After hiding from the news for a couple of weeks, Digging INTO Politics is grudgingly willing to accept that 2025 has arrived. Just this week has seen California on fire, the east coast frozen by a polar vortex, and Donald Trump announce his plans to annex Greenland and Canada. But don’t worry, there’s plenty of terrible news in the world of queer politics as well. We’ll see if we can find a positive note to end on though.
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The bill “automatically makes confidential any court record regarding a person’s legal change of name & gender marker.”
Before the year even began, it was already set up with a record number of anti-trans bills pre-filed for the 2025 legislative session with 120 new bills, compared to just 80 this time last year. Less than two weeks into the year, we’ve heard about Republican’s true number one priority, tech companies have begun bowing to Donald Trump, and trans people have to worry about corrected gender markers being revoked. Here’s everything you need to know about LGBTQ+ political issues from the last couple of weeks.
Republicans revealed their true top priority
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Republicans ran campaigns promising to improve the economy while villainizing trans people and immigrants and claiming that Democrats only worried about trans issues (while Dems were largely silent on it all). So when it came to their actions after taking office, some voters might have thought that their focus would be on the economy. We now know better as the Republicans revealed their first rules package and it outlined their plans.
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Trump’s election means that any hopes of federal protection to counter state laws have disappeared.
Of the 12 legislative priorities listed, the very first bill highlighted for action was designed to attack trans people. The proposed bill would redefine sex for the purposes of Title IX compliance in regards to school sports to only consider “biological sex.” While the rules package doesn’t bother to define “biological sex” past experience suggests that the Republican bill will use language to exclude all trans, non-binary, and intersex people from sports and potentially other areas of school life.
Bathroom ban sagas continue
We left 2024 with two big stories around political bathroom bans targeting specific trans representatives. Sarah McBride faced a bathroom ban orchestrated by Nancy Mace and Mike Johnson on Capitol Hill, while Zooey Zephyr was attacked with a ban in the Montana legislature. Unfortunately it seems that we brought those bans with us into the new year.
Nancy Mace’s anti-trans bathroom ban plans didn’t appear in the rules package that the Republicans put out, despite her having been promised that it would be there. While that posed a headscratcher for a minute, it soon turned out that Mike Johnson was just slipping it in elsewhere. The bathroom ban for the Capitol was instead inserted into the Congressional Record. While the rules packet has to be voted on, the Congressional Record becomes policy without any vote and is simply enacted by Mike Johnson himself in his role as Speaker of the House.
Meanwhile, while Montana’s plans for a Capitol bathroom ban were squashed, a new, much worse bathroom bill is now on the table. HB121 was heard on Friday and threatens trans people all across the state as it bans trans people from using the correct restroom in all “public buildings” in Montana.
McBride reveals the agenda Republicans fear so much
Back in DC, Sarah McBride has introduced her first bill in congress. While Republicans would like people to believe that McBride is going to be focused on trans issues and far-left ideals, her first bill is completely in line with what she campaigned on. The bill is a bipartisan move to take aim at credit repair scams that take advantage of people across the United States.
McBride is also in the news this week for her comments about Republicans’ priorities. Referring to the rules package and attacks on trans people, McBride highlighted the “look over there” nature of the move: “It defies understanding, except for the fact that it’s a pretty obvious part of a politics of misdirection and distraction.”
Meta has green lit LGBTQ+ hate
Tim Cook, the out CEO of Apple, joined a list of tech people to donate a vast sum of money to Trump’s inauguration fund. However, Cook’s monetary contribution to the fund seems almost meaningless when compared to Meta CEO Mark Zukerberg’s own donation and actions. Since Zuckerberg’s donation back in December, Meta has been working hard to make its platforms less safe and supportive for LGBTQ+ people.
This week, Meta updated their policies to allow “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.” As well as allowing hate speech, Instagram was found to be flagging a host of LGBTQ+ related tags as “sensitive content,” which is automatically removed from teen search results. Presumably as part of kissing up to Trump, Meta have also announced that they will be eliminating fact checkers, instead usings a community-driven notes model (similar to the one that Elon Musk’s X/Twitter uses). And, while it shouldn’t come as a surprise with all of that, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday that Meta will be terminating its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
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This detail is insane
Florida has started revoking gender marker changes (as we warned)
Florida, Texas, and Alabama all made various changes to how they processed requests for gender marker corrections last year. Florida refused to update them, Alabama required surgeries, and Texas stopped processing them even with a court order while seemingly creating a list of names of those requesting a correction. Alongside fears that using a corrected ID might be retroactively classed as fraud was the concern that these states might start to revoke past corrections. That concern has now become a reality for one Florida woman after she became a target of the LibsofTikTok account. According to Alejandra Caraballo, Florida both cancelled the license, and then leaked the news to the LibsofTikTok account.
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Despite how awful this already is for trans Texans, it’s getting worse.
A lesbian grandma for the trans community
In both the US and the UK, it seems to be a painfully regular occurrence that a respected member of the LGBTQ+ community comes out and says something stupid and hurtful about the trans community without seeming to know what they’re talking about. But this is a bit of warmer news: Sandi Toksvig remembers how lesbians were treated and talked about at one point and sees the parallels in the rhetoric around trans people. And she’s not having any of it: “I won’t stand by and let that happen,” she said. “I will stand up each time and say no. Clearly, if you’re anti-trans, it’s because you don’t have any trans friends. If you did, you wouldn’t be able to look yourself in the [mirror] as you say these terrible things.” As well as promising to stand up for trans people, Toksvig is also offering hugs and your very own lesbian grandmother: “Please know I understand and I’m here,” she said. “I don’t know for what, for a cuddle? I’m here to be the grandma lesbian who goes, ‘Let’s just keep going’.”
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“Clearly, if you’re anti-trans, it’s because you don’t have any trans friends. If you did, you wouldn’t be able to look yourself in the [mirror].”
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