October 25, 2022
Trans People’s Rights Are on the Ballot, but Many Won’t Be Able to Vote
By Lisa Herforth-Hebbert
Over 850,000 trans Americans are eligible to vote in the midterms. But strict voter ID laws, less mail-in voting, and other barriers will make it more difficult.
With the 2022 midterm elections only a few weeks away, the stakes have never been higher for trans people. In the first three months of 2022 alone, state lawmakers across the country proposed more than 200 bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community. These attacks have escalated considerably over the last several years.
In Iowa, Senator Jake Chapman has made trans women the subject of a new wave of attack ads, criticizing their participation in high school athletics. And a new series of political advertisements sponsored by the dark money group Citizens for Sanity has centered on youth athletics and gender-affirming health care. In Michigan, House Bill 6454 would make providing gender-affirming health care to a minor punishable by life imprisonment. For now, it appears that Gretchen Whitmer’s veto power is the only thing stopping its passage. But if Republican nominee Tudor Dixon were to unseat Whitmer, HB 6454 could become state law, threatening trans teens with forced medical detransition.
Says Sarah Combellick-Bidney, a professor at Augsburg University who identifies as both trans and nonbinary, “There’s just this chorus of agreement that [trans] people…feel ignored, pushed out, attacked, sometimes directly, and silenced and stigmatized.”
