Panic in Wake of Trump Win Spawned Misinformation for Trans People and Advocates

In the days following the election, transgender people and their allies began planning for possible disruptions in their ability to live life as normal under a Trump Administration. For some, that meant taking steps to change names and gender markers on identifying documents in case policies were changed to make that more difficult. Legal advocates saw an “explosion” of clients seeking help and advice, according to Sasha Buchert, a trans woman and attorney at the Transgender Law Center in Oakland, CA.

Others began formulating contingency plans for acquiring essential hormone medications.

In the US, 18 states require that insurance companies cover hormone treatment and surgery for transgender people who experience gender dysphoria, in which someone’s assigned gender doesn’t match their gender identity. States also have their own medical assistance programs, like California's Medicaid, which cover this.

"Strides made by President Obama to make sure that trans people have health care will be erased by this administration."

But in more conservative states with laws that allow insurance providers to exclude transgender people, Trump's promises to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which covers the hormonal treatments and surgery, have created shockwaves of concern. Right now, the Affordable Care Act is a stop-gap. It requires federally-funded health care providers to provide hormone treatment and surgical care to transgender people, just like they do for non-trans people. If it went away, people in conservative states would be more vulnerable to the whims of local politics.

“There is a huge concern that the hard-won expansion of [health care] coverage we’ve seen in our communities will be lost, that strides made by President Obama to make sure that trans people have health care will be erased by this administration,” Buchert said.

Some trans people and advocates got on Facebook and posted (and reposted) instructions for stockpiling hormones. The posts weren’t organized by a campaign, but there were multiple threads, according to another transgender attorney I talked to and posts I've seen on a women’s group page with hundreds of members. The posts advocated that cisgender women stockpile certain types of birth control that could, if necessary, help a trans woman maintain her hormone levels if she had trouble getting a normal prescription. Upon investigation, though, the science behind those posts was shaky.

Here's one that came up on my own Facebook feed:

“Cis women and afab trans people who care about trans women, if you are still able to access this when the dust settles, please consider getting a Rx for estradiol-only birth control, not for yourselves (unless that’s what you use) but as a way to help the many trans women who are going to use their hormones.

Anyone who can get a Rx for it, please consider getting spironolactone for ‘acne’ or for your ‘blood pressure.’

PLEASE COPY/PASTE. We need to start thinking about these kinds of seemingly little things, especially given how many of us are dependent on the ACA Medicaid Expansion.”

There are two main things that male-to-female trans women need to do if they want to use hormones to transition: block testosterone and take some estrogen (trans men, by contrast, mainly need to take testosterone).

Unfortunately, some of the posts, including the one I saw, contained faulty or vaguely illegal suggestions.

First, there are no estradiol-only birth-control pills, at least not in the US, according to two medical specialists I spoke to, including Joshua Safer, the medical director of Boston University’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery. Safer said he was aware of reports of some high-dose estrogen birth controls being used in the Netherlands.

Second, getting prescriptions for someone else is technically illegal. Milo Manopoulos Beitman, a trans man and a Oakland-based attorney I spoke to, said he had seen a similar post and several others like it on Facebook. He immediately liked and reposted one of the similar calls to action he saw on his feed. But soon after, the questions began pouring in.

A couple of women told him that they would be happy to stockpile birth control but weren't sure how to connect with trans women who needed it. Other friends questioned if birth control would actually contain enough estrogen to give trans women the hormone levels they need. Yet another friend suggested that Manopoulos take the post down, because sharing prescriptions is against the law.

San Francisco Pride March 2015. Image: James Buck/Flickr

"It seemed like such a good idea in the moment, but ultimately I took the post down," Manopoulos said.

Third, according Safer, it could be unhealthy for trans women to take hormones prescribed for cis women. There are simply better, safer medications for them with less side effects. Of course, he said, if those weren’t available, taking someone else’s birth control and spironolactone would probably work—and it would be an understandable decision for someone who was unable to get hormones.

"I don't want to be alarmist about it, because I'm not," he said. “It's not like people are gonna keel over but it’s the unhealthy choice [to do it that way].”.

Yet despite the risks, it isn’t unusual for trans people to want to pursue their own treatment outside the medical system, where some have experienced prejudice or ignorance, Dee Wollstonecraft Michel, a trans woman and transgender services coordinator at St. James Infirmary in San Francisco, told me.

“Right now the safest thing to do is pretend to be a mostly straight male instead of a mostly gay transwoman.”

“I know a lot of other trans women who have gone years and years without seeing a medical provider but have been taking hormones,” she said.

Hormones that foster male or female characteristics in the body can be prescribed by doctors, but the process to get them has varying degrees of hoops to jump through—depending on how easy or hard doctors in a given place think it should be for a trans person to begin the transition process—and how much vetting they believe doctors should do beforehand. So even if a person has health care coverage, the ease of getting hormones is intertwined with local politics and beliefs about trans people.

