By Ann Rostow—
Putting the Freud in Schadenfreude
I was so excited when I first saw the story about Kristi Noem’s husband posting photos of himself with the balloons under his see-through top and texting about big boobs. Could this be true, I thought, with a journalist’s eye for accurate reporting? OMG it was! How much mileage will I get out of this one, I wondered with a lazy notion of hitting my word count with fun-filled rambling instead of time-consuming research? Tons! And, also, don’t you love it when obnoxious high-profile people demand “privacy” the minute a scandal spotlights themselves or their relatives? Please spare us the sanctimony. The victimhood! Privacy is what we give to the brokenhearted, the sick, and the dying. We don’t owe privacy to a grandstanding, gun toting, puppy killing harridan who wore her Rolex to a Salvadorian prison camp and told her lover to fire the pilot because he left her favorite blanket on the plane. I figured I could drop 200 words on that alone (and I just wrote about 100 as it happens).
But, after my initial exhilaration, I thought twice. Poor hapless Bryon was apparently a really nice guy (his neighbors told The New York Times) with a kind word for everyone and a storefront insurance office in small town South Dakota where the sign promises: “Old fashioned service, Easy as pie!” Did he really deserve the gleeful and humiliating publicity that certainly drew most of its energy from his wife’s nasty rep?
And what about his little kink, anyway? What’s so bad about a little cross-dressing? Surely our community knows better than to frown on some innocent cyber cosplay. Haven’t we all been seen as the personification of perversion at various times in our lives? There are many decades of our lives for the gay elders, like moi, to pick an example at random, as we went through years of social disdain before finally being elevated to a relatively normal status.
Yet, we were categorized as misfits out of unreasoned hostility. There’s nothing kinky, weird, or shameful about gayness. I’ve mentioned my memory of one of the early marches in New York City when the lesbians broke off from the main parade group because the guys had allowed a group of NAMBLA activists to march along for civil rights. That was the North American Man/Boy Love Association, a bunch of pedophiles, and, in the early days of the gay civil rights movement, some (guys) felt, I guess, that since we were called deviants, we ourselves shouldn’t point the finger at some other group that was also ostracized. But they were ostracized for a reason. They were legit deviants.
C’mon people! Even back then, the lesbians were the conscience of the community despite the fact that the mostly male community leaders ignored us.
That lengthy sidetrack is to say that my third take on Mr. Noem was that, hmmm, it actually is a little nutty to put on spandex, pay money to go online with balloons under some spandex so that the knots sort of look like nipples, and rave about gigantic breasts. And to do so using the public technology of 2026, when your wife is massively famous and presents her family as an all-American clan of devout Christians is just plain crazy. Yes, we’re GLBT and we don’t like to judge others, particularly as far as their sexuality is concerned, but really, Bryon. I suppose you’re not hurting anyone, but a therapist would not be a bad idea.
My final thought is this. When average low-information Americans think of transgender men and women, they don’t think of the thousands of transgender people living their lives, working, just going about their daily business, and, for the most part, blending into society as the men and women they are rather than the girls and boys that came into the world. No, they think of big cross-dressing guys with beards trying to check out the girl’s locker room. And they think of men like Bryon Noem—men with (sorry, Bryon) real issues that have nothing to do with being gay or transgender, but instead have to do with being a little messed up. Of course they don’t want them in the ladies’ bathrooms! I wouldn’t either.
Say What?
I just finished a confusing New York Times article headlined “U.S. Quits Deals on Trans Rights.” It seems the Department of Education is canceling or backing out of various legal settlements negotiated during the Obama and Biden administrations that concerned the treatment of transgender or non-binary students at certain federally-funded schools. Huh?
It seems as if the settlements stemmed from civil rights investigations launched by the government back when the government was in the business of protecting GLBT rights rather than destroying them. The Biden administration, you recall, interpreted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Arguably, so did the Obama administration, but Biden’s policy was derived from the (oft-mentioned in our pages) 2020 Supreme Court ruling that ruled explicitly that a ban on “discrimination because of sex” inherently included gay and trans bias.
Somehow, I gather vaguely, Trump’s Department of Education is now trying to reverse the outcome of those investigations and require a number of schools to revert to whatever horrible behaviors provoked the original complaints. According to the Times, at least a few of these schools are either ignoring the demand, have not heard of the demand, or cannot alter their situations without falling afoul of state law. I don’t know if this will turn out to be a big deal or not, but it doesn’t sound good and it doesn’t sound legal. Since I don’t really understand it to begin with, I’ll leave it there.
Gray Area Redux
Meanwhile, in other trans news that involves the Gray Lady, do you remember earlier this year when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the American Medical Association appeared (in a Times article) to discourage surgery for transgender youth? The plastic surgeons came out against transition surgery for minors, the vast majority of which involves breast reductions for trans boys. The American Medical Association, in turn, appeared to echo these concerns, also urging caution before picking up the scalpels. “In the absence of clear evidence,” the Times quoted, “the AMA agrees with ASPS that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”
But that statement did not represent a change in AMA policy, The Advocate reports. In a March AMA Board newsletter, the group explained that the whole discussion began with a meeting in January between medical honchos and Dr. Oz at the Department for Health and Human Services on the subject of transition care (which Trump and company are trying to defund from Medicare and Medicaid). While the plastic surgeons issued a nine-page position report on youth surgery, the AMA did not. Nonetheless, they prepared a comment in the event they were asked to weigh in on the ASPS policy by the media.
