The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
CT bills part of a ‘nationwide coordinated attack’
LGBTQ youth being targeted, according to advocates
Five bills proposed this year in the Connecticut state legislature would, in various ways, restrict the expression of gender identity or shield organizations that seek to do so.
Advocates say the proposed measures are part of a “nationwide coordinated attack” on gender identity.
The issue entered the national discourse last week when conservative commentator Michael Knowles, a Yale graduate, said during the Conservative Political Action Conference that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely, the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”
A bill in Arizona, for example, says that a public school employee may not “knowingly address” a student using “a pronoun that differs from the pronoun that aligns with the student’s biological sex.” That bill was approved by the Arizona state Senate, as was similar legislation in North Dakota. Both resemble a bill proposed by Connecticut state Rep. Joe Hoxha, R-Bristol.
Hoxha’s proposed bill would “require public school educators to recognize each student by the biological gender of such student.”
“I believe that teachers, educators should not be able to affirm or encourage a child’s misguided belief in believing that they may be a different gender, and I say ‘misguided’ because when you’re at that age, you don’t really know much of anything much less potentially thinking to change your gender,” Hoxha
said during a recent interview. “It’s not the teachers’ role or responsibility to confirm or affirm that type of stuff to children that young.”
The ACLU has been tracking legislation it deems to be anti-LGBTQ. Claudine Constant, public policy and advocacy director for the ACLU of Connecticut, said in a prepared statement, “So far this year, state legislatures in the U.S. have introduced 382 anti-LGBTQ bills.”
“These Connecticut bills are an extension of the same attacks on LGBTQ people that we have seen for decades, and they are part of the nationwide coordinated attack that is especially focused on trans youth,” she said.
In Idaho, a bill would guarantee that certain businesses would not be required to provide a restroom “on any basis other than biological sex,” similar in content to a measure proposed by Connecticut state Sen. Rob Sampson, RWolcott.
Sampson’s bill would “set forth the right of an individual business to determine the policies of the business establishment with respect to genderspecific access to facilities and activities,” according to the text of the bill.
“This is vital for protecting the rights of business owners and customers alike,” Sampson said in a prepared statement. “Private businesses should have the freedom to set their own policies and regulations, and customers should be able to choose whether or not to patronize these businesses based on their own personal beliefs and preferences.”
Sampson also proposed a measure that “prohibit the use of a nonbinary marker on birth certificates and require the sex of the parents and child be listed on birth certificates” and another that would provide “civil immunity for interscholastic athletic organizations and the sanctioning bodies of private youth organizations when such entities adopt policies that require an athletic participant to compete on a team that matches the gender identity on the person’s birth certificate.”
“Each of these items is a question of freedom of expression and the only proper solution in each case is to protect maximum freedom for all individuals, limiting it only when it conflicts with another individual’s freedom,” he said by email.
There has been a “rise in anti-LGBTQ legislation” and that “trans, nonbinary people” have become “the target across the entire country,” said Juancarlos Soto, interim executive director at the New Haven Pride Center.
“Sometimes we in Connecticut think that we’re immune or that those things don’t happen here,” he said. “But we see it. We see it every day, and now we see it at every level of the legislative branch.”
Legislators in many states have sought to limit which teams trans athletes are allowed to play on, and similar legislation is proposed at the federal level. Republican Connecticut state Rep. Doug Dubitsky of North Windham, whose proposed measure would “prohibit student athletes who were born of the male sex from participating and competing in women’s interscholastic athletic events,” would not say it was part of a trend.
“My bill is very focused, very specific about a very specific type of fact pattern,” he said. When asked why his bill seemed to follow a pattern similar to other bills proposed in other states, Dubitsky said the question “shows media bias because there is a difference. You have to realize that not everybody is a cliche. Not everybody is just a headline.”
Dubitsky said he has “all the respect and sympathy in the world for people who transition from one sex to another” and argued that his bill is not about gender identity. “It’s about school safety. It’s about fair competition,” he said.
“It’s about men playing sports with women,” Dubitsky said. “Regardless of what somebody says they are, regardless of what their identity is or their transition, men are bigger, stronger, faster, and it makes for a dangerous and unfair competition.”
Hoxha said his bill was intended to protect against a “slippery slope” or a “Pandora’s box.”
“It creates a type of environment where now you can get people that come up with all types of demanded titles and ways of being identified, and where does it stop? It could just go on and on and on,” he said. “At some point, there just needs to be a line drawn, and you believe whatever you believe. There are going to be people that believe they’re animals. I identify as a dinosaur. I demand that my fifth grade teacher calls me ‘T Rex’ or ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex’ or whatever, and then tomorrow, I may feel like
I’m a kangaroo and demand to be called a kangaroo.”
Soto said anti-LGBTQ legislation and sentiment “often comes from a place of ignorance.”
“We know that gender is a social construct, and that’s why people can identify as a different gender,” he said. “Gender and being an animal is something completely different.”
Constant said these bills “are about pushing transgender people, especially youth, out of public life.”
“These are political attacks from groups with a fundamental opposition to transgender people being able to live openly and freely, affirmed as who they really are,” she said. “It is up to each and every one of us to rise against fear and ignorance by surrounding trans youth with strength, love and support.”
When asked if these bills have any chance of passage, state Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney of New Haven and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff of Norwalk sent the following statement:
“Bills like these seriously risk the health and wellbeing of trans kids in order to score political points and are yet another Republican attack on the vulnerable. Legislation targeting any group or minority will go nowhere in the Connecticut State Senate.”
Nonetheless, Dubitsky said, “I wouldn’t have put it in if I didn’t hope it was going to pass.”
“As a member of the minority party, none of my bills are likely to pass,” he said. “The Democrats can kill anything they want. So why would I bother? Why would any Republican bother putting in any bill unless they believe that there is some path to having this become law?”