More than half (51 percent) of trans male teenagers have attempted suicide in the past year, according to new research.
The new study by researchers at the University of Arizona also found that more than four in 10 (42 percent) of non-binary adolescents and 30 percent of trans female teens had attempted suicide.
The new research has found trans and non-binary teenagers are significantly more likely to attempt suicide. (Getty)
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among teenagers and young adults aged between 10 and 34 in the US.
The latest data revealed that transgender and non-binary teens—aged between 11 and 19—are at a significantly greater risk of attempting suicide than their peers who are cisgender, meaning
Nearly two in 10 (18 percent) of cis female teens, and 10 percent of cis male adolescents, had tried to end their lives, according to the study.
Russ Toomey, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, who led the research, based his findings on an analysis of data from the Profiles of Student Life: Attitudes and Behaviors survey—a national survey of 120,617 adolescents in the US.
The survey, carried out between 2012 and 2015, included data from 202 transgender teenagers, 70 per cent of which were trans male adolescents.
Previous research has show that an alarming percentage of transgender people have attempted suicide. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Commenting on his research, Toomey said: “Transmasculine youth and non-binary youth are the two populations that often are the least focused on in the transgender community.
“So really reorganising our efforts to focus in and try to really understand and learn about the experiences of these youth is critical.”
Past research has shown that a shocking proportion of transgender people have attempted suicide.
In 2016, a study by the NationalCentre for Transgender Equality found that 40 percent of transgender people had tried to end their lives.
Other studies have also revealed that lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) young people are more likely to attempt suicide than their straight counterparts.
A 2016 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) young people are almost three times as likely to seriously contemplate suicide than heterosexual youths.
It also found that LGB youth were five times more likely to have attempted suicide than heterosexual young people.
If you are in the US and are having suicidal thoughts, suffering from anxiety or depression, or just want to talk, call the National Suicide Prevention Line on 1-800-273-8255. If you are in the UK, you can contact the Samaritans on 116 123.
A group of House lawmakers is calling on the Department of Veterans to incorporate gender reassignment surgery as part of its coverage for U.S. veterans, calling denial of the procedure for transgender people “unconscionable.”In the Sept. 7 letter, the lawmakers respond to a request for comment on coverage for gender reassignment surgery.
“Simply put, the VA has an obligation to provide the necessary care that is prescribed to enrolled veterans by their health care practitioners,” the letter says. “It is unconscionable to deny veterans the same access to health care services that civilians receive in the private sector, and that is available to Medicare beneficiaries and federal workers, simply because of outdated and unscientific prejudice against their gender identity.”
The VA has request comment on gender reassignment surgery as a consequence of ongoing litigation against the department seeking coverage for the procedure. The case is currently pending before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Given the anti-LGBT policies of the Trump administration, including the attempt to ban transgender people from the U.S. military, it’s hard to see how the solicitation for comment could result in a proposed rule change. In fact, the administration could use comments against coverage as justification for current policy.
Brownley, top Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Health Subcommittee, said in a statement the estimated 160,000 transgender veterans in the United States are deserving of coverage and “have put their lives on the line in order to protect our constitutionally protected freedoms.”
“It is simply unacceptable that we would ask our veterans to risk their lives to protect our rights but we would refuse to defend theirs in return,” Brownley said. “The VA must put an end to this discriminatory and outdated ban on treatments for gender dysphoria and ensure that all our nation’s veterans have access to the healthcare they have earned.”
The lawmakers’ letter to the VA has a blemish of bipartisanship. Among the 83 House members who signed the missive was Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who has a transgender son and is slated to retire from Congress at the end of this year.
Charlotte Clymer, a transgender veteran and spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement the exclusion of gender reassignment surgery from VA coverage is harmful.
“The Department of Veterans Affairs’ exclusion of many forms of transition-related health care flies in the face of every major medical authority and undermines the health and wellbeing of transgender patriots who have laid their lives on the line for this country and their families,” Clymer said.
Indeed, the letter says studies have shown transition-related care, including gender reassignment surgery, can reduce the rate of suicide among transgender people as well as mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression.
“This broad medical consensus on the treatment of gender dysphoria is based on decades of peer-reviewed studies and clinical observation — including studies of veterans — that demonstrate its efficacy and substantial health benefits,” the letter says.
The Department of Veterans Affairs during the Obama administration had floated the idea of covering gender reassignment surgery, but the planned was scrapped after the election of President Trump — but before his inauguration — under the pretext of concerns about cost.
A VA spokesperson said in response to the letter the department “appreciates the lawmakers’ views and will respond to them directly.”
