When Advocacy Perpetuates Systemic Violence: A Critique of National Movements Contesting the Criminalisation of Youth Access to Gender-Affirming Care Daniel Soucy, USA

When Advocacy Perpetuates Systemic Violence: A Critique of National Movements Contesting the Criminalisation of Youth Access to Gender-Affirming Care

By Daniel Soucy, USA

Introduction

While marriage equality in the United States was presumed to bring a new age of sexual freedom and LGBTQ equality, numerous commentators point out how gender and sexuality are again becoming central in political, legal and moral debates (Brenan, 2021; Chappel, 2022; and Romano, 2022). In these debates, Conservative-Christian understandings of ‘sex-assigned-at- birth’ often position sex as a natural and biological fact. As such, an individual’s gender performativity (Butler, 2004) and sexual desires should correspond neatly with these biological realities. Furthermore, deviance from these ‘facts’ is framed as morally corrupt and threatening. While more progressive framings have identified gender as a social construction, even these continue to juxtapose gender against sex’s intrinsic character (Fausto-Sterling, 2000 and Fuentes, 2022). As a result, policies seek to regulate transgender people based on the justification that misguided understandings of biology corrupt their bodies and minds. Intersecting this view, Christian discourse often frames children as pure thus positioning transgender children as desperately needing protection from social corruption. These views have framed a variety of policies regulating bathroom use, education about LGBTQ identities, transgender participation in sports and gender-affirming care (Thoreson, 2022 and The Daily, 2022). While each of these issues is unique, they all centre around rhetorical, legal and political attempts to confine children to heteronormative systems (Butler, 2004 and Richardson, 2011). The starkest example of this is in the state of Texas, where Governor Greg Abbot directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to conduct child-abuse investigations against caregivers7 who pursue gender-affirming-care (Bouranova, 2022). While numerous groups have pushed back against this policy’s deliberate attempt to police transgender children and their families, their advocacy campaigns have failed in two key respects. First, although dominant voices against Abbot’s directive8 critique the policy’s ignorance of gender as a social construct, the movement has only partially conceptualised sex as a categorisation system embedded within political, social and cultural power relations. As a result, it has perpetuated, rather than deconstructed, Christian-medical discourses arguing that sex is a ‘scientific’ category. From this view, all humans can and should align with the socialised gender norms aligned with sex. To demonstrate these gaps, I rely heavily on Fausto-Sterling’s understanding of Dynamic-Systems Theory. Second, this countermovement’s have not recognised their work’s intersections with movements against family regulation in poor communities of colour (Washington, 2022) as well as the inability of individual legal equality to address violence at the population level (Spade, 2015). As the upEND movement to end family policing makes clear, “The child welfare system is predicated on the subjugation, surveillance, control, and punishment of mostly Black and Native communities experiencing significant poverty” (Dettlaff, 2021).

7 I use the term caregiver to refer to biological and adoptee parents as well as physicians, doctors and therapists who provide care for children. Each of these groups is liable to prosecution under Abbot’s directive. 8 While I refer to Abbot’s directive throughout this analysis, it is important to note that Abbot relies heavily on references to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s legal brief arguing that gender-affirming care for minors is child abuse. 34

Based on this assertion, I suggest that the movement against Abbot’s directive must consider how liberal equality’s individualist framing and inability to contest disciplinary power against populations hurts, rather than supports, marginalised populations (Spade, 2011). In demonstrating these two critiques, I argue that these movements can create a far more comprehensive and intersectional approach to combatting not only Governor Abbot’s directive but also the cultural assumptions which empower the violent regulation of intersectional queer bodies.

