How Do You Know the Legislation Is Anti-LGBTQ Without Reading It?

2023 was gruesomely challenging. 2024 is something else.

Tucker Lieberman

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line art of winged dragon eating its own tail
How do you know what it is if you haven’t eaten it all? Dragon by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

For people concerned about queer/trans rights in the United States, 2023 was a gruesomely challenging year. I don’t know what the best word is for it; perhaps the word has not been invented yet. A grue is a lurking monster in the Zork games that eats you if you stumble across it, hence I think “gruesome” will do.

In 2023, the ACLU tracked 510 anti-LGBTQ bills in the U.S.
ACLU

Did Republicans get it all out of their system in 2023? They did not.

Only “three days into 2024,” Erin Reed recently wrote, U.S. lawmakers had submitted 125 anti-transgender bills. (I wrote about it at the time.)

Now it’s February 1. How did January shake out?

The ACLU is tracking 393 anti-LGBTQ bills in the U.S.
ACLU, as seen February 1, 2024

I’m sorry to sound like a broken record about this, but those of us who are LGBTQ and affected by what happens in the US can’t take a day off.

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Tucker Lieberman

Editor for Prism & Pen and for Identity Current. Author of the novel "Most Famous Short Film of All Time." tuckerlieberman.com