As a teen, a friend got them interested in evangelical Christianity, which seemed to offer the promise of ­transformation. They joined a church youth group and began studying the Bible. Soon after, Markham found an online forum for a ministry that supports “those affected by unwanted homosexuality.” Markham didn’t identify as transgender at the time, but to their mentors in the conversion therapy program, Markham says, sexuality was inextricable from gender identity. “A woman being attracted to women—she was confused about her gender identity, confused about what it means to be a godly woman,” they explain. “And so what they end up doing, therapeutically, is attempting to police and reform your gender presentation.”

Markham’s experience is far from unique. As professional and legal objections to conversion therapy grew in the 2000s, such “change efforts” were migrated from the clinical realm into religious settings. The vast majority of people who have gone through conversion therapy received it from a religious leader, according to the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. The practice remains shrouded in secrecy, says Simon Kent Fung, a conversion therapy survivor and creator of an award-winning podcast on the subject, Dear Alana. “In religious settings, homosexuality is not just a pathology, but a spiritual brokenness,” he explains. “Conversion therapy today is psychologically manipulative.”

Markham’s time in the ministry’s forums made their emotional state even more fragile. They started experiencing panic attacks almost every day. They would be reading or riding the bus and then be overcome by waves of nausea, a racing heartbeat, and the sense of paralysis. “Something was happening to me internally, where I was [feeling] I was about to die,” they remember. At night, they had terrors of demons suffocating or drowning them.

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First They Tried to “Cure” Gayness. Now They’re Fixated on “Healing” Trans People.

The worse Markham’s anxiety got, the more they became convinced that only God could save them. They enrolled at a small Christian college and found an outside church that offered group therapy. Other members of the group were there to overcome a variety of issues: eating disorders, alcoholism, or depression. “I was there talking about ‘gay,’” Markham recalls bitterly. The counselor, in training to become a licensed practitioner, told Markham to “write out every single same-sex ­attraction or ­gender confusion–related thought, dream, action, behavior that had ever materialized in my life per my memory, and describe the way that it hurt me, it hurt God, and hurt other people.” When they sought help from college administrators, they required Markham to attend biweekly sessions with a women’s chaplain who counseled them on “biblical womanhood” and made them read a book called God’s Little Princess.

At the end of their senior year, Markham received a class assignment to create a plan to convert an “unreached group” to Christianity. They chose LGBTQ people. Conducting interviews with queer students and community members, Markham says, was the first time in their life they developed relationships with out, self-­affirming queer and trans people. 

 




“I fell in love with everybody who consented to doing these interviews with me,” they remember, cracking a smile.




“I just found myself experiencing a sense of comfort, ease, and possibility in the company of other queer people that I did not expect to feel.”

 

Myles Markham in Los AngelesChloe Aftel

When Markham tried to share their feelings, their classmates immediately ostracized them. Markham was banned from participating in school groups, forbidden from leading church services, and pressured to find new housing.

The hostility only deepened their resolve to live an openly queer life. After graduating, Markham took a job living and working at the Equality House, the rainbow-painted protest house across the street from the notoriously anti-LGBTQ Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. They started organizing to pass discrimination protections and prevent youth suicides and met with countless LGBTQ community members. Everything immediately changed. “The night terrors were the first thing that ended,” they say. The panic attacks faded too, eventually. “I was finally in an environment that just allowed me to be who I was.”

They also found a supportive therapist. “It wasn’t just the tools I developed in therapy that [resulted in] this constitutional shift,” they say. “It was once I was comfortable being who I am and being able to share that with other people, and not having to hide, ignore it, or try to diminish it.”

Now, some 10 years later, Markham feels as though the torments of the past are finally put to rest. “I went from a place of constant, albeit quiet, torment into one of vitality,” Markham remembers. “I was able to wake up grateful for my life. I wanted to be alive, and that was something that took me most of my life at that point to be able to say with sincerity.”

Cretella was delivering a keynote speech at the first in-person conference in four years of the Alliance, which describes itself as a “professional and scientific organization” with “Judeo-Christian values.” Its purpose: to defend and promote the practice of conversion therapy by licensed counselors.

Not that they’d call what they do “conversion therapy.” That term lacks a precise definition, but it is used colloquially to describe attempts to shift a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. In the 1960s, some psychologists tried to make gay men straight by pairing aversive stimuli, like electric shocks or chemically induced nausea, with images of gay porn—techniques that ran the risk of causing serious psychological damage even as they failed to change participants’ sexual orientation, researchers eventually concluded. Today, “conversion therapy” generally takes the form of verbal counseling. Participants are typically conservative Christians who engage voluntarily—motivated by internalized stigma, family pressure, and the belief that their feelings are incompatible with their faith. Others are children, brought into therapy by their parents.

The American Psychological Association (APA) has concluded that conversion therapy lacks “sufficient bases in scientific principles” and that people who have undergone it are “significantly more likely to experience suicidality and depression.” Similarly, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), part of the Department of Health and Human Services, published a report concluding that “none of the existing research supports the premise that mental or behavioral health interventions can alter gender identity or sexual orientation. Interventions aimed at a fixed outcome, such as gender conformity or heterosexual orientation…are coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment.”

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Learning to Love My Trans Self After Conversion Therapy

Accordingly, the Alliance and the ideas it promotes have been relegated to the scientific and political fringes. In the 2010s, as acceptance of gay rights grew rapidly, 18 states and dozens of local governments passed laws forbidding mental health professionals from attempting conversion therapy on minors.

Yet by 2020, a new front had opened in the war against LGBTQ people. Republican state legislatures started passing laws targeting transgender and nonbinary children at school—restricting their access to bathrooms, barring them from participating in sports, and stopping educators from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity. The most intense attacks have banned doctors from providing the treatments for gender dysphoria backed by all major US medical associations. Nearly 114,000 trans youth live in states where access to puberty blockers and hormone therapy has been wiped out.

Last year, I received leaked emails illustrating how these laws are crafted and pushed by a network of anti-trans activists and powerful Christian-right organizations. The Alliance is deeply enmeshed in this constellation of actors. Although small, with an annual budget of under $200,000, it provides both unsubstantiated arguments suggesting LGBTQ identities are changeable and a network of licensed counselors to lend their credibility to these efforts. Among the collaborators were David Pickup, the Alliance’s president-elect; Laura Haynes, an Alliance advocate; and Cretella, the former executive director of an anti-trans pediatrics group who described gender-affirming medical care at the Las Vegas conference as “evil” and part of a “New World Order.” (“I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” she assured attendees. “I’m just someone who has been in the battle of the culture of life versus the culture of death long enough to see the big picture.”) All three have testified before state legislatures against gender-affirming care. When a US senator introduced a pair of bills to restrict trans youth health care in 2021, his press release quoted Cretella calling gender-affirming treatments “eugenics.”

What I couldn’t see from those leaked emails was how the Alliance is resurrecting conversion therapy from the ash heap of history. Its signature fight, to overturn laws prohibiting conversion therapy for minors, is being fueled by the rise of anti-trans politics, which maintains that trans teenagers are simply troubled and need help to embrace the sex they were assigned at birth. In a handful of states, they’ve started winning: Conversion therapy bans have been blocked in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Indiana. Nebraska now requires minors interested in transitioning to undergo therapy that doesn’t “merely affirm” their gender identities.

The Alliance has “suddenly become a more prominent force in the anti-LGBTQ movement again,” says Emerson Hodges, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which documents extremism of various sorts. Backers of anti-trans laws have adopted “the conversion therapy premise,” he says, “that being LGBTQ means you experienced some terrible trauma, or some sort of aberrant disorder, and therefore, it’s an illness—which means we can cure it.”

I wanted to get a deeper insight into those who not only see transness as a problem, but also see conversion therapy as a solution. How have they shifted their approach, given the wealth of professional literature undermining their practices? What is their “treatment” like for trans youth? And who are these people?

So when I saw that the Alliance was holding a one-day conference, it seemed like an opportunity to find some answers. I requested media credentials; receiving no response, I bought a regular $203.98 ticket using my Mother Jones contact information. The day before the conference, I received a packet of materials from Alliance board member Keith Vennum, a psychiatrist who specializes in “helping men develop their heterosexual potential,” according to his profile on Focus on the Family’s Christian Counselors Network. They included an article by a gender care specialist who turned against youth medical transition, reading suggestions from Cretella on how to “heal” “transgender belief” in children, and an essay by Fresno psychiatrist Avak Howsepian arguing that supporting “diversity and inclusion” means supporting pedophilia. I packed my bag and flew to Las Vegas.

When I first arrived at the Hampton Inn, a woman smiled and welcomed me to a quiet meeting room where mostly white men in businesswear chatted in small groups like old friends. I signed in and sat next to a large camera pointed at a lectern. The day’s presentations would be available for purchase online and count toward continuing education credits for licensed counselors.

Not that the education on offer would be seen as credible by most therapists. Since the group’s beginnings in 1992, the Alliance has rejected the now-dominant understanding of LGBTQ identities as normal, healthy expressions of human diversity. Its trio of founders includes psychiatrist Charles Socarides, who helped lead the unsuccessful campaign to keep homosexuality classified as a mental illness in the DSM, the bible of psychiatric diagnoses; psychiatrist Benjamin Kaufman, who’d pushed for nonconsensual, nonconfidential HIV testing in Sacramento, California, during the height of the AIDS epidemic; and psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, who ran a clinic in Los Angeles that specialized in “curing” gayness. They started the Alliance, then named the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), to fight what they called the “scientific censorship” imposed by the “pro-gay lobby.” “As clinicians, we have witnessed the intense suffering caused by homosexuality, which we see as a ‘failure to function according to design,’” one of NARTH’s early policy statements said. “Homosexuality…works against society’s essential male/female design and the all-­important family unit.”

Within a few years, NARTH was claiming hundreds of members. In conferences and publications, it used its members’ status as licensed clinicians to project an ethos of scientific expertise, helping to prop up the “ex-gay” movement of religious groups like Exodus International, which urged LGBTQ Christians to “pray away the gay” in support groups and counseling. Nicolosi, in particular, brought anti-gay pseudoscience to the public, publishing books like A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. He proclaimed that same-sex attraction came from childhood trauma, distant fathers, and overbearing mothers, and called his work “reparative therapy.”

The veneer of scientific rigor was peeling by 2009, when the APA published a landmark report finding no compelling evidence supporting the idea that sexual orientation could be altered with psychological interventions. Robert Spitzer, a leading psychiatrist, apologized for a major study he’d authored that had claimed to show NARTH’s and Exodus’ methods were effective, admitting that he didn’t really know whether anyone in his study had changed their sexual orientation. Then, NARTH board member George Rekers was caught in the Miami airport returning from a vacation to Europe with a gay sex worker he’d hired on Rentboy.com. (He resigned from NARTH and insisted that he had “not engaged in any homosexual behavior whatsoever.”)

