In 2023, a record-breaking 586 bills were introduced across the United States that specifically targeted transgender people and their right to exist. From removing trans people's access to healthcare to their access to public bathrooms, sports, books, or simply the use of their names and pronouns, efforts to erase trans people were intense. The 2024 legislative season is around the corner, and there will undoubtedly be another onslaught of anti-LGBTQ bills up for debate. Neca Allgood returns to the podcast to talk about the upcoming legislative season with Jen. They discuss the general categories of anti-trans legislation that occur, how to combat misinformation, and ways to make a difference politically. They also discuss the importance of resilience, healthy boundaries, and self-care during difficult times.
Special Guest: Neca Allgood
Neca Allgood is the mother of a transgender son. She is a former President of Mama Dragons, a current Mama Dragons board member, and a former board member of Affirmation: LGBTQ Mormons, Families, and Friends. Neca and her husband own a small engineering consulting company. She has a PhD in Molecular Biology. And Neca has been a powerful political ally to the LGBTQ community for over a decade now.
Links from the Show:
In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you.
Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org.
Connect with Mama Dragons:
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Donate to this podcast
In 2023, a record-breaking 586 bills were introduced across the United States that specifically targeted transgender people and their right to exist. From removing trans people's access to healthcare to their access to public bathrooms, sports, books, or simply the use of their names and pronouns, efforts to erase trans people were intense. The 2024 legislative season is around the corner, and there will undoubtedly be another onslaught of anti-LGBTQ bills up for debate. Neca Allgood returns to the podcast to talk about the upcoming legislative season with Jen. They discuss the general categories of anti-trans legislation that occur, how to combat misinformation, and ways to make a difference politically. They also discuss the importance of resilience, healthy boundaries, and self-care during difficult times.
Special Guest: Neca Allgood
Neca Allgood is the mother of a transgender son. She is a former President of Mama Dragons, a current Mama Dragons board member, and a former board member of Affirmation: LGBTQ Mormons, Families, and Friends. Neca and her husband own a small engineering consulting company. She has a PhD in Molecular Biology. And Neca has been a powerful political ally to the LGBTQ community for over a decade now.
Links from the Show:
In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you.
Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org.
Connect with Mama Dragons:
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Donate to this podcast
JEN: Hello and welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. I’m your host, Jen. This podcast was created to walk and talk with you through the journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. Thanks for listening. We’re glad you’re here.
Given the past few legislative seasons, it’s realistic to expect a new flood of proposed anti-LGBTQ legislation again for 2024. These are laws that seek to limit the safety, health care and basic authentic living for some of the people we love most. Some of us are quite involved in politics and some of us wish we didn’t even need to care. We thought it would be good to get ahead of the season this year and invite some additional understanding about how to navigate all this a bit. For those who are interested in more information or deepening their understanding, I’d strongly encourage you to go back and listen to episodes 11A and 11B for a refresher on what we talked about last year.
But, today, our beloved friend and mentor to many, Neca Allgood, has agreed to come and hash through some of this stuff with me. Neca is the mother of a transgender son. She is a former President of Mama Dragons, a current Mama Dragons board member, and a former board member of Affirmation: LGBTQ Mormons, Families, and Friends. Neca and her husband own a small engineering consulting company. She has a PhD in Molecular Biology. And Neca has been a powerful ally to the LGBTQ community for well over a decade. Welcome, welcome Neca!
NECA: Thank you. Good to be here with you, Jen.
JEN: It is always a joy for me to talk to you just in general in real life but especially about topics we are both passionate about. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation all week. So I’m super excited. I want to dive right in.
Last year we saw hundreds, literally hundreds, of bad bills across the nation targeting LGBTQ people and the community at large. And it feels impossible to track it all. It feels impossible to be educated enough to have any influence. So, first, I want to discuss the way these bills are named. Can you kind of break down for us the sorts of words we’re looking for.
NECA: So, proponents of anti-LGBTQ bills do try to hide that they are anit-LGBTQ with vague titles or sometimes they hide that they’re anti-LGBTQ by claiming that these bills are about protecting children and women. Now, what they don’t often say is that who they’re trying to protect women and children from are scary LGBTQ people. And it is a challenge. You may read a bill that is title – and this is a title of a real bill from Utah’s 2023 session – “Event permit notification amendments” Now, from that title it’s hard to tell that that is a bill that is focused on trying to label all drag shows as adult content and inappropriate for minors and something that has to carry a warning label. Similarly, last year in 2023, again Utah, there was a bill labeled, “Medical Practice Amendments.” That sounds harmless except what it actually was, was a ban on transition-related medical care for transgender minors.
So in the face of that obfuscation, how do we find the bills that we need to pay attention to? First, follow trusted messengers if you can find them. And I will help you try to find them. Every state has an equality organization. And frequently you can find your state's equality organization by searching your state’s name and the word “equality”. If that doesn’t work, try your state’s name and LGBTQ equality. There’s a few states that that won’t get you the equality organization, but for the vast majority it will. If you are in Mama Dragons Facebook groups, you can ask in your regional group what other Mamas in your state, what sources they follow for good political information at the state level. Also, PFLAG has an excellent email that goes out about two times a month that is called PFLAG Policy Matters. And I have found that to be a useful source of information at the national level. And they also hit the high points of state-level resources.
JEN: So I want to back up a little bit to these ideas of names, how they name these bills because they – you mentioned that they’re sneaky, right? They make these names that feel all sorts of warm and fuzzy. Things that make you say, “Of course I support this idea. Who doesn’t want to protect the children.” And I often need somebody to interpret some of the bills for me. I can read the Idaho bills over and over and over until I really understand the impact. But nobody can do that 600 bills unless that’s they’re actual paid, full time gig is to read these over and over and over. So I love that you’re talking already about organizations that we can look to and trust to help point to us, “This is one to pay attention to. This is a yucky one.” I’m going to call them bad bills, yucky bills. I don’t know what else to call them, mean bills, hateful bills because the names are tricky.
NECA: Anti-LGBTQ bills.
JEN: And sometimes they’re big enough that they get their own name that’s a little more clear like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that helps you understand that what they’re really trying to do without diving into the whole details and stuff. But the naming of it I find super problematic in general.
NECA: And I think that that comes up when we try to communicate about these bills with other people. Because if we repeat their BS name, we are making it sound like a safe bill. So I think it’s useful and important to refer to bills by their number. In state legislatures they are often names with a prefix of HB or SB or if your legislative bodies are named slightly different they might have different letters. But HB means House Bill. SB means Senate Bill and then a number. And so that unequivocally identified a bill. If you say the year it’s introduced and then it’s bill number. So that’s a good strategy. And then, I try to talk about what the bill actually does in plain language. So, something that might be labeled a “Vulnerable Child Protection Act”, well doesn’t that sound good.
JEN: We’re all on board for that, right?