“VA will consider the comments received and determine the appropriate response,” the spokesperson added. “Although there is no specific timeframe required for this type of consideration, VA will announce any action it takes in the Federal Register.”
Shantee Tucker is the 19th reported case of a trans person being killed in the US so far in 2018. (Shantee Tucker/Facebook)
A black trans women shot dead in Philadelphia on Wednesday morning has become the 19th reported case of a trans person being killed in the US so far this year.
Shantee Tucker, who had celebrated her 30th birthday on Sunday (September 2), was found suffering from a gunshot wound by police at about 1am on a highway in the Hunting Park area of the city, according to local media reports.
She was taken to Temple University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.Police are reportedly looking for a suspect in connection with the murder.
According to local magazinePhiladelphia, a police report state that Tucker had been arguing with an unidentified person or persons in a black Ford truck, who then started shooting at Tucker.
Philadelphia Police Department are appealing for any witnesses to contact the Homicide Unit on 215-686-3334.
Friends have paid tribute to Tucker on social media.
One friend, Samantha Jo Dato, wrote on Facebook: “R.I.P Shantee Tucker I was just on your live checking in on your birthday. May you forever live in our hearts and justice be swift and ruthless.
“This is so close to home Philly Stay Strong and wrap one another in love.”
Another friend, Tameer Harris, posted on Facebook: “Omg I can’t believe the news I just got R.I.P Shante !! you was really like another big sister to me!”
Harris added: “I really can’t even believe this phone call I got ❤️❤️❤️ this morning I woke up to a confirmation that I can’t even stomach to believe 😔 May you Rest In Peace baby 💋 I Love You So Much!”
Sarah McBride, national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign, told PinkNews: “There is a growing epidemic of violence targeting transgender people, particularly Black transgender women.
“This is an urgent crisis that is a by-product of the toxic and violent combination of transphobia, misogyny, and racism. As a society, our policymakers and lawmakers must do more to combat this violence.
“Our hearts go out to the family—both blood and chosen—of Shantee Tucker, and we must never forget that behind the headlines was a real person whose life of love, hopes and dreams was tragically cut short.”
Dejanay L. Stanton (left) and Vontashia Bell were both found dead on August 30. (Facebook)
Dejanay L. Stanton, a 24-year-old woman, was found on a street in Chicago on Thursday morning with a gunshot wound to the head, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
The other woman, 18-year-old Vontashia Bell, was also found in a street in Shreveport, Louisiana, with gunshot wounds to the chest and wrist.
Messages had come to light in a Facebook group for parents of students, where several people had vented about Maddie being allowed to use the female bathroom.
Maddison Kleeman Rose (HBO/VICE News)v
They referred to the 12-year-old girl as “it,” “this thing,” “half baked maggot” and “the transgender,” and threatened to use a “good sharp knife” to slice her genitals. Another suggested: “Just tell the kids to kick [her] ass in the bathroom and it won’t want to come back!”
The girl has now spoken out in an interview with HBO’s Vice News, publicly identified for the first time as Maddison Kleeman Rose.
Her mother Brandy Jay Rose explained that Maddie had been living as female with no issue until the school pulled up old records that identified her as male.
She said: “Around the time that they found out that she is transgender, they called us and said that she’s no longer going to be allowed to use the girl’s bathroom, that she’s going to have to use a staff bathroom.”
Brandy Jay Rose (HBO/VICE News)
However, rumours quickly spread throughout the town about Maddie after the intervention – including an incident where Maddie was confronted about her gender by a “fully grown man” at a Daddy-Daughter dance.
The same man later posted the Facebook thread that led to the security incident.
Speaking to VICE News, Maddie put on a brave face.
The 12-year-old said: “I don’t care for it. I think it’s all stupid. The threats and that is stupid. Who would do that, to a 12-year-old?
“Everyone’s different. No-one’s the same. We’re all different and unique and special in our own way.
“Some of those adults out there do get it but don’t support it, and that’s their choice. They can be hateful and rude about it, but they ain’t dragging me down.”
Superintendent Rick Beene defended the school’s actions.
He said: “What do you say to a mother who says ‘I do not want my daughter in a restroom where somebody has… you know, is a different gender’?
“We have one side who says the transgender student is what they say they are, and that sounds good. You have another side, that is the majority, that says I do not want my child in a bathroom with someone of a different gender.”
The town’s mayor David Northcutt, who is openly gay, insisted that the community was changing and that “the day of running someone out of town is gone.” Addressing Maddie’s family leaving town, he said: “I was sad when I heard that.”
He added: “I can understand the want and need to be near her family, and I think that’s a goal that did nor originate in the last few weeks, and was a goal for some time. I hope that’s true.”
