By Ann Rostow—
The Cruelty Builds
For the last two years we’ve been hit with a strong backlash against transgender Americans, who were beginning to make some progress in their fight for civil rights. You’ve seen it: state laws against transgender girls in sports, bans on minors taking hormones and puberty blockers, bathroom bills, and the like. Used as a political cudgel and broadcast in campaign ads, this vilification of transgender people has resulted in a shift of public opinion. Hostility has penetrated the middle of the road, where most people could once be characterized as neutral or indifferent, but where they now put themselves in the majority that opposes specific transgender rights.
I sort of thought that the anti-trans wave might begin to subside, just as the public impression of Trumpy craziness has moved into negative territory. But it seems as if the reverse is true. It seems as if we are gearing up for a brutal year, when anti-trans laws are piling up in state legislatures and midterm ads are doubling down on trans derangement syndrome.
This trend was described in a recent New York Times article that caught my eye, but I could also feel it in my news collections. Just the other day, my adopted state of Kansas overrode the Democratic governor to pass a bathroom bill, along with a bill that allows random people to sue anyone who uses a public bathroom that doesn’t match their sex at birth. It’s noteworthy that transgender men must now use the ladies’ room, in some cases that means men with beards and manly muscles. Don’t be alarmed! It’s just us girls, right?
As if that weren’t enough, Kansas also passed a bill requiring transgender drivers to take their licenses into the DMV office, where they will be replaced by a birth gender license. Noncompliant licenses will be considered invalid as soon as the law goes into effect.
Really? Not only have they humiliated transgender Kansans, but they also have stressed them out by nullifying their IDs. Worse, they are forcing their transgender neighbors to spend a couple of hours at the DMV, watching the numbers slowly advance to 96 while holding a ticket marked 134. Can they fly with their invalid license? Is their insurance still in force? What if they get a ticket? Do they get an extra fine?
Meanwhile, on February 19, the Trump administration issued a new federal prison policy, barring surgeries for transgender convicts, but, more insidiously, ordering transgender inmates to “taper off” of hormones. The policy ends the practice of housing transgender prisoners according to their gender identity, and restricts inmates’ ability to dress and operate in their transgender identities. In short, the policy is an attempt to de-transition transgender inmates—not just an attempt, perhaps, but more a giant leap in that direction.
Indeed, the state laws under consideration, combined with the administration’s executive orders and policy changes, now seem designed to eliminate transgender Americans, and Trump’s Day One executive order that a person’s gender is defined at birth has inspired red states to enact similar decrees.
I assume the new prison policy will wind up at the Supreme Court, but I’m not sure I can see five votes to overturn it. Justice Barrett, who recently joined Gorsuch and Roberts to strike Trump’s power to unilaterally impose tariffs, is notably anti-trans, writing a concurrent opinion in the Tennessee healthcare case to make the point that transgender people are not a protected class. Gorsuch, quixotically, gave us a gay rights victory in 2020 that included transgender Americans under the Title VII of the Civil Rights act, which bans workplace discrimination. But Roberts has never been our pal. So, I count three, maybe four votes on our side, and five, maybe six votes against us. It’s possible, I suppose, that someone will be struck by the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment, but I’m just speculating. I have no idea.
What’s to be done? The Human Rights Campaign asks candidates to stand up strongly for trans rights when threatened by an opponent, but to pivot quickly back to bread and butter issues. I don’t always side with the Human Rights Campaign, but I agree with them. We can’t be trapped into a debate with those who flatly demonize all transgender Americans, because in this 30-second sound-bite political world, candidates don’t have the time or space to present a nuanced view. Should a 14-year-old get top surgery? Um, maybe not. Hormones? Yes, in a case-by-case basis. Should a trans girl play on the girls’ tennis team? Of course. What about the college track team? Well, has she transitioned? To what extent?
In the long run, transgender men and women need the kind of visibility that the gay and lesbian community showed during the long fight for marriage equality. Many low-information people don’t know the difference between transgender women and drag queens or cross dressers. In fact, I’ll bet many of them imagine big guys in skirts when they hear about transgender women—the kind of guy whom we see in old army movies when the all-male troops are putting on a show to lift their spirits during a break in combat. Just as gay men were once seen as sex perverts hooking up in back alleys and lesbians were thought of as tough butches, packing whatever and looking to seduce some innocent girls, trans people need to be seen and heard in order to turn their own stereotypes inside out.
Did You Watch?
The Olympics are finally over. I enjoy them, of course, but there was something about this year’s TV coverage that didn’t work for me. I never really knew what was going to be on, and, when it would air. I would wake up with the sense that I was missing something but had no desire to interrupt my sluggish mornings with a search of my Peacock app.