NECA: Yes. Say, this is an attempt to ban access to medical care if that’s what it is. If it is denying transgender children access to appropriate school restrooms, that uses the plainest language you can. And use that when you’re talking to your legislators too, when you’re talking to them in person or making a phone call or sending them an email because the reality is that our legislators – even the good ones – are not superheroes and the legislative session may have 500 bills. And there’s no way a legislator can track them all and keep track of what all of them are by their bill number or whatever. So find a way to concisely but accurately, describe what that bill would do.
JEN: I love that, refusing to play the name game. We’re not calling it that. These bills, in my brain, the idea of them being insurmountable to figure them all out, it helps me to have little sub-categories when I’m going through. Because, across the nation, it’s the same bills over and over. There might be 600 of them, but we can put them into some nice little lanes, some columns. Can you talk to us about these basic categories?
NECA: Yes, First, I want to start out by talking about why there’s basic categories. And the reason is that those bills run in individual states are usually based on model bills that are crafted by legal teams for hate groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the American College of Pediatricians which has named itself to sound like a reputable medical organization, The American Association of Pediatricians, but it’s not.
JEN: I could just name myself that, have six people and write a bunch of professional things. And I’m not even a doctor.
NECA: And claim to be an expert.
JEN: Exactly.
NECA: So, because of that, bills do fall neatly into sets of categories because frequently they’re derived from the same model bill. Now, I don’t want people to get the idea that working from a bill model is a problem for a legislator, right?
JEN: No. No. No.
NECA: Crafting model bills is a useful thing to do for organizations that want to help states make legislative change. It is the specific content of these model bills and their goals that are the problem. So, some types of bills, a common type that runs early in states, is a bathroom ban. These tend to be bans whether they’re in schools or in any kind of public place that forbids transgender people from using the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity.
JEN: We’re going to go back – don’t lose hope – to why they’re bad.
NECA: Talk about why that bill is a problem, right? But I also want to briefly mention why those tend to get run first.
JEN: OK.
NECA: It's’ a triggering topic. People want to feel safe and feel like they have privacy in a public restroom. And people have heard stories of times when people have been unsafe in public restrooms. Another common, specifically anti-trans bill, are sports bans. And these are bans against transgender people participating in sports as their affirmed gender. Sometimes these are only at the K-12 level. Sometimes they also try to encompass college-level sports.
Another particularly dangerous type of bill are the medical bans. These are trans gender medical bans. And what they specifically try to do is remove transgender minors – but sometimes also adults – from having access to appropriate transition-related medical care. Those might be hormone blockers. It might be hormones. It might be surgery. Those bills differ, but we’ll talk about why those are such a problem later on.
Another class of bills attacks specifically the performance of drag. And often what they try to do is label any drag show as adult content. Now, adult we understand is a euphemism for something that’s pornographic. And there are drag shows that are adult content.
JEN: Yes.
NECA: But, fundamentally, someone regardless of their genitalia, wearing female coded clothing and makeup and hair, there is nothing pornographic about that. But they try to make the wearing of non gender-typical clothing to be threatening when they try to pass these bans.
There are a whole batch of bills specifically related to schools. There are bills that say that schools cannot use student’s preferred names or pronouns, but instead they must use the legal name on birth certificate and the pronouns of someone’s legal gender marker. Similarly, there are bills that require schools to “out” students to their parents if they have requested a different name or pronouns. And the challenge with all of those is that they make it more difficult for a student to explore their gender identity. They make it particularly difficult for young people who don’t know if their parents are going to be supportive and want to have some time to explore before they tell their parents. But a lot of places that run these bills quickly come up against the reality that plenty of people use names that aren’t the name on their birth certificate.
JEN: I do.
NECA: Yes. My guess is that your birth certificate says Jennifer.
JEN: Yep.
NECA: But that’s not what you go by. And that’s okay.
JEN: Nor did any teacher ever push back or try to create a law requiring me to be called Jennifer in school.
NECA: Right.
JEN: Even though my parents absolutely called me Jennifer when I got home.
NECA: So another group of laws are about challenging access to information. And these days, a lot of those come in the form of book bans. However, it’s important to look at how those bills work because there are already librarians who do good careful work to make sure that the books in school libraries are age appropriate for the children who are reading them. That is a big part of the job of being a librarian is to look at a book and say what is the reading level of this book, but also what is the maturity level of this book and say, “Well, you know this is a book with a high school level of maturity, so we’ll have it in our high school libraries.
JEN: Even though it’s a picture book.
NECA: But not K through 6. The problem with a lot of these bills is what they do is they let individuals challenge specific books. And what that means is that books that librarians have already reviewed and decided are appropriate for their book, they then have to re-review and say, “Does this meet the standard for obscenity or is to too mature content or whatever?” And it would be no big deal if a parent had a concern about one book and went to the librarian and said, “I have this concern about this book.” And the librarian said, “Oh, let me review it.”
But what happens is people submit lists sometimes of hundreds of books. And it means that all of the librarian's time is taken up doing formal reviews of these books. And, until they’ve had a chance to do the formal review, usually the laws say you have to pull it until you’ve had a chance to do the formal review and write a justification of why it should be on the shelves or not. And the people who do those bans may claim, “We’re not targeting LGBTQ people or we’re not targeting racial minorities or whatever.” But the reality is the books that get challenged overwhelmingly are challenged because they have LGBTQ characters or because they tell the truth about some of the less sterling moments in our history like our longstanding discrimination with people with African American ancestry. And so that’s that whole set of laws that are about book bans.
Some of them are particularly challenging because what they do is change from an obscenity-standard to a goes-against-community-standards type of challenge. And the language of community standards is too vague, right? If one person in the community objects to is, well, that doesn’t mean it goes against the standards of the whole community. Also, what if the majority of your community has genuine prejudices against African American people, for example. Does that mean you should be able to pull from the library books with African American heroes or books that talk about the realities of slavery in America. Community standards is too vague a standard.
There are another group of laws that – again these are targeting trans people – are designed to prevent transgender people from updating their legal documents particularly their birth certificate to reflect their new name or new gender marker. Or sometimes, what they do is require an amendment history to be printed on the birth certificate. And what that does is “out” the transgender person in any situation where they have to show their birth certificate. That may not seem like a problem. For my son, he is out as there is possible to be. It wouldn’t be a big deal if he had an amendment on his birth certificate that showed. But, we live in a society where threats of physical violence against transgender people are real, particularly against transgender women and particularly against trans women of color. And so for their safety, it is important that their documents not “out” them.
So I’m going to say one more and it is the class of “Don’t Say Gay” type bills.
JEN: Be invisible. I could call them the “Be Invisible Bills.”
