Ohio's War On Trans People, Pt. 2: From WPATH to the Legislature

And I wanted to I wanted to talk about some of the older campaigns that happened, and I wanted to talk about specifically some of the campaigns to influence WPATH. Oh boy, right, right, So we should we should start by explaining to people what WPATH is, because I think unless you're trans, you probably don't know. You've probably never heard of WPATH.

real trans person or not. And like things have, Yeah, things have gotten like somewhat better over time, but there's still a lot of medical professionals in and especially like therapists in WPATH who like still want to require some form of gatekeeping basically still don't trust trans people to know, you know, who we are and what we need and are like, okay, but we need to make sure they get therapy. We need to make sure we do like

oh the sype tesks, what if they regret it? And so yeah, So I used to be a detransitioned radical feminist back in the day, and I used to know I mean, I knew Maxim Kitty. I was involved in that particular group for about like six and a half seven years, and I used to have a blog called Crash Chaos Cats where I wrote about de transitioning and

kind of got more more turphy over time. But like pretty early into my blog, about like three months or so in this gender therapist who worked for the San Francisco Department of Health like left a comment on my blog and was like, I'm interested in talking to de transitioned people because I think there are too Like well, she have to comment that she was interested in talking to de transition people and you know, talking to me, and then like we started emailing back and forth, and

she opened up pretty quickly and said, like there are too many f to ms in San Francisco. It was like, too many f to ms in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are too many like you know, Quoe unquote, female people transitioning.

the trans community. So anyway, shit all this stuff, something about like you know, people are treating this social problem as a medical problem. And I you know, immediately kind of turned around and started talking with this other detrans radical feminist that I knew, devoras Ahab, and we started scheming like, Okay, this like gender therapist who works for the San Francisco Department of Health like thinks there's too

many people transitioning. How do we exploit this, Like how can we like use this as an opportunity to like cut down on the number of like people transitioning.

she also wanted to try to develop psych assessments that could supposedly like weed out you know, who the real trans people were, who was going to benefit from transitioning and who was supposed to go on to regret transitioning and d transition.

actually were suffering from internalized misogyny or some other kind of rad fem explanation for gender dysphoria. And like, the thing is, like Devora also lived in the San Francisco Bay area, so she actually ended up like meeting up with this gender therapist. His name was Julie Graham and was like pretty open with her with their anti trans views.

I mean, she wasn't like completely open with her like intentions like oh, I'm going to use this person to try to like work towards ending all transition, but she was. She did tell you know, Graham, but she didn't think

anyone really benefited from it. And she told her that, you know, she said she knew people who have been true transsexuals who had de transitioned and said like lots of really awful things about like trans women being fetishists and just like you know, all this very anti trans stuff. But then you always say, oh, but I think we

don't have to agree on everything. I think we can like work together, and like, you know, this gender therapist fell for it like somehow like divorcing all this very anti trans stuff, like making a close she was opposed to transition, saying like really nasty trans misogynistic shit, like none of that was like objectionable enough for Graham not to like continue to like work with her, to continue to be like, hey, do you want to talk to

these clinicians about what it is to do transition? And you know eventually what happened like that Eventually, this relationship with this gender therapist eventually led to a presentation at the first us PATH conference by Carrie Callahan, who's like she's a kind of an odd figure because she never actually identified as like a radical feminist, but she spent like years hanging out was like de transitioned radical feminist, and she's she's de transitioned, but she's kind of more

of like a weird liberal who believes in more gatekeeping, but she's kind of handy, like we like, like, she did this presentation at us PATH and she showed some videos of d trans turfs, including myself, like I made one of I made a short video, and Max Robinson also made one of those videos, and Carrie Stella was the third person, and Carry Stella she did like she was another like d trans tumbler turf who did this survey that still gets like it was a it was

a survey monkey survey. It's gets cited by like anti trans researchers about d transition yeap, which anyways, so we so there were three of us who made these short videos. Both me and Max Robinson by that point had gone like we had hooked up with these weird turfs who were deanic witches and taking part in these kind of

weird neopagan x trans reclaiming femaleness rituals. We had been through this kind of like religious neopagan like you know, conversion practice rituals, which of course that wasn't something that the USP like those are the people, you know, us Path knew that, but we hit that. We just you know, I talked about how I thought I had transitioned due

to like internalized misogyny and trauma on all that. So I was sort of like spreading a more like kind of watered down terf ideology to the folks over at us Path.