Public awareness was growing about the damage conversion therapy could inflict. In a lawsuit against a New Jersey clinic called Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality, former clients alleged that they’d been made to strip naked, touch themselves in front of a counselor, or reenact sexual abuse scenes as part of their treatment. (A jury would eventually hold the clinic and its NARTH-affiliated founder liable for consumer fraud and “unconscionable commercial practice.”) In 2012, California passed the country’s first ban on conversion therapy for minors. Exodus President Alan Chambers acknowledged that its methods had hurt people and that “the majority of people that I have met, and I would say the majority meaning 99.9 percent of them, have not experienced a change in their orientation.” Exodus folded soon after.

Yet NARTH persisted. In 2014, it rebranded as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity. The group soon began to shed loaded terminology for more neutral euphemisms about its work. “The board has come to believe that terms such as reorientation therapy, conversion therapy, and even sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) are no longer scientifically or politically tenable,” Christopher Rosik, a clinical psychologist in Fresno, California, wrote in an Alliance statement in 2016. These descriptors sounded too coercive and categorical, he wrote, and “imply that sexual orientation is an actual entity.” Instead, the board endorsed a new phrase: “Sexual Attraction Fluidity Exploration in Therapy”—a.k.a. the inelegant backronym SAFE-T.

Getting the new name to stick has been a losing battle. During a presentation at the Las Vegas conference, Rosik—a small, intense, bespectacled man who speaks at a rapid clip—shared that he couldn’t get the term SAFE-T published in an APA journal. Mainstream psychologists tend to use a technically accurate term for conversion therapy, “sexual orientation change efforts,” which Rosik has appropriated into “self-initiated sexual orientation change efforts,” to underscore that the individuals he studies are choosing to participate.

During Rosik’s talk, Joseph Nicolosi Jr., the son of the Alliance’s now-deceased co-founder, was seated in the front row in a sharp black suit. At his side was his wife, with whom he occasionally held hands. “We shouldn’t even use the word ‘orientation,’” he argued when Rosik finished. Sexual orientation couldn’t be measured or disproved, he continued, but sexual attractions or feelings could. “They talk about pseudoscience. That term—orientation—is a pseudoscience.”

“I agree,” Laura Haynes, the Alliance advocate, broke in from the back. “We should not reify it.”

“Could the same thing be said of the term ‘gay’?” someone else wondered.

“Possibly,” Nicolosi Jr. said. “At what point is a person gay? Do they have one homosexual thought a year? Fifty? One thousand?”

Earlier in the day, Nicolosi Jr. had told colleagues that he’d registered his own term, Reintegrative Therapy®, with the US Patent and Trademark Office. His website contains a 12-point chart on how Reintegrative Therapy® differs from conversion therapy. The chart makes clear that changing sexual orientation is not the objective; rather, the goal is to “resolve trauma.” “Spontaneous” changes in sexuality are a “byproduct,” the website says. In 2021, Nicolosi Jr. sued a pair of Canadian academics for defamation over a paper that listed “reintegrative therapy” as one of several pseudoscientific practices that fell under the conversion therapy umbrella. (The suit was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. He is appealing. Neither Nicolosi Jr. nor anyone else from the Alliance responded to my requests for comment on how this article characterizes their work.)

Yet Nicolosi Jr.’s website is full of testimonials about clients’ sexual attractions changing. And it repeatedly cites a study that purports to show Reintegrative Therapy® decreasing clients’ same-sex attractions and improving their overall­ ­wellbeing.­ The study’s publisher? The Alliance’s Journal of Human Sexuality.

Another euphemism in Alliance circles is “change allowing therapy”—a phrase whose gentle ambiguity suggests openness to personal growth. In a similar vein, Michael Gasparro, one of the youngest Alliance board members, told attendees about a technique he and Nicolosi Jr. called “mindfulness,” which they became interested in “because of its ubiquitousness in the mental health field as a term that is generally just accepted carte blanche,” Gasparro explained.

They then showed us a “mindfulness” video in which a young adult client, played by an actor, sits nervously across from Nicolosi Jr. in a room filled with books. Nicolosi Jr. asks him to describe his ideal sexually attractive man. The client responds that the man would be strong, confident, informal. “I would definitely say a guy who’s like, um, on the taller side,” he says.

Then, Nicolosi Jr. asks the client what he would change about himself: Shorter or taller? Stronger or weaker arms? More or less confident? He urges the client to compare himself to the imagined man, and the client says he feels inadequate. “How do you feel about the fact that you feel that inferiority, weakness?” Nicolosi Jr. asks.

“Sadness,” the client says.

“Feel your sadness as you continue looking at that guy,” Nicolosi Jr. urges. “And as you hold them together right now, zero to 10, how strong is your sexual attraction toward him?”

It was Nicolosi Jr.’s dad who championed the idea that queerness comes from childhood trauma, one of the same narratives weaponized today to explain why kids come out as trans. The APA has slammed both ideas as unfounded.

Yet these kinds of claims are familiar to trans survivors of conversion therapy interviewed by Mother Jones. “The idea was that you don’t find boys and men to be safe, and so in order to protect yourself, you want to become a boy or a man,” recalls Myles Markham, who participated in group conversion therapy in high school and college, when they were struggling with their feelings around sexuality and gender. Yet to Markham, those explanations “never resonated,” they say: “I’m not a person who has experienced acute or direct misogynistic violence. I grew up with emotionally intelligent and gentle masculine figures.”

Other survivors say their therapists tried to attribute their transness to negative childhood experiences. “For me, it was daddy issues,” says Arielle Rebekah, a diversity, equity, and inclusion trainer in Chicago, recounting how counselors at a residential boarding school for troubled teens tried to force them to abandon their trans identity. “They basically tried to pin it on, ‘You’ve never had a positive male role model.’” Lillian Lennon, a 25-year-old organizer in Alaska, says her parents sent her to a similar residential program after she told them she was trans at age 14. According to an affidavit she filed in a custody lawsuit involving another LGBTQ student, the therapist Lennon was paired with at the school said her transness was a form of “lashing out” and “seeking attention” in the face of turmoil at home, such as financial problems and her parents separating.

None of this therapy “worked.” Today, Lennon, Rebekah, and Markham have all transitioned and have become activists or consultants supporting other LGBTQ people. Yet they all still deal with nightmares, panic, and other mental health struggles they attribute to the conversion efforts. “A lot of thoughts [were] placed into my head about how disturbing and gross and creepy people like me were,” Lennon says. “I internalized a lot of these projections.” Today, she deals with depression and loneliness. “I’ve never shaken the consequences of my time there,” she says.

Still, multiple counselors I met at the Alliance conference endorsed the concept that queerness and transness are the result of trauma or bad parenting. After the morning’s sessions, David Pickup, a towering man who identifies as a “reintegrative” therapist, approached the table where I was sitting with a group of clinicians. Pickup mainly practices in Texas and says he only works with clients who truly want to change their sexuality or gender identity. He has publicly attributed his own same-sex attractions and discomfort with his gender in part to sexual abuse. Pulling aside a chair from a neighboring table and folding his lanky frame into it, he patiently explained his belief that being trans is the same as being gay, except with “more severe” trauma, from earlier in life, and worse family environments. “I have yet to see one case where there’s not been trauma underneath every single homoerotic or transgender issue.” His theory on trans youth: “Basically, what happens is those kids don’t attach to their same-sex parent, and so they don’t attach to themselves in their own biological sex.”

At her session, “Healing Gender Incongruence in a Hostile Environment,” Cretella also urged attendees to focus on parenting and underlying trauma when working with trans teenagers. She described trans identity as a “maladaptive defense mechanism” in response to events like divorce and sexual abuse.

Her evidence: a 2018 Pediatrics study that examined medical records from youth enrolled in Kaiser Permanente health plans in California and Georgia. The researchers identified 1,082 minors between the ages of 10 and 17 whose records indicated that they were trans. Some 70 percent had mental health problems like depression, anxiety, and attention disorders that predated the first sign of gender dysphoria in their medical record. “They are not suicidal because of us,” Cretella said, giggling before hitting a somber note, “but because they are traumatized beforehand.”

Cretella’s interpretation of the research—that poor mental health led people to identify as trans—relies on a “fundamental” error, according to Michael Goodman, an Emory University professor and one of the study’s authors. Researchers, himself included, didn’t know when their subjects first identified as trans, only when they talked to their doctors about it. “It takes years, usually, before the child or adolescent, or an adult, presents to the health care provider with gender dysphoria issues,” Goodman told me. “It might as well be the other way around: The gender dysphoria leads to all of those mental health problems, which is a far more reasonable interpretation.”

Yet Alliance affiliates have been using Goodman’s research to lobby against conversion therapy bans and gender-affirming care. In 2019, Laura Haynes distributed his paper to colleagues working on anti-trans legislation. “It may be the first research that found onset dates of psychiatric disorders and first-evidence date of gender non­conforming identity,” she emphasized.

“Laura, thank you! I’m testifying soon for a case in Colorado and this data will be very useful,” replied psychiatrist Miriam Grossman, a senior fellow at the anti-trans group Do No Harm. A group co-founded by Pickup called the National Task Force for Therapy Equality drafted letters to legislators citing Goodman’s study to claim that “gender dysphoria may have pathological causes.” And when Pickup testified in support of an early gender-affirming care ban in South Dakota, he said there was a “rapidly growing body of literature suggesting that psychological issues play a crucial role in many young people’s trans identification.”

This isn’t the only example of scientific spin from Alliance figures. Last year, in what he called an “adversarial collaboration” with queer researchers, Rosik got a study published in the peer-reviewed APA journal Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. The paper looked at attempts to “reduce, change and/or eliminate” same-sex attractions, behavior, or orientation, either on one’s own or with a counselor, and found that 326 people currently undergoing conversion therapy had greater depression than those who’d stopped or never tried it. Yet Rosik and his co-authors concluded that the differences “may be of uncertain practical significance and interpretive meaning.”

It didn’t take long for others to point out the contradiction. “Basically, what they were saying is that even though there’s [evidence] of harm, the harm isn’t grave enough to be concerned about,” explains David Rivera, a psychology professor at Queens College in New York who co-authored a rebuttal to the Rosik paper. Soon, with the authors’ agreement, the journal retracted the study, saying it wanted to provide “greater accuracy and interpretive clarity to sensitive findings that might be misused.”

Rosik is used to fighting criticism: He edits the Alliance’s Journal of Human Sexuality. The very first issue, in 2009, was devoted to rebutting the APA report on the lack of evidence behind sexual orientation change efforts. Since then, its articles, interviews, and book reviews have defended “SAFE-T” and attacked the anti–conversion therapy consensus. At the conference, Rosik asserted that mainstream research institutions are “ideologically captured.”