NECA: Yes. And what they are are bills designed to erase the existence of LGBTQ people or to imply that their very existence is somehow sexual or inappropriate for children to learn about. And, again, it’s easy to say, “Well, they can wait and learn about that when they’re in junior high or high school or whatever.” They don’t have to learn about it in elementary school. But the problem is that we know that for gay or lesbian identities children usually are aware that they are gay or lesbian by the time they go through puberty. And that is in elementary school. In the United States, children typically go through puberty some time between 10 and 12. Maybe a little older if they are assigned male at birth. And so young LGBTQ children need to be aware of the existence of other people like them.
JEN: I want to talk about some of the false arguments used to support each of them in categories. We can’t talk about 600 bills but just the category. So I want to go category by category and I want to talk about some of the approaches we can take to defend against them. So we’ll go in the order that you listed the categories and start with bathroom bans.
NECA: It’s important to understand that these laws often feed into or build on one or more anti-LGBTQ tropes and are commonly communicated in our society but are false. And so when you’re talking about a bill that is built on falsehood, you want to clearly communicate the truth. And the experts on debunking falsehoods, particularly emotionally loaded falsehoods, suggest that we build a truth sandwich. Which is, you state the truth, and then the filling is here’s what the trope is, but again, the actual truth is, right? So that’s an idea I want to toss out there. And you can search for “Truth Sandwich” and learn more about that structure. It’s a way to make sure that the truth sticks in people's head instead of the lie.
JEN: I like that. I’m going to call it that. I’m going to serve you up a truth sandwich.
NECA: So, for example, the truth sandwich about bathroom bills is why do transgender people go to the bathroom? They go to the bathroom for the same reason that cisgender people go to the bathroom. They go to the bathroom because they need to pee.
JEN: Because they need to go to the bathroom.
NECA: Exactly, right. And so these tropes may imply that trans people are going to the bathroom because they want to violate other people’s privacy or that they’re a molester or something. But there is no data to support that. Transgender people need to pee, just like all the rest of us. And for that, they need to be able to go to a bathroom. They need to be able to go to a bathroom where they are safe. And we already talked about the threats to safety of the transgender women in particular. Transgender women are safe in women’s restrooms as long as they’re not being accosted by nosy people. And that is where they should be able to take care of their bodily functions just like everybody else.
JEN: Yes. I just want to highlight for anybody who’s kind of in that middle space, like, “Okay. But what about the girl who’s changing her clothes that feels uncomfortable?” And that might be real, right? I might be uncomfortable in different circumstances that I’ve never been in before. But when we’re talking about bathroom bills, I think we need to be very, very clear about the difference between actual safety of an actual person based on actual statistics as compared to the uncomfortable feelings that someone may have based on limited personal experience.
And my experience with trans people is not universal. I obviously don’t know every trans person. But my limited experience is that they overwhelmingly are not desiring to be seen. They are not desiring to be outed. They just want to do their business and they tend to do it more privately. Especially when they’re trying not to be outed. There’s nothing that’s going to out somebody more in a space and make a space more dangerous than disclosing pre surgical genitalia in some sort of space. And they want to be just like all of us. You walk into that women’s locker room and you’re feel kind of awkward and you’re hoping there’s stalls with doors and this is actually multiplied for trans people.
So if we’re talking even in the realm of people feeling uncomfortable, the little cisgender girl who’s been maybe told some untruths about trans people might feel uncomfortable. But if we’re comparing comfort, the trans person already feels more uncomfortable and that’s not where laws come in. We’re talking about actual, physical safety. I told you I’m going to get all ranty about these. Alright.
NECA: That’s awesome, Jen. Thank you.
JEN: Alright, sports bans. You can move on.
NECA: Actually, I want to talk about bathrooms for just one more second. If we genuinely have a concern about privacy in a bathroom, the answer to that concern is to do a better job of building bathrooms with privacy.
JEN: Right.
NECA: I mean, if the stall doors only go up four and a half feet high, well, I’m almost six feet tall and it is very hard not to look over that stall door at my height.
JEN: Or those three-inch cracks.
NECA: Yes. exactly. If privacy is a genuine problem in those bathrooms, let’s fix the privacy problem for everyone rather than harass trans people.
JEN: I’d like to point out too, there’s already laws against leering at people. So if you’re in a bathroom and someone is staring at you while you change your clothes, there’s already a law against that. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they’re gender is. Or if someone is taking pictures of you or if someone is making inappropriate advances or touching you, those things are already illegal. So let’s enforce them and empower people to deal with the things that are actually a problem. Somebody walking in and urinating and leaving or walking in and trying – we’ve all done that, right, where you’re trying to change your shirt without taking off the other shirt until the last second. Maybe I’m outing my own modesty, but that’s not really the problem.
That’s not what the laws are doing. And I don’t think there’s any – well maybe there is – but I can’t think of any more dehumanizing statement than to say to somebody’s face, “You aren’t welcome to use a public toilet. The least sanitary, least desirable place in all of society, you’re too gross to enter that.” And I think that’s why they come up first, right? Because every opportunity to dehumanize and make the trans population less worthy of existing in public. If you can’t use a public toilet, you’re pretty much stuck in your house for the majority of the day. Sports. We’ll move on to sports bans.
NECA: Okay. So sports bans tend to be presented as protecting women’s rights to participate in sports, recognizing that there are sports where women on average are at a disadvantage compared to men on average. And so there are people who claim that transgender women are transitioning to try to get an unfair advantage in sports. So that claim is garbage, right?
JEN: And so ridiculous. Transition is hard.
NECA: It is hard. And it’s important to understand, not only is that claim garbage on its face but that trans women who go on something that blocks the production of testosterone and go on estrogen and related hormones instead, within a very short period of time lose whatever muscle mass or strength advantage we are ascribing to men. And so it’s important to recognize that there are already legitimate sports organizations who have come up with reasonable standards about when is it appropriate for a transgender woman after she transitions to compete in sport as a woman and not as a man. And we should address some of those potential competitive advantages for specific sports at the level of the sports organization, not at some big broad-sweeping government policy level. I can think of a real but really ridiculous example. There are gendered competitions in billiards.
JEN: Did you just see that article?
NECA: Yes. And it’s like, what?
JEN: Okay. You have to tell the audience what we’re talking about.
NECA: Okay. So the question is, “Is there a gendered advantage for one gender or the other in a sport – using that definition sort of loosely – of billiards. And no, there’s just no reasonable way you can say men are at an advantage this, because their fingers are thicker or that’s just garbage, right?
JEN: Yes. In my head I keep thinking of chess. Do we have to have gendered chess because of the exposure to testosterone?
NECA: There’s not evidence that testosterone makes you better at chess. That’s another excellent example. And so a ban, a competition ban that banned people from playing in an activity as their affirmed gender, if the activity is something like chess or billiards, I mean, that’s just absurd.
JEN: Exactly.
NECA: So we want sport-specific organizations to make sport-specific rulings and have them make sense on genuine advantages. For example, people with long wingspans tend to have an advantage as swimmers.
