Without fail, it happens: a new legislative session starts in the U.S., and trans people begin a new round of stomach-churning dread. The past few years have seen hundreds of anti-trans bills floated in state legislatures, each worse than the next: full bans on any medical transition procedures for adults as well as children; laws banning any book that depicts “gender identity” (which, last I checked, was all books); “drag bans” that would penalize trans and gender non-conforming people for travelling through West Virginia, or for leaving the house.
It’s bad news and nothing but, especially if you get it on social media—which, thanks to the absence of reliable mainstream coverage, queer and trans people are increasingly forced to do. Unsurprisingly, being exposed to a constant tide of doom and hate is hard on people’s mental health, especially if they’re younger. A recent poll from The Trevor Project found that “86 percent of transgender and non-binary youth say recent debates around anti-trans bills have negatively impacted their mental health.”
This raises a question for those of us who cover the news, and for any trans person who wants to read it. How, exactly, can we cover a moment this dark without disempowering or traumatizing our readers? How much panic is too much panic? And if panic is justified—which it may be, at least in some cases— how do we differentiate urgency from despair?
“Last year, there were over 300 pieces of anti-LGBTQ2S+ legislation proposed in statehouses across the country. In 2021, that number was 250. This year, so far, the ACLU says that it’s 185,” says Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director for Media Matters.
Before I have time to point out that “185 anti-trans bills proposed before the end of January” is exactly the kind of headline I tend to panic over, Drennen adds that “most of these bills will not pass.”
“Any specific bill could become the law, but most of them won’t,” Drennen says. “In Texas last year, for example, every single anti-LGBTQ2S+ bill was defeated in 2022 … [nationally], 19 of them became law last year, many without the governor’s signature in the state where they were passed, and in 2021, that number is 17.”
Even when anti-trans bills do pass, there is a high likelihood of them being struck down by the courts. (Although this is not unqualified good news—more on that later.) When hearing about these bills on Twitter, it’s easy to feel that each and every one is directed at you, specifically, and to imagine some nightmare scenario in which you are impacted by all of them at once, but that is not how it’s going to happen. Most of the bills will never be made law, and if they are, the impact will depend on where you live.
In fact, there is reason to suspect that some politicians and candidates are purposefully proposing legislation that they can’t pass or enforce—not because they’re optimistic, but because they want to dominate the right-wing media conversation, build a national profile and win Republican primaries.
“I live in Illinois. It’s pretty much the one of the best possible places to live if you’re trans,” says media critic Parker Molloy. “But, you know, every year there will be people in the state legislatures who will introduce bills that will never get passed and will never become law. The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor last year had said that she wanted there to be biometric DNA tests on bathroom doors to prevent trans people from using them … that’s something that wasn’t going to happen. But at the same time it still sucks that there’s anyone who’s like, ‘Yeah, this is a fine idea.’”
If the extremely serious plan to put Mission Impossible-style retinal scanners on every gas station crapper in the Midwest got national coverage, and if it was presented as a serious possibility, that could indeed cause panic, Molloy says— which is why it’s good to for reporters to be clear on the fact that it never will.
Yet, some anti-trans bills do pass, and even the ones that don’t pass cause damage by making trans people targets of public rage. The aforementioned poll from The Trevor Project, for instance, says that 45 percent of respondents had been cyberbullied in the past year as the result of the conversation around these bills. Panic is damaging, but complacency is dangerous: “Is it worse if we worry too much about something that might not happen,” Molloy says, “or if we’re blindsided by something that does?”
“It’s not the news of the bills that is harmful to people’s mental health,” says trans advocate (and sometimes Xtra contributor) Erin Reed. “It’s the bills themselves.”
Reed has become one of the most prominent and reliable sources of information on the anti-trans legislative wave, reporting from legislatures and courtrooms around the country. (She spoke to me from one such session.) Reed strongly defends her choice to publicize and condemn the ugliest bills: by putting them in front of the public, she says, “we reveal what is at the anti-trans movement’s heart to people that might not understand what their ultimate goals are.”
Here’s where we pause to discuss something that was brought up by every single person I interviewed: The lack of adequate mainstream coverage, or, more bluntly, the New York Times problem. Even as anti-trans bills have become more numerous and extreme, American news outlets, including the paper of record, have slid to the right, and are now allowing an increasing number of flatly ideological and transphobic articles—“Are trans people getting too much medical care? Are there too many trans people? Do [they] have it too easy?” summarizes Drennen—to pass as objective “reporting.”
