They’ve started with trans Utahns. They won’t stop there. Vote.
The Log Cabin Republicans, the national conservative gay group, announced they will no longer include transgender people in their advocacy, as they have done since 2015. It now calls itself an “LGB advocacy organization.” Board president Ross Hemminger said the group was uncomfortable with the current focus on issues involving minors.
The national group also shut down the Utah chapter that had been around since the 1990s. New leadership was even too conservative for the national organization. The leader of the spin-off group that followed put his views in writing earlier this year:
“The whole community has been taken over by the TQ+
Being gay is biological
Being TQ+ is a mental illness which means you can convert or groom people into it
The TQ+ uses gays to push their evil agenda.
I’m not interested in that. I just want to live my life.”
Being trans is not a mental illness, and nobody is ‘converted’ or ‘groomed’ into being gay or trans. That’s the position of every major medical body. What I want to do though is look at the logic of that statement as that is the more dangerous aspect.
It assumes that if trans people are pushed out, gay and lesbian people will be left alone. That has never been how this works. The right currently sees trans Utahns as an easy target. If the strategy succeeds, they’ll aim the same arguments at the rest of us. Some of this is already happening. A CNN report notes growing hostility toward LGBTQ rights inside the Republican Party, including attempts to challenge same-sex marriage rights. Many of the people making those arguments never made a distinction between the “L,” the “G,” and the “T.” The distinction only exists in the minds of those who hope to be spared.
Utah’s LGBTQ community has been through this before. Every gain we have made, from nondiscrimination protections to marriage, came from standing together. None of it came from sorting ourselves into who deserves protection and who doesn’t. Every time someone has said “I just want to live my life,” that life has depended on people who refused to leave anyone behind.
That is why Tuesday, Nov. 3, matters. It is time for the LGBTQ community and our allies to vote in large numbers and say “enough.” I believe this is the best opportunity in decades to break the GOP’s supermajority in the Utah Legislature. That supermajority has written the bills, set the agenda, and shut out voices that disagree with it. It does not have to be permanent. Legislative races are often decided by a few hundred votes, and a party that can lose seats has to start listening.
Go to the polls to vote. If you’re not registered, you can do so there. Take a friend, a neighbor, and a family member to the polls.
Vote for the whole community, including the people some groups have decided to leave behind. They are not the last ones the right will come for.
