vehicle tailgated him through several blocks of a residential neighborhood, so he called 911 to ask if he was being pulled over even though there were no lights or sirens.
“I was told if there were no lights and sirens, then I wasn’t being pulled over and could continue to where I was going,” Brock said.
Brock pulled into a 7-Eleven in Whittier, a Los Angeles suburb, and Deputy Joseph Benza parked behind Brock’s vehicle, according to video from the store’s security cameras that Tom Beck, Brock’s attorney, provided to NBC News.
Brock exited his vehicle and, as he closed his car door, Benza said, “I stopped you,” the video shows. Brock responded, “No, you didn’t,” with the knowledge that he had called 911 to check, he said. But then he said the deputy’s hands were on him, and he immediately panicked and thought, “I’m going to die.”
Benza grabbed him, threw him to the ground and then held Brock for three minutes while repeatedly punching him in the head, the video shows.
“You’re going to kill me,” Brock is heard yelling. “You’re going to f—ing kill me. Help! Help! Help! I’m not resisting!”
Brock said he’s 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighs 115 pounds, and he estimated Benza is about 6 feet tall and 180 pounds.
“His entire body weight is on top of me, and he flipped me over and threw me on my head,” Brock said, adding that his glasses broke immediately. “I’ve never even been in a fight, I’ve never had a speeding ticket, nothing like that. So I’ve never been punched before, and to have these full-force blows from behind from this deputy that is so much bigger than me, it was just, there’s no way I’m getting out of this alive.”
After the struggle, Benza arrested Brock and put him in the patrol vehicle.
Benza said he pulled Brock over because there was an object hanging from his rearview mirror, and it appeared to obstruct the driver’s forward view in violation of a California code, according to an arrest report Beck provided to NBC News.
Benza wrote in the arrest report that he activated “my patrol vehicle overhead lights, which include a fixed forward-facing red lamp,” though the overhead lights were not on when Benza pulled into the 7-Eleven parking lot behind Brock, the video shows.
Benza wrote that he got out of his car and told Brock he “stopped (detained) him,”Brock said he didn’t, and “it appeared he was about to walk away from the car and myself.” He added that Brock’s “rejection of my traffic detention and his apparent intent to distance himself from his vehicle further raised safety concerns.”
“I know from my training and experience that those who possess contraband items inside vehicles commonly attempt to disassociate themselves from their vehicles when law enforcement is present,” Benza wrote.
Benza added that he feared Brock was going to punch him and that Brock “continuously tried to bite” him. He said he punched Brock “approximately eight times in rapid succession.”
“My punches had their intended effect,” Benza wrote, adding that Brock subsequently stopped trying to bite him and wrapped his arms around his own head.
Benza did not reply to a request for comment.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said in an emailed statement that it “takes all use of force incidents seriously.”
“The Department is investigating the information and allegations brought forward by Mr. Brock and his attorney,” the statement said. “Unfortunately, we cannot comment any further at this time due to the pending litigation in this matter.”
Brock was booked at the Norwalk Sheriff’s Station, which is part of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, where he said he told staff he is transgender.
“And the jailer began to just badger me with questions,” Brock said, including, “So, you’re actually a woman?” and “Do you have a penis? If you don’t have a penis, then you’re definitely a woman.”
“I’m seeing him get angrier and angrier every time I deny that I’m a woman,” Brock said. He feared the jail would increase his bail if he argued, so he decided to just nod his head and say “OK.” He added that the gender markers on all of his identity documents say male.
The male jail employee then brought in a female employee who told Brock she was going to need to “see everything,” Brock recalled. So she brought him to a nearby bathroom and he showed her his genitals and explained what surgeries he has had and the effects of testosterone before being placed in a women’s holding cell.
“I’m not sure what I could have shown her on my body that would have been enough for them,” Brock said. “I just felt so demeaned. I felt humiliated. I felt small. Here are these police officers, these sheriff’s deputies telling you to do something while you’re in their custody, and if you don’t want to make it worse for yourself, and you don’t want your bail to be higher and you don’t want to be stuck there longer, you have to comply with anything they say. You are completely powerless.”
The sheriff’s department did not respond to questions regarding Brock’s allegations.
Brock said he was booked on three felony charges of mayhem, resisting arrest and obstruction, along with a misdemeanor charge of failure to obey a police officer. He said he lost his teaching job three days later due to the pending charges and is still unemployed. He said his girlfriend and his parents have been supporting him, but that he is also accruing debt.
Prosecutors have since decided to pursue two misdemeanor charges of resisting arrest and battery on an officer, according to arrest records.
Brock said he has anxiety every time he drives his car, because he fears someone from the sheriff’s department will know the make and model of his car and pull him over. The arrest also took one of his greatest sources of fulfillment: his job. He worked as a 12th grade English teacher at an alternative school for at-risk youth.
