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Transcript:
It’s tough to find good news these days, so I’m very excited to bring you some today, and it’s all about our trans friends! First, 26 medical and psychotherapeutic organizations from across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, have just dropped a massive 400-page report that definitively supports the need for comprehensive gender-affirming care for transgender youth, and which directly rebuts the lack of scientific data in the Cass Report.
If you missed it, last summer I talked about some of the serious problems in the Cass Report, which misrepresented the research on trans care in order to justify laws that withhold care from the young people who desperately need it.
As journalist Erin Reed points out in her newsletter, the new report “criticize(s) the Cass Review and NHS’s recommendation of “psychotherapy” for gender dysphoria as without evidence and as potentially harmful: “Psychotherapy is recommended for co-incident disorders, for which there is already an indication due to the co-incident disorder itself. However, it is also recommended or the ‘management of [GD] associated distress.’ None of the studies included in the review in question were able to show a reduction in gender dysphoria through psychotherapy.”
Reed has some other translated bits of the report if you want to check it out–as always, links are in the transcript on Skepchick.org or patreon.com/rebecca. But this is great news for people needing gender-affirming care in Europe. As Reed points out, the US really is an outlier on the medical science, here.
And that brings me back to the good news here in the US. I know, I know, things are awful but you know what Mr. Rogers said: look for the helpers. One such helper is Ana Reyes, Washington, D.C.’s first Latina and the first openly LGBT district court judge, who spent last week absolutely roasting members of the Trump administration.
As you may or may not have noticed (because who can pay attention to every terrible thing that’s happening right now), one of Trump’s deranged executive orders was one banning transgender people from the US military, stopping any trans people from joining up and calling for current trans service members to be found and dismissed.
In response, six transgender active service members (including one with nearly 20 years of service) and one potential recruit joined with Lamda Legal, Human Rights Campaign, and Gender Justice League to sue the Trump administration for violating their rights and discriminating against trans people with no justification.
The case happened to land on the desk of Ana Reyes, and for that we should all be grateful because this lady rules. In the first hearing last month, she described Trump’s order as “biologically inaccurate” and “frankly ridiculous.” As Pink News reported, she went on to ask some pointed questions about the order legislating how people should use pronouns:
“Would you agree that if the military is negatively impacted [from the use of pronouns], we all have a lot bigger problems than pronoun use?” Reyes asked, adding that if the military is damaged by pronoun usage, then “our military is incompetent”.
“I can’t agree with that,” Justice Department attorney Jason Lynch replied.
Judge Reyes continued: “Do you think usage of that preferred pronoun by that small group of people is going to impact our ability in combat situations? Explain to me how pronoun usage impacts [military readiness]. Because it doesn’t. Because any common sense rational human being would understand it doesn’t.”
“The judge described the order as “frankly ridiculous”, claiming she would hear testimony from a US military officer to testify in defence of the ban on pronouns if they could find one.
“If you can get me an officer of the United States military to get on the stand and say that because of pronoun usage we are less prepared, I will be the first to buy you a box of cigars,” she said.”
She also gave them a helpful metaphor. When the DOJ attorney couldn’t say whether or not it was showing animus “to call an entire group of people, lying dishonest people who are undisciplined, immodest and have no integrity,” she announced that she was instituting a standing order that “says that no one who has graduated from UVA Law School can appear before me. So, I need you to sit down, please. I need you to sit down.” When the DOJ attorney complied, she explained that the reason for the order was because UVA grads are “all liars and lack integrity.”
This destroyed them so thoroughly that the DOJ issued a strongly worded “Petition To Stop Hurting Our Feelings,” as coined by Joe Patrice at Above the Law, whining that Reyes was (EDIT: WASN’T) being impartial.
The next hearing happened last week, and Reyes once again did not hide her utter contempt for Trump’s sniveling minions. For instance, as reported by Tiffany Vilches on BlueSky, at one point she asked the DOJ attorney, “You quote the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Do you know who that is?”
The attorney responded, “No?”
Reyes: “He’s the highest ranking uniformed military member. Feel free to ask the service member behind you if you need to verify.”
Holy shit.
When the attorney told her to check his cited studies because they would overrule her own common sense, she asked him if she should be forced to listen to a Beyonce album just because he cited it. “The DoD can’t say they’re excluding Yankees fans because they upset unit cohesion due to the Beyonce album,” she said.
But it turns out that the studies he cited weren’t just irrelevant–they actively negated his point. Reyes asked the DOJ to support their assertion that trans service members were dangerous because they reduced group cohesion, and it appears that they offered this study conducted by RAND in 2016. Unfortunately for them, the study actually found the opposite of what they claimed: “The limited research on the effects of foreign military policies indicates little or no impact on unit cohesion, operational effectiveness, or readiness. Commanders noted that the policies had benefits for all service members by creating a more inclusive and diverse force.
Accordingly, they recommended that the Department of Defense “should ensure strong leadership and identify and communicate the benefits of an inclusive and diverse workforce to successfully implement a policy change and successfully integrate openly serving transgender service members into the force.”
When Reyes pointed all this out to the DOJ attorneys, they admitted they hadn’t even bothered to read the studies in the two months they had before this court date.
In response to the DOJ’s claim that transgender people should be excluded from service due to their high rates of suicide, Reyes said, “Do you know why people with transgender, with gender dysphoria, have higher rates of suicide ideation? It’s because they face such stigma and discrimination in society. All the studies show that transgender people and people with gender dysphoria are not more inherently subject to suicide or likely to have suicide ideation. That’s not it. It’s not biological, it’s not inherent.”
“I assume you would agree with me with the following: The answer to suicide ideation caused by discrimination is not further discrimination, right?” the judge asked.
She’s absolutely correct. There’s a reason the DOJ wasn’t able to provide any studies to support their claims: they don’t exist. Trans people have been in the US military since at least the Civil War, when people who were assigned female at birth would join up by dressing as men, and some of them liked it so much they did it for the rest of their lives, like Albert Cashier. And we don’t have a ton of hard data on trans service members because it wasn’t a topic of research until the past decade, but the studies that HAVE been done match that RAND study.
For instance, in 2020 researchers surveyed 195 trans service members and found that “transgender service members report above average physical health and few risk behaviors” compared to cis soldiers.
Last year, researchers found that it was actually policy changes like Trump’s that led to negative impacts on the military, concluding that there’s a real “need for consistent policies that support inclusion of trans and gender diverse service members and reduce barriers to accessing healthcare services, which optimize the strength of a diverse military force.”
So yeah, the data suggests that if you want a strong military, you make it as inclusive as possible for everyone, including transgender people.
Look, I’ll be honest with you: do I think transgender people should be in the US military? No. But I also don’t think that cis people should be in the US military. I think the US military is an overall bad thing for the world and it needs some healthy defunding and reorganizing before it can even be considered morally questionable. But if we’re gonna have a military, then dammit we should have a military that accepts people regardless of their sex, gender, sexuality, or race. And it is an absolute joy to see Judge Reyes tear these anti-science bigots a new asshole before our very eyes.
