“Flood” of anti-LGBTQ bills shows GOP wants to “eradicate trans people from public life”: advocate

A bill that would have restricted healthcare access for transgender and gender expansive youth in Ohio was vetoed by the governor last week. Now, after cutting their winter recess short, Republican lawmakers in the state are flocking back to the capital to override the decision — a move representative of the larger GOP crusade against LGBTQ rights nationwide.

Last Friday, Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine struck down House Bill 68, which would have prevented doctors from providing puberty blockers, hormones and gender affirmation surgeries to patients under the age of 18, and barred transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams in high school and college, according to The Columbus Dispatch. In contrast, the bill would also have permitted physicians to perform surgeries on intersex children, a procedure advocates flag as often medically unnecessary and nonconsensual. 

DeWine blocked the bill just minutes before he was set to publicly announce its fate. He told the media that he came to the conclusion after convening with medical providers of gender-affirming care at children's hospitals, speaking with families and young people who have sought and had varied experiences with that care, and reviewing testimony supporting and opposing the legislation. 

“Were I to sign House Bill 68, or were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most: their parents," DeWine said during the press conference.

While trans activists and LGBTQ rights advocates lauded the decision as a victory, the Republican governor's veto upset party members in the state legislature and across the country, even drawing rebukes from former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 presidential candidate and Ohio native.

On Tuesday, Ohio GOP representatives, who weren't expected to return until the end of the month, scheduled a session for Jan. 10 to begin the override effort, News 5 Cleveland reported. Given that the bill cleared the Republican-dominated Ohio House and Senate with a supermajority — 62 of the 99 representatives and 24 of 33 senators — the legislators could garner the three-fifths vote necessary for an override, though it is unclear if they will retain all the support. On Friday, DeWine also authorized an executive order prohibiting hospitals from providing gender-affirmation surgeries to patients under 18 to "take this issue off the table." But advocates have deemed such a move unnecessary because no Ohio hospitals perform the procedures on minors. 

HB 68 "actively harms trans, non-binary, gender expansive and intersex youth and young adults across Ohio," Rhea Debussy, a lecturer of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University at Newark, told Salon. "And by attempting to overturn Governor DeWine's veto, the Ohio Legislature has essentially shown, yet again, that they don't value these young Ohioans and their rights."

These legislators' apparent enthusiasm to make the anti-trans bill become law reflects the greater push by GOP lawmakers across the nation to strip rights from LGBTQ Americans through legislation targeting their protections, freedom of expression and access, a campaign signified by the record number of anti-LGBTQ proposals advanced — and passed — in the United States in 2023.

The American Civil Liberties Union recorded more than 500 proposals progressing and over 80 passed in 2023 targeting LGBTQ Americans, particularly trans and gender expansive youth, a rate previously unseen in the organization's nearly eight-year history of mapping the legislation. 

Per the ACLU's tracker, 510 bills advanced across all but three states — New York, Illinois and Delaware — and Washington, D.C. in 2023, taking aim at LGBTQ civil rights broadly, trans people's access to accurate identity documents and the community's free speech and expression protections as well as healthcare, public accommodations and education provisions.

Eighty-four of the anti-LGBTQ bills became laws across 22 states last year, ACLU data shows, a huge spike compared to the 17 proposals signed into law in 2022 and the six or fewer enacted in 2020, 2019 and 2018. 

Missouri and Oklahoma saw the largest number of bills in their legislatures, coming in at 48 and 35 proposals, respectively, while Tennessee and North Dakota passed the greatest number of policies, with each state signing 10 into law.

"Back in 2022, the total number of bills was somewhere south of 300," ACLU Communications Strategist Gillian Branstetter told Salon. "We were not expecting at all the flood of bills that we faced last year, and certainly this year is likely to be as — if not more — horrendous."

Most significant about the bills isn't just how they've grown in number but how they've escalated in their extremity and impact, she added. 

The vast majority of the proposed legislation sought to limit trans kid's access to healthcare by way of gender-affirming care bans and restrict student and educators' rights by barring trans students from participating in gendered school sports, forcing teachers to out students or censoring in-school discussions about LGBTQ people and issues. Of those 370 bills, 26 healthcare restrictions and 34 student and educator rights limitations passed.

"It's very easy to lose the forest through the trees when looking at these bills," Branstetter said, explaining that the public often discusses trans rights through narrow, individualized frames. "That is all distracting from the full impact that these laws are having because, viewed together, they represent an effort to, in so many words, eradicate trans people from public life."

Gender-affirming care bans exacerbate physical health disparities among gender expansive youth and young adults, while other targeted legislation threatens their mental health as well as that of LGBTQ people overall, explained Debussy, who also serves as the external affairs director of Equitas Health, an Ohio-based healthcare system catering to LGBTQ patients. 

A recent study also shows that transgender youth, who the CDC says have a higher likelihood of experiencing mental health problems and suicidal thoughts than the rest of their peers, have lower rates of depression and suicidal ideation when provided access to gender-affirming care. 