“That was my self-worth. That’s where I got my fulfillment in life, was helping others, teaching these students and being there for them,” he said. “So when I lost that I just, that was my happiness, and it’s been a lot of depression and hopelessness.”
He said people have asked him if he regrets giving the deputy the middle finger as he drove by, but he said he doesn’t.
“I felt like that’s what I could do in that moment to stand up for that woman,” he said, adding that the deputy appeared to be harassing the woman. “I regret that he reacted so poorly and so angrily and then he beat me for that. But I don’t regret expressing my First Amendment right.”
As the country and world become more aware and accepting of LGBTQ identities, an increasing number of people are coming out as nonbinary, which means their gender identity is neither exclusively male nor female.
A Pew Research Center survey published last year found that about 1.6% of U.S. adults identify as transgender or nonbinary. Transgender means someone’s gender identity, or the personal sense of their gender, differs from the sex they were assigned at birth, which is based on their external sex characteristics.
Transgender can be thought of as an umbrella term, and nonbinary exists under that, though not all nonbinary people identify as transgender. Some nonbinary people also identify with other terms that describe identities outside of the male-female binary, such as genderfluid, genderqueer or bigender.
Younger adults are more likely than older adults to be trans or nonbinary. Pew found that 5.1% of adults under 30 are trans or nonbinary, including 2% who are a trans man or trans woman and 3% who are nonbinary.
Two national surveys of LGBTQ people ages 18 to 60 found that 11% of them identified as nonbinary, according to a June 2021 reportfrom the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA School of Law.
Though the term nonbinary has gained increasing mainstream recognition over the last decade, nonbinary people are not new or a trend. Out & Equal, a nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ workplace equality, created a resource that traces nonbinary identities back to 2000 BCE.
Different cultures also have their own terms for nonbinary identities, according to GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy group. Some Native American people, for example, use the term two-spirit to describe people who are neither exclusively men nor women.
Nonbinary people can use any personal pronoun, including “he” and “she.” Many use the gender-neutral pronoun “they,” and some use neopronouns, such as “xe,” “xir” and “xirs.”
According to a 2021 Pew survey, a quarter, or 26%, of Americans say they know someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns, up from 18% in 2018.
Nonbinary people can dress in various ways, and some will pursue social and/or medical transition, while others won’t. Nonbinary is also different from intersex, which refers to people who are born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that falls outside of what people would typically describe as male or female.
International Nonbinary Day is celebrated annually on July 14 and is an opportunity to honor and recognize the nonbinary community.
The day was first celebrated in 2012, after nonbinary writer Katje van Loon wrote a blog post suggesting the nonbinary community be honored on July 14, which falls halfway between International Women’s Day (March 8) and International Men’s Day (Nov. 19).
“We can feel invisible in a world that still hasn’t completely understood what we are. So it’s nice to have a day that recognises our existence,” Loon wrote. “I want people to be happy with themselves. And if having a day helps you be happy with yourself, that’s great. That is the best outcome I could have hoped for from that one-off blog post that I wrote 10 years ago.”
The Montana State Library Commission voted Tuesday to leave the American Library Association, the oldest and largest library association in the world, because the ALA’s president described herself as a “Marxist lesbian” in a social media post last year.
Emily Drabinski, who was elected president of the ALA in April 2022 and took office this month, celebrated her election in a social media post that has since been deleted.
“I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of @ALALibrary,” Drabinksi wrote in a tweet last year. “I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity! And my mom is SO PROUD I love you mom.”
During a meeting Tuesday, Tom Burnett, a member of the Montana State Library Commission, made a motion to “immediately withdraw” the state library from the ALA and send the association a letter to explain that “our oath of office and resulting duty to the Constitution forbids association with an organization led by a Marxist,” according to the Montana Free Press.
In a statement published on its website Thursday, the ALA — a nonpartisan nonprofit founded in 1876 — outlined its mission, described how its presidents are elected and noted that ALA’s operational decisions are “made by ALA staff leadership working with a full range of committees and advisory groups.”
It also described how the Montana State Library has benefited from ALA membership, including more than $218,000 in program grants over the past two years and a 24% increase in federal funding from 2019 to 2023.
“Despite the decision in Montana this week, ALA remains committed to providing essential support, resources, and opportunities for every library and library worker in every state and territory across the nation to help them better serve their communities,” the group said.
Drabinski did not immediately return a request for comment.
After about an hour of public comment Tuesday, the commission voted 5-1-1 in favor of the motion. Commission Chair Peggy Taylor abstained, and Commissioner Brian Rossmann, the only active librarian on the commission, cast the one opposing vote.
Dana Gonzalez, who spoke in favor of withdrawing from the ALA, said the commission “ought not promote, celebrate or support what scripture condemns” and then quoted Bible scriptures that she said condemned what Drabinski wrote in her tweet, according to the Daily Montanan.
