Absolutely. Thank you so much. Awesome. Looks like this works. Great. Great to see everybody here today. You know, I always love speaking to people who are involved in this arena and who want to learn more about what's going on around the world. Whenever I was invited to give a keynote speech, I envisioned what I was going to come do here today is not to be a big, lofty speech about, like, the generalities of being trans and stuff like that. I want you to leave today with a very real understanding of what is going on in the United States, what's going on in the world, the laws, the executive orders, all of the big pict things that are going on. And so that's what I hope to leave you with all today. I've been covering this issue for years. I started tracking LGBTQ legislation about six years ago. And I remember the news stories would be there are 20 bills attacking the trans community in the United States at the state level. And at the time it was, you know, this incredibly lofty number. And this year we're at 760 is how many bills at the state level that. That I'm tracking right now. So there's a lot to cover.
I'm going to try to go through it a bit quickly because I know that we're starting a little bit, but thank you all for having me today. So I titled my presentation from the History to the Headlines. Because I am a journalist, I cover all of the major headlines, but also a lot of these headlines assume that we just appeared out of nowhere, that trans people suddenly appeared 5, 10, 15 years ago, and it's simply not true. We have a history. We have a very long history.
And so I'm going to take you all back to 2600 BC. There was a writer in Haeduana, and she was the very first human author. It's the first time that somebody wrote and then signed their name, said, this is my work of authorship. And so whenever we think about how old transgender people are, we need to think about what Enheduanna was writing about. She was writing about the priesthood of Inanna, which was a group of transgender, third gender and gender non conforming priests. The very first example that we have of human authorship was about transgender people or third gender people or gender non conforming people. We have always been here. We are part of the DNA of what it means to be human. Then traveling 2,000 years into the future, past Enheduanna, we're still 2,000 years ago, we had a transgender Roman empress. Her name was Elagablo. She used feminine terms to refer to herself. A few museums have finally started correcting her pronouns. And whenever they actually show the history of Elagabalus, she didn't have a long reign, but she very famously offered vast sums of wealth to any physician in the Roman Empire who could give her gender affirming care. And as a trans woman today, that is a mood that is still the case sometimes. We've always been here, and apparently our health care has always cost a lot. In the 1300s, there was a Jewish poet by the name of Clonimus Ben Kalanimus. And this poet wrote these long, lamenting poems about how, despite being assigned male at birth, they wished they had been born a woman. And we don't know how colonomists would identify today, but we do have them to thank for our very first description of gender dysphoria. I wish I could go back in time and give colonomist estrogen. Unfortunately, I can't. But I can thank them for letting us know that we have always been here.
In the late 1800s, there was a transgender woman by the name of Lucy Hicks Anderson. I don't know how well y'all can see, but she's going to be the woman in the bottom left on the picture here. And she is being flanked by two police officers in this picture. She's a black trans woman who transitioned as a kid in the late 1800s. Trans kids have always been here, too. And whenever she transitioned, she told her parents that she was a girl despite being assigned male at birth. And her parents didn't know what to do. So they brought her to a doctor, and the doctor said, let her be. Like, she's. She's clearly healthy. She's doing well. If this is working for her, let her be. And so they did. She moved to California town, where she opened up a hotel, and she became known as that town's best chef and socialite. She was the best cook in town. They arrested her whenever they did, whenever they discovered her assigned sex at birth. However, that's not the end of her story, because the very next day, the townspeople marched down to the jail cell to demand her release because they had a big party to throw that night, and everybody loved her, and she was going to be the cook for the party. So, like, the bankers actually went to the jail sale, and, like, it was just like some of the. Some of the movies where, like, they go down to the jail cell and demand you release. So it was really cool. And she ended up moving to a small California town. Actually, no, she moved to la, where she married her husband and passed away quietly in the 1950s. She lived a long life. We've always been here.
