LGBTQ+ Americans have stronger support than ever — and fiercer backlash
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Casey Parks
2023-06-14 21:40:09GMT
Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D), center, and her fiancée, activist Erin Reed, left, talk with Ruth Belay of Los Angeles during a Pride celebration at the White House on Saturday. (Elizabeth Frantz for The Washington Post)
Republican-led state legislators and their allies have mounted a far-reaching and coordinated effort to pass a record wave of new measures restricting gay and transgender rights. Almost no aspect of life is untouched.
Among the roughly 60 laws enacted in nearly half of U.S. states this year are limits on what children can read about LGBTQ people, whether trans youth can participate in school athletics, what trans or nonbinary adults can wear in public, which bathrooms and pronouns they can use, and whom doctors can treat.
Trans Americans make up less than 1 percent of the population. But this year, they are facing heightened scrutiny. The backers of the restrictions say they want to protect children. Conflicts over LGBTQ rights have spilled into the streets, school board meetings and store aisles. Drag story hours and Pride Month displays are now occasions for protests, vandalism and even violence. Conservative pundits and elected officials regularly cast LGBTQ people as a threat to children and refer to them as “groomers,” echoing anti-LGBTQ campaigns of the 1970s.
All of this led the Human Rights Campaign this month to issue a state of emergency for LGBTQ Americans — the first in the nonprofit’s more than 40-year history. It also has prompted the architects of anti-trans laws, who say they have “maxed out” at the state level, to set their sights on passing federal restrictions. Both sides agree that the battle over LGBTQ rights is likely to intensify as another presidential election approaches.
Still, Erin Reed, an activist and content creator who publishes a daily newsletter on anti-LGBTQ legislation, said queer and trans people remain hopeful. They’ve endured discrimination in the past, and this time, they have a bigger community and a raft of new knowledge, including some gleaned from abortion rights activists who have navigated similar fights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
“The story of LGBTQ history is a story of resilience through community,” Reed said. “No matter how much they keep turning the dial on the cruelty and the extremeness of these laws, trans people still exist. We’re not going anywhere. We remain undaunted.”
A cultural shift on the right and the left
Across the country, LGBTQ activists say they have told themselves one thing over and over this year: We’ve been here before.
Though some might think social progress is a straight line up, historian Hugh Ryan said policymakers have often moved to curtail rights after periods of social liberation. Ryan, the author of LGBTQ history books including “When Brooklyn Was Queer,” noted that New York passed its first specifically anti-gay law, a cruising ban, 100 years ago, “immediately after [a] moment that is so progressive, it is still referred to as the Progressive Era.”
In the ’70s, Ryan said, a few years after the Stonewall riots, Florida’s Dade County passed housing and employment protections for gay people, a move that prompted Florida citrus pitchwoman and Christian crusader Anita Bryant to launch “Save Our Children,” a campaign that both overturned the ordinance and cast gay people as predators who would “recruit” children.
“There’s no straight progress forever forward,” Ryan said. “Things get better, and they get worse, and they get better, and they get worse, and they change. We’re sort of in a constant pendulum struggle.”
Singer Anita Bryant, who launched an anti-gay “Save Our Children” campaign, in her home in Miami Beach in 1978. (Kathy A. Willens/AP)
This newest swing right began, in part, after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015. Lawmakers filed more than 250 discriminatory bills the following year, up from 85 the year before the Obergefell v. Hodges decision. Though some of those — including a Mississippi measure to allow state employees, service providers and others to deny service to LGBTQ people — eventually became law, policymakers backed off an anti-trans bill in North Carolina. After Donald Trump became president, the number of bills dwindled.
Before 2020, no state banned trans girls from participating in school sports or trans youth from accessing transition-related health care. Then, a few weeks after the coronavirus shuttered most of the country, Idaho became the first to pass a sports ban. Arkansas passed the nation’s first ban on gender-affirming care the following year, and in that year’s legislative sessions, the number of anti-LGBTQ bills across the country ramped up again, to 268. By the spring of 2023, that number had surged past 400, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Movement Advancement Project (MAP).
Whereas previous anti-LGBTQ efforts focused on one issue — marriage, say, or military service — this year’s onslaught stunned Logan Casey, MAP’s senior researcher, in its scope and “cruel creativity.”
“This moment is unlike any before, given the truly wild breadth and scale of the attacks,” Casey said.