Bozeman parent Cheryl Tusken also spoke in favor of the motion.
“I think this is a really good move to send a really clear signal to our national organizations that we are not in agreement with the direction they are taking these organizations,” Tusken said, according to the Montana Free Press.
Rossmann, who works at the Montana State University Library, said the ALA presidency is “largely a ceremonial role,” the Montana Free Press reported.
Susan Gregory, the director of the Bozeman Public Library, spoke in opposition to the measure. In her 40 years of involvement with the ALA, she said, she has never seen the organization provide a program or presentation about Marxism.
“We don’t leave the United States because we don’t like or agree with whomever the sitting President of the United States is,” Gregory said in a written statement to the commission. “I hope that the Montana State Library Commission will understand the critical importance of remaining in our professional association so that we know what is happening in the world, our country and neighboring states to improve public libraries.”
Last year, the Montana State Library Commission voted down a proposed logo that used rainbow colors because some members said it didn’t clearly convey the library’s work. During debate over the logo, multiple members who ultimately voted against it said it looked too similar to the LGBTQ Pride flag, the Montana Free Press reported. The commission subsequently adopted an alternate logowith an updated color scheme.
The commission’s actions are examples of a larger trend of libraries being pulled into the national debate over what information children can access freely at school or in libraries — particularly when that information includes LGBTQ people or themes.
Conservative advocacy groups and some elected officials have painted LGBTQ books and content in schools as “grooming,” using a decades-old false moral panic about LGBTQ people.
In the last few years, parents and local conservative advocacy groups have started asking for certain books to be removed completely from schools and public libraries. In its annual book censorship report, the ALA found that there was a 75% increase in the number of challenges against books between 2021 and 2022.
Of the 13 books that made the ALA’s “Most Challenged Books” list in 2022, seven — more than half — were challenged for having LGBTQ content.
Penguin Random House, authors, parents and a free speech group filed a lawsuit Wednesday against a Florida school district for removing 10 books related to race and the LGBTQ community after a high school teacher complained.
In addition to the publishing house, PEN America, a nonprofit group that advocates for free expression in literature, five authors whose books have been removed from the district, and two parents whose children go to school in the district filed the suit against the Escambia County School District and the Escambia County School Board in Pensacola, Florida.
“All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a memoir manifesto by LGBTQ activist George M. Johnson.Alamy Stock Photo
The plaintiffs alleged that the district and the board violated the First Amendment by “depriving students of access to a wide range of viewpoints, and depriving the authors of the removed and restricted books of the opportunity to engage with readers and disseminate their ideas to their intended audiences.”
They also argued that the removals violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment “because the books being singled out for possible removal are disproportionately books by non-white and/or LGBTQ authors, or which address topics related to race or LGBTQ identity.”
“This is no accident,” the suit alleged. “The clear agenda behind the campaign to remove the books is to categorically remove all discussion of racial discrimination or LGBTQ issues from public school libraries. Government action may not be premised on such discriminatory motivations.”
Neither the district nor the school board immediately responded to requests for comment. However, Bill Slayton, a member of the school board, told NBC News correspondent Antonia Hylton that he was surprised by the lawsuit because the school board and the superintendent have been following state law.
“We have been removing books that have been called inappropriate, pornography,” he said. “I guess I’m a little surprised because this is going on all over the state of Florida, not just here. My reaction is our procedures are following what we have been told we have to do.”
The plaintiffs allege a campaign to restrict access to books in the Escambia County School District began last May after Vicki Baggett, a language arts teacher at the district’s Northview High School, challenged “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky. Baggett expanded her effort in the fall and challenged more than 100 books for “questionable content,” prompting a book purge in the district, according to the Pensacola News Journal.
Baggett did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since last May, the district and the school board have removed or indefinitely restricted access to five books by the author plaintiffs: “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” by Sarah Brannen, “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson, “Two Boys Kissing” by David Levithan, “When Aidan Became a Brother” by Kyle Lukoff and “Out of Darkness” by Ashley Hope Pérez.
When Kyle Freels got off work Tuesday, he and his wife, Rene, drove from their home in Missouri across the Mississippi River to look at neighborhoods in Illinois. They also picked up three months’ worth of estrogen for their daughter, Chelsea, who is transgender.
The Freels are preparing to potentially leave St. Louis, where they moved 17 years ago just before Chelsea was born, due to the state’s repeated efforts to restrict the rights of trans people.
“I never thought we’d have to be refugees in the United States, but now we’re being forced out,” Kyle Freels said.