What that basically meant was she was taking away a lot of the more objectionable elements, the things that would identify folks like Kai in her previously scrambled state as a turf and being completely opposed to transition and stuff like that, and then putting on you know, kind of suiting them up right, like you know, getting getting them in their in their nice clothes, and then presenting them to a professional audience who is then able to take

that information and sort of absorb it into their general thinking and then how that's going to play out in terms of their changes or implementations of care in the long term.

with that because I think, right, I mean, I think I think there should be more skepticism of people who are like I got a vision from the Christian God or like the Abrahamic God that told me to do transition. I think they should be more skepticism of that. But that's not something that like, I don't know if if you if you walk into like w Path and you tell them I was given to vision from God, They're gonna be like, what whereas this kind of stuff?

in this battle against handy trends stuff. And it's true to a certain extent, but they're also like, this is an organization composed of a bunch of CIS doctors, right, who can be influenced and manipulated.

want to like control trans people. To have some trans people as like figureheads, you know, expressing those views gonna be like oh well, you know, look this person's saying it and they're trans, so like yeah, I mean, I mean, like yeah, at the same like that the first US Path, I mean, just to kind of show how far things still need to come, you know, the same us Path where Carrie did her de transition presentation. Ken Zucker was there and he got he got protested, I mean, like

there was a protest against him, and I did. I believe they ended up like canceling at least like one of his presentations.

It's like a lot of like I mean, and like when we talked about sort of like gatekeeping for healthcare, like that was the like one of the original things was like you know, one of the things that would happen very very commonly was you know it's like okay, like if you if you want to get healthcare, like you have to let me rape you.

that ship. But simultaneously, yeah, like I don't know, that's that's something that you know, like there are living people who fucking experience that, right and m you know, and and when when you when you look at why these kinds of like d trans campaigns, why why these just like like these sort of d trans anti transactivists have been so successful in targeting this it's like, well, you know, it's it's it's it's I think I think it's a kind of similar thing to like, oh wow, I wonder

why like the third KKK was successful in this South And it's like hmm hmm, maybe there are things happening. I mean that that is slightly unfair as being a bit unfair to them, But you know, there's there's still a lot of these sentiments that there's a lot of sort of like transphobic sentiments that are just kind of like buried beneath the surface. And I think a lot of what we've been seeing over the past you know, like like eight ish years. What is time hold on?

cut down on the number of people transitioning. I'm going to find some like de transitioned women and then use their experiences and you know, that's what she.

Emily Bailon. Was it like I forget what it's called the giald for gender therapy, where he's like kind of cast is this like this poor moderate position who's caught between the religious right that wants to ban all trans healthcare and these wacky transactivists who just want to let everyone transition. It's like he's just trying to find this nuanced approach and make sure that like teenagers don't transition

and regret it. And you know, yeah, I know he was like, I mean, like he was trying to stop the healthcare bands in Ohio by pointing out like, oh look, you know we're we do comprehensive care. You know, most most youth don't go on to medically transition. Like like Carrie Callahan was also one of the you know she and her testimony, and in some op ed pieces that she wrote, she was like praising his broach, calling it cautious.

You know, people who want to like restrict care implement more gatekeeping will use like D transition stories to justify that. And then of course, like you know, the religious right who wants to completely wipe out all transition healthcare will also use like D transition stories as well.

And part of this was actually captured by a white paper that was written by Kelly Winter's a trans woman. You know, she's got a PhD and everything like that. She's been paying attention to this stuff for a really long time, has been working in aspects of wpath and trying to like, you know, kind of help reshape some of the transphobia that's been happening.

that chapter you also see the laundering of specific studies that are focused on predominantly de transitioned women, predominantly gender critical or radical feminist. These two papers were Litman twenty twenty one, which surveyed a lot of the kind of the old D trans turf groups that we had been connected with right around twenty seventeen or so, So this was before the ROGD paper was published in twenty eighteen.

