Trans Legislative Fights and Wins

[00:00:08] Hey TransLash Fam, this is The Mess, Imara’s guide to our political hellscape, and that’s me, I’m Imara. Thanks for continuing to hang in there with us as we move through all of The Mess from week to week. Today on The Mess, though, I’m going to tackle the new what is a woman law in Alabama, a proposed gender fraud bill in Texas. I don’t know, part of me wants to say, I’m not a fraud, you’re the fraud, but that’s not very professional. And lastly, I’ll be talking about some good news. You heard that right. Good news about the defeat of two anti-trans bills in the state of Montana. As always, we wanna give you a heads up that we record this a few days before it actually gets to your ears. So something might have changed. We know that it will. It changes hour to hour now. So when you hear the fact that something that came up, maybe like, I don’t know, two hours ago, that’s earth-shattering, isn’t in your ears right now. Now you know the reason why. Okay, with that, let’s get messy. So first up today is something that’s coming out of Alabama called the What Is a Woman Act. Well, what is the What Is a Woman Act? Well, why don’t you just listen and hear for yourselves. Here’s the clip from local news, WSFA Channel 12. The What Is a Woman Act officially defines the terms man and woman, father and mother, and male and female based on a person’s biological sex at birth. Now this law was passed by the Alabama State Legislature and signed by Governor Kay Ivey back in February. But because of everything that was going on, it kind of flew under the radar of news outlets and community overall, but we really think that it’s important to lift this up, especially now, because we know that Alabama is one of those states that always tinkers around with anti-trans laws before they go national. So we’re probably not going to only see this in Alabama. So this law takes what Trump did as an executive order, right, which is just his, his pen and you know, it’s what he says. And the executive branch says not what is law, but what he declares. And it takes that and it makes that into the law of the land with respect to the state of Alabama. And what’s important is that it actually, because it’s now in the state code, it’s adding penalties to the language. So this isn’t only about bureaucracies acting out and acting badly and penalizing us, it could eventually have the force of law and translate into jail time and other things as specified by state code, depending on what the law is that governs it, which would be another level of criminalization and marginalization and exclusion for our community. Sort of heaping on to the damage that’s done by the executive orders, which we already know is massive, from the passports to taking away people’s benefits, if they are linked to somehow them being trans, you know, it runs the full gamut. Now there’s a new thing to worry about. What’s even more critical is not only does it do all those terrible things, but it seeks to actually define who is a man and who is a woman by what their sexual organs do, right? It says that a woman is the person whose biology is designed to produce ova. But first of all, who talks like that? Okay. fine, use that language. Also, how do they know what bodies were intended to do? So if you weren’t born with the reproductive organs that they say you should have, they say that it’s okay because that’s what they were designed to do. I mean, they’re just kind of making it up. But more to the point one, it makes the state directly invested into defining your personhood based upon what people think your reproductive organs were designed to do. And then, of course, it completely erases intersex people, right? Because, I mean, I guess to them, because there’s not a firm definition, as they would say it, as to what the body was supposed to do, then, you know, I guess they don’t exist. I mean, all of this just gets us further and further into the realm of being in the upside down, into the realm of actually denying us human rights because we are whole people, not because other people get to think what our bodies are supposed to do and to define us like that. And, you know, you’re gonna see this law in other places because it’s just not gonna stop in Alabama. And for all of those reasons, we wanted to uplift this at this moment, even though this law passed in February. But, you know, every day is a journey and it got lost in the shuffle, not here on the mess. But any way you look at it, this law is an over mess. Next up today on the absurd law list is HB 3817. Now that was a bill that’s been introduced in Texas by State Representative Tom Oloverson, which would make it as a part of the penal code to create a new form of quote fraud, specifically gender identity fraud. Now, if a person is labeled as committing gender identity fraud under this law, It basically means that you identifying the opposite of what they say is your biological sex essentially amounts to you committing fraud, intentionally lying, intentionally misleading, and therefore says that that fraud could translate into up to two years in prison. That’s right, you heard it, two years in prison. Now, what that means is that if you show up and you apply for a job as a man, because you are a trans man, If they, you know, somehow go and do some records checks, social security, it doesn’t match, they then could report you to the authorities and you could be accused of fraud, which means that trans identity is immediately criminalized, right? Immediately criminalized on the spot. And you are criminalized just for living your life, just for engaging in the world, just for doing anything that anyone else would do, applying for housing, trying to get a job. going to get healthcare, like you name it, literally the basic things of life, right? And what this means is that this is a criminalization, not only of our existence, but our right to be in public, right? Our right to engage with anything other than ourselves. Now, people don’t believe that it’s going to pass, it’s probably going to fail, but the reason why this is important is teed up in this clip by Gwen Harrington, who is a reporter for the Houston Chronicle, she explains why all this matters.

