#sourced from substack

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The saga began earlier this month, when Amnesty International (UK) released a report titled “A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK.” It released a similar report last year, but this year, it added a new category for what appears to be the anti-rights movement’s most rapidly growing sector: “Gender critical” groups, or groups that are antithetical to transgender rights and inclusion. Rowling rushed to tweet about the situation. She lauded “LGB” groups—another anti-trans buzzword, which, as the name suggests, describes groups that wish to erase transgender people from the queer liberation movement—like the Gay Men’s Network, an organization that has pushed for anti-trans policies. That group posted a public letter indicating it might sue Amnesty International for defamation. The Network demanded a retraction of the report and then claimed that Amnesty is guilty of “trying to control gay and lesbian free speech.” In the day or so that followed, Rowling retweeted around a dozen similar letters. The posted letters include groups like Genspect, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group that threatened Amnesty International with legal action, as well as groups like LGB Alliance and Sex Matters.

TERF Activist J.K. Rowling Threatens To Finance Wave Of Attacks On Amnesty International Over Report On Anti-Trans Groups

“They have sued organizations into the ground.”

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In a landmark two-year review, the Health Council of the Netherlands—the country’s highest scientific advisory body—has delivered its verdict on gender affirming care for transgener youth. The council’s conclusions were universally positive for gender-affirming care: it endorsed the treatments as careful, lawful, and effective, framed quick access as a matter of the right to health, warned that “doing nothing” is harmful, cast aside the Cass Review as not applicable to Dutch care, reported zero cases of regret among trans youth patients, and called the reduction of the country’s years-long wait times “morally urgent.” In doing so, the Netherlands becomes the latest in a series of European countries to reaffirm and strengthen care for transgender youth, refuting a right-wing talking point in the United States that Europe is “pulling back.” The review was commissioned in May 2024 in the wake of the Cass Review. The Health Council’s committee ran systematic literature searches and consulted outside clinical experts chosen for their differing perspectives on the care—a list that included Hilary Cass herself. The panel was chaired by Olaf Dekkers, a Leiden University Medical Center professor of internal medicine whose academic specialty is research methodology, and seated professors of health law and medical ethics alongside practicing physicians and psychiatrists. From that foundation, the committee dismantled the argument at the center of the American campaign against this care—that the evidence is too weak to justify treatment—answering that the evidence quality for trans youth care is in line with the norm across pediatric medicine, and that doing nothing carries documented harms of its own, pointing specifically to harms produced by America’s own care bans. The committee concluded that the care is lawful and careful, and that it works as intended, stating in its summary: "The committee concludes that somatic treatment for young people with gender dysphoria fits within the health law framework. It further finds that scientific research shows the intended physical effects are achieved, that there are indications of some improvement in mental outcomes, and that the number of cases of regret is low. In the committee's view, the current data on unintended physical and mental effects are not cause for concern." The advisory also rejected the framing that treating transgender youth is a risky intervention while not treating them is a neutral default.

Landmark Official Dutch Review Recommends Trans Youth Care, Call For Expanding Treatment

The review finds that wait times must be shortened, that few people detransition, and that trans youth care has enormous benefits.

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On Wednesday, Gallup released a striking new poll showing support for LGBTQ+ people declining for a second consecutive year. The drop is not limited to transgender people—similar declines have hit support for same-sex marriage and the moral acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships, which is now at its lowest point since 2016. When examined closely, the decline is driven almost entirely by Republicans, whose support for same-sex marriage has collapsed 18 points in five years and whose moral acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships has fallen back to where it was in 2010. The numbers come as the political crackdown that began with transgender people has broadened to target the wider LGBTQ+ community—with state legislatures now hearing bills to overturn same-sex marriage and a sitting Republican congressman declaring this week that "homosexuality has no place in America." The data makes one thing clear: there is no LGB without the T. As it has been for our entire history, our rights are deeply interconnected, and those who target one part of this community will not stop until they have come for all of it.

Latest Gallup Poll Shows Republicans Will Not Stop With Transgender People

Support for LGB people is dropping as well as trans people, and it seems entirely driven by Republican respondents.

