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A Safe Haven Requires a Stronger Shield

By Danielle Oster

CT residents, medical experts urge need to strengthen state shield law; opposition limited to anti-trans activists and hate groups

In 2022, Connecticut became the first state to pass a shield law with the Reproductive Freedom Defense Act, which protects medical providers offering reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare. On March 24, the Connecticut General Assembly held separate public hearings on a pair of bills—SB-1530 and HB-7135—which would strengthen the state’s shield law, including by codifying protections for telehealth services. Testimony from residents of the state and subject-matter experts was overwhelmingly for the measure.

“Since the passage of Connecticut's existing shield law three years ago, the national climate has continued to shift, increasing the challenges that providers and patients face in delivering and accessing care,” Hannah Husey, staff attorney at GLAD, said during testimony supporting HB-7135.

“Since 2022, abortion bans have been enacted in 19 states, more than 25 states have banned or restricted families from accessing medically-necessary healthcare for their transgender children, and six states have made it a felony to provide certain forms of medically-necessary care to transgender people,” former 149th District House Representative Rachel Khanna elaborated. “Shield laws have enabled tens of thousands of people in states with abortion bans or bans on telehealth healthcare to access timely affordable medication abortion care from licensed medical providers.”

“No out-of-state lawmaker should be able to dictate what care Connecticut providers can offer to their patients,” Khanna added. “Medical professionals should be able to practice within the bounds of professional standards without fear of repercussions. Passage of House Bill 7135 will strengthen Connecticut's shield law and ensure that providers who are doing work that is legal in our state continue to be protected.”

Flown in for hate

Earlier in the day, Elle Palmer was the first to weigh in on SB-1530 during the Government Administrations and Elections committee hearing. Palmer, who identifies as a “detransitioner,” appears to be a religiously-motivated anti-trans advocate. She wore a large pair of gold cross earrings during her testimony, and in a social media post last month donned a ketchup-red “Make Jesus First Again” cap during a visit to the White House. She was in Washington, D.C. for “Detrans Awareness Day” on March 12, which centered around an event hosted by SPLC-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group Genspect.

In her testimony, Palmer appeared to blame medical professionals for prescribing her testosterone at age 16, a full year after she came out to her parents as trans—despite her own admission that she would have insisted on the treatment regardless of any potential side-effects. “In my mind, there was no other option. It was transition or die,” she said.

She claimed that when she returned to the Planned Parenthood clinic at the age of 19 to seek care for her detransition, they didn’t know how to respond.

All of this happened, as Palmer would reveal later in her testimony, in her home state of Montana—where she testified in a hearing earlier the same month in favor of extending the statute of limitations to 25 years in order to, in her words, “be able to hold the providers accountable” for providing gender-affirming care.

Palmer appears to be a professional detransitioner (or at least an aspiring one), which would place her among a small group of anti-trans rights activists being paid to advocate against trans rights and spread misinformation. In addition to a crowdfunding page soliciting donations for her “advocacy,” Palmer appears to have connections to The Heritage Foundation, the far right think tank behind Project 2025, and appears in a recent video from the group alongside Chloe Cole. Cole revealed last year in an Ohio court proceeding that she makes over $200,000 for her anti-trans activism through her employment with SPLC-designated hate group Do No Harm, donations solicited through a crowdfunding page, and speaking engagements.

An eager Sen. Rob Sampson (R) thanked Palmer for her testimony and asked her when she first “came in contact” with medical professionals about her transition. She responded that she saw a mental health professional for around six months before receiving a referral for hormone therapy. By Palmer’s own admission she was “very pushy about it” during her eventual Planned Parenthood appointment seeking a testosterone prescription, and fully aware of any risks.

“The first course of action whenever this topic comes up really ought to be some sort of counseling,” Sampson said, ignoring—whether in an attempt at obfuscation or due to simple incompetence—the testimony Palmer had just given about that being the first course of action taken in her own case.

Dance conversion therapy and blaming Satan for trans people: Connecticut transphobes weigh in

One of the few Connecticut residents to testify against the bill, a dancer named Katherine Saras, offered medical misinformation and conspiracy theories about youth transition being driven by the “medical industry,” in her testimony. Sampson himself then echoed conspiracy theories about “social contagion,” asking a bizarre question about the role of “peer pressure” in gender transition.