Positioning attacks on gender affirming care within hegemonic Christian ideals of sex

Contesting the idea that sex is grounded in biology, gender is a cultural construct and sexuality is completely biological or completely social, Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling Employs Dynamic Systems Theory (2000). Stemming from other sexuality theorists like Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz as well as developmental-systems theorists, Fausto-Sterling critiques the dominant view that social and biological categories are fundamentally oppositional. Instead, she positions them as mutually constituting one another since the very production of knowledge regarding biological concepts like sex are fundamentally constrained by society (ibid, 2000). “Scientists do not simply read nature to find truths to apply in the social world. Instead, they use truths taken from our social relationships to structure, read, and interpret the natural” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). More recently, more authors have embraced this critique, pointing out that while there are biological realities, the ways we study bodies and the categorical conclusions these studies lead to, are shaped through cultural and social hegemonies (Fuentes, 2022). In demonstrating the links between ‘scientific’ disciplines like psychology, brain science and endocrinology with social constructions of sex and gender, Fausto-Sterling alludes to the ways in which Dynamics-Systems also provides a useful critique of Conservative-Christian views on sex as naturally binary (p. 78-79). Namely, sex is biologically male or biologically female. Through this lens, individuals outside this binary transgress their nature (Fuist, Stoll and Kniss, 2012). Therefore, societal institutions like the church, government or family are meant to ensure the two categories' sanctity. Importantly, numerous scholars have pointed out how LGBTQ groups also shift their language, practices and organising to fit these dominant assumptions (Fuist et. al., 2012; Fetner, 2008 and Kane, 2013). In building on these ideas, the first part of this analysis will demonstrate the extent to which LGBTQ movements against Governor Abbot’s directive have remained limited by Christian-medical frames. Similarly, theorists have demonstrated the ways in which children mark a particularly important social location for protecting Christian binaries pertaining to sex (Fischer, 2011). More specifically, “purity” is positioned as a sought-after ideal. Children, while born “pure”, are easily corrupted through their exposure to society. As such, recent policies criminalising gender- affirming care for transgender children as child-abuse are best viewed as an attempt to protect sex in its most “natural” form. In extreme cases, transgender children are positioned as “groomed” into their identities through their exposure to LGBTQ people (Romano, 2022). From this frame, children deviate from biological categories when caregivers fail to protect them from corruption. As this analysis will demonstrate, LGBTQ advocacy relies on similar frames. These framings are not merely theoretical. Rather, a close look at Focus on the Family demonstrates their social influence. Focus on the Family is a dominant Christian advocacy group in the United States which views the family as a “God-ordained institution” that can be encouraged by “sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as possible” (Focus on the Family, 2022). In 2021 alone, Focus on the Family spent 29.1 million USD, 28 percent of their budget, on activities 35

related to “parenting” and presented numerous advocacy resources against not only gender-affirming care, but transgender children more broadly (Focus on the Family Annual Report, 2021). Sex, as the previous analysis expects, is framed as natural and biological. As such, it can and must be ‘correctly’ enforced through social institutions (Focus on the Family, 2022). Equally as important, the heteronormative family and child are positioned as sacred, pure and in need of protection. In fact, their “About Us” section states, “we believe God has ordained the social institutions of family, church, and government. Therefore, Christians are called to influence these institutions according to God’s design and purpose” (Focus on the Family, 2022). Focus on the Family therefore frames transgender identity as a “disorder” of away from divinity which must be “treated” or “fixed” through social intervention (Johnson, 2015). Of course, these views have a political impact. More specifically, based on the idea that transgender identities are bad for society, most Christian voters believes it requires correction (Brown, 2022). In fact, Texas Governor Abbot used similar reasoning to justify criminalising caregivers who provide gender-affirming care to minors. “Childhood-onset gender dysphoria has been shown to have a high rate of resolution” (Washington, 2022). Furthermore, "they would deprive the child of the fundamental right to procreate, which supports a finding of child abuse under the Family Code" (Abbot, 2022). Based on the idea that individual identity can change to fit ‘nature’ and support heteronormative family structures, Abbot reifies binary sex and the importance of reproducing heteronormative families; largely falling in line with Christian rhetoric. Each seek to discipline caregivers who affirm children refusing to conform to binary ‘natural’ male-female categories.

