ERIN REED; erinreed44@gmail.com
Reed is a transgender journalist reporting on LGBTQ+ legislation and news at the Erin in the Morning Substack.
Reed told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “In recent days, we have learned about more and more nonprofits that have been forced to strip out transgender and queer people from their websites. They’re trying to pretend transgender people don’t exist. These are organizations that have a history of supporting LGBTQ people. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, for instance, is now using the old pronouns and dead names of transgender youth––which doesn’t serve them very well in finding these children, if their appearance has changed or they are now using different pronouns. RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, was told the same thing. Other LBGTQ organizations that focus on HIV prevention have had to move transgender people from their websites. The Stonewall National Park Service website has likewise stripped transgender people from its website. It’s now just ‘LGB.’ On the National Park page for Sylvia Rivera, a transgender woman, it says that she fought for ‘gay and [sic] rights.’ It’s sloppy. There are protests going on at Stonewall this weekend and there were protests immediately after this occurred.
“But the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit on Wednesday [Feb. 19] arguing that the ‘DEI ban’ is affecting nonprofits in ways that suppress freedom of speech. We are also seeing court cases tearing through the courts, with positive decisions on access to transgender healthcare in the Washington, Minnesota, and Oregon lawsuits as well as the PFLAG case in Maryland, which opened transgender healthcare back up at Children’s National Hospital. We are seeing transgender care returning to some hospitals.
“For the first time, in Montana, a law that defines sex as binary and unchangeable was also struck down. We may see this play out in other states in addition to Montana. Montana has a strong state constitution in terms of guaranteed right to privacy. In response, [the GOP] is currently attacking the Montana courts through the legislature as much as possible. Those bills are being pushed every day to try to make it harder for decisions to be overturned by the state courts.”
Reed also noted that the ban on transgender people serving in the military is currently being heard in court. “In that case, it is possible that [the judge] will rule that transgender people make up a quasi-suspect class. That legal distinction means that transgender people would get equal protection under the law with heightened scrutiny––similar to how we treat laws around discrimination based on sex, religion, or race. That could be a huge development for transgender people.
“Mainstream media is not reporting on these stories. When the hospitals were shutting down care, I was oftentimes the only one reporting those stories. The administration has been a chaos orb. But the mainstream media is reacting very slowly to a lot of the news that is developing.”