The Slow Erosion of Transgender Civil Rights
a Timeline of Florida’s Trans-Antagonistic Crusade
Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislators’ newest attack on transgender people has many surprised at what appears to be a sudden escalation of anti-trans rhetoric. These attacks, while largely absent from mainstream media attention, have not come out of the ether fully formed. Rather, the transgender and gender nonconforming community has been fending off a coordinated attack on their lives and civil rights for the last seven years. What follows is a non-exhaustive timeline of how these attacks have developed. I write this in hopes that it will alert cisgender people (both gay and straight) to the ongoing crisis the transgender community faces and as a resource to identify similar anti-trans strategies in other states.
In March of 2015, Florida began their assault on transgender people with a bill that actively denied trans people access to public bathrooms consistent with their gender (CBS News). The bill would have made it a crime for people to use a bathroom that was inconsistent with the sex that was assigned to them at birth. The bill would have forced trans women to use men’s bathrooms and trans men to use women’s bathrooms. The legislators pushing it understood this would put trans women and trans femmes into a hostile environment where they have an…