Rep. Dominique Johnson (D), who identifies as genderqueer, followed up by asking whether Saras believed sexual trauma causes people to be LGBTQ. Saras responded that it was “a contributing factor in many people’s choices,” and attempted to skirt a follow-up question about whether she believed it was a choice to be LGBTQ. Johnson pressed Saras for a straight answer and noted that her responses were self-contradictory after the dance instructor referred to “children who’ve gone through sexual trauma that causes them to reject their own bodies.”

In a particularly revealing moment, Saras pontificated about whether it might be possible to “create a dance as therapy for transgender people so that they can, like, reintegrate with their own bodies”—dance conversion therapy, essentially. Government Administration and Elections Committee Chair Rep. Matt Blumenthal (D) clarified that he personally knew plenty of LGBTQ people who were not survivors of sexual trauma, and pointed out that Saras is not a medical expert or scientist.

Another anti-trans state resident who testified in the hearing, Mona Collwell, is a state leader for Intercessors for America—a Christian nationalist group which denies that gender identity is real. A 2019 report published by the group claims, “The transgender movement is the newest installment in the push to derail our Judeo-Christian culture through social engineering,” while advancing hateful anti-LGBTQ+ tropes about “grooming” and ultimately attributing responsibility for “the move to transgender kids” (with “transgender” functioning as a verb) to Satan.

Collwell didn’t do much to hide the extent of her extremism, citing misleadingly-named SPLC-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group American College of Pediatricians to support the false claim that “children with gender dysphoria usually naturally desist as they mature,” and suggesting medical providers should be imprisoned for providing gender-affirming healthcare to minors—conflating such care with mutilation, alluding to Senate Bill 1438, “An Act Prohibiting Female Genital Mutilation.”

“I believe that any medical procedure causing irreversible physical alteration to a child's healthy body based on gender identity is mutilation, not care,” she said. “A minimum Class D Felony carrying up to five years in prison is a fitting consequence for such acts, reflecting their severity under Connecticut's penal code for child harm.”

Three experts testifying on the issue strongly disagreed: the very next speaker in the hearing and two leaders for the U.S. End FGM/C (female genital mutilation/circumcision) Network.

“I could swear that I've heard this testimony all before.”

Palmer was not the only aspiring professional detransitioner to testify. Simon Amaya Price, a self-described “desister” and “gender apostate” who started socially transitioning in high school but never medically transitioned, testified in the hearings for both bills. Last November, he appeared on the podcast for SPLC-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group Do No Harm. In his hearing testimony, he echoed transmedicalist and conspiracy theories advanced by that group, calling medical transition a “$4.4 billion industry.”

Rep. Gail Mastrofrancesco (R) asked Price vague, open-ended questions, eager to hear more about the contributing factors to his “detransition.”

Rep. Blumenthal pointed out that the bill only applies to people other than patients suing their medical providers. “Does it help you to know that this bill will not prevent an individual from suing a medical provider for malpractice in any way?” he asked Price.

“Unfortunately it does not,” Price slowly answered. “There are organizations which will sue on behalf of detransitioners. Certain law firms and action groups, such as Do No Harm,” referring to the aforementioned hate group.

Price was also the first to testify in hearings on HB-7135, providing essentially the same testimony—something noted by Senator John Kissell (R), who commented, “I could swear that I've heard this testimony all before. Have you testified before our committee previously on a similar bill?”

“There's no real epidemic of detransitioners: this is heavily coordinated and fabricated,” Shelton resident and trans rights advocate Emma Scott explained later in the hearing. “This has been a coordinated attack from different groups [which] go from state to state and either fly people in or bring people on virtually…a lot of them have been paid or groomed, or trained, to basically be professional detransitioners.”

“There are not a whole lot of detransitioners that are actually willing to do this, which is why they use so many of the same ones [and] bring them state to state to state [saying] the same thing over and over again—it's like a traveling act, almost,” she added. “If you ask most people that consider themselves detransitioners,” she said, “they will say that gender-affirming care should absolutely be available to as many people as possible.”

Jared Ross, a South Carolina physician who works with Do No Harm, testified via Zoom. He erroneously referred to gender-affirming care as “experimental” and falsely claimed “9 out of 10” trans children will “outgrow” being trans if “allowed to go through a normal puberty”—a claim which has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked—before yelling, “Doctors are just creating patients with scars and hormone imbalances.” In answering questions from Rep. Blumenthal, Ross conceded he is not a pediatrician and only practices clinically as an emergency physician about once a week.

