This is what terrifies the fundamentalist and republicans. That is why the attacks on LGBTQ+ kids in schools, it is an attempt to stop this acceptance of people different, of people not straight or cis. This is what it is about. They are terrified their outdated unreasonable hates and moral superiority of straight people is going away. So like the people who hated equality for black people, they created Jim Crow laws for gay or trans people. Hopefully we can beat back this attack on liberty and rights. Hugs. Scottie
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Story at a glance
Roughly 1.6 percent of American adults are now transgender or nonbinary, according to a 2022 survey.
That number is higher still among young adults, with 5 percent of people under 30 now identifying their gender as different from the one assigned them at birth.
The growing visibility of transgender and nonbinary people comes amid rising societal acceptance and new efforts to count the populations.
One young adult in 20 is now nonbinary or transgender, communities that society barely recognized and seldom counted until a few years ago.
Those populations are not new. Only recently, though, have survey-takers thought to ask people about gender identity, invoking terminology that did not exist for prior generations. The word “nonbinary” did not appear in The New York Times until 2014.
The rising visibility of nonbinary and transgender people reflects the nation’s growing acceptance of gender fluidity, especially among the young. One landmark study found 1.2 million nonbinary people in the 18-60 age group. Of that total, three-quarters were under 30, which suggests Generation Z has explored gender identity to an extent that older Americans have not.
“We have a world in which we are finally counting these groups,” said Kay Simon, 28, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota who studies the experiences of queer youth and their families. “You can’t identify as something if you don’t know what the word is.”
Simon grew up in Florida and Texas. “From a very young age, I kind of realized I was gay,” they said. “At the time, I probably could have told you that I felt different about my gender, but I didn’t have a word for it.”
The word was nonbinary, denoting a person who identifies with neither the male nor female gender.
Simon remembers when the academic community introduced he-she-they pronouns on faculty pages and email salutations, during their grad-school years. Even now, teaching about sexuality and gender identity in the presumptively safe space of a college campus, Simon must decide “kind of regularly” whether to correct someone who refers to them with the wrong pronoun.
“I’ve had students misgender me,” they said. “And it becomes this joke of, A, you’re referring to your professor wrong, and, B, you didn’t read the syllabus. So, we have two problems.”
The population of young nonbinary and transgender people is clearly large and probably growing.
A 2022 report from the Williams Institute, a research center at the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that 1.3 percent of adults ages 18-24 and 1.4 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds are transgender, with a gender identity different than the one assigned at birth. Teens and young adults are much more likely to be transgender than older adults.
Five years earlier, in a 2017 report, the Williams Institute had found roughly half as many young transgender people. But the earlier analysis used different methods and drew on comparatively sparse data, so it’s hard to know how much of the increase is real.
Is the transgender population exploding, or are researchers simply counting better? That is a common quandary, researchers say, in studies of the nonbinary and transgender communities.
“I would argue, actually, it is not an increase,” said Russ Toomey, a professor of family studies and human development at the University of Arizona. “We are seeing the numbers of people disclosing nonbinary and trans identity on a survey because we are asking people in more inclusive ways about their gender.”
Perhaps the most expansive tally to date of transgender and nonbinary people comes from the Pew Research Center. In a 2022 survey, Pew found that 1.6 percent of U.S. adults reported a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth.
Pew, too, found that the nonbinary and transgender populations skewed young. Three percent of adults ages 18-29 said they were nonbinary and 2 percent said they were transgender. In the 50-plus population, by contrast, only 0.3 percent of respondents identified themselves as transgender or nonbinary.
“I think that Gen-Z individuals are not alone in this, but they are kind of leading the charge,” said Rachel Farr, an associate professor of developmental psychology at the University of Kentucky.
Today’s young adults have grown up in a society that is gradually recognizing the rights of the LGBTQ community. In 2010, the Senate voted to repeal the Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, allowing LGBTQ people to serve openly in the military. In 2015, the Supreme Court recognized a legal right for same-sex couples to marry.
“It’s not that there are more people. It’s that there are more people who are open and who are out,” said Shoshana Goldberg, director of public education and research at Human Rights Campaign, the LGBTQ rights group. “The reality is that when you talk to the average person on the street, they’re going to be more accepting and more affirming than they’ve ever been.”
