From Florida to Oklahoma, transgender rights are facing a fresh wave of attacks in Republican-controlled state legislatures.
Though many of the bills being proposed will never become law, they serve a practical purpose for Republicans. Whether or not they are enacted, they allow conservative state legislatures to perform opposition to the “woke left” and ensure evangelical voters show up to vote — even after the religious right achieved its decades-long goal of overturning Roe v. Wade last year. A recent report from Mother Jones showed that leading religious-right organizations are playing a prominent role in creating and promoting the bills.
The political debate is escalating at a volatile time. Trans Americans are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than their cisgender peers, according to a 2021 study. Trans youth, who have been the primary focus of anti-trans legislation this year, are experiencing a mental health crisis: A 2022 survey by the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention group focused on LGBTQ youth, found that 86 percent of trans or nonbinary youth reported negative effects on their mental health stemming from the political debate around trans issues, and nearly half had seriously considered suicide in the past year.
While Democrats have sought to fight back with their own legislation affirming protections for the trans community at the state level, there’s not much they can do federally at the moment. The Equality Act, which was passed by the then-Democrat-controlled House last year and would prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ Americans, doesn’t currently have the votes to become law.
That’s despite the fact that most Americans currently support protecting trans people from discrimination, according to a June 2022 Pew survey, although there are sharper divisions over gender-affirming care for youth and public school curricula about gender identity.
All of that makes for a bleak outlook for trans Americans in…
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