\u201cI grew up in Texas in the 1990s, and I don\u2019t remember seeing any LGBTQUIA+ people,\u201d Michael Terry told VOA, using an acronym for sexual minorities, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and other people.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot in person, not on TV or movies, and not in the books I read,\u201d said Terry, who is gay and lives in Atlanta, Georgia. \u201cIt made me feel like something was wrong with me and caused me to have thoughts of self-harm and suicide.\u201d<\/p>\n
June in the United States marks LGBTQ Pride Month, a celebration of sexual minority communities, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. This year’s Pride Month coincides with concerted and accelerating state-led efforts to restrict certain activities by Americans who identify as transgender and to cordon off drag queens from broader society.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve spent decades trying to build representation in society,\u201d Terry said, \u201cand now it\u2019s being systematically dismantled by legislation being pushed in Republican-controlled states across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
The American Civil Liberties Union reports 491 bills introduced in U.S. states this legislative session that the organization believes attack LGBTQ+ rights. Sixty-two of those bills have already been passed into law, by the ACLU\u2019s count.<\/p>\n
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a presidential contender, signed into law restrictions on gender-affirming treatments for minors seeking to transition to a new gender, as well as restrictions on drag shows, bathroom usage and pronoun usage in schools.<\/p>\n
In Kansas, new laws are leaving many transgender people unable to use bathrooms of the gender with which they identify, or to change how they identify on their driver’s licenses. Public school teachers in Florida and Iowa are restricted from discussing gender identity and sexual orientation issues with students. In many states, local school boards have removed LGBTQ-themed books from libraries.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis month \u2014 Pride Month \u2014 is supposed to be a time of hope, relief and joy,\u201d Janet Genusa of McComb, Mississippi, who identifies as lesbian, told VOA. \u201cBut those feelings have largely been replaced by fear and anxiety.\u201d<\/p>\n
Competing feelings<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think these laws are meant to stop people from being gay,\u201d said Danielle Streger, a Republican voter from Tampa, Florida. \u201cI just think LGBT pride is everywhere now \u2014 rainbow-colored beer bottles, rainbow-colored toilet paper \u2014 and my elementary school-aged children are surrounded by it in class.\u201d<\/p>\n
She continued, \u201cIf an adult wants to change their gender, that\u2019s up to them, and I don\u2019t want to stop them. But we should be able to discuss these complicated things as a family when I, the parent, feel my girls are ready. I don\u2019t want them to be force-fed it at school. It\u2019s not the teacher\u2019s responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many of the new laws being proposed across the country are focused on people who identify as transgender or nonbinary – that is, their gender is different from the sex they were assigned at birth – accounting for 1.6% of the U.S. population, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey.<\/p>\n
While the U.S. State Department and Social Security Administration announced last year that Americans are now allowed to select \u201cX\u201d rather than \u201cmale\u201d or \u201cfemale\u201d for their sex marker on their passports and Social Security applications, Americans are largely divided on how they feel the law should treat transgender people.<\/p>\n
A Washington Post-KFF poll released in March, for example, found 57% of American adults believe that gender should be based on sex assigned at birth. An overwhelming majority of Americans, however, support laws that prohibit discrimination against transgender people on a variety of policy issues.<\/p>\n
Seventy-four percent, for example, support housing laws prohibiting such discrimination. And while most survey respondents are in favor of gender-affirming counseling for youth and teens, the majority oppose providing medication such as hormone therapy to minors.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen gay marriage was legalized by the Supreme Court back in 2015, there was so much optimism that the country was on our side and that progress would continue,\u201d said Jeremy Fogg, a baker in New Orleans. \u201cBut now, it feels like conservatives are saying, \u2018Well, we lost that fight, so now let\u2019s target this more vulnerable group.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cTransgender people are already fighting so hard just to be themselves \u2014 through coming out, hormone therapy and gender-affirming care \u2014 that this is only making their struggle even harder,\u201d Fogg told VOA. \u201cSo much of the optimism from 2015 is gone, but it also feels like if we fight hard enough, maybe these setbacks can just be a blip in the larger social progress of history.\u201d<\/p>\n
Setback or blip?<\/p>\n
University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock said history can be a potential guide on how to view progress for rights in the LGBTQ+ movement. He warned, however, against viewing the current laws focused on the trans community as a setback to other gains made in the past.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s highly unusual to eliminate a right once it\u2019s conferred,\u201d he told VOA, \u201cand that\u2019s not what we\u2019re seeing here. There is no challenge on the same-sex marriage front or to discriminating against gay or transgender people in the workforce. The transgender issues are new and apparently viewed differently by a share of the public.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bullock said he thought that some of the restrictions focused on children have precedents.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor non-adults, there are limitations keyed to age,\u201d he explained. \u201cDriving a car, drinking, voting, purchasing firearms and even protections against how children can be punished if they commit a crime. This provides a basis for arguing that a young person should not be allowed to make permanent decisions with regard to gender until reaching a certain age.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the end, will the LGBTQ community get every right they would like? Probably not,\u201d Bullock said. \u201cBut I do expect they\u2019ll gain some additional rights similar to how it seems to have occurred in our federal system in the past \u2014 first with a few pioneering cities and states, and then expanding to the national level.\u201d<\/p>\n
That expansion of rights, many in the LGBTQ+ community believe, will require a fight they are prepared to wage.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think our love is louder than this meddling by these bad actors,\u201d said Diego Sanchez, director of advocacy, policy and partnerships for PFLAG National, an organization dedicated to supporting, educating and advocating for LGBTQ people and their families.<\/p>\n
\u201cBusinesses and lawmakers and good people who believe in justice and inclusion have risen with us,\u201d Sanchez told VOA. \u201cTogether, we will continue to meet this moment and to fight to ensure every LGBTQ+ person is safe, celebrated, empowered and loved.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mel Manuel of Madisonville, Louisiana, who identifies as pansexual nonbinary, is running for a seat in the state’s legislature. Manuel wants legislatures and Americans to work together to solve bigger issues, rather than restricting the LGBTQ community.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wish Republicans understood that the LGBTQ community is not the enemy,\u201d Manuel said. \u201cI think their political leaders are using us as a distraction. Wages that have stagnated for decades. So many of us living paycheck to paycheck. Americans going bankrupt due to medical expenses. Why not work on these issues instead of paying so much attention to which bathroom trans people are using?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cI grew up in Texas in the 1990s, and I don\u2019t remember seeing any LGBTQUIA+ people,\u201d Michael Terry told VOA, using an acronym for sexual minorities, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and other people. \u201cNot in person, not on TV or movies, and not in the books I read,\u201d said Terry, who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":495,"featured_media":9716,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[141],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/495"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}