As state legislatures across the country are considering — and often passing — laws to limit access to gender-affirming health care and ban drag performances, the University of Colorado Boulder hosted the 17th annual TRANSforming Gender Conference this weekend. The free conference, which featured nearly 50 panels and workshops, raises awareness about issues and identities in the trans community, bringing together members of the LGBTQ community and allies to attend talks, trainings and forums on a wide variety of topics.
“Politically, our people are going through it, right?” said Raquel Willis, Saturday’s keynote speaker and the author of the forthcoming memoir The Risk it Takes to Bloom. “We have more than 400 anti LGBTQ+ bills moving across the country, tackling subjects like banning educational curricula that speaks to the experience of people on the margins. So a lot of what y’all are discussing and learning and hearing here, there are people out there who don’t want you to have these experiences. There’s banning of books that could aid in the pursuit of that knowledge. There is banning of drag performances and in some places any type of performance of trans folks, gender nonconforming folks publicly. Banning of access to sports for trans people, of course, especially young for young trans girls and feminine folks. Even more than last year, we are under attack.”
In Colorado, freshmen Reps. Lisa Frizell (R-Castle Rock) and Brandi Bradley (R-Littleton), along with state Sen. Byron Pelton (R-Sterling), introduced House Bill 23-1098, entitled “Women’s Rights in Athletics” in January. The bill, which claimed to be about protecting the rights of female students in athletics, would have required all school sports programs and events to restrict students from joining based on the sex they were assigned at birth. The bill died in committee.
Despite Colorado’s robust protections for LGBTQ people, which have made it a haven for families fleeing states with anti-trans legislation, in November, 2022, a gunman killed five people during a drag event at Club Q in Colorado Springs, one of the conservative city’s few LGBTQ nightclubs.
During one of the TRANSforming Gender Conference’s roundtable discussion sessions, participants discussed the impact that the Club Q shooting had on them. One Colorado State University student mentioned security concerns for campus drag events, and others expressed the secondary trauma of being part of a community regularly targeted for violence.
“It could have been me,” said one discussion participant.
During her keynote address, Willis elaborated on the struggles facing transgender people today. “Our community is still plagued by barriers to education, employment, housing, health care — in general — increased the rates of suicide, especially among our young people and transmasculine folks, which is rarely often discussed, and of course, something I’ve often discussed a lot in my career, this continued epidemic of violence plaguing trans women of color,” she said. “That is also kind of a misnomer because all of this is violence, right? It’s not just the physical things that we hear about. It’s also the psychological violence we’re experiencing and also the political violence that we’re experiencing.”
In Colorado, Democratic legislators have introduced legislation, as part of their “Safe Access to Protected Health Care” package, to protect patients seeking legal gender-affirming care in Colorado that may be banned in other states.
“Nationally, our fundamental rights are under attack, and it’s our responsibility in Colorado to protect those seeking legal gender-affirming health care from vicious and outright dangerous legal overreach by other states,” said Rep. Brianna Titone (D-Arvada) in a news release. “Having access to gender-affirming care saves lives and gives people the power to live their life unapologetically, and be true to themselves. Our bill prioritizes patients and providers, fights back against anti-abortion and anti-trans rhetoric, and protects our privacy.”
Citing The New Yorker writer Masha Gessen, Glenda Russell, a Boulder-based psychologist, discussed the current backlash against the LGBTQ community. “They call this whole process ‘past-oriented politics,’” she said. “‘I want to go back to the past. Things were so much simpler then. Things seemed easier then — in the past.’ Well, it might have been simpler for some people, but it wasn’t simpler for a whole lot of people. The past-oriented politics are what we get over and over and over again. We’ve been having this struggle for a couple hundred years in this country, almost 300 years of this. I’m talking about backlashes to both formal campaigns and to informal campaigns. I’m talking about backlashes that happen when somebody reads something in the newspaper they don’t like, sees something on social media they don’t like, backlashes where there’s actually an event — an election, a legislative event. Backlashes can come in lots of different ways and they get provoked by lots of different things. The message of the backlash is they want us to go away. They don’t want to have happening what is happening. Our job is to fight the backlash.”
