RACE TO THE BOTTOM: ANTI-TRANS LAWS IN THE USA

On March 11th, a Texas judge temporarily halted statewide investigations of parents with trans kids. This came after Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered state officials to consider gender-affirming healthcare, like puberty blockers and hormone replacement

therapy (HRT), as child abuse. In Texas, child abuse is punishable with up to 100 years in prison and losing custody of your kids, which is pretty alarming when you start defining child abuse as “stuff I don’t like”. The judge in question ruled that Abbott’s actions were unconstitutional, but the threat has been made.

The United States is seemingly on an inexorable march towards trans erasure. In the first half of 2022 alone, 300 anti-LGBT bills were proposed by state legislators. That’s an increase from the 130 similar bills proposed last year–a number so large it’s prompted some advocates to label 2021 as “the worst year in revent history for queer rights.”

Over one third of 2022’s anti-LGBT bills target trans people. Trans kids’ access to sports is singled out, with bills in 17 different states restricting high schoolers from participating in sports teams associated with their gender. Tenenssee added that they’ll withhold a portion of state funding if schools fail to confirm trans students’ birth sex (presumably via phsical examination). Arkansas was the first state to ban affirming healthcare for trans youth, promising to revoke the licences of doctors who provide it, followed by Arizona and Tennessee. Five states also passed anti-trans bathroom bills. Bills were passed in Arizona, Indiana, and Oklahoma allowing religiously-motivated discirmnation against LGBT people in adoption and foster care. Finally, Montana legislation stated thatpeople had to medically transition before they could change their birth certifications (qualifying in some jurisdictions as coerced surgery), but it’s recently gone further and blocked changes to birth certificates even after surgery. And this list is…non-comprehensive.

How did we get here? Since the mid-twentieth century, Republicans

have been fine-tuning their fratty cowboy style of right-wing populism. “Traditional conservatives” were a little reticent to make flagrantly racist, sexist, and violent statements to win over voters, and then Newt Gingrich came along. He pioneered a style of partisan combat so toxic and obstructionist that it put Republicans back in control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years. Then, Goldwater, Reagan, and other conservative politicians used abortion to galvanise evangelicals back to the polls, who become the single most important interest group for Republicans moving forward (second only to the NRA).

The idealised rewind back to the 1950s went awry when sodomy laws were overturned and the fight won for same-sex marriage. But the GOP has to keep their base boiling in constant populist fervour, so when one issue fades (as with gay rights) they’ve got to find something else. And trans people were next on the horizon. In the 2010s, the Tea Party (who were offended by Obama’s blackness, not so much his war crimes) and their white nationalist allies made social conservatism trendy for bluecollar Americans. Where once the targets of conspiracy theories were confined to Democratic party officials, fearmongering was suddenly laser-focused on LGBT individuals, and beamed directly into their homes and phone screens.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM

