LGBTQ lawmakers, advocates vow to resist repressive legislation this session
Several hundred LGBTQ-rights advocates gathered in the Florida Capitol Tuesday to denounce fresh attacks on their rights and urge passage of legislation that would repeal existing restrictions on their rights.
Legislative Democrats joined the crowd on Tuesday, including out gay Sen. Shevrin Jones, of Miami-Dade County and House member Michele Rayner, representing parts of Pinellas and Hillsborough, along with representatives of Equality Florida, which organized the affair. The crowd was good-naturedly rowdy despite the threat they saw to their wellbeing.
“I will not be scared out of the state. You will not make laws to remove me or my dreams. I was raised on an America that believed that freedom will ring,” said Angelique Godwin, coordinator for trans-related events at Equality Florida.
“We are not pawns in a political game; we are people with the right to dignity, equality, and a life free from constant slander and discrimination,” Godwin added later in a written statement.
The speakers referred to HB 599 and SB 1382, which would bar state and local governments and contractors or nonprofits drawing state money from recognizing employees’ preferred gender pronouns if they differ from their biological sex.
Additionally, employers could act against employees or contractors based on the “deeply held religious or biology-based beliefs, including a belief in traditional or Biblical views of sexuality and marriage, or the employee’s or contractor’s disagreement with gender ideology.”
Equality Florida senior political director Joe Saunders, a former state House member, called it the “Don’t Say Gay or Trans at Work” bill.
‘Trans erasure’
HB 1233 and SB 1639 would require the state to treat people according to their biological sex instead of their gender identity, including on their drivers’ licenses. Any health insurer that pays for gender reassignment treatments would have to cover “detransitioning” treatments, intended to reverse the process. Additionally, insurers would have to offer policies lacking transition care and to cover treatment of gender dysphoria as a mental rather than physical health problem.
“[D]istinctions between the sexes with respect to athletics, prisons or other detention facilities, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, locker rooms, restrooms, and other areas where biology, safety, or privacy are implicated which result in separate accommodations are substantially related to the important state interest of protecting the health, safety, and privacy of individuals in such circumstances,” the measure says.
Also, the state and its subdivisions would have to count transgender people for statistical purposes according to their biological sex.
Saunders referred to that one as the “trans erasure” bill.
“These bills are fuel for a sinister belief that transgender people don’t exist and that government should be weaponized to exclude them from public life,” he said.
By contrast, LGBTQ-friendly legislators are pressing the Health Care Freedom Act (SB 1404) essentially repealing Florida’s and trans care restrictions) and the Freedom to Learn Act (SB 1414) repealing restrictions on classroom instruction about race, color, national origin, or sex and forbidding schools from requiring employees to notify parents of student’s LGBTQ status “if a reasonably prudent person would believe that disclosure would result in harm to the student.”
“We are fed up with government intrusion into our private lives,” Sauders said.
‘Read the numbers’
Participants mocked Gov. Ron DeSantis’ second-place showing in the Iowa Republican caucus, with former President Donald Trump leading 51.1% of the vote, nearly 30 percentage points ahead of DeSantis.
“Read the numbers from yesterday,” Jones, of Miami-Dade County, told the governor. “Your policies don’t work; America don’t like them and Florida don’t like them, either.”
“Banning books does not ban LGBTQ youth or adults and it will not eliminate them. Restricting access to Black, queer, and other diverse media does nothing, nothing, to actually protect our children. It actually harms them. A child should not have to feel fear from their parents because of who they are,” said Duval County Democratic Sen. Tracie Davis.
Republicans are scapegoating LBGTQ people and other minorities to distract from their inability to solve problems including high insurance and housing costs, Equality Florida executive director Nadine Smith said.
Smith compared the climate now to the 1970s, when Anita Bryant led her anti-LGBTQ campaign, and earlier, when the legislative Johns Committee rooted out reds and LGBTQ people from the public universities. Then as now, LGBTQ advocates were seen as “grooming” children for sexual abuse.
Smith urged moderate Republicans to see the light. “History will remember what you do this session,” she said.
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