We are living in a time of great desperation and great resilience within the LGBTQ community. It is a time of escalating attacks, particularly on trans people and communities of color. Each day brings new challenges and devastation.
For black trans women, an epidemic of violence continues to claim too many lives and the entire trans community struggles to access health care, safe education, housing, shelter, and freedom from criminalization and surveillance.
At the same time, our community has thrived and created beautiful networks of support, and achieved unprecedented visibility. It is a time of contradiction and great possibility that demands a progressive platform that understands how policy can protect and empower us.
As in health care, LGBTQ people face systemic discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations.
It is not enough to support only formal equality norms, like passing the Equality Act, ending the military trans ban, protecting marriage equality, and making sure men who have sex with men can still donate blood. These measures, while important, are moderate, liberal interventions and stopping here reflects a failure to connect with the larger aspirations of the LGBTQ community.
We must strive to connect LGBTQ survival to progressive policies generally. This includes passing Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, ending mass incarceration, expanding access to lawful immigration status, decriminalizing sex work, canceling student debt, and other interventions that seek to end income disparity and promote racial and economic justice.
The reality is that the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ community live in poverty, experience homelessness, are being pushed out of schools, denied health care, and are disproportionately subjected to incarceration. If we fail to address the root cause of economic and racial injustice in the country, then we fail to address LGBTQ community needs.
A progressive platform must start with this premise. From there, progressive candidates can focus on the unique challenges and needs of the LGBTQ community.
Provide health care
A progressive platform must ensure that everyone has access to comprehensive and nondiscriminatory health care, including mental health care, addiction services, and gender-affirming care. The statistics within the transgender community are staggering. Transgender and non-binary people are routinely denied care, including mental health care in times of crisis.
A comprehensive 2015 survey of trans and non-binary people in the United States found that 25 percent of respondents had problems accessing insurance coverage for needed care within the past year and 33 percent had a negative experience with a health care provider within the past year. The same survey found that 40 percent of respondents had attempted suicide in their lifetimes, compared to 4.6 percent of the U.S. population as a whole.
To address these systemic issues, a progressive platform for the LGBTQ community must address the specific challenges and exclusions faced by LGBTQ people, particularly trans people of color. It must include safeguards to enforce nondiscrimination provisions and affirmatively mandate coverage. And, because many LGBTQ people are pushed out of their families of origin and discriminated against in employment, leading to higher rates of poverty and poorer health outcomes, it must include health care coverage under a single-payer plan.
Prohibit discrimination
As in health care, LGBTQ people face systemic discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations. The 2015 U.S. Trans Survey found that “the unemployment rate among respondents (15 percent), was three times higher than the national unemployment rate (5 percent).” Respondents also noted high rates of harassment and even violence at work, and nearly one-third said they were homeless at some point in their lives.
One important intervention is enumerated by the Equality Act, which would close critical gaps in federal nondiscrimination law by adding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to existing civil rights laws, and expanding civil rights protections for everyone. But this measure does not go far enough. A progressive platform must also work to increase employment opportunities and wages for all people. That means raising the minimum wage, ending discrimination in employment based on criminal conviction history, increasing access to family leave, creating housing programs, working to end homelessness, investing in public space, and ending gentrification.
Protect educational opportunities
In early 2017, the Trump Administration rescinded prior Department of Education guidance clarifying protections for transgender students in schools. Across the country, trans youth remain a target for state and local policymakers and face extraordinary obstacles to accessing education. More than half of students perceived as transgender in K–12 report experiencing harassment in school and almost one in five say they have experienced such high levels of harassment that they had to leave school altogether.
A progressive platform must at a minimum restore previous guidance establishing protections for trans students, but it can’t stop there. Given the high rates of poverty within the community, investment in education must look at equalizers across the board. This means ending charter schools and gifted-and-talented programs that pull resources out of communities of color. It also means canceling student debt, affirmatively mandating inclusive curriculum, and enforcing robust requirements for inclusion based on gender identity. The goal must be to move toward an end to sex-segregation in dress, classrooms, and restrooms.
Reform the legal system
Any progressive LGBTQ platform must include ending mass incarceration and disrupting the LGBTQ-specific drivers of incarceration. Such a platform would not include support for expanded hate crimes laws or bans on the so-called gay and trans panic defense—measures that expand the power of prosecutors and fuel mass incarceration. Instead, a progressive platform would work to end cash bail, decriminalize sex work and HIV status, and reduce violence within the system.
Because so many LGBTQ people, particularly trans and non-binary people of color, end up in prison, jail, and immigration detention, we must work to reduce harm in those systems as well as end their expansive reach. A progressive platform must identify ways to utilize the power of the federal government to reduce harm, including ending practices of detention based on genital characteristics or assigned sex at birth. We must also expand clemency and pardons, particularly for those who experience violence in detention, expand services for survivors of sexual violence in custody, and utilize the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA).
Allow non-binary identification
A simple but important aspect to any progressive platform is support for gender-affirming identification, which would create additional options on government forms and identification cards besides male or female. This also means ending medical requirements for updating gender markers in recordkeeping and identification, and adding a non-binary gender marker option. Any such platform must extend to Social Security records, immigration records and documents, passports and consular IDs, Medicare and Medicaid records, and any other federal agency record.
Make sure everyone can vote
With the Trump Administration’s transformation of the federal judiciary, survival for LGBTQ communities is even more precarious, and top down investment in local and state work is essential. That means ending racist gerrymandering and increasing access to the polls. If we don’t invest in state and local elections, anti-LGBTQ laws will continue to pass. From school boards to city councils to local district attorney races to state legislatures, we must work to expand access to the polls, and invest in candidates and races that will have a transformative impact on people’s lives.
I hope the 2020 candidates for President will do more than spout equality norms that might, if we’re lucky, bring us back to how things were in 2016. We deserve a robust and forward-looking vision for the future.