Indeed, many of the Alliance speakers seemed to take it as a given that the medical and scientific communities were in thrall to LGBTQ activists. In a question that seemed intended to ridicule, Pickup asked during one of Cretella’s talks if the doctors who provide gender-affirming care to trans youth are personally “suffering from a disorder of some kind.” Appreciative laughter scattered throughout the room.

“Yes,” she replied, becoming serious. “Many of the physicians who are in leadership positions are themselves on the LGBTQ spectrum.” Then she referred to the disorder in which a caregiver imposes an ailment on a child to gain attention for themselves: “I would hypothesize that we were dealing with Munchausen by proxy in many cases.”

Outrageous claims like these are a common weapon among anti-trans activists and their right-wing political allies, who often describe trans health doctors as butchers mutilating kids. In 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton classified gender-affirming care for minors as a form of child abuse and equated parents who sought such care for their children with those suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Using this theory, Texas’ Department of Family and Protective Services opened at least nine investigations into parents before an ACLU lawsuit put a halt to them.

Similarly extreme language also comes from the small cohort of paid expert witnesses often called upon to support gender-affirming care bans—like endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, who compared such care to Nazi experimentation and the Tuskegee syphilis study when testifying for anti-trans legislation in South Dakota. (In a court case about Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care in Florida, a federal judge concluded that Laidlaw was “far off from the accepted view” on transgender issues, in part because Laidlaw had said he wouldn’t use patients’ correct pronouns.)

To Cretella, the solution to gender dysphoria is obvious: Transition people’s minds, not their bodies. She described this project in religious terms. “In a Judeo-Christian worldview,” she explained during her talk, “one of the functions of the brain is to accurately perceive” the physical reality created by God.

“If my thinking is contrary to physical reality, that’s the abnormality that must be understood,” she continued. “We try to ­understand the abnormal thinking and come to help the person attain flourishing, by analyzing and shaping thinking to embrace the physical reality.”

In other words, if a person’s sense of self doesn’t match their physical body, their sense of self requires fixing.

During the break after Cretella’s presentation, I overheard two women chatting on their way into the restroom. “Talk about a wealth of knowledge,” one remarked.

“True science will always back up true religion,” the other replied. “God’s truth and science, if it’s true, will always match up. That’s what I tell my students.”

If the Las Vegas conference made one thing clear, it’s that conversion therapy is alive and well, even in places where it’s been banned. One counselor told me he makes it a habit not to document his treatment plans in writing to avoid getting in trouble and simply treats “family dynamics” in states with conversion therapy bans.

In a 2015 survey of more than 27,000 trans adults, nearly 1 in 7 said that a professional, such as a therapist, doctor, or religious adviser, had tried to make them not transgender; about half of respondents said they were minors at the time. By applying this rate to population estimates, the Williams Institute at UCLA projects that more than 135,000 trans adults nationwide have experienced some form of conversion therapy.

Despite the data, lawmakers frequently don’t believe that conversion therapy is still happening in their community, says Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the Trevor Project, the LGBTQ suicide prevention group. “We’re constantly running up against this misconception that this is an artifact of the past,” she says. So, five years ago, the Trevor Project began scouring psychologists’ websites and books, records of public testimony, and known conversion therapy referral services, looking for counselors who said they could alter someone’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

As the research stretched on, Pick noticed webpages being revised to reflect changing times. “We saw many folks who seemed to leave the industry entirely,” she says. “But others changed their website, changed their keywords, [from] talking about creating ex-gays to talking about ex-trans.” Last December, Pick’s team published their report documenting active conversion therapists. They found more than 600 were licensed health care professionals and an additional 716 were clergy, lay ministers, or other unlicensed religious counselors.

According to Pick, some conversion therapists have embraced a new label for what they do: “gender exploratory therapy.” It’s a term that Cretella used to describe the approach she recommended, and unlike the other euphemisms thrown around at the conference, this has gained traction. In 2021, a group of therapists, who ranged from conflicted about medical interventions for kids with gender dysphoria to skeptical of the very concept of transgender identity, formed the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association (GETA) to promote an approach they characterize as neither conversion nor affirmation.

Some current and former leaders of the group, which claims a membership of 300 mental health providers, have been involved in influential organizations lobbying against gender-affirming care across the world, such as the Ireland-based Genspect and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, a nonprofit registered in Idaho. They’ve notched some big wins: In November 2023, the UK Council for Psychotherapy—the nation’s top professional association—declared that it was fine for counselors to take GETA’s “exploratory” approach to gender. This April, a long-awaited review of gender-related care for youth in England’s National Health Service endorsed exploratory therapy, according to Alex Keuroghlian, an associate psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School. And in the United States, in cases in which families of trans children have sued states for banning gender-affirming care, the state often calls expert witnesses who endorse “exploratory” psychotherapy as their preferred alternative treatment.

After all, the idea of “exploring” one’s gender identity sounds benign. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which issues guidelines on gender-­affirming treatment, recommends that clinicians working with teens “facilitate the exploration and expression of gender openly and respectfully so that no one particular identity is favored.” Yet, as with mindfulness, “that term has now been hijacked by folks on the other side,” says Judith Glassgold, a clinical psychologist who chaired the APA task force that in 2009 documented the lack of science behind conversion therapy.

GETA’s guidelines instruct therapists to dig deep into “the entire landscape of the young person’s life and subjective experience,” probing all possible reasons they might identify as transgender. The catch, says Glassgold, is that “exploration” means “trying to find negative reasons why someone’s diverse.” Last year, SAMHSA issued a report saying that “approaches that discourage youth from identifying as transgender or gender-diverse, and/or from expressing their gender identity” are sometimes “misleadingly referred to as ‘exploratory therapy.’” These approaches are “harmful and never appropriate,” the report concluded.

GETA rebranded as Therapy First late last year, saying exploratory therapy was really no different from standard psychotherapy. The group’s membership statement still disavows conversion therapy. But its co-founder Stella O’Malley told me she believes bans on conversion therapy should apply only to sexual orientation. And in Las Vegas, Cretella drew a direct connection between the old work of the Alliance and the new work of gender-exploratory therapists. “It truly is very similar to how the Alliance has always approached unwanted SSA [same-sex attraction],” she told the assembled therapists. “You approach it as ‘change therapy’—or, even less triggering, ‘exploratory therapy.’”

At lunch, I headed over to a discussion convened by Robert Vazzo, a red-faced man with a buzz cut. While picking at his rice pilaf, he recalled working with a trans-feminine 14-year-old. Vazzo referred to them as a “young man” who “complained of being trans.” He complimented their biceps and tried to get them to be “more assertive” with their mother. The goal, he explained, was to get the teen to connect with some inner masculinity. “The bulk of our work is trying to get people to value who they really are,” Vazzo told me. “Who they really are,” in this view, is cisgender.

In 2017, Vazzo filed a lawsuit against the city of Tampa, Florida, after it imposed a fine on licensed counselors who attempt conversion therapy on minors. Vazzo says he was represented pro bono by the Christian-right law firm Liberty Counsel, which also represented Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to grant marriage licenses for gay couples in 2015. Liberty Counsel argued that the city was infringing on Vazzo’s right to free speech, because his treatment consists of talk therapy. In late 2019, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump agreed with Vazzo and overturned the Tampa ordinance, concluding that the state, not the city, should determine health care regulations and discipline.

Between 2012 and 2023, the Alliance and connected groups filed a combined 11 federal lawsuits challenging conversion therapy bans in eight states. Vazzo’s was the first to succeed. The next year, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals shut down a similar ordinance in Boca Raton, Florida, which had been challenged by former Alliance President Julie Hamilton and another therapist. The court concluded that it violated the First Amendment. The decision blocked youth conversion therapy bans in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.

So far, the 11th Circuit is the only federal appeals court to agree with the idea that conversion therapy is protected by the First Amendment, says Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Minter notes that federal courts have previously considered clinicians’ words in mental and medical health care settings to be a form of professional conduct and fair game for state regulation.

At the time of the conference, the Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear a similar case brought by Brian Tingley, who sued Washington state with the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the powerful conservative Christian legal organization behind many recent anti-trans bills and attacks on abortion, in order to practice conversion therapy. The Supreme Court declined to take the case, but a similar lawsuit, also filed by ADF, is making its way through the Colorado court system.

In his dissent to the court’s decision not to take the Tingley case, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, described bans on conversion therapy for minors as “viewpoint-based and content-based discrimination in its purest form.” Thomas even foreshadowed a future ruling overturning conversion therapy bans: “Although the Court declines to take this particular case, I have no doubt that the issue it presents will come before the Court again. When it does, the Court should do what it should have done here…consider what the First Amendment requires.”

Meanwhile, the fight over conversion therapy bans is continuing in state legislatures. In 2023, Indiana passed a law halting enforcement of local bans. This year, legislators in two more states, Iowa and West Virginia, introduced similar bills.

The West Virginia bill went further than the one in Indiana—attempting to stop mental health professionals from providing anything except conversion therapy to trans minors. The bill, which suggested trans people have “delusion[s],” would have prohibited providers “from attempting to induce or exacerbate gender dysphoria in a minor…with no intent of cure or cure-pursuing recovery.”

That measure failed. But in Nebraska, a similar—though less explicit—bill has already become law. The “Let Them Grow Act,” passed last year, mandates that trans kids receive therapy before they get any medical treatments for gender dysphoria. On its face, the law appears to preserve some access to treatments; its language emphasizes the need to protect kids. “What we got was a version that ends up sounding more compassionate,” says Abbi Swatsworth, the executive director of OutNebraska, an organization that coordinated community opposition to the bill. “But in actuality, it is much worse.”

After it passed, Nebraska’s health department was tasked with issuing guidelines on implementing it. The state’s chief medical officer, Timothy Tesmer, an ear, nose, and throat doctor, assembled a team of “experts”—but didn’t include anyone who specialized in transgender medical care, local practitioners and advocacy groups say.

The rules crafted by Tesmer’s department require that trans kids receive 40 hours of therapy that “do not merely affirm the patient’s beliefs” before the kids can move forward with medical interventions like puberty blockers. The therapy recommendations are “not in the standard of care, they’re not in any of the pediatrics or psychiatry literature,” says Alex Dworak, a family physician who works with trans youth in Nebraska. Florence Ashley, a bioethicist at the University of Toronto who focuses on trans issues, points to the regulations’ instruction not to “merely affirm” a client. “What does that mean, in the actual therapy room?” Ashley asks. “Does that mean they can’t use your name and pronouns? Because then that’s very much privileging a specific outcome.”

Camie Nitzel, the founder of Kindred Psychology in Lincoln, is wondering the same thing. “If the artwork in my office reflects gender-­diverse faces, is that overly affirming?” she asked Tesmer in a letter opposing the regulations. Nitzel, who has been working with trans Nebraskans for 29 years, uses the clinical approach recommended by the APA. Under the Nebraska regulations, therapists “are going to be forced to choose between practicing ethically and practicing legally,” she warns. Already, some other providers have begun to refuse to see trans youth because of the risk. “We’re now getting referrals from providers who have worked with trans youth before, but they’re sending their clients here because they don’t feel comfortable,” Nitzel says. “Providers are faced with the decision about the safety of continuing to do work.”

Meanwhile, the trans community in Nebraska is just plain scared. Andrew Farias, a lobbyist in Lincoln, is so worried about the possibility of future restrictions on adult trans health care that he temporarily stopped testosterone just to see if he could bear it. “I want to make sure that I’m prepared in terms of my own safety and mental health,” he says. “I wanted to test myself and see: Could I do this?…Or do I have to move?”

I left the last session of the conference with my head spinning. In the world of the Alliance, down was up, harm was help, expert conclusions were lies—or were they? As I made my way out of the hotel lobby, where the therapists were gathering to walk together to a nearby diner, I had the feeling of exiting an alternate reality.

No one had distilled that feeling better than the Alliance’s incoming leader, David Pickup. “There is such a thing as a man born in a woman’s body,” he’d declared in a speech, delivering the line with sarcastic bravado. “There is such a thing as homosexual marriage.” Then he parodied what was happening in the Hampton Inn: “The small conferences that are held by these fringe groups across the country are all right-wing, unscientific, no-research-given, closeted Christians who try to prod and force people to do therapy.” The audience laughed with uncertainty. Had their comrade gone soft on them?

No one need worry; Pickup cut to his point: “The Alliance tells you the truth. And none of those statements I just said—even though the world tends to now believe in that—has anything to do with truth,” he assured them. In Pickup’s view, “the transgender movement is actually crumbling. In part, that’s due to the Alliance.” Then he asked the audience to take out their phones and laptops to donate. “Good things are coming,” he promised. “I think the truth will one day win out, more than ever.”

There is an urgency behind Pickup’s words. His truth must win out because the opposite would be devastating. To concede that trans people are real, let alone happy, would strip away the Alliance’s last best hope of a comeback. 

Read more about Myles Markham’s story of surviving conversion therapy—and finding self-love—here.

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

Correction, May 17: A previous version of this story misstated Alex Dworak’s medical specialty.

The conclusions of the Cass Review differ from mainstream standards of care in the United States, which recommend medical interventions like blockers and HRT under certain circumstances and are informed by dozens of studies and backed by leading medical associations. The Cass Review won’t have an immediate impact on how gender medicine is practiced in the United States, but both Europe’s “gender critical” movement and the anti-trans movement here in the US cited the report as a win, claiming it is the proof they need to limit medical care for trans youth globally. Notable anti-trans group the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine called the report “a historic document the significance of which cannot be overstated,” and argued that “it now appears indisputable that the arc of history has bent in the direction of reversal of gender-affirming care worldwide.”

Most media coverage of the report has been positive. But by and large that coverage has failed to examine extensive critiques from experts in the US and elsewhere. Research and clinical experts I interviewed explained that the Cass Review has several shortcomings that call into question many of its findings, especially around the quality of research on gender medicine. They also question the credibility and bias underpinning the review. I spoke with four clinical and research experts in pediatric medicine for gender-diverse youth to dive into the criticisms.

“I urge readers of the Cass Review to exercise caution,” said Dr. Jack Turban, director of the gender psychiatry program at the University of California, San Francisco and author of the forthcoming book Free to Be: Understanding Kids & Gender Identity. 

The Cass Report’s bar for evaluating research is too high

In scientific research, the randomized control trial (RCT) is often considered the gold standard. In a randomized control trial, study subjects are randomly split up into two groups. One group gets the treatment being examined. The other group doesn’t, and is used as a baseline with which compare the effects of the treatment.

But there are ethical limits to this setup, says Dr. Meredithe McNamara, a professor of pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine who co-leads the Integrity Project, a Yale research hub meant to bridge the gap between policy and science. RCT’s are great when “it is not known whether or not the intervention might be beneficial,” McNamara says. “Having pre-knowledge of benefits means that we would never consider randomizing somebody to no treatment.” In other words, RCTs are a great option when there is not a lot of data pointing to the efficacy of a certain drug or treatment program. But when that data does exist, using RCTS would be considered “unethical” and “coercive,” says McNamara.

In the case of gender-affirming care, decades of research exists showing “gender-affirming care confers key benefits to those who desire and qualify for this care, including youth,” McNamara explains. “It would not make sense ethically to conduct a randomized control trial.” The Federal Drug Administration suggested as much last year, when it told researchers conducting a study on estrogen for trans patients not to use an RCT. That clinical study may include youth as young as 13, per suggestion from the FDA.

The evidence supporting medical interventions for trans youth comes from primarily observational studies, meaning those conducting the research collected data on people undergoing gender-affirming medical care. These kinds of studies are used 70 percent of the time in research on health care, McNamara explains. Alex Keuroghlian, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a clinic psychiatrist and director of education at Fenway Health in Boston, emphasizes that gender-medicine providers are not making choices arbitrarily or without robust research. “It’s really setting a double standard in terms of expectations for evidence supporting medical intervention. It is not the standard we expect in other contexts,” they say.

Cass’ systematic evidence reviews used the “somewhat subjective”—as Turban puts it—Newcastle-Ottawa scale rating system to evaluate research on gender-affirming care, which is a rating system to evaluate observational studies. (More precisely, the review actually commissioned researchers at the University of York to conduct the ratings, which Cass then discusses at length in her own report).

The reviewers from York evaluated the research on a scale from “low quality” to “high quality” and found that “much of the research rated as moderate or even sometimes high quality,” explains Turban. But the Cass Review diverged from these findings. Some experts suspect that may be because she compared the research to RCTs despite their inappropriateness. There is “actually wider understanding of the evidence than the Cass Review presents,” says Streed. Cass categorically denies that the review “set a higher bar for evidence than would normally be expected.”

“It’s a bad faith claim that we don’t have enough evidence for pubertal suppressants or gender-affirming hormones,” says Keuroghlian, who has worked with over 2,000 trans and gender-diverse patients in their career. “Gender-affirming medical interventions have been used for adolescent gender dysphoria for decades, and we have a large body of evidence linking them to improved mental health outcomes,” says Turban.

Cass doesn’t apply important terminology consistently or accurately

Multiple experts told me that the language in the review diverged from technical standards and may confuse readers. McNamara explains: “There is a lot of terminology-switching throughout the report.” “Low-quality evidence” is a technical term with specific technical meanings that can be interpreted by researchers, she says. “Weak” or “poor quality,” on the other hand, are “subjective terms that might strike a chord with the lay public but don’t have any concrete meaning.” This means that a reader who is not an expert in medical research may assume that the there are dangers or uncertainties around this health care when there are not. 

Perhaps because of the loose use of terminology, the Cass report describes some gender-medicine research as “poor” even though those same studies were rated “moderate” or “high quality” by reviewers at the University of York. The studies downgraded by Cass all demonstrated the efficacy of gender-affirming medical interventions. On the other hand, other studies that didn’t come to such strong conclusions in favor of intervention were not similarly downgraded. 

Carl Streed, the research lead for the GenderCare Center at Boston Medical Center and president of the US Professional Association for Transgender Health, clarifies that just because a study is classified as “low-quality” in the report does not mean the data is not robust or rigorous. “It doesn’t actually mean the evidence itself is not to be trusted,” he explains. “It is just that you have to understand the nuance of the methods to understand the context of the results.” 

Cass endorses questionable therapeutic treatment  

The Cass review recommends psychotherapy as the main and frontline treatment for gender-diverse youth, in place of medical interventions like puberty blockers. But the experts I spoke to say the evidence shows psychotherapy alone doesn’t do enough. Clinicians have been trying “psychotherapy as the way to solve issues around gender since at least the late 1800s” explains Streed. “It wasn’t working. It wasn’t leading to any kind of significant success, people still had significant distress.” 

“No contemporary evidence whatsoever shows that people who receive only psychotherapy experience improvements in gender dysphoria,” says McNamara. “There is an abundance of evidence showing that medically affirming interventions confer key benefits and there is none regarding psychotherapy alone.”

What’s more, the therapeutic approach Cass seems to suggests has close ties to conversion therapy. While Cass does not recommend a specific modality, she repeatedly advocates for an “exploratory” approach. She writes: “The intent of psychological intervention is not to change the person’s perception of who they are but to work with them to explore their concerns and experiences and to help alleviate distress.” 

Fair enough. Except that these are the same talking points that conversion therapists use to describe their work. There’s even a group, Therapy First, devoted to pushing the idea of “gender exploratory therapy.” Therapy First’s co-founder has advocated to make conversion therapy bans more lenient to make room for an “exploratory” approach. The US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has stated that gender change efforts are often “misleadingly referred to as ‘exploratory therapy.’” 

Streed explains that “at best, gender exploratory therapy is just delaying people’s access to the care they need, and at worst, it is conversion therapy. That is what we’ve seen in multiple studies, and it is associated with harm.” Keuroghlian puts it more bluntly: “Not providing gender affirming care in a timely way” is “trafficking in conversion efforts.” 

“It feels like a double standard to say, ‘Oh, there’s no evidence for medical and surgical interventions with regards to gender-affirming care or affirmation,’ but then, ‘Oh, let’s turn around and offer this other therapy that has absolutely no evidence,’” says Streed.

In a follow-up Q&A, Cass said she “believes that no LGBTQ+ group should be subjected to conversion practice.” At the same time, she stands behind her inclusion of exploratory therapies, saying, “young people with gender dysphoria may have a range of complex psychosocial challenges and/or mental health problems impacting on their gender-related distress. Exploration of these issues is essential.”

The Cass Report shows signs of bias 

Cass does a fair amount of work at the outset of the report to make clear that she’s not attempting to undermine “the validity of trans identities” or rollback “people’s rights to healthcare.”

But Cass goes too far in her attempts to remain neutral. The review cites sources that lack credibility or are from anti-trans actors, including an article written a college undergraduate, a pamphlet funded by an anti-trans group, and a YouTube channel run by right-wing commentators. More than once she cites notable exploratory therapists like Ken Zucker.

Further, experts note the report does not disclose all the people who collaborated on the project and their affiliations. Streed says, for similar reviews, “every author has to have their name on it and say what their conflicts of interests are, where they are getting their funding from. The Cass Report does not offer that information. For me, that is a big red flag.” Some of those connections have become clearer since the report was published. For example, the blog Growing Up Transgender uncovered a 2022 meeting between the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has dubbed “the hub” of the “anti-LGBT pseudoscience network.”  Representing SEGM were Richard Byng and R. Stephens, who were identified in the meeting as part of NHS’ “working group on Gender Dysphoria.” 

More broadly, Keuroghlian and McNamara both argue that Cass’ conclusions undermining the observational studies is itself a form of bias. “The review’s conclusions are discriminatory,” says Keuroghlian. “It’s an intentional misapplication of science to deny a minoritized group access to medically necessary evidence-based care.” “Any deviation from basic principles of evidence-based medicine suggests bias,” says McNamara. 