Conservative groups including the American Principles Project and America First Legal also collectively spent at least $50 million airing anti-trans ads in 25 states in the 2022 election, according to the Human Rights Campaign, and politicians from Georgia to Arizona ran on anti-LGBTQ platforms.
Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said his group began focusing on transgender issues after North Carolina rescinded a 2016 measure that required trans people to use a bathroom that matched the gender on their birth certificate. The group had invested in 2022 campaign ads not because of a cultural shift on the right, but on the left, he said.
“They went toward kids, teaching them weird things in school, taking away parental rights, putting kids on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, teaching kids that boys can become girls and girls [can become] boys,” Schilling said. “Put aside the merits of their arguments and whether or not they’re right. This is new. This is different.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), flanked by elementary school students, displays the signed Parental Rights in Education bill on March 28, 2022, at Classical Preparatory School in Shady Hills, Fla. (Douglas R. Clifford/Tampa Bay Times/AP)
Schilling and others have pressed on with an anti-LGBTQ agenda despite mixed political results. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) handily won reelection last year after signing and promoting the country’s first Parental Rights in Education bill — a piece of legislation critics dubbed the “don’t say gay” law. But campaigning on anti-trans policies hasn’t helped every candidate. Drag critic Kari Lake lost in Arizona. Herschel Walker lost in Georgia after running on a platform to ban trans women from women’s sports. And Janet Protasiewicz defeated a conservative challenger for a spot on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, even after the American Principles Project PAC spent nearly $800,000 to defeat her with anti-trans ads.
The issue may lack resonance for swing voters. Although conservatives have expressed waning support for transgender inclusion in the military and in women’s sports, just 8 percent of people nationwide closely followed anti-trans bills last year, according to the Pew Research Center.
After Michigan Republicans lost all three branches of government to Democrats in November, the party’s chief of staff ascribed the defeat in part to the campaigns’ reliance on similar ads.
“There were more ads on transgender sports than inflation, gas prices and bread and butter issues that could have swayed independent voters,” Paul Cordes wrote in a memo to the state GOP. “We did not have a turn out problem — middle of the road voters simply didn’t like what [Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon] was selling.”
Schilling allowed that his group’s efforts weren’t enough to overcome some electability issues, but he said they made significant inroads. American Principles’ polling showed that the nonprofit’s ads swayed tens of thousands of voters in Arizona, Virginia and Wisconsin, Schilling said.
“I can assure you that if the ads weren’t effective in persuading voters, I wouldn’t be running them,” Schilling said. “I’ll just let my record speak for itself and where the American people are.”
Empty beer bottles sit on top of campaign signs at an election watch party for Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon at the JW Marriott in Grand Rapids on Nov. 8. (Evan Cobb for The Washington Post)
Targeting hospitals and adults
About 22 states now ban trans people from competing in women’s sports, and teachers in nearly a dozen states can no longer affirm students’ gender, according to MAP. And at least 19 have passed bans on transition health care for minors, despite the fact that all major medical associations oppose such restrictions.
Conservatives have succeeded in passing these bills, in part, by showcasing a small group of detransitioners who have flown to multiple states to testify that they felt abused and fast-tracked by gender-affirming doctors. Lawmakers and activists alike have accused those doctors of “mutilating” minors.
Only a handful of hospitals have released their numbers, but those that have been show that transition-related surgeries on minors are rare. An internal review at the Transgender Center at Washington University in St. Louis found that just six of the hospital’s 1,165 transgender patients younger than 18 had undergone gender-affirming procedures since 2018, and all of them were chest surgeries. A Reuters analysis of insurance claims found that while 42,167 young people nationwide were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021, just 282 had top surgery that year.
Lawmakers and conservative activists have successfully pressured hospitals in Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas to stop treating transgender children.
Republicans have begun to target gender-affirming care for adults, too. Florida’s DeSantis essentially cut off access for trans adults in the spring by imposing rules so strict that activists estimated 80 percent of trans adults in the state could no longer get hormones. And in April, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) issued an emergency ruling for regulations so stringent that most trans adults would have lost access to hormones. Bailey later abandoned the ruling, but trans Missourians like Casey, the researcher at MAP, say the proposal hurt in ways they can still feel.
“Even when we win, even when these bills don’t become law, the bills are still causing harm that can be very long-lasting and difficult to shake for many people,” Casey said.