Police across the US are overwhelmingly using the birth names of transgender murder victims, it has been revealed.
Transgender women, and specifically trans women of colour, are one of the demographics most at risk of being murdered in the US.
Despite the frequency with which they are killed, their deaths are often handled in an insensitive and transphobic way by police.An investigation by ProPublica has found that transgender victims are still commonly referred to by their deadnames in the vast majority of cases.
The outlet reviewed the murders of 85 transgender people since January 2015, finding that in 74 of the cases, the victims were identified by their former names or birth genders.
Many forces insisted on using the name or gender listed on the victim’s ID, even when it is several years out of date.
Campaigners say that deadnaming transgender people can cause significant harm to police investigations during the most critical phase, because people with information may only know the victim by their chosen name, and because deadnaming fosters mistrust of police within the transgender community and the victim’s social circle.
Detective Orlando Martinez of the Los Angeles Police Department agreed: “That might lose the cooperation of the friends and family — the people we need to solve the case.”
In Jacksonville, Florida, a spate of murders of transgender women has seen relations between the community and police force break down significantly – with the repeated deadnaming of victims a point of tension.
Since February, four transgender women of colour have been gunned down in the city. Three victims died, while the fourth victim was shot five times but survived
Police continue to deny there is any link between the killings, but trans campaigners say police’s treatment of victims “creates an unwillingness by others in the community to step forward.”
Gina Duncan, Equality Florida’s Director of Transgender Equality and Chair of TransAction Florida, said: “The transgender community in Jacksonville is frightened. They fear this could be a serial killer or orchestrated violence targeting the community. They do not feel protected on their own streets.
“By misgendering these transgender women, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office disrespects their memory and impedes their own investigations.
“These are out, trans women and that is how they are known in the community.”
There has been some progress, as the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office has admitted “insensitive” handling of the deaths.
Meanwhile, in Orange County, Florida, the Sheriff issued an apology for misgendering a murder victim.
Sheriff Jerry Demings said: “The Orange County Sheriff’s Office did not intend to be insensitive in this effort and I along with agency members apologize for any misgivings our communications may have caused.
“As Sheriff, I am proud to report that the Orange County Sheriff’s Office continues to have a positive relationship and open dialogue with members of the LGBTQ community, and we will seek additional measures to further strengthen that bond in the days ahead.”
Gina Duncan continued: “All across the nation, law enforcement agencies have adopted protocols for responding to anti-transgender violence.
“They recognise that respecting the community builds trust and creates a willingness to share information that may catch a killer.”
ProPublica’s research highlighted the real possibility that shoddy handling of trans murder cases may actually lead to killers escaping justice.
The survey found that arrests have been made in 55 percent of the murders, lower than the overall clearance rate for murders in the US, which is 59 percent.
An estimated 78,000 transgender Americans may be barred from voting in the upcoming US elections due to strict voter ID laws, according to a new report.
Eight states require voters to provide a government-issued photo ID at polling places, where officials decide whether the ID photo matches their registration information.The rules could prevent trans people from voting in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin.
According to the report, there is “no way to predict precisely how election officials and poll workers will treat transgender voters” at the polls if they present identification that does not accurately reflect their gender.
Across these eight states, 57 percent of the transgender voting-eligible population may have no identification or records that accurately reflect their gender, the report data suggests.
“Voter ID laws create a unique barrier for transgender people who would otherwise be eligible to vote. Many transgender people who have transitioned do not have identification documents that accurately reflect their correct gender,” the report authors state.
“In the November 2018 general election, strict photo ID laws may create substantial barriers to voting and possible disenfranchisement for over 78,000 transgender people in eight states.”
The institute, who has monitored the impact of these laws in previous elections, said this estimate is higher than in the past due to increase availability of “better data on the status of names and gender markers among transgender people.”
The report also highlights that trans people of colour, young adults, students, people with low incomes and people with disabilities are likely to be among those facing barriers.
Trans people reported negative experiences when voting in the US (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
“Some voters may not have the means or the ability to obtain the required voter identification for a variety of reasons, such as poverty, disability, or religious objection,” researchers add.
The report, which uses data from the 2015 US Transgender Survey by the National Centre for Transgender Equality, found 32 percent of survey respondents reporting having negative experiences after presenting ID that did not match their gender identity.
Trans voters said they were verbally harassed, denied services or asked to leave the polling area, with some reporting being attacked or assaulted.
The William Institute report also used data from the 2017 Current Population Survey (CPS), conducted by the US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labour Statistics.