But then there was also let's see, there's the Vanderbusch study, which I believe that was published in like what twenty I don't remember what year that was published in the Vanderbusch study. Now, this study was done by Eli vander Busch, who is basically post trans the half of a gender critical de transition project, and it had a very similar kind of like recruitment strategy sometimes an overlapping recruitment pool. But the difference is that this happened after the rog D paper dropped RGDS.

are wildly biased sample pools. It's not going to be generalizable to basically any population. It's only focused on like a very particular subset of people who end up detransitioning and then develop some kind of like political belief it's connected to it, right, And then it's being used as legitimate data as part of standards of care that is supposed to be like, yeah, yes, it's just it's particulars.

ways to cope with it. And it's just like, I don't I mean a lot of people were trying to like talk themselves out of like transitioning again. So I don't think the issue here is like, oh, transition didn't work for these people. It's more like they internalized the idea. You know that no one said transition, but again, like people don't. It's like people don't. Yeah, they only care about using de transition in order to reduce the number

of trans people or prevent transition. They don't care about transition or d transition that you know results from transphobia, either internalizing it, yeah, internalizing it an anti trans ideology, or you know, not being able to access transition because of you know, living in a transphobic society, coming from a transphobic family, you know, having to go into the closet to find a job, that kind of stuff. Like it's never about like, yeah, it's never about preventing due

transition that results from transphobia. It's just about finding excuse to control us and our access to healthcare.

not actually doing their job. They're going out and trying to find ways to like they're trying to find, you know, whatever whatever like absolutely dog shit studies or like just stuff that like probably should be considered medical malpractice. Like they don't really care because again it's it's it's it's just this like loop because that's the thing that they need. So they'll they'll find whatever, like crank pseudo scientists just like cranking this stuff out and they'll use it.

find were crappy because they were coming from urfs. But it's like it's really just kind of like transitioning again and then a.

the anti trans movement. But also just like I mean, if it's not scary anymore, if you just feel like, okay, like this is just an issue of like making people, making sure people get the supports that they need so they can just get on with their lives. Like we just treat it as a practical problem. That needs to be solved instead of using it to feed a trans panic. Like, yeah, it's just like the the there's actually like less reasons

for gatekeeping. I mean, I feel like like creating like basically you're kind of like creating a safety dit for in case, like you know, in case something unexpect did or negative happens. So you're like, okay, well, if you transition and things you end up changing your mind or things don't work out the way you think they would,

here's all these supports you can turn to. So I feel like that's kind of a better long term thing to work for, is like okay, like make sure there are supports for people no matter how their transition turns out, like if then including you know, de transitioning, or if people like you know, face health complications, like make sure that there's like supports in place for that. Don't use that as an excuse for gatekeeping.

or tools. Yes, and once you do, when you do that, right, like everything suddenly you know, like who cares what happens to these people afterwards, because you don't think of them as people. You think of them as just a thing that you're using to do another thing.

healthcare outcomes for trans and d trans people. Right during that time frame, I had been starting to go off of my hormones. I started going off of them a few months prior to that point, and in that time frame, I started experiencing certain types of what seemed like progressive vision loss. Right. My brain, I sometimes have a tendency to panic, I guess, especially when it comes to things like health anxiety. My brain started to make the internal connection,

did going off of my hormones cause my vision to change? Right? And unfortunately, as I started to talk about this online and the likes, I was getting a lot of encouragement from other folks, usually like you know, gender critical, anti transparents, that kind of thing. That yes, absolutely like the hormones were causing me to have vision loss right and it was really impacting my ability to function in my daily life. Right.

