Local LGBTQ officials detail their fight against hate

Williams added that while she hopes Trenton will never again face that kind of scandal — partly because it happened when the members were working remotely and in-person meetings tend to discourage officeholders from making hateful comments to each other — “I am confident that all six of my colleagues will have my back if anything happens.”

In the legislature, consistent with the approach she has employed in her prior work as an activist, Zephyr said she expects to focus her work on “making sure that we are taking action behind the scenes” to make sure each measure carrying a pro-equality message also carries a pro-equality impact.

For example, she said, passing a nondiscrimination ordinance is commendable, but when residents have cause to file a complaint, is there an accessible and effective means for them to do so?

Among the work Zephyr has done since she was seated has been the introduction of bills to ban the “gay and trans panic defense” and protect same-sex adoptive parents. She has also been a vocal critic of her Republican colleagues’ move to table Democrats’ proposal to allow police to temporarily take firearms from those deemed by a court as a danger to themselves or others.

The Club Q shooting provides for the opportunity for Colorado to build upon its already strong gun safety laws, such as by passing an assault weapons ban and achieving universal implementation of the state’s “red flag law,” Moreno told the Blade, adding that “we’re going to explore some of that in this next [now current] legislative session.”

Democratic state lawmakers in Colorado introduced an assault weapons earlier this month. With expanded Democratic majorities in both chambers of the state legislature serving with Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, who is gay, the state is in a position to pass more progressive legislation across the board, Moreno said.

In New Hampshire, Cannon has proposed a bill to make it easier for residents to change the sex listed on their birth records, having previously introduced the proposal to allow for people to change the sex listed on their driver’s licenses and state-issued IDs with the option to check a box for “nonbinary.” Republican Gov. Chris Sununu signed that bill into law and it went into effect in 2020.

Despite his support for that proposal, Cannon said Sununu pushed back against a previous version of her birth records bill because it had included an option to identify as nonbinary. She told the Blade she has reintroduced the measure this year without that provision, with the expectation that its success will provide for an opportunity to make it more inclusive in the future.

In her position on the school board, too, where until recently she served concurrently, Cannon focused her approach on working towards incremental change — voting, for instance, for a proposal that allows students to use restrooms and facilities that align with their gender identities even though it requires parental permission, therefore excluding trans students who are not out and supported at home.

“Getting that policy in place will open the door in the future” for a more inclusive policy, Cannon said.

Another bill introduced by Cannon, which was modeled after California’s, would make New Hampshire a sanctuary for LGBTQ families to escape prosecution in states that have criminalized parents for facilitating their children’s access to medically necessary and guideline directed medical treatments for gender dysphoria.

Parker noted that these types of bills were a major topic discussed by LGBTQ legislators when they convened for programs hosted by the Victory Institute.

Republicans, meanwhile, including Cannon’s GOP colleagues, are continuing to advance proposals to outlaw healthcare for minors for the treatment of gender dysphoria.

“I’m speaking out against the [GOP’s] healthcare bill, flagging it as discriminatory and in violation of HIPPA rights,” Cannon said, referring to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which prohibits the disclosure of sensitive health information without the patient or guardian’s consent or knowledge.

“You have to be able to use medical information to prosecute a family [for facilitating access to gender affirming healthcare],” Cannon said, adding constitutional issues might also be raised under the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.

Cannon is confident she will be able to convince enough of her Republican colleagues to table the bill so it never reaches a vote, adding that she expects Sununu would veto the proposal should it ever reach his desk.

Williams told the Blade that apart from bringing back Pride weekend celebrations that were on pause during the pandemic, Trenton does not have any LGBTQ-specific policy matters on the horizon.

“I think that is due to our being the capital of a very protective state that has strong LGBTQ protections written into law,” she said.

At the same time, she said, “my lived experience as a LGBTQ person informs me in many ways that correlate with the experiences of other marginalized groups,” Williams said.

“From issues ranging from youth homelessness to economics to law enforcement, LGBTQ people can bring much to government and its decision-making that can benefit everyone,” she said.