Ambiguous frames, silences and overlaps: empowering Christian medical discourse

Although one might expect that Abbot’s conservative order would overlap with Christian discourses, there are also surprising links with The Trevor Project, a national organisation seeking to provide social, emotional and educational support to LGBTQ youth (The Trevor Project, 2020). Rather than unequivocally assert that sex is social, they sometimes position sex as a biological category. Given that The Trevor Project spent over 20 million USD in 2020 to provide critical mental health services to 1.8 million highly vulnerable individuals, 147,000 of whom resided in Texas (p. 17) as well as its prominent role in debates regarding transgender rights, it offers a useful means for understanding LGBTQ opposition to the Christian right. Meanwhile, the ACLU and Lambda Legal, do not mention sex while also falling into Christian medical discourses regarding gender-affirming care. Therefore, given the extent to which these categories are utilised, as Fausto-Sterling makes clear, “to achieve a social result” (2000, p. 80), critiquing their replication within LGBTQ movements is crucial to combat the directive. More specifically, The Trevor Projects sometimes problematises the distinction between gender and sex in its online resources for transgender and gender non-conforming youth. “In fact, gender and sex exist on a spectrum, meaning that there are a lot of different ways that people can express their gender identity or sex” (Weaver, 2022). However, while this framing is useful for elucidating how sex can exist outside of binaries, does not provide context into sex’s epistemological grounding in heteronormative ideals. Furthermore, the same page goes on to state, “When we’re born, a doctor assigns us a sex. This has to do with our biology, chromosomes, and physical body. Male babies are generally assumed to be ‘men’ and female babies are generally assumed to be ‘women’”. Although the Trevor Project notes how neither gender nor sex are binary, they obfuscate this idea by positioning gender as a “social construct” (Weaver, 2022) and sex as emerging from 36

biological realities. While this framing demonstrates how The Trevor Project views gender as mutable, it fails to provide context for the ways in which biology is also a highly contested and socialised discipline (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Cementing this construction, the second sentence refers to “gender assigned at birth” even after saying that a doctor assigns us a sex. By conflating these terms, they position gender as a social construct liable to contestation without clarifying if sex is a similarly contested category. Of course, the ACLU and Lambda Legal, the two primary civil liberties and LGBTQ rights organisations directing lawsuits against the order, do not reference sex at all in their press releases. Rather than view this silence as a lack of conformity to Christian discourses, instead, it illuminates the ways in which this discourse cements sex as a completely uncontested, scientific reality. Their collective silence thus reinforces these norms. Each of these organisations also build on Christian frames by positioning gender-affirming care in medical binaries. Just as Abbot argues that this care is “not medically necessary” (p. 4), The Trevor Project notes that “Access to gender-affirming medical care, has been found to be significantly linked to lower rates of depression, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary youth" (Weaver, 2022). Similarly, the ACLU argues, “Gender-affirming care for the treatment of gender dysphoria is medically necessary care, full stop” (ibid, 2022). Of course, unambiguously asserting that gender-affirming care is medically necessary creates a powerful account of transgender youths’ lived experiences. Furthermore, it disrupts the directive’s legality since Abbot concedes that “in rare circumstances” gender-affirming care for minors is legal if it “is borne out of medical necessity” (Abbot, 2022). However, this framing still fails to critique the social circumstances which make this care necessary. Namely, sex, as a reified binary category, makes it impossible to recognise biologies different from ‘male’ and ‘female’ binaries as normal. As such, we need to broaden our conception of sex to Fausto-Sterling’s (Richardson, 2000) and Fuente’s (Abbot, 2022) understanding of Dynamic Systems Theory, through which biological characteristics are viewed as mutually informed through the expectations, decisions and norms born out of power dynamics in research, culture and society. Recognising that power relations determine the types of knowledge which become hegemonic, opens a far deeper critique of sex as a classification system. Merely conforming to Christian medical binaries without substantively disrupting their power, fails to move away from a categorising system that demands alignment with arbitrary and reductionist hormonal differences. This makes it possible for policies like Abbott’s to seem grounded in science and morality, rather than through a lens of social discrimination and heteronormative dominance. However, without a reified state of nature to fall back on, “deviation” can more accurately be contested as a misleading term. Rather, the existence of a diverse range of bodies, psychologies and endocrine systems which do not align with biological accounts of male and female make it clear that difference, whether developed through one’s life course or apparent at birth, is far more ‘natural’ than uniformity (Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Fuentes, 2022). Therefore, while this terminology may appear inconsequential, our flawed understanding of human characteristics as existing within immutable binaries limits this movement’s capacity to undermine the logics guiding Abbot’s directive. It is also important to include a brief clarification. I am not arguing that gender-affirming care for many in the trans community is vitally important and lifesaving. Rather, I am pushing our movements to incorporate a more radical vision of a society where we recognise the dynamic and largely constructed nature of all categorisation systems.