But another part of me at the same time as all of this was starting to feel like I was starting to feel aspects of regret and anger, which made me want to do something. This is a very common narrative, right. It made me want to do something so that other people would not end up in the situation that I

was in and so I answered this call. Probably not the best of decisions that I could have made for myself, but I decided to go ahead and do so answered Kerry Calhoun's call, Yes, Yes, I decided to go ahead and say, yes, I will, I will connect in with this. I would like to be a part of it. I had to apparently apologize for talking to the wrong clinician in public first, but.

off very early on. So it was predominantly the four of us that ended up being the actual formal board at any point in the early stages, right, And so we started to draft a lot of this stuff. But like, over I was starting to wonder about two things, right, Like, after some exchanges with other board members about who it

is that we should be predominantly outreaching. Should it be clinicians or should it be people that are actually impacted, people who have gone through gender affirming care, regardless of how they identify themselves currently, Like, what is our main priority? The other board member at the time wanted to focus

more on the clinician route. I did not. My focus was on if we are going to be doing a quote unquote patient advocacy organization, we should be focusing on the people that we are supposed to be connected to, right, Like, those are who we are. Why would we want to put more power into the hands of the clinicians that

supposedly harmed people. That doesn't make any sense, right? And then, like you know, as these wheels were starting to churn, another part of me was starting to worry that over time, the trajectory of this organization at that point was going to start advocating for more restrictions or full out bands later on in the future, possibly even partnering up with some of the some of the more right wing groups.

I believe I Actually, I think I worried about them becoming like the gender care equivalent to Wolf, which was unfortunately pretty accurate, I would say in terms of my my concern that was that was part of my my formal resignation to the board. I stepped down as vice president about five months after I had joined on because I could not see any I could not see any

recourse within the group for for changing directions. I couldn't be party to them hurting other people, even if I felt hurt at the time, and so I ended up taking a step back. My vision was still having problems, but you know what ended up making that a lot easier. Actually, it's funny. This is not something that was recommended to me by anybody that I had been talking to about this stuff, who had been more exposed to anti trans rhetoric like I. I talked to blind people. Yeah, I

ended up talking to to blind people. I connected with folks from the National Federation for the Blind. It was a group that was recommended to me by somebody I knew from a from a past job that I had because she was the daughter of somebody who went blind later in life due to a genetic condition, and he was a member of the NFB right, he was part of the federation, and so that was her recommendation to me.

I hadn't reached out at the time. My brain was too focused in doing this weird we got to save people kind of bullshit direction. But like, eventually, after I'm like taking a step back from all of this stuff, I decided to go ahead and pursue that suggestion from you know, this random person in my life, not from anybody I had been connected to in terms of organizing. And when when I went there, like the only thing that I ever got was acceptance. There was no questioning.

Nobody asked what happened, Nobody asked like any sort of details about like my my personal views. Like I didn't have to express any forms of like, you know, sorrow or regret or anything like that. A lot of it was focused on, Okay, these are the issues that you're currently dealing with. Here are some of the things that

you can work on to make your life easier. Here are some supports that you can find within your states if you need to do things like, you know, get certain kinds of mobility training using a white cane and the likes. If you need to learn how to use braille, all of that fun stuff. Here. Here's even like specific doctors that you could try to go to who can like really assess what's going on with your vision. Because before that point I did not have access to specialists.

I was living in like you know, rural main There was there was nothing there. I would have had to travel like over three hours to go to Boston for me to be able to see as specialist. Instead, like they were able to point me to people who had specializations in like retinal conditions, and so when I went there,

you know, they they did their usual tests. They ruled out some things that were known to run in my family actually, but they did ultimately decide that like my retinas are not processing light correctly and that it's actually likely genetic, so unrelated to horrormone youth conrelated to hormone usage.

In fact, you know, as I was going through that process and I started to reflect on what my vision was like before I even took hormones, let alone stopping it, like certain symptoms were actually there, just at a much lower degree. Since like at least my teens, I already had difficulties with my night vision. I had difficulties with color contrasts. Sometimes my light sensitivity wasn't nearly as bad.