So far this year, Missouri lawmakers have introduced 48 bills targeting LGBTQ rights — the second highest number in the nation behind Texas — with nearly half of those restricting trans rights, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Kyle and Rene Freels moved to St. Louis 17 years ago, just before the birth of their daughter, Chelsea.Kyle Freels
In February, just as the state’s legislative session was starting and Missouri Republicans were filing bills to bar gender-affirming care for minors, Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced that he had started an investigation into the Transgender Center at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital, the state’s only multidisciplinary clinic for trans adolescents. The probe followed claims by Jamie Reed, a former case worker at the center, who alleged the facility was harming children by not conducting thorough mental health assessments before providing patients puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy, or HRT.
Reed’s allegations — outlined in an affidavit and an op-ed, both published on Feb. 9 — have become a flashpoint in the debate over transition-related care for minors, both in Missouri and nationwide. The week after Reed’s op-ed was published, state Sen. Mike Moon, a Republican, introduced a trio of bills to restrict such care and cited Reed’s allegations.Earlier this month, the Republican-led House passed a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors.
“Sex changes and little kids are two things that should never go together,” Rep. Brad Hudson, the Republican who introduced the recently passed bill, said on the House floor earlier this month, as reported by the Kansas City Star.
“I never thought we’d have to be refugees in the United States, but now we’re being forced out.”
KYLE FREELS, PARENT OF A TRANS TEEN
Though Bailey’s investigation into the Transgender Center is ongoing, he issued a rule on April 13 to significantly restrict transition-related care for all trans people in the state by requiring them to meet a list of criteria before treatment, including attending 15 hourly therapy sessions over at least 18 months and having any mental health issues “treated and resolved.” The rule was scheduled to take effect Thursday, but a judge issued a temporary stay Wednesday night, after civil rights groups and local attorneys filed a petition seeking a temporary restraining order against it. The rule is now slated to take effect Monday, pending the outcome of a hearing.
More than a dozen parents with trans children in the state described the resulting climate as hostile, with one parent calling it a “a dystopian nightmare” and another saying they’ve been “living with harassment every day.” When the Freels talk about it, they call it a “battle” — one that they said will eventually push them out of the state, even though they want to stay and support families with younger kids.
“We kind of feel battle-tested, so we don’t want to leave, but yet we also want our child to be safe,” Rene Freels said. “With the legislation, I know if it goes through, I don’t want to be in the state.”
Allegations made public
Reed, who was a case worker at the Transgender Center from 2018 to November 2022, alleged in a 23-page affidavit that children were being harmed at the center as a result of being routinely prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy too quickly and without “appropriate or accurate” mental health assessments.
She also said patients were provided medication “without informed parental consent,” alleging that parents were not given enough information about the side effects of hormone therapy, which can include infertility. The center, she alleged in her affidavit, also did not obtain custody agreements from divorced parents to ensure all parties consented to treatment.
Shortly after Reed went public with her allegations in an op-ed published in The Free Press, a news website started by Bari Weiss, a former op-ed writer and editor at The New York Times, the Missouri attorney general’s office announced its investigation and made Reed’s affidavit public. Reed, who has a master’s degree in clinical research management, concluded her op-ed by calling for a “moratorium on the hormonal and surgical treatment of young people with gender dysphoria.”
NBC News contacted Reed’s legal team via phone and email, and Reed via mail, but after multiple requests, she declined an interview.
‘Unsubstantiated’ allegations
Washington University in St. Louis, the parent institution of the St. Louis Children’s Hospital, released the findings of an internal investigation into the Transgender Center on Friday. It found that “allegations of substandard care causing adverse outcomes for patients at the Center are unsubstantiated.”
Reed’s attorneys, Vernadette Broyles and Ernest Trakas, said in a statement on Reed’s behalf that the university did not interview their client for its internal investigation. They also said the university “acknowledges the validity of several of Ms. Reed’s allegations,” including that the center didn’t obtain written informed consent from parents or custody agreements.
In a summary of its investigation findings, the university said the center’s existing policy includes obtaining verbal parental consent for treatment and documenting that consent in the patient’s medical record, as well as requesting custody agreements “before medical intervention in cases where decision-making authority was in question.” Going forward, the university said, the center will require written consent from parents prior to prescribing medications, such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy, and families to provide custody agreements before an initial visit at the center if the patient is a minor.
The university did not answer NBC News’ question about whether Reed was interviewed as part of the investigation.
“WPATH is an advocacy organization whose publications rely very little on the emerging international evidence and much more on the idea that trans health care is about the right to embodiment of cosmetic goals on demand,” the attorneys said in their statement. “The newest WPATH publication even contains a chapter on the rights of those of the eunuch gender. It seems clear that reasonable people would have caution in providing unquestioning affirmation to children and teens, but neither WPATH nor the Center clinic does this.”
Firsthand accounts
Over the last two months, NBC News has requested interviews with nearly 40 people currently or formerly associated with the Transgender Center — including parents of children treated at the center, current and former patients and former employees — as well as local mental health providers and providers at other gender clinics. NBC News has also reached out to local and national groups that both support and oppose transition-related care for minors.
