Gillian Branstetter, a trans rights advocate, has watched in distress over the last year as lawmakers have eliminated fundamental protections for transgender people across the US.
But last week she felt a rare moment of hope after four trans youth fought for their lives in Arkansas federal court – and won.
“The courage and strength of these young people was resoundingly clear in the courtroom,” said the communications strategist at the ACLU, which persuaded a judge to permanently strike down Arkansas’s ban on gender-affirming healthcare for minors. The first victory of its kind in the US, it ensures the four youth and other vulnerable kids can access life-saving treatments. “They are really at the forefront of history, and I was so humbled to hear them share their stories and see the parents’ love for their children.”
As many celebrate the ruling, the ACLU and other groups continue to fight about 70 other anti-LGBTQ+ laws Republicans have adopted this year.
The Guardian spoke with Branstetter, 34, who works for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project and Women’s Rights Project, about the forces driving these anti-trans bills, the “upside-down” media coverage, and what she thinks it will take to defeat this escalating discrimination.
Can you give an overview of how attacks on trans rights have increased so far this year?
Nearly 500 pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation were introduced this year. If you didn’t know anything else about the US, you’d presume there is an army of transgender people who are swiftly taking over the country. It’s hard to overstate how grave this is for trans folks. Twenty states have now banned the healthcare that many transgender youth need to live. There are bills restricting trans people’s participation in sports and which bathrooms they can use. There are efforts to restrict trans people from having their stories heard at libraries and in schools. There are restrictions on drag performances, which are a proxy for attacking gender nonconformity and fluidity. There are bills forcing teachers to out students they perceive to be trans. Most alarmingly, we’ve seen efforts in Texas and Florida to empower states to remove trans youth from their parents’ custody.
What is the impact of all of this on trans folks in the US?
This has transformed the reality of transgender life in this country. It’s not as if trans people had achieved social and legal equality before this started. Trans people are significantly more likely to experience poverty, homelessness and hunger. We’re overrepresented in our nation’s shelters, prisons and foster care system. We are four times as likely to experience violence as cisgender people. So to turn this marginalized group into the main character of conservative nightmares is very daunting.
The people behind these bills are transparent that they want to “eradicate transgenderism” from public life entirely. They do not view trans people as legitimate. This political effort has been paired with a cultural and rhetorical effort to dehumanize and villainize us and target institutions that support us, whether going after a beer company for featuring a trans woman in an ad or calling in bomb threats to children’s hospitals that work with trans youth.
Why are trans people the target of so much hate right now?
The first sphere fueling this moral panic is ideological. A large section of the American right, in particular white Christian nationalists, have an extremely rigid understanding of not just what makes somebody a man or woman, but what men and women are for. The core of their worldview is complementary gender roles, rooted in male dominance and female subservience. Men are breadwinners and women are caregivers. The ability of trans people to thrive in society is a mortal danger to that ideology. Transphobia occupies so much of the mindset of the right because we defy expectations. When trans people are being attacked, self-determination and freedom of expression are being attacked.
Why have these bills become central to the conservative legal movement and the Republican party?
These bills started to spike in 2020 after a supreme court decision in favor of a trans woman who was fired from her job because she came out as trans. The court determined if you discriminate against somebody on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity, this is sex discrimination. The right greeted this ruling as apocalyptic – the “end of the conservative legal movement”. So lawmakers began introducing legislation to try and set up cases that they believed would bring down that supreme court decision by a thousand cuts and limit its reach.
Additionally, the conservative movement realized they were headed toward a supreme court challenge that would overturn Roe v Wade, which they knew would be disastrously unpopular. They needed to give their elected allies something to talk about that was not abortion, to distract from this grave intrusion into people’s private lives. Now the same politicians getting pummeled over the disastrous harms from the Dobbs decision are running to every microphone to yell about trans athletes, because they believe if they can make you so afraid of trans people’s freedoms, then you won’t mind sacrificing your own.
What do you see as the pitfalls of media coverage of trans rights in this pivotal moment?
Six years ago, I’d get calls from reporters daily with questions like, “Why can’t I cite a trans person’s former name or pronouns?” A lot of newsrooms have since adopted style guides to address that, and that’s how a lot of reporters have still encountered trans people – as a list of rules to follow. It hasn’t encouraged newsrooms to grant trans folks their own subjectivity, to treat trans people as experts in their own identity. It hasn’t inoculated the media to what are genuinely manufactured panics on the right. With trans athletes, for example, if reporters had made cold calls to women’s athletic associations and clubs and asked them their top issues, they might talk about pay equity, funding disparities or safety for athletes who face harassment and abuse. And yet trans athletes became front-page news, with reporters covering the “controversy” and not taking a step back and saying how does this show up in people’s lives? They’re looking at transgender people as a political issue rather than as a people.
The media should remind people who the actual victims are. In Connecticut, a cis girl sued after a 2018 high school track meet in which two trans girls beat her. She went on to win scholarships and championships and run NCAA track. The trans girls have been harassed out of sports altogether. One “save women’s sports” group could only name five examples of a trans girl participating in K-12 sports. Twenty states have banned trans athletes. There are more states with bans than there are openly trans athletes. West Virginia appealed to the supreme court to try and kick one 12-year-old girl off her track team. So it’s important to remind folks of the upside-down nature of the actual stakes.
What will it take to defeat these anti-trans campaigns?
The mechanisms being weaponized against trans people are made possible by the weakening of democracy over decades. A healthy functioning democracy does not enable a marginalized group to have their basic human rights subject to the whims of partisan politicians. The tools they’re using to target trans folks are hyper-gerrymandered state legislatures, the institutional capture of our judiciary, the weakening of the power of people’s vote. Politicians are emboldened to run roughshod over people’s rights. When I hear pundits talk about the “threat to our democracy”, especially since January 6, they never seem to note what it is they’re trying to accomplish by weakening our democracy – and that’s banning abortion, draconian restrictions on immigrants, weaponizing a police state to further entrench Black communities into poverty and imprisonment, and certainly policing sexual and gender minorities.
In the meantime, you’ve had a number of successes in court. What does the Arkansas victory mean for the movement?
Arkansas provides some much-needed momentum for us. It adds to a string of early victories that we and other queer advocates have had in court, including in Alabama, Florida, Indiana and Tennessee. Every court that has considered these laws banning trans healthcare has read them for filth. The Arkansas judge had particularly strong words about the lack of expertise of the state’s witnesses – the coterie of religious doctors called to try and justify this ban. He ruled in our favor on all claims – that this ban violated the equal protection clause by only targeting trans youth; violated due process claims by subverting parental rights; and violated the first amendment by limiting what counsel doctors can give their patients. That’s enormously helpful as we challenge other bans.
It’s also a personal victory. I sat in the courtroom in Arkansas and met with these families, and it was clear the love these parents have for their children was their predominant justification for being there. The judge saw the strength and power of that. We’re still very early in these fights. It’s the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. Trans people and our families are terrified and outraged. But there’s something to be said for hope and believing you can win, and I hope that’s what people take away from Arkansas and our success thus far in blocking these laws.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity
