The rhetoric of the anti-trans movement — and Republican politicians — is getting more apocalyptic and eliminationist by the day. And anti-trans violence is getting worse. Last week, a man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, firebombed a donut shop after it held a drag event.
So here’s a reminder of what’s at stake in tomorrow’s midterms for LGBTQ+ people in general and trans people in particular — and why we all need to vote.
Republicans are passing anti-trans legislation in dozens of states — and will pass more if they win on the state level.
As Vice News reports:
According to a national trans legislation tracker, a record 171 bills targeting trans rights were introduced across the U.S. this year alone, with 26 passing, 20 failing, and 125 still active. Conservative school boards and states across the country have already imposed or attempted to impose restrictive bathroom policies that force transgender students into bathrooms that match the gender they were assigned at birth, bans on trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams, and bans on critical gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy.
But, the issues these laws are based on aren’t factual. Children aren’t being forced to transition. Gender-affirming care for youth is safe and effective, and has been endorsed by several major governing medical bodies, because it improves mental health outcomes for trans youth into adulthood. These realities aren’t stopping Republican candidates, and their supporters with big pockets, from spreading falsehoods anyway.
The Republicans want to take their attacks on LGBTQ+ and trans people national.
They’ve already introduced a federal “Don’t Say Gay/Don’t Say Trans” law modeled after, and extending on, a Florida law. As I noted in a previous post,
the misleadingly named “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act” would ban federal funding for developing, promoting, or hosting any “program, event, or literature” that would supposedly expose children under ten to what the bill calls “sexually-oriented material.” But the bill defines “sexually oriented” material so broadly that it includes not just things like “lascivious dancing” and racy books but also “any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t the only regressive state legislation that could go national. As The Atlantic explains,
Over the past two years, the 23 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and state legislature have approved the most aggressive wave of socially conservative legislation in modern times. In highly polarizing battles across the country, GOP-controlled states have passed laws imposing new restrictions on voting, banning or limiting access to abortion, retrenching LGBTQ rights, removing licensing and training requirements for concealed carry of firearms, and censoring how public-school teachers (and in some cases university professors and even private employers) can talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation.
With much less attention, Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate have introduced legislation to write each of these red-state initiatives into federal law. The practical effect of these proposals would be to require blue states to live under the restrictive social policies that have burned through red states since President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.
Again, if they win, all of this gets worse, much worse.
As Aaron Ridings, chief of staff of the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN), tells PinkNews, he’s seeing a
coordinated attack on basic civil rights across this country. … Regardless of the specifics of a particular bill, it’s all about the same thing – taking away basic civil and education rights. …
The rise of fascism and white supremacy represents an extinction-level threat to our decades-long struggle for basic civil and education rights across the country. …
The consequences of LGBTQ+ and allied communities not making their voices heard is an elimination of basic civil and education rights, and a fearful future and something that we’ve not known before.
So VOTE. Even if you’re in a blue state. We need everyone on our side to make themselves heard. Because if we don’t, things will get dark indeed.
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They aren’t going to just hit trans people. They hate gay men at least as much. Consider how much time they spend ranting about drag shows. They are going to find a way to undo Obergfell in all but name, and they will even go further and introduce sodomy laws.
I voted. It didn’t seem like it was really that worth it. In my state it seems the Democrats failed to produce candidates and about a third of the time the only option was Republican. Fucking bullshit
Imagine if they put this much energy into helping make people’s lives better.
Mr. Parasol and I voted early. We don’t know how much difference it will make, but that’s no excuse for not exercising the right to vote.
Disabled people’s lives are also under threat. They’ve considered us “moochers and parasites” for decades, and dreamed of cutting us off from all support in the name of “personal responsibility.”
That this would kill thousands of us is not a bug, but a feature, as we learned during the lockdown when Republicans went from calling for cutting or eliminating our support without mentioning that iut would kill us, to straighhtt-up saying that we should be allowed to die to benefit the economy.
I expect that mass deaths of disabled people to happen before other groups, because there is no need to work people into violence or round anybody up. Just stop our Social Security, Medciare, and Medicaid, and we die all on our own.
Just came back from the polling booth and read this post. Bright side: when I stopped by the firebombed donut shop’s GoFundMe (see the article linked in the post) to make a donation, I saw that they have now raised nearly $30K of their original <$3K goal. 🙂
Dave said:
Indeed. I’m routinely startled by how many cis gay people assume the anti-trans push can’t possibly affect them — as if conservatives didn’t explicitly state after Obergefell v. Hodges that they were re-drawing the battle-lines at trans rights, but only until they could turn public opinion against gay rights.
(And don’t even get me started on the affluent white feminists who are smugly confident that the girl-haters they’re cuddling up to very definitely won’t use the attack on trans rights as a stalking horse for taking away the bodily autonomy of all women.)
Not gonna lie, I’m absolutely terrified. Even my most optimistic friends are scrambling to get passports and whatnot in order, and some are learning to shoot and getting carry licenses. For myself I don’t like weapons, but I’m trying to come up with contingency plans for still getting meds if state/federal laws start making things difficult. And praying that the pogroms don’t get too much worse too fast.
@Allandrel: all the hugs offered, if wanted. And yeah, seeing eugenics go from subtext to bold flaming Comic Sans text has been wild.
@Allandrel I’m also absolutely terrified.
Sadly for legal reasons that I’d prefer not to explain, I cannot legally vote. But if I did, I’d vote for Bernie and Beto.