Gwendolyn Herzig, a transgender pharmacist, went to the Arkansas state house earlier this month to testify in support providing transgender youth with gender-affirming health care.
Herzig hopes lawmakers will consider the expert’s background when debating a law that would allow anyone to receive gender-affirming treatment from doctors as a minor. sue for malpractice up to 30 years after the age of 18.
However, he met with transphobia.
“You said you’re a trans woman,” Republican state Rep. Matt McKee said. “Do you have a penis?”
Herzig later told NBC News experience”This is probably the most humiliating thing in public I have ever experienced.
The medical malpractice suit is just one of the anti-LGBTQ measures Arkansas has considered recently. In January, Republicans introduce extreme bills that will be criminalized “adult-oriented performances” – including those players “discovering a gender identity that is different from the gender of the player assigned at birth” – in public where children can see people.
Republican sponsors of the bill ultimately removed language specifically targeting drag performers general pushbackand laws criminalizing public adult performances take effect this week.
Nationwide, there is a chapter 351 anti-LGBTQ bill in the current state legislature, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The proposed measures, all sponsored by Republicans and coming at a time when the GOP has been consumed by anti-LGBTQ hysteria, attempt to criminalize drag performances, ban trans youth from sports in schools, and ban health care for transgender children and people mature.
Several anti-LGBTQ bills have made their way through state legislatures — just this week, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves (R) signed a law banning gender-affirming treatment for trans youth.
“The Republican Party is playing politics with people’s lives and they’re painting a clear picture of their priorities,” said Heather Williams, interim president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
An avalanche of bills
Tennessee is poised to become the first state to criminalize drag performances, a move that LGBTQ people and supporters say has the potential to criminalize transgender and nonbinary people as well as limit Pride celebrations.
Republican Gov. Bill Lee has signaled he will sign the law HB3/SB9which would ban “adult cabaret performers” – which include topless and exotic dancers, as well as “male or female impersonators” – in public where minors can see them.
The language is so broad that LGBTQ advocates worry that the law could also be used to imprison transgender people who are just living their lives.
“Trans and non-binary people now have to wonder if they’re going to be accused of being male or female impersonators,” Chris Sullivan, executive director of the Tennessee Equality Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to LGBTQ rights, told HuffPost. “It makes you think twice about going to the store.”
A similarity proposal in Missouri, a state that also seeks to prohibiting gender-affirming health care for minors and adults who are incarcerated, will make a performance in public or where a minor can be sentenced to one year in prison and a fine of $2,000.
Even in Virginia, where the number of Democrats in the state Senate all but ensure that homophobic and transphobic bills cannot go forward, Republicans have tried to get stuck through extremely deadly bills to prove on a red-blooded basis that they are also trying to. limiting the rights of the LGBTQ community.
One such bill would require students submit identification of “biological type” in the form, which requires a doctor’s signature, to play sports. The proposal is an attempt to ban transgender students from participating in athletics.
“If you think requiring 1.6 million students to get their gender checked is a good policy, a lot of parents are going to disagree,” Virginia House Democrat Del. Danica Roem told HuffPost.
Republicans remain focused on anti-LGBTQ legislation, even as many high-profile candidates pushing a far-right culture war-led agenda are defeated in the 2022 midterms.
“Not all partisans. There are some people who truly believe,” said Roem. “But whenever he’s worried about drag queens, that’s when he’s not worried about transportation infrastructure and overcrowded classrooms.”
As an extremist group protest outside the public library that drag queen story jam host and GOP politicians despise racial justice and LGBTQ rights as a “woke” ideology, it seems like flooding bills is an easy way to score political points on an ongoing basis.
“It’s not about public service, it’s about how they can rise in the ranks of the party and get all the attention,” Williams said. “And the only way to do that is to be anti-everything and nothing.”
Many anti-drag bills and other measures targeting the LGBTQ community will face legal challenges. But supporters and Democrats say the bill doesn’t have to become law to cause harm.
“He caused real damage to his constituents,” Roem said. “You cannot serve your constituents by attacking them.”