Medical practitioners from the state, who, unlike Ross, don’t appear to be employed by any hate groups, disagreed. “In my experience, [providers of gender-affirming care] do frequent and continued assessment follow-up, and I've never seen a case where they've pressured, or forced, or encouraged, anyone to do anything,” Connecticut resident and certified nurse midwife Amanda Corcoran testified. “The kids and their parents are very involved in the decision-making, and, in my experience, I see a lot of trans joy.”

“I see the truth of how gender-affirming care…saves lives and improves lives every day based on the patients I work with and in my own life,” said Palmer LaVelle, a nonbinary lifelong Connecticut resident who provides gender-affirming care to trans and nonbinary patients in their work as a nurse.

“Only a small minority of people who identify as transgender go on to detransition—and of those, the majority detransition for reasons besides realizing they’re not transgender, such as discrimination or a lack of resources to pursue transition,” they explained, pointing to studies showing a regret rate for gender-affirming surgery of around one percent.

LaVelle also spoke about how overly-broad laws in a number of states targeting reproductive and gender-affirming care have a chilling effect on medical providers. “They have poorly-defined exceptions and harsh penalties, so doctors and hospitals are worried about being sued into oblivion [or even]going to jail,” LaVelle said. “If I’m seeking medical treatment, particularly for something that could become life-threatening, I don't want a doctor who hesitates.”

“I don’t think that the care that I provide should be impacted by laws in other states passed by officials which I didn’t elect,” they added.

Another anti-trans activist from out-of-state, Leta Boylan, said she worked as an agency nurse for a “taxpayer funded facility on both the adult and youth psych units” from 2017 until last December (without initially disclosing this was in her home state of Wisconsin). In her testimony, Boylan made the outlandish claim that, “Many days, on youth psych, every single minor female patient was trans-identified,” using transphobic language to refer to transmasc youth. “It was unusual for us to have no trans patients on a given day,” she added.

Boylan also recently testified in Wisconsin in support of the state’s proposed ban on youth gender-affirming care. A co-sponsor of that bill, Rep. Scott Allen (R), posted a video of her testimony on his YouTube page, which contains the message “Help Not Harm” before previews of that and related videos. That banner is used to refer to a range of laws promoted by Family Policy Alliance, the lobbying arm of Focus on the Family, a Christian nationalist extremist group which is a primary driver of anti-trans legislation.

Leslie Wolfgang, who serves as director of public policy for Family Institute of Connecticut, a state affiliate of Family Policy Alliance, also testified against HB-7135, relying on familiar medical misinformation.

“You may hear from other Christians that laws protecting reproductive and gender-affirming care are somehow a threat to Christians, and to churches. That the free expression of religion requires limitations on access to necessary medical care. To that, I would say I express my religion most freely when I love and care for my neighbor as myself,” said Bekah Maren Anderson, the director of pastoral care for The Julian Way, a disability ministry nonprofit. “If we are free to judge others, but not free to offer care, we are not free at all.”

“We need more protections for providers [offering] this care, especially as trans people arrive in Connecticut from states where trans care is threatened or illegal,” said Emily Scott, a non-binary transgender pastor with New Haven’s First Presbyterian Church who has ministered with the trans community for 15 years. “In my ministry, I have seen firsthand the pain and suffering of congregants who can't access care.”

“This is all based on a lie that we don't exist.”

Members of our own community provided some of the strongest testimony in support of HB-7135.

“Personally speaking, gender-affirming care saved my life,” Newington resident Mars Rodriguez, a recent master’s graduate in political science, said, explaining that before starting HRT she was “on the brink of suicide.”

“I was deeply, deeply depressed and unhappy,” she added, “and this was life-saving healthcare for me. I am not on any kind of antidepressants. I'm not on any kind of medication, other than my HRT, and I am the happiest that I have ever been in my life because of that medication. And there are millions...of stories out there that are really similar.”

Shelton’s Emma Scott provided perspective on the political landscape for trans people right now.

“At the federal and state level across the country, trans people are under relentless attack,” Scott said, citing 26 states which have already passed bans on gender-affirming care for minors, some also targeting adults. “The far right has constructed a narrative that [gender-affirming care] is mutilation or needs to be restricted for the benefit of trans people who they claim are just mentally ill.”

“What this is all about is an attempt to erase our existence, to use every tool available to make it impossible to transition, and this is all based on a lie that we don't exist,” she said. “Gender-affirming care is essential care…and the thought of that being torn away by extremism, and a blatant assault on basic human autonomy, seems worse than death for many of us.”

