This week was Transgender Day of Visibility, but it wasn’t all twitter trends and selfies. This week also saw some major setbacks to the global cause of Trans rights.

Idaho

The Governor of Idaho, Brad Little, signed into law the two anti-trans bills I covered previously in a special edition. I went into a lot more detail there, but I’ll give a basic overview. One bill is the nation’s first successful ban on transgender women competing in women’s sports that requires medical proof (blood tests or genital exams) of sex if challenged. The other is a ban on changes to the gender listed on birth certificates.

Both of these laws are legally dubious. The birth certificate law in particular is going directly against a 2018 federal court case that decided that such laws are in violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution, and while there hasn’t been any court ruling on sports, Title IX’s definition of ‘sex’ is recognized to be more than just birth biology. Officials in the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare could be fined and face legal consequences from the federal court. Contempt of court is not to be taken lightly.

The Justice department has stepped into the debate over trans women participating in sports, which I covered in more detail in last’s weeks edition.

Many other states have been flirting with these types of laws, in fact more than 40 anti-trans bills have been introduced this year. Idaho is the only state to actually pass such laws, and it doesn’t look like any other states are very close to passing their own.

Hungary

Here’s a joke: what does a State of the United States have in common with a small Eastern European far right regime? They both made inhumane attacks on their transgender citizens this week.

Hungary has very recently been taken over by a right wing dictator. On March 30th, the Hungarian Parliament cancelled elections and handed power over to the prime minister Viktor Orban indefinitely. Essentially Orban has killed democracy in his nation under the cover of a coronavirus ‘response’.

One of the first acts of the government after Orban’s power grab was to introduce a bill that would change the ‘Gender’ marker on the civil registry to ‘Sex at Birth’.

The civil registry is the basis of all official identifying documents. This law would effectively stop all legal recognition for transgender citizens in Hungary. Even name changes to names of the other gender could be prohibited. It would violate EU law and has already been strongly condemned by EU officials and global advocacy groups.

When governments force trans people to carry documents that don’t match their identity and appearance, every situation when documents are requested or appearance is scrutinized becomes fraught with potential for violence and humiliation. Human Rights Watch

New York City

Saturday morning of last week saw the fifth murder of a trans woman in America this year. Her nickname was Lexi, and her full name has not yet been released.

Lexi was stabbed in death in Harlem. A friend of Lexi’s said that the murder was over a wig Lexi had taken off of another woman’s head the previous evening. According to the same friend, Lexi was tolerant, respectful, and gifted.

No arrest has yet been made, but city officials including the mayor have spoken out and the cochair of New Pride Agenda said the following:

We are devastated by the murder of a young transgender woman this past weekend. Too often the lives of members of our trans community are at risk and too many are senselessly killed. This is particularly true for trans women of color who are seven times more likely to be murdered than a member of the general population. Our hearts go out to the friends and family of the woman who lost her life. We are grateful to New York City personnel for their efforts in responding to this tragic incident and we are thankful for their efforts to navigate the situation with sensitivity and respect. -Cecilia Gentili

This murder wasn’t the only death to strike New York’s trans community, however. Lorena Borjas, who was an advocate for trans rights and for immigrants and sex workers, died from complications due to coronavirus.

She was known as the mother of Queens’ trans Latinx community. She was born in mexico and came to America seeking a better life and found just another hostile and intolerant society, and so she spent the next 30 years of her life fighting to change that. The nation mourns her loss.

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