Predictably, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders was not happy with the recent federal court decision to overturn her state's ban on gender-affirming care for trans kids
No one should be distracted by her hysterics. The state lost the case simply because it couldn't justify banning gender-affirming care for trans kids. It's easy to create laws or sway voters with lies but in a court of law, facts matter. And in this case, Arkansas failed to provide the facts.
Independent journalist Erin Reed (folks should really support her work. She is very good) wrote a brilliant summation of the judge's decision:
The crux of Judge Moody’s ruling lies in the substantial 311 individual statements of fact, many of which decisively dismantle arguments made against gender affirming care. These facts apply to issues from the rarity of detransition to the vital medical benefits that gender affirming care offers transgender youth. The statements also rule on the credibility of the state’s experts as well as the plaintiff’s experts. The court found the plaintiff's experts to be extraordinarily credible, while the state’s experts were deemed to be considerably lacking in credibility and motivated more by religious beliefs than sound policy. Even religious organizations lobbying for anti-transgender laws, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, are probed within these factual statements.
One statement of fact was about the "experts" Arkansas used to justify its ban:
Judge Moody offered a biting critique of the credibility of the witnesses fielded by Arkansas, stating their opinions were "more rooted in ideology than in science." Backing this statement, Moody pointed out the significant lack of training that state experts possessed in providing gender-affirming care. For instance, Dr. Mark Regnerus, a sociologist specializing in sexual relationship behavior and religion, lacks any clinical or psychological experience with transgender individuals.
Similarly, Dr. Patrick Lappert, a plastic surgeon, has no experience in mental healthcare, let alone in gender-affirming care. Furthermore, Dr. Paul Hruz, a pediatric endocrinologist put forward by the state, has never treated a patient for gender dysphoria. Of particular note was the involvement of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in recruiting the state's experts.
Judge Moody highlighted that Dr. Regnerus, Dr. Hruz, and Dr. Lappert were all connected through an ADF seminar in Arizona meant to recruit witnesses for court cases like this one. Given the nature of their testimony and how they were recruited, the judge observed that the state experts were "testifying more from a religious doctrinal standpoint than from the perspective expected of experts."
In a post last night, I wrote about how one of those experts, Regnerus, created a fraudulent study in 2012 in an effort to justify a ban on marriage equality. The point was to show that the same folks who fought our right to marry are now fighting against the right of trans people to get decent healthcare.
But there is also another linkage.
This isn't the first time using poor witnesses led Arkansas to lose a case in which it was attempting to defend anti-LGBTQ law. And wouldn't you know it? A Huckabee was involved in that situation. Sanders's father, Mike Huckabee, was governor in 2004 when a state judge ruled that gays and lesbians could be foster parents.
According to a January 1, 2005 edition of The SF Gate
An Arkansas judge's ruling allowing gays and lesbians to become foster parents contains findings on parental fitness that could have an impact in both the U.S. Supreme Court and a court in San Francisco, where major decisions on the rights of same-sex couples are imminent. In his ruling Wednesday, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Timothy Fox said the ban enacted by an Arkansas state agency in 1999 had nothing to do with protecting children's health or welfare, but instead was an attempt to regulate "public morality," which is beyond the agency's authority. Fox also issued a series of findings, based on testimony by child welfare and mental health experts:
In that case, Arkansas used an "expert witness" by the name of George Rekers. An ACLU Fact Sheet on Rekers said the following:
Rekers is one of the founders of the Family Research Council, a notoriously anti-gay group.
Rekers relies on the discredited research of Paul Cameron, an anti-gay “”researcher”” who was kicked out of the American Psychological Association for misrepresenting the research regarding homosexuality.
Rekers has suggested that gays are unsuitable to serve as foster parents because they’re at higher risk for AIDS and other sexually-transmitted disease, ignoring the fact that there is a physical examination required of all foster parent applicants in Arkansas that would weed out any applicants with health conditions that could jeopardize a foster child.
Rekers says that children are best served when raised by both a mother and a father, but doesn’t favor excluding single heterosexual single women from fostering.