JEN: Yes. Michale Phelps.
NECA: Everybody names him as the example, right? But we don’t, therefore, say people with a wingspan over this distance have to compete in this separate category for swimming.
JEN: If we were interested in fairness, we might.
NECA: Right. And we could choose to do that. There are sports we do that. Wrestling is an excellent example. We have weight classes in wrestling because, yes, there is an advantage. There are differences there that we can take into account by dividing people up into weight classes. That’s great. But make it make sense. Medical bans.
JEN: This one has been really – I’m sure for you also – the last couple years watching the conversations across the nation because all of the reasoning for these medical bans is based on zero evidence or outright lies.
NECA: Yes.
JEN: And it’s really, really challenging and we’re going to talk about how hard it is later. But it's really hard to listen to people in professional places like on the House of Congress telling lies that influence legislation. So what are the lies that they’re telling and how do we fight back for medical bans?
NECA: So the first lie that is commonly out there is the lie that young children who transition are having any kind of medical procedure done to them at all. That is a lie. When a young child transitions, what that means is that they switch to wearing clothes that code to their affirmed gender. They may switch the name they use, the pronoun they use, maybe they grow their hair out or maybe they get it cut short. That’s all. They are social changes, how they present to the world. All of them are reversible. And for a prepubescent child, that is all that happens.
JEN: I’m nodding.
NECA: And nodding doesn’t show up on a podcast, Jen.
JEN: Sorry. Yes. Yes.
NECA: So, now we need to stop and talk about the onset of puberty. For some transgender children, puberty is incredibly clarifying. That was true for my kid. My son was fairly gender variant as a young child but didn’t experience any gender dysphoria about their body prior to puberty. But with the onset of puberty and the start of those changes to their body, Grayson experienced a lot of dysphoria. So puberty was clarifying for him. Before we might have said, a girl who likes kinda boyish things and has lots of little boy friends. But if we had known what was going on, after the onset of puberty, would’ve been, “No, my child is very distressed about the physical changes happening to their body.” And that’s because this is “The wrong puberty” for my child.
So for a child who is just starting puberty, if they experience distress about those changes, there is a medical option to delay puberty. And those are called hormone blockers. And hormone blockers are a great gift to transgender children. And honestly, a great gift to their parents because usually if a child goes on blockers, it will be for a few years while everybody – child, parents, medical providers, therapist, comes to a consensus about Yes this child has a consistent, persistent, and insistent transgender identity.
JEN: And it’s interesting because one of the main arguments used in these health care bans are, everybody is too young. They’re too young. How could they know? they’re too young. And puberty blockers are the genius solution to that. You’re right. They are too young. This kid’s 11 and way too young to tackle all of this. So let's just push the pause button for a little bit. Everybody’s going to take some deep breaths. We’re going to take two, three, maybe five years and sort through this. So when you take those away you’re actually fighting your own narrative, right? They’re too young, they’re too young. They’re too young. Yes. they are. Please let us help these kids.
NECA: Right. So I’m going to take a detour now to talk about one of the false arguments against puberty blockers which is that puberty blockers are dangerous.
JEN: Yes. I heard it thousands of times this last session.
NECA: Right. So it’s important to understand that puberty blockers are drugs that are also used to treat other medical conditions besides puberty in a transgender child. They are used to treat people with hormone sensitive cancers like prostate cancer for example.
JEN: We have a mutual friend whose child was almost put on blockers because of cancer treatment.
NECA: Yeah. And they are also used to treat children who are undergoing precocious puberty. That means puberty considerably younger than would be typical for a child of their sex assigned at birth. And there are people who take the data about people who are on those hormone blockers for cancer treatment or who are on those treatments for precocious puberty, and try to apply them to transgender children. And it’s like, transgender children don’t have cancer. And usually, they’re not going through precocious puberty. And so comparing the results of using those drugs against those other groups to the results of children who are on blockers to delay puberty until they’re ready for a medical transition is just inappropriate. It’s apples to oranges. So any time you hear somebody saying, “Blockers are dangerous. All these studies show . . . “ Just ask, were those studies done on transgender children or were they done on people with hormone-sensitive cancer or were they done on people who have precocious puberty, right? The answer is that the studies done on transgender children who go on blockers show them to be very useful and quite safe medications. If the child stays on them for only an appropriate amount of time. and I want to talk about that caveat because the older recommendations for blockers was that you stay on blockers and not go through hormone-assisted puberty until 16. Sixteen is very late to go through puberty.
JEN: Yes.
NECA: I mean, particularly in my family, we tend to go through puberty early. So my kid went through female puberty at age 10, right at the start of age 10. And if they had gone on blockers then and had to stay on blockers until they were 16, six years is probably too long to be on hormone blockers. And I would have argued for an earlier start to cross hormones.
JEN: Those fall, the whole thing is about protecting children, protecting children, protecting children from irreversible things. I just want to throw in there – remind everybody that natal puberty is also irreversible. And foreseen little girl to go through a male puberty until she’s 18 and then she can experience the female puberty, leaves her with markers that are expensive to reverse and sometimes impossible to reverse and leave her as a target for some really horrible statistics. So the whole idea that they can just wait, they can just wait, they can just wait, sounds really nice, but it’s not true because the body is moving on without you.
NECA: Waiting is not neutral.
JEN: That’s a good way to word it. Waiting is not neutral. I like that.
NECA: Can I talk about medical bans one more second?
JEN: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
NECA: Some medical bans only involve restrictions on surgeries. And they sometimes claim that doctors are doing gender reassignment surgery on children. That is not happening.
JEN: I’ve asked several legislators, find me a single example in the entire nation, a single example of this happening, genital surgery for only gender-affirming purposes and no other reason and they cannot find an example, but they still believe it. I can’t understand. Who’s telling them these lies that they just accept without question?
NECA: Having talked about that, when we push back about transgender medical bans, we need to talk about who’s going to be in the room when it happens to quote Hamilton.
JEN: I like it.
NECA: Who should be making those decisions, those decisions about a minor's medical care. And who should be making those decisions? Well, the minor should have input. The parents should have input unless there is other evidence that those parents are manifestly unfit to make decisions on behalf of their child. Doctors, qualified doctors with experience treating transgender patients should have input. A therapist who has spent time with the child and has diagnosed them with gender dysphoria should have input. End of list.
JEN: I was going to say, “That’s all.”
NECA: That is a big team. And each one of those people has some power if they feel like, “Hey, in this specific child’s instance, I’m concerned that this decision-making process is going awry? There are people there who can stand up and say, “Whoa, wait a minute. Not this decision.” I, as a parent, do not want my state legislature or the governor for that matter, in the room when that decision is made about the healthcare of my child.
JEN: I’m going to jump us past the other individual categories so that we have a chance to talk about what do we do? Who do we reach out to? How do we fight back? Who’s on the ground? It’s January, the bills are coming out. What’s our next step?