Then in the bottom right, there's a picture of five transgender women who are sitting around a table at the Club El Dorado in Berlin. This club was a famous nightclub for all the LGBTQ people in Berlin. It's also where a lot of the trans people would go. These trans patients would have been the first patients at the Institute of Sexology, which was the very first place where transgender people were researched. They would have been among the first people to get gender affirming care by Magnus Hirschfeld. And this was. They would have legal documents. It was actually one of the very first times that you could transition legally. But just as we've always existed, we have always had to fight for our right to exist. So in the top left picture, you're going to see a picture of books that are burning. And if you can't see the picture, you probably have seen it before. It's in all of your history books. And these books that are burning are. There's several different pictures from this event. It was done in one of the squares in Berlin. And it's 30,000 books in all that are burning in this picture. This picture is often used to make very important points about freedom of speech, literature, not banning books and more. But what is often never mentioned in any of the history books, whenever you see this picture, is what books they're burning. The books that are being burned in this picture. 30,000 books in all, are the books from the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute of Sexology. They are the first 30 years of research into trans and queer people. This happened far before the rise of camps in Germany. This was the 8th edition of Der Stormer, which is the Nazi publication at the time, focused on this institute. And Magnus Hirschfelding called him a groomer. Like this. This is all sort of history repeats itself in many ways.
And so that's the story of these books. In Stonewall, you know, in the 1960s, we had to fight fright, right, to exist. A lot of people think about Stonewall and the lgbtq, LGBTQ club raids. A lot of people don't realize that those raids happened because of drag bans. That was that. That was what was going on there. They wouldn't have called them drag bands back then. They were female impersonation laws. But they essentially said that you had to dress as your assigned sex at birth. You had to always be wearing three articles of clothing that matched your assigned sex at birth. And if you didn't. Well, then you'd get arrested because they assumed you were a sex worker. And, you know, you got arrested if you were a sex worker. And so that's how these clubs were rated. That's what led to the raids on. On all of these clubs, these queer clubs. That's how we got pride. Because the people who often fought back in these circumstances, in the raids were the trans people. You had Compton cafeteria riots where this occurred. And then at Stonewall, where some of the leaders of that movement were transgender women, like Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Zuzu, a number of transgender women were very much leaders of Stonewall. That is how we got pride. The same holds true for the ACT up in aids HIV epidemic. In that era, the ex gay movement, where they had conversion therapy, was all the rage, and the gay marriage amendments in the early 2000s. So we've always had to fight for our right to exist.
In 2015, of course, we had a major turning point all of these times where we fought for our right to exist. We finally get the right to marry. It was a huge moment. I think that whenever we think about major moments in LGBTQ history, this is one that a lot of us will point to. But what happened immediately after this was that the people that were arguing on the other side of that case, they didn't just lick their wounds and go home. They held a conference the very next year, and they said, how are we going to pull this back? How are we ever going to make gay marriage illegal? How are we ever going to go and overcome this big of a burden? With the Supreme Court case, they made their plan. It was attack trans people. That was the plan. It was a conference in Phoenix, Arizona. They drew up everything that we're seeing today. There's lots of recordings of the conference. There's lots of transcripts and things that were done there, and we'll talk about that in a little bit, because the very next year, North Carolina bans transgender people from the bathroom. You can't go to the bathroom of your. Your gender identity. You got to go to your assigned sex at birth. And if you fail to, then you could get arrested. It was an unmitigated disaster in North Carolina. It did not work. It did not work at all. You had people suddenly realizing how many trans people exist around you. They never knew that certain people were trans in their community. And also, major corporations pulled out. PayPal, Deutsche bank, the NBA All Star Game was pulled at the time. This was a major moment. This was something that we all saw, and we all recognized was wrong throughout American society. There were travel bans to North Carolina. Things have changed. We have a good 10 states with a law like this right now. This is part of what they first attacked was bathrooms. They realized, though very quickly that that was a bad move because they bit off more than they could chew too quickly. They thought that they could get this through and that this was going to be the end and that they were going to quickly jump back into the gay marriage fight. So that didn't work.
We're going to talk about what did work in a little bit, but right now, before we get to that, I want to talk about all of the cultural circumstances surrounding trans people right now. Why are we in this moment? The first thing to note is that LGBTQ identification is up across the board. 53% of Gen Z. Only 53% of Gen Z identify as exclusively attracted to the opposite sex and cisgender. That's 47%. That doesn't mean that 47% will say that they're LGBTQ. But what it does mean is that there's a general openness to expressing non heterosexual, non cisgender identities and expressing those to your friends, to public and more. So it's important to be a good colleague, a good peer. You're going to be advising these people, these are important people that you're going to have to deal with in your day to day lives. At the same time, there have been more anti trans and anti queer bills than ever before in history. With this increase in visibility, it's led some researchers to go, what's going on here? Why are there more trans and queer people around us? People that are opposed to LGBTQ identities will say that there's some sort of a mass social contagion that you are catching the gay, if you will. I promise you, if you leave this talk, it's trans. It's not because of me. You didn't catch it from anybody at your table.
There's something else at play here. There's an analogous period in human history here at the graph at the bottom, you're going to see a graph of left handedness throughout history. If you had gone and studied left handed prevalence in American society in the 1900s, you would find that only 3% of people were left hand. That number shot up to 19 to 12% by 1950, which it stayed at ever since. What happened? There wasn't a mass social contagion of left handedness. You weren't bumping into a left handed person. You're like, oh God, that's not how that worked. We made accommodations for left handed people. We made left handed scissors, left handed tools, left handed desks. We stopped beating it out of kids in schools. Believe it or not, there was even a parents rights movement over left handedness in the 1930s. I discovered that during research on this. Some things never change. So we're allowing people to express themselves more. We also get representation. We get transgender celebrities prior to 2011.
For any of you who are a little bit older and can remember some of the comedies and Saturday Night live prior to 2011, if you go and watch any of these old things, there's like a 50, 50 shot. You're going to get some random transphobic joke. It's in everything. You don't realize how prevalent it is until you're watching 90s and early 2000s movies. It is everywhere. There was a Saturday Night Live sketch whttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBXsobhajq4here it's like, it's pat and the entire punchline is gender non conforming person on Saturday Night Live. That's the punchline. So things have changed. We have the first trans woman to win best actress at the Golden Globes, Michaela Rodriguez. We've got Amy Schneider going on an absolute tear in jeopardy. And we finally have transgender elected officials. Sarah McBride, first transgender congresswoman. We have Representative Zoe Zephyr, first trans woman in Montana, who I am very partial to because that's my wife. Thank you. Thank you. I will applaud her later. I'll send her your love. But we finally get representation and this matters. We'll show you why it matters even more later. But also matters to see yourself reflected. It means that, you know, whenever in Montana, if somebody is teaching civics in school, like kids have to learn that there's a trans woman that's, that's a representative. Like, it's big. It's, it's huge. And so we get representation. We also get a change in how healthcare is accessed. So for those of you who have not had the misfortune of dealing with the trans healthcare System Prior to 2003, it was even worse back then. If you wanted to transition, you had to have $20,000 saved up. You had to go to maybe one of 20 therapists in the country. And these people were brutal. If you loved the wrong way, then you could be banned from transitioning. So I have married another transgender woman. That would have been absolutely disallowed. You couldn't do that if you couldn't pay for surgery. If you didn't have the money to pay for your surgery up front, then you wouldn't be allowed to transition at all. You also would have to go through two or three years of something called real life experience where you had to exist in your gender for a long time before you could even take hormones, which was kind of tough because hormones have an effect. Like hormones do things to you. They change your appearance and. And so it forced people to sort of very publicly out themselves for a long time before they could obtain their care. You also would have to often leave your home state and let go of all of your old friends and family. That was another big one because they said that anybody who remembers you as you were could pull you back from your transition. And so they banned you from basically keeping contact with anybody. That's changed. It's changed a lot.
We've got informed consent hormone therapy clinics now where doctors will guide your medical transition. I've mapped them out. This map has been used 13 million times. Most people who have transitioned have probably seen this map because it's how they access healthcare resources. Originally, this was mainly us and Canada led the charge on this. We now have clinics in France, in Spain, Australia has several, and Japan just opened their first one. So go Japan. This is still not the case in many countries, though. If you're interested in trans legal stuff and trans medical stuff, you'll often see that in countries that are typically seen as more left leaning and progressive, like Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom, even France. Many of these countries, you'll have 10 year waiting lists to transition medically in these countries. And a lot of people are, you know, ask like, why is that the case? What's going on there? And the way that the medical systems in many of these countries work, the. The way in which advancement and progression through the ranks work is that the people that were doing the on the ground treatment of trans people back in the 1990s and learned under the sort of old system, are now in charge of all of the transgender medicine in the these countries. In a lot of cases, they still hold back to those standards of care that are two or three revisions old. We do have very long waiting lists in many of these countries.