Christine Hallquist leaned back in her swivel chair inside a private room at the Northshire bookstore and dialed up potential donors, trash-talking the plummeting approval numbers of Vermont’s incumbent Republican governor and touting her chances against her Democratic rivals. “It’s clear it’s for us to lose, which I won’t, ’cause I’m disciplined,” she assured one prospective contributor of the upcoming primary.
Beating her fellow Democrats and then defeating a sitting Vermont governor for the first time since 1962 are only the beginning. From there, Hallquist, a first-time candidate, plans to reverse the decline of rural Vermont and maybe even solve climate change.
All of this, Hallquist thinks, will be relatively easy, because she has already done the hardest thing she will ever do. In 2015, she began wearing a wig and a blouse to work, publicly coming out as a woman named Christine to her employees at the Vermont Electric Coop, the utility she had led for years as a man named Dave. It was the culmination of an eight-year gender transition that, after a lifetime of experiencing gender dysphoria, had filled her with dread at the ostracism she knew would follow.
“I was sure when I transitioned, I’d end up sleeping in a gutter somewhere,” she said.
But Vermonters greeted her transition with overwhelming acceptance, so she forgot about the gutter and began contemplating the governor’s office instead.
In April, she officially announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination from a dive bar in her hometown, becoming the first openly transgender gubernatorial candidate in the nation’s history.
In large parts of the country, the appearance of a viable statewide transgender candidate would have caused a political earthquake, but here, her transgender status has been largely an afterthought.
“It will be irrelevant in Vermont,” former governor Howard Dean, who recently offered Hallquist campaign advice over breakfast, told POLITICO.
Rather than making her gender identity a focus of her campaign, she is running, essentially, as a wonky technocrat. Her signature issue is a plan to revitalize rural Vermont by laying high-speed, fiber optic cable statewide. It’s a platform that plays to her record turning around the fortunes of the electric utility she ran until early this year.
That her transgender status has been relegated to a non-issue — in fact, she’s starting to wield it as an asset — is in part, a testament to the state’s longstanding progressive culture. Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery, the first to grant same-sex couples civil unions with full marriage rights, and the first to legalize same-sex marriage through its legislature, rather than by court ruling.
It is also a sign of the arrival of transgender Americans as a small but burgeoning political force.
***
That was on display at a July fundraiser for Hallquist in Washington, where a small group of supporters, many of them transgender, gathered in the rooftop lounge of an upscale apartment building off Dupont Circle. A group of trans donors gathering to support a transgender candidate is not something you would have expected to see in Washington even just a few years ago.
“We can enter political space,” said attendee Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, who served as Barack Obama’s last director of LGBT outreach and was the first openly transgender White House staffer, of transgender people’s greater visibility in the electoral realm.
She observed that a transgender political community was beginning to take form more distinctly from the umbrella of the broader LGBT movement. “Just as siblings grow old together, we’ll find our different paths, but we’ll always be family,” she said.
While the LGBT rights movement has won an astounding series of victories across the Western world over the past two decades, transgender people remain among the most stigmatized and marginalized groups in Western societies, including the United States. Forty-one percent of respondents reported attempting suicide in one survey of transgender Americans, and young black transgender women in the U.S. are more than four times more likely to be murdered than their peers in the general population, according to an investigation by Mic.
For most of the 20th century, being transgender was considered a bizarre curiosity or a mental illness, when it was heard of at all, and openly transgender officeholders were unheard of. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a handful of openly transgender candidates won local elections, but it was not until 2006, with the election of Kim Coco Iwamoto to Hawaii’s board of education, that one won statewide office.
Iwamoto, who is running for Hawaii’s lieutenant governor this year, remains the only person to accomplish that feat. Hallquist appears to be only the third openly transgender candidate to even seek statewide office — the other being WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning, who ran for Senate in Maryland earlier this year — according to former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, president of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, which supports LGBTQ candidates and recently endorsed Hallquist.
“Christine will be a historic figure if she wins the nomination, whether or not she becomes the governor,” Parker said. “If she becomes the governor, she has the potential to be a role model for every trans kid in America.”
According to LGBTQ Victory Fund communications director Elliot Imse, transgender candidates are regularly subjected to whisper campaigns and other forms of discrimination, even within Democratic primaries. “We hear of people saying to influential party people that ‘Of course, I’m not transphobic, but we can’t let the transgender candidate win because general election voters would never vote for a trans person,’” he said.
When journalist Danica Roem, a transgender woman, ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates last year as a Democrat, the Republican Party of Virginia paid for campaign fliers that repeatedly referred to her with male pronouns, considered a slap in the face to someone who identifies as a woman.
But Roem went on to win her race, becoming the first openly transgender person elected to a state legislature and one of a record eight transgender candidates who won nationwide on Election Day last year (the other seven were municipal candidates).