Speaking about doctors who adhere to the more stringent standards, called “WPATH,” Wollstonecraft Michel said, “(Those) standards are set forth by cisgender doctors that have pathologized transgender people's bodies.”

Fear has hit a fever pitch since election day, as seen in the range of answers to the following question on the “MtF” (male to female) subreddit.

“I'm going to lose my dad's health insurance when [Obamacare] is repealed.” a user called zoebytes said. “There's a good chance that my dad will refuse to pay for other insurance for me ... I basically have to stay in school because that's the only way I can see a therapist and a psychiatrist without insurance right now, and I don't know if I'll able to pay for school. I don't even know if they do HRT [hormone replacement therapy] there…"

“ I … wish it wasn't this way and I don't want to have to worry about getting my HRT or receiving medical attention,” slingbladerapture said.

Another user named BardicFire said they were thinking about putting off their transition for the foreseeable future. “Right now the safest thing to do is pretend to be a mostly straight male instead of a mostly gay transwoman,” they said.

If trans people followed the instructions I saw on Facebook and took the hormones described there, they’d be risking a host of side-effects. Estradiol can cause blood clots and isn’t as safe as other estrogen supplements, Safer said. And Spironolactone blocks testosterone but can cause increased potassium and heart rhythm problems.

Image: Shutterstock

Websites, discussion boards, and online pharmacies have popped up to fill-in where medical professionals have lagged, though Safer said they’re often plagued by misconceptions that get slowly corrected over time.

Safer said that there are two main problems he sees with DIY.

“The risks are, number one, that you won’t get the product you think you’re getting and two, that you may overdose or underdose… [and] there’s no proof that taking a boat-load of hormones will get you extra benefits,” Safer said.

The range of options, the hostility of some medical providers, and the abundance of well-meaning, inaccurate information make navigating a transition challenging and full of potential missteps.

But Wollstonecraft Michel said that although things might get worse under Trump, she’s confident in the resiliency of her community.

“Trans people will keep doing what they need to survive,” she said. “It’s what we’ve been doing for decades.”

from Panic in Wake of Trump Win Spawned Misinformation for Trans People and Advocates

Doomsday Prepper Supply Companies Are the Real Winners of the Election

When doomsday “preppers” start stockpiling emergency food, it’s usually because of a typhoon, a terrorist attack, or an event that signals the end times is near. This month, the horrifying event du jour is the US presidential election.

“We’re hearing from people in our call center. People feel like they’ve lost control of the election process,” said Keith Bansemer, the vice president of marketing at MyPatriotSupply.com, which sells emergency food. “So they’re taking matters into their own hands—those things they can control. I think there is apprehension with both top candidates.”

These concerns were echoed in a recent New York Times story that explored the belief by many Donald Trump supporters that a victory by Hillary Clinton could spark another revolutionary war.

Many doomsday preppers are stocking up on emergency survival food (sometimes called MREs or Meals Ready to Eat) with decades-long shelf lives, just in case all Hell breaks loose on November 8.

Read more: Doomsday Preppers Are Planning to 3D Print Their Way Through the Apocalypse

“The last couple of weeks have been the busiest in our company’s history,” Bansemer said of MyPatriotSupply, which was founded in 2008 and began seeing sales spike in July. In the last few weeks sales have almost tripled and the company is shipping out thousands of units a day, according to Bansemer.

Image: My Patriot Supply

Among its products, the company sells a 1-year supply of food for four people (priced at $6,897) and packs with 720 servings (“That’s two cups per day for an entire year!”) of Franklin’s Finest Survival Coffee.

“Franklin's Finest is the ultimate survival perk, especially for those that drink coffee on a daily basis,” the website says. ”It's also the perfect item for barter or trade in an emergency! (You'll thank us for that tip later.)”

The food, like many modern emergency food products, promises an expiration date that is up to a quarter century away.

“The last couple of weeks have been the busiest in our company’s history”

Although Bansemer said many of the customers are “your moms, neighbors, school teachers” and other Americans who want to make sure they can feed their family in the event of an emergency, some are bonafide preppers, a nickname for people who prepare for a nebulous, approaching calamity they call WSHTF (When Shit Hits the Fan) with near-religious fervor. WSHTF could be a global pandemic, a terrorist attack, a hack on the global banking system, a crippling economic recession, or social unrest caused by a political event like the upcoming election, according to many prepper blogs.

The most dedicated preppers don’t just store food; they make evacuation plans, pore over survival tactics, and plan for a post-apocalyptic future. They tend to brush off mockery by promising that when things go wrong, you’ll be the one knocking on their door, asking for help. And right now, it’s fear around the election that is most pressing, Bansemer said.