NECA: Great. So, number one on the list although not number one in January, is vote. Please recognize that you do not want to elect politicians who are either gullible or cynical, right? And politicians who, when you give them accurate information and explain why some of these other tropes are false and inaccurate, continue to hold onto the inaccurate stuff. They are either gullible or cynical and you don’t want them in office. So that is top of the list.
Number two, is donate time or money or both to politicians who are neither gullible nor cynical. Related to that idea, recognize that politicians like every human being, are swayed by trusted messengers. The way the human brain works is based on humans having evolved in small community groups where we know everybody. And we learn fairly quickly who the people are who are full of it and who are the people who tell the truth. And we recognize the people who tell the truth. They become trusted messengers.
And we do not expend the same mental energy to screen what they tell us and decide, “Is that the truth or is that just a lie.” As we do the person who’s full of it, right? Them, we take everything they say with a grain of salt. That mental framework that served us so well when we lived in small communities, does not serve us so well in a political system designed to serve millions of people. But still, we tend to find people that we believe or groups that we believe and then believe them about everything. And the reality is, what we need to be doing is saying, “Is this an area where they have expertise?”
JEN: Yes.
NECA: So, just like us – and we need to be careful to find people with expertise – politicians need to do that too. But it’s hard because they have lots of people competing for their time and attention. And so we can communicate to politicians and say, “This sort of bill is going to be running in this legislative session. The people who are running it are making these claims. But these claims are false. Here is what the people with expertise say.” And try to inoculate our politicians. Try to feed them a truth sandwich to help protect them against the lies that they will hear from groups that they might trust. Also, politicians are swayed by threats. I had not understood that concept until the last few years. But, in Utah, there are a few bills where legislators have been told the specific message, “If you do not get behind this bill, we will primary you.”
JEN: We had the same situation here. Where they were stating, “If you don’t get behind this anti-trans health care bill, we will not support any other bill that you bring to the floor no matter how good it is for our state.”
NECA: Yeah. And, in Utah, the version of it was we will fund a candidate to run against you in the primary so that we can get someone in office who will vote the way we want. And politicians are legitimately swayed by that message. Several politicians who I thought I respected and who I thought had legitimate understanding and interest in LGBTQ issues, nonetheless, when it came to that threat, knuckled under.
JEN: Same.
NECA: And they knuckled under for good reason. There is a politician – he doesn’t represent me, but represents an area near where I live who was a very conservative politician. But there were some issues that he felt very strongly on and he did not bow to that threat to be primaried and he was primaried and he lost his seat. And now the person who represents that district is just – in my opinion – one of the loonier members of our state legislature. So I want to toss that out there. Because of that, we need to pay particular attention, again, to voting, right? To elect people who are going to be pre-armored against that kind of threat. If we can’t pay attention to every race, the most important political races to pay attention to is races where no incumbent is running. And that is because incumbents are almost always re-elected. And so, if there’s a race where there’s no incumbent and you have an opportunity to vote in that race, pay attention, particular attention, to that race.
Also, pay particular attention to local races. And this may sound strange because the people on your city council or your school board or the water district or whatever, they’re not going to be voting directly on legislation that affects LGBTQ rights. But, people get their start in politics at that low level. And so that is a good chance for us to screen out the gullible and the cynical. So go to meet the candidate nights if you can. And go prepared to ask a question. My suggestion is script out your question first because even if you think you can express that beautifully in a crowded room with a microphone pointed at our face, you’ll stumble on your words. So go ahead and take a piece of paper with your question scripted out.
JEN: It gets so awkward when they’re all staring at you.
NECA: That's the most important thing where we exert our influence as citizens is as voters. Less effective, but still worthwhile, is to communicate with the people who are already in office. Call their office. Send them an email. Make in-person contact if possible. Go to rallies. I kind of list that one a little more hesitantly because the other ones are more effective than going to a rally. Rallies really only work if they make it into the press. Also, if your legislators do something you like, send them a thank you note. I think that’s really important. Our legislators or politicians in general get screamed at a lot and thanked very little. And what politicians are doing is genuinely hard and they’re not getting rich doing it, or they shouldn’t be.
JEN: Not the local people.
NECA: And so if they make a good decision, tell them you appreciate them making a good decision. They deserve to be treated with respect. And the flip-side of that is, no matter how furious you are at the decision you legislators have made, please don’t scream at them. Please don’t swear at them. Please don’t threaten them. Our political system has gotten so toxic in the last few years and there are good committed public servants who are stepping down from political office because they’re tired of being screamed at and sworn at. And they’re definitely tired of being threatened. And they’re frightened for their families.
JEN: Yeah. Quite toxic out there.
NECA: Yeah. So the other thing we can do is try to educate other voters. And, again, the top of the list for educating other voters is “Get out the vote” efforts for people who already support your cause. It is easier to get somebody who already supports your cause to actually go vote than to try to change somebody's mind on an issue. So you can learn more about “Get Out the Vote”efforts from various political organizations. Again, your local equality groups will have information about that and ways you can work that.
So I will just say one more thing about that, that there are a variety of ways to help get out the vote. You can help make phone calls as part of phone banking to get out the vote or send postcards, offer rides to the poles. You can, on social media, encourage people to make the effort to vote. And all of those are profoundly hypocritical if you don’t vote first unless of course you’re not a citizen or not old enough to vote. Those people can get a pass for encourage other people to vote even though they can’t vote yourself.
JEN: So, despite our best efforts, we’re writing letters, we’re testifying, we’re talking to our legislators, we’re getting people to vote, we have all of the facts on our side, and some of the stinkiest bills still pass. Do we just have to give up and accept it?
NECA: No. Yes, it’s a law. Laws can be changed. So the common next step when a bad bill passes is a lawsuit because often the bad bills that pass are unconstitutional either against the federal constitution or sometimes against the state constitution. And every state’s constitution is a little different. But sometimes there’s better arguments to be made when pushing against the state constitution then the federal constitution. It just depends.
So I’m not a lawyer and I couldn’t lead one of those lawsuits to save my life. I can, however, donate to the other organizations that run them because lawsuits are expensive. Also, lawsuits require a plaintiff. A plaintiff is someone or multiple someones who are actually harmed by the bill, whose rights are actually infringed against by this new law that has passed. And if organizations trying to run a lawsuit can’t find plaintiffs, they can’t file a case. Now, this is a challenge in the face of so many anti-trans bills that are specifically targeting transgender minors because it means the plaintiffs have to be a minor. Which means parents have to be supportive of their child being a plaintiff in a case understand that it does put their child at some risk.