Allegations of bias in the report are not new. In November 2023, Zinnia Jones, who runs the website and web series Gender Analysis, surfaced court documents in GLAD’s constitutional challenge to Florida’s ban on gender-affirming care for youth. The documentation showed that in 2022, Cass met with Patrick Hunter, a DeSantis appointee to the Florida Board of Medicine, member of SEGM, and big proponent of banning gender affirming medical care for transgender youth.

Hunter sent Cass materials from Florida’s thoroughly discredited 2022 review of gender medicine. That review had gotten edits from Andre Van Mol, a member of a fringe, conservative doctors group that calls itself the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds). (Read more about Van Mol and his partners in my colleague Madison Pauly’s investigation.) Cass passed along research from her in-progress review and was even invited to do a presentation in front of the Florida Board of Medicine, which was then putting together specific regulations on youth access to HRT and puberty blockers. The Florida review and Cass reports draw similar conclusions about the “weak” research on gender-affirming care. 

The experts I spoke to hope the report is not set in stone. “This report and its systematic reviews were just released, and experts are actively reviewing their contents,” Turban says. “Our team has already identified an error with the systematic review on gender-affirming hormones and has notified the journal, requesting a correction be issued.” 

“There are no neutral decisions to be made for transgender youth.” McNamara explains, “We have to recognize that physical change that does not align with a person’s gender identity is a source of harm for people who experience gender diversity and dysphoria. Simply watching that happen, feel feels like doing harm.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the relationship between the Newcastle-Ottawa scale and RCTs. 

In another 60 years, it’ll be discovered that your fur hides regenerative, bony scales called osteoderms—an incredible adaptation long thought exclusive to armadillos and reptiles. The finding is pure accident: a herpetologist on an unrelated project, Dr. Edward Stanley, happens to scan you and catch “something strange.” You launch a small scientific firestorm and several research studies. Researchers hypothesize that you could help unlock regenerative medicine, a nascent field which seeks to replace or “regenerate” our cells and organs.

But that’s a long way off.

Back in ’63, Charles A. Reed, the young curator of Yale’s Peabody Museum, packs you into a traveling bag with dozens of other spiny mice, likely relatives. You’re dead, by the way. But you will have an afterlife. You will be ooohed and aaahed at by Connecticut schoolchildren, if you’re among the one to two percent of specimens that make it into a display case. More likely, you will prodded by researchers. Hopefully not undergrads. Even more likely, you’ll sit tagged and stored in a climate-controlled room on campus. I imagine that even in the dull light of Yale, your golden fur glints.

Around the same time, British engineer Godfrey Hounsfield ponders how to “look inside a box without opening it.” It takes the soldier-turned-inventor—described as “thick” by schoolteachers—until 1971 to outshine his peers by inventing the CT scan, or computed tomography, which uses X-ray technology to create detailed internal images of the body. His invention transformed medicine, but Hounsfield had no interest in the field; his device was produced by the company that manufactured Beatles records. He still wins the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine a few years later. Hounsfield dreams of using his invention to find lost passages in Egyptian tombs. He never does, but CTs are used to scan countless mummies during his life.

In 2017, some two decades after both men died, Reed’s museum and Hounsfield’s revolutionary machine finally meet. 

Unlike humans, who slide into CT scanners on a gurney and remain still as it moves, you—the mouse—are mounted vertically and spun around while the machine sits motionless. Perks of being dead. You’re placed there by Stanley, the fast-talking and enthusiastic British herpetologist.

In this moment, you reveal your secret, the dermal armor that coats your tails. It’s a stroke of luck that Stanley, a lizard expert, took you to the machine. How does a mouse mostly found an ocean away develop the same trait as distant lizards and armadillos? Geneticists dive in. Through RNA sequencing, they identify the gene networks that allowed the change to evolve. Scientists are still trying to figure out if osteoderms play the same protective role in mice that they do in other species.

The discovery probably wouldn’t have happened without Stanley’s passion for digital equity. Researchers have scanned tens of thousands of specimens since Hounsfield invented the CT scan—but digitization was “so piecemeal,” Stanley explains, because researchers were “scanning things for specific projects” and not sharing data from each scan. That made quick collaborations like the spiny mouse study much rarer and more difficult. 

But this scan was part of Stanley’s openVertebrate project project, or oVert, which was trying to change that. Instead of handfuls of scans accessible only to some academics, oVert set out to scan thousands of specimens and make the data available to anyone. Over the last six years, they did just that, analyzing 20,000 specimens from museums across the US. In March, they made it all— images, 3D morphology files, and code—available to anyone with internet access. The trove of data has logged almost a million views and been downloaded almost 100,000 times. They’ve since received data for 54,000 more specimens.

The proof is in the pudding, and it’s not all about mice. More than 200 peer-reviewed publications, with several hundred authors, have cited oVert’s data, including at institutions across the US and from China to Portugal, to India, to South Africa, and to Australia. Researchers have finally figured out the anatomy of the “elusive” blind snake, or how frogs lost their teeth. They’ve found a new species of lizard, among countless other discoveries.

Stanley’s oVert project is both the culmination of long research and the propellant for much more. Without Hounsfield’s CT scanner, and without thousands of researchers following in Reed’s footsteps, these discoveries wouldn’t be happening. They also couldn’t happen without those, like Stanley, committed to more public access and collaboration with diverse research institutions. And that’s sorely needed in the field. 

In 2024, you still sit preserved in the Peabody, where you’ve been since JFK was president. But every detail of your form is on the cloud, and can be seen across the world. Your afterlife has gained its own afterlife.

The specimens that sit in Yale’s Peabody, and similar collections, were in large part gathered by colonial expeditions or projects, sometimes traveling on slave ships, used to help justify colonial expansion, or stolen along with precious cultural artifacts. That legacy still permeates the field, shaping who can access zoological repositories and knowledge. More than 70 percent of specimens “are located in developed countries with colonial histories,” writes Daniel Park, a biologist at Purdue University in Indiana. That, Park says, hinders former colonies’ ability to conduct research. And it’s exacerbated by a digital divide that makes data inaccessible outside select institutions: less than 10 percent of zoological research collections digitize and share images of their specimens. Park calls on those institutions to expand their digital reach and remedy the harm to the Global South, including by investing in research abroad.

Stanley realizes the problematic history of the museums he inhabits, which, in his words, began as “cabinets of curiosity that rich aristocrats in their houses [showed] off to their mates.” Even when those museums transformed into public-facing institutions, beginning in the mid-19th century, only small portions of their collections were ever shown to the public.

Stanley is ready to change that. “The next stage is making the data truly available,” he says. “That means increasing training for people. It means improving the pipelines…It means making educational resources available for people, and training scientists to better articulate their science.” 

“I like the idea of this being the next phase of natural history museums, where we can not only point to the the overwhelming and slightly befuddling diversity of things we have, but actually let people explore that themselves,” Stanley says. “I’m collecting things today that I hope in a hundred years’ time will be used in ways I couldn’t begin to imagine.”

More than two years have passed since Conley blasted the consortium of utilities and government entities behind the massive clean energy project for “playing a shell game,” accused them of behaving “cavalierly,” and derided their legal arguments as “thin porridge indeed.” Since then, the legal battle has continued ricocheting through the courts, shedding light on one of the most intractable debates in the struggle to decarbonize the US economy. In March 2024, Conley again ordered a halt to construction. That meant more delays for the transmission line, which had already cost nearly $650 million, some $156.8 million over budget.

Those delays might now be coming to an end. Last week, the Seventh Court of Appeals lifted Conley’s most recent injunction, apparently paving the way for construction to resume and for the promised climate benefits of the project—an annual emissions reduction of between 150,000 and 1.1 million tons of carbon, according to its backers—to finally be realized. Conley is set to hear a last-ditch motion next week from plaintiffs still hoping to thwart the deal, though it’s unclear if that will come in time to stop the utilities from clearcutting the land.

As the need for new infrastructure to mitigate and adapt to climate change grows more dire, the massive for-profit companies behind these projects have sought to steamroll local opposition and bypass inconvenient—and, according to many, unreasonably onerous—laws. That’s resulted in fights not just between developers and environmental activists, but often between competing groups of environmentalists who are waging an increasingly high-stakes debate: Are the patchwork of local, state, and federal permitting rules an archaic impediment to green energy, or are they a vital safeguard holding communities together?

Virtually everyone involved in the debate agrees that investment in new energy infrastructure has become increasingly urgent. “To meet [the Biden administration’s goals of] 100 percent…clean electricity energy by 2035 and…a zero-emissions economy by 2050, the US Department of Energy says we will need to triple our transmission capacity by 2050,” says Matthew B. Eisenson, who leads the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative at Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Since renewables are often sited specifically to maximize their energy input—solar farms, for example, are in sunny areas—they may not always be near population centers. Transmission lines are needed to transport the energy to consumers. Eisenson explains that we need to install 54,500 gigawatt-miles of new transmission lines. The Biden administration has already set aside $73 billion for this work and other updates to the grid. 

Supporters of the Cardinal-Hickory Creek transmission line say it’s a key part of the region’s transition away from fossil fuels. When complete, the project—whose utility company coalition includes American Transmission Company, ITC Midwest LLC, and Dairyland Power Cooperative, with backing from the federal government’s Rural Utility Service—is supposed to connect 161 solar and wind projects to the grid.

Conservation groups opposing the plan counter that the developers didn’t even consider options that wouldn’t endanger such an important wildlife preserve. The sensitive ecology of the region is wholly unique, explains Jennifer Filipiak, the executive director of the Driftless Area Land Conservancy, one of the plaintiffs in the suit. The Driftless Area—which covers parts of Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota, including the refuge—”is where the glaciers never extended and receded.” That difference, over 12 millennia ago, had a lasting impact on the ecosystem. “It’s like you’re in a totally different place,” she says. “We have a lot of unique features, species, and habitats here.”

For months, the project has been stalled at the edges of the refuge, as the utilities worked on an agreement with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to swap 20 acres of the existing refuge for 36 new acres elsewhere. That swap was reportedly completed on Thursday, though the conservation groups are still hoping for a last-minute judicial intervention to once again halt construction. Either way, the legal battle could have lasting implications for the future of protected land, green energy, and climate action.

The Cardinal-Hickory Creek fight is as much about legal principles as it is about the fate of the mile-wide section of the wildlife refuge the developers want to traverse. The actual environmental impacts of the current deal on the table are arguably not the worst outcome, explains David Drake, a wildlife specialist at the University of Wisconsin. With proper mitigation, he argues, the ecosystem could respond well to the proposed land swap. “After the transmission towers are constructed, there is a minimal impact at that point,” he explains, though he warns that construction would still pose dangers like habitat disturbance and invasive species.