Incorporating intersectional critiques of family regulation into Advocacy: moving beyond a legal approach

In addition to maintaining Christian frames, the fight against Abbot’s directive has also failed to ground itself in an intersectional approach that incorporates a broader movement against family regulation. By instead focusing on individual legal cases and targeted advocacy which position transgender youth and their caregivers as a monolithic group, the ACLU, Lambda Legal and The Trevor Project all do little to counter systemic violence. As Spade makes clear in his critique of liberal equality, LGBTQ movements and even more radical theories like Fausto-Sterling’s (2000), often focus on the social or epistemological regulation of gender/sex as the only mechanism for population-level management (Spade, 2011). However, the state often consciously and unconsciously enforces population management on a broader scale through administrative categories and racist institutions (Spade, 2011). These impact transgender people but have a far greater impact on communities of colour, migrants, people living in poverty and trans people of colour who live at the intersection of these marginalised categories. As Spade notes, these systems have concrete impacts on the duration and potential of trans lives (ibid, 2011). For this reason, LGBTQ movements must pursue forms of advocacy which do not merely contest gender as a categorising system but instead transform or abolish wider systems of family regulation. Although Abbot’s directive is still quite recent, scholars have already built similar arguments as Spade by focusing on the directive’s connections to family regulations which police caregivers based on race, class, national origin and gender. “The weaponising of the family regulation system against transgender children and their parents in the Texas case, while exceptionally cruel, fits into a much larger project of producing fear to maintain white heteronormative order through family regulation” (Washington, 2022). As Washington makes clear, these policies, while rooted in history, are not purely historical. Rather, the state continues to weaponise family separation as a threat to ensure that white, cisgender, upper class family ideals remain dominant. For example, in Texas, black children were twice as likely as their white peers to be separated from their families (Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, 2019). In some counties, Child Protective Services conducted five times more investigations into black families (Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, 2019). Similarly, Abbot has separated thousands of families under “Operation Lone Star”; using state funds to incarcerate adults crossing the Mexican border while also detaining their children (Binion, 2021). Given the scope of this problem, critiquing family regulation against caregivers of transgender youth without a broader attention to family regulation’s more pervasive forms, fails to engage this directive in an intersectional manner. Organisations combating the directive stand to provide more comprehensive and long-term protections by widening their scope. Unfortunately, as the next section will demonstrate, Lambda Legal and the ACLU’s press statements confronting the policy fail to take on a more direct, comprehensive, and historically contextualised account of race, class and national origin. Meanwhile, The Trevor Project does not discuss how these categories of difference critically influence transgender mental health (Weaver, 2022). Both Lambda Legal and the ACLU focus on individual, constitutional rights and fall into Christian frames of children’s innocence when defending their opposition to the directive. Most notably, to confront the directive, both organisations filed a lawsuit in Texas State Court on behalf of three families pursuing gender-affirming care for their child (ACLU, 2022). While the ACLU supports the decriminalisation of sex work, the end of family detention and a reduction in the US prison population by 50 percent (ACLU, 2022), its advocacy against Abbot’s directive fail to specifically embrace these intersectional issues or even mention the disproportionate impact that