Rekers is an ordained minister in the southern Baptist convention. He has strong religious beliefs about homosexuality and the role of men and women, including the belief that married women should be submissive to their husband’s leadership in the home.
Rekers practices “”conversion therapy,”” the attempt to “”cure”” people of being gay.
Rekers has said he favors pulling children from long-term placements with gay foster parents if the opportunity arises to place them in homes headed by straight parents even though, as he acknowledges, research shows such transitions are traumatic for children.
That should give you an idea of what Rekers would say in his testimony. According to an October 6, 2004 edition of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:
Little Rock attorney Kathy L. Hall, who represents the Arkansas Child Welfare Agency Review Board, questioned Rekers about his opinion regarding placement of children in foster homes where at least one person is homosexual. The board approved a regulation in 1999 prohibiting such placements. "It would be in the best interest of foster children to be placed in a heterosexual home,"
Rekers began, adding that children in foster care are more likely to already have psychological disorders. He said that because the majority of people in the country — according to one public opinion study — disapprove of homosexual behavior, placing vulnerable children in a home with a gay person would intensify their stress. "That disapproval filters down to children,"
Rekers said. "Children will express disapproval in more cruel, insensitive ways" toward children being raised in a household containing a gay person.
In his ruling, Judge Fox did not give a positive opinion of Rekers's testimony. From The SF Gate:
Fox, in his ruling, described Rekers' testimony as "extremely suspect" and said the witness "was there primarily to promote his own personal ideology."
Rekers later demanded over $200,000 ($165,000 initially plus late fees and other charges) as payment for his testimony. He and the state reached an agreement for $60,000 in 2006. In 2010, Rekers was embroiled in a huge scandal in which he paid a male escort to accompany him on a trip to Europe. The escort claimed that he and Rekers had "heavy petting type sex."
All in all, one would think that Arkansas would have learned its lesson about relying on bad experts to defend anti-LGBTQ laws. Lucky for the state's trans community, it clearly didn't.
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| Mark Regnerus |
On Tuesday, I pointed out a similarity between why social media conservatives lost marriage equality cases in court with their recent loss to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth in Arkansas:
. . .far right conservatives using their money and resources to gain legislative and referendum victories which are eventually dismantled in our courts because said victories were built on faulty foundations. In other words, it's easy to scare or persuade people into voting the way you want but in a court of law you have to provide facts proving your point. And far right conservatives simply can't do it.
As it turns out, there was another huge similarity which I overlooked. In striking down the Arkansas ban, U.S. District Judge James Moody Jr. listed a number of reasons why he felt the law was unconstitutional. One had to do with the witnesses the state used to prove its case.
According to NPR:
The court found three of the state's witnesses had been recruited at a meeting of the Christian advocacy organization Alliance Defending Freedom held specifically to gather witnesses trained in various fields that would be willing to testify in favor of laws passed that limit transgender care. "While there is nothing nefarious about an organization recruiting witnesses to testify for their cause, it is clear from listening to the testimony that Professor Mark Regnerus, Dr. Paul Hruz, and Dr. [Patrick] Lappert were testifying more from a religious doctrinal standpoint rather than that required of experts," the ruling reads.
. . . His testimony was meandering, repetitive and often confusing as U.S. District Judge James M. Moody Jr. struggled at times to understand the relevance of his testimony to the matter at hand. Regnerus said he had reviewed numerous works by other researchers. He said had observed a bias among providers treating transgender patients, a bias toward affirmation rather than treatment of underlying mental or emotional conditions. The sociologist also testified that researchers had faced pressure to agree with treatment models based on affirmation and that a number of groups exist that "don't feel like they have the freedom to object.""There is significant concern that there's a rush to treat minors," Regnerus said, but when asked what research he had done in the area, he continued to point to the work of others that had fallen under heavy criticism."All I'm hearing is some people are forming opinions which are causing debate," Moody said at one point. "All he's telling me is there was a report and there was back flow and that shows there was criticism ... What does it have to do with the decision I have to make?"