The utility coalition behind the project has submitted federal filings that claim the new land “has tremendous conservation value to the Refuge…since it provides higher quality habitat and less fragmentation.” Proponents of the plan, like Princeton Professor Jesse Jenkins, who heads the university’s Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Laboratory, agree. Following Conley’s March ruling, Jenkins wrote that the opposition’s arguments were “absurd” and pointed out that the swap would retire two existing transmission lines on the newly added land.

But more important, according to the groups opposing the project, is how the developers went about constructing the transmission line and what would happen if they got the legal gold stamp to do it again. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a bad deal, a neutral deal, or a really good deal,” Filipiak says. “[It’s] the precedent that it is setting.”

Howard Learner, an attorney representing opponents of the project, argues that his clients were left with little choice but to sue because the utilities and their government backers attempted to fast-track the deal without proper permitting. If the developers’ tactics are rewarded, he warns, public lands all over the country could be in danger—especially in a future Trump administration that could aggressively seek to evade environmental protections. “They will put our national wildlife refuges and national parks and national wilderness areas up for sale in a swap-a-rama,” he predicts.

Eisenson, who isn’t involved in the case, agrees that it could set a precedent for land swaps. He’s not convinced that the practical effects of such a precent would be particularly harmful, however, due to the highly specific nature of this dispute. At 261 miles long, the Upper Mississippi refuge poses an unusually formidable obstacle for a transmission line, one that other projects are unlikely to encounter. And he worries a final ruling in favor of the conservation organizations could cause backsliding to fossil fuels “if it looks like investing in transmission for wind and solar is too costly and too risky.”

The legal basis for opposition to the Cardinal-Hickory Creek project dates to the 1997 National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act, which requires public input in land management decisions and mandates that any alterations be compatible with the purpose of the refuge: that is, wildlife protection and recreational opportunities for visitors.

The law followed what Learner calls a “death of 1,000 cuts” to the wildlife refuges. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, he explains, “refuge managers were being put under political pressure to engage in [deal-making] and allow big power lines and pipelines and highways to run through the middle of our refuges.” This led to massive habitat fragmentation, which is detrimental to wildlife. “Animals need large pieces of connected land,” Learner says, and “the wildlife refuges were getting carved up.”

Conservation groups and other opponents of development have become increasingly adept at using these legal tools. “Transmission lines are an especially difficult thing to build,” says Aidan Mackenzie, a fellow at Institute for Progress who supports the project. “It’s complex linear infrastructure that just cuts through many different jurisdictions. You’re impacting a lot of different communities…There are just way more chances that people will have to take issue with their projects.”

In this case, Learner and his clients argue that the mandatory assessments of the project’s possible environmental consequences have been inadequate—an increasingly common scenario as the Bureau of Land Management receives pressure to approve green energy projects. Since the developers didn’t evaluate potential routes that circumvented the refuge, opponents say, they failed to consider the full impact. “If they had, they may have concluded that avoiding the Refuge altogether would be the alternative with the least environmental impact,” says Filipiak.

Proponents such as Jenkins counter that avoiding the refuge altogether simply isn’t feasible. “The Upper Mississippi Wildlife Refuge extends north to south through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois for approximately 260 river miles!” he wrote on X, following the March injunction. “So can’t go around it. Gotta go through it.”

When confronted with that argument back in 2017, the EPA declined to try to block the project but instead “strongly recommended” in its assessment that the developers evaluate routes outside of the refuge. Regardless, the utilities decided that their preferred plan included cutting a mile-long path through the reserve. Since a previous transmission line had passed through the refuge in the same spot, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages refuges, granted a permit in 2019.

But from there things got even more complicated. The utilities asked for a slightly amended right of way and then, before it could be approved, instead suggested the land swap. In August 2021, the Fish and Wildlife Service “responded favorably” to the land swap idea but did not explicitly approve it. A month later, the agency withdrew its entire compatibility determination from 2019 that allowed the utilities to pass through the refuge at all, saying it had “learned that an error had previously been made.”

Despite the lack of formal approval—for the right of way permit, or for the land swap—the developer coalition commenced building the utility line in 2021. Learner describes this process as “steamrolling.”

“They kept building and building and building while the courts were finding that they hadn’t satisfied their permits,” Learner says—a tactic he calls “a typical developer strategy.” Builders, he complains, might “ignore all the stop signs and tell everybody: How you could stop us now [when] we’ve already built 80 percent?”

Although not publicly known at the time, it has since emerged that the Fish and Wildlife Service and one of the power companies “had already entered into a non-binding understanding for a land exchange/purchase in private writing dated October 29, 2021,” explained Conley in a 2024 ruling.

The utilities continued their path toward the refuge even after Conley warned them against building across it in January 2022. In that order, the judge had called the utilities out at their tactics, stating that “while [the defendants] assert they are acting in good faith, there is substantial, contrary evidence in this record.” He explained that “the Utilities have continued construction on the Iowa side of the line and started construction on the Wisconsin side in October 2021, even as they maintained passage through the Refuge was uncertain.” And he accused the utilities of attempting “to evade judicial review until any route, other than through the Refuge, would be so prejudicial that a court would have little choice but to approve the crossing.”

Regardless of Conley’s scorching, the gambit appears to be paying off. A federal appeals court overturned Conley’s initial injunction in 2023. Meanwhile, the Fish and Wildlife Service raced forward with the utilities’ land-swap plan, giving the surrounding community just a 14-day public review and comment period—an amount of time that the plaintiffs challenged as inadequate. “It is setting [precedent] that you can do something as simple as this without public input, without public comments,” Filipiak says.

The unusually brief comment period was especially discouraging because of the outpouring of engagement from community members worried that the project could harm the environment, local tourism, and their property values. They were joined by a bipartisan group of US Senators, members of Congress, and state lawmakers who urged government officials to consider alternative routes and more rigorous environmental assessments. “It’s pretty amazing to see 1,000 people come together in an area where the largest town is 5,000 people,” Filipiak says.

As of now, half of the approximately 100-mile transmission line is already operational, while the remaining half sits in limbo. Everything is built, save for the mile-long stretch through the refuge.

In March 2024, Conley placed a 30-day preliminary injunction on construction and ruled that the plaintiffs have “a right to challenge the proposed land exchange in court before the metes and bounds of the Refuge are forever altered.” He ordered both parties to come back with supplemental briefs about whether the swap will actually benefit the refuge.

The utilities responded, arguing that “the federal agencies that granted the land exchange and issued permits for the project acted within their legal authority under federal law.” They once again appealed, and last week the appeals court lifted the injunction.

The Fish and Wildlife Service and the utilities finally completed the land exchange on Thursday, May 9, according to the Associated Press. A representative for the utilities reportedly said the exact start date of construction is still up in the air. For his part, Conley has set a new hearing for next Tuesday—five days after the land swap took place—to consider a final plea from the conservation groups hoping to pause the project.

Learner, meanwhile, is concerned that the utilities could start “clearcutting and construction” through the refuge before Conley has a chance to rule next week. “The Conservation Groups deserve their long-delayed day in court for a judicial review and a fair determination of the substantive merits of the claims before any damage occurs to the Refuge’s public lands and waters,” he said in a statement Thursday.

Mackenzie worries about the environmental toll of the legal back and forth. The project has already taken a decade, and for every additional year it remains offline, the country forfeits between 150,000 to 1.1 million tons of carbon savings, he says. “That’s a real cost.”

Mackenzie isn’t arguing that local communities should have no role in approving clean energy projects. “There are things to do to improve the ability of people to access the process, provide public comments, and be informed what the project impacts are,” he concedes. But he thinks that the glacial pace of construction dictated by laws from an earlier era is not helping anyone. “The never-ending litigation might need to be curtailed because these timelines just aren’t consistent” with Biden’s decarbonization goals, he adds.

Learner disagrees. “We can achieve renewable energies and climate solutions in our country without building transmission lines everywhere and anywhere,” he says. And if the Cardinal-Hickory Creek developers get their way, he argues, it “would create the distressing precedent of allowing transmission companies to bulldoze their way through protected national wildlife refuges.”

The exact cause of Benedict’s death—which occurred less than 24 hours after he was “jumped” by three other students who, in Benedict’s words, were “beating the shit out of me”—remains under investigation. The latest update from police confirmed that the fight has not been ruled out as Benedict’s cause of death. 

Benedict’s grandmother and guardian told the Independent that Benedict had been bullied over the past year for being transgender. Since Benedict’s death, calls to LGBTQ crisis centers from Oklahoma youth have increased by 300 percent. Eighty-five percent of those callers said they had faced bullying and 79 percent feared for their physical safety.

Benedict’s death also highlights the unique struggles that trans youth face under anti-trans policies and laws. In 2023, in addition to the bathroom ban, the Oklahoma legislature stopped trans kids from playing on sports teams that align with their gender and banned gender-affirming care for minors. The Oklahoma education department appointed far-right TikToker Chaya Raichik—of “Libs of TikTok”—to sit on the statewide library advisory board. Raichick promotes the “eradication of transgenderism.”

Many of these same politicians have used Benedict’s death as an opportunity to double down on their anti-trans rhetoric. During a public forum last week, state Sen. Tom Woods (R) said, “I represent a constituency that doesn’t want that filth in Oklahoma. We are going to fight to keep that filth out of the state of Oklahoma, because we’re a Christian state.” When pressed on if he was referring to the LGBTQ community when he said “filth” he said “no comment.”

Later, after the comment reached the national news, Woods said “a child losing their life is horrible,” but stood by his statement, adding: “This is an agenda that is being forced on Oklahoma kids. My voting record speaks for itself. I supported legislation to keep men out of women’s sports and to protect children from being mutilated by transition surgery before they can make an informed decision.”

Then there is Ryan Walters. Walters, the state superintendent, has spent the last few years working to ban anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in Oklahoma schools—when he is not running his Koch-brothers backed nonprofit or being accused of misusing state funds. In his short statement on Benedict’s death, Walters said: “We have witnessed the radical left and their accomplices in the media use the tragic death of a student to push a political agenda and a false narrative. It is despicable and harms our students and communities. I will continue to fight for parents and will never back down to the woke mob.”

Since then, Media Matters revealed that Walters has fundraised with conservative talk show host Ron Causby, who Walters described himself as being in a “bromance” with, and who, at a school board meeting in January 2022, encouraged his daughters to “kick the shit” out of transgender students.

Raichick, meanwhile, misgendered Benedict in posts, as she tried to defend herself against the upwelling of coverage linking her to the school district.

While the legislators and government officials surrounding Benedict have failed to rise to the occasion following their death, his friends, family, and the larger LGBTQ community has come together to share in grief and celebrate Benedict’s life. Rep. Mauree Turner (D), Oklahoma’s only nonbinary representative, held a moment of silence for Benedict on the state House floor, which was not respected by all of their colleagues. Turner wrote in a statement, “Every day I get more angry that we, politicians, no matter your party affiliation are aiding in a transgenocide… Nex’ death is a direct result of a failed administration in a public school that didn’t value the life of a trans student.” (Experts confirm that there is a correlation between anti-LGBTQ policies and violence.)