Conservatives have spoken openly about their plans to escalate, according to Ari Drennen, a trans woman who monitors anti-trans rhetoric in conservative media as LGBTQ program director for Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group.
A Pride display at a party store in Prince George's County, Md. Target and other big-box stores have embraced LGBTQ-themed merchandise, but some have also received backlash. (Petula Dvorak/The Washington Post)
In April, conservative pundit Matt Walsh urged his Twitter followers to pick a “woke” company to “target ... with a ruthless boycott campaign. Claim one scalp then move onto the next.” The next month, shoppers began harassing Target employees over the store’s Pride collection, even though the big-box company has sold similar merchandise for more than a decade.
And Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles, who earlier this year said that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” said in May that conservatives have to make Pride symbols “culturally toxic” as part of a grander plan to “come back in with more political force to ban some of this stuff.”
These campaigns have led to boycotts, canceled Pride festivals and hundreds of protests, Drennen said, in part because more than half of Americans don’t know a trans person. Polls show that voters who know transgender people are less likely to support restrictions on them. But many anti-LGBTQ bills ensure that trans people won’t become more visible, Drennen said.
Sports, for instance, are one of the main ways young people build community, Drennen said. Lawmakers have said they pushed bans on trans competitors because they want to ensure competition is fair for women and girls, but those laws exclude trans kids from participating in one of their school’s most public spheres.
“Not knowing a trans person is what enables that propaganda to take hold,” Drennen said. “Once trans people become fully integrated as members of their community, as their visible neighbors, co-workers, family members, it’s that much harder to paint a picture of us as terrifying monsters.”
The role of Roe and the courts
For Drennen and others, this era is directly connected to the fight that abortion rights activists have waged for decades over bodily autonomy. The map of states that have banned abortion since Roe fell is nearly identical to the map that shows which states have banned gender-affirming care for minors this year.
Doctors in states that have banned both say the bans feel similar. Colleen McNicholas, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood in the St. Louis region, said that in both instances, conservative groups and lawmakers homed in on a vulnerable and stigmatized population, then bullied the providers who care for them by making those doctors seem “unqualified, self-serving and, in some capacity, immoral.”
“It is painfully obvious to us that they are using the same playbook, but in an expedited time frame,” McNicholas said.
When the Missouri attorney general began targeting transition care in the spring, McNicholas’s clinics were able to mobilize without hesitation in large part because they’d learned how to adapt after Missouri banned abortion last year. The clinics added additional appointments, and staffers worked overtime. They prepared themselves for potential litigation, and they sent the highest-risk clients over the river to Illinois. After Roe fell, southern Illinois became a hub for people forced to travel for abortion care, and McNicholas said she expects the region will see an influx of trans patients soon.
“The same phenomenon that happened with abortion care happened with trans care,” McNicholas said. “We had to be ready to quickly use all of the resources we have to make sure folks knew what care they could get, where they could get it and for potentially how long they could get it.”
In another parallel with the post-Roe landscape, 13 states, including Maryland, Illinois and New Mexico, have recently passed explicit protections for transgender people, according to Reed.
As most states wrap up their legislative sessions, Schilling, the executive at the American Principles Project, said his group has probably “maxed out” on state legislative wins. The group plans to turn its focus toward federal policies as the presidential election nears.
Meanwhile, LGBTQ activists say they are eager to see what will happen in the courts. This month a judge declared Tennessee’s drag ban unconstitutional, and courts in Arkansas, Alabama and Florida have temporarily blocked medical bans from taking effect. Activists believe that at least one of the health-care cases will eventually make it to the Supreme Court, and they’re not sure how the justices will rule.
Some say they’re hopeful that Bostock v. Clayton County, a 2020 decision that protects gay and trans employees from discrimination, will serve as precedent for future LGBTQ cases, but activists say the high court’s decision to overturn a decades-old precedent like Roe has left them feeling less optimistic.
Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D) stands in protest as demonstrators are arrested in the House gallery of the Montana Capitol on April 24. (Thom Bridge/Independent Record/AP)
In the spring, near the end of a painful and record-breaking legislative season, Reed and her fiancée, Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D), went for a walk in western Montana. The year had marked an era of unprecedented success and oppression for the women, both of whom are trans. Reed had become a go-to pundit for PBS and other news outlets, but she’d endured “swatting” attempts and daily online harassment. Zephyr had started the session as Montana’s first trans state lawmaker. She had ended it working from a bench outside the House of Representatives after her colleagues barred her from the chamber for criticizing a proposed ban on transition care for minors.