“The Court finds Regnerus’s testimony entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious consideration. The evidence adduced at trial demonstrated that his 2012 ‘study’ was hastily concocted at the behest of a third-party funder, which found it ‘essential that the necessary data be gathered to settle the question in the forum of public debate about what kinds of family arrangement are best for society’ and which ‘was confident that the traditional understanding of marriage will be vindicated by this study.’ … While Regnerus maintained that the funding source did not affect his impartiality as a researcher, the Court finds this testimony unbelievable. The funder clearly wanted a certain result, and Regnerus obliged.”
From Yahoo News:
A federal judge in Arkansas has permanently struck down the state’s first-in-the-nation ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth, finding that the law violates the constitutional rights of trans patients, their families and health providers. The law – the first-such ban on affirming healthcare for trans youth in the US – is permanently enjoined following a weeks-long trial, marking the first such ruling in the country.
A decision from US District Judge Jay Moody, who was appointed to the federal judiciary by Barack Obama, joins a wave of legal victories in federal courts for transgender rights and the rights of trans youth to access medically recommended and potentially life-saving care.
The law prohibited doctors from providing hormone therapies, puberty blockers or affirming surgeries to anyone under 18 years old. It also barred state funds or insurance coverage for affirming care for people under 18 and allowed insurance companies to refuse to cover affirming treatment for people of any age. Judge Moody had temporarily blocked the law in 2021 as a legal challenge from a group of families with trans children played out.
In his ruling on 20 June, Judge Moody determined that the law discriminates against transgender people and that attorneys for the state of Arkansas failed to contest the “extensive clinical experience” from doctors who testified in the case and the “decades of clinical experience demonstrating the efficacy of gender-affirming medical care.”
The judge also debunked the state’s medical claims by pointing to testimony from its own witness and ruled that the state failed to prove any of its claims that affirming treatment is “ineffective or riskier than other medical care provided to minors,” among other statements.
The story is still developing but some folks on Twitter were quick to point out just how the state was unable to prove its case.
It gets better: the court pointed out, after actually examining expertise and evidence, that 3 of 4 expert witnesses the state provided had no expertise, were frequently misleading, and were ideologues, not experts. https://t.co/wkpjxUOH5e
— Q. McLamore (@GhawinRiver) June 20, 2023
Specifically, Judge Moody gave Arkansas an opportunity to justify the trans health care ban in court; it failed spectacularly—whereas the plaintiffs' experts provided hour after hour of compelling testimony about the medical benefits of such treatment. https://t.co/62n3YC6cky pic.twitter.com/2XIx06y4qv
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) June 20, 2023
This will probably be appealed to a higher court but for now, it is a huge victory for trans kids on so many levels. For one, it could be a preview of rulings to come involving other anti-trans laws passed in other states.
For another, it replicates a cycle we saw in the marriage equality fight - far right conservatives using their money and resources to gain legislative and referendum victories which are eventually dismantled in our courts because said victories were built on faulty foundations. In other words, it's easy to scare or persuade people into voting the way you want but in a court of law you have to provide facts proving your point. And far right conservatives simply can't do it.
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I ran into this ball of bullshyte today online:
Who is this woman? In the grand scheme of things, a huge nobody. She is simply one of many on Twitter attempting to monetize themselves or grab social media clout for their "substack" or "podcast." Since buying Twitter, Elon Musk has been breeding that type like the xenemorph queen in the Aliens franchise.
What she represents though, is an attempt by conservatives on the far right to remake LGBTQ history to make their transphobia more palpable to the masses. The narrative is that gays and lesbians were pretty much accepted but are now facing a backlash because the community has been "hijacked" by transgender and queer activists. In the case above, the tweet blames Joe Biden for it all.
It is a ludicrous narrative but it is also fairly popular amongst some on Twitter including, I hate to say, some gays and lesbians. It's a woeful mixture of young gays and lesbian ignorant of their history, older gays and lesbians who can't deal with how more other voices in the community (bisexuals, transgender people, and LGBTQ people of color) are demanding to be heard, and far-right outsiders looking to divide and conquer.
