750 Anti-Trans Bills

Summer Miller

Nearly 800 anti-trans bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year. This includes bans on healthcare, attacks on trans students, restrictions on bathrooms, sports bans, forced outing policies, and attempts to legally erase transgender people altogether.

In West Virginia, legislators introduced a resolution “recognizing transgenderism as a mental disorder.” In Maryland, a bill would make it a felony for doctors to prescribe gender-affirming hormones to minors. 

In Washington state, right-wing hedge fund executive Brian Heywood has bankrolled two anti-trans initiatives which will appear on the November ballot. The first, IL26-001, would shred privacy laws for students. It would force teachers and counselors to inform parents if their children come out as LGBTQ+ and remove confidentiality protections for victims of child abuse. The second bill, IL26-638, bans transgender girls from girls’ sports, requires genital exams for all girls participating in school sports, and allows for broad discipline against coaches and school administrators who refuse to follow this law.

These attacks are not only attacks on transgender people. They are attacks on teachers, nurses, doctors, counselors, coaches, and other workers who will be pressured to carry them out. They are meant to divide us and distract working people from the failures of capitalism. 

We need a working-class movement to fight back against the attacks on LGBTQ rights, and go on the offensive for demands like free healthcare for all, national rent control, public housing, and good union jobs for all.

The biggest advances for civil rights have come from workers’ struggle. Black, white, and immigrant workers joined together in the 1930s and 1940s to carry out a wave of strike action in steel, auto, trucking, shipping, and other industries. Workers broke through the segregationist labor leaders and founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which led campaigns against racist discrimination in the workplace. These fights laid the basis for the Civil Rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, including Stonewall and the fight for gay liberation.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have not lifted a finger for gay or transgender rights. In Kentucky in 2023, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear issued a performative veto of SB 150, one of the most vicious anti-trans bills in the country. Republicans overrode the veto and the bill became law. When protesters chanted against the bill from the Capitol gallery, Beshear sent state police to drag them out and charged 19 trans rights protesters with criminal trespassing.

To defeat these attacks on trans rights, we need militant movements independent of the Democratic Party. In states where anti-trans bills have been passed, workers who are tasked with enforcing the law (teachers, nurses, counselors) should begin organizing for mass civil disobedience. If any worker is disciplined for breaking unjust laws, we need strike action and walkouts. We need socialist organization in workplaces and in unions to build a fighting core that can organize these kinds of actions, with or without the approval of the union leadership.