Within Generation Z, polling suggests the LGBTQ population doubled in just four years, from 10.5 percent in 2017 to 20.8 percent in 2021.
Bisexuals, and especially bisexual women, populate the majority of the Gen-Z queer community, according to research from Gallup and others. Transgender and nonbinary people constitute a smaller but significant share.
Researchers say social media played a defining role in helping transgender and nonbinary young people define themselves.
Landon Richie, 20, grew up in Texas and came out as transgender at 11. “But since I was two,” he said, “really as early as I could think and express myself with some sort of agency, I understood that I did not fit into the role that I was assigned as a girl.”
Richie couldn’t fully process his identity until around age 10, when he “gained larger access to the internet and saw people who were transgender and who talked about their experiences,” he said. “And I was able to see myself reflected in their stories and their experiences.”
Now that the transgender and nonbinary communities have been identified and counted, researchers say, they need society’s support.
Both groups face a heightened risk of physical, emotional and sexual abuse in both childhood and adulthood, the UCLA study found. Depression and suicidal ideation are alarmingly common.
Transgender and nonbinary people often feel under attack, and with good reason. Research shows queer people face a heightened risk of being victims of violent crime. Transgender and nonbinary individuals also face higher rates of workplace harassment and discrimination.
The communities also face legislative attack. GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy group, tracked more than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills across the nation in 2022, many of them targeting transgender persons by seeking to bar them from equal access to sports, restrooms or health care.
“Almost for as long as I’ve been out, there’s been a target placed by the Texas legislature on my back,” said Richie, who has been politically active in his state for several years.
Some faith-based and socially conservative groups have argued that influential Instagram posters and overzealous educators seed gender confusion in young people.
Advocates for the queer community counter that social media and progressive curricula help transgender and nonbinary people discover their identities, rather than create them.
Friends and loved ones can play a crucial role, researchers say, simply by honoring the name and pronoun requested by a transgender or nonbinary person.
“I think the first thing is just to accept them and listen to them,” said Allison Eliscu, M.D., medical director of the adolescent LGBTQ* Care Program at Stony Brook Medicine in Stony Brook, N.Y.
“If you make a mistake, because we all do, apologize, say it correctly and then try to do better.”
Hi, welcome to Essence of Thought with me, Ethel Thurston, as your host.
Today’s video explores the Cold War’s impact on the West, namely how the Red Scare laid down the groundwork for the modern anti-trans panic in sports. From the media’s open misogyny to literally cartoonish fearmongering, there’s a lot to unpack.
@EssenceOfThought7 hours ago Today’s video explores the Cold War’s impact on the West, namely how the Red Scare laid down the groundwork for the modern anti-trans panic in sports. From the media’s open misogyny to literally cartoonish fearmongering, there’s a lot to unpack.
Thanks to politicians are poody heads for the link. Their link below. Destroying public education has been a goal of the right for a long time. They want to make it for profit and use it for public indoctrination in both right wing ideology and in the Christian religion. The one thing they don’t want to use school for is an educated public. The well off do not send their kids to public school. They want the public school to educate workers to follow orders and not to think for themselves. Hugs. Scottie
Ohio Senate President, Matt Huffman has been trying to hide behind the gerrymandered power of the Ohio GOP to avoid being deposed in court about the lobbyists he talked with privately as the Ohio Senate was getting ready to insert an especially lavish, last minute expansion of EdChoice vouchers into the state budget bill in June of 2023.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s Laura Hancock explains: “A judge can’t force Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman to answer lawyers’ questions about which private school lobbyists he speaks to outside of legislative chambers, the Republican has argued before the Ohio Supreme Court.” Huffman doesn’t want to comply with a subpoena to testify in the case of the Vouchers Hurt Ohio, brought by 200 school districts to demonstrate that private school tuition vouchers violate the provisions of the Ohio Constitution. Hancock continues, referring to the step Huffman took to discourage school districts from joining the lawsuit: “Huffman’s battle has lasted over a year, and even included a request from Huffman during last year’s state budget season that every school district provide the legislature and Ohio Auditor Keith Faber the amount of money they’re spending on the litigation…. Huffman believes that a portion of the Ohio Constitution that privileges lawmakers’ speech and debate from questioning applies not just to speech and debate on the Senate floor but to all discussion on bills…”
And the gerrymandered legislature’s attempt to wield power isn’t limited to trying to avoid testifying in court about the voucher expansion. Marilou Johanek just penned another bombshell Ohio Capital Journal column about the debate last week as the legislature finished up work for the summer and autumn: “Nobody, but showboating extremists in the Ohio legislature, gives a damn about which school bathroom is used by a minuscule number of transgender students… Same goes for the nonsense cooked up in the Ohio Senate to wield an authoritarian hammer over the state’s highly regarded colleges and universities. It’s a kneejerk response to a long-running Fox News narrative about leftist indoctrination ruining higher ed. The MAGA Republican fever dream to own campus libs by censoring them lives in the Senate bill stalled in the Ohio House that nobody—except gerrymandered ideologues—wants or needs…. It doesn’t improve life for students or faculty and threatens to make it worse with tyrannical rule over great academic institutions.”