Any idea that gays and lesbians were accepted before trans and queer people came along is a lie. And so many of us know it too well. We have the physical and psychological marks to prove it. We remember how the right denigrated us in the past with the same audacity they use to openly denigrate trans people. The false narratives about unhealthy lives, despotic desires for control, and sexualizing kids were hallmarks of anti-gay propaganda:
Their [gay] minds are perverted, they’re frankly sick people psychologically, mentally, and emotionally.” – Bishop EW Jackson
Yet almost all gays make lots of money:
“You know, I saw yesterday how much -- how much money the homosexual community has. I mean, good gracious, the average homosexual makes four times more than I do . . . I mean, they're not -- these people are not in poverty or hurting or denied or anything else.” – Donald Wildmon, American Family Association
Gays are only a small part of the population:
“Relying on three large data sets: the General Social Survey, the National Health and Social Life Survey, and the U.S. census, a recent study in Demography estimates the number of exclusive male homosexuals in the general population at 2.5 percent and exclusive lesbians at 1.4 percent.” – Family Research Council in its inaccurate brief “Homosexuality and Child Abuse”
Yet gays “control” the culture:
“Homosexual activists in many ways, drive our culture, they decide what’s going to be in a movie, we see all the portrayals, homosexuals are the most positively portrayed in the movies and on television.” – Peter LaBarbera, Americans for Truth
Gays “bully” all of those who oppose them:
“Instead, what we have is the gay Gestapo who go out and try to intimidate morally, economically, professionally, and personally anyone who speaks out against the homosexual agenda.” – Jeffrey Kuhner, The Washington Times
Gays “Recruit” children:
“. . . Folks who cannot reproduce want to recruit your children. What we are facing is a radical force of people who want to change what America looks for the next twenty years . . .” – Bishop Harry Jackson
And are plotting to either destroy or change America and “silence” Christians:
“Those special gay rights would require Christians not to speak against –would require us Christians not to speak against homosexual rights . . . because if we did, we could be charged with bullying or censored for it.” – Buster Wilson, American Family Association
“Through a carefully crafted, decades-old propaganda campaign, homosexuals have successful cast homosexuals - many of whom enjoy positions of influence and affluence - as a disadvantage minority” – Matt Barber, Unmasking the “Gay” Agenda
And while generating all of this mayhem, gays still manage to find time to have all sorts of mind-boggling wild sex with multiple partners:
“One study determined that homosexual males have from between 20 to 106 sexual partners per year. It’s no wonder that homosexual men account for over 50% of all hepatitis cases, and still account for over 50% of all AIDS cases despite the fact that they only make up 1-3% of the population.” – Matt Barber, The Gay Agenda vs. Family Values, December 12, 2004What happening now is that trans people are the new target because, like gays in the past, people are ignorant about what their lives entail. And with ignorance comes the power to exploit fears of the unknown.
“Homosexual activists claim their lifestyle, which in some cases includes thousands of sexual partners, should be sanctioned, protected, and granted special rights by society. Would you critique this stance?“ – a question on Dr. James Dobson's web page. Dobson is the former head of Focus on the Family.
Earlier on Thursday, the Washington Post ran a huge article exposing a right-wing organization masquerading as legitimate medical group.
According to The Daily Beast:
Internal documents from a conservative group of doctors shows how the organization has lobbied to limit transgender rights and restrict access to abortion, according to a report. A review of the American College of Pediatricians’ records from The Washington Post showed how the organization has lobbied in at least eight states to ban puberty blockers and and hormone therapies for transgender minors, and sought new recruits with mailers targeting Christian MDs and pediatricians in “red states.” The group has also successfully pushed its message in conservative media, with the American College of Pediatricians being mentioned in more than 200 articles on right-wing news sites since 2016. Jill Simons, the organization’s executive director, told the Post that the group’s “recommendations are based on the medical research and what is best for children.”
I'm happy that the American College of Pediatricians is finally getting some mainstream scrutiny even if it is long time coming. The Southern Poverty Law Center had already listed the organization as a hate group.
But even before then in 2009, I called the group out in a blog post.
