By Rachel Bacchus
Over the past three years, there has been a staggering increase in anti LGBTQ legislation being proposed on both the state and federal levels, with over 400 bills currently set to come into effect or to be voted on. Politicians such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have emboldened many other state legislators and governors to propose their own bills as an act of harm against the LGBTQ community, with a primary focus on the transgender community, and the sole goal of erasing the LGBTQ community from public view. These bills have been heavily criticized for underlying messages that they each hold, that being that there is something inherently wrong with the people these bills target.
The string of anti LGBTQ bills started of in 2020, with the movement to “protect children from indoctrination in K-12 schools.” Some called to remove all traces of Critical Race Theory (CRT) from school textbooks, despite the lack of actual CRT material in said textbooks. Meanwhile, others suggested outlawing LGBTQ people, topics, literature, and discussions in schools. These demands were followed by discussions of banning transgender students from participating in sports that align with their gender identity and preventing adolescent trans individuals from pursuing hormone blockers, which serve to postpone their puberty, or any form of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) until they have reached adulthood.
Within the past year, the presence and intensity of these types of bills have increased dramatically. Florida alone has ten bills, with nine of those bills already set to come into effect by July. One of these bills, HB 1421, gives the state jurisdiction to “enter, modify, or stay a child custody determination relating to a child who is present in this state to the extent necessary to protect the child from being subjected to gender clinical interventions,” effectively allowing the government to remove minors from homes purely off the grounds that their guardian(s) are supportive of their gender identity (HB 1421, 2). A large sum of bills from other states, such as Texas bill SB 1646, serve the same function. “These bills add the administering or supplying of life-saving transition-related health care, as directed by medical or mental health professionals, to the statutorial definition of ‘child abuse,’ including related penalties,” said Equality Texas.org, a website dedicated to both the tracking of and the fight against anti LGBTQ laws.
With the severity of these bills seemingly increasing day by day, thousands have made and effort to protest and fight against each bill’s passing. Though the pushback against these bills has proven to be effective in some instances, the number of bills that still manage to pass despite the protesting has become a point of concern. In the end, all that can be done is to continue pushing against these bills by protesting and contacting legislators in the pursuit of equality.