Trump adopted the idology of the farright base he needed to win, making so many moves against LGBT people that his leadership was branded “The Discrimination Administration”. Meanwhile, cable news (which remains the primary news source for 91% of Americans) popularised conspiracy theories about trans people and egged on far-right street violence, smearing their opponents as “groomers”. This is a transparent attempt to erase trans people BOTTOM by contextualising their very existence as sexually predacious and harmful to children. I mean, the “Don’t say Gay” bill was publicly referred to by Republicans as the “Anti-Grooming Bill”-they’re not even being subtle about it! Anti-trans panic has since taken hold and metastasized. There’s a growing cottage industry of Christian mommy bloggers turned right-wing thought leaders–e.g. Abigail Shrier and Maria Keffler–who’ve reskinned old gay conversion therapy manuals into guides for “de-transing” your child. These guides dehumanise trans kids as being brainwashed by the “gender industry”, requiring parents to isolate them from their friends, family, and the internet until they repress. Not only are these people enriching themselves at the expense of trans people, they’re draping bigotry in a gossamer covering of feminism, generating anti-trans laws bearing progressive-seeming names. For instance: the Mississippi “Women’s Bill of Rights’’ is essentially a TERF manifesto that invokes the seperate-but-equal doctrine for women. Sound culty enough yet? This flows seamlessly into a now-common anti-trans playbook: produce bigoted content about trans people, film yourself antagonising and attacking trans-inclusive events, then go on Fox News, Newsmax, and other right-wing media outlets to put the videos in front of an even broader audience. Eventually, the original talking points trickle upwards to conservative lawmakers, who zero in on schools and bathrooms as pressure points for eliciting “what about the children?” reactionary sentiments. What-about-the-children-ism is an evergreen trope in the conservative arsenal. It dates back to Jim Crow, when segregationists would argue that white schoolgirls were under attack physically and psychologically from the integration of Black students. Now we’re seeing the pathologizing of trans kids and teens: saying they’re confused, or they’re enforcing “authoritarian tolerance”, or they’re being experimented on by doctors, and therefore should be barred from accessing transanything…whether they want to or not. Because…what-about-the-children?! These contradictions serve the needs of those in power: that is, the many Republican candidates for the 2024 Presidential elections who are staking their campaigns on culture war bullshit. Worse still, is Americans aren’t liberalising over time on trans issues the same way they have on same-sex marriage–they’re actually becoming more intolerant. About four-in-ten American adults (38%) say that greater acceptance of trans people is good for society, while 32% say it is bad, including 54% of Republicans and

ANTI-TRANS LAWS IN THE USA

Republican leaners. The effect has been devastating for the LGBT community. You might remember how, in the wake of the Uvalde shooting, conspiracy theorists built a lie that the 18-year-old cis gunman was a trans woman by falsely conflating him with random trans women of colour. Tens of thousands of people were exposed to these lies, and the story eventually reached Congressman Paul Gosar who claimed that the shooter was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.”

Manufacturing trans panic comes with a human cost. Fifty seven trans and gender non-conforming Americans were fatally shot or killed by other violent means in 2021, making it the deadliest year on record for trans hate crimes. And judging by recent trends, the far-right’s capacity for street violence will only escalate, of which black, brown, and Indigneous trans people are the most impacted.

Let me be clear–the current legislative push in the U.S aims to permanently confine trans people to their homes. For instance, let’s look at Tennessee’s House Bill 1182 (SB 1224). SB 1224 forces businesses and schools to post “trigger warnings’’ on their doors if they allow trans people to use bathrooms or locker rooms that match their gender. You know, like all buildings in a civilised country should. But under the bathroom measure, cisgender people can sue for “psychological, emotional, and physical harm suffered” if they so much as see a trans person on the premises. This is so ridiculously vague that it appears to litigate everything and nothing, but what it really does is coerce trans people away from existing in public–otherwise suehappy Republicans will plunge businesses and schools into financial ruin through civil suits. Forcing trans people out of the formal labour market has the added effect of making medical transition prohibitively expensive and disenfranchising those who would otherwise fight back. it so that the social “punishment” for being trans extends and stretches from the original victim and their loved ones, to all trans people, who are forced to relive their past trumaas and cope with the resulting wave of extrajudicial punishment that rains down from all sides. The long-game, then, is to make trans people detransition via lack of healthcare, to make them become lifelong closet cases for fear of being harmed, or–ideally–to make them not exist at all through religious education. If the push succeeds, the U.S. wll have effectively declared itself fully cisgender for the first time.

Sadly anti-trans rhetoric has migrated to Australia, as at the beginning of this year we were inundated with bathroom and sports bills. We must push back hard against the Coalition and News Corps’ willingness to engage in culture war bullshit before it escalates. Do not give them the benefit of the doubt: anti-trans statements are so newsmaking, they only work to the advantage of conservatives who will happily strip away rights from other groups given the opportunity. But if the last century of U.S. history can service any kind of precedent, it’s that the GOP will lose this fight eventually, and you can help out by donating to the Australian trans rights charity linked below. Stay safe out there. QR code for Transcend Australia:

//transcend.org.au/about/