Utah Governor Spencer Cox and other local leaders are calling for the resignation of state school board member Natalie Cline after she falsely implied a girl playing on a local high school basketball team was transgender in a Facebook post. Though the post was quickly deleted and Cline apologized, the firestorm it set off within the local community and beyond is ongoing. (Teen Vogue has reached out to Cline but has not heard back as of press time.)
“They’re putting pictures of other people’s children on the internet and then allowing people to just bully a child. It’s an adult bullying