JEN: We saw that a lot trying to find plaintiffs for some of these, the anti-sports bill, the anti-health care bill, the bathroom bill. You’re asking a vulnerable population that’s already being targeted, “Hey, did you want another job? Did you want to go testify and bear your soul and work with lawyers?” and parents are largely like, ”We might have to move to protect my kid and outing my kid like this targets us for future if there’s parental accusations of abuse, it’s putting this huge target on our back.” It was really hard to find people. And I understand why. But what you’re saying is true. If somebody doesn’t step up, the law sits on the books.
NECA: So I think it’s important to look at the history of the civil rights movement for inspiration there and think about the brave parents of little black children who sent their kids to school through a howling mob.
JEN: Can you imagine being Ruby Bridge’s mom?
NECA: Right. I just look at those parents and I look at those children and at the courage it must’ve taken to be the plaintiffs and step up for that. I want to point out, however, that our court system today tends to make more effort to protect plaintiffs' privacy particularly children. I know in Utah, when there was the lawsuit against Utah's no-promo-homo bill, was it’s nickname. What it was designed to do was to forbid schools from promoting homosexuality, whatever that means – like talking about it could make kids gay. And the three minors who were the plaintiffs in that case were all anonymized and their families were protected. After the case was resolved and that was written out of statute in response to that case, the three plaintiffs all decided to go public. But parents don’t need to make that decision and their children don’t need to make that decision. They could stay anonymous.
JEN: Our very, very, very brave Idaho families, at this point, are all anonymous for those same reasons that are in the midst of those ugly cases. And courts are being great to respect that.
NECA: So, if you are hearing this and see your family as potentially a family that could step up and be plaintiffs, you can reach out to the equality organizations in your state for more information without any commitment on your part. They can just tell you what the process would be and give you details.
JEN: ACLU or Lambda Legal, also very active if you’re looking for places to contact to help.
NECA: Agreed. Yeah. In addition, laws can be repealed and amended. If we elect new politicians, we can make that happen. It has been fascinating for me to see in the last year since the supreme court “Dobbs” decision, how many people have gone to the pole who otherwise might not have gone to the poles based on the Dobbs decision about abortion rights and how that has actually flipped some state legislatures including in Michigan. And so that’s another way to get rid of bad laws. It takes longer, but it can work. Finally, if you really need to for your family's safety, you can move. And I have friends with young trans children who have moved.
JEN: So do I. We’ve said goodbye to several this summer.
NECA: Yeah. Some of them have moved to a more affirming state. I even have a few friends who have moved out of the United States because they are so concerned with what has been happening here politically for the last few years and their child’s safety.
JEN: Which leaves – and I just want to toss this in there – which leaves those of us who are not directly impacted by this legislation to stay and fight harder because it only gets worse as people have to flee for their safety. Those who are left, who can’t fight, are stuck. So those of us who aren’t impacted, who can stay, this is time to show up and fight.
NECA: And for me, I don’t need to be driven out of my state.. My transgender child is an adult. And so our families can’t be the plaintiff. But we can stay and fight because my kid is safe.
JEN: Exactly. But, for me, one of the most frustrating things to face during the legislative sessions is the idea of saliency, right? There’s people who care, but they don’t care enough to actually do something about it, right? Of course, “I think there should be anti-discrimination legislation to protect people, but I need low taxes more.” Or “But I’m not really interested in politics.” Those kind of things. Are there ways we can address this without making everyone annoyed by us all the time?
NECA: Okay. First of all, being annoying is underrated. And so don’t have that be your bar. But I think it is worthwhile to strategically think about what issues track with LGBTQ rights issues that may be an issue that is sufficient to activate the other person. I have to give some background on this. I lost my brother to gun violence in 2003. He was shot and killed during the robbery of his coin store in Saint George. And so I am also active in the gun violence prevention movement. And gun violence prevention as an issue is a very significant issue for younger people in the US, Millennials and Gen Z. These are the young people who are now voting age but who went through active shooter drills in schools.
JEN: Right.
NECA: And so they have been traumatized by gun violence in a way that adults often have not. Also, gun violence prevention is an issue that tracks strongly with LGBTQ rights. A politician who supports sensible gun violence prevention legislation, often is also a politician who supports LGBTQ rights.
JEN: Yes.
NECA: And so we can talk to people about a different issue that will motivate them to get to the polls and still accomplish our goal in terms of LGBTQ rights. So I gave gun violence prevention as an example, but I don’t think that’s the only issue. We can spend some time saying, “Well, what are the issues that I think track with this issue of LGBTQ rights?” And then look and see, does the polling date support this? And say, “Aw, well, I can also talk about this other issue as a way to help motivate my friends to vote.” So that’s another way to deal with the salience issue that LGBTQ rights just may not be as high on peoples list is to look at another issue that might be high on their list that would track
JEN: One thing I’ve noticed living in a very conservative location, is that sometimes people aren’t directly impacted and so they are supportive of LGBTQ rights. But they don’t understand the reality. In Idaho we’ve been fighting for 14 years now for anti-discrimination legislation for LGBTQ people so they don’t lose their housing, so they don’t lose their jobs. And I was talking, actually, to my dad about my kids. “But my kids don’t want to live here because they could be fired for just being gay.” And he was like, “No you can’t do that. That’s illegal.” I’m like, “It’s not illegal in Idaho. If their landlord discovers that Jackson is gay, he can kick him out onto the street.” and he was like, “No. no. no. you can’t do that.” And I was like, “Yeah, you can. Let’s talk about the actual law.”
And so, for my dad who’s very politically conservative, he just needed to just be exposed to the law. It was wildly unfair to him and so he actually wrote his legislators that he had voted for and said, “I’m one of your constituents. I voted for you and this law needs to change.” And so sometimes I think even a little bit of information instead of the big chunk. Let’s support the queer affirming politician might be too big for people to handle. But if you can get them on individual issues that they care about, they might be willing to do stuff.
We take a vacation every January to gear up for the legislative session because it can be brutal. It’s hard to listen to and it’s not even me. I’m not even the one being targeted. It’s so hard to listen to. It’s so hard to participate. It’s so hard to gear yourself up to write another letter, to make another phone call, and be respectful. My instincts are not always respectful. But in order to interact and write letters and stuff, you have to turn on that respectful level. And sometimes when the facts are on our side, we lose. So what can we do to build some resilience. I would like every year, to survive the political season. And, more importantly than that, I want our LGBTQ loved ones to survive this onslaught. So teach me, teach me how to build some resiliency.
NECA: Well, first of all, I think resiliency probably deserves a whole hour on its own.
JEN: Right.
NECA: And probably that hour should not be from me. I am not an expert. But you said an excellent point, right, which is that we need to survive. And so each of us needs to do a little honest introspection and say, “Right now in my life, what am I up for?” And then set some boundaries. And say, “You know what, I’m feeling super fragile right now. As much as I care about this issue, I have got to take a step back and protect my mental health.”
JEN: Right. Because we’re prioritizing survival.
