Trans advocate Peyton Rose Michelle isn’t going anywhere. The executive director of Louisiana Trans Advocates (LTA) remains firmly planted in her home state even after its legislators sent three bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights to Governor John Bel Edwards’s desk during the 2023 legislative session.
“I love Louisiana,” said Michelle, 25. “I love the warm weather. I love the food. I love our people, even though sometimes it’s hard to have deep conversations with all of them.
“I’m also born and raised here, and I always pose the question: Why do I need to move? My heritage, my literal DNA, is entirely Cajun.”
But it’s not for a lack of trying that she doesn’t feel unwelcome. While Edwards vetoed all three bills, lawmakers convened an override session. And they gathered enough votes to overturn Edwards’s veto of a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors, meaning the ban will go into effect on New Year’s Day 2024.
Similar stories are playing out all across the US south. During the 2023 legislative session, the ACLU has tracked 492 anti-LGBTQ+ bills around the US, with nearly half of them in southern states. As of the time of publication, 40 of those bills had passed into law in the south, with some facing court challenges.
“We are seeing a well-funded, sophisticated, coordinated extremist movement flexing,” said Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality and a Bundcombe county, North Carolina, commissioner. “The southern states very specifically have been used as sort of laboratories on the introduction and advancement of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation.”
While she calls the legislative landscape a crisis, she also notes that public support for LGBTQ+ rights has reached unprecedented levels, saying: “The south is very much the epicenter of where you feel both of those forces being fully expressed.”
Although the south is known for its deep conservatism, more than 75% of people in the region favor laws that would protect LGBTQ+ people against discrimination in jobs, public accommodations and housing, according to a 2022 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). The survey also found that a majority of southerners (61%) oppose allowing religion-based refusals to serve gay and lesbian people.
Moreover, the PRRI survey authors noted that support for same-sex marriage has grown in the south over the past decade, from 46% in 2014 to 63% in 2022.
Growing support networks
One-third of the US’s population of 11 million-plus LGBTQ+ adults live in the south, according to data collected by the Williams Institute, a thinktank at the UCLA School of Law. And, even though their rights are in conservative lawmakers’ crosshairs, support networks for them are expanding.
The Magic City Acceptance Center, a program of Birmingham Aids Outreach in Alabama, offers a variety of programs for LGBTQ+ youth, including after-school drop-in hours, summer camp, an annual prom and an adult-facilitated Discord forum in which youth across the state can connect with one another.
“I think our tagline should be: ‘We have things,’” said program director Amanda Keller.
And that was key last year, when the Alabama governor, Kay Ivey, signed into law three bills attacking LGBTQ+ rights. One required students to use the bathroom that aligns with the gender they were assigned at birth. Another was a “don’t say gay” law in the style of Florida’s, prohibiting discussions around gender and sexual identity in lower grades. And another criminalized the use of puberty blockers and hormones for transgender people younger than 19.
Nonetheless, despite those political headwinds, the Magic City Acceptance Center’s assistant director Lauren Jacobs believes that LGBTQ+ communities have made meaningful strides in becoming more visible and creating safe spaces for one another. And she expects that community supports will continue to blossom.
“There [were] more Pride celebrations across the state of Alabama than I’ve ever known there to be,” Jacobs said during June’s Pride month celebrations of the LGBTQ+ community. Although many might be small gatherings in their first or second years in small towns, they mark progress, she said.
Keeping an eye out
Yet the charged political climate has made LGBTQ+ people in the south more cautious. Michelle, the Louisiana trans advocate, said she recently bought a gun for self-protection.
In Dallas, drag performer Shandra “Trigger Mortis” Kundak is careful not to walk alone to their car, illustrating how the costume that feels like armor while they perform on stage can become a target for unwanted attention when away from that context.
“I just keep an eye out a little bit more, look over my shoulder a little more,” Kundak said.
Such precautions make sense given the last eight years.
A’Niya Robinson, advocacy strategist at the ACLU of Louisiana, said that mainstream politicians nationwide began to ramp up the number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills after the US supreme court in 2015 ruled that same-sex couples have the right to marry.
“If you think about different movements in history, there’s always kind of that wave of progress, and then in response, there’s that wave of backlash and regression that happens,” Robinson said.
Michelle said it’s difficult to sit silently in committee hearings and listen to lawmakers’ negative rhetoric about trans people.
However, even inside Louisiana’s state capitol in Baton Rouge, emotions get complicated.
She recalled that a legislator once broke down in front of her and said that while he wanted to vote against a bill, he felt he couldn’t because his constituents wouldn’t support it. “He literally cried, very briefly, in a very public hallway, and then he pulled himself together and walked away,” Michelle said.
Based on historical trends, the Campaign for Southern Equality’s Beach-Ferrara said she expects current legislative trends to continue to escalate through the 2024 election cycle. Yet she also predicts it all will reach a crescendo, at which point acceptance could be closer than ever.
“Eventually you get to the rupture or some kind of reconciliation,” she said. “And our commitment is toward some kind of reconciliation and … doing this work from a basis of love and hope and empathy.”
The Link LonkAugust 07, 2023 at 04:00PM
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiVmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnRoZWd1YXJkaWFuLmNvbS93b3JsZC8yMDIzL2F1Zy8wNy9sZ2J0cS1zb3V0aGVybmVycy1mYWNlLW5ldy1kYW1hZ2luZy1sYXdz0gFWaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAudGhlZ3VhcmRpYW4uY29tL3dvcmxkLzIwMjMvYXVnLzA3L2xnYnRxLXNvdXRoZXJuZXJzLWZhY2UtbmV3LWRhbWFnaW5nLWxhd3M?oc=5
‘I look over my shoulder a little more’: LGBTQ+ people on surviving hostile laws in US south - The Guardian
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