That brings me to the laws. What are we seeing right now? Well, in the last four years, there have been over 1600 anti LGBTQ bills proposed. Now we've got federal policies which we will talk about in more detail later. Things like passport bans, federal bathroom bans in certain facilities, teachers are being investigated. Funding is being pulled from children's hospitals, from federally qualified health care centers. Whitman Walker has had funding pulled. This is a local Thing. This is especially a local thing, which I'm sure many of you are aware of. This is something that's not just affecting the trans community. It's affecting everybody. Right now, we are seeing a lot of attacks at home. We're also seeing international crackdowns. Russia has absolutely banned transition. They're throwing trans people in prison. Same thing in Hungary. Hungary just had a pride, an actual pride celebration ban that they passed yesterday, where you can't attend a pride parade. In the UK, there's a puberty blocker ban. In Sweden, they're drawing down care. In Argentina, there are massive police crackdowns and violence against transgender people. And so we are seeing this as an international movement.
How did this happen? I mentioned earlier that they bit off more than they can chew on the bathroom ban, and they did. They went too far, too fast. In 2017, the American Principles Project, a guy named Terry Schilling. They met again at a conference, and they said that we got to start somewhere. Let's start with sports, because if we could get you to accept an asterisk on a transgender person's gender identity anywhere, then we can get you to move that to other places. That was the philosophy, and it worked. They had an ad against Andy Beshear in Kentucky. Beshear won his election, but the strategy was here to stay. We've seen sports fans in 25 states, and now we're seeing them federally. Now, I want to be clear about something, because sports are often a topic that people don't know much about. Whenever you think about transgender people participating in sports, many people probably go to swimming because of the fact that that was the big blow up on Fox News. But sports bans cover a large variety of areas that you might not realize. Sports bands have covered fishing. We've seen bans on fishing. I assure you that, like, if you throw estrogen in the water, fish are not going to come. Swimming. You can't chum the water with. With blue little pills. Like, that doesn't work that way. Darts, like, we don't have, like, angle bars. Like, you ever play those games, like, pool. Like, they ban trans people from pool. And I know that if you play online pool, you'll have, like, a little bar that shows exactly where your balls are, where the ball's going to go, and you. We do not calculate angles. Like, that's not something that we have. It's like, I picture, like, the TV screen with all the angles, like, swarming around me, and that doesn't happen. Dancing. I've seen competitive dancing that was one. And even the incredibly gendered and athletic sport of chess, the International Chess Organization, has banned transgender women from women's chess. And I want to be clear about something. This isn't just transphobic. It's misogynistic. It's clear what's going on here. The idea here isn't that transgender women have an advantage at chess. It's that men have an advantage at chess because that's how they view transgender women, and that men are just automatically smarter and better at games of skill. They've done studies on differences in chess scores, and they found that 97% of those differences are attributable to getting chess tutors at an earlier age and being exposed to chess at an earlier age. The reason why women's organizations were formed in chess, I know one of the people who helped form it. It was, by the way, a trans woman helped form the women's group in chess, is because men were actively harassing women who were entering the sport. We see bans in chess.
This map right here shows all of the states that have sports bans active right now. This is not counting the federal ban. And some people have said, okay, maybe we give up on sports. Maybe if we do that, they're going to stop. But I can tell you, having tracked this legislation for six years now, it's never worked. I've watched people make that calculus, and it's never worked. Every single state that has passed a sports ban, has passed a health care ban, has passed a birth certificate ban, bathroom bans, and more. This sort of strategy that you might hear sometimes of like, well, just give them sports, it doesn't work. I think that if you could. If you would offer that. If you would offer that deal to the people that are writing these laws, they wouldn't take it. And we know that. And then the end game. As a journalist, I managed to find my way into one of these meetings, and I got to listen to them talk about exactly what they view the end game is. And for them, the end game is ending gender affirming care entirely. They want to end it for everybody. And this is a map of all of the bans on gender affirming care in the United States. We have many. Many of these affect transgender youth. Many also affect adults. State of Florida banned about 80% of trans care. We see several states ban transcare for incarcerated trans people. In Florida, they are currently shaving trans women's heads and pulling them off their medication. They are feeling their breasts to decide if they can keep their bras. That is actively going on. It was in a court case that was recently heard. And if you follow me, you're going to be familiar with this map right here. This map is my legislative risk assessment map. This map will determine the risk that you might have as a transgender person traveling through various states. And if you're going to move to a state, it shows the risk of anti trans laws. And so you know, you have states like Texas and Florida and dark because in, in Texas they have a, they have a few cities where they will have, they have a bounty law or if you, if you catch a trans person in the bathroom, you could get $10,000 from them. And then in Florida you could be arrested if you're in the bathroom and that matches your gender identity. So now let's talk about the current executive orders. Right now, the big ones that are out there. We have a state department block on passports, transgender gender identity, getting your gender identity changed on passports. What this has in effect led to is people that sent in their documentation in that three month period between the. A lot of them just have their documentation confiscated. Right now it's not being returned. They're waiting for the court decision and they can't leave the country. They can't get their passport. Some people have had their passports taken. Those have been returned in some cases. Some people have had difficulties. They've had their documents destroyed. There's a few posts about people that have shown how their documents were destroyed after being sent in.