NECA: Because if you survive, you know what, maybe you can be more politically active next year.
JEN: I had to eliminate this last year, several topics I’m passionate – like you said, you’re passionate about gun violence. I have a couple of pet projects, particularly education. And I had to pick out of these 27 topics that are going to hit the legislature this year, I’m going to tackle two. I’m going to stay on top of two. And the other 25, I’m not even going to really pay attention to. I’m not going to listen. I’m going to trust that the other people in my camp are going to fight in those areas where they might not be able to fight quite as hard or quite as effectively on the trans issues. But I had to pick. And sometimes I had to remind myself of those boundaries. Like, “This one’s not yours this year. This one’s not yours this year. This one is NOT YOUR THIS YEAR.”
NECA: Excellent. So the next thing I would point out is that worrying by itself is exhausting and it accomplishes nothing.
JEN: You can teach my brain that. I don’t believe that.
NECA: If you spot your brain in churn-mode where you are just worrying about something, sometimes it is better to do a thing then just keep churning. If you are having trouble sleeping because you are churning on an idea, maybe getting up and spending 30 minutes writing an email to your legislator about that topic. If you’re concerned you haven’t been respectful enough, or polite enough, and haven’t edited out all the swear words, you don’t have to hit send until the morning.
JEN: I do that. I leave the “To” line blank so I don’t accidentally send it.
NECA: Oh, that’s clever. I like that. Anyway, but you can get some of those things down and then sometimes you can, “Okay. Now I can stop churning and sleep about this issue.” So, if the action you’re taking is just worrying, shift to taking even a small action that will actually, potentially, do something is another suggestion.
Similar to that, I think it is important to set news boundaries with ourselves. We can say, “I will read a key article on this and then I will stop reading out that topic for the day.” And this is really hard because modern online media, particularly social media platforms, they push hard against that boundary. And I admit, I love YouTube. Lectures about dinosaurs, I’m all in. But, that aspect of its algorithm is a problem and so I have to be disciplined enough to scroll by the next YouTube discussion of that same topic that I have already learned about for the day. So in addition to setting specific news topic boundaries, setting time boundaries can sometimes help.
JEN: I have to go with time boundaries.
NECA: The other resilience thing that I will suggest, is I initially wrote this down as “Knit” But what I mean . . .
JEN: Like actual knitting with yarn?
NECA: Yes. Do something where you can actually see concrete progress because that’s the problem with a lot of political activism, you can spend a ton of time, but you can’t actually tell if you’ve changed anybody’s opinion or if they’re going to vote a certain way or whatever. And people, for their sanity, need to be able to look at things and say, “I did this.”
It’s part of the reason parenting young children is so hard because toddlers are little chaos machines and your job may be to keep the toddler fed and clothed and keep the house in some kind of order. But you have this little chaos machine. So you’ve cleaned up the living room and vacuumed the carpet and five minutes later there’s five hundred toys on the living room floor. And so it can be one of those situations where, at the end of the day, you look and say, “Well, what have I done all day? I just can’t see anything.” So it really does help to have some kind of hobby or activity or something where you can look at it, and at the end of the day say, “There. That’s the thing I did. That sweater is an inch longer.”
JEN: You have just explained to me my own brain because I find myself doing a lot of puzzles during the legislative session. I’m just always, “I’ve got a have a break. I’ve got to do a puzzle.” I don't know why it’s always puzzles, but now I know. At the end, the puzzles done and I make everyone come clap for my puzzle.
NECA: Take a picture and post it on social media.
JEN: Yeah. and the rest of the year, I don’t really do a lot of puzzles.
NECA: So it's a way for us to see progress when the thing that is occupying so much of our time and attention it’s very hard to see progress on.
JEN: All right. Getting the puzzle collection going again.
NECA: Don’t be ashamed of the puzzles. So I think, as parents, it’s very important that we also help our kids be resilient in the face of these onslaughts.
JEN: Social media makes it impossible for them to just be oblivious like we maybe got to be when we were 12 and 13 and 14.
NECA: Right
JEN: They will know what’s happening.
NECA: Right. So if you have a 3 and 4 year old, they may genuinely be oblivious. But when they go to kindergarten, your little transgender five year old is going to probably have a classmate who spouts off very strongly about boys do this and girls do that.
JEN: My Dillan started getting the big onslaught in third grade of all of that stuff. We managed to avoid it until then .
NECA: That’s great. And so I think it is important to help our kids in age-appropriate ways to be resilient in the face of these attacks. The APA the American Psychological Association has a really great article about teaching children resilience that includes specific discussions of in what age windows take what approach.
JEN: We will include that link in the show notes for anyone who wants to do that.
NECA: They are the experts and I will just briefly say two things. One is that your child needs to know other people like them. They need access to queer peers so that they don’t feel so alone. They also need some kind of access to queer teen, young adult, adult role models so that they can see a happy future for themselves. And that is an important tool of resilience. Make the effort to help your child access those support networks. You may live in a big queer-friendly city and then that wouldn’t be hard. But when my child transitioned at age 16, I looked at my sweet son and said, “He’s got a totally supportive family, but he’s the only trans person he has ever met.” And that was 12 years ago. I had to drive him to the pride center in Salt Lake City that was an hour away so that he could meet another transgender person.
JEN: And that’s so important.
NECA: And I did that because it’s what he needed. The other useful thing for helping our kids be resilient that I want to mention is help them see their power. Help them see what they can do to help make change. And interestingly, this cycles back to the idea of being a plaintiff. We know for most people, that’s not going to be possible. You’re not going to be in the right situation and it’s not going to be right for your kid. But that is a way to help your child claim their power.
JEN: To be fighting back.
NECA: And there are other ways, taking a child to a political rally can be valuable for your child to say, “Here’s a bunch of people who feel the same way I do about this issue that’s so important to me.”
JEN: And look at this big crowd of adults who are fighting for me.
NECA: Yeah. And also, to help them understand how rallies impact the media. That this rally may show up on the evening news or it may show up in a newspaper and that’s a way we communicate to our legislators and to other people as well. And there’s other ways that we can help our kids to show their power. And it’s something that we don’t have a lot of time to explore in a lot of detail here. But it's something for parents to think about. With my kid, at their age, and in their situation, and honestly, if they’re comfortable being public or the shy and retiring type and that would be horrible. We can think of what will work for our kid.
I remember years ago, I watched a lecture that was about political power for introverts, basically, which I thought was such a marvelous concept. And one the people they interviewed was somebody who created a political action crafting circle. And for her legislator, she had needlepointed a glasses case. She saw that this legislator wore glasses and so she needlepointed him a glasses case with a message about the political cause she was supporting on a glasses case and then gave it to him.
JEN: I love that.
NECA: And she met the guy a year later and he was like, “Yeah. I totally use that glasses case.” But be creative, but find a way.
