From state houses to Congress, anti-trans fights arrive in Washington

By Maham Javaid

July 28, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

When AJ DePre, a trans rights organizer, heard that a House subcommittee was holding a hearing about “The Dangers and Due Process Violations of ‘Gender-Affirming Care,’” on Thursday, they spent the day making calls to their family in Belgium to assess if they could move to Europe.

“I felt scared and ready to leave,” they said.

For months, DePre, 30, closely watched state after state attempt to ban gender affirming care for minors, as well as adults; so for them, they said, the pivot from state legislatures to a House Subcommittee was unsurprising. “It felt inevitable that these issues would be discussed at the federal level,” they said.

Since January dozens of state legislatures have debated anti-trans bills on an almost daily basis; at least 66 bills introduced in the past seven months have become law, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the ACLU and Movement Advancement Project. These state bills target drag shows, prohibit trans girls from participating in school athletics, and restrict gender-affirming care for minors and adults. Now federal lawmakers have brought these debates to Congress.

Conservative activists have said after their success at the state level, they plan to focus on federal policy. And with the 2024 presidential campaign underway, Republican candidates, including former president Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have begun campaigning on curbing transgender rights.

The hearing Thursday before the House subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government focused on gender affirming care for minors, but also touched on trans athletes’ rights to participate in sports. It featured many of the same witnesses who have testified repeatedly in favor of state bills restricting transgender rights.

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), the chair of House subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, told The Washington Post that he has not reached a conclusion about what role the federal government should play in banning gender affirming care for children.

“Congress is going to continue to research and consider this issue and determine ultimately if there is a federal role to play here,” he said. “State legislatures are taking action in this space and so we are trying to strike the right balance here to determine what the appropriate role of the federal government would be is to protect children from harm.”

He said the purpose of the hearing, and of similar hearings in the future, is to build a consensus about what legislation around these “new and emerging issues such as gender affirming care could look like,” and that the hearings are not related to the 2024 election in any way.

“This is obviously not a political issue, its an important issue facing all of society,” he said. “The issue alone of men and women’s sports touches everyone around the country and the so-called gender affirming care issue is emerging and is becoming a bigger issue across the country.”

Johnson said that ultimately, Congress could decide that this is an issue for the states to grapple with. For now, he believes that the hearing was “thoughtful and respectful.”

The hearing had several contentious moments. In the first few minutes Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) used a procedural motion to block Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who is not a part of the subcommittee, from introducing the witnesses; when Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) began speaking, an anonymous attendee shouted at him; and the room was divided between smiles and expressions of devastation when Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Tex.) used a food pyramid chart to argue against gender affirming care for minors.

Democratic lawmakers said that parts of the hearing were distressing, especially for trans people and their families. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.), part of the subcommittee, described the hearing as a “gut punch.”

She said that when Hunt tried to minimize the issue of gender affirming care by comparing a young person with gender dysphoria to a child who is demanding ice cream, she felt that some of her Republican colleagues at the hearing were being “unnecessarily mean, thoughtless, and belittling.”

Escobar, however, said she was unsurprised by the GOP taking up the issue of gender affirming care on a federal level.

“Everything that has been happening in Congress since House Republicans gained the majority has been about dividing our country as deeply as possible,” she said. “They are fighting the culture war through committee work and appropriations process.”

Last week, the GOP tried to turn the annual defense authorization bill into a vehicle for blocking abortion access, banning books, honoring Confederate generals and dismantling racial diversity initiatives. This week, Republicans issued an amendment in the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill to strike down three of the 2,680 earmarks that had been cleared for inclusion in the bill by Republicans and Democrats.

This struck down all programs providing housing and related assistance for those in need in the LGBTQ+ community; banned the display of “extraneous flags,” such as Pride flags, at funded facilities; and forbade discrimination “against a person who speaks or acts in accordance with a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of what constitutes traditional marriage.”

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle said that Thursday’s hearing was unlikely to be the last on the subject.

“This was one of several hearings that the Republicans have called to keep whipping the idea that families are under threat from transgender people,” Scanlon said. “My colleague, Rep. Escobar, rightly called it a treadmill of fear and rage to keep the Republican base whipped up and supporting their electoral ambitions.”

Scanlon said that if it was up to her, the hearing would never have occurred, because “it was so destructive for trans people, and it will stir up hate crimes and endanger actual lives.”

DePre said they felt sick to their stomach after the hearing. “It was worse than I thought it would be. I hadn’t realized until I arrived that the hearing was never intended to be fair or equal,” they said. “The first thing I noticed was there were very few other trans people present in that room. I must’ve been one out of probably five.”

Out of the six people testifying on Thursday, only one identified as a transgender person, Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Many of those testifying, including Chloe Cole, an activist from Florida who has traveled across the U.S. to tell her story about detransitioning, and Jennifer Bauwens, a director at Family Research Council, have appeared at state legislatures earlier this year.

“This is not the first time I am feeling forced to move because of my identity,” DePre said. “I was raised in Oklahoma but after I came out two years ago, I had to flee from there to Wisconsin.” Then, earlier this year DePre moved from Wisconsin to Northern Virginia because “the apathy to trans peoples’ rights in Wisconsin was too much to bear.”

“I just want the lawmakers to remember that these are people’s lives they are talking about. It’s my life they are talking about.”

This article was originally published on July 28th, by the Washington Post.