Weekly Full Policy Report - 10/4

atenmorin0
Oct 3
4 min read

Trans Joy is Contagious

This October, as we mark LGBTQ History Month, we’re seeing renewed efforts to criminalize and erase transgender people. Trans lives have always been political lives, and they are also lives of ordinary grace, laughter, love, work, and hope. That is what we defend. That is what they cannot take.

For decades, laws and campaigns have sought to criminalize gender diversity: policing bathrooms, banning transition-related care, prosecuting parents and providers, and framing whole communities as threats. These efforts are not new. From medical pathologization and police surveillance to sodomy laws and conversion therapies, the machinery of criminalization has always relied on fear and spectacle to make gender variance seem illegal, untoward, or unacceptable.

Today’s calls to label LGBTQ+ identities as “extremist” or to expand surveillance and prosecution are the latest iteration of a long history that treats trans existence as a problem to be solved rather than lives to be protected.

But history also shows what authoritarian repression cannot silence: our resistance. Trans people have always fought back—quietly and loudly, in courtrooms and on porches, in basements and on parade routes. From Stonewall to local organizing across the country, trans and queer communities have built movements that refuse erasure.

As queer people, we have organized mutual aid networks, built clinics, and created art and culture that refuse to let the world reduce us to case law or headlines. The countless local fights for healthcare access, school protections, and basic dignity, trans communities have turned vulnerability into power. Every clinic opened, every supportive parent, every name change granted, every day lived authentically is an act of defiance.

The recent wave of attacks aims to stoke fear and normalize state control over our bodies and families. It seeks to make providers, teachers, and parents choose between helping a child and risking prosecution. It weaponizes institutions like public schools and universities, hospitals, law enforcement, and the military to enforce partisan ideas about gender. These tactics have serious consequences: denial of care, loss of livelihoods, threats to safety, and the chilling of everyday freedoms.

And yet: we persist. Trans joy has never been contingent on permission from lawmakers. Joy is found in the small public truths that elections and policy cannot erase: the way a name finally fits, the relief of being seen by a trusted clinician, the warmth of chosen family, the fierce pleasure of drag, of art, of public existence. Joy is a political act because it insists on our full humanity in the face of efforts to render us invisible, criminal, or shameful.

Resistance takes many forms. It looks like coalition-building with disability justice, immigrant rights, racial justice, and reproductive freedom movements; educators creating inclusive classrooms; neighbors showing up at school board meetings; doctors and nurses refusing to abandon patients; and grassroots mutual aid that fills gaps when systems close doors. It looks like storytelling: music, memes, TikTok videos. Our resistance refuses to let fear set the narrative. Each tactic chips away at the power of those who would make us lesser.

Our advocacy must be intersectional: protecting trans students, equipping and supporting affirming educators and providers, funding public education, supporting trans people of color who bear disproportionate violence, ensuring access to healthcare and economic security, and keeping our elders and houseless neighbors safe.

We must also be clear-eyed about safety and survival. Not every fight is ours to wage alone, and tactical retreats to protect vulnerable people are not surrender; they are another prong of strategy. We’re not going to policy our way out of this dehumanization.

History also teaches us that criminalization often backfires. It consumes resources, provokes resistance, and creates heroes who humanize the targeted community. When laws attempt to erase us, they expose the lie they are built upon: that any group’s dignity depends on the consent of the powerful. Our dignity is inherent. Our families, communities, and cultures are real. And our joy is contagious.

SCHOOL BOARD ACTION

Take meaningful action in your school community to monitor Arizona’s school boards by applying to be a Hall Monitor!

We’re currently taking applications for Hall Monitors to help monitor local public school governing boards. We can train you or your organization on how meaningful this work is to stemming the attacks on some of our most vulnerable youth: trans and nonbinary students.

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT - Local Elections

Check your mailbox Maricopa County voters! Ballots for the all-mail election go out on Oct. 8, and should be mailed back by Oct. 28.

This election deals with bonds to fund local hospitals, schools, etc. Government bonds are loans paid back with tax money. Investors lend the money up front, and taxpayers pay them back over time, with interest. The idea is that taxpayers get some public benefit in return, like a hospital, school or road.

REMEMBER, if you're a Maricopa County voter, look out for your ballot on or after Oct. 8 and return it by Oct. 28. Vote from your couch or kitchen table. Your vote matters!

CIVIC LITERACY - DISCRIMINATION & HARASSMENT COMPLAINT FORM

Humanity doesn’t always send our best. We know that queer students experience discriminatory comments, harassing behavior and a spectrum of slurs at school from their peers, faculty, and administrators. Discrimination and harassing behavior are not part of growing up and have no place in our classrooms or on our playing fields.

By documenting your ongoing lived experience, government officials can no longer claim their ignorance of the problem. Bullying, harassment, and discrimination disrupt a student’s education and threaten their academic attainment and physical and mental health. Don’t be silent.

If you have been discriminated against or have experienced harassment at school, consider filing a complaint with the Civil Rights division with the Arizona Attorney General here: (https://www.azag.gov/complaints/civil-rights)