Meanwhile, Marco Rubio has banned transgender foreigners from seeking visas for entry if they don't match their assigned sex advice birth. So if you have a, a gender marker on your visa request, you can't enter in the military. We've got a military ban. This was currently held up in court as of two days ago. Thank God. But I want to be clear about something. The rationale for the military ban in 2017 was healthcare resources. It's going to cost too much to take care of these people. That was destroyed in court because it cost less than erectile dysfunction drugs. It costs less than people who are depressed in the military have more off time than trans people. So, like, it didn't work out. So now the rationale in the executive order is, and I'm going to read this right now, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual sex commits with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle. It's literally being trans is dishonorable, untruthful and undisciplined. This was blown away in court. The judge said that this is. The quote was. This is dripping with anhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBXsobhajq4imus. This thankfully, was just blocked in court. Health care. We've got health care bans on those under the age of 19 in the United States. This has currently been used to stop Children's National Hospital from providing care. Whitman Walker has had to pull all of the gender identity stuff from their website and more. We've got an education executive order that says that we're going to investigate teachers. The word transgender has been stripped from all federal websites, including Stonewall. The very history that we helped create. And if you go to Sylvia Rivera's page, she's one of the leaders at Stonewall, and you look at her and you read her description. This is Sylvia Rivera's National Park Service website page. It now says that at a young age, Sylvia began fighting for gay and rights. The word transgender has been removed. So she has been fighting for gay and what kind of rights? Who knows? Gay and rights. The funny thing is, though, is that it calls her instead of a transgender woman, it calls her a woman now. So they've kind of played themselves. We've had plenty of responses. We've had the trans military executive order currently being blocked and challenged. We've had Letitia James in New York City or in New York State tell hospitals not to stop providing care. We've had Montgomery County Public Schools say we're not going to comply with any of the anti trans executive orders. And we've had many hospitals restarting care, saying that we're not going to listen to these sort of broad eos that have no statutory backing. There are many lawsuits that are ongoing. Right now I'm tracking several of them. The military lawsuit, Montana, Oregon, Washington just sued. We've got a suit going here in Maryland, but I also want to close a little bit with a little bit of hope. So this is my wife, Zoe Zephyr, and I'm going to play her speech. And this is why representation is really important. She spoke on a bill that was a drag man. After she spoke, it was so powerful that Republicans stood up to speak with her. And 13 Republicans crossed party lines. The first time I've ever seen this done in a state legislature on a trans issue.