Back then, the American College of Pediatricians was targeting gays. Below is the published post. If anything, it should serve as a reminder that all of the LGBTQ community are in this together because we are targets of the same haters:
The American College of Pediatricians and the Laundering of Junk Science, July 6, 2009
Two weekends ago, I was embroiled in an intense discussion about gay parenting on the webpage Truthwinsout.org
Comments had gone back and forth, spurred by someone who spouted what he thought was credible information proving that gay marriage was not a good idea.
The subject drifted to gay parenting. Naturally the person did not agree with the idea and he cited information by a group called the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) that supposedly proved his point.
I took a look at this group's webpage and from what I saw, it looked like a group masquerading as a legtimate medical organization while spouting religious right dogma about the lgbt community.
Mike Airhart, a writer employed by Truth Wins Out and a very good friend of mine, broke it down like this:
The “American College of Pediatricians” screens its membership according to a pro-life philosophy spelled out on its “Core Values” page and an anti-gay philosophy spelled out here. The organization’s Bible Belt charter members are listed here.
According to Concerned Women for America, ACP formed in retaliation against the American Academy of Pediatrics after AAP released scientific studies finding no significant harm to children in same-sex parenting. ACP accuses the AAP of “bad science” but does not say how AAP’s studies were flawed.
The ACP’s family resources page links primarily to religious-right organizations. In contrast to the scientific approach of the AAP, ACP employs what it considers a predetermined “moral” filter to pediatrics.
Translation: The American College of Pediatricians is a group masquerading as a legtimate medical organization while spouting religious right dogma about the lgbt community.
I pretty much said the same thing already, but didn't Mike say it much better than me?
Seriously though, I took a look at the work ACP put out about the lgbt community, particularly a piece called Homosexual Parenting: Is it Time for Change?
What I found was a hot mess of the usual lies put out by the religious right. I'm sure those who keep up with this blog have heard these before but I'm a stickler for consistency when it comes to religious right distortions, so bear with me.
The distortions of the ACP piece can be broken down in three brackets:
1. Outdated data
The paper says:
Homosexual partnerships are significantly more prone to dissolution than heterosexual marriages with the average homosexual relationship lasting only two to three years
As proof of this, the ACP paper cites sources from over 15 years ago:
David P. McWhirter and Andrew M. Mattison, The male couple: how relationships develop (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984), pp. 252-253.
M. Saghir and E. Robins, Male and female homosexuality (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1973), p. 225; L.A. Peplau and H. Amaro, "Understanding lesbian relationships," in homosexuality: social, psychological, and biological issues, ed. J. Weinrich and W. Paul (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982).
M. Pollak, "Male homosexuality," in western sexuality: practice and precept in past and present times, ed. P. Aries and A. Bejin, translated by Anthony Forster (New York, NY: B. Blackwell, 1985), pp. 40-61, cited by Joseph Nicolosi in Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality (Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc., 1991), pp. 124, 125.
To make matters worse, the ACP is inaccurately using the data to generalize about all lgbt couples.
The authors of The Male Couple said their book could not be used to generalize about the lgbt community:
“We always have been very careful to explain that the very nature of our research sample, its size (156 couples), its narrow geographic location, and the natural selectiveness of the participants prevents the findings from being applicable and generalizable to the entire gay male community.”
Another outdated source the ACP piece uses is:
A. P. Bell and M. S. Weinberg, Homosexualities: a study of diversity among men and women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), pp. 308, 309
Homosexualities was published in 1978. And with it, the APC paper continues to inaccurately generalize about lgbt couples.
A passage in Homosexualities clearly says:
“. . . given the variety of circumstances which discourage homosexuals from participating in research studies, it is unlikely that any investigator will ever be in a position to say that this or that is true of a given percentage of all homosexuals.”
Generally speaking, if you looked at all of the sources in the ACP paper, you see that the majority of them are over 10 years old. And many of the ones that can be construed as current are misused.
But that is the next section.