Likewise, Russell said, “being an advocate for LGBTQ rights and issues is going to be something that I will continue to do in my role” as treasurer. “But I think the there are opportunities for there to be overlap with a lot of different things.”

For instance, the attacks on LGBTQ rights come alongside efforts to abridge women’s reproductive freedoms. “One of the policies that I built through the campaign and worked with some legislators and nonprofits on was the creation of a safe harbor fund within the treasurer’s office,” Russell said.

“It would ultimately be a fund that we would put in place, and it would be used to help individuals traveling from anti-choice states who needed to access safe reproductive health care,” he said.

Other matters on Russell’s agenda will impact all residents in Connecticut, policies like “baby bonds, which was passed in our Legislature,” and will provide publicly funded trust accounts for every new child. Another priority is “expanding financial literacy programs so that we [will] have young folks who are coming out of school who know how to manage money,” he said.

Whatever their putative purpose might be, Cannon stressed that the impact of anti-LGBTQ legislation proposed by her colleagues is often a solution in search of a problem — a message that was echoed by Parker and Williams.

“In New Hampshire, the trans population is one-tenth of one percent,” she said. Nevertheless, “We have people trying to put forth legislation against the trans community when we’re such a small community of people.”

Likewise, regarding the debate over her proposal to allow residents to change the gender listed in their birth records, Cannon said, “the number of people born in the state who want to change their birth records is incredibly small,” while, “many of us who were born outside the state already had our information changed.”

Zephyr stressed the ways in which anti-LGBTQ bills are based on lies about LGBTQ people.

She pointed to a proposal in the Montana Legislature that would prohibit minors from attending drag shows, which comes from the baseless smear propagated on the right that organizers of and participants in all-ages drag performances are sexually abusing or exploiting children.

Bills like these are “not a matter of logic or facts or information,” Parker told the Blade, but rather are intended as politically motivated attacks on the LGBTQ community. It’s “political theatre” cooked up by “right wing think tanks that circulate these bills to legislators around the country,” she said.

Russell noted how unpopular these policies are, broadly speaking. “Republicans are really using these campaigns to target trans kids, for instance, or to create these kinds of social wars around issues that the large majority of Americans believe that people should have the freedom and right to be who they are, and love who they love, and express themselves how they want to,” he said.

Williams sees both political opportunism and sincere bigotry motivating these anti-LGBTQ proposals: “There is definitely some hard-core prejudice behind some of these bills, but for many of these bills’ sponsors I believe they feel that they have put forth anti-LGBTQ legislation because they think they need to do so for their ‘conservative street cred’ and to raise money or gain a few percentage points in a primary.”

“There are definitely some Republican legislators who believe their legislation will solve problems that don’t exist,” Williams said. “I also learned that there are more moderate Republicans willing to push against such bad legislation, but they need support to help defend themselves when they get attacked for supporting LGBTQ people and in particular, trans kids.”

Parker has had first-hand experience dealing with anti-LGBTQ legislation when serving as mayor of Houston from 2010-2016, during which time, as an out lesbian, she was one of the first openly LGBTQ mayors of a major U.S. city.

In 2015, when voters repealed a broad nondiscrimination ordinance that included sexual orientation and gender identity, “it was about fear,” Parker said, stoked in large part by “the smear that trans women are sexual predators.”

She added that the effect of anti-LGBTQ bills can be both harmful and performative at the same time, pointing to efforts by conservative lawmakers to ban books that contain LGBTQ characters or themes.

“We [in the the LGBTQ community] have fought so hard to have affirming depictions of our lives in books and other media, so, to have books about LGBT lives removed from school libraries is really frustrating,” Parker said.

Particularly after the bills addressing “performative culture war stuff,” including book bans, are signed into law, she said, it often becomes clear that their proponents had failed to consider what that their implementation will look like in practice, perhaps in many cases because they did not expect the proposals to succeed in the first place.

From anti-LGBTQ laws to the onerous abortion restrictions that have been passed by many conservative states, GOP legislators are discovering the unintended and unforeseen consequences of poorly-construed policies and suffering the backlash from voters, Parker said. “It’s like the dog who chased the car.”