Still, as the women walked, Zephyr said that “it was hard to feel anything other than hope.” Even in Montana’s most conservative reaches, every few minutes, people stopped to tell Zephyr they disagreed with her colleagues’ anti-trans policies and actions. They included security guards and National Guard members, lifelong libertarians and people who told Zephyr they’d voted for Trump twice. Each one told Zephyr they supported her.
“Given the growing awareness that I’m seeing about what’s at stake in our country, I feel hope that change is possible,” Zephyr said.
After Reed flew home to Maryland, she said she continued to find promise in an unlikely place — Louisiana. Last month, a Republican lawmaker there bucked the Southern trend and refused to advance out of committee a ban on gender-affirming care. State Sen. Fred Mills said he’d voted to kill the ban because a Louisiana Health Department report showed that each year very few minors went on puberty blockers, just a few dozen started cross-sex hormones and none on Medicaid underwent surgery.
“My decision was really, really based on the numbers,” Mills told the Louisiana Illuminator. “All the testimony I heard by the proponents that children are getting mutilated, I didn’t see it in the statistics.”
A different committee eventually pushed the bill through, but as Reed followed Mills’s decision, she couldn’t help but think of her childhood. Reed grew up in south Louisiana, and when she was a child in the 1990s, her classmates bullied her. She wasn’t able to come out until she was 30. But the environment was changing, she believed.
LGBTQ activist and content creator Erin Reed in Germantown, Md., on June 5. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Late last year, a trans teenager from a parish close to Reed’s hometown wrote to say her classmates had nominated her to the homecoming court. She sent along a celebratory picture as proof.
“I cried because I remember how hard it was for me,” Reed said. “To see a trans girl in small-town Louisiana not only being accepted but celebrated and loved, seeing her driven on the back of a car with her dad around the football stadium, waving at everybody, that’s how change happens.”
---
The Tony (Erin) Reed thread is over here:
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/erin-...olderseye-realitybias-anonymousrabbit.112364/ (.onion)
His tattoo tells you everything you need to know about him:
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Casey Parks
2023-06-14 21:40:09GMT
Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D), center, and her fiancée, activist Erin Reed, left, talk with Ruth Belay of Los Angeles during a Pride celebration at the White House on Saturday. (Elizabeth Frantz for The Washington Post)
Republican-led state legislators and their allies have mounted a far-reaching and coordinated effort to pass a record wave of new measures restricting gay and transgender rights. Almost no aspect of life is untouched.
Among the roughly 60 laws enacted in nearly half of U.S. states this year are limits on what children can read about LGBTQ people, whether trans youth can participate in school athletics, what trans or nonbinary adults can wear in public, which bathrooms and pronouns they can use, and whom doctors can treat.
Trans Americans make up less than 1 percent of the population. But this year, they are facing heightened scrutiny. The backers of the restrictions say they want to protect children. Conflicts over LGBTQ rights have spilled into the streets, school board meetings and store aisles. Drag story hours and Pride Month displays are now occasions for protests, vandalism and even violence. Conservative pundits and elected officials regularly cast LGBTQ people as a threat to children and refer to them as “groomers,” echoing anti-LGBTQ campaigns of the 1970s.
All of this led the Human Rights Campaign this month to issue a state of emergency for LGBTQ Americans — the first in the nonprofit’s more than 40-year history. It also has prompted the architects of anti-trans laws, who say they have “maxed out” at the state level, to set their sights on passing federal restrictions. Both sides agree that the battle over LGBTQ rights is likely to intensify as another presidential election approaches.
Still, Erin Reed, an activist and content creator who publishes a daily newsletter on anti-LGBTQ legislation, said queer and trans people remain hopeful. They’ve endured discrimination in the past, and this time, they have a bigger community and a raft of new knowledge, including some gleaned from abortion rights activists who have navigated similar fights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
“The story of LGBTQ history is a story of resilience through community,” Reed said. “No matter how much they keep turning the dial on the cruelty and the extremeness of these laws, trans people still exist. We’re not going anywhere. We remain undaunted.”
A cultural shift on the right and the left
Across the country, LGBTQ activists say they have told themselves one thing over and over this year: We’ve been here before.