It is tempting to view this decline as emblematic of a broader societal backlash toward LGBTQ+ people, but a closer look at the data reveals something more specific. The numbers are driven almost entirely by a collapse in attitudes among Republicans, whose party has actively stoked hostility toward LGBTQ+ people among its base for the past five years. Democratic support for same-sex marriage remains at 87%, unchanged since 2022. Independent support has dipped only modestly. But among Republicans, the reversal is severe. A majority of Republicans—55%—said they favored same-sex marriage in 2021 and 2022. Today, that number sits at 37%, an 18-point collapse. In that same period, the share of Republicans who said gay and lesbian relationships were morally acceptable fell from 56% to 35%, a 21-point drop—meaning nearly two-thirds of the Republican Party now believes it is immoral to be gay. Only 5% of Republicans believe it is morally acceptable to change one's gender. These changes did not happen organically. They are the product of a deliberate, well-funded, decades-long campaign by the religious far right to roll back LGBTQ+ acceptance in America. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a massive far-right and Christian Nationalist organization with $100+ million fundraising, has pursued what it calls a "generational wins" strategy that explicitly includes the elimination of marriage equality. The organization was was the legal force behind Chiles v. Salazar, the case that legalized conversion therapy nationwide. ADF has openly identified the elimination of marriage equality as part of its "generational wins" strategy. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term included sweeping rollbacks of LGBTQ+ protections across the federal government, many of which are actively being implemented. As a result, Republican leaders are more willing than ever to embrace not only anti-transgender stances, but openly anti-LGB ones as well.

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It Is So Easy To Not Do This

Please forward this to Nate Bargatze, Alexis Ohanian, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and so many other “nice” white guys.

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Virtually all specialized knowledge arises from this sort of dialogue among experts in the field. We don’t use public opinion polls in, you know, archaeology either. “Hey Jim from Omaha, quick polling question, how old do you bet the sarcophagus that they just dug up in Egypt is?” In order for this process of “experts trying to discover the most beneficial policy solutions” to be benign, it must be conducted in good faith. That element, of course, is frequently corrupted by our political system. The experts all agreed about climate change, sure, but you get Exxon’s lobbyists involved and suddenly half of the political establishment has magically become climatologists and they must warn you that they are quite skeptical of the evidence. And so on. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know here. I say this only to make the point that when you see someone waving around a public opinion poll in order to argue against a policy that would benefit the public, there is good reason to ask whether that person is operating in good faith.

What Polls Do and Don't Tell You

Does the public oppose its own interests? Really?

Polls are used in political discourse when they serve the interests of the groups publishing the polls. When they don’t, they are not used. There is an entire industry of political pollsters that can use various wording and targeting techniques to produce desired polling answers on demand. I am not saying that is what Searchlight did. I am fully willing to accept their poll is of high quality. But what exactly are we supposed to learn from the fact that a majority of Americans—who have never known public health care, who can hardly imagine what it would be like for all citizens to access health care for a low cost, and who must cling tenaciously to their own health insurance plans like a life raft in order to survive—do not tell a pollster that they support Medicare for All? If you imagine that we are all good faith participants in a debate over the question “How do we best help people get good and affordable health care?”, does this poll then lead us to conclude that Medicare for All is an idea that should not be pursued by the more progressive of our two political parties? Of course not. That would be an absurd conclusion. If we were all operating in good faith here, the only conclusion to take from this polling would be that it provides mildly informative data on the starting point of our organizing campaign in favor of Medicare for All. As someone who would like to see Medicare for All in America because it is the standard in all the advanced world, except for here, and because it is obvious that our insanely convoluted health care system causes infinite misery in order to enrich a handful of shareholders in private companies, what I take from those poll numbers is: A majority of Americans have the intuition and the desire that everyone should have health care, and that is a good starting point for a push in favor of Medicare for All.

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When Elliot Page was first confirmed for a role in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, transphobes from across the globe lost their goddam minds. This was, partly, because initial online chatter assumed he would play Achilles, a character who doesn’t actually appear in the Odyssey (aside from a brief moment in the Underworld), and is actually dead for a big chunk of the Trojan War. Even before we had any real information about the realities of the film, a lot of us (rightly) jumped to Page’s defense. Trans men are men, and they can play men in movies, we said. Not every role we take has to be about *being trans.* I still believe this, but my opinion has shifted since I saw the film for myself on Sunday. Oh shit, I thought, as I watched Homer’s epic unfolding in a way I didn’t expect. I think this might actually be a little bit about being trans.

Actually, Nolan IS kind of making a point about trans people

And I have the (ancient) receipts

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The Supreme Court has made it official: Religious freedom only applies if you’re a conservative Christian. The conservative super-majority ruled 6-3 on Tuesday, along partisan lines, that a Rastafarian man whose hair was cut off against his will—violating his religious beliefs—had no legal remedies available to him. The case centered around Damon Landor, who hadn’t cut his hair in decades because he follows the Nazarite vow—which includes a reference to Numbers 6:5: “… No razor may be used on their head… they must let their hair grow long.” He continued that vow even after entering two Louisiana jails in 2020, for a five-month sentence over a drug-related charge. When he was transferred to a third facility—the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center—Landor worried they might try to cut his hair to fit in with inmate grooming policies, so he showed officers paperwork that said federal law was on his side: The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA) basically says prisons that receive federal funding can’t violate someone’s religious beliefs unless there’s a really good reason for it. The officers didn’t care. They threw his paperwork in the trash, handcuffed him to a chair, and shaved off his hair.