I'll play you now, Representative Zephyr. I love her. Thank you, Madam Chair. Here I am again to rise on another bill targeting the LGBTQ community. I first want to start off and say, at its very core, drag is art. Drag is a beautiful art. Drag has a deep history in this country, and it is a history that is important to my community. You know, if you are wearing. If you are a woman in this body wearing a suit today, you are challenging gender norms that existed long ago. And in some ways, drag does work to challenge those norms. There were three articles of clothing laws 50 years ago that said if you wore three articles of clothing that were indicative of the opposite gender, that the police could stop you and arrest you. It was those laws that led to the police raiding an LGBTQ bar in New York and led to the Stonewall riots, one of the most important civil rights moments in my community's history. I also want to reject the notion, however, that these are, as the sponsor says, events where explicit content is expected or where audience expects risque entertainment. Drag story hours I have been to here in Montana, they are like Disney princesses reading to people. We had people come in and talk about this. These are spaces where people come up and they sit down in libraries and parents elect to bring their children and learn about books and the love of reading and also, yes, be involved in part and be. And to hear stories told from members of my community, that is important and that is beautiful. And I do not think that we should be standing up and saying that this art form, because it's somehow connected to my community, is not allowed. But there's something underpinning this that makes this even more insidious. And the sponsor called this a fix to last session's bill. It's important to note that last session's bill, when it was applied, the first application of this was not on a drag show. It was to prevent a trans woman from giving a history lesson in a library. That's where this came up. That's how this is going to be attempted to be applied as an attack against the trans community. And we have even more examples of that because, sorry, in committee, when the sponsor closed on this bill, he said, this bill is needed. He said, and I quote his words, because transgenderism is a fetish based on cross dressing. Those were his words for why this bill's necessary. And I'm here to stand before the body and say that my life is not a fetish. My existence is not a fetish. I was proud less than a month ago to have my son up in the gallery here. Many of you on the other side met him when I go to walk him to school. That is not lascivious display. That is not a fetish. That is my family. This is what these bills are trying to come after. Not obscene shows, somehow getting in front of children. We have the Miller test for that. We have laws for that. This is a way to target the trans community. And that is my opinion. And in the Speaker's own words, please vote. No further discussion. Representative Essman, this is a Republican that stands up here. Thank you, Madam Chair. Just speak to the bill. Representative. I'm speaking as a parent and a grandmother, and I'm very emotional because I know the representative in C20 is also parent. No matter what you think of that, she is doing her best to raise a child. I did my best to raise my children as I saw fit. And I'm taking it for granted that my children are going to raise my grandchildren as they see fit. Everybody in here talks about how important parental rights are. I want to tell you, in addition to parental rights, parental responsibility is also important. And if you can't trust a decent parent to decide where and when their kids should see what, then we have a bigger problem. So I advise you all to vote about parental rights, parental responsibility, and remember, we already have indecency laws in this state. We voted on one, I don't know, earlier this week, last week, sometime during the session, we all wanted to make sure we knew what indecent was. And now we know. Trust the parents to do what's right and stop these crazy bills. They're waste of time, they're a waste of energy. We should be working on property tax relief and not doing this sort of business on the floor of this House and having to even, even talk about this. Please vote no. Arises on the motion of Representative C. Hinkle that when this committee does rise and report after having had under consideration House Bill 675, it recommend the same DUPASS. Those in favor of the motion, vote I. Those opposed, vote no. Are there absentee votes? None. Madam Chair, has every member voted? Does any member wish to change their vote? If not, the clerk will record the vote. Madam Chair, 44 representatives have voted. I 55 have voted no. House Bill 6.
So that was the first time that I've seen that happen. I've been tracking these bills forever. Once these bills hit the floor, there's never any crossing party aisles. They don't want you to take the vote. Otherwise, there is hope. There is representation. Representation is important. Anyway, thank you so much, everybody, for having me today. I hope that this was very educational for all of you, and I'm here to answer any questions you might have.
Wow. Thank you, Erin. That was amazing. All right, we're going to run around with the mic again. As I mentioned earlier, if you could please wait until you get the mic to ask your question just because for folks who are hard of hearing, it's a lot better to have the MIC to increase the clarity. So Jenny is going to run around the room. So if you could please raise your hand if you have a question for Erin.
