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The GOP’s
latest culture war is focused squarely on the nation’s
transgender community, specifically transgender youth. It isn’t
a new war, simply a new front in an old war that can be traced back
to the famed “bathroom
bills“
from some years ago that spread across dozens of states. Those bills
were introduced in tandem with former President Donald Trump’s
targeted federal
government-led attacks
that included the overturning of anti-discrimination statutes
protecting trans people and an outright transgender ban in the U.S.
military.
Now, in the
wake of Trump’s humiliating electoral loss, Republicans have
accelerated the state-level attacks to a breathtaking level. In just
the first three months of 2021, GOP-led state legislatures introduced
more bills
aimed at transgender people, especially youth, than they did over the
entire previous year. There are now more than 80 bills introduced
this year alone that, according to Alphonso David, president of the
Human Rights Campaign, “are not addressing any real problem,
and they’re not being requested by constituents. Rather, this
effort is being driven by national far-right organizations attempting
to score political points by sowing fear and hate.”
I recently
spoke with Jules
Gill-Peterson,
an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the author
of the award-winning book Histories
of the Transgender Child,
in an interview,
and she echoed this claim, saying, “A lot of authoritarian
political movements are using trans people as their scapegoats.”
She called the latest wave of anti-trans legislation “an
unprecedented assault in terms of just the magnitude of the bills and
the severity of what they propose to do in terms of criminalizing
basic access to health care and equal access to education.”
She explained
that “due to perhaps their general political incompetency, a
lot of [Trump’s attacks on transgender people] didn’t
really end up making it into practice.” However, “on the
state level, as is often the case, the GOP is much more successful at
pursuing an anti-trans agenda than they ever are at the federal
level.” Gill-Peterson sees this as a culmination of efforts
that can be traced back to North
Carolina’s
2016 passage of a bill banning transgender people from using
facilities of the gender with which they identify.
On April 5,
North Carolina Republicans continued what they began five years ago,
introducing a bill called the “Youth
Health Protection Act,”
which blocks transgender minors from accessing the health care they
need upon deciding to transition. Just as the GOP has often couched
its attacks on communities under the guise of protecting them (think
of anti-abortion legislation presented as “fetal personhood”
bills), this bill, like several others in states like Arkansas,
purports to protect trans youth.
Republicans
also claim they want to protect “fair
competition,”
in the words of Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, by banning transgender kids
from sports. Lee, along with the governors of Arkansas and
Mississippi, signed bills into law this year banning
trans youth
from playing sports in school. These transphobic bills are based on a
theory that transgender kids, especially girls, have an unfair
biological advantage over non-transgender girls.
Just as the
GOP’s stated war on voter fraud is based on an imagined assault
on the nation’s democracy in order to disguise the real war on
voting, the conservative party’s stated reason for going after
transgender children’s access to health care or participation
in sports is based on an imagined crisis. Gill-Peterson said, “most
of these lawmakers will admit they’ve never heard of any issue
with transgender participation in sports in their state, and they’ve
never heard of any issue around trans health care in their state, and
they don’t actually know any trans children.”
The GOP’s
war on voting offers another analog. If the GOP really cared about
democracy, they would make voting easier, not harder. Similarly, if
the party were truly interested in the safety of girls, it would
offer up bills that protect transgender girls in particular, who face
very real dangers. Gill-Peterson said, “young trans girls and
trans women are extremely vulnerable to sexual harassment and
violence because it’s not taken seriously.” Instead, the
bills banning access to health care and sports only fuel greater
violence against them. Every year, dozens
of trans women
are killed, and more
transgender people were killed in the U.S.
in the first seven months of 2020 than all of the previous year. It’s
no surprise that the spike in violence has coincided with legislative
attempts to dehumanize the community.
Just as with
anti-voter and anti-abortion bills, the GOP’s tactic of
pursuing transphobic legislation involves wasting legislative time
and money by passing clearly unconstitutional bills that are
invariably legally challenged, remain tied up in the courts for years
and ultimately end up at the Supreme Court. Last summer, justices
ruled
against an attempt to legalize workplace discrimination
against transgender employees, and then in the winter, they left in
place a public school’s accommodation
of transgender students
to use the bathroom of their choice.
Whether the
GOP wins or loses on this issue in the nation’s highest court
is almost beside the point because the party’s goal is to
distract its anxious base from the fact that their leaders do little
to nothing about pervasive problems around inequality and depressed
wages, a stagnant job market and the ever-rising cost of living.
Moreover, the
GOP’s anti-trans bills fulfill part of a larger conservative
agenda to create evermore exceptions to government-provided services
such as health care and education, whittling away at the state’s
responsibility for resources to be available to all and rights to be
respected universally. If hormone treatments, abortions, and medical
treatments for immigrants are exceptions to government-provided
health care; if public education is for everyone but transgender
kids; then those services are weakened in service of libertarian
fantasies of how society should function.
How to combat
this brutality and inhumanity? Gill-Peterson pointed out, “the
folks who are on the same side of this debate as the Republican
legislators include a wide swath of extremist groups: white
nationalists, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, anti-immigrant groups.”
To meet this threat will require an equally broad coalition of
progressives to stand guard against attacks on transgender people.
The state of
South Dakota has been a testing
ground
for state-level legislation aimed at trans rights. Bill after bill
has failed
in that state, thanks largely to a coalition that has stood firm at
every turn to protest them. Alongside transgender
activists
are parents, teachers, and doctors as well as national organizations
like the ACLU
and the National
Center for Transgender Equality.
Having a president like Joe
Biden,
who has reaffirmed the humanity and dignity of transgender people,
rather than targeting them for violence as Trump did, is also a huge
help. “We need to see trans rights as integral to a broader
agenda for democracy, justice, and public good in this country,”
said Gill-Peterson.
This article was produced by Economy
for All,
a project of the Independent Media
Institute.
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