On Wednesday, the Missouri General Assembly was slated to discuss eight anti-trans bills, from regulations barring “discrimination” against health providers who refuse to perform gender affirming care to an exclusionary “bathroom bill.”
Legislative researcher Erin Reed told the Washington Blade on Tuesday that she expects these items will leave no room for other business: “This happened last year on a number of occasions” with hearings that began at 9 a.m. and stretched past midnight.
Missouri “had one day last year where they heard several sports bans and several health care bans and then several drag bans in the same day,” she said. “The idea, I think, is to truly wear people down.”
The Show-Me State’s legislative calendar this week is almost rote: 17 days into the new year, lawmakers in Congress and in statehouses across the country are considering more than 275 anti-trans bills according to the Trans Legislative Tracker and ACLU.
With 150+ pieces of legislation that were carried over from last year and some 100+ new bills, 2024 could break records that have been set for each of the past three consecutive years. “Our count right now is 230 have been introduced this year,” Reed said, referring to new bills. “The number has been going up really quickly.”
“Across the country, state and local politicians have declared war on freedoms, including the freedom to get necessary medical care, a good education, and to simply exist without fear of violence or state-sanctioned discrimination,” Human Rights Campaign National Press Secretary Brandon Wolf told the Washington Blade.
“The result has been a crisis for millions of LGBTQ+ people, many of whom have been forced to flee their states to access basic civil liberties,” he said, adding, “The 2024 attacks on freedom are already accelerating. MAGA politicians are already doubling down on the agenda to strip transgender people of lifesaving care, ban more books, censor more curriculum, and wield state statutes as a weapon against people’s freedom to exist as their authentic selves.”
Anti-trans legislation can be difficult to categorize. Bills restricting trans young people’s ability to play on sports teams that align with their gender identity, for example, often including sweeping binary and exclusionary definitions of gender and sex.
Bans and restrictions on healthcare remain popular. Measures targeting access to medically necessary healthcare interventions that are supported by every mainstream scientific and medical organization with relevant clinical expertise have surged, totaling 179 bills in 2023 and 68 so far in 2024, according to the Trans Legislative Tracker.
Overall, compared to last year, Reed said, “the frequency of the bills is higher right now. And there are still state legislatures that are not fully in session.”
And looking ahead, the pace is unlikely to taper off as Republican presidential candidates including the party’s frontrunner, former President Donald Trump, have made anti-trans policy proposals and rhetoric cornerstones of their campaigns, Reed noted.
For instance, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will participate in a meeting Wednesday in South Carolina focused on “trans people in sports — and so, we’re gonna see more of these bills proposed and the heat and the pressure has ratcheted up this year,” she said.
“There’s already a lot of lack of understanding of transgender people in the United States and Republicans have taken advantage of that,” Reed said. “That lack of understanding is, I think, magnified whenever it comes to sports and whenever it comes to the expectations people have of trans people and our bodies and what we look like and who we are.”
Not only is anti-trans legislative activity outpacing that which was seen last year, but Reed said the scope of bills targeting the LGBTQ community has broadened relative to 2023.
“Some of the states might have passed a sports ban but didn’t pass a drag ban. Some of the states that passed a drag ban might not have passed a sports ban. And so now we’re seeing all of those states kind of say, ‘OK, let’s do that too.’”
At the same time, Reed said, states have expanded anti-LGBTQ laws that were passed in recent years. For example, Florida was the first to pass “don’t say gay” legislation, which prohibited classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity through the fifth grade. It took effect in 2022. After other states followed its lead, last year Florida moved to enforce the law in all grade levels.
This year, Reed noted, Florida proposed a measure “that would essentially make all trans people and all people in the state of Florida sign biological sex affidavits whenever they update their driver’s licenses.”
If passed, the law would “basically end all legal recognition for trans people in the state. It takes every single place in the state law where trans people have any sort of legal recognition of their gender identity and erases it,” she said.
Reason for optimism
Toward the tail end of Missouri’s legislative sessions last year, when the general assembly was debating drag bans, the LGBTQ community and allies continued to show up, Reed said — many dressed in drag, even “at the end of the night, like one in the morning.”
She highlighted the results of the 2022 and 2023 midterm elections, where “These attacks did not work” and “most people that ran on anti-trans campaigns lost their elections — and I can name dozens of examples of this.”
Reed said she could not name a single candidate who, “running specifically on this issue as their main talking point at the end of the election” won their race.
Likewise, Wolf said, attacks against LGBTQ people are accelerating, “But the truth is: LGBTQ+ people have been here before, with fewer allies and fewer resources. We won then and we will win again now.”
He urged folks to “Show up to hearings, call and email lawmakers, organize our communities, and send a clear message: the war on freedom and equality will not win. Resistance is in our DNA. And the time for it is now.”
Story courtesy of the Washington Blade via the National LGBTQ Media Association. The National LGBTQ Media Association represents 13 legacy publications in major markets across the country with a collective readership of more than 400K in print and more than 1 million + online. Learn more here: https://nationallgbtmediaassociation.com/