The more than two dozen people who agreed to interviews said Reed’s allegations don’t reflect their experiences at the center.
Sixteen parents, two current patients and two former patients of the center said the care they received was thorough and slow. The shortest amount of time that a parent said their child waited between their first appointment at the center and when their child started a puberty blocker was about six months. Five parents said their children waited more than a year between their first appointments at the center and their children beginning medical transition.
The Freels are among those five parents. Chelsea, now 17, waited about 15 months between her first appointment at the clinic in August 2021and when she started hormone therapy in November 2022. They waited a year between their first appointmentand their second in August 2022, in part because they had to receive a letter of support from a therapist in order for Chelsea to start hormone therapy. They also alleged that Reed was responsible for some of the delay.
“Medicine is stashed around town at friends’ homes that we’ve stockpiled already in advance of legislation passing.”
DANIELLE, PARENT OF A TRANS TEEN
When they first called the center in the summer of 2021 and asked to make an appointment, Rene Freels said, Reed repeatedly asked them, “What do you want?”
“We were just very dumbfounded, because we didn’t know,” Rene Freels said. “At this point, we were so new to everything that we didn’t know what we wanted.”
Rene Freels said Reed allegedly told them she could email them some information but couldn’t do anything else for them.
“We were in tears,” Rene Freels said. “We hung up the phone. We thought we were supposed to call this place, and they’re supposed to help us.”
Reed’s attorneys did not return a request for comment regarding the Freels’ allegations.
Not knowing where to turn next, they found a therapist for Chelsea who told them to call the center again and tell the center that Chelsea was under the therapist’s care. So they did, and they scheduled their first appointment in August 2021 with Dr. Christopher Lewis, the center’s endocrinologist.
Kyle Freels said the first appointment took more than an hour and a half. Lewis drew on the paper roll on the exam room table to illustrate how various medications interact with different body parts. He then said that, before Chelsea could start hormone therapy, she would need to provide him with a letter of support from a psychologist, and he would run a blood test to check her bone density.
Now that she’s been on hormone therapy since November, Chelsea said, she feels much happier. She’s a junior in high school and the business lead of the robotics team.
“The Missouri legislature is doing its thing, restricting trans rights for political gain and all that stuff,” she said. “But overall, I still feel better now than I did back then, and I think not all of it, but definitely a good part of it, has been being on HRT and transitioning. And that has led to other good things, like more social involvement, getting in a group of my peers that support me for me.”
Other families have similarly said their children’s treatment has been very slow and thorough. Becky Hormuth said Dr. Sarah Garwood, one of the Transgender Center’s providers, said she didn’t want Hormuth’s son to move forward with treatment until he had seen a dietician, because she was concerned he had an eating disorder. Another parent, Kelly, who asked that her last name not be published to protect her family’s privacy, said she and her transgender son, Logan, were well informed about the potential effects of testosterone on fertility, and Logan chose to have eggs harvested at 15 before he started testosterone. And another mom, Christine Hyman, said her son saw a therapist more than 80 times before he received a letter of consent to start testosterone.
While no one who could validate Reed’s claims agreed to an interview with NBC News, one parent shared their negative experience with The Free Press in an interview published earlier this month.
A parent who went only by her first name, Caroline, said she felt “bullied” into agreeing to allow her teenager, Casey, to receive puberty blockers. She said Casey’s mental health has severely declined and that she revoked consent for the blocker in June, but that it still hasn’t been removed. Casey, who uses they/them pronouns, lives primarily with their father, who hasn’t consented to have the blocker removed, according to the article.
The day after the article was published, Casey, whose real name is Alex, criticized the story in a series of Twitter posts. NBC News has independently verified that the account does belong to Alex and that Alex is Caroline’s child, but Alex declined an interview. Neither Caroline nor Alex’s father returned requests for comment.
Legislative impact
Dr. Angela Goepferd, the chief education officer and medical director of the gender health program at Children’s Minnesota, said she was disappointed when she read Reed’s allegations. She said she is connected online with doctors who provide care to trans youths nationwide, but she doesn’t know any of the providers at the Transgender Center and hasn’t heard anything negative about the clinic.
“Whether the allegations are true or not,” she said, “it doesn’t really matter, because this is going to be something that is going to make it harder for all of us to provide the care that we know that kids and families need.”
Jeff Dewald, the parent of a trans teen who has been a patient at St. Louis’ Transgender Center for two years, said Reed’s allegations don’t reflect the experience of his family. And while he said he wants to give Reed the benefit of the doubt, he questioned the timing of her claims.
“We’re in the middle of the legislative session, so right when this was issued, not even a week later, they took to hearing three bills on banning health care for trans kids,” he said. “And of course, that was the only talking point in the hearing.”
Dewald said Reed’s affidavit was the last straw for him as a parent. Before this, he said, he had never gone to the Capitol to advocate or spoken to reporters.