According to Mara Kiesling, founder of the National Center for Transgender Equality and a Hallquist confidant, races like Roem’s illustrate that transgender candidates can overcome hang-ups about their identities by focusing on constituent needs. “Nobody’s looking for a transgender person to run for office,” Kiesling said. “They’re looking for somebody who will make their life better.”
In June, Roem traveled to Vermont to campaign with Hallquist, and offered similar advice. “When someone else wants to make that the narrative of the race, you acknowledge it and say, ‘Yes I’m trans and’ — in her case — ‘I happen to know a lot about our infrastructure,’” Roem said in an interview. “In my case it was, ‘Yes, I’m trans and I also know a lot about transportation.”
***
Other advice has been more tactical.
In the bookstore backroom in Manchester, Hallquist called around to potential donors with the help of commercial sales software called Phoneburner, which she called her “secret weapon” and which Roem turned her on to. Such tips are invaluable for a candidate who did not enter politics until late in life.
Born male in 1956 and raised as a boy named Dave in upstate New York, Hallquist made Vermont her home in young adulthood when her father’s job was relocated to Burlington.
She studied engineering, worked as a consultant and joined the Vermont Electric Coop in 1998, rising to become its CEO in 2005. Though her record on renewables is now being scrutinized for the compromises she made to keep rates down and the coop’s reliance on hydro- and nuclear power sources, it forms a core part of the rationale for her candidacy. It also, she argues, serves as a model for addressing climate change globally. During her time at the helm, she steered the utility from the brink of financial ruin and increased the share of its energy coming from carbon-free sources while limiting rate hikes.
That outward success masked inner turmoil.
Since childhood, Hallquist had felt she was a girl, a feeling her mother had warned her to keep to herself or risk being committed to an asylum. But it’s a feeling she never shook. Throughout her life, she found herself buying women’s clothing and wearing it in secret. She suffered from the pain and confusion of gender dysphoria even as she married a wife, Pat, and fathered three children.
Later in life, she came out as a woman to Pat, a discreet transgender support group, the rest of her family and eventually, in 2015, to the world. She began wearing women’s clothing and accessories in public, along with a wig. She also started hormone replacement therapy, reporting that she felt angry less often and began crying more.
Hallquist, 62, said Trump’s election a year later depressed her, but also helped inspire her to enter electoral politics earlier this year.
“Thousands of people have fought for freedom before me and died for freedom,” she said. “The least I could do is give up my retirement.”
Now, Hallquist is picking up politics on the fly. In Manchester, she spoke with enthusiasm about the details of a campaign “ground game” and rued a recent faux pas that led a deep-pocketed donor to cut her off. “I did a protocol violation,” she said, but declined to elaborate, other than to say, “You’ve got to give you high-value donors special treatment.”
Despite her novice status, she exuded total confidence at the bookstore in a sleeveless white blouse and thigh-length skirt. Between calls, she chatted with her communications director, David Glidden, about plans for her primary night gathering, emphasizing the need to find a venue that serves booze.
“People party a lot as you lose or win,” Glidden remarked.
“People are going to party because we won,” she said.
During her donor calls, Hallquist noted that the Republican governor’s slide in approval ratings — an astounding 38-point net drop between the first and second quarters of this year, in Morning Consult’s polls — has coincided with her entrance into the Democratic primary.
“I’m not taking credit,” she said between calls, but added, “If there hadn’t been a strong alternative in the race, maybe the drop wouldn’t have been as precipitous.”
In fact, Gov. Phil Scott’s popularity problems appear to be mostly about guns. He ran on a promise to impose no gun control measures, but after a school shooting scare in February, he signed a sweeping law in April that has angered his base and inspired a write-in Republican primary challenge.
In response to requests for comment about Hallquist, the fall in approval rating, and the guns issue, Scott’s campaign manager, Brittney Wilson, wrote that Scott “had the most successful first term of any Governor in Vermont” and ticked off a list of fiscal accomplishments, but did not mention guns.
Vermont’s gun culture is such that gun control is thorny even in a Democratic primary. “I would prefer not talking about this issue,” Hallquist said.
But what is her position? Well, she owns five hunting rifles, which she doesn’t use because most of them she acquired a long time ago to teach her son to hunt, which she wasn’t very good at, anyway.
“I’m beating around the bush,” she said, and after some more explanation, “I’m really beating around the bush.”
Finally, she confided, “I would support regulating guns like we regulate automobiles, but I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s a little bit off the record,” Glidden chimed in.