In the emergency, long-term, ready-to-eat food business, sale spikes are usually motivated by fear.

“When people freak out, obviously our sales go up, because they’re worried about the uncertainty of everything,” said Bryan Nelson, the owner of the emergency food and survival supplies site, TheEpicenter.com. “When people see someone that has gone through something like the hurricane in North Carolina they think, ‘That could be me’… Or, if they don’t know what’s going to happen with the election and how it’s gonna turn out and how the other side is going to react to their candidate not winning. It’s a fear factor. If you have that kind of fear … that’s when our sales go up.”

Read more: Confessions of a Former Apocalypse Survival Guide Writer

The Epicenter has been in business for 21 years, selling more than a million prepackaged “emergency and outdoor” meals some years, along with camping and survival supplies. Like MyPatriotSupplies, TheEpicenter is a retailer that buys its food from a wholesaler.

The Fukushima nuclear plant disaster and the earthquakes in Nepal and Haiti were all sales-triggering events for The Epicenter. Now, the same kind of natural disaster reaction is happening with some conservative clients who are worried about civil unrest after the election, if on a smaller scale, Nelson said.

“We had a customer come in to our office yesterday and he was very, very interested in freeze-dried food. He has a lot of property and 10 family members and said he wanted to get enough food together to feed 10 people for a year—specifically because he was worried about the election, about civil unrest, about how it’s going to go—that’s a lot of food,” Nelson said. “In general, Trump supporters are very worried about everything and very private, because no one wants to be labelled in a negative way by the other side.”

The owner of another online food retailer also said they had seen sales spikes and that their supplier had sold out of many food items over the summer faster than it could restock. The owner requested anonymity and asked not to be quoted for fear of being associated with the prepper community's more fringe viewpoints and said they planned to close the online store and get out of the business because they couldn’t deal with the constant doomsday predictions any longer.

These sorts of sales spikes have not been seen industry-wide, however. The companies profiting the most appear to be those that emphasize WSHTF doomsday preparedness on their websites and advertise on conservative talk radio or TV shows. That makes sense, according to Nelson, since those companies are reaching people who are already hyped-up about the election and fear civil unrest could happen no matter who wins.

The companies profiting the most appear to be those that emphasize WSHTF doomsday preparedness on their websites and advertise on conservative talk radio or TV shows.

This year, some officials are even taking precautions. The Clerk and Recorder in Arapahoe County, Colorado, said he had gone so far as to train his staff to deal with a potential mass shooting and political conflicts in case things got out of hand, after Trump alleged widespread voter fraud and called on supporters to monitor election sites.

One Trump supporter told The New York Times that if Clinton won, “People are going to march on the capitols … If push comes to shove (Clinton) has to go by any means necessary, it will be done.”

If such an uprising does happen, it’ll be the first time in years that threats of revolt by right wing groups are finally put into action, according to Dr. Lawrence Rosenthal, the chair and lead researcher of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, who published an opinion piece on Thursday.

“Will the Trump constituency take up its leader’s hints and turn into an organized force … or to take revenge for imagined voter fraud?” Rosenthal wrote. “If so, this would be a great departure from what we have seen in the recent past. Rising up … has been discussed on the far right for years … Yet the Tea Party was a movement that at most engaged in occasional verbal violence.”

Image: Legacy Food Storage

MyPatriotSupply fits the profile of a politically-visible online store, since it advertises on Fox News, The Blaze (the news and entertainment network founded by Glenn Beck) and the American Heroes Channel. It’s also sold by radio show host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his INFOWARS site, which has published a dizzying number of articles predicting “civil unrest” this year.

The Epicenter, by contrast, sells mostly to hunters, campers, large companies, government agencies, and embassies that must keep prepared food on-hand in case of an emergency. The Epicenter saw a spike in June and July, but sales are only up by 5.5 percent on the whole, Nelson said.

Other doomsday supply companies, like Legacy Food Storage, which sells dehydrated and freeze-dried food, haven’t seen election-related spikes in the industry, but keep close tabs on the next world crisis, imagined or real, and wait.

“We don’t believe there is going to be a spike until maybe after the election and in the event of a super scary economic forecast from real events (Deutsche Bank goes upside down, China’s real estate bubble pops, etc.),” CEO Phillip Cox said in an email. “Last year there was a Red Blood Moon event,” Cox said, using a biblical term that refers to a “red” lunar eclipse preceding the second coming of Jesus. “The year before last we had Ebola come on and that drove a huge spike in sales.”

Sales spikes are more likely the result of better marketing or normal fluctuations, not an industry-wide spike, Cox said.

In the meantime, he and the rest of the world will be watching the news, waiting to see what happens.

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from Doomsday Prepper Supply Companies Are the Real Winners of the Election