Though some might think social progress is a straight line up, historian Hugh Ryan said policymakers have often moved to curtail rights after periods of social liberation. Ryan, the author of LGBTQ history books including “When Brooklyn Was Queer,” noted that New York passed its first specifically anti-gay law, a cruising ban, 100 years ago, “immediately after [a] moment that is so progressive, it is still referred to as the Progressive Era.”
In the ’70s, Ryan said, a few years after the Stonewall riots, Florida’s Dade County passed housing and employment protections for gay people, a move that prompted Florida citrus pitchwoman and Christian crusader Anita Bryant to launch “Save Our Children,” a campaign that both overturned the ordinance and cast gay people as predators who would “recruit” children.
“There’s no straight progress forever forward,” Ryan said. “Things get better, and they get worse, and they get better, and they get worse, and they change. We’re sort of in a constant pendulum struggle.”
Singer Anita Bryant, who launched an anti-gay “Save Our Children” campaign, in her home in Miami Beach in 1978. (Kathy A. Willens/AP)
This newest swing right began, in part, after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015. Lawmakers filed more than 250 discriminatory bills the following year, up from 85 the year before the Obergefell v. Hodges decision. Though some of those — including a Mississippi measure to allow state employees, service providers and others to deny service to LGBTQ people — eventually became law, policymakers backed off an anti-trans bill in North Carolina. After Donald Trump became president, the number of bills dwindled.
Before 2020, no state banned trans girls from participating in school sports or trans youth from accessing transition-related health care. Then, a few weeks after the coronavirus shuttered most of the country, Idaho became the first to pass a sports ban. Arkansas passed the nation’s first ban on gender-affirming care the following year, and in that year’s legislative sessions, the number of anti-LGBTQ bills across the country ramped up again, to 268. By the spring of 2023, that number had surged past 400, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Movement Advancement Project (MAP).
Whereas previous anti-LGBTQ efforts focused on one issue — marriage, say, or military service — this year’s onslaught stunned Logan Casey, MAP’s senior researcher, in its scope and “cruel creativity.”
“This moment is unlike any before, given the truly wild breadth and scale of the attacks,” Casey said.
Conservative groups including the American Principles Project and America First Legal also collectively spent at least $50 million airing anti-trans ads in 25 states in the 2022 election, according to the Human Rights Campaign, and politicians from Georgia to Arizona ran on anti-LGBTQ platforms.
Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said his group began focusing on transgender issues after North Carolina rescinded a 2016 measure that required trans people to use a bathroom that matched the gender on their birth certificate. The group had invested in 2022 campaign ads not because of a cultural shift on the right, but on the left, he said.
“They went toward kids, teaching them weird things in school, taking away parental rights, putting kids on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, teaching kids that boys can become girls and girls [can become] boys,” Schilling said. “Put aside the merits of their arguments and whether or not they’re right. This is new. This is different.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), flanked by elementary school students, displays the signed Parental Rights in Education bill on March 28, 2022, at Classical Preparatory School in Shady Hills, Fla. (Douglas R. Clifford/Tampa Bay Times/AP)
Schilling and others have pressed on with an anti-LGBTQ agenda despite mixed political results. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) handily won reelection last year after signing and promoting the country’s first Parental Rights in Education bill — a piece of legislation critics dubbed the “don’t say gay” law. But campaigning on anti-trans policies hasn’t helped every candidate. Drag critic Kari Lake lost in Arizona. Herschel Walker lost in Georgia after running on a platform to ban trans women from women’s sports. And Janet Protasiewicz defeated a conservative challenger for a spot on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, even after the American Principles Project PAC spent nearly $800,000 to defeat her with anti-trans ads.
The issue may lack resonance for swing voters. Although conservatives have expressed waning support for transgender inclusion in the military and in women’s sports, just 8 percent of people nationwide closely followed anti-trans bills last year, according to the Pew Research Center.
After Michigan Republicans lost all three branches of government to Democrats in November, the party’s chief of staff ascribed the defeat in part to the campaigns’ reliance on similar ads.
“There were more ads on transgender sports than inflation, gas prices and bread and butter issues that could have swayed independent voters,” Paul Cordes wrote in a memo to the state GOP. “We did not have a turn out problem — middle of the road voters simply didn’t like what [Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon] was selling.”