“Until that moment, I wanted to protect my kid and our family and just that was good enough,” he said.
But, he added, things changed after Reed’s affidavit came out and, shortly after, his child turned 18.
“I really feel for those that are in the heat of this health care battle,” he said. “Kids that have years to go and genuinely wondering where they’re gonna go if this health care stuff passes. So since then, I’ve actually started stepping up my activism.”
‘Safety versus engagement’
Like the Freels, many Missouri parents of trans kids are making plans in anticipation of the attorney general’s rule taking effect and potential laws restricting trans care loom.
Danielle, the parent of a trans teen who asked not to have her last name published to protect her family’s privacy, said her family has had a plan in place for a while.
“Medicine is stashed around town at friends’ homes that we’ve stockpiled already in advance of legislation passing,” she said. “I feel like we’re living in a dystopian nightmare.”
Chelsea Freels has signed up for text updates on the legal challenge to Bailey’s rule.
She joked that it’s “not doing wonders” for her mental health, but, “Hey, Missouri’s keeping its therapists employed.”
She joked a lot while talking about the attorney general and the Legislature’s attempts to restrict her health care. Her parents said she is generally a very happy kid, but they recently noticed she was struggling.
“My energy bank for hiding everything kind of ran out,” Chelsea said. “It’s back.”
She turns 18 in November, but if she has to leave the state and change high schools before she graduates, she said she’ll be sad to leave behind the robotics team and her friends. Part of her wants to stay, she said, but the other part thinks the state might not be safe anymore.
“If you leave, to some extent, they gain, because you’re not going to be as politically engaged,” she said. “It feels like you’re losing your voice by moving. Safety versus engagement.”
Rep. Zooey Zephyr, the first openly transgender woman elected to the Montana Legislature, held her microphone in the air during a House session Monday as her supporters chanted “Let her speak!” from the gallery.
For the third day in a row, Zephyr’s House colleagues refused to allow her to speak on bills that would restrict the rights of transgender people. The refusal followed a comment she made last week during a hearing on a bill that seeks to ban gender-affirming care for minors.
“I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,” Zephyr, a Democrat, said while debating the bill on April 18.
That evening, the Montana Freedom Caucus, a group of 21 Montana Republicans, called for the House to censure Zephyr and misgendered her, using the incorrect pronouns to refer to her in a statement and social media post.
“This kind of hateful rhetoric from an elected official is exactly why tragedies such as the Covenant Christian School shooting in Nashville occurred,” they also said in the statement.
Though the House did not hold a vote to censure Zephyr, two days later House Speaker Rep. Matt Regier refused to recognize Zephyr and allow her to speak on a bill that would define sex under state law as only male or female, and determined only by biology and genetics “without regard to an individual’s psychological, behavioral, social, chosen, or subjective experience of gender.”
Both the House rules committee and the full House, where Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 2 to 1, voted to uphold Regier’s decision despite repeated protests from Democrats.
“It’s about everybody having equal access to this floor to be able to discuss and to be able to represent their community,” state Rep. Sharon Stewart Peregoy, a Democrat, said Thursday, the Montana Standard reported. “And I believe that where we’re at is we are being discriminatory.”
In a statement shared on social media after Thursday’s House session, Zephyr said, “No amount of silencing tactics will deter me from standing up for the rights of the transgender community.”
“This year, I have lost friends to suicide, and I have listened to the heart-wrenching stories of families dealing with suicide attempts, trans youth fleeing the state, and people being attacked on the side of road — all due to legislation like this,” she said in the statement.
Republicans have called on her to apologize for her remarks last week, but Zephyr said she has no intentions of doing so.
“Montana Republicans say they want an apology, but what they really want is silence as they take away the rights of queer and trans Montanans,” she said in her statement Thursday.
Republicans continued to block Zephyr from speaking Friday, including on bills unrelated to LGBTQ people. On Monday, some of her supporters delivered a petition with more than 3,000 signatures to Regier’s office, according to KTVH-TV, an NBC affiliate in Helena.
Some of Zephyr’s supporters rallied on the Capitol steps Monday and at one point displayed banners across the front steps that read “Democracy dies here.”
Republicans voted again Monday afternoon to continue to block Zephyr from speaking and, after they did, protesters in the gallery shouted “Let her speak!” until they forced the House to halt proceedings. Zephyr held her microphone in the air.
Seven people were arrested for criminal trespass, the sheriff said. Regier’s office shared a statement Monday night describing the events as a “riot.”
“House Republicans condemn violence and will always stand for civil debate and respect for our processes of government,” Regier said in a joint statement with Rep. Sue Vinton, House majority leader, and Rep. Rhonda Knudsen, speaker pro tempore. “Today’s riot by far-left agitators damages our discourse and endangered legislators and staff.”
