LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back! We shouldn’t accept being a scapegoat

Image; Lucas Werkmeister

Trans rights are not great in this country. They never really have been, but in recent years, there has been an uptick in anti-trans sentiment.

States have started rolling back everything from restricting trans athletes from participating in athletic events that align with their gender to prohibiting those under the age of 18 from accessing gender-affirming care.

The state of Florida, in particular, has passed some of the most regressive laws in the nation. People can only use gendered facilities such as bathrooms, locker rooms, domestic violence centers, and prisons that match the gender they were assigned at birth. Another law has banned everyone under 18 from accessing gender-affirming care. The law has also allowed the state the right to temporarily take away the children of the parents who permit such care.

This shape of affairs is, if anything, picking up steam. Trump made his anti-trans messaging a significant part of his 2024 campaign, with one of Trump’s primary campaign promises being to stop gender-affirming care for minors. This is a promise that very much may come to fruition, considering that the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on this on December 4th. The whole country could start looking like Florida soon (if not probably much worse).

And so, what is the Democratic Party (and its center-left allies) doing in response to this worsening trend?

While there have been some calls for support, I see much of the political class trying to back away from defending my community. Commentators are telling the American public to decenter trans people, with Matthew Yglesias, for example, calling on the Democratic Party to view sex through an essentialist lens. Centrist politicians, according to Politico, have alleged that “identity politics and culture war issues need to take a backseat,” with Democratic representative Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) even doubling down on the position that transgender women should not participate in women’s sports.

A reactionary wave is coming for the entire LGBTQ+ community, and if nothing is done about it, we will experience a backslide felt by the queer community in the US for generations to come.

The backlash to the backlash

The thing about queerness, or whatever you want to call the diversity of gender and sexual expression across history, is that it’s not new (although how it has been framed in each culture has varied dramatically).

We don’t even have to look that far to see examples of this. Many indigenous tribes in the Americas were so beyond the European gender binary that it was undeniable. Going back to the 1500s, even colonizers were writing about Indigenous “men in women’s apparel.”

Yet, over the course of generations, that acceptance was undermined by settler colonialism. Native people were shamed (and, barring that, violently forced) into compliance until, eventually, the Christian-European standards for gender and sexuality became dominant. It’s something Europeans were openly bragging about. According to Indigenous scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, the 18th-century French Jesuit missionary Joseph-François Lafitau talked about this openly in a report he penned. Simpson summarized this report in her book, As We Have Always Done, writing:

“Lafitau ‘congratulates’ missionaries for ‘suppressing’ Indigenous queer relationships. He describes the missionaries’ success in prompting many queer Indigenous people and their relations to see their identity as ‘shameful.’ He was pleased to report that after seventy-five years of missionary work, people once ‘regarded as extraordinary men,’ had now, ‘come to be looked on, even by the Indians, with scorn.’”

It’s the same pattern worldwide — the demonization of same-sex relationships in India, the strict anti-queer legal code in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, etc. Our hatred of queer people was very much cultivated over generations by white-settler governments.

This trend did not start to reverse until the Post-Stonewall activism of the late 1960s and beyond when militant activists pushed their queer-phobic governments into recognizing them (feel free to read the Stonewall Reader for more context). As a result, these last few decades, we have seen the expansion of parental, marital, employment, and housing rights to some (though certainly not all) groups of queer people in the US, and it has improved the standards of living for many.

For those younger queers who were born in the shadow of this movement, it’s easy to think that this progress was and is inevitable, but it would be a mistake to assume that a similar project of anti-queerness cannot be restarted in the present era. As we have seen, it’s perfectly possible for a society to backslide, and in many ways, the US already has — hence all the anti-trans laws we mentioned at the beginning of this article.

It’s why recent calls by liberals and centrists to backpedal from trans rights are so dangerous because the rights that we have won are not inevitable, and with the complicity of democrats, they very much can be stripped away.

How to stop it

If these pundits have their way, Democrats will stop trying to whip votes against anti-trans and anti-lgbt legislation — a move that would essentially ensure that the politics of Florida are exported across the country.

We must not go back to the Pre-Stonewall days when queers had to hide their identities or risk being ostracized from society, and that means reminding our leaders of what will happen if they stop providing us support.

LGBTQIA+ people are a major constituency for the Democratic Party. Exit polls indicate that around 86% voted for Kamala Harris. We easily represent tens of millions of votes in districts and seats all across the country, and if our politicians aren’t even going to ensure we can continue to exist, then they shouldn’t get our votes. We need to let these leaders know that trans rights are a red line. I encourage you to contact your representatives and tell them they must support trans rights or risk alienating millions of LGBTQIA+ voters with this rhetoric.

And that is more important than a pundit bemoaning the state of ‘identity politics’ on his substack.