Are States’ Rights Only for Republican-Controlled States?
As the current administration reversed President Obama’s federal guidelines directing schools to allow transgender to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that match their real gender, this current administration said it wasn’t about harming vulnerable trans students but about states’ rights.
Look, the original federal guidelines were not a perfect solution. Thirteen states sued, and a federal judge froze the guidelines pending further court decisions. States who weren’t protecting trans students continued to do so. Even where they were followed, the guidelines didn’t address the endless other moments in the lives of trans students when we are forced into gender segregation – lining up for class after recess, buying everything from clothes and toys to shampoo and even pens, and in some public school districts now even class itself. The guidelines didn’t give guidance on how to support nonbinary, genderfluid, and other trans students who don’t feel comfortable in sex- or gender-segregated spaces at all. The guidelines were still far from everything trans students need to feel safe and supported in school, but they were still a landmark step toward that goal.
The current administration, which has at times claimed to be a friend to the LGBTQ+ community (don’t believe this; I’m working on a list of all the many reasons we shouldn’t and will link to it here later), just reversed that landmark step by claiming it violated “states’ rights.” This same party, and indeed administration, has used “states’ rights” to justify everything from opposing the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) to refusing to enact any federal gun control measures, from limiting abortion rights to eliminating federal marriage rights to same-sex couples.
By the most literal definition of states’ rights, one devoid of its association of a desire to return to a pre-Civil War era and states’ “rights” to continue slavery and, later, segregation, I actually like states’ rights. As a native of California, I grew up over and over glad that my home state had the right to make progressive laws before the country as a whole was ready to do so. Our last Republican governor, Schwarzenegger, passed the nation’s most aggressive climate change bill over a decade ago. On the 2016 ballot, we passed things like bilingual education, decriminalising marijuana, and banning single-use plastic bags which pollute our water ways, well before the country as a whole is ready for such laws. (And our localities are often even further ahead, like when San Francisco issued the first same-sex marriage licenses in the country in 2004, shortly before Massachusetts followed and became the first state to allow same-sex marriage.)
Meanwhile, the new head of the EPA refused to commit to continuing to grant California the right to set its own, more aggressive, emissions standards, and the president has threatened to cut off funding to California for being a sanctuary state (or becoming one, that is). If this administration truly believes in “states’ rights” though, that has to include states like California. If they’re going to roll back my basic human rights on account of “states’ rights,” they better start respecting my home state’s right to welcome immigrants and refugees, to refuse compliance with ICE, to pursue aggressive measures to stop climate change, to provide health care to all our residents, to protest a white nationalist being given a platform to spew hate.
I think we all know that won’t happen though, not without endless resistance, because “states’ rights” has never actually meant allowing states the freedom to self-govern. When this administration and its party say “states’ rights,” they only mean that for the 25 states controlled by their own party – for their right to violate their citizens and inhabitants rights.
