This article first appeared on March 8, 2019 on Rewire.News. Julia Beck has been granted a platform to give the right wing's anti-transgender activism the veneer of bipartisanship. A baffling sentence opened the Thursday testimony of Julia Beck, speaking at the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security on the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. “I am a lesbian radical feminist,” said Beck, who was removed from the Baltimore Ci

This article first appeared on February 20, 2019 on the Eyes Right Blog. California-based epidemiologist Hacsi Horvath raised this alarm about protections based on gender identity at a panel titled “The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns From the Left” at the Heritage Foundation in late January 2019—the latest in a series of panels of anti-transgender activists who root their activism in the rhetoric of feminism platformed by right-wing organizations. “And, in five yea

This article original appeared on January 11, 2019 in ReWire.News. In the 1970s, ultra-conservative, anti-abortion, anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly organized STOP ERA, the successful campaign to tank the Equal Rights Amendment. So devastating was the loss that the legislation—proposed to remedy gender disparity in employment, property ownership, and other areas—has been mired in the courts and state legislatures for 40 years. “Since the women are the ones who bear the

This article first appeared on December 19th, 2018 in Political Research Associates. The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), founded in 2002 in opposition to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) support for adoption by LGBTQ couples, was cited in one of several articles published by right-wing news outlets in late November in apparent concern over transgender people “taking advantage of” and “recruiting” people with autism. Church Militant, the Post Millennial, a

This article first appeared on November 6, 2018, in Political Research Associates. On November 6, Massachusetts voters will decide several ballot measures, including Question 3, which asks voters to overturn public accommodations protections in the Bay State based on gender identity. Despite the Commonwealth having some of the strongest protections for LGBTQ people in the nation, the Massachusetts legislature waited nearly 30 years after protecting its residents against discr

This article first appeared on November 1, 2018 on Political Research Associates. On October 21, The New York Times reported receiving information from the White House that details how the Trump Administration proposes to impose a multi-agency re-interpretation of “sex” under several civil rights laws to mean “[t]he sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued.” Further, it would codify “sex” as only existing in a binary of male and female “based on immuta

This article originally appeared in on October 25th in Religion Dispatches. As the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services faces harsh criticism for its proposed policy to redefine “sex,” another memo sits on the desk of HHS Secretary Alex Azar, one that would allow South Carolina child welfare agency Miracle Hill Ministries to affirmatively discriminate on the basis of religion while receiving state and federal child welfare funds. While it appears that Miracle Hill has