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LGBTQ+ Politics
CO Representative Diana DeGette: LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back!
Trans voters who survive these attacks will always remember who was silent and complicit and who spoke up when it mattered
Dear Representative Diana DeGette,
A little over two years ago, my wife and I moved to Colorado from North Carolina to feel safer as two transgender people. Though I was overcoming a lot of life challenges, I was full of gratitude for the way that Colorado embraced us as we arrived from a place where legal discrimination could have put our careers and even our lives in danger. Since I left North Carolina, a lot has changed there, and some things have stayed the same. A “Don’t Say Gay” law passed. Since I worked as a secretary in the public school system there, that would have spelled the end of my career. The Gay and Trans Panic Defense remains in place there, so someone could receive a lesser sentence there for assaulting or killing me, if who I am scared them enough.
During some of the time we lived in North Carolina, there was a Bathroom Bill (HB2) in place that could have required us to show our birth certificates to determine which public restroom we belonged in. As someone who looks like a man, my unchangeable Ohio birth certificate that doesn’t match my appearance would now put me in a bathroom where women would feel extremely uncomfortable, if I were still living under such a law. If an uncomfortable women assaulted or killed me in such a place and time because she saw me correctly as a man in her restroom, she could use the Trans Panic Defense as justification for harming or killing me in response to me obeying such a law.
As my wife looks like a woman, using the men’s restroom in accordance with her birth certificate would make her extremely vulnerable to assault or murder. Again, any man who assaulted or killed her for not appearing to belong in the men’s restroom could claim the Trans Panic Defense in such a place, even if she was only following the law by using the restroom that matched her birth certificate.
I was very grateful when I arrived in Colorado. I’m still grateful. I’m also scared. I don’t know how well protected we will be as trans…