Schilling allowed that his group’s efforts weren’t enough to overcome some electability issues, but he said they made significant inroads. American Principles’ polling showed that the nonprofit’s ads swayed tens of thousands of voters in Arizona, Virginia and Wisconsin, Schilling said.
“I can assure you that if the ads weren’t effective in persuading voters, I wouldn’t be running them,” Schilling said. “I’ll just let my record speak for itself and where the American people are.”
Empty beer bottles sit on top of campaign signs at an election watch party for Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon at the JW Marriott in Grand Rapids on Nov. 8. (Evan Cobb for The Washington Post)
Targeting hospitals and adults
About 22 states now ban trans people from competing in women’s sports, and teachers in nearly a dozen states can no longer affirm students’ gender, according to MAP. And at least 19 have passed bans on transition health care for minors, despite the fact that all major medical associations oppose such restrictions.
Conservatives have succeeded in passing these bills, in part, by showcasing a small group of detransitioners who have flown to multiple states to testify that they felt abused and fast-tracked by gender-affirming doctors. Lawmakers and activists alike have accused those doctors of “mutilating” minors.
Only a handful of hospitals have released their numbers, but those that have been show that transition-related surgeries on minors are rare. An internal review at the Transgender Center at Washington University in St. Louis found that just six of the hospital’s 1,165 transgender patients younger than 18 had undergone gender-affirming procedures since 2018, and all of them were chest surgeries. A Reuters analysis of insurance claims found that while 42,167 young people nationwide were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021, just 282 had top surgery that year.
Lawmakers and conservative activists have successfully pressured hospitals in Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas to stop treating transgender children.
Republicans have begun to target gender-affirming care for adults, too. Florida’s DeSantis essentially cut off access for trans adults in the spring by imposing rules so strict that activists estimated 80 percent of trans adults in the state could no longer get hormones. And in April, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) issued an emergency ruling for regulations so stringent that most trans adults would have lost access to hormones. Bailey later abandoned the ruling, but trans Missourians like Casey, the researcher at MAP, say the proposal hurt in ways they can still feel.
“Even when we win, even when these bills don’t become law, the bills are still causing harm that can be very long-lasting and difficult to shake for many people,” Casey said.
Conservatives have spoken openly about their plans to escalate, according to Ari Drennen, a trans woman who monitors anti-trans rhetoric in conservative media as LGBTQ program director for Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group.
A Pride display at a party store in Prince George's County, Md. Target and other big-box stores have embraced LGBTQ-themed merchandise, but some have also received backlash. (Petula Dvorak/The Washington Post)
In April, conservative pundit Matt Walsh urged his Twitter followers to pick a “woke” company to “target ... with a ruthless boycott campaign. Claim one scalp then move onto the next.” The next month, shoppers began harassing Target employees over the store’s Pride collection, even though the big-box company has sold similar merchandise for more than a decade.
And Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles, who earlier this year said that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” said in May that conservatives have to make Pride symbols “culturally toxic” as part of a grander plan to “come back in with more political force to ban some of this stuff.”
These campaigns have led to boycotts, canceled Pride festivals and hundreds of protests, Drennen said, in part because more than half of Americans don’t know a trans person. Polls show that voters who know transgender people are less likely to support restrictions on them. But many anti-LGBTQ bills ensure that trans people won’t become more visible, Drennen said.
Sports, for instance, are one of the main ways young people build community, Drennen said. Lawmakers have said they pushed bans on trans competitors because they want to ensure competition is fair for women and girls, but those laws exclude trans kids from participating in one of their school’s most public spheres.
“Not knowing a trans person is what enables that propaganda to take hold,” Drennen said. “Once trans people become fully integrated as members of their community, as their visible neighbors, co-workers, family members, it’s that much harder to paint a picture of us as terrifying monsters.”
The role of Roe and the courts
For Drennen and others, this era is directly connected to the fight that abortion rights activists have waged for decades over bodily autonomy. The map of states that have banned abortion since Roe fell is nearly identical to the map that shows which states have banned gender-affirming care for minors this year.
Doctors in states that have banned both say the bans feel similar. Colleen McNicholas, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood in the St. Louis region, said that in both instances, conservative groups and lawmakers homed in on a vulnerable and stigmatized population, then bullied the providers who care for them by making those doctors seem “unqualified, self-serving and, in some capacity, immoral.”
“It is painfully obvious to us that they are using the same playbook, but in an expedited time frame,” McNicholas said.