JEN: I like that because we do have different personalities and you have to find your own way without – back to that idea of survival.
NECA: And I think that’s so important because we don’t have to be superheros and do everything. I know tons of politically active people phone bank. And I have all the respect in the world for people who phone bank. I have phone phobia.
JEN: I’m not doing the phone bank.
NECA: The closest I have ever come in my whole adult life to a panic attack was the one time I tried to phone bank. I made exactly one call. And then it was like, “Okay. I’m going to sit on an iron spike because it will be comfier.” So don’t phone bank. I don’t say yes to that.
JEN: I don’t either. Same thing.
NECA: But I do other things. And I trust that I have great friends who are out there phone banking for the good cause. And I appreciate them. And I admire them. And I let them do it.
JEN: I love that. I have the same. What other jobs, the not phone jobs? I could do a postcard. Sure.
NECA: I can do a podcast.
JEN: Exactly. So, before we go, I want to talk about just drop the names of a couple of resources. We talked about finding good sources of information and we’re going to link these, anything that’s mentioned we’ll link in the show notes. And I want to start with, because I don’t know if you’ll think of this one, but find a local person who cares a lot and follow them. Because if they care a lot, they’re already doing a lot of the leg work. So that’s my first suggestion is just find two people and be like, “What’s up. What’s happening.” And just follow them on whatever platforms they use to advocate because they're probably dying for someone to care about what they’re sharing. So what other resources can we offer to people?
NECA: There, as I said earlier, are state-level organizations in every state that work on LGBTQ related political issues. Find the one for your state. Some of those organizations do a better job of others then communicating about current issues. Sometimes that’s frustrating to me. I’ve seen some of those organizations who are great at the end of the legislative session in doing a summary of their accomplishments. That’s nice. But that’s not what I want from you. I want you to tell me the bill number of the bill I want to write my legislator about before that crappy bill passes.
JEN: Before it gets to governor’s desk, that’s when I want to know about it.
NECA: So, if the equality organization that you’ve reached out to isn’t doing that, you can write them and say, “Here’s what I want to know. Are you already doing that on a platform and I’m not seeing it? And, if you aren’t doing it, why not?”
JEN: Because they already know, they just have to pass it on.
NECA: And maybe they don’t have anybody on their staff who’s at all savvy with social media. And honestly, if they don’t, they need to spend some of the dollars that are donated to them to hire somebody who is savvy on social media to make that happen.
JEN: Agreed.
NECA: So that’s at the state level. At the national level, there are a number of great groups. I’m going to start with one you wouldn’t expect, the Southern Poverty Law Center. And the Southern Poverty Law Center did lots of great work in the civil rights area. And we are still in the civil rights era, they still do lots of great work. But they also track hate groups and how those hate groups feed into our current political system. And so I recommend them as a source for looking up some of these organizations with tame sounding names – like the Alliance Defending Freedom. I’ve already named them – and read about what they’re actually doing.
JEN: I love this suggestion because I wouldn’t have thought of it. I follow them pretty closely but I wouldn’t have thought of this as a resource so I appreciate this one a lot.
NECA: For me, they’re also a useful resource because they also track a lot of white supremacist groups.
JEN: Which seem to line up almost 1,000 percent with anti-queer groups.
NECA: Yes. They do. And I want to know, again, who those groups are even if they have an innocuous sounding name.
JEN: Perfect.
NECA: The National Center for Lesbian Rights, NCLR, did I get that right?
JEN: Mm-hmm.
NECA: Is another great group that does a lot of the legal stuff. I already mentioned that PFLAG tracks LGBQT related bills in the US and is a good source of information. Let’s see, now I’m losing the name, the Trans Equality . . .
JEN: Last year I looked it up under Trans Equality 2023. So I’m assuming this year it will be Trans Equality 2024 for their tracking system.
NECA: Yeah. Theirs is a great one even though they’re a national organization, they’re tracking all these bills on the state-wide level.
JEN: They’re pretty fast. If you click on any individual bill it’ll tell you what it’s pretending to be and what it actually is and who wrote it and who to contact.
NECA: They’re a great source of information. My friend Sue Robbins has a website that is SueinUt and she tracked some of these bills and shared how those bills intersected with medical best practice in the American Academy of Pediatrics position statement on medical care for transgender children. And WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, their guidelines which I thought was very useful if you’re looking for facts to be able to push back against false claims.
JEN: And I’m not in Utah. I follow SueinUT.
NECA: Right. Because it’s the same bills.
JEN: And she does provide, here’s a link to this. Here’s an argument to this and the fact behind it. It’s like the super short cut when you’re getting ready to write those letters. So don’t think that that one’s only for people in Utah. The bills are the same.
NECA: And that is a dear friend of mine just generously donating her time and energy and experience to make it easier for us to give fact-based arguments.
JEN: Yeah. Bless her heart. She’s lovely. She’s been on an episode talking about politics with us last year. That episode 11B I talked about is Sue. That’s why we know she’s a genius.
NECA: So, anyway, listen to that episode of the podcast, follow SueinUT. You won’t be sorry.
JEN: Exactly. I’d like to toss in the ACLU which tracks legislation across the nation. The reason I follow multiple tracking for the same bills is because some of them are a little quicker on some topics a little slower. So, just to stay up to date. But the ACLU tracker is a good one.
NECA: Excellent, thank you. So, for education-related bills, GLSEN, G-L-S-E-N has useful information. If you’ve got a school-age LGBTQ kid, GLSEN is also worth a follow because they talk so much about the intersection of LGBTQ students in schools. But they particularly have information about some of those bills that target LGBTQ students' existence and visibility and safety in a school setting.
JEN: Again, for everyone who’s listening, go to the show notes. You’re probably driving in your car right now. Just make a little mental note to go to the show notes when you’re not driving. And follow some of the links and bookmark them so that you’re ready. This episode will air in January so this is current stuff. We’re at the starting gate and if we can keep the bills from going to the floor in the first place, that’s the ideal situation. They never even get debated. I want to thank you, Neca, so much for allowing me to steal you for an afternoon. This is a pet passion of mine, human rights, I want human rights. I want everybody to exist equally under the law. Thank you for coming and donating your time and your wisdom and your experience. You’re a dear friend, not just to me, but to the Mama Dragons community and the LGBTQ community at large. So thank you again for coming.
NECA: Thank you. and Thanks to the people who take the time to listen and then to act. You are the ones who change the world.
JEN: Thanks for joining us here IN THE DEN. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell your friends, and take a minute to leave a positive rating or review wherever you listen. Good reviews make us more visible and help us reach more folks who could benefit from listening. And if you’d like to help Mama Dragons in our mission to support, educate, and empower the parents of LGBTQ children, please donate at mamadragons.org or click the donate link in the show notes. For more information on Mama Dragons and the podcast, you can follow us on Instagram or Facebook or visit our website at mamadragons.org.