Defeated last week by the Maryland Court of Appeals, a Maryland antigay coalition’s canvassers continue to lie to mall shoppers in a twin effort to:

• re-legalize discrimination against transgender persons
• deny transgender persons access to gender-specific public facilities

The coalition includes “Citizens for Responsible Government” — an outfit of seemingly paranoid individuals sponsored by the national pro-theocracy Family Research Council and Alliance Defense Fund — and Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX).

The Maryland Court of Appeals today threw out a ballot petition to re-legalize discrimination against the transgender residents of Montgomery County. The antigay group, Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum and its offshoot Citizens for a Responsible Government, obtained substantial publicity and petition support from Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and its co-founder, the Family Research Council. The antigay campaign suffered from reports of misconduct among uncivil and misinformed canvassers who deceived petition signers about the petition. (Read More)

Focus on the Family again equated same-sex-attracted and gender-variant persons with sexual predators this week, when it condemned the signing of a new Colorado law that guarantees restroom access to gay and gender-variant persons.

Focus on the Family — de facto headquarters of the ex-gay movement through its Love Won Out roadshow and its political and financial influence over Exodus International — declared:

Henceforth, every woman and little girl will have to fear that a predator, bisexual, cross-dresser or even a homosexual or heterosexual male might walk in and relieve himself in their presence.

Despite growing disenchantment among evangelicals and repudiation by a new generation of Christian young adults, the aging and morally corrupt leadership of Focus on the Family seems unwilling to free itself from obsession with toilets, ex-gay sex, and abortion. (Read More)

UPDATED with revised conclusion.

Feministe say wrote May 13 of efforts to assist people struggling with gender identity:

Ken Zucker of Toronto’s Clarke Institute represents the widespread, traditional approach, where the goal is to eliminate cross-gender behavior and the desire to be a different gender. He basically describes his success rate as the number of kids he’s managed to steer away from becoming an adult trans person; as he’s said elsewhere, he wants to “help these kids be more content in their biological gender.”

Which sounds all right on paper, but how far do you go in denying a child’s perfectly innocent inclinations?

Feministe notes that some view Zucker’s attitude toward gender-variant people as repackaged ex-gay therapy. And so Feministe is naturally concerned that the American Psychiatric Association has put Ken Zucker in charge of a working group that will weigh changes to the definition of gender identity disorder.

Although I don’t know if I quite understand this given that the DSM is a diagnostic tool rather than a prescriptive tool, and given that previous DSMs were written from similarly retrogressive approaches, she also feels there’s “an additional danger that gay and lesbian communities need to be cognizant of […] if Zucker and company entrench conversion therapy in the DSM-V, then it is a clear, dangerous step toward also legitimizing ex-gay therapy and re-stigmatizing homosexuality.”

That may seem to be a logical fear, but apparently it is unwarranted:

Gay City News wrote a story today that addresses some (not all) activist apprehensions. Key points:

• The working groups will not prescribe treatment
• The diagnosis of homosexuality will not be put back into DSM

Dr. Jack Drescher, a gay Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry affiliated with New York Medical College and a member of the APA’s DSM Work Group for Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders, was helpful in clearing up concern relating to the scope of working-group efforts.