Eleanor McDonough used to be a legislative assistant in the Florida State House of Representatives. She believes she was the only openly transgender person who worked there. That was until the wave of oppressive anti-LGBTQ—and specifically anti-trans—legislation passing in the state became unbearable for her. She recently resigned from her position and fled Florida to New Hampshire.
As McDonough told me, it became a “difficult situation” to work in the Capitol and “for people to debate your existence on the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate, whether or not you were going to be able to use the bathroom in the building.
“When you look at history and what other authoritarians have done when seeking power, you have a decision to make: where is it too dangerous to stay?he declared.
McDonough is not alone among people of different orientations and their families who sense danger and are considering relocating.
As Kelley Robinson, president of The Human Rights Campaign, recently told me, “I think for the first time, at least in my history of the movement, we are seeing a new breed of political refugee moving to other states because they believe they are not safe in their own.”. These are gender refugees. In United States.
Following the passage of a new law in Florida that prohibits classroom teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity, research by Abbie Goldberg, a professor at Clark University in Massachusetts, surveyed 113 parents who are LGBTQ and found that “56 percent of them considered moving out of Floridaand 16.5 percent have taken steps to move out of Florida.”
However, the fight-or-flight dilemma facing these families is tense because, as the study highlights, “many feel conflict,” noting that they “loved their families, friends, and communities.” They are being forced to choose between the comfort of the tribe of their choice and the safety of their families.
And as the study indicates, for some families with LGBTQ members, “moving right now was impossible” as they “cared for elderly relatives or other dependents or had jobs they couldn’t find elsewhere.” As Goldberg has explained: “for LGBTQ+ parents without the means to transfer or send their children to private schools” — where, hopefully, they would not have to keep quiet about their families — the stress generated by anti-LGBTQ legislation “will be considerable”.
One prominent family that has decided to leave Florida is that of Dwayne Wade, who won three NBA championships with the Miami Heat, and TV and movie star Gabrielle Union. The couple have a transgender daughter, Zaya, 16, and Wade has said Florida’s anti-LGBTQ laws were among the reasons they decided to move.
According to a report released this month by The Human Rights Campaign, of more than 525 anti-LGBTQ initiatives introduced across the US in this year’s legislative sessions, “more than 220 target the transgender community”.
Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, told me that “people are terrified, particularly parents of transgender children.
“All the time we hear about families who are terrified, facing very concrete practical problems like ‘my son is about to lose medical services’ or “Our family doctor, whom we have consulted for years, says that he will no longer treat my son””, he added.
The fear and desperation are such that he has spoken with parents who are considering relinquishing custody of their trans children to relatives in friendlier states, Robinson said.
This situation is not only sad, it is offensive and infuriating.
A judge in Florida recently granted a preliminary injunction to three transgender youth against certain provisions in a state law that seeks to ban gender-affirming care for minors.
In the judge’s scathing ruling, he wrote two statements that often seem to get ignored in the crusade against trans people: “Gender identity is real. The record makes this clear.”
The reality that “variations in gender identity and expression are normal aspects of human diversity”, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, should be commonly understood, but it is not. Instead, too many people falsely view gender dysphoria as a choice, not a medical condition. And they confuse the condition with its effective treatment: transition.
You are wrong.
The transition can be costly and often faces various obstacles. A 2023 poll by KFF and The Washington Post found that just 31 percent of trans adults have used hormone treatments and just 16 percent have undergone gender-affirming surgery.
The truth is that the LGBTQ community in general and the trans community in particular are being bullied, and willful ignorance around gender identity is being exploited in a political battle. Safety, even that of children, is being ruthlessly sacrificed for public preference.
This year, the New Hampshire legislature has adopted bills that target transgender students and their families. But McDonough says she chose the state as her destination because she was raised in New England and has family there.
She also reminded me of the state motto, “Live free or die”, which for trans people today has an urgent meaning.
INTELLIGENCE / CHARLES M. BLOW
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6774300, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-23 16:10:06
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