“As a result of these attacks on our healthcare, people are leaving states with restrictions and coming to states that will provide care—but those restrictive states, and now even the federal government, have made it clear that they plan to use fringe legal theories to attack states, including this one, which have become medical safe havens,” Scott added. “This means safe states must pass legislation that protects providers and patients to keep them safe from a wave of bad faith, authoritarian legislative attacks—and this is just the bare minimum for protection [required] right now.”

Trans rights activist Lucy Autumnsong testified that bans on gender-affirming or reproductive care in other states are also “forcing many healthcare professionals to leave those places,” adding, “We should protect the healthcare providers already in our state, as well as the ones coming to our state [due to] these hostile laws.”

New Haven civil engineer Fable Burley said they talk to “hundreds” of trans people daily as an organizer with Trans Haven.

“We are critical parts of this society, and I don't want us to think about transgender people in the abstract,” they said. “I work with facilitating folks who are fleeing from other states, seeking refuge here in Connecticut because they are being cut off from access to life-saving care…and we need to be able to provide for them the safe haven that they believe Connecticut to be.”

HB-7135 ultimately passed out of committee on April 4, clearing its first legislative hurdle. Whether or not the bill ultimately passes this session will say a lot about the degree to which the state can live up to that reputation.

Perspectives

The Real ‘Radical Gender Ideology’

By Evelyn Belle Scott

A radical ideology has taken root in American politics. One which believes that children in public schools should be put under surveillance and that the mentally ill should be tortured. That all men—or rather, all people born with a penis—are inherently predatory rapists.

I’m talking about a deeply ideologically-driven movement that has found purchase not only with the reactionaries demolishing civic life as we once knew it, but also among people who consider themselves centrists, liberals, or leftists. I am talking about the anti-trans ideology fueling attacks on our rights.

The anti-trans movement claims that in recent years, radical “gender ideology” has invaded our schools, our governments, our public institutions—even our sacred bathrooms and holy fields of sport—as if the existence of transgender people is an idea rather than a material fact. “Gender ideology“ is used almost exclusively as a convenient, catch-all term that frames trans existence as some sort of radical idea. Anti-trans people rely on the term to avoid saying what they really want: to never have to see, hear, or think about the reality that transgender people exist.

One does not need to adopt a particular ideology in order to be trans. Some trans people are highly conversant in esoteric ideas about gender theory, transness, and identity, but many more are following their hearts without feeling the need for permission from an academic text or a political rallying cry. Being trans—feeling that indescribable, primordial yearning deep in one’s soul, the overwhelming alienation and those divine ecstasies—precedes any ideology.

But according to anti-trans ideology, trans people simply do not exist—only the delusionally mentally ill, who have fallen under the mistaken belief that they are supposed to be a different gender. The proper treatment for trans people, then, is not hormone therapy, surgery, or even social transition, but breaking these “delusions” through a combination of intensive therapy and strict social reinforcement—or what most would recognize as conversion therapy.

Of course, this approach is far from new. It has been the primary treatment for transgender people in a number of societies throughout history, including our own until relatively recently. The results are clear and consistent: conversion therapy simply does not work. There is a reason that healthcare professionals ultimately coalesced around gender-affirming care as the best option: if the desired end result is a patient living a fulfilling life, then there is simply no alternative.

This is how you know that anti-trans ideology is not about concerns that gender-affirming care might be harming patients. In their radical efforts to deny the existence of transgender people, they are willing to inflict severe harm on those they consider mentally ill—even if such “treatments” cause trans people to commit suicide. Since the real goal is a world without trans people, every case of gender dysphoria that ends in suicide is a victory for them.

Hate breeds strange bedfellows

Many liberals and leftists, still stuck in the political atmosphere that surrounded much of the struggle for gay rights, attribute anti-trans sentiment solely to conservative Christian religious indoctrination. While positioning this ideology in the form of defending “traditional Christian values” is among the most common expressions of anti-trans ideology—and religious free speech offers a handy defense for anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in general—it’s not the only one.

Take a fresh look at the language used by anti-trans politicians and pundits when discussing transgender people. They talk about “protecting” women and girls; they abuse the phrase “biological reality”—which, despite its clinical sound, is as ideological of a thought-terminating cliché as one can imagine. They talk about “fairness” in women’s sports. They talk about “male violence.” Instead of Phyllis Schlafly, we get Janice Raymond.

While Christian Nationalists provide much of the funding and logistical support behind anti-trans political action, anti-trans ideology gained purchase in certain liberal and even leftist circles not by converting secular liberals into religious fanatics, but by laundering an extremely reactionary ideology through modern feminism. To fully understand anti-trans ideology, we must understand the complicity of this strain of feminism in the oppression of transgender people—particularly trans women.

