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We must stop anti-trans onslaught in US before it’s too late [1]
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Date: 2023-01
The legal and cultural situation for LGBTIQ Americans – especially transgender Americans – has got worse and worse with every passing year. This trend shows no signs of abating in 2023.
We’re just three weeks into the year, and at least 225 anti-LGBTIQ bills have already been introduced in state legislatures, according to a list compiled by trans rights activist Alejandra Caraballo. Many target gender-affirming healthcare. A smaller number are focused on drag shows, because the anti-trans right tends to incorrectly conflate dressing and performing in drag with being transgender.
Last year, more than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in 26 states, with 13 states passing some of those bills into law. In some cases, when extreme proposals failed to clear a state’s legislature, right-wing governors and officials circumvented the legislative process. This is how Texas ended up targeting the loving parents of trans children with phony ‘child abuse’ investigations, and how Florida managed to ban gender-affirming healthcare for trans minors and defund it for trans adults.
This onslaught follows years of the right (aided and abetted by trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs) fomenting anti-trans sentiment via fear-mongering in the media and in political campaigns. Bathroom and school sports bills served as gateways to more extreme laws, while the campaigns associated with them spread false and violent rhetoric.
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A moral panic in 2022 about so-called ‘groomers’ – a term slung frequently at trans people and drag performers – grew out of this trend. Trans people, drag performers and other LGBTIQ individuals were subjected to intimidation, angry mobs and bomb threats – to say nothing of the murderous rampage at Club Q in Colorado (on the night before the Transgender Day of Remembrance), where five people died and 19 were injured at the hands of a mass shooter allegedly fuelled by anti-trans hatred.
New tactics
As anyone who has spent much time on social media can tell you, ‘genital mutilation’ is a term that right-wingers and TERFs constantly throw at trans individuals. Now, that rhetorical violence is coming home to roost in state legislative initiatives: a dangerous new tactic is to conflate gender-affirming healthcare with ‘genital mutilation’, as a way to ban gender-confirmation surgeries.
Last month, openDemocracy revealed that Republican lawmakers in Texas are attempting to amend the state’s health and safety code, which currently bans the clearly abusive practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), as practiced on minors for religious reasons. The new language would simply ban ‘genital mutilation’, explicitly including transition procedures that are almost never carried out on minors. Conflating these procedures with FGM is false and harmful. Should this initiative pass, it will amount to yet more direct state persecution of transgender individuals.
Texas is following the example of Idaho, where a similar bill was introduced last year (it ultimately failed to pass, due to Republican state senators’ concerns that it went too far in overstepping “parents’ rights” to determine healthcare choices for their children).
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/anti-trans-rights-legislation-united-states/
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