Hi there, I’m Madison Pauly, and I’m a reporter for Mother Jones.
A few weeks ago, when a source sent me thousands of emails between lawmakers, doctors, lawyers, and activists, it took me a while to understand just what I was looking at. The scrambled missives dated mostly to 2019 and 2020 and included dozens of interlocutors—I recognized some of the names, others I didn’t. But as I untangled the documents, a jaw-dropping story began to emerge: I was looking at a coordinated, behind-the scenes effort to spread legislation attacking transgender health care across the country. (Go behind the leaked emails in a video, here.)
We already know the effort worked. Anti-LGBTQ health care bills have been introduced in at least 31 states this legislative session alone, while opposition to trans people’s very existence has become a huge GOP talking point. It’s a culture war with real effects on people’s lives and their bodies. Since 2021, seven states have banned gender-affirming medical care for trans youth—including puberty blockers for children, hormone therapy for teens and adults, and, almost exclusively for older teens or adults, surgeries—even though these treatments are supported by a long list of major medical associations. South Dakota, where much of the emails are focused, recently passed a law that’s expected to force teens to detransition.
What I was able to show through my reporting was proof of what trans rights advocates have suspected for a long time: That behind the legislative onslaught, from the very beginning, were religious-right lawyers, fringe doctors, and anti-trans activists. Among them was Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative legal behemoth that has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people in Europe (and also helped overturn Roe v. Wade). Then there was the innocuously-named American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds)—a group of right-wing doctors that has opposed adoption by gay couples and supported conversion therapy for LGBTQ kids.
These groups and others didn’t just help elected state lawmakers draft anti-trans bills. They also hammered out talking points, assembled witnesses to testify at bill hearings, and brainstormed counterarguments to any challenges, such as the research-backed assertion that gender-affirming care reduces suicide. (More than half of trans and nonbinary youth considered suicide in 2021, according the Trevor Project. Yet in the emails I reviewed, working group members called this argument “abusive” and a way for doctors to coerce parents into consenting to medical treatment.) Their discussions evince a belief that no one is truly transgender. And they see their work as a holy effort. “Know that the Lord is with you,” one of the attorneys on the email chain, Vernadette Broyles, wrote to South Dakota legislator Fred Deutsch, who had convened the working group in 2019.
As Deutsch shared a draft of an anti-trans bill, he warned the team: “As always, please do not share this with the media. The longer we can fly under the radar the better.” My investigation shines a light on their secretive mission.
—Madison Pauly