The vast majority of feminists are also genuine allies of transgender people. Most transgender people consider themselves to be feminists. Yet it is undeniable that the rhetoric used against transgender people today in most public policy debates is taken directly from the texts of certain radical second-, and even third-wave, feminists who see in every male the body of a predator.

Between feminism and conservative Christianity, we have what one might refer to as the “left” and “right” wings, respectively, of anti-trans ideology. Make no mistake, however, this entire movement is reactionary. Both the traditionalists and the feminists wish to “conserve” bio-essentialist gender roles: the male as uncontrollable beast and the female as fragile victim are the mirror images of the male as strong provider and the female as submissive babymaker.

Relying on this premise, conservative and liberal anti-trans demagogues alike stoke fears of horny men leering at them or their daughters in locker rooms or bathrooms, suggesting that every trans woman in a gender-segregated space is a threat to (cis) women.

Wedge issues as Trojan Horse

The anti-trans movement smuggles this radical ideology into mainstream discourse via wedge issues hand-picked to arouse the greatest outrage and controversy.

Recently, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast hosted right-wing arch-propagandist Charlie Kirk—who has made a fortune off of racist dog-whistles, as well as some of the most vile rhetoric uttered about transgender people (including calling trans people “disgusting, mentally ill, neurotic, predatory freaks” in an August, 2023 podcast and calling for a University of Wyoming trans woman to be imprisoned for joining a sorority).

Kirk is a master at calibrating the tone of his content for his audience, striking a more measured tone on Newsom’s “liberal” program. Kirk prompted the governor on trans issues: “Would you say no to men in sports?”

Kirk claimed to “have a heart” for the San Jose trans volleyball player, expressing “compassion” for a person he would have branded a “predatory freak” on his own show, before adding, “But it's not fair.” He even used they/them pronouns to refer to her, instead of he/him, as he had done previously. While still misgendering her, the gesture was intended to demonstrate his willingness to “compromise.” So surely they could compromise as well by, say, looking away as the anti-trans movement has its way with transgender people?

Newsom, if you haven’t heard, agreed with Kirk, calling it “a fairness issue.”

Depending on the context, Kirk quickly moves the goalposts from limited ideas like “fairness” in sports to broader, more malicious ones, like the criminalization of “misrepresenting” one’s assigned-gender-at-birth, as one recent bill introduced in the Texas state legislature calls for. This is a radical ideology being presented to the American people by media and politicians alike as legitimate debate.

It is an undeniable fact that trans people exist. The only way to change that would be to use extreme cruelty and repression to transform this country into a place where trans people simply cannot exist.

Fascist movements do not invent prejudice out of whole cloth; they identify those already subjected to prejudice and exploit that for political gain. Anti-Semitism did not produce the Nazis and the Nazis did not invent Anti-Semitism: they took advantage of a hatred that was deeply rooted in European history. The current administration is focused on scapegoating transgender people and immigrants, but just as with the Nazis, this cynical and authoritarian movement is bent on eliminating not just these groups, but all people and institutions who stand in their way. It gives Americans someone to blame while they are robbed, imprisoned, and enslaved by a brutalizing late-capitalist regime.

We are rapidly approaching a point at which the crackdown on dissent will seriously hamper the ability of any resistance movement to gain traction. The aforementioned bill recently introduced in Texas will almost certainly fail. But these anti-trans bills are like Jason Vorhees—they have a bad habit of coming back year after year, each time widening the acceptable window of ideas. Banning gender-affirming care for adults suddenly feels like a compromise when the other side is trying to jail trans women for wearing a dress in public. We cannot afford to be fooled by their rhetoric of “protecting women and children,” of radical anti-trans ideology presented as “common sense” or “compromise.”

None of this is new. History shows us what happens when we try to compromise with fascists—in fact, we have a word for it: appeasement. It failed us then, and it will fail us now.

You can read the original, extended version of this article here.

Acknowledgements:

With endless thanks to Kirill, Elliot, Fable, and all our Trans Haven family.

We Want To Hear From You!

Send us submissions for the Community Bulletin section, ideas for future Perspective pieces, or suggestions about what else you’d like to see from CT Trans Tribune by sending us an email at [email protected]. For our next issue, we’re especially interested in hearing from nonbinary folks who can speak to the importance of nonbinary gender markers on forms of identification in support of HB-6847. Please reach out with a submission, or if you’d like to work with us on crafting a story.