As I sit down to write my last column of 2023, it occurs to me that much of my work this year has focused on the high stakes of the US presidential election coming up in 2024.
I’ve emphasised that democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are on the ballot in 2024. And now, even the corporate, authoritarianism-enabling American legacy media are increasingly unable to ignore Donald Trump’s evident dictatorial aspirations and fascist attitudes.
While I’m glad the legacy media’s gatekeepers have finally decided to state these obvious facts, I worry about their lack of regard for how devastating a Republican victory in 2024 will be for members of particular marginalised groups, with transgender Americans like myself among the most at risk.
Even as the major mainstream newspapers and magazines now worry about democracy in the abstract – and, to be fair, sometimes also about immigrants and abortion access – they blithely continue to print the kind of anti-trans rhetoric that has been fueling state-level persecution of trans people for years, escalating with frightening rapidity.
Republicans want to take that persecution national, but even in a best-case scenario in which Democrats hold the presidency and the Senate and retake the House, political persecution of trans Americans will continue to escalate in red states. We know that because 2023 has been another record year for anti-trans state legislation – over 500 bills were filed, 75 of which became law – and 2024 promises more of the same.
To be sure, not all the news for trans folks is currently bad. In September, striking results from the first ever randomised controlled trial of hormone therapy came out: transmasculine individuals in the treatment group, who received hormone therapy starting at the beginning of the three-month study, experienced a 55% reduction in suicidality compared to their previous baseline. The study could be conducted ethically because the people in the control group were not denied treatment, but simply required to wait three months to start.
The reason it’s important to have such data is that it puts the lie to the bad-faith argument, levelled frequently by transphobes, that most of the research showing gender-affirming care is healthy and helpful for trans individuals is not “high quality research”. By this definition much medical research is not “high quality” precisely because the conditions required for a randomised controlled trial would be unethical.
Far be it from anti-trans bigots to let such facts stand in the way of their preferred narrative, however. And unfortunately, the publication of this study hasn’t really shifted the national discourse on trans rights in the months since it came out.
The other good piece of news for transgender Americans that comes to mind for me is the continuing fall from grace of right-wing, anti-LGBTIQ group Moms for Liberty, the Florida-based national activist organisation whose chapters are largely responsible for many of the anti-trans policies and book bans implemented in school districts across the country.
Last month school board candidates backed by Moms for Liberty suffered major defeats in local elections. And since then the news emerged that Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler engaged in a threesome involving her husband and another woman, making her a grade-A hypocrite. Even worse, the other woman accused Ziegler’s husband, Christian Ziegler, of raping her on another occasion after the initial sexual encounter between the three of them. Christian Ziegler, who denies any wrongdoing, has refused to resign as chair of the Florida Republican Party, and the party has now had to take extraordinary action to punish him – stripping him of the powers of his office and reducing his $120,000 annual salary to a single dollar – as it attempts damage control.
The losses and scandals that Moms for Liberty have confronted in 2023 may pave the way for better conditions for queer students in some school districts, and one might hope that the fallout could spill over, to some degree, into state legislative battles and state and national elections as well. Nevertheless, for the foreseeable future, American states will remain divided between those that are to varying degrees outright hostile to trans people, and those that accommodate our existence.
In short, even if 2024 goes as well as possible for marginalised Americans, it is almost certainly still going to be another bad year, overall, for transgender Americans.
This is something I wish the members of our punditocracy would raise explicitly as they warn the public that democracy is on the ballot next November. Even if “democracy” wins, the fight for the human rights and fair and equal treatment of trans people across vast swaths of America is going to need to continue. That fight, in turn, depends on the battle for hearts and minds. Fairer mainstream media representation for trans Americans could go a long way to help on that front, though I’m not holding my breath that it will happen any time soon.