Nonbinary actor Sara Ramirez said at a vigil: “Nex, Benedict, I wanna say I’m sorry for the ways your peers and your school discarded and threw you away. Your life was valuable.”

Benedict’s partner shared, “He made everything easier. He kept energy levels high. He would always keep the room in a good mood. He was always one of the brightest kids in the room, whether he would smile or not.”

“Nex had a light in them that was so big, they had so many dreams.” Sue Benedict, Nex’s grandmother, told the Independent, “I want their light to keep shining for everyone. That light was so big and bright and beautiful, and I want everyone to remember Nex that way.” 

Yet for all the criticism it unleashed, or precisely because of that very criticism, conservative groups seized upon Paul’s piece to pursue anti-trans legal maneuvers. In Idaho, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the powerful conservative legal group known for its critical role behind the strategy that overturned Roe v. Wade, specifically cited Paul’s Feb. 4 column as evidence of the “ostracism, pain, and lifelong regret” young people experience after receiving gender-affirming health care. The legal brief, which aimed to overturn a federal judge’s December ruling that blocked the state from enforcing a ban on gender-affirming health care, was ultimately unsuccessful. But it underscored the right’s enthusiasm for including New York Times pieces that have been accused of cherry-picking data and citing problematic sources in their defenses of anti-trans legislation across the country. 

“It’s not surprising that the ADF would cite Paul,” Gillian Branstetter, Communications Strategist from the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, told Mother Jones. “They have been working to manufacture doubt around the safety and efficacy of this care.”

My colleague Madison Pauly has reported on this very effort. In May 2023, Pauly uncovered leaked emails that showed ADF working behind the scenes to pressure Republican lawmakers to create some of the most restrictive bills in the country. That strategy often involved citing misinformation and experts some view as unqualified or biased. 

Paul appears to follow a similar tactic. In her February piece, Paul claims that some professionals who question the gender-affirming care model feel silenced, afraid that airing public concerns over procedures would get them labeled as transphobic. Paul references Stephanie Winn, a therapist in Oregon who primarily works with parents of gender non-conforming youth “worried that [their] child’s new ‘identity’ may be influenced by peers, media, underlying mental health issues, or trauma.” But Paul failed to mention that Winn is not a neutral professional: She has promoted invasive techniques for parents to encourage their children not to be transgender; and supported theories like “RODG” and hormone imbalance caused dysphoria, both of which have not been supported by science; and testified against Oregon’s ban on conversion therapy. 

Paul also appears to follow ADF’s pattern of misrepresenting data. When her piece claims that “30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years,” Paul declines to include key context to that statistic: The study focused specifically on military families who stopped refilling their hormone replacement therapy prescriptions through Tricare, a health program for active duty service members. In the study, the researchers state “our findings are likely to underestimate continuation rates among transgender patients” because patients may have switched to an alternative insurance plan or private pay. Erin Reed, an independent trans journalist, also pointed out that the last two years of the study data coincided with Trump’s ban on transgender service members, another reason why people may have opted to switch providers. Paul presented the statistic as fact, without scientific or historical contextualization. Paul did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but after publication, a Times spokesperson said in an email that “this column was thoroughly reported and fact-checked, and we stand behind its publication.”

But it isn’t just Paul. The Attorney General of Missouri cited a highly criticized article by Emily Bazelon about gender therapy in an emergency order that restricted gender-affirming care for both trans youth and adults in the state. (As political rhetoric expert Heron Greenesmith told The Texas Observer, “Bazelon did a really great job of replicating their anti-trans talking points.”) The same piece by Bazelon was used in Alabama’s defense of a law criminalizing gender-affirming care for transgender youth. In September, Sen. Josh Hawley name-checked a Times investigation that reported on “whistleblower” Jamie Reed when he launched an investigation into The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, Reed’s former workplace. Reed was later accused of misrepresenting the experience of patients there.

“By any objective measure, the paper seems clearly devoted to advocating against this care,” Branstetter said of the Times.

Their coverage, Branstetter said, has led to a serious erosion of trust between the trans community and the Times. “If they want to tell the stories of trans people and the families who have been impacted by these bans, they are burning any trust as fast as they possibly can,” she continued.

This article has been updated to include comment from the New York Times.

Then he showed a video of the vehicle being pummeled by a machine gun, quipping, “If you’re ever in an argument with another car, you will win.” 

And then he sold a bunch of Cybertrucks. Two million have been preordered—and 500 delivered—for over $60,000 a pop. Some soon proved that they couldn’t survive a test drive, let alone a ride with Mad Max. I’m not kidding. Not one, but two Cybertrucks have been reported broken after test drives since October. Advertised as able to drive on “any planet,” the truck has been mocked for failing to drive up a snowy hill in California.

The vehicle, which was supposed to arrive in 2021 with a $40,000 price tag, was first announced in November 2019 in Los Angeles—the exact time and place where the film Blade Runner was set. The date is likely no accident: Musk has said that a character in the movie would have driven his truck. (It’s unclear if Musk has seen the movie; he named a character that didn’t exist.)

Regardless of Musk’s pop culture knowledge, I can guarantee no character in the BCU (Blade Runner Cinematic Universe) would own one of these trucks. The ’80s sci-fi classic is known for its abundance of rain. (The rain makes no sense meteorologically, but hey! That’s Hollywood.) And Cybertrucks are now known for rusting in the rain. A lot.

In Tesla’s promotional video advertising the bulletproof nature of their beastly vehicle, an engineer boasted that the custom alloy they used for the truck was a “bit more corrosion-resistant.” The engineer doesn’t say what it was more corrosion-resistant than. Apparently, not much. 

This week, on Cybertruckownersclub.com, which is exactly what it sounds like, hysterics broke out as owners realized they may be destined to a life of high-maintenance car buffing due to frequent rust. Several threads blew up as owners raced to figure out how their stainless steel vehicles could, you know, have stains. One commenter wrote: “Just picked up my Cybertruck today. The advisor specifically mentioned the cybertrucks develop orange rust marks in the rain and that required the vehicle to be buffed out.” Others posted photos of their trucks already speckled by damage.

Snuck in the owner’s manual, it turns out, was a whole section about how the stainless steel was quite stainable. The manual details: “To prevent damage to the exterior, immediately remove corrosive substances (such as grease, oil, bird droppings, tree resin, dead insects, tar spots, road salt, industrial fallout, etc.)” 

I don’t know about you all, but I always leave time in my apocalypse adventures to stop the car immediately after a bird shits on it. Maybe Musk falls into the “birds will go first” category of apocalypse believers?

To be clear, avoiding rust and corrosion isn’t just an aesthetic preference. Car experts write that “Rust can eat away at the internal components of your car and compromise its stability and weaken your car’s structural components and limits its capacity to handle impacts, consequently endangering your life.”

Genuine question, Elon, can you count it as “best in apocalypse technology” if it can’t even survive a little rain storm?

This isn’t the first time a futuristc car has had trouble in the rain. The DeLorean, the famous stainless steel sci-fi car of the 80s, is notorious for it.

It’s ironic, to say the least, that futuristic cars aren’t rain-ready, since all climate models forecast a future with more extreme weather. In the 80s, when DeLorean was made, those models were a little more iffy. But Elon doesn’t have that excuse. Why chose a metal that doesn’t stand up to predictably erratic environmental conditions?

Dr. Matthew Watkins, principal lecturer in mechanical engineering at Nottingham Trent University, had a similar question.

In an article for The Conversation, Watkins explains that pretty much every design choice—from the truck’s bulky frame to its safety concerns—stems from the decision to make it from stainless steel. “Why choose a material that is more difficult to form using traditional processes and that compromises your design language and aerodynamic efficiency?” he asked.

The answer was simple. The real reason why the metal, which made it bulky, rusty, ugly, and unsafe, was necessary? Because it apparently had to be bulletproof. “The key function that has determined the design of the Cybertruck is the requirement to be bullet-proof,” Watkins said, and “this material has enabled Tesla to make a truck that is.” (Far from the first shot at turning a profit on Silicon Valley’s doomsday complex.)

The bulletproof quality of the vehicle has been a pillar since it was first announced and spectacularly failed a live demonstration of that capability. And we know Musk hates being embarrassed, so it’s no surprise great care would be put into defending his ego at the expense of everything else.

And maybe that’s what makes Tesla, and the rest of the Musk empire, so apocalyptic. As Watkins writes, “a bulletproof, go-anywhere, do-anything tank with the ability to reach 60mph in 2.6 seconds is quite a tool in the wrong hands.” Cybertruck—and while we’re at it, X, and SpaceX, and self-driving Teslas—may be the best apocalypse technology. It’ll just be the cause of it.

Nashville residents weren’t alone in their troubles. The multi-week winter storm blast knocked out power for more than 750,000 Americans. Potable water was inaccessible in over 75 municipalities across both states, including cities such as Springfield, Oregon, where more than 60,000 residents were forced to boil their water for four days after pipes exploded and water infrastructure was damaged in the storm. Even as roads have opened up, the refreezing of water on streets and unexpected disasters like sinkholes keep travel treacherous.

Over 70 Americans so far have been reported dead. Most of those deaths are emblematic of structural failures—collisions on icy roads, hypothermia from heat and power loss, and tree damage—that improved infrastructure and city planning could have mitigated. 

Experts have been quick to call out the role of climate change in the storm’s intensity. Due to a disrupted polar vortex, exacerbated by global warming, the polar jet stream is more likely to bring intense cold to certain locations. Paradoxically, climate scientist Jennifer Francis told the Associated Press, “When the Arctic is off-the-charts warm (like now), we’re more likely to see frigid cold invade places like Texas that are ill-equipped to deal with it.”

Some states, like Oregon and Tennessee, are also ill-equipped to deal—and they’re feeling it. While eastern parts of Oregon have historically seen regular snowfall in the double digits, the Willamette Valley (where most of Oregon’s damage was sustained) sees, like Tennessee, five inches of snowfall in a typical year. The average temperature in both regions never drops below freezing.

It’s not surprising that states used to limited snow have limited snow infrastructure, explains Josh Bruce, associate director for applied research at the University of Oregon’s School of Planning. “We’re not going to have lots of snowplows and de-icers, because we don’t see these events particularly often,” he said.

But the problem isn’t two states underprepared for a storm. US infrastructure as a whole has consistently not been up to the task for regular use, let alone climate crisis–induced exacerbation. The same issues have been seen in inverse: States like Massachusetts, known for its snow resiliency, face growing wildfire risk—a hazard Oregon has long been prepared for.