On issues of economics and inequality Halquist speaks of her desire to support marginalized communities. But she also makes it a point to take issue both with rich people who loathe the poor and with those who blame all the problems of the poor on the rich. When I suggested that the latter sounds like an oblique critique of the state’s socialist senator, Bernie Sanders, she clapped her hands and let out a laugh, before regaining herself.
“I wouldn’t ever criticize Bernie,” she said.
What she would do is say Sanders’ rhetoric is inconsistent with the concerns of managing a state budget and making a state’s economy competitive with those of its neighbors: “He’s great on the national platform,” she said. “I don’t think it works from a governor’s standpoint.”
***
After wrapping up her calls in Manchester, Hallquist drove to the small town of Ludlow for an evening candidates’ forum.
On the second floor of Ludlow’s town hall, the race’s four Democrats held forth in front of a handful of campaign staffers and an audience of actual voters that numbered about a dozen (a showing that was “big for Ludlow,” Glidden claimed). A moderator wielded a rusty old cowbell to silence anyone who exceeded their allotted answer time.
On Hallquist’s right sat environmental advocate James Ehlers, a handsome and solemn silver-haired Navy veteran who counts himself an admirer of psychedelic guru Ram Dass and is running somewhere to the left of the state’s socialist senator.
Ehlers is considered Hallquist’s chief rival for the nomination. Hallquist had raised $132,000 through mid-July to Ehlers’ $50,000, and her statewide name recognition was at 41 percent in a recent poll, more than 10 points ahead of any other Democratic candidate.
She and Ehlers are not above taking swings at each other. “I celebrate Christine for the example she’s setting,” Ehlers said before the forum, “But fundamentally we’re very, very different people and that’s reflected in my lifetime of service to people and the planet and Christine’s decision to spend her time in the corporate world.”
Hallquist scoffed at the charge, saying she could have made more money in the private sector but chose to end her career leading the local electric coop instead. “If you’re going to be negative, try to get real shit out there,” she said the next day, adding that Ehlers “keeps shooting himself in the foot.”
To Hallquist’s left in Ludlow sat activist Brenda Siegel. A single mother with purple and yellow streaks in her hair, she often gets together with Hallquist after the forums to make fun of the other candidates, and themselves, at a local bar.
On Siegel’s other side side sat rising high school freshman Ethan Sonneborn, a precocious 14-year-old who has exploited a loophole in the state constitution to make himself a legally viable candidate.
Asked to reveal a surprising personal detail in her opening statement, Hallquist spoke of the annual week she spent with a friend in the wilderness of northern New York state in the dead of winter, telemark skiing and practicing cold-weather survival techniques for 22 years straight years.
Earlier, Hallquist had said that she believes those excursions were a way of coping with her gender dysphoria — going to the extremes of masculinity to resist her feelings of identifying as a woman. It’s the same reason, she hypothesizes, that a disproportionate number of transgender women serve in the military before transitioning.
In Ludlow, Hallquist’s transgender status came up only at the end of the night, when she recounted her experience of coming out and being embraced by Vermonters in her closing statement.
The next morning, Friday, Hallquist visited the offices of her hometown newspaper, the Morrisville News & Citizen, to face an hour of questioning from a trio of bearded journalists — Tom, Andrew and Tommy — as her son, Derek, a filmmaker, taped the sitdown for a forthcoming campaign video.
Huddled over a small conference table, Hallquist described her plan to wire the rural parts of the state with a high-speed, fiber optic network as “probably one of the most bold and visionary goals we’ve seen since the electrification of Vermont.”
Her transgender status was mentioned only when she was asked whether any “assholes” were attacking her for it. Very few, she said. Still, though Hallquist said her transgender status is not a relevant factor in the race, she is finding way to make it part of the rationale for her candidacy.
When it came up at the News & Citizen, she took the opportunity to argue that a transgender governor could help cement the state’s global image as an open and welcoming place.
“Vermonters should be thrilled that we’re continuing to perpetuate our wonderful brand,” she said.
As for the political downside, Hallquist points out that any Vermonters turned off by her gender transition would probably not be voting for a liberal Democrat anyways.
From the newspaper offices, Hallquist, Derek and Glidden strolled a few blocks to a cluttered three-room office space that serves as her campaign headquarters. A smattering of colorful sticky notes stuck to the walls reminded her how she wanted to campaign (“Pay attention to details”; “low ego”; “can dish and take it”) and commingled with a framed panoramic photo from a Phish concert.
While she plowed through more call time, Derek directed me to the family residence, a modest house perched on a fairy-tale piece of land off a gravel road overlooking a lake at the southern end of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
Pat had taken Derek’s two young children, 3 and 5, to visit relatives nearby. When Hallquist and Pat became grandparents, Pat decided she wanted her grandkids to call her Oma, the German word for grandmother. At the time, Hallquist was still navigating her transition and identified as “Whatever,” a term of her own making. Rather than Oma or Opa — the German word for grandfather — the grandkids called her “Owa.” They have not gotten to the point of asking about the unique term.