Q&A
First of all, thank you so much for this presentation and for your speaking. So, you know, as someone who also works at Whitman Walker, I am also aware of the overcompliance that my organization and other advocacy organizations have done. What can you suggest for workers in these type of spaces to combat these over compliance measures? Because it does seem that a good chunk of advocacy organizations, especially those that have been on the ground working for the community over decades, are now turning our backs on the very community that they seek to help. What do you suggest workers to combat these, as I mentioned? And what other ways can we just increase activism and advocacy for trans people? Absolutely. So this is a big deal right now. And I use Whitman Walker because they're, they're a local org, but there are a lot of organizations out there that are not even connected to federal government grants that are basically throwing trans and queer people under the bus, removing all references of trans people. This erasure is happening not just on the federal government websites. It's happening in our local communities and in our major organizations. And I've been in the room when these discussions are being had. I'm on a few boards, advisory boards and more. And what I can say is that often these things happen because nobody's willing to speak up, nobody is willing to say anything as these decisions are being made. And I found that, like, people will come in, they'll say, like, yeah, let's, we, we need to do this because we, this is a dangerous time to like, have this information up. Everybody agrees, or like, people stay silent. And then like, I'll say, wait, hold on. Like, I have criticized places for doing this. I can't be on this board if you're going to do that. And then other people start to stand and say, yeah, I don't want this either. I don't want this either. Sometimes all it takes is a single voice in that room to say, no, this is not right. We have a duty to our people. Now, sometimes if you get some questions on, well, no, we do have to put trans people aside or else we're going to lose our federally qualified health care funding for Whitman Walker. I had a conversation with the CEO of Whitman Walker, and what I told her was, you're making that decision right now, but what if tomorrow the federal government says you got to pull your prep information off your website, all of your HIV prevention information off your website. This is happening in some places right now. We're about to have a big denial of HIV grants. Are you going to do that as Whitman Walker? Like this is what you were established for. Are you going to pull off all your HIV information? Are you going to pull off all your birth control information? You're going to be asked to draw a line eventually. Draw the line now. And so that's what's worked for me in the past, of course. Thank you. Is that on? Oh, I was just curious if you could provide any insight on the choice of the age of 19 and instead of 18 for the youth care ban and how it's encroaching on adult territory. Yeah, I think that that was a very strategic move. I think that they want to include an adult age in that list. I think that there may be some Medicaid implications around it as well. I know that there's. That the age of 19 does appear in a few places, but it's also, it seems like a number that was designed just to get like one more year out of a healthcare ban. I will say that I've been tracking this for a long time and they want to make that number 25. That's the number that they're really, really aiming for right now. And then they want to make that number total ban. Like that's the end goal. 25 is what they want to make it because that's the age that you see on your parents insurance and also because they just don't want you to transition as a, as a young adult at all. I do think that it's a strategic move to start to include adult populations in their list. And we've seen other places where we've seen that as well, like Florida. Your presentation was incredible. Thank you. Someone in that video mentioned the Miller test and some I think, decency laws that had been passed. Can you say more about that? Yeah. So Miller test and I'm sure that I'm in a room full of people that probably have a bit more legal knowledge than even me. But the Miller test is the test of obscenity. It's the idea that something has to appeal to prurient interest has to be three prongs in the Miller test. And what we have actually seen recently in a lot of obscenity laws that are not explicitly targeted towards the trans community, they have been adding an additional four kids. So has to appeal to the parent interest for kids or has to like, they add an additional two words that were not in the original Miller test decision. And it's specifically designed to create a separate test for young people. And that's how they're trying to get around the drag bans and say, okay, the drag ban is constitutional for people under the age of 18. But it is something that, you know, in a lot of these, in a lot of these places, they're saying that we already have laws on the books that are. That ban obsinity. And they point in this particular case to the use of the Miller test in the state of Montana, which is common there. Is it on? Yeah. First of all, thank you, and I'm sorry for asking you to speculate on a question for which there really is no good answer all the time. What do you think kind of is the allure between legislators and their voters about focusing so much on an issue that's, you know, such a small amount of people like to adopt the words of the Republican representative, like, why are we focusing on this and not property tax taxes? You know, most polling shows that while there is a variety of opinion on each individual trans issue, like sports and healthcare and all that other kind of stuff, it's not a salient issue. It's not an issue that voters are, like, chomping at the bits to care about. Anytime you see, like, a ranking of issues, it always ends up at the bottom. However, it is a quick way to get a lot of money in your campaign. Whenever you have elon Musk donating $50 million per month to transgender issues, whenever you have the Koch foundation doing the same thing, whenever you have the alliance spending freedom rushing into each state, it is a very fast way to get a lot of money in your campaign. And I do think that that is what we're seeing. We're also seeing anybody that votes against it. It's a very good way to get money against you in your primary. And so that's why we're seeing this as a major issue and you're seeing a lot of money poured into this. Like in the last