SCOTUS says Rastafarian can't sue prison guards who violated his faith and cut off his dreadlocks

Damon Landor showed officers the law protecting his religious beliefs. They shaved his head anyway. The Supreme Court just let them off the

That’s really the big takeaway here. The Supreme Court has rewarded Christians who filed religious freedom lawsuits even when the facts were not on their side (like Joe Kennedy) or when they suffered no actual damages (like the wedding website creator). Here’s a Rastafarian whose story is not in dispute and who actually suffered, and the Supreme Court’s conservatives are giving him a pat on the back and nothing of value. Hell, Gorsuch, who went out of his way to give Kennedy a victory by lying about the nature of his case, is the same person now saying there’s nothing he can do for Landor. This man literally waved the law in front of the officers but the Supreme Court insisted those officers can’t be held accountable for not following the rules. What else could Landor have possibly done?

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What I soon discovered was that some people are mad about this event. And not just mad at the Trump administration, which I could easily understand. They’re also mad at the UFC. They’re mad at me for writing about it, even critically. They’re mad at the fighters for participating in it. They’re mad at anyone who watches this sport. It’s all trashy bullshit, according to them, and it’s our fault there’s a gaudy arena going up on the White Houe lawn right now. I was surprised by this reaction, and maybe that’s on me. I’ve been inside the fight sports bubble for so long that I’ve gotten desensitized to a lot of different aspects of it. Not just the violence, either (but definitely also the violence). I’ve also become numb to some of the more absurd and sensationalized aspects of the fight business, mostly because it’s always more or less like that. At some point you lose the capacity to be shocked. Oh, they’re gonna put a UFC cage on the White House lawn? Yeah that sounds like some shit they would do. In the years I’ve worked within this weird world we’ve had fights at the Playboy mansion, a Brazilian police special forces base, a U.S. military base, a Spanish bull ring, and a medieval castle, just to name a few. Couple weekends ago there was a boxing match at the pyramids. The real ones! The ones in Egypt! So yeah, when I heard that the UFC would team up with its pals in the Trump administration for a fight at the White House, it did not seem all that surprising. Tacky? Sure. A possible sign of a republic in decline? O absolutely, it’s some dwindling days of the Roman empire type of shit for sure. (My podcast co-host Chad Dundas has suggested we call this event “UFC: Bread And Circuses,” which just feels right.) But I have to admit that I didn’t seriously consider the possibility of any meaningful backlash against the UFC itself, maybe in part because I assumed that all the people who usually ignore this sport would ignore this event. Then we saw that giant “claw” structure going up in front of the White House. Suddenly it got a lot harder to ignore. Especially when paired with the super important ballroom construction site right next to it, there’s an inescapable quality to this visual reminder of what our nation has become.

Is the UFC prepared for the backlash to its White House event?

So a weird thing happened last week and it exposed a blind spot in my thinking that I am going to attribute to having my brain gradually mel

It’s not hard to see how even some longtime fans might not relish their role in this exchange. In this way being a fan of MMA and the UFC starts to seem pretty fucking uncool. It’s kind of like how, back when I was on dating apps and having the same what-do-you-do-for-work conversations over and over, women would often go straight from the ‘MMA writer’ reveal to probingly skeptical questions about my thoughts on Joe Rogan. I knew what they were really trying to find out: Is this guy one of those manosphere red pill dickheads? I’m not, but I could definitely see how they made the mental leap from UFC to internet misogyny. (It’s the same leap the YouTube algorithm has made with me many, many times. Just because I’m watching old Wanderlei Silva highlights that does not make me a prime candidate for Jordan Peterson lectures.) And see, that was back when the Joe Rogan association was about the worst thing the UFC had going for it. The Trump stuff is, for around 50-60% of Americans, way worse. What becomes of your sports brand if a significant chunk of its target demographic regard it as some cringey bullshit they do not want to be lumped in with? These are people who love the sport itself. Many of them have already been straining hard to ignore the political allegiances of the UFC owners and just focus on the fights. But when you plant your cage on the White House lawn and fawn all over the president on his birthday, you make it pretty much impossible to ignore the politics of the moment.