As Derek bobbed in the water off the dock out back, he recounted the family’s trepidation over his parent’s run (he now calls Hallquist his “parent,” occasionally reverting to habit and calling her “dad”). When Hallquist first began considering a run, she held a family conference call with Derek, her two daughters and her wife, Pat. They were concerned that entering the race, especially given the rancor in the current political climate, would expose them all to a flood of nasty transphobic attacks.
But Vermont’s political culture is notoriously genteel, and aside from some nasty remarks on social media, there have been few problems. Derek said he was worried that would change with the approach of the Aug. 14 primary and the heightened profile he expected his parent to take on if she wins it.
As it happened, Hallquist arrived home in the mid-afternoon, excited to announce that a teaser video for an upcoming news segment about her had been released on social media by the UK’s Channel 4 and that it was quickly racking up tens of thousands of views. She also revealed that the video was unleashing a torrent of online vitriol directed at her from men around the world.
During a swing through Washington at the beginning of the week, she had been advised to contact a specific FBI agent for help with the threats she would be expected to face if she wins the primary and gains widespread attention. Now that the wrong kind of attention had arrived early, she resolved to call the FBI agent that day.
But she did not seem scared, and she said she viewed the call to the FBI as a “precaution.”
Soon, Pat returned home with the grandkids, who greeted their father and their owa enthusiastically.
The threats became an afterthought as Hallquist talked about the possibility that Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden could stump for her if she wins her primary. Then she wandered off to push her granddaughter on a swing set out back.
Since she transitioned in 1998, at the age of 16, all of Danni Askini’s identity documents have read “female.” But last month, when Askini went to renew her passport, her request was denied. Askini says the U.S. Passport Office told her she had “failed to disclose” that she was transgender and needed to provide proof of gender transition — after 20 years of having a passport that says she’s female.
“Make no mistake, this was an intentional action by the State Department to withhold recognizing my gender,” says Askini, who was eventually granted a temporary two-year passport that allowed her to travel from her Seattle home to Sweden. The activist and executive director of Gender Justice League needed to leave Seattle, she says, after a series of death threats posted on the anti-trans website Kiwi Farms, as well as threats from local alt-right groups in the Pacific Northwest. She’d had her most recent passport for 10 years, but it was up for renewal.
Askini’s battle with the U.S. Department of State — which oversees the Passport Office — began last month, and a June 29 tweet she posted about the ordeal went viral.
Just this week, another trans woman encountered the same problem.
New York-based technology researcher Janus Rose says she’s had her passport, with a female gender marker, since November. But recently she finalized a legal name change, and sent in paperwork along with her current passport to renew the document with the new legal name. It seemed like a simple formality, until she received a phone call from a passport processing center in South Carolina.
“She basically told me that even though the government had changed my gender marker in the last year, that was a mistake,” says Rose. The passport official told Rose that the State Department should not have allowed her to change her gender on the document — and that the medical documentation she’d supplied at the time was invalid.
“This letter is something my clinic has been using as a boilerplate for years for so many people,” Rose says. “The clinic says I’m the first person to get a rejection.”
Rose had successfully changed the gender marker on her passport in 2017 using a letter signed by the nurse practitioner at her clinic. The clinic, she says, told her they’ve never encountered a person being told that that letter is invalid or that they need to have it written by an M.D. instead.
“It seems pretty clear that even if the policy hasn’t changed, something has changed in terms of guidance on how to enforce this — because it’s being enforced differently now,” says Rose.
According to the State Department’s policy, a person seeking a gender change on a passport must submit an ID “that resembles your current appearance,” a recent passport photo, proof of legal name change if applicable, and a “medical certification that indicates you are in the process of or have had appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition.”
In response to an emailed request for comment, a State Department official said the department doesn’t comment on individual applications — but provided more context on the gender change policy in general.
“Every applicant who applies for a U.S. passport undergoes extensive vetting of their identity, claim to U.S. citizenship and entitlement to a passport,” said the State Department official. “When a passport applicant presents a certification from a medical physician stating that the applicant has undergone or is receiving appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition, a new passport will be issued with an updated gender marker. Sexual reassignment surgery is not a prerequisite for updating the gender marker in a passport and documents proving sexual reassignment surgery are not required.”
The State Department did not respond directly to a question about why someone’s gender marker would be “revoked” after already being changed years ago.
Rose says she’s frustrated that a simple name change turned into a reevaluation of the validity of her gender.
