Nationwide study: “Heartbreaking” levels of violence against Queer youth

It’s tempting to respond to this article with a scathing “you don’t say” but it is, at least, contributing to a body of data which confirms what anyone woke is already aware of. It’s an American study that reports on violence trends against Queer youth, and the outcomes aren’t pretty.

The first nationwide study to ask high school students about their sexuality found that gay, lesbian and bisexual teenagers were at far greater risk fordepression, bullying and many types of violence than their straight peers.

“I found the numbers heartbreaking,” said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which includes a division that administered the survey.

The survey documents what smaller studies have suggested for years, but it is significant because it is the first time the federal government’s biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the gold standard of adolescent health data collection, looked at sexual identity. The survey found that about 8 percent of the high school population described themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual, which would be about 1.3 million students.

These adolescents were three times more likely than straight students to have been raped. They skipped school far more often because they did not feel safe; at least a third had been bullied on school property. And they were twice as likely as heterosexual students to have been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property.

More than 40 percent of these students reported that they had seriously considered suicide, and 29 percent had made attempts to do so in the year before they took the survey. The percentage of those who used illegal drugs was many times greater than their heterosexual peers. While 1.3 percent of straight students said they had used heroin, for example, 6 percent of the gay, lesbian and bisexual students reported having done so.

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Academic transphobia and The Media: The persistence of the “activists vs science” false dichotomy

Content Notice: Transphobia

Introduction to the False Dichotomy of Scientist or Activist

The rise of visibility of transgender people correlates with an increase in the sheer and committed dishonesty of many media outlets any time they cover trans issues. There are the usual suspects: budding radfem academics penning unsubstantiated diatribes riddled with fallacies; established academics angrily penning burning letters to the editor any time their pet pseudoscience is called out for being pseudoscience; religious fundamentalists who can’t decide if they’re sticking to noninformation or disinformation; and the many ignorant journalists caught in between this shitstorm. Many of these trans-antagonistic figures are represented by said ignorant journalists as “martyrs for an inconvenient truth,” where trans-affirmative opponents to these figures are engaging in “pointless witch hunts” that result in these brave champions being “suddenly and unceremoniously fired” while repudiating Real Science™.

Jesse Singal is at the centre of this “activist versus Real Science™” narrative by implying both that activists were the ones that had Galileo’s Middle Finger pulled from Lambda and that said activists are uninterested in “truth, accuracy, or fairness in argument,” having shared on Twitter:

“Lambda Literary has withdrawn Alice Dreger’s book from consideration for its nonfiction literary award. The (very strongly) implied message here is that you can’t be an advocate for social justice and care about the principles of truth, accuracy, and fairness in argument.”

He also penned an article about Dr. Zucker, a notorious conversion “therapy” advocate who was finally discredited and shut down in Ontario after decades of abusing gender nonconforming kids. In this piece, Singal pushes the narrative that anti-science activists are at fault for the clinic’s closure: (emphasis mine)

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Signal Boosting: Convert, Cure, Closet, or Kill — the Religious Right’s Plan for Trans Folk

Medium has a post up that is equal parts delightful in its thoroughness (so many citations, thank you!) and also… horrifying, in its thoroughness (egads, that’s so much hate being cited). It explains that the plan the Religious Right has for trans folk can be reduced to “Convert, Cure, Closet, or Kill:”

Almost 60 anti-transgender bills were introduced this year, most of which targeted transgender youth, restricting access to public accommodations, defining “sex” in non-discrimination laws to exclude transgender people, or permitting health care providers to refuse to treat transgender patients. Another six states introduced laws banning protections for LGBT people, which would join Tennessee and Arkansas in nullifying local non-discrimination ordinances. Twenty-two states introduced “Religious Freedom” laws making discrimination against LGBT people legal and consequence-free.

The vast majority of these laws did not pass, but HB2 in North Carolina did. It functionally accomplished two of the Family Research Council’s goals by nullifying all legal protections for transgender people, and effectively banning them from public bathrooms, while setting a nearly impossible bar for obtaining legal recognition of a gender change.

Also noteworthy is that while NC requires “sex change surgery” (the preferred term is gender confirmation surgery) to change a gender marker, they are adamantly opposed to state provided insurance from covering such procedures. Many transgender people do not want such surgery, or are physically unable to have it. Most simply cannot afford it.

This is why the transgender community has reacted so vehemently to HB 2: it is the realization of many of the goals of hate groups intended to legislate a community out of existence. This is something that has not been pointed out in the mainstream media, though it should be. How would the media react if North Carolina had passed a law targeting black people that was explicitly proposed and endorsed by the Klan?

I strongly recommend this post in its entirety, as it demonstrates the contradictions and inanity of religiously motivated positions to antagonize gender diversity. It also demonstrates why trans folk are generally suspicious of researchers, as so-called scientists have been well known to abuse us to further political agendas (see: Dr. Zucker, asshole extraordinaire, standing proud among the ranks of abusive anti-trans researchers like Alice Dreger, J Michael Bailey, and Ray Blanchard). It predicts that these strategies, tried and tested as routine failures against the LGB, will ultimately flop as they did before–but not before they’ve claimed a body count.

The authoritarian war machine needs lives to fuel it, after all.

-Shiv