LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back

Democrats must take a stand

Back on August 22nd I was watching Kamala Harris's acceptance speech as the nominee of the Democratic Party for President of the United States. Coming into the convention, I had full throated support for the Vice President. I had been questioning Joe Biden's viability for a second term as early as February. Biden made great statements for the transgender community. But his accomplishments for us, when so much can routinely be against trans people, were mainly procedural. He did things like update the policy of the Social Security Administration to ensure that you can update your gender with self-declaration, which is huge in allowing trans folks to not have to out themselves at work. Other updates are that he did the same with passports, a legal ID that's valid for ten years from the date of issue. While it's certainly an expensive form of ID, now every trans and nonbinary person has an ability to have a legal ID matching their gender identity, M, F, or X. He also updated TSA procedures so that gender is no longer considered a factor when clearing security for plane travel. I've benefited from all of these updates. In February, before my legal name and gender marker were updated, I flew to Arizona for business. Thank goodness being myself didn't get me singled out for additional scrutiny. I have since changed my name and updated the gender marker on both my passport and with social security.

With that said, there's been an avalanche of hate against the transgender community coming from the right. Since 2023, over 1250 proposed state laws have targeted the trans community. So many life-endangering and dehumanizing laws have come into place. For so much of Biden's time in office, he seemed reluctant to use the power of the Federal government to safeguard trans rights. He had the tool of the 2020 Bostock Supreme Court Decision, with the opinion written by Neil Gorsuch, that says for employment all Federal protections on the basis of sex must also apply to someone's orientation and gender identity. Within a year, that opinion was applied to hundreds of other areas in law beyond employment so that queer people aren't discriminated against for who they are. Yet, the Biden administration didn't advance much with this. States like Florida have made laws like the restroom law where if I use a restroom that matches my gender identity at a public building in the state, I can be arrested and jailed for a year. Bostock established that this law is illegal in a workplace, and certainly trans people's work requires that they use the restroom in public buildings, so this law should be illegal under federal law at a minimum for workers in these locations. The Justice Department should have found trans folks in Florida who were impacted by this law and gone to court. While the Bostock decision was while Ruth Bader Ginsberg was still on the court, it was a 6-3 decision and five of the Justices, including Gorsuch and Roberts who voted in favor of it, are still on the court. Heck, Gorsuch wrote the decision that if you are discriminating against someone who is trans, but would not discriminate against someone of the same gender who is cis (not transgender), that IS discrimination based on sex.

This was the crux of a lot of the criticism of Joe Biden from the trans community. He would often say great words, like when he acknowledged that trans people exist on Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31 each year, or when he issued a statement about Nex Benedict's death. So many laws were rolling back transgender rights in states across the country though, that nice statements were not enough. We needed actions to safeguard us. This past spring, his administration finally issued guidance that Title IX applies to transgender people, more than three years after his administration took over. I can't help but think if this had been issued years earlier, maybe Nex Benedict wouldn’t have been forced into the wrong restroom at school where he was beaten unconscious and he'd still be here today.

I was so excited when Vice President Harris ascended to the top of the ticket. She's someone that has worked within the system to be a strong advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, so I saw her candidacy as the next step in the evolution and someone who might look to do more than just watch the tide roll in on these bigoted state laws. Rather, I hoped she'd go on offense for our rights. My rights to live and work as myself shouldn't be controversial.

So at the convention on August 22nd, I was listening closely to Vice President Harris's speech. I didn't need my rights to be a major talking point. The GOP spent their convention demagoguing people like me. Trans people know that while this issue is of critical importance to us, most voters can't personally identify with the experience. So, no, I didn't need Vice President Harris to do a major inflection point on my rights. But I did expect a level of inclusion as I wanted to know that she would have our back. So what did she say?

"Friends, I believe America cannot truly be prosperous unless Americans are fully able to make their own decisions about their own lives, especially on matters of heart and home." She then spoke at length about abortion and I.V.F. which are great issues of importance to bodily autonomy rights. It resumes: "And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law. In this election, many other fundamental freedoms are at stake. The freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities and places of worship. The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. The freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis. And the freedom that unlocks all the others: the freedom to vote. With this election, we finally have the opportunity to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act."

I'll tell you what wasn't mentioned in that speech, the right to authentically express your gender identity. It would have been so easy to get it into the mix too. While she spoke about bodily autonomy, the right for me to take hormones matching my gender identity is the same reason women should be able to control their reproductive rights. But I understand why Vice President Harris might not wanted to take away from her strong stance on reproductive rights. So then, why couldn't she have changed "The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride." to "The freedom to love who you love openly and live in line with your gender identity with pride." Trans rights were not mentioned in the Vice President's speech. There have been over 1250 state laws proposed restricting transgender rights in the last two years, and we couldn't get eight words in a speech.

It wasn't just the Vice President's acceptance speech though. The Democratic National Convention had about six hours of coverage during prime time. In that six hours from the main stage, there were no mentions specifically for transgender people. None. In fact, at any time in the week of the Convention, there were only two times transgender people were mentioned at all from the stage. Those mentions were by the President of the Human Rights Campaign Kelley Robinson and by New Jersey Senator Corey Booker. Neither slot had significant attention. Again, the Republicans made demonizing transgender people a central issue of their convention, and the party that is supposed to be aligned with our rights responds with crickets?