There is a strong case to be made that advocates like Reed have to publicize each and every bill on social media, and that they have to do so in strong, attention-grabbing language. Traditional outlets aren’t really covering this, and it takes a lot of noise to be heard over the blare of the irrelevant and misleading trans “coverage” coming from those bigger platforms.
There is also, as Reed reminds me, precedent for state-level bills gradually pushing the status quo to the right: “In abortion rights for a long time, total abortion bans and fetal heartbeat bills and fetal personhood, those were the ridiculous goals. Those were the ones where people said, ‘We shouldn’t really focus effort on those,’” she tells me. “But now those are the bills that are front and centre in many of the most extreme anti-abortion states.”
This is also why the phrase “struck down by the courts” is not unilaterally reassuring. For every bill that is sent up to the court, a Supreme Court case becomes more likely, and—given the overwhelming conservative bent of the current justices—the outcome is unlikely to be favourable for trans and queer people.
“The 11th Circuit [in Florida], for instance, just had a very terrible ruling against transgender people being able to use bathrooms according to their gender identity,” Reed says. “And now we’ve got a circuit split. The Gavin Grimm case famously allowed transgender people the right to use bathrooms, and the 11th Circuit in Florida is now saying that it is legal to discriminate against transgender people in bathrooms. Just that alone makes it extremely likely that we will see a Supreme Court case in the next few years on transgender bathroom rights.”
Not every anti-trans bill will pass. Not every anti-trans bill is even intended to pass. But any anti-trans bill stands to do damage on a national level. Reporters do have a responsibility to inform the public about this, even if the reporters at the Times aren’t fulfilling it. So, how do you tell people they’re in danger without also telling them to despair?
I remember the night George W. Bush proposed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. I went outside and ran around my block in Queens over and over, sweating, teeth gritted, speeding up every time I thought of Bush and his horrible little smile. I remember the night I heard that Matthew Shepard had died. I was in high school. I lay on the floor of my bedroom and played the same two songs over and over, cursing out God. I volunteered at an AIDS hospice—washing dishes, doing laundry, babysitting a little boy born with HIV —as a preteen in the early ’90s. My service was neither long nor heroic, but I fed French toast to a child who was not expected to see his late teens. I saw people who were dying; when I had to walk past the morgue, I saw people who had died.
I’m an adult now, and it’s easy for me to maintain perspective. I have seen things get very bad. I have also seen things get better. If I were someone else—say, a teenager in West Virginia, waking up to the news that he might not be allowed to leave his house—I don’t know how I would handle these headlines. It’s my job to break the news to that teenager in a way that convinces him he has a reason to live, and that his future, while never certain, is not foreclosed.
Trauma, in my experience, equals terror plus powerlessness. It’s not just that something bad happened, it’s that you were unable to do anything about it. Perhaps the most important thing to do is to frame these bills in a way that reminds trans readers they do have agency, especially when they act together.
“Whenever people ask, ‘What can I do,’ ‘Who do I go to’ or ‘How can I fight back,’ the number-one thing that I always say is network with your local community,” Reed says. “Support the local organizations on the ground that are doing the work, because that’s where people’s mental health is going to get taken care of. That’s where people are going to find local community to help them in times of crisis. That’s where people will organize and rally should the worst bills in these states get passed.”
Drennen concurs. Anti-trans bills are failing to pass, she says, “because of the response from the LGBTQ2S+ community showing up to hearings and showing up to sessions and really making lawmakers confront the stakes of what they’re doing.” Engaging with local activism not only clarifies the specific threats you may be facing, “you see that anti-LGBTQ2S+ legislation can be stopped in any state. It can be stopped in Missouri. It can be stopped in Texas. The best salve against the overwhelming despair is to plug into your local community.”
Things could very well get worse for trans people in the U.S.: if a culture warrior like Ron DeSantis becomes president, or if Trump wins a second term, or if one of those anti-trans bills gets in front of SCOTUS, we could easily be looking at national bans. Things could also get better, though: anti-trans extremism did not deliver Republicans the results they wanted in the recent midterms. It’s entirely possible that conservatives will find some more popular form of bigotry to motivate their base.
“Right-wing hysteria is always moving between different issues to keep their audiences scared and engaged,” Drennen says. “And the good news about that is that it means that eventually they’ll move on. And the bad news, of course, is that they’ll end up attacking some other vulnerable community. It’s a movement that can’t exist without somebody to hate, but trans people won’t be the scare of the day forever.”
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