Social Justice Maryland as a Safe Space:
State-Level LGBTQ+ Protections in the National Context For LGBTQ+ people, allies, and advocates, the recent trend among state legislatures targeting transgender individuals and LGBTQ+ families is an alarming signal of backlash against the progress and legal protections that these communities have fought hard to achieve. Statelevel legislation directed at LGBTQ+ youth has garnered national headlines. Local organizers and national organizations have highlighted the implications of these new state laws, ranging from attempts to shut down sexual and gender identity conversations to the criminalization of healthcare typically obtained by transgender youth. Marylanders should take note of the legislative onslaught because while our comparatively liberal laws and available resources may indicate that Maryland is a safe alternative for LGBTQ+ families, our laws still need improvements to adequately protect the LGBTQ+ population and truly offer this state as a safe place to grow up or parent as an LGBTQ+ person. Florida has generated numerous demonstrations of support and opposition to its “Parental Rights in Education” bill, branded by opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay Bill.” The legislature used decidedly neutral language to define any classroom discussion of gender or sexual identity as inappropriate where students are in third grade or younger. The bill also granted parents of older students the opportunity to bring legal action against a school district if the believe that a student has been exposed to classroom discussion on these topics “in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate.” In essence, the bill serves to discourage any school official from permitting discussions that might affirm the identities of LGBTQ+ children or LGBTQ+ families because of the ever-present risk of legal liability. The bill has garnered much national attention primarily because of pushback from the Walt Disney Company (Disney), Florida’s largest and most recognizable private employer. Despite the protests from Disney and others, Florida Governor Ron Desantis signed the bill into law. This type of bill, and indeed some of the verbatim language contained in it, is certainly not unique to Florida. Similar legislation restricting classroom discussion, diversity training, or counseling in schools that acknowledge LGBTQ+ personnel or affirms LGBTQ+ students has been proposed or passed with significantly less scrutiny in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South 32
Carolina, and Tennessee. The public policy focus on transgender youth started with an alleged concern for fairness to their athletic peers and quickly morphed into the criminalization of private medical decisions. Transgender youth sports participation has become a point of contention for anti-LGBTQ+ political groups recently. In the last two years, 15 states have enacted bans on transgender students participating in sports consistent with their gender identity. Last April, Arkansas kicked off a domino effect of legislation targeting transgender youth healthcare with the “Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act.” The bill, first introduced on February 25, 2021, and passed into law a mere 40 days later on April 6, created a statewide ban on gender-affirming healthcare for any transgender person under eighteen years of age. Despite ongoing legal challenges to this bill, 14 other states introduced and passed similar bans on restricting healthcare for transgender youth. Legislators in Idaho recently took this trend a step further, advancing a bill that would not only make providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth a felony, but would also criminalize transporting a child outside of Idaho with the intent to facilitate this care. In February 2022, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an order, pursuant to an opinion from the Office of the Attorney General, that classified gender-affirming care as “child abuse,” imposing mandatory reporting requirements on anyone involved in these individual care plans and directing the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate any reports. A recent assessment of this type of legislation from NPR found that up to one-third of trans youth will lose access to gender-affirming healthcare if these laws are allowed to go into effect.
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The Advocate
June 2022