The Montana Freedom Caucus called for immediate disciplinary action against Zephyr in a statement Monday, saying she stood on the House floor and encouraged “an insurrection.”
Zephyr said in a statement that she raised her microphone to stand in solidarity with those who “protested on behalf of their democratic right to be heard.”
“As an elected representative, I am devoted to supporting those who speak in defense of democracy, as it is my duty to ensure their voices are heard and respected,” she said.
A Missouri man was sentenced to nearly 22 years in prison Thursday for a hate crime after shooting a gay teen in May 2019.
Malachi Robinson, 25, shot the teen, who is referred to as M.S. in court documents, eight times after meeting him at the Kansas City Public Library and luring him into the woods under the guise of looking for a place to engage in a sexual act, according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri.
On the day Robinson met M.S., who was 16 at the time, he messaged his girlfriend about M.S. and said, “He tryna set me up on sumn now, gonna unfriend him, might shoot this boy if he try some gay shit,” according to court documents.
In the days after the shooting, Robinson told a friend in a message that he had shot someone because “he was being gay af and following me like a mf,” according to court documents. Before his arrest on June 3, 2019, Robinson Googled phrases including “how to get away with murder in real life” and the victim’s name with the word “shot,” according to the documents.
M.S. was taken to a hospital in critical condition and remained hospitalized for two weeks. The department said he has suffered “long-term effects of the shooting,” including having to undergo multiple surgeries and physical therapy. He also still has several bullets inside of him, the attorney’s office said.
As part of a plea deal, Robinson pleaded guilty to one count of a hate crime involving an attempt to kill and was sentenced to 21 years and 10 months in prison without parole, according to the plea.
“This defendant’s sentence holds him accountable for the violent and callous hate crime perpetrated against a defenseless teenager targeted because of their LGBTQ+ status,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a news release. “Recent FBI data makes clear that hate crimes targeting the LGBTQ+ community persist and this sentence should send a strong message to the perpetrators of these crimes that they will be held accountable.”
The FBI’s supplemental 2021 hate crime statistics found that hate crimes increased 11.6% nationally from 8,120 in 2020 to 9,065 in 2021. Out of over 10,500 single-bias incidents involving 12,411 victims, the majority — 64.5% — were targeted due to the offenders’ bias against their race, ethnicity or ancestry, followed by 15.9% who were targeted because of the offenders’ bias against their sexual orientation, 14.1% who were targeted because of the offenders’ bias against their religion, and 3.2% who were targeted due to the offenders’ bias against their gender identity.
Over the last two years, LGBTQ people, venues and events have increasingly become the targets of violence.
North Dakota’s Legislature advanced 10 bills Tuesday that advocates say target the state’s LGBTQ community, setting a single-day record for such legislation, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group.
The state Senate passed all 10 bills, which had already passed the House, on Monday. Eight of them are headed to Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, for either a signature or a veto.
Those eight include a broad measure that would ban “adult-oriented performances” on public property or in front of minors, which could restrict many forms of drag. Some of the bills passed with veto-proof majorities, including one that would restrict gender-affirming medical care for minors and another that would ban transgender students in public and private K-12 schools and colleges from playing sports on school teams that align with their gender identities.
Two bills have been returned to the House after the Senate added amendments. They would prohibit trans people in the state from updating the sex on their birth certificates and would ban state facilities from allowing trans people to use the restrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their gender identities.
Cathryn Oakley, the state legislative director and senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement that the 10 bills “have the sole aim of pushing LGBTQ+ people back into the closet” and urged Burgum to reject them.
“It’s shameful, yet not surprising, that instead of spending their day attempting to tackle the real issues facing North Dakotans, extremist legislators in Bismarck were working vigorously to rile up the far fringes of their base — and now some of their most marginalized constituents could pay the price,” Oakley said in the statement.
It’s unclear whether Burgum will support the measures. Last week, he vetoed a bill that would’ve allowed school personnel to misgender trans students and barred school districts from adopting “a policy or practice regarding expressed gender.” The Senate overrode his veto, but the House was unable to garner the two-thirds majority needed to uphold the override.
In a letter to state Senate President Tammy Miller regarding his veto, Burgum said ambiguity in the bill “would invite lawsuits and put teachers in the precarious position of trying to determine how to refer to students without violating the law.”
“The teaching profession is challenging enough without the heavy hand of state government forcing teachers to take on the role of pronoun police,” he wrote.
North Dakota’s legislation is part of a nationwide wave: State lawmakers have introduced more than 450 bills targeting the LGBTQ community so far this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union and a separate group of researchers who are tracking the flow of legislation.
More than half of those target transgender youths by restricting their access to either transition-related care — like puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery — or school sports teams.
If North Dakota’s health care and sports restrictions become law, it will become the 14th state to restrict transition-related health care for minors and the 20th to restrict trans students’ participation in school sports.