[00:07:01] this bill probably won’t become law. It’s super vague. Maybe it wouldn’t stand up in court if it did. But it does kind of, you know, when we look at the other bills filed this session that also won’t pass one of them that would ban adult gender affirming care, you know, it kind of moves the Overton window one way of what is possible. And so that’s kind of what advocates that I’ve talked to are really alarmed about.

[00:07:22] And the Overton window is, as she alludes to, is what we basically think of as possible. Like, if something that we didn’t think of as possible suddenly becomes possible, it shifts what we call the Overton window, the Overton window named after the person who came up with the concept. And all of this is just to acculturate us to more and more criminalization, right? The ability to be able to stigmatize more and more, to put us on the path. of marginalizing people even further and then to using the authorities and the police to solely enforce the criminalization of that identity, right? It’s not that you’re being arrested for loitering like an activity. Here you are arrested for literally just existing and literally being you if this law passes. Now, again, as we referred to in the last segment, this isn’t only about Texas. Like Alabama. We know that Texas is one of the you know mix-and-match It’s one of the tinkering states. It’s one of the states where they use in their little lab to create anti-trans laws that they’re going to export to other places. So again, be aware of this law, know that it’s happening. It will likely fail, but we’ll surely see it somewhere else. And just like so many other things, sadly, when it comes to trans people and Texas, this is just a long horn mess. Last up today is good news, which we don’t get to do enough of, but we are ending on a good note, despite two really tough topics. And that good note is that not only was there one anti-trans bill in Montana that was defeated, but actually two. Two went down to defeat. The first bill would have banned Pride and drag shows, and that went down by a solid majority. I mean, even a lot of Republicans. join Democrats to defeat that bill because it just was beyond absurd. I mean, add it to the list. But in this case, that argument swayed and the work of Zoe Zephyr, it swayed. And the second one was to remove trans kids from their parents. And even in that case, there were some Republicans that joined Democrats in order to defeat that bill. You have to because Republicans are in the majority in that state. And it was not only just a few Republicans, it was an overwhelming majority. The vote was 71 to 27, like the vast majority of people in that chamber voted that down. Now, the defeat of these two bills in a state like Montana shows the importance of having trans representatives. Specifically, Zoe Zephyr helped to lead the charge against these two bills. Of course, we’ve spoken about her before. She’s a trans state representative in that state. And she worked with S.J. Howell, another representative to work to bring those bills down. And it’s one of the cases where sometimes your personal story and being vulnerable, even in a hostile place, can make all of the difference. And so I think that, you know, this shows that when trans people stand up, trans people can win, even if you are the minority, because we are almost always the minority, and that we can count on allies, even sometimes unexpected allies, to join us. So we should never give up hope and never give up on ourselves. And of course, never give up on others as well in this mix. And secondly, that it matters having trans people in spaces that are not typically seen as being open to trans people. That even in the case where you’re one person in a chamber of a hundred people or nearly a hundred people that your voice can make a difference. And so it’s one of the reasons why all the attempts to criminalize trans existence are so terrible, right? And the reason why they’re threatened by us because they know that even one of us. is enough to turn things around. And so we wanted to end today with a really powerful speech that State Representative Zoe Zephyr gave on the House of Montana that helped to explain to them in really personal terms why this bill should go down to defeat.

[00:11:27] In committee, when the sponsor closed on this bill, he said, this bill is needed, he said. And I quote his words, because transgenderism is a fetish based on cross-dressing. Those were his words for why this bill is necessary. And I’m here to stand before the body and say that my life is not a fetish. My existence is not a fetish. I was proud just a month ago to have my son up in the gallery here. Many of you on the other side met him. When I go to walk him to school, that is not a lascivious display. That is not a fetish. That is my family.

[00:12:19] is what these bills are trying to come after. And what we heard there was the love of the parent for their child. And that’s the opposite of any mess. Thank you for being a TransLash fam subscriber and sorting through all of the mess with me today. If you like the show, it would mean so much if you go to leave us a review on Apple Podcast, you will hear me read it out on the show, only if it’s a good one though. I’ll be back in your feed in a couple of weeks to sort through all of the shenanigans that come up between now and then and to see if we can clean up the mess. I’m your host, Imara Jones. The show is produced by Aubrey Callaway. Xander Adams is our senior sound engineer and contributing producer. and this episode was engineered by Lucy Little. Oliver Ash-Kline oversees production as the director of podcasts to TransLash Media. This show gets to your ears with the help of our social media team, including Morgan Astbury. And of course, this show is made possible by TransLash fam subscribers like you. Thanks for listening.