How Many Anti-Trans Laws Were Proposed Last Week?
They‘ve been counted, but let’s also reflect on what they mean.
“Only three days into 2024,” Erin Reed informed us yesterday, U.S. lawmakers had submitted 125 anti-transgender bills.
I don’t want to steal her analysis here (she’s doing the hard work), but we all need to be amplifying the news and the message. So, in this post, I’ll talk about a handful of these bills, and I encourage people to pay for a subscription to Erin Reed’s work to support her as she supports all trans USAmericans in our Sisyphean exercise of this decade: to continue existing, despite Republican efforts to end us.
Here’s the 2024 tracking spreadsheet she’s using. It will be kept updated. Consult it to learn what anti-trans laws have been proposed in your state.
This Week’s Focus is on Five States
We need to pay attention to all 50 U.S. states—as well as all countries—but doing all that in the same article makes for challenging storytelling and storylistening. Reed’s article yesterday highlighted five U.S. states, so I’ll go with her approach.
New Hampshire
Last week, New Hampshire’s House passed two anti-trans bills (HB 619 and HB 396) because, as Reed noted elsewhere, at least 20 Democrats voted for them or abstained from voting. Now these bills go to the state Senate.
Ohio
A week ago, Governor Mike DeWine vetoed the state legislature’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Parents know what’s best for their kids, he argued. But (as the legislature might override his veto) he promised another solution to the non-problem of trans people existing.
Yesterday, he signed an executive order that might be worse than the original legislation.
On an emergency basis, DeWine has banned minors from getting gender-affirming surgery, effective immediately, because he’s “determined…that an emergency exists,” even though no Ohio clinic performs this kind of surgery on minors, which DeWine himself admits. (Try to make sense of his actual logic there. You can’t.)
Further, non-emergency rules will apply to adults. According to Laura Hancock for Cleveland.com, these will include:
—To require a multidisciplinary team to support individuals receiving gender-affirming care, including but not limited to a bioethicist, a psychiatrist and an endocrinologist.
—To require a comprehensive care plan that includes sufficient informed consent from patients and, when the patient is a minor, their parents. This includes discussions of potential risks associated with the treatment and comprehensive and lengthy mental heath counseling prior to being considered for any treatment.
—Clinics that offer gender-affirming care must report cases of gender dysphoria and any subsequent treatments received by the patient.
Erin Reed emphasizes, in a separate article she published just a few minutes ago, that gender-affirming care for Ohioans of any age will have to be “signed off by a psychiatrist, an endocrinologist, and a bioethicist” with mandatory “reporting of each trans diagnosis to the state.” As a result, the Ohio Department of Health website suddenly has “a slew of burdensome rules that appear borrowed from similar tactics used to close abortion clinics,” including an “expansive surveillance system for all trans care with no opt-out.” It’s a “defacto ban,” she says — just as last year Missouri briefly accomplished, Florida did implement, and Donald Trump called for on a federal level, which he’ll surely do if he’s elected president this November.
Worse, as Ohio lawmakers already scheduled a special session to override DeWine’s veto of the minors-only care ban, they are using that session to expedite “a trans adult bathroom ban in colleges.”
Florida
This state’s new anti-trans bills “appear aimed at the complete eradication of transgender existence by ending all legal recognition and significantly limiting medical care,” Reed explains. Quick refresher: In 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a “Don’t Say Gay” law applying to grades K–3, which in 2023 was expanded through grade 12, and which in 2024 is proposed to be expanded to adults in the workplace. Florida also has a 2024 bill to enable the identification and tracking of all trans people, in part by not letting anyone update their gender marker on their driver’s license.
South Carolina
There’s a bill to “ban Medicaid coverage for gender affirming care up to the age of 26,” Reed says.
Missouri
There’s a proposed “bathroom ban” which claims that “transgender people using the bathroom violates the rights of cisgender people,” Reed says. The Missouri Human Rights Commission would have to enforce this.
Trans people already know why bathroom laws are harmful. If this is a bit fuzzy to you, please reflect (sorry for my rudeness, we’re just entirely out of time here): Do you appreciate that it’s legal for you to enter a public bathroom corresponding to your gender, that it’s illegal for others who see you there to harass and threaten you based on their guess of what gender you are, and that, after being threatened in-person, you aren’t dragged in front of a judge to provide evidence of your sex? Wash, rinse, repeat, every time you enter a bathroom, maybe either bathroom, until you’ve been outed, lost your job, and gotten locked up?
Missouri is also continuing its efforts to ban drag. Part of the legal definition would be “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment.” Again, trans people already know why this is harmful. If fuzzy on this, consider: If trans people aren’t recognized as legally having our genders, authorities might consider us perpetual “impersonators.” If we then attend, say, the upcoming AWP writers’ conference in Kansas City, Missouri, and we stand up and read a poem, we will have entertained the public while impersonating our own gender, and this (given that a minor could be present) would be a felony.
It Comes Fast and Furious
It was bad enough up to 2022
See Krista Brynn’s spreadsheet of pre-2023 anti-trans bills & laws.
2023 was horrific
See the ACLU’s “Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures,” which tracks all anti-LGBTQ bills in the United States. In 2023, there were over 500, many of which became law. Most were anti-transgender in intent—by which I don’t mean to imply that these bills affect only a tiny sliver of the population and therefore can’t matter to anyone who’s not trans. As a reminder: transphobia contributes to homophobia and can harm anyone (including people who aren’t trans). And to make a different point: If these laws weren’t serving some powerful political purpose, Republicans wouldn’t have bothered filing over 500 of them.
2024 is looking like my least favorite wave to surf
If 2023 was a legislative “tsunami,” Erin Reed says, 2024 is the “second wave.”
I’m not paywalling this story of mine. I want everyone to be able to read it. Go ahead and forward it. And if you want to read more about my thoughts on this topic, you can find all of my articles about transphobia (over 250) unpaywalled on my website.
If you do have cash to support people who are fighting transphobia, please subscribe to Erin Reed to support her work. You’ll get these kind of legislative updates directly from her throughout 2024.
January 6 Can Be a Day for Making Connections
Today is the third anniversary of the attack on the Capitol, into which there was a congressional investigation, and now there’s a federal prosecution and a Georgia prosecution and challenges to the former president’s eligibility to run for office in 2024. If you typically read online about U.S. politics, then a few retrospectives on January 6, 2021 are hitting your inbox today. Read, listen, and reflect; it’s an important topic. I’m an ongoing contributor to those Wikipedia articles that I just linked to. I’ve also written several articles here on Medium about January 6. For example, I have a favorite chapter in the final report of the House select committee.
What we learn from living in this world is that nothing is just one thing.
The Republican Party’s ongoing attempts to overturn the 2020 election and subvert democracy, and its attempts to eradicate transness and queerness, are facets of the same phenomenon. They are not separate.
If you’ve written on some aspect of this connection, please do me the honor of sharing a link in the comments. I’d love to read your story.