Invariably I’d be scrolling through news or emails, only to encounter spoiler headlines about the Quad God screwing up or Vonn crashing on the slopes. I liked curling, but had no patience for the lengthy round robin tournaments. Whenever I turned it on during the first week or so, I ended up watching preliminary contests that might get a skier or snowboarder into the next round. As you might expect, I am only interested in events that will result in medals, because that’s the whole excitement of the Olympics, isn’t it? Would you turn on the TV to watch some random Bank of Geneva ski race that merely rewards the winner with some points on the ski circuit? No. Have you ever watched, say, a swim meet when it didn’t have a gold medal as the prize?
The rare moments when I thought to watch the NBC overview, I got stuck on, I don’t know, kilometer number six of some fifty-kilometer cross country thing, or a skating race that involved twenty laps around the rink and only qualified you for the next stage. I don’t have time for these interminable events.
I only bring up the Olympics because one of my GLBT athletes, bisexual skier Breezy whatshername, got a public marriage proposal from her boyfriend after winning one of her medals. Many headlines ensued. This annoyed me on two counts. First, I was oddly disappointed in Breezy, even as I recognized that her professed status as bisexual includes being attracted to men or women. If you have the inclination to go either way, I thought subconsciously, why would you pick heterosexuality? Analyzing my reaction, I’m sad to say I caught a whiff of bi-phobia in myself and gave myself a few internal slaps about the face.
Second, I hate public proposals. They are so self-absorbed. They transform what should be a profound expression of love into a self-aggrandizing spectacle of performative romance. Worse are the ones where the woman is taken by surprise, which I gather was not the case with Breezy. Unless you know for sure that she will appreciate getting engaged during the seventh inning on the kiss cam, it’s controlling, pompous, and egotistical. Enough said!
Rotten Pot
Let’s see. There’s a new draconian law about to emerge in Turkey, aka Türkiye with two dots over the u, which sentences anyone who “publicly encourages, praises, or promotes attitudes and behaviors contrary to innate biological sex and general morality” to one to three years in prison. Under the law, you would also go to prison for attending a gay wedding.
As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, I don’t know why we’re all suddenly supposed to use local spellings and pronunciations for cities and countries. We don’t say “Italia,” we don’t pronounce Paris “Paree.” Personally, I still say “Kiev” like we all did back in the day when we ordered the chicken dish. I know the Ukrainians say “Keeve,” but I’m not a Ukrainian.
And last week, I submitted my column just before Trumpy officials from the National Park Service took down the rainbow flag from the Stonewall Inn national monument and replaced it with the stars and stripes. Apparently, this was due to some policy about flags that prevents, um alternative flags, from gracing our nation’s historic sites. When Trump returned to office last year, the “Progress Pride” flag that includes transgender stripes, was replaced by a rainbow flag and all the references to transgender activists who actually fought the police were removed from the Stonewall website in yet another example of the depth of distain held by the administration.
Are you kidding me? Activists, as well as the Gilbert Baker Foundation and Village Preservation sued the Department of the Interior and the National Parks Service on February 17 in a 41-page complaint that I have not read. And New York city officials raised another rainbow flag on the same flag pole, disappointing trans activists who pushed to return the Progress Pride flag to its pre-Trump position.
Using Religion to Discriminate
Finally, let’s go to Nashville, where first grade teacher Eric Rivera refused to read a book, Stella Brings the Family, which describes a same-sex marriage and that is part of the curriculum at the KIPP Antioch College Prep Elementary school. (Do we really have to prepare first-graders for college?) Rivera got a colleague to read the book, which conflicted with his so-called religious beliefs, and was later called to the office for a written “final warning.”
He was transferred to a tech teaching post and later over to kindergarten, but, even though he’s still teaching at KIPP, he insists he is living with the “fear that I could lose my job for anything I do based on my religious beliefs.” On February 17, his lawyers at First Liberty Institute sent the school a letter that First Liberty’s counsel said demands “that they accommodate Mr. Rivera’s religious practices and that they not discriminate.”
The letter cites Title VII, the federal law that prohibits workplace discrimination based on a number of categories including religion. But Bay Times legal authorities note that a bigoted view of same-sex families should not be categorized as a “religious” belief, even as it is advanced by various conservative branches of Christianity. If someone said their avowed racism was based on Christian theology, I doubt they’d be given a pass on state and federal civil rights law.
Rivera also advocated for parental guidance, arguing that parents should be aware of nefarious lesson plans (my words) and have the ability to opt out. Sound familiar? Yes, this idea echoes the Supreme Court case from last year that gave Montgomery County parents the right to remove their kids from story time when a GLBT-friendly book was on the agenda. The problem there was that the books weren’t scheduled in advance and the logistics of informing parents was too cumbersome. Again, this case was couched in religious terms even as marriage equality has been the law of the land for a decade and settled law suggests that minor faith-based objections cannot disrupt schools or offices. By the way, the parents who won that case just picked up $1.5 million in damages for the distress of having their kids listen to a gay kids’ book for ten minutes. Nice work if you can get it.
GLBT Fortnight in Review
Published on February 26, 2026
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