The best one can say is both of these bills have been passed by only one chamber and can’t be acted on again until the legislature reconvenes for a lame duck session right after the November election.
But Ohio’s GOP dictatorship pales compared what’s happening this month in Oklahoma—the state where, The Oklahoman‘s Murray Evans reports,“Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters sent a letter to state school districts… ordering them to incorporate the Bible ‘as an instructional support into the curriculum’ for grades 5 through 12, citing its importance as a historical document. ‘Adherence to this mandate is compulsory,’ Walters’ letter read…. ‘Immediate and strict compliance is expected.’…. Walters announcement came two days after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that a contract between the Statewide Virtual School Charter Board and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would have been the nation’s first religious-based charter school, violated both the state and U.S. Constitutions and state law.”
Evans provides evidence that Walter’s new order does not seem to represent the will of the voters. In 2016, they rejected “by more than 200,000 votes,” a state constitutional amendment to remove Section 5, Article 2 of the Oklahoma Constitution, “which states, ‘No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such.’”
It is hard to understand why Oklahoma’s state school superintendent is prioritizing mandating the insertion of Bible teaching into the public schools when, as in Ohio, needed school funding and other immediate issues for the state’s public schools are apparent. For years, for example, we have read about teachers leaving Oklahoma for nearby Texas, where teachers’ salaries are higher. In the most recent in a series of reports tracking teachers’ salaries, the Economic Policy Institute showed that in Oklahoma, the disparity between the salaries of teachers and other comparably trained professionals is forth largest in the nation. The only states where teachers’ salaries are more inadequate are Colorado, Arizona, and Virginia.
The President and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Rachel Laser released the following statement about Ryan Walter’s act to command Bible teaching in all of Oklahoma’s public schools: “Public schools are not Sunday schools… This is textbook Christian Nationalism. Walters is abusing the power of his public office to impose his religious beliefs on everyone else’s children… Christian Nationalists and their lawmaker allies want to replace school counselors with religious chaplains, allow teachers and coaches to pray with students, teach Creationism in science classes, and ban books and censor curricula that feature LGBTQ+ people and racial and religious minorities.”
Two sociologists, Philip S. Gorski at Yale University and Samuel L. Perry at the University of Oklahoma, define the mythology of white Christian nationalism in their excellent book, The Flag and the Cross: “White Christian nationalism is a ‘deep story’ about America’s past and a vision of its future. It includes cherished assumptions about what America was and is, but also what it it should be… America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were ‘traditional’ Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on ‘Christian principles.’ The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful; and the nation has a special role to play in God’s plan for humanity. But these blessings are threatened by cultural degradation from ‘un-American’ influences both inside and outside our borders.” (The Flag and The Cross, pp. 3-4)
Gorski and Perry conclude: “White Christian nationalism is our term for the ethno-traditionalism among many white Americans that conflates racial, religious, and national identity (the deep story) and pines for cultural and political power that demographic and cultural shifts have increasingly threatened…. (T)he term Christian in white Christian nationalism is often far more akin to a dog whistle that calls out to an aggrieved tribe than a description of the content of one’s faith.” (The Flag and The Cross, p. 44)
In an opinion piece for CNN, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, Amanda Tyler succinctly defines how Christian nationalists like Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, “threaten the careful balance worked out over more than half a century by the courts, presidential administrations from both parties and a diverse set of interest groups about how best to recognize the religious freedom rights of students, teachers and administrators in our pluralistic public schools. These recent developments are… just the latest examples of a concerted strategy to inject the political ideology of Christian nationalism into public education. Christian nationalism, which merges Christian and American identities, relies on a false narrative of the U.S. as a ‘Christian nation’—a country founded by Christians and for Christians. Such mythology betrays our history and constitutional framework, which created a separation between the institutions of religion and government so that all religions could flourish without the state’s control.”