2. Misusage of studies
Many of the studies the ACP uses to claim that children will suffer adverse effects in lgbt households in fact did not have anything to do with looking at children in lgbt homes at all. They include:
A. Marie Xiridoui, et al., "The contribution of steady and casual partnerships to the incidence of HIV infection among homosexual men in Amsterdam," AIDS 17 (2003): 1029-1038. [Note: one of the findings of this recent study is that those classified as being in "steady relationships" reported an average of 8 casual partners a year in addition to their partner (p. 1032)]
As pointed out in a post two weeks ago , this study only looked at casual relationships between gay men. It had nothing to do with the lesbian population and certainly nothing to do with children in lgbt households. The ironic thing is that this study has been used to also claim that lgbts have no concept of monogamy in marriage even though the data was compiled before marriage was even legalized in the Netherlands.
B. Joanne Hall, "Lesbians recovering from alcoholic problems: an ethnographic study of health care expectations," Nursing Research 43 (1994): 238-244.
In my 2007 book, Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters, I talk about how this article in Nursing Research was distorted. The author of the article, Joanne Hall, Ph.D. of the University of Tennessee’s College of Nursing, wrote me a letter outlining how it was being misused. She said that not only did the study have nothing to do with gay parenting but also:
“My study was an investigation of experiences of lesbians who ALREADY have self-identified as having ‘had an alcohol problem.’
They were not recruited as ‘alcoholics,’ ‘addicts’ or such terms, because I realized people have different understandings and preferences about ‘labels.’ These women were not necessarily under treatment at all, but living in the community. I did not ‘verify’ either their sexual orientation (that was also self-identification), nor a ‘diagnosis’ of substance abuse. They responded to a flyer. They all lived in the Bay Area. There were 35 women in the study. ONLY 35. They do not REPRESENT a population. My point was to try to get a handle on what they were experiencing—to UNDERSTAND their patterns . . . . "
C. Gwat Yong Lie and Sabrina Gentlewarrier, "Intimate violence in lesbian relationships: discussion of survey findings and practice implications," Journal of Social Service Research 15 (1991): 41-59.
Again a study having nothing to do with children in same sex households. The original study was conducted in 1985 at a Michigan Women’s Music Festival. It included only 1099 participants and all were lesbian.
According to a reviewer of the study, Suzana Rose, Ph.D., of the 1099 lesbians participants, most were white and between the ages of 20-45. - Intimate Violence in Lesbian Relationships: Discussion of Survey Findings and Practice Implications, Journal of Social Science Research, 1991
D. "Sex survey results," Genre (October 1996), quoted in "Survey finds 40 percent of gay men have had more than 40 sex partners," Lambda Report, January 1998, p. 20.
Not only did this Genre article have nothing to do with children in same sex households but check out the entire citation. The Lambda Report was an anti-gay publication put out by an old friend of ours - Peter LaBarbera - before he began Americans for Truth.
So in all honesty, it can be said that the ACP paper does not misuse Genre article because it does not cite the article at all, but what LaBarbera (a man with an anti-gay bias) claims the Genre article says.
3. Researcher complaints
A consistent factor of religious right studies is how they inaccurately use studies even after complaints by the work's original author. There are two in the ACP paper:
A. It cites the infamous 1997 study Canadian study as proof that lgbts have a short life span even though the study's authors complained in 2001 of its misusage by the religious right. (This is getting to be a favorite citation of mine. In almost every religious right paper I've talked about on this site, the distortion of the Canadian study is included.)
B. Judith Stacey and Timothy J. Biblarz, "(How) Does the sexual orientation of parents matter," American Sociological Review 66 (2001): 174, 179.
Judith Stacey has said repeatedly that nothing in her work says that same sex parenting is a bad idea.
Finally, the most interesting thing about the ACP paper is that it is not original. Some of the citations and passages in the paper are identical to a Family Research Council paper, The Negative Effects of Homosexuality.
This is the same paper is considered "outdated" by the Family Research Council.
So basically, the American College of Pediatricians is a puppet organization that can do damage if no one researches its background.
The folks who founded this organization are clearly sacrificing the integrity of their profession by laundering religious right propaganda as credible medical research.
And it makes one wonder as to how many other "groups" like ACP are out there. And also what can we do to bring attention to these groups.
