SACRAMENTO, Calif. — About 40 people who oppose gender-confirming health care gathered on Friday at the Capitol, while a larger group of counterprotesters marched toward the event.
The marchers, who held pride flags and signs supporting trans youth, gathered in Southside Park and stopped short of the Capitol where the permitted Detransition Awareness Day rally took place.
There were three reports of assault and theft, according to a tweet from the Sacramento Police Department. One person was arrested on suspicion of assault. A police spokesperson would not say whether these incidents were related to people of either protesting group.
The Statehouse rally was organized by Our Duty, an international organization that reaches out to parents of young people with gender dysphoria, a psychiatric diagnosis of people who feel a discrepancy between their sex and their gender. The group rejects using gender-confirming procedures to treat gender dysphoria.
Detransitioning is when a person chooses to stop undergoing or to reverse their gender transition. Statistics show that it is a relatively rare phenomenon. A 2014 study found a 2.2% regret rate among those who had gender-confirming procedures, and in a 2015 study, the National Center for Transgender Equality surveyed nearly 28,000 transgender people in the U.S. and found that 8% of respondents detransitioned.
Protesters at the Statehouse
Organizers of the Sacramento Statehouse rally described, in a news release, the goal of their event as to “honor those harmed by the gender industry and ignored by the mainstream media and politicians on the left.”
Headlining the Capitol event was 18-year-old Chloe Cole from Manteca, who announced last month plans to sue Permanente Medical Group, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan & Kaiser Foundation Hospitals for inappropriately providing her with gender-confirming female-to-male medical procedures when she was a minor. Cole’s lawyer is National Committeewoman of the Republican National Committee for California Harmeet Dhillon.
Kaiser Permanente has said its treatment is “consistent with the standards of medical care and excellence.”
Gender-confirming procedures are “presented as rainbows and unicorns and stars,” Cole said Friday afternoon, “but it’s not.”
She repeated what she told the Bee earlier this week — that her opposition to gender-confirming care is apolitical.
But some of the rally attendees, did tie the issue to politics. Several signs read “DEMOCRATS FOR DETRANSITION.”
At the rally Friday, Cole said there are too many “bodies and minds falling apart in the aftermath of transition,” and that too many young people diagnosed with gender dysphoria are struggling in silence.
Activists down the street
The counterprotest group, Pride Was A Riot — Sacramento, marched down N Street toward midtown while Our Duty supporters spoke at the Capitol steps. At least one unidentified man was injured after a conflict with a marcher; he was struck above his right eyebrow and taken away in an ambulance.
Most who marched in opposition to the Our Duty event did so nonviolently.
Lisa Bunker, who moved to Sacramento last fall after two terms as one of the first trans women elected to the state legislature in New Hampshire, said she attended the Support Trans Youth event to speak out for her community.
“I’m committed to speaking out, I’m really concerned about the current sustained fear campaign being directed at trans and nonbinary people,” she said. “But I think it’s a mistake to buy into the language of war. The stories the (right) is trying to tell are about trans people being an imminent threat … I think the radical response to that is to stay calm and just exhibit humanity.”
Some activists who gathered at the park expressed concern that Cole plans on suing Kaiser Permanente in the Central Valley.
“Chloe’s end goal is to outlaw gender-affirming care for youth and adults in general,” said James Patnaude, a transgender service specialist at the San Joaquin Pride Center in Stockton. “Her rhetoric is directly attacking trans individuals.”
Patnaude said that Kaiser Permanente Manteca is one of few such service providers in the area, and that increasing negative coverage and rhetoric of the trans experience is “sowing discord between trans individuals, the public, and cisgender allies.”
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