What's Good with Trans Activism

[00:00:00] What's Good, Ohio? I'm your host, James Hayes, and this is the What's Good, Ohio podcast,

[00:00:20] where we talk to the activists, organizers, visionaries, and good troublemakers coming

[00:00:25] together to make our state better for everyone. Of course. It's so good to have other people, but more importantly, like I was saying, when we first sat down,

[00:01:40] it's really nice to be the guest for once and not have to do all of my story

[00:01:44] boarding and planning in advance. I could just kick back.

[00:02:42] is similar to what that was. So if you need more, go back and we'll listen to that.

[00:02:46] And I think that one's a little bit longer

[00:02:48] than this is gonna be too.

[00:02:49] So a more thorough look at the details.

[00:02:52] All right, so yeah, like James said,

[00:02:54] we are at a Kaleidoscope Youth Center today

[00:02:56] because we were going to talk about all the recent attacks

[00:02:59] on trans people in Ohio from our gerrymandered legislature

[00:03:02] and Governor Mike DeWine.

[00:03:04] But we can't just focus on the bad, like he said,

[00:03:07] because in the face of 2020, I took on a role as the deputy comms director for the Senate Democratic Caucus. And that's kind of like, you know, I've always had an interest in politics. I've always had an interest in communications. That's my background. And through that work, I was able to meet some awesome people like Cam, of course, so. Amazing, and Cam, how about you? Well, Mallory, it's been wonderful working with you at the State House as well. Unlike Mallory, I didn't go looking for politics. Politics went looking for me. So I started getting involved at the State House

[00:05:40] around the end of 2022, beginning of 2023,

[00:05:43] when anti-trans legislation first started getting introduced

[00:05:46] and really gaining traction aren't actually able to be there because of school, because of the travel time, because of a variety of different things. And so holding space for them and for their allies to show up and advocate for them was the way that I really got started. And then as of last year, late last year, I started an internship at Equality Ohio. And well, over the last couple of years, I've gone from being an engineering student

[00:07:00] to a political and data science student.

[00:07:03] And I found that a lot of the things

[00:07:04] I enjoyed about engineering,

[00:07:06] I also enjoy about political science, It's like I kind of roll my eyes at having to go through security and deal with state highway patrol and then I'm also like I would not put it past any of these people to show up with a gun, right? So I digress. That's a topic for another episode, but very different episode. Is it that different? No, and you know, very true. It's all related. I remember when there was no security and you could just lead a protest right through

[00:08:22] and now you're going to have 7 ID if you want to come in.

[00:08:26] Right.

[00:08:27] Well, it, yes. And yeah, but, and being able to help people break through that wall of fear is so important that these folks, they don't know any better than you,

[00:09:42] that they have so much power over you,

[00:09:43] and it's really hard to voice, you know, opposition

[00:09:47] and that dynamic, but helping people break through or they wanted to attack transgender youth. They had to come up with that idea all on their own. Now, we've got organizations such as the Center for Christian Virtue, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, all of which are financially very closely tied together, essentially writing model legislation such as HB 68, such as HB 8 and other such legislative attacks

[00:11:01] across the country on transgender youth

[00:11:03] that a legislator knows they can introduce

[00:11:06] and get a pat on the back from some well-muddied interests got to brag that they had introduced the bill, because it was all about getting that attention, being known as being hard on these kids who really don't want to do anything other than just be themselves. And that incentive structure, that completely out of whack way that politics is being run at the state level right now in a lot of these legislatures, is really to blame, I feel like,

[00:12:21] for this huge, huge increase in anti-LGBT sentiment.

[00:12:25] Absolutely. really solidified their need to double down on trans attacks because that's exactly what we saw. They came back and at the end of the year, again after a year where they passed historically low numbers of legislation, they came back and the first thing they cared to do was attack trans rights. Really just as a double down and be like, ha ha, look we have this power over you, right? So that's

[00:13:41] just another take that I have too that kind of goes hand in hand. Yeah, HB 68

[00:13:45] started moving in the legislature less than a week after issue one passed. And from, you know, drag bands, bathroom bills, sports. Like there's so many different types of legislation that is used to oppress and marginalize trans folks. But could you talk about the ones that have been specifically brought in Ohio? Yeah, I mean, I can't be sure that I've that I'll be able to list all of them off the top of my head. I wish this was an open book test.

[00:15:01] Off the top of my head, there's HB of children, which of course we know is nonsense because transgender and gender nonconforming youth are at higher risk under policies such as this of bullying, harassment, intimidation, sexual assault.

[00:16:21] Then there's HB 245, which is the if a young person is in a school play and playing a male role, if they're female or vice versa, that could be a violation of this policy. And so if you attack them, you're attacking everyone. And beyond that, I would like to come to one of the more concerning pieces of legislation

[00:19:01] because of both the status that it has in the legislature

[00:19:05] and the very, very real ramifications of it, the child would be abused, the parents should still be told. Even in cases where the child is believed to be in danger if that information is passed on, the teacher is still obligated to pass that information on to the parents. And again, this is just another one of those encroachments into sort of really dangerous sort of policies for all kids.

[00:20:24] Because all kids do stuff like that, When HV-8 was moving through the Ohio House, and this is a little bit convoluted because legislature can tend to be convoluted, but when HV-8 was first introduced, it was talking about sexually explicit material. But in committee, they amended it to be about sexuality concepts, and they refused to give a clear definition of what sexuality concepts were.

[00:21:40] That's an ass.

[00:21:41] I was like, what does that mean?

[00:21:42]