“I spoke to someone the other day, a cis person, who had their legal name changed and it was fine,” says Rose. “There was no asking for additional documentation or proof. She literally did the same thing just the other day. That’s what this is about. A cis person can go in and make this simple change, and a trans person cannot.”
Askini, in contrast, was disturbed by the fact that the State Department even knew she was transgender. In her specific case, her legal gender transition was granted by a judge when she was still a minor — and in relation to a sex trafficking case and a safety effort to conceal her identity, all of the child welfare records were sealed at the time.
“None of my documentation would disclose my trans status,” says Askini. “No databases that are local, state, or federal should note my gender as anything other than female.”
Askini believes the only reason she was eventually granted a temporary passport is because Seattle-based congresswoman Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s office put direct pressure on the passport agency on the well-known activist’s behalf.
“I believe that the Trump Administration or someone in the Seattle Passport Office has targeted me politically and politicized the process for obtaining passports,” says Askini. “Their actions and statements are NOT consistent with the actual letter of the code related to trans people.”
Rose has similar suspicions. Though she’s careful to steer clear of “the temptation to blame everything on Trump,” and notes that trans people have faced bureaucratic discrimination for years, she says it feels like a very sudden change has occurred at the State Department.
“It seems like they’re applying a different standard of enforcement to these cases now. I’ve never heard of a person having a problem changing their name on a passport until now,” says Rose.
Although the State Department did not directly respond to a question asking whether there had been a recent change in policy or internal guidance mandating new enforcement rules, a change would hardly be surprising. Since Trump took office, his administration has altered existing transgender-inclusive guidelines at the Department of Education, the Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Census, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Even the Centers for Disease Control was instructed in an internal memo not to use the word transgender — along with terms like “diversity” and “evidence-based.” It’s not unfair to say the Trump administration has stopped just short of outlawing transgender people entirely.
“I think there’s an internal policy change to make it as difficult as possible for trans people,” says Rose. “The goal is to create friction. They can’t change all these laws right away, but they can make it really hard.”
An anti-LGBT+ Christian legal advocacy group has asked the US Supreme Court to review a ruling that bans employers from discriminating against transgender people on religious grounds.
Alliance Defending Freedom filed a petition to the court last week, which means that the Supreme Court, if it decides to go ahead and hear the case, now has the option to rule whether the country’s civil law right prohibiting sex discrimination in the workplace also includes discrimination based on gender identity.
This Court of Appeals ruling was issued after a transgender employee from Detroit was fired by her employer because she is transgender.
Aimee Stephens was fired from her job at a funeral home after coming out as trans to her boss.
She took her case all the way to the Court of Appeals with the support of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC], after a district court dismissed her legal challenge, claiming that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act gave the funeral home an exemption from the federal law – Title VII – of the Civil Rights Act, which covers sex discrimination in the workplace.
However, the Court of Appeals overruled this district court decision, saying that sex discrimination includes discrimination against trans people – and that there is no exemption under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
“Discrimination against employees, either because of their failure to conform to sex stereotypes or their transgender and transitioning status, is illegal under Title VII,” Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote for the Court of Appeals.
(Mark Makela/Getty Images)
“Discrimination against employees, either because of their failure to conform to sex stereotypes or their transgender and transitioning status, is illegal under Title VII,” Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote for the court.
“The unrefuted facts show that the Funeral Home fired Stephens because she refused to abide by her employer’s stereotypical conception of her sex.”
A representative from the ACLU, who argued the case for Stephens, said at the time that it was “an exciting and important victory for transgender people and allied communities across the country.”
In spite of The Equality Act, it appears that a staggering number of workplaces think that they can discriminate against transgender employees.
After a poll 1000 different workplaces, 43 percent of employers said that they are “unsure” if they would hire a transgender person in their workplace.
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Out of the 1 in 3 employers admitting they are “less likely” to hire a transgender person, just 8 percent said that they believe they should have the same rights to be employed as a cisgendered person, in a survey carried out by Crossland Employment Solicitors.
However, this transphobia is not limited to the workplace.
Beverley Sunderland, Managing Director of Crossland Employment Solicitors – who carried out the survey – said: “Our findings reinforce what bodies such as ACAS and the Women and Equalities Select Committee have been highlighting to the Government for years; trans identity is more complex than the law currently recognises.
“What’s most worrying is the high percentage of employers that are biased against transgender workers from the recruitment stage and beyond. And not just in one sector, but a prejudiced attitude that is found throughout both shop floor and management in particular in the retail and tech sectors. Whether this reflects a lack of understanding or simply a fear of a potential discrimination claim, is not evident.