Usually it was only with migrains. But time, like you know, that started to break out more where like even just like you know, there being too much sunlight was painful for me. But like some of this stuff, it definitely predated when I started my transition. But because I wasn't really given space to actually unpack any of this stuff, I didn't really have the ability to make those connections. Instead, what happened was, you know, I join in on this

organizing board. I connect in with three other people that were looking to advocate in very particular directions. And like, my story was not something that was meant to get support, My story was something that was meant to scare people. I was also nominated as the spokesperson, which meant I would have had the responsibility to do things like, you know,

respond to the press or give sound quotes or whatever. Right, I gave certain kinds of descriptions over to a like a Democratic candidate that we had been scheduled to meet with Ryan Starzik at the time down in Arizona, and you know, give the whole spiel, right, you know, A visible trans person with a story that for a lot of people who, like most people, are very connected to their senses, whether that's hearing, vision, touch, or whatever, they

can't conceptualize a life without them, and so it terrifies them. Right, But like that doesn't actually help the person be able to get to a point where this is a livable life, it's even a frame life. There are certain things that I can do that other people can't do. I can navigate inside the apartment without having the lights on because I know where everything is mapped out of my head,

and I can rely on touch. I can pour myself a glass of water and not have to worry about its spilling because I can feel where it like goes up. But that's not really something that like we're not even allowed to think about. We're not even allowed to think about. Like, Okay, so if this thing happens to you and there's documented evidence of it, not like something that's completely imagined, like my brain decided it was, here's what we can do

to help m's. That's the kind of things that people really need to be able to access, right, you know, if something happens to you, these are the things that you can do to be able to work through this and live a more comfortable life in the way that

you are happy with. But I don't really see any of that happening to be perfectly frank well, no, Like, I'm also thinking back about the like the standards of care A because like, you know, there's this you know, inclusion of aspects of regret and de transition and stuff like that into things like the adolescent chapter. But you know what, they don't include a chapter for de transition support. Yes, no, because they're not serious about that.

of slowly realized over time. It's just like, oh, all these people to use my story, but they need me to suffer for it to like work out for them. Like they don't have any interest in making my life easier, Like they don't have any interest in like helping me like create a good life and being happy. They want me, they really do want me to be ruined and miserable forever because they can use like that's more valuable to them, Like my suffering matters more than my happiness to a

lot of these people. Yeah, Like you know, that was definitely one of those moments where I was like, what, like one of those things that eventually, you know, let me to get disillusion with the whole thing and be like, you know what I get myself involved with. But yeah, yeah, it's just it's it is really like sick and perverse. How how anti trans people like use suffering, use both transcendi trans people suffering for their own agenda.

York Times, right. And the way that this plays out for trans people and for de trans people is that like the thing that these people that you know, the journalists also are looking for is suffering, like they don't really care, you know, like they like, none of these people ever report stories that are just like, hey, like I went to a gender clinic and it was great, Like nobody's gonna like, I don't think anyone's going to read that, Like I would read that because you know

that's you know, that's great, but like like they don't care about that there's there's no sort of sensationalism there. The sensationalism is like, you know, then this is why

you get like the Washington Post interviewing this light. You know, like these people who are just like, oh, like I was I worked at a gender clinic, but I was secretly doing evil or like you know, or or or you get all of and this is why a lot of even protrans like media coverage is about things like suicide rates and about things like you know, like how like how likely you are to die if you don't get the healthcare thing you need, because it's it's the

same as CenTra structure. It's the thing, the thing that's useful to sell to people is suffering and that I don't know what the solution is to that, because I mean, I don't know have have media that's not based on profit, I guess, but like, you know, to decommodify the news. But that's one of these things where it's like, you know, like as long as long as like every single like shitty local newspaper is making all of their money from

like crime scare stories, they're not going to report. They're not going to You're not gonna get accurate reporting about police because they need the police to like give the like feed them all of these shitty crime stories.

don't exist. And it's a absolutely like if you were just to like ask someone, how do you want a society to be run? Zero people would answer, we want it to be based on the production of suffering. And yet we have done this, but it doesn't have to be like this. To sort of finish that, Dave a great quote, the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. So let's go build a world

that's safe for trans people. This has been It could happen here. You can find more of Lee and Kai's work at Health Liberation Now dot com. I recommend you go do it. It is great and go and make the world otherwise.