During debate on the health care bill Monday, Sen. Keith Boehm, a Republican, falsely claimed that puberty blockers permanently sterilize children and referred to transition-related care as “child mutilation,” according to KFGO, a local public radio station.
“If someone, once they are an adult, wants to sterilize themselves, or cut off body parts, they have every right to do so — not children,” Boehm said, according to KFGO.
Democratic Sen. Ryan Braunberger spoke against the bills Monday and said that, as a gay young person, laws restricting LGBTQ rights contributed to his decision to attempt suicide.
“I was lucky to survive that suicide attempt — to be here — but many others have not and will not,” Braunberger said. If the bills pass, then “kids like me across the state will feel like the world is against them. They’ll eventually feel like they can no longer go on.”
The Education Department proposed a rule Thursday in connection with the growing number of states that have banned transgender student-athletes from participating on school sports teams that align with their gender identities.
The department’s proposed rule would change Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 — which prohibits discrimination based on sex in federally funded education programs — by, in part, prohibiting blanket exclusions of trans girls and women from female sports teams, which have become law in 20 states.
The measure would, however, permit some restrictions in certain sports at more elite levels of competition, such as in high school or college.
The proposed regulation, which will be open for public comment for 30 days, says programs or schools that adopt sex-related criteria “that would limit or deny a student’s eligibility to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity” must meet two standards.
First, the restriction must “be substantially related to the achievement of an important educational objective,” and, second, it must “minimize harms to students whose opportunity to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity would be limited or denied,” according to the draft of the proposed rule.
“A one-size-fits-all categorical ban that excludes all transgender girls and women from participation on any female athletic team, for example, would not satisfy the proposed regulation because it would fail to account for the nature of particular sports, levels of competition, or the greater education level of students to which it would apply,” a senior Education Department official said at a news conference Thursday.
The official said the department expects that elementary school students would be able to participate on school sports teams consistent with their gender identities under the proposed rule, while schools might choose to restrict the participation of some trans students in higher grade levels in certain cases.
“The proposed regulation would give schools flexibility to identify their own important educational objectives,” the official said. “They might include, for example, fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injuries. Some objectives, like the disapproval of transgender students or a desire to harm a particular student, would not qualify as important educational objectives.”
The department said in a statement that its approach fits with Congress’ direction in 1974 that the Title IX regulations include reasonable provisions that consider “the nature of particular sports.”
The statementalso noted that many sports governing bodies have developed participation criteria and that the NCAA adopted a sport-by-sport policy for transgender athletes’ participation last year. The official who spoke to media Thursday, however, said that the department does not take a stance on the NCAA policy and that it would not advise a school to adopt a particular athletic association’s policy.
“A key element of the proposed rule is a need for schoolsto have particularized consideration for each sport and level of competition and grade or education level, and I would caution any school about taking something off the shelf without offering that particularized consideration,” the official said.
The NCAA changed its policy amid a media firestorm ignited after Lia Thomas, a trans swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, broke multiple records at a meet in December 2021.
Efforts to restrict trans athletes’ participation are part of a nationwide wave of bills targeting LGBTQ rights. State legislators have introduced more than 450 bills targeting the LGBTQ community this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union and a separate group of researchers who are tracking the flow of legislation.
In addition to the 20 states that have passed trans athlete laws, 14 have passed restrictions on transition-related health care for minors.
Asked by a reporter Thursday how the Education Department would enforce the proposed rule against states that have already passed categorical bans, the senior department official said, “Federal civil rights law is the law of the land.”
The department would investigate, the official said, and in the past, when it has identified legal violations, school committees have elected to come into compliance.
“In the unlikely scenario that a school committee declined to come into compliance with the law, the tool that the department has is to initiate fund withholding and to ensure that no federal dollars are spent to discriminate against students,” the official said.
The department plans to have the rule finalized in May.
Reactions from LGBTQ advocacy groups and trans advocates are mixed.
Sasha Buchert, a senior attorney for Lambda Legal and the director of its Nonbinary and Transgender Rights Project, said the proposal “includes critical recognition of the importance of participating in sports for transgender youth and shows why 100% of the state bans are invalid.”
“We are concerned about whether the proposed rule can properly eliminate the discrimination that transgender students experience due to the pervasive bias and ignorance about who they are,” Buchert said in a statement. “Given the importance of the opportunity to participate in athletics to students’ educational experience, we look forward to submitting comments and working with the administration to further remove those remaining bigotry-based barriers to full and equal participation by transgender youth.”
Alejandra Caraballo, a trans advocate and clinical instructor at Harvard Law’s Cyberlaw Clinic, called the proposal a “backwards betrayal” that would force trans people “to have to spend our time dealing with god damn sports instead of criminal bans on our healthcare.”
President Joe Biden “could have just done nothing,” she said on Twitter. “This is legitimizing transphobia.”