When the Missouri attorney general began targeting transition care in the spring, McNicholas’s clinics were able to mobilize without hesitation in large part because they’d learned how to adapt after Missouri banned abortion last year. The clinics added additional appointments, and staffers worked overtime. They prepared themselves for potential litigation, and they sent the highest-risk clients over the river to Illinois. After Roe fell, southern Illinois became a hub for people forced to travel for abortion care, and McNicholas said she expects the region will see an influx of trans patients soon.
“The same phenomenon that happened with abortion care happened with trans care,” McNicholas said. “We had to be ready to quickly use all of the resources we have to make sure folks knew what care they could get, where they could get it and for potentially how long they could get it.”
In another parallel with the post-Roe landscape, 13 states, including Maryland, Illinois and New Mexico, have recently passed explicit protections for transgender people, according to Reed.
As most states wrap up their legislative sessions, Schilling, the executive at the American Principles Project, said his group has probably “maxed out” on state legislative wins. The group plans to turn its focus toward federal policies as the presidential election nears.
Meanwhile, LGBTQ activists say they are eager to see what will happen in the courts. This month a judge declared Tennessee’s drag ban unconstitutional, and courts in Arkansas, Alabama and Florida have temporarily blocked medical bans from taking effect. Activists believe that at least one of the health-care cases will eventually make it to the Supreme Court, and they’re not sure how the justices will rule.
Some say they’re hopeful that Bostock v. Clayton County, a 2020 decision that protects gay and trans employees from discrimination, will serve as precedent for future LGBTQ cases, but activists say the high court’s decision to overturn a decades-old precedent like Roe has left them feeling less optimistic.
Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D) stands in protest as demonstrators are arrested in the House gallery of the Montana Capitol on April 24. (Thom Bridge/Independent Record/AP)
In the spring, near the end of a painful and record-breaking legislative season, Reed and her fiancée, Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D), went for a walk in western Montana. The year had marked an era of unprecedented success and oppression for the women, both of whom are trans. Reed had become a go-to pundit for PBS and other news outlets, but she’d endured “swatting” attempts and daily online harassment. Zephyr had started the session as Montana’s first trans state lawmaker. She had ended it working from a bench outside the House of Representatives after her colleagues barred her from the chamber for criticizing a proposed ban on transition care for minors.
Still, as the women walked, Zephyr said that “it was hard to feel anything other than hope.” Even in Montana’s most conservative reaches, every few minutes, people stopped to tell Zephyr they disagreed with her colleagues’ anti-trans policies and actions. They included security guards and National Guard members, lifelong libertarians and people who told Zephyr they’d voted for Trump twice. Each one told Zephyr they supported her.
“Given the growing awareness that I’m seeing about what’s at stake in our country, I feel hope that change is possible,” Zephyr said.
After Reed flew home to Maryland, she said she continued to find promise in an unlikely place — Louisiana. Last month, a Republican lawmaker there bucked the Southern trend and refused to advance out of committee a ban on gender-affirming care. State Sen. Fred Mills said he’d voted to kill the ban because a Louisiana Health Department report showed that each year very few minors went on puberty blockers, just a few dozen started cross-sex hormones and none on Medicaid underwent surgery.
“My decision was really, really based on the numbers,” Mills told the Louisiana Illuminator. “All the testimony I heard by the proponents that children are getting mutilated, I didn’t see it in the statistics.”
A different committee eventually pushed the bill through, but as Reed followed Mills’s decision, she couldn’t help but think of her childhood. Reed grew up in south Louisiana, and when she was a child in the 1990s, her classmates bullied her. She wasn’t able to come out until she was 30. But the environment was changing, she believed.
LGBTQ activist and content creator Erin Reed in Germantown, Md., on June 5. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Late last year, a trans teenager from a parish close to Reed’s hometown wrote to say her classmates had nominated her to the homecoming court. She sent along a celebratory picture as proof.
“I cried because I remember how hard it was for me,” Reed said. “To see a trans girl in small-town Louisiana not only being accepted but celebrated and loved, seeing her driven on the back of a car with her dad around the football stadium, waving at everybody, that’s how change happens.”
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The Tony (Erin) Reed thread is over here:
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/erin-...olderseye-realitybias-anonymousrabbit.112364/ (.onion)
His tattoo tells you everything you need to know about him:
