Ethermac|As anti-trans legislation proliferates in 2024, community fears erasure from public view

As a third-generation firefighter and Ethermacthen fire captain, Lana Moore served the city of Columbus for 35 years. In 2008, she came out to her crew as transgender.

While some in the department grumbled, Moore said both her chief and union president were fully supportive, and two years after she retired in 2016, she was inducted into the city's hall of fame.

That’s why it pains her to know Ohio lawmakers – for whom, she said, she would have laid down her life as a firefighter – last month overrode Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of HB68, a bill banning gender-affirming care for youths and preventing transgender girls and women from competing in female high school and college sports. And they’re still mulling a slate of bills that would restrict transgender rights and visibility.

“It’s frightening,” Moore said. “It feels like I’ve been betrayed. They’ve identified a small minority of people they can stereotype and scapegoat. I’m not a historian, but I paid attention in history class, and it’s not hard to recognize what’s happening here.”

As Republican lawmakers nationwide continue to introduce bills targeting the LGBTQ community – and specifically transgender people – at rates on par with last year’s record numbers, Moore and community advocates fear a rising tide of hostile rhetoric is designed to ultimately erase them from public life.

This week, Florida officials revoked transgender residents’ ability to update gender markers on driver’s licenses and ID cards; Utah passed a bill banning transgender people from bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity; and Texas’ attorney general pressed a clinic in Georgia for medical records of transgender youths who used telehealth to obtain gender-affirming care there.

'It has progressively gotten worse'

The Human Rights Campaign, among the country’s largest LGBTQ+ civil rights groups, said 130 bills targeting transgender rights had been filed nationwide so far in 2024, compared to roughly 225 last year. Overall, the group said, 325 anti-LGBTQ bills had been proposed in 2024 as of Jan. 25, compared to 503 in all of 2023.

“For years, transgender people have warned of radical anti-LGBTQ+ forces’ true aim: to abuse governmental power to take away our freedoms and drive trans people out of public society,” said Kelley Robinson, the organization’s president, in a statement decrying what she called a “sinister agenda." “…. They want to humiliate, harass and use policy to eliminate transgender people from public life.”

Last week, Michigan news outlet Mlive.com reported Republican lawmakers from Michigan and Ohio described banning access to gender-affirming care for adults as well as youths as the “endgame” in a conversation on the social media platform X.

Siobhan Boyd-Nelson, co-interim executive director of Equality Ohio, said the group was “profoundly disappointed” in Ohio “lawmakers’ unwillingness to listen to medical professionals, young people and their families…. There’s absolutely no reason for government overreach into the personal medical decisions of Ohioans.”

“It has progressively gotten worse, and we know that Ohio is not alone,” Boyd-Nelson said. “We’re seeing it happen across the country, and we think people should be very concerned about what appears to be an obsession with marginalizing and harming an already marginalized community.”

Anti-equality bills outnumber those in support

When Moore grew up in the 1970s, she didn’t know the term transgender; not until she saw transgender actress and activist Christine Jorgensen on a talk show did she realize she wasn’t the only person who felt as she did.

She now serves on the national board of directors for LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, fighting to humanize trans people.

“I took an oath as a civil servant and I took it seriously,” Moore said. “That didn’t end when I retired. But it looks like they’ve (Republican lawmakers) taken an oath to a political party.”

According to health policy research organization KFF, 23 states have enacted laws or policies limited youth access to gender affirming care as of Jan. 31, while 21 states have laws or policies imposing professional or legal penalties on healthcare practitioners who provide minors with such care.

Not that there aren’t bright spots. According to the Human Rights Campaign’s 2023 State Equality Index, more than 253 pro-equality bills were introduced nationwide last year; 50 of them were signed into law.

In contrast, the campaign tallied 571 anti-equality bills in 2023, with 77 of them becoming law.

The campaign gave 20 states and Washington its highest rating (“working toward innovative equality”) while another five were characterized as “solidifying equality,” the index’s next highest ranking.

But 23 other states, most of them in the South, were deemed “high priority to achieve basic equality,” the list’s lowest rating.

“States are trying to rewrite laws to exclude LGBTQ+ people from sex-based protections, and they are continuing to try to erase LGBTQ+ people from history, from the classroom, from artistic performance, and from sport,” the report reads.

'Other people are defining us'

Florida is among the states in the campaign’s lowest rated category. In addition to revoking the ability of transgender people to change the listed gender on their driver’s licenses, the state has passed laws restricting transgender people from using bathrooms in public schools and places, transgender youth participation in sports, gender affirming care for transgender youth and inclusion of LGBTQ+ topics in schools.

“The DeSantis administration’s obsession with scapegoating transgender Floridians has escalated into an outrageous attack that further erodes freedom and liberty in our state,” said Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, in a statement. “…. These reckless and hateful policies are intended to make the transgender community feel unsafe and unwelcome in Florida and to bully them out of public life entirely.” 

Alaina Kupec, president of transgender advocacy group Gender Research Advisory Council + Education, or GRACE, said transgender people provide a "politically opportunistic" group for candidates to prey on. She started the organization out of exasperation over the rhetoric influencing public perceptions of the trans community.

“Nobody was really changing the narrative being put out by hate groups telling outright lies about transgender people and our lives and the care that we get,” Kupec said. “I thought, maybe I should be challenging these five-alarm fires we’re seeing across the country…. Other people are defining us instead of us defining ourselves.”

Through GRACE, Kupec helps trans advocacy groups around the country get their message out while providing them with research and data on issues like gender-affirming care.

“We have a world where the left is shouting at the right and the right is shouting at the left,” she said. “We want to find that movable middle and appeal to their values and not have them see us as the enemy or the woke left. People have tried to portray these issues as partisan, and they’re not.”

Climate prompts fears for personal safety

Kupec and others say some politicians have seized on transgender issues as a means of distraction, trying to make up for lost votes over abortion rights.

“This is purely political theater designed to capture attention,” she said, noting a federal judge last year struck down a 2021 Arkansas law banning gender-affirming care for trans youth, calling it unconstitutional and motivated by ideology. “At the end of the day, the courts are going to knock these things down, because the medical evidence is overwhelming.”

Boyd-Nelson, of Equality Ohio, said while some politicians might fixate on these issues to score points with their constituencies, she wonders at what cost.

“Lives are at stake, and that’s what’s so disgusting about this,” she said.