The Despicable Campaign to Roll Back Transgender Protections in the Massachusetts Midterms

  

By Natasha Lennard

The November midterm elections are poised to offer, in some sense, a referendum on the Trump administration’s two-year assault on the rights and liberties of women, immigrants, people of color, and LBGTQ communities. In Massachusetts, the referendum is literal: Voters will be asked on the ballot whether they want to uphold or repeal anti-discrimination protections for transgender people in the state.

In 2016, one month prior to Donald Trump’s presidential election, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker signed into law a bill that updated the state’s civil rights statutes to protect transgender individuals from discrimination in public places, including restrooms, locker rooms, restaurants, stores, and medical offices. Now, thanks to the concerted efforts of anti-transgender opponents using transphobic misinformation and scaremongering, Massachusetts will become the first state to question whether to uphold or repeal such hard-won protections.

The 2016 law, and those like it around the country, far from assured an end to rampant anti-transgender discrimination. But a repeal on the grounds framed in the Massachusetts referendum — steeped as it is in bigoted, anti-transgender myths — would not only assert that transgender lives do not matter, but that they constitute a public threat.

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Source: The Intercept_