Most of the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ bills advanced in 2023 were defeated, while another 14, according to the ACLU tracker, are being contested in court via civil lawsuits. But the proposals' presence in state legislatures still causes harm to LGBTQ youth, especially trans, intersex and nonbinary children, Debussy told Salon.

A 2023 poll by the Trevor Project found that 86 percent of trans and nonbinary youth say that debates around anti-trans bills had negatively impacted their mental health. Policies prohibiting doctors from providing gender-affirming medical care to gender expansive youth made 74 percent of respondents feel angry, 56 percent feel sad, 48 percent feel hopeless and 47 percent feel scared, while policies barring trans children from playing on a gendered sports team in line with their gender identity made 64 percent of trans and nonbinary youth feel angry and 30 percent feel hopeless, the survey found.

The volume of anti-LGBTQ legislation progressing in the U.S. last year even prompted the Human Rights Campaign to declare a national state of emergency for LGBTQ Americans, marking a first for the advocacy organization. 

"We have states where governors have turned their own trans constituents into refugees in search of health care, and good education, basic rights and freedoms," Brandon Wolf, the HRC's national press secretary, told Salon,

The state of emergency is not just one large danger, he added, quoting HRC President Kelley Robinson, "it's millions of individual moments of crisis that happen every single day."

Those crises contradict the views of anti-trans-bill supporters, who believe gender transitions are harmful to children and young adults, and argue patients should wait until they're older before making the decision to begin transitioning. Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp referenced such a claim when announcing that he signed a bill barring doctors from beginning hormone therapy for trans minors in March. 

But those beliefs, Debussy said, are deeply rooted in misinformation about what gender-affirming care is or what it looks like in reality, and Republican lawmakers take advantage of that lack of understanding to push anti-trans legislation and their political agendas.

"Anti-trans legislation has become such a target for some lawmakers because they view it as a way to score easy political points," she told Salon, adding: "At the same time these bills are fueled by misinformation, the misinformation also allows these bills to perpetuate themselves."

Prior to the spike in the number and range of legislation targeting trans Americans, some of the most prominent anti-trans policies were bathroom bills, according to Christy Mallory, the legal director of UCLA's Williams Institute, which researches gender identity law and public policy. House Bill 2 in North Carolina, a 2016 bill that prohibited transgender people from using bathrooms in certain spaces based on their gender identity and instead forced them to use facilities according to their sex assigned at birth, was one of the earliest examples of those discriminatory policies, she said.

Coupled with the rollback in protections for LGBTQ people at the federal level under the Trump administration, including preventing trans people from serving in the military, the North Carolina law set the groundwork for state lawmakers' current campaign to advance legislation of their own. 

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"That bill, which ultimately passed but now is no longer in effect, provided a model for and paved the way for other legislation that limited trans people's access to certain facilities, whether that be, again, bathrooms, other school facilities, sports, athletics," Mallory told Salon. "And then we started to see these bans around gender affirming care come later within really the last couple of years."

But just as the policies have arisen in droves, legislation supporting trans youth and adults — as well as the broader LGBTQ community — has also cropped up in 2023. Eleven states and D.C. enacted "shield" laws and policies providing protections to medical providers and parents who prescribe or seek access to medical care for trans minors, according to a recent Williams Institute report. Four states — Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota and Utah —also banned or restricted conversion therapy practices in 2023, the report found. 

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in September a spate of bills strengthening protections for LGBTQ Californians, while four Democrats in Congress reintroduced The Equality Act, a measure intended to protect LGBTQ Americans from discrimination on a federal level, amid a boom in homophobic and transphobic sentiment and a subsequent increase in threats against the community, ABC News reported.

The defeat of 228 anti-LGBTQ bills in 2023 also suggests that most Americans aren't buying into the conservative paranoia and right-wing rhetoric that stokes the anti-trans legislative movement, Wolf told Salon. 

Right-wing activists in America "promised the power-hungry politicians who signed up for their agenda that anti-LGBTQ+ hysteria would be a political slam dunk," Wolf said. "They promised that it would deliver election wins, that it would help usher in an area of authoritarian power, where democracy is no longer regarded as a shared value but seen as simply an obstacle. And by and large, they failed."

Part of that pushback arose from efforts to broker understanding, Branstetter notes, pointing to DeWine and Republican, ex-Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson's meetings with trans people and their families when deciding to veto gender-affirming care bans. (Hutchinson's 2021 veto was overridden.)

Activism within the community, Branstetter added, and staunch defense of and advocacy for trans freedoms from outside of it ensure that more cisgender Americans see trans and gender expansive rights as intrinsically tied with their own. 

"This is about a fundamental fight for self-determination, which after all, rides shotgun with self-governance," she said, explaining she wants others to understand "there really is no such thing as freedoms that only belong to other people, that when you allow one group of people's rights and freedoms to be restricted, you're really just laying the groundwork for the same to be done to your own."

Despite legislators' "incredible attacks" on the LGBTQ community in 2023, "there's still such beautiful joy and resistance happening every single day" within it, Wolf added. "And that gives me hope for what's possible in the days, months and years to come."