“Nationally, in terms of critical infrastructure in particular, the US doesn’t grade particularly well,” Bruce says, pointing to years of public works and engineering assessments. Joseph Schofer, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University and host of The Infrastructure Show, a podcast, agrees that our infrastructure is “due for an update.” He told me that infrastructure is designed for a “certain range” of stress and demand. “When conditions exceed, we’re not prepared for it,” Schoefer explains. “Now, the assaults have changed and they’re much greater.”

Schoefer says that lack of preparation was a choice. “We didn’t design for that. We didn’t expect it. Should we have expected it? Historical evidence did not suggest it, but the trend line did.”

Bruce encouraged me to look beyond the current storm cycle to the systems behind it. “In this event, electricity was a big deal,” Bruce said. “A lot of people lost power, and if the only thing that they’re reliant on is electricity, things kind of slow down and grind and grind to a halt.” The snowstorm showed that Oregon could have improved canopy management, which would have reduced power outages.

But it also showed that the power grid didn’t have adequate backups when its lines were damaged, which could happen in a variety of disasters—including ones more common to the region. In 2022, Oregon’s legislature passed a bill investing $220 million in fire preparedness, but the strategies focused on wildfire-specific responses like risk mapping and prescribed burns. “Everybody’s going to talk about the winter storm and forget the context: how does this event fit in with the wildfires that we had in 2020? How do we think about flooding that may occur later this year?” Bruce asks.

In 2020, when Oregon faced a particularly bad wildfire season, the Oregonian reported that 50,000 residents lost power. Four years later, in the latest winter storm, grid failures left 200,000 without power. In February 2022, 132,000 people in Tennessee lost power due to a winter storm. The year before, 260,000 households in the state lost potable water also due to winter weather. “People’s attention spans are really short.” Bruce says.

Across the US, energy specialists warn that power grids aren’t prepared for this weather—especially amid transitions to green power. “There’s a fundamental difference between the gas and electric systems,” Ted Thomas, a former state energy regulator in Arkansas, told EnergyWire, referring to the fact that pipelines are built “incrementally by contract,” in contrast with the widespread planning of a power grid. “When they rub like this and we’re relying on gas in extreme weather, it creates a challenging situation.”

Grid experts are brainstorming to create power stations that are resilient to new disasters, especially after all power plants in New York state came dangerously close to losing power in 2022’s Winter Storm Elliot. “You need to build a grid that’s bigger than the weather,” another expert told EnergyWire.

The problem, though, is the US’ systematic delays in infrastructure investment. “We’re not investing on an ongoing basis,” Schofer says. “We’re not fixing roofs when there’s a growing problem, every 10 years or something like that. We’re waiting every 40 years, [until] the roof was leaking, and now saying, ‘Oh my God, I need a lot of money.'”

Even monumental investments like the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure deal barely scrape the surface of resources needed. The bill, which includes more than $343 billion for major projects like coastal restoration and road improvements, is not entirely the boon it seems. “When you read the fine print, only half is new investments and the rest is routine investments.” While it’s a good start, Schofer told me, “it’s a fraction of what we need.”

The country’s disinvestment in infrastructure has outsized effects on some. “More vulnerable populations tend to see a greater impact,” Bruce explains. Research shows that people dependent on electrically powered medical devices were disproportionately affected by winter storm outages. Communities of color and low-income communities have disproportionately poor infrastructure due to systematic disinvestment, meaning they are more at risk when storms hit.

“Communities that don’t have a political voice tend to either be ignored or adversely impacted by infrastructure decisions, whether that’s highways being put through low-income neighborhoods or disinvestment in certain areas. That’s the reality of our culture and society,” Bruce says.

Bruce encourages legislators and planners to take a multi-hazard approach. “Whether it’s an earthquake, a flood, a landslide, a windstorm, a drought, a winter storm,” Bruce says, “the more diversity in those systems the better”—both in terms of having systems that work for multiple events and maintaining backups.

Bruce recommends that states invest in microgrids, self-sufficient local power grids that will make the overall grid more redundant. That could look like installing solar panels and battery storage at critical facilities like hospitals and fire stations, so they won’t fail when a wider grid goes down. 

Counterintuitively, some responses to extreme weather require fossil fuel dependence. Across Oregon, Bruce explains, “There’s been activist attempts to try and have no natural gas installed in residences. A lot of people are saying ‘No fossil fuels ever at any time.’ Personally, I don’t think that is realistic—at least not right now, until we have better sources of redundant power.”

Schofer agrees that climate-resilient infrastructure and decarbonization are not always aligned. “[Green energy] is another bucket to put your money in. It’s another demand on resources. How much can we afford to do? Another way to look at it is to say, ‘If I have to rebuild, can I do this in a greener way?’”

But Bruce cautions against an uncritical look at some plans for green energy. “Batteries for electric vehicles or battery walls currently require some metals that are kind of nasty. Extracting those impacts tribal communities and natural areas. All of this is about trade-offs.” 

Three weeks after the latest storm, both Tennessee and Oregon are still rebuilding, with encouraging bills on the docket. The newest draft of Tennessee’s Transportation Modernization Act promises to drastically reduce the states’ billions of dollars in road repair bills, but not eliminate them. In Oregon, many are supportive of a bill to fund housing infrastructure, both to combat homelessness and improve climate resiliency. 

But as weather warms and the next disaster looms, the question remains: is it enough?

And that’s just the tip of the (quickly melting) iceberg.

Since the start of 2024, countless scientific studies have been published with big repercussions for our understanding of climate change and weather events. I read through as many as I could and have rounded up some of the most telling:

We might need to expand the hurricane rating system.

Hurricane strength is generally rated on a scale from 1 to 5, based on wind speeds. Category 3 hurricanes have wind speeds between 111 to 129 mph, for instance, and category 4 goes from 130 to 156 mph. Category 5, however, is flexible, and includes storms with wind speeds ranging from 157 mph to infinity. The trouble is, with climate change, the wind speeds just keep increasing. 2015’s Hurricane Patricia, for example, saw wind speeds up to 215 mph. 

That huge range is dangerous, researchers explained recently in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. “The open-endedness of the Saffir-Simpson Scale can lead to underestimation of risk,” the authors wrote. “This underestimation becomes increasingly problematic in a warming world.” 

In the paper, authors Michael F. Wehner, of the Berkeley National Laboratory, and James P. Kossin, of the nonprofit First Street Foundation, make the case for a Category 6 in the hurricane scale that would encompass winds greater than 192 mph. Wehner and Kossin found five storms that would fit into Category 6, and all of them occurred in the last decade.

While the researchers are not formally proposing changes to the scale, they hope “to raise awareness that the wind-hazard risk from storms presently designated as Category 5 has increased and will continue to increase under climate change.” Communication is a key way to mitigate that danger, Kossin emphasizes. “Changes in messaging are necessary to better inform the public about inland flooding and storm surge.” 

The world may have already surpassed the warming we thought we’d hit in the year 2100.

In a study published by the journal Nature Climate in early Feburary, researchers from the University of Western Australia looking at sea sponges stumbled upon an inconvenient fact: The Earth is warming at a rate almost two decades faster than expected. In 2015, 174 nations came together to draft the Paris Accords, an international treaty on climate change, and agreed on one thing: it was crucial to stop the world from getting 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter by 2100. “One-point-five has become an iconic figure,” Sir David King, former lead negotiator from the UK Foreign Office at the UN climate summit, told BBC News. We have left that iconic figure in the dust though, as the study in Nature Climate estimates we passed the 1.5 threshold in 2020. 

The researchers were able to come to this conclusion through a close examination of sclerosponges, a slow growing ocean creature that can live for hundreds of years. The team used strontium to calcium ratios—how much of each element in each sponge—sampled from the creatures to calculate the water temperature of the ocean over time. Due to the slow-growing nature of the sponges, the team was able to look back to temperatures in the 16th century, something no other researchers have been able to do; the IPCC, the UN’s climate change body, had relied on research drawn from sailors’ hand written logs.

Outside scientists like Dr. Hali Kilbourne of University of Maryland say the new research should be validated by other records before it completely shifts our paradigm. But the researchers feel confident in the sclerosponges, which are located below the sea surface in an area of the Caribbean not affected by major ocean currents. They may be the perfect neutral watchdog for ocean temperature. “The changes in Puerto Rico mimic the changes in the globe,” Amos Winter, one of the study’s authors told the New York Times.

Climate change deaths since 2000 top 4 million. 

Last month, a climate change biologist at Georgetown estimated that 4 million people died due to climate change between 2000 and today.

Biologist Colin Carlson reached that conclusion using the McMichael standard, a 2000-era estimation that looked at deaths from malnutrition, floods, diarrhea, and malaria and used computer modeling to estimate how many of those deaths were from climate change. His commentary in the journal Nature Medicine, published at the end of January, was titled: “After millions of preventable deaths, climate change must be treated like a health emergency.”

Carlson’s count is “definitely an underestimate” says Wael Al-Delaimy, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego who pointed to a lack of mortality data in low income countries. Even researchers involved with the McMichael standard admit they knew their model was conservative when they were implementing it.

Around the same time Carlson’s article was published, the World Economic Forum released a research report titled “Quantifying the Impact of Climate Change on Human Health.” The report utilized a similar framework to the McMichael standard, considering how floods, droughts, wildfires, sea-level rise, tropical storms, and heat waves may affect health. Their calculation estimated that 14.5 million would die globally from climate change by 2050. “These staggering numbers are actually conservative,” Daniel R. Brooks, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto uninvolved with the research, told Grist. 

Living up to its name, the WEF calculated that these deaths don’t come cheap. The report predicts that health care systems will bear $1.1 trillion in medical costs from climate-induced impacts.

Snowpack—and freshwater—is at the lowest it has ever been.

Newsrooms across Washington, California, Montana, and more are reporting “record-low” levels of snowpack. While traditionally considered to be a concern of the skiers and snowboarders of the world, snowpack is a key element of the water cycle. As the EPA explains, “millions of people in the West depend on the melting of mountain snowpack for hydropower, irrigation, and drinking water.” (Our recent water package digs into the losses and dangers of this loss of H2O.)

A January study published in the journal Nature proved that global warming caused declines in Northern Hemisphere snowpack from 1981 to 2020. The researchers identified 17.6 degrees Fahrenheit as the “tipping point” where snowpack starts to decrease significantly and warn that “further warming is likely to have rapidly emerging impacts on snow water resources in the mid-latitude basins where people reside and place competing demands on fresh water.”

And the snowpack loss has nothing on the “rapid and accelerating” groundwater loss we published about last week, which reported on another study in Nature that concluded nearly a third of aquifers showed accelerating rates of decline in groundwater levels over the past four decades.

At this point in the climate apocalypse article, there is an impulse to start citing good climate news. There’s the rising renewable energy use, a toad that was saved from extinction, and the unlikely benefit of chat GPT fighting against climate change deniers, to name a few.

But when the numbers keep breaking the wrong records—2023 was the hottest year on record—sometimes we just have to tally it up.