election, $214 million are spent on anti trans advertisements, most of them on sports, to prevent 10 trans people in the entire country who are in the NCAA in sports. Okay. Or back there. I don't know what question. Okay. Right there. Oh, my God. Okay, that's better. So piggyback to that question, actually. So then, if it's a really quick way to get funding, why. So if. I mean, I understand why legislators are doing it. Right, but why are all of These giant organizations with all of these billions of dollars, frankly, why do they give a shit? You know, whenever this is, this is something that's really strange, but whenever you look at the big billionaire donors, the ones that are really driving us, they've got some really, really weird philosophies. Whenever it comes to reproduction, whenever it comes to great replacement theory, whenever it comes to what they want, they want more workers. They want more white workers, they want more white people. They view transgender people. It's the same reason why they oppose abortion. They view transgender people as threatening the, the future of Western civilization. They view people who are providing abortions as threatening the future of American civilization. They really do believe in this great replacement stuff. You read Elon Musk tweets. He tweets about it all the time where he's. He thinks that, you know, our birth rates are going down and we have to have kids. You look at Elon Musk himself and he's had, you know, 12, 13 kids. Beyond like, God, it's, There's some weird stuff going on there too. It is kind of a culture of reproduction now. And, you know, I, I really do think that the people with the most amount of money in this, this is what they care about. The second part of it is also Christian nationalism. So you have groups like the Alliance Spending freedom that have $200 billion in operating or $200 million in operating revenue right now. And they truly believe that this should be a Christian nation and that anybody that lies outside of their very specific version of what a Christian nation looks like is out of bounds. And so those two powers combine. And we've got two major forces in the United States that are opposing transgender rights, but also opposing birth control access, opposing abortion, opposing DEI and education because they don't want their workers to believe in any DEI type concepts. That's at least the way that I see it. Okay, follow up question. How does it feel to be destroying the western world? Yeah, I think the Pope called transgender people a throbbing middle finger to God. So that. Awesome. Yeah. You know, but no, you know, I. We're. We're just like anybody else. Trans people are like anybody else. We're just like anybody. We want the same things as everybody else. We want to live in the same, you know, society. We want to have success. I've got a kid, a nine year old kid with Zoe. Like, we are here. I think we have time for one more question. And you have the last word. Hi, Erin. It brick and rocks that you're here. So I grew up in Texas. And two years ago, I was the first openly lesbian candidate for Miss Texas who competed in the Miss America organization. And even though I am not trans. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Even though I am not trans, in a lot of those spaces, I was kind of the closest thing. And so a lot of my interviews and interactions in that space were around whether trans people should compete in pageants, whether trans people should be able to play in sports. And as someone who wants to honor, uplift and advocate for my trans siblings, while knowing I don't hold all the answers and knowing that I don't have those lived experiences, how do those of us who are not part of the trans community but that want to fight tooth and nail? How can we use our individual voices and our privilege so that in those one on one interactions or those spaces where there is not a trans voice that is able to speak up, how can we advocate on that behalf? That's a really good question. The first thing I'll say is, by the way, I hope you all heard that we've also seen bans on transgender people in beauty pageants. That's a real thing. Saying that we have a natural advantage of being pretty, but for real. That's the things. But on the other side of what you said, how can we best advocate? I've said this in many of my speeches for a long time, and I think it's becoming more apparent now is that you will find yourself, especially as we continue down this path, in a room where you can make a difference at personal risk. If you can make that choice, it is good not just for the trans or queer people that you're making it for. It's good for your you, it's good for your soul. It's good for humanity as a whole. I'll give you a really good example. In Texas, whenever they had the sweeping of the state for transgender kids under the Child Abuse Enforcement Initiative, they were literally trying to accuse all parents in the state who had a trans kid of child abuse just for having a trans kid. And they would go into the schools, they'd pull the kid out of school, they'd question them for four hours. This was a big deal back in 2022. And there was a group of three social workers. One of them was a trans man who got together and said, we're not going to do this. We're going to go and close out these cases. And so they did. And every single person they went to, they just closed the case out. They closed the case out. They closed the case out. They all got fired. They did that at really great personal risk themselves. They took a step that resulted in them losing their job. That was a hard decision. But do you know how many trans people they saved, people that were able to escape Texas after that? That's the kind of decision, like, you might be asked to make a decision like that one day. You might be asked in a boardroom to say, no, don't take off trans people from our website. You might be asked in a beauty pageant to stand up and say, like, I'm going to use my, my voice to speak right now as I'm getting the award. Like, you're gonna be in those positions. And whenever you find yourself in that room, the room where you can do good in, do it. Make that hard choice. It's important. Erin, thank you so, so much for being with here, being here with us today. Wonderful speech, wonderful answers to all the questions. Folks, I know you probably have some more questions for Erin. Please know she has to pick up her kid from school. School. So please do not haunt her. She's leaving the building. But. Yes, but can we get another round of applause for Aaron? Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. And enjoy your day.