family regulation has on communities of colour (Dettlaff, 2021). In the first press release from the ACLU regarding their lawsuit against Governor Abbot, Adri Perez, policy and advocacy strategist for Texas stated, “It is indefensible for any state leader to repeatedly attack trans Texans and weaponise the child welfare system against the loving families of transgender kids and teens” (ACLU, 2022). Although Perez correctly critiques the child welfare system for attacking these families, they also maintain the possibility that the welfare system can exist without being weaponised. In other words, families who are not loving may deserve regulation. However, as the upEND movement to end family policing makes clear, who and what practices constitute a “loving family” versus those marked as dangerous, are largely based on dominant white, colonial ideals that perpetuate violence against indigenous, black and immigrant communities in the United States (Williams, 2021). The ACLU goes on to state, “If it takes a court ruling to ensure that the law protects families who lead with love in support of transgender Texans, so be it.” First, these racist cultural norms which regard certain families as loving and others as not continue to be reinforced without opening space for a broader conception of what it means to love and care for one’s child. In addition, the concept of childhood innocence fits neatly into the Christian attempts to defend ‘purity.’ Rather than question the racialised logics behind hierarchical interventions into certain families and children’s lives, the ACLU similarly frames children as pure and in need of protection. While they may indeed need protection, this framing perpetuates Christian frames while ignoring why certain children are forced into regulatory systems and others are not. Finally, this statement also reveals an assumption that legal equality will lead to substantive improvements for transgender youth. However, as Spade makes apparent, legal protections for individuals experiencing intentional discrimination ignore the ways in which social “interventions” determine who is valued and who is diminished (advertently and inadvertently) in broader regulatory systems (Spade, 2015). The advocates’ ineffective and decontextualised reliance on problematic legal mechanisms is also apparent in Lambda Legal’s arguments. “By upholding the injunction, the court credited the finding that investigations based solely on the provision of medically necessary gender affirming care cause irreparable harm” (Lambda Legal, 2022). From this lens, Lambda Legal does not categorically critique family welfare as a discriminatory population management system. In particular, the word “solely” draws a clear distinction between regulation against caregivers of transgender youth and those families who are marked as ‘real’ abusers. The ACLU offers a similar frame. “We must take a stand against government leaders that are hell-bent on stoking fear and trying to criminalise transgender young people and their families” (ACLU, 2022). Therefore, transgender children and their parents are positioned as ‘more innocent’ than other potentially abusive families in turn attempting to protect individual families in the context of a regulatory system which marginalises and abuses poor people of colour and transgender individuals alike. Although Lambda Legal and the ACLU deem family policing unjust in this specific context, by continuing to rely on legal advocacy to contest the directive as an individual instance of abuse, they empower the welfare system’s legal legitimacy to disproportionately and systemically police poor families of colour and transgender individuals (Space, 2015). As Spade makes clear, “these strategies are not only failing to improve the life chances of the people they are supposed to help, but also strengthening the criminal punishment system by allowing it to appear fair and neutral” (Brenan, 2011). Therefore, by merely focusing on and framing individual cases as outliers, both organisations “enhance” legal and regulatory institutions which systematically abuse marginalised groups (Brenan, 2011).

Conclusion

Each of these movements is doing important work. Their advocacy has the potential to provide safety and affirmation to transgender children and their caregivers in a highly precarious and dangerous time. However, their response to Abbot’s directive reveals how they also fail to provide a radical alternative to Christian medical discourses regarding sex, gender, and gender-affirming care. Even more apparent, by either remaining silent or actively embracing individual legal solutions to policies which control marginalised populations, they empower a family regulation system committing violence against groups who do not conform to white, heteronormative, and upper-class norms. In addition to providing resources to transgender children, these movements need to reorient their social frames to embrace a more radical critique of sex as hegemonic, arbitrary mechanism for categorisation. Simultaneously, rather than merely contest discrimination, they must seek to abolish family regulation as a racist, classist and heteronormative system.

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