When the Times article appeared, the newsletter said, it gave the impression that the AMA had tightened their stance in response to the ASPS press release issued the previous day. The AMA Board subsequently asked for a public correction. As they said in the newsletter: “This was neither a policy change nor was it an endorsement of a position taken by another medical society.”
The AMA’s stance, the letter concluded, is unchanged. “Our recent response to questions about ASPS’s position statement was intended to preserve—not diminish—access to gender-affirming care, and to clarify and reinforce what our policy has long reflected and standards of care. The AMA supports gender-affirming care as medically necessary per our policy.”
Okay then! Why do we care about the nuance in a two-month-old article anyway? For me, mainly, it’s because we were left with the impression that reputable scientific and medical organizations had abandoned a commitment to youth healthcare, presumably after careful thought. But both organizations made clear that their positions were advisory, and, of course, limited to surgery—not trans youth healthcare in general.
Indeed, as we wrote here at the time, surgery for underage trans kids is not a thing, and is mainly limited to top surgery for developing transboys in their mid to late teens. The Times article was juxtaposed with a successful $2 million malpractice suit from a cisgender girl who had her breasts removed when she was 16 after her parents were pressured by a careless psychologist. The girl thought she was trans, but had doubts. Nevertheless, she went ahead to her later regret.
These situations are tragedies. But, make no mistake. Little boys aren’t getting their penises chopped off and the vast majority of doctors do not sign off on operations without extensive evaluations. But that won’t stop the anti-trans bullhorns from adding the American Medical Association to their propaganda machine. Lots of people read the Times. Few read the AMA’s Board newsletters.
My Public Idaho
I think I told you about the Spud State proposal that could make it a felony to use the bathroom as a transgender person. The bill passed the state senate as expected last week and was just signed into law by Governor Brad Little. No other state has gone this far, although Kansas comes close with a recent statute that allows civilians to file civil suits for $1,000 if they are “aggrieved” by someone in the john, even in a private business.
Effective July 1, a first offense is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. A second offense within five years of the first is a felony, carrying a prison sentence of up to five years. The law applies, not just to government offices, but to all public accommodations. There are several exceptions, such as medical emergencies and “dire need.” But an amendment requiring that the person first be asked to leave the restroom before police are called was voted down.
It remains unclear how police and sheriff deputies are meant to enforce the law in the event that someone’s gender is up for debate. What happens to the masculine woman, or the non-binary person? Do they carry their birth certificates into the stalls?
Obviously, it’s cruel. But it’s also absurd. What about the transmen forced to use the ladies’ room and the transwomen checking their makeup by the urinals? Just as we said in the Bryon Noem section, many people have no idea what it means to be transgender, and even these lawmakers seem to be imagining that their law “protects” women from burly cisgender men trying to invade an intimate space. Of course, it does the exact opposite, by forcing those men to use women’s facilities against their will and forcing the fragile ladies to confront the transmen they never even imagined existed. Who knows? Perhaps these laws will inadvertently lead to a new understanding of what it means to be transgender to begin with.
Christian ‘Speech’ Wins Again At SCOTUS
Finally, we turn to the High Court ruling that called Colorado’s law against conversion therapy for minors a violation of Free Speech, sending it back to the lower court for a ruling almost certain to favor Kaley Chiles, the anti-gay therapist who complained about the statute. The 8–1 ruling included a concurrence by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, who noted that, while the law prohibited talk therapy that discouraged homosexuality and transitioning, it did not bar talk therapy that supported GLBT orientations, therefore it represented viewpoint discrimination.
The law, which has never been enforced, does not involve physical treatment or coercion, but is limited to what licensed counselors can discuss. Nonetheless, one would think that Colorado has a right to regulate attempts by state-licensed professionals to discredit and reverse a fundamental feature of a patient’s identity that causes no harm—damaging young psyches in the process.
Justice Jackson read her dissent from the bench: “Ultimately, because the majority plays with fire in this case, I fear that the people of this country will get burned,” she wrote towards the end. “Before now, licensed medical professionals had to adhere to standards when treating patients: They could neither do nor say whatever they want … . Today, the Court turns its back on that tradition. And, to be completely frank, no one knows what will happen now.”
She continued, “This decision might make speech-only therapies and other medical treatments involving practitioner speech effectively unregulatable—not to be reached via licensing standards, medical-malpractice liability, or any other means of state control. Who knows? Certainly not the majority. It appears to have made this momentous decision without adequately grappling with the potential long-term and disastrous implications of this ruling.”
arostow@aol.com
GLBT Fortnight in Review
Published on April 9, 2026
Recent Comments