Ukrainian authorities say the number of children abducted by Russia since the start of the war, stands at more than 19-thousand. Few have made it back home. DW went to Ukraine to speak to one of those who did.
Donald Trump has chosen J.D. Vance as his running mate, the former president announced on Monday.
Vance, a first-term Republican senator from Ohio, was widely expected to be Trump’s vice presidential pick as the pool of potential hopefuls narrowed earlier in the day. Just hours before the announcement, several outlets reported that Gov. Doug Burgum (R-N.D.) and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) were informed by the Trump campaign that they would not be on the 2024 ticket. Others previously thought to be on Trump’s short list included Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), U.S. House Rep. Elise Stefanink (R-N.Y.), and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.
In a post on his own tech platform, Truth Social, Trump lauded Vance as the “person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States.”
“J.D. honorably served our Country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal, and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association,” he said, adding that he “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond.”
The choice of Vance, who rose to fame as the author of the controversial memoir Hillbilly Elegy, was likely intended to help Trump shore up support among white, lower-income voters in the Midwest, where President Joe Biden is considered vulnerable in the 2024 race. According to poll averages from FiveThirtyEight, Trump leads Biden by more than nine points in Vance’s home state of Ohio, and Biden also trails in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Biden would likely need to win all three of the latter states to stave off a second Trump term, with swing states like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada also looking vulnerable in 2024.
A former critic of Trump who recast himself as a politician in the MAGA model, Vance’s LGBTQ+ record differs very little from the man at the top of his ticket. During his two years in the U.S. Senate, Vance opposed the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified federal same-sex marriage rights in the event that Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2004 ruling legalizing marriage equality, is repealed by the Supreme Court. He also authored the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which would make it a class C felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, to provide gender-affirming surgery to trans minors. (This despite the fact that transition surgeries are rarely offered to patients under the age of 18 and only in cases of extreme medical need.)
Additionally, Vance is a supporter of the so-called “parent’s rights” movement, which advocates that LGBTQ+ students be outed to their parents and seeks to remove queer-affirming resources from classrooms. He has repeatedly referred to opponents of those actions as “groomers,” such as in an April 2022 post on X. “I’ll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children,” he wrote at the time.
The 39-year-old politician has also opposed diversity and inclusion in the U.S. armed forces, suggesting that he is likely to support re-banning trans servicemembers from the military should Trump be elected. “American political leaders should stop using America’s military as a social justice side project,” his 2022 campaign site reads. “Troops don’t need to focus on diversity or equity or any other progressive buzzword; they need to focus on fighting and winning America’s wars.” The removal of trans troops from the military is a major component of Project 2025, a set of far-right policy proposals shaped and promoted by the anti-LGBTQ+ Heritage Foundation, which Trump has sought to distance himself from in recent days.
Vance’s anti-LGBTQ+ background also includes claiming that Biden supports Ukraine because Russian President Vladimir Putin is anti-trans and blaming the “childless left” for America’s decline, specifically citing U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Furthermore, he once accused U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) of making up the term “Two-Spirit,” which is broadly embraced by LGBTQ+ Native Americans to describe their identities. “Would love if progressives just stopped inventing words,” Vance posted on X in February 2021.
In repeatedly opposing LGBTQ+ equality, Vance has found a perfect match in Trump, whose administration was responsible for more than 200 attacks on queer rights in four years, according to GLAAD. These assaults included repealing protections for trans students, removing resources for LGBTQ+ Americans from federal websites, decimating funding for global HIV/AIDS prevention, and appointing a record-number of judges opposed to LGBTQ+ equality. His administration also made it harder for marginally housed people to find safe shelter and opposed workplace protections for LGBTQ+ employees.
Trump, whose own supporters threatened to kill his last vice president for refusing to support Trump’s 2020 bid to remain in office, is likely to resume many of those policies if reelected in November.
The Rev. points out how bad an idea this is, and that is people want religious instruction they should trust their church, their trained religious leaders, not the government. Again this man makes a lot of sense to me compared to US hate preachers. Hugs. Scottie
Scottie's Playtime 