The silence didn't stop. Republicans ramped up the hate against the trans community, dropping $215 million dollars on ads demonizing us. Democrats were largely silent. Occasionally they seeded ground so much that they started repeating Republican talking points. The Democratic national party seemed to treat transgender people like a trolley problem, allowing months of vitriol to go unchallenged in some type of bizarre strategy. It seemed that they believed they were sacrificing the mental health and literal lives of trans people from the convention to election day, essentially telling us to pipe down about being under attack, so that Democrats could protect us after getting into office. So Republicans pushed anti-trans demagoguery with $215 million in anti-trans attack ads, advancing anti-trans ideas and the literal death of trans people (content warning on this link posted one day after the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention) between the convention and the election. But with the election loss, the trolley problem was different than it was presented because now there's a second train on the other track anyway and it looks like all trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people are about to be run over.

It doesn't have to be this way. My state of Illinois continues to show that you can be a vocal supporter of trans rights and it can be a winning political issue. Advocacy comes from the top of the ticket in Illinois, with Governor JB Pritzker continuing to make codifying trans rights in Illinois a top priority.

Just this year, Illinois passed a law so that Illinois will issue a court order to update an out of state birth certificate for residents born out of state. Currently, HB 5164 is making its way through the Illinois Senate after clearing the Illinois House. This bill would waive the public notice requirement so that marginalized people are not subjected to a judge's whim when not wanting to out themselves and reduce the residency requirement to three months to change your name when moving to Illinois. Heck, when the new for 2024 Illinois law that should have made it easier to not publish notice without outing yourself did not work for me as expected, I contacted my Illinois State Rep to let them know. I was hoping for a future meeting to update the law. What I got was my rep personally responding to me in less than thirty minutes asking if I wanted assistance and offering to get the ACLU involved. This led to direct assistance from other organizations. It was the pivot point in allowing me to get my name changed without outing myself, and my name is not stored on a public website documenting name changes. This is exactly the type of advocacy that we need and have a right to expect and Democrats in Illinois state government up and down the ticket consistently go to bat for the trans community. Since the Democrats have gone to bat for expanded trans rights in the state, they have had huge gains in Illinois governance. Illinois had a Republican Governor as recently as 2018 and that seems almost unfathomable today.

So while Democrats are on the defensive and have eroding support in many places, Democrats are on offense with expanding support in Illinois. JB Pritzker posted this on his Instagram after the most recent elections, in November of 2024.

Civil rights IS a winning issue when Democrats embrace them for all Americans. The GOP is going to release a hellscape on all marginalized people. Trans people are at the tip of the spear. LGBTQIA+ people represent 8% of the voting public and 86% of us voted Democrat in this election. We need national Democratic leaders to grow a spine and advocate for us NOW. Republicans have already started their attacks in this cycle, dehumanizing Sarah McBride, the first openly trans person elected to the US House of Representatives, by not allowing her to use the women's restroom. I'm not going to get into Sarah McBride's response to these attacks, as I can certainly understand why she would not want to start her service in Congress by talking about her restroom habits while the press doesn't ask for comment on the restroom habits of the other 534 members of Congress. We cannot afford to let this continued erosion of rights happen and LGBTQIA+ people are not going back. The rollback of rights doesn’t stop when the right achieves a goal, they immediately move to the next goal. For example, when the right realized they had “won” the Capital restroom battle without a fight, they immediately moved on to a bill to rollback the rights of trans people to use restrooms on all Federal properties. They won’t be stopping at the next restriction either. Their goal is the complete erasure of all LGBTQIA+ people from public life. They will be coming for the right to marry, the right to serve in the military openly, and the rights of all queer people. Democrats need to act as a breakwater now. If you are a Democrat and you are not meeting the Pritzker standard on LGBTQIA+ rights, we will not be voting for you. Period.

The argument that tends to come after an assertion like this is that Democrats most closely match my values, so who else would I vote for? I need to give you a personal story because there’s an underlying assumption that isn’t true of values matching. Before my name change finally went through with the help of my Illinois State Rep., I voted in the Illinois primary. It was an especially traumatic point for me as the Illinois primary was right after my name change did not go through originally. So I went with my wife for moral support as my legal name was still my deadname. To vote, I would need to sign my deadname before getting my electronic code. My wife goes in front of me. The judge sees her, says her name off of what she filled out, she confirms the name and gets her code. I'm next. The judge sees me and proceeds to yell "(DEADNAME, LAST NAME)!!!" I'm right there, but the judge yells it to ensure that everyone in the polling place looks up to see that there's a tr***y in the neighborhood. The judge yelling this was a Democrat. It was disgusting. Being a Democrat does not automatically mean that they support my rights or that our values align. The only people I will be giving my support to moving forward are those that give full throated support to the rights of all marginalized people, including queer and trans people. The act of voting in and of itself for trans people can put our life at risk by outing us to our neighbors. I won’t be doing this for candidates that don’t push back on LGBTQIA+ hate.

So today is a day of action. Please contact your representatives in Congress and the Senate and tell them to take a stand for the rights of LGBTQIA+ people, or they will not be getting your vote. Period. Tell them they need to meet the Pritzker standard for how to support the LGBTQIA+ community. I’ll be contacting all of my Federal representatives, but especially Senator Tammy Duckworth’s office. Tammy Duckworth voted for a final appropriations bill in committee that would ban gender affirming care for the children of military members because she did not hold the line earlier this year for the rights of all LGBTQIA+ people. LGBTQIA+ people are not bargaining chips for a negotiation to be surrendered for what Democrats really want and they have an obligation to meet the Pritzker standard and vehemently say no to all restrictions for our entire community at the Federal level. Please join me in telling all Democrats in Washington that they need to push back on the hate and go on offense. Democrats need to call everyone advancing these types of restrictions what they are - obsessed with other people’s genitals. Tell them that they need to start talking about how Republicans are trying to erase trans teens from existence, just as nine out of ten trans Gen Xers were erased from existence or public life. LGBTQIA+ people are not going back.

This post is part of a day of action for LGBTQIA+ rights organized by Julia Serano. You can read more about the day of action here.