Tomorrow is Transgender Day of Visibility, a commemorative holiday established sixteen years ago to try to bring more humanity to media depictions and public understanding of trans people. It’s a common joking-not-joking trope among us to acknowledge how “visibility” alone has not accomplished this. “Ok we’ve had enough visibility, please do not perceive me.” What we have now is arguably hypervisibility, especially for trans women, but definitely not humanity for any of us. And as I wrote this weekend over at The Backbone, that kind of media visibility has led to extensive harm, personally, interpersonally, and politically.
So what do we do? Because going back into the closet is not the answer, and at least for this gender freak, is just not going to happen.
That’s what I am aiming to answer with the learning material I’m preparing for professional members in our paid tier, which I am tentatively calling The Well these days as I work my way through the creation process.
Eventually the material in The Well will cover four major areas: media literacy, provider activism, systems literacy, and collective care & sustainability. We are starting with media literacy for all the reasons I wrote about for The Backbone. At every level, media coverage of trans people is impacting how we feel about ourselves, how the public treats us, and how systems legislate our lives.
In order to combat all these forces piled up against us, we need to understand how they operate. We'll dig into the language that shape how trans people are discussed in news coverage and popular media. We'll look at how to read LGBTQ+ science journalism critically, especially when research about us gets filtered through outlets that don't understand it or don't care to. And we'll practice the skills providers need when they're on the other side of the exchange — as sources, as public voices, as professionals whose expertise gets sought out and, sometimes, weaponized.
I know one day we’ll be on the other side of this. I do not think it will be soon, or easy, and that’s what a lot of the skill-building is meant for, to develop what we’ll need to get to through this. But there are also skills and competencies for the after, for when we rebuild a media that works for the people, when we will get to use our voices to represent ourselves and our communities, when we will remake systems by us and for us, when we will build a world of mutual aid and community care.
So stay with me.
The physician behind the ASPS anti-trans position statement pushed the same resolution at New York's largest medical society this past weekend, with outcomes still pending. An investigation revealed that the same dark money behind Project 2025 is bankrolling a Northwestern University study recruiting trans kids through the Gender Dysphoria Institute. The Ohio Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the ACLU's challenge to the state's ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth, with a written opinion expected in the coming months.
The New York Times denied that the AMA requested a correction to a story characterizing the organization as having backed limitations on youth gender surgeries, despite an AMA board newsletter stating the language attributed to them was neither a policy change nor an endorsement. A 16-year-old's breast reduction was cancelled hours before surgery by Novant Health after staff determined it was geared toward "transgender intent." Separately, a contract dispute between Mount Sinai and Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield has led to the cancellation of hundreds of trans surgeries, leaving patients facing bills exceeding $100,000.
Idaho passed the most extreme bathroom ban in the nation, applying to public buildings and private businesses with penalties escalating to life in prison under the state's persistent violator (ie. “three strikes) statute. Given that we know the Trump administration admits to medically experimenting on trans people in federal prisons every layer of criminalization matters. Trans West Virginians asked the full Fourth Circuit to revisit an alarming ruling in their Medicaid coverage case, warning the panel's reasoning could amount to judicially-endorsed regulation of trans people's liberty to exist.
Tennessee's House passed a bill to track transgender patients seeking gender-affirming care, with the sponsor comparing transition care to frontal lobotomies. Ohio's House passed a drag ban that criminalizes gender nonconformity in public, backed by a GOP lawmaker accused of child sex abuse, with Republicans voting down an amendment to strip the anti-trans language. Given that we know Republicans are expanding the asylum state and criminalizing homelessness by targeting "the mentally ill," Kentucky Republicans are quietly moving to ban trans teachers while forcing doctors to reclassify being trans as a mental disorder, mirroring the anti-gay movement of the 1970s.
Attend “From the Statehouse to the Streets: Taking Action for Trans Rights” tomorrow for Transgender Day of Visibility!
Support ETSI, a trans-led HIV clinic in Portsmouth, Virginia that is struggling to stay open amid funding cuts and DEI rollbacks.
A year after the Trump administration took aim at transgender Americans, a doctor continues her fight — a profile of one provider’s sustained resistance against federal pressure to abandon trans patients.
Ten notes on gender-critical complaint — how two cases pursued by nurses misguide the public about trans healthcare. (Opinion)
Trans kids in limbo as Trump takes ‘unprecedented’ actions to limit health care — on the ground impact in communities where care access is disappearing.
Trans kids need rights, whether or not their parents or doctors agree — of the approximately 300,000 trans kids in the US between ages 13-17, only about 1,000 of them access medical interventions.
How this ‘out and proud trans woman’ navigates Missouri men’s prisons — Lexie Handlang writes about resilience inside a system designed to break people.
Transgender Quebecers face surgery delays while out-of-province patients get faster care — on the structural barriers in Canada’s surgical care pipeline for trans patients.
How the UK media has wrongly shaped knowledge about some of the country’s most important trans legal cases for for Transgender Day of Visibility.
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Very excited to share the first story in my collaboration with Madisyn Parisi at The Backbone, just in time for Trans Day of Visibility. Madisyn will be over here on Well Beings News with their own story soon!
Original Reporting
Weekend Column
Stay visible.
For my trans readers, please take some time this week to really see yourself, in the mirror or in the eyes of the people in the world around you. Be in community with queer and trans people, whatever that looks like for you. Celebrate each other.
To the rest of you, please do what you can to make space for trans folks in your life to be safely, fully human and fully seen.
To many more Trans Days of Visibility to come, friends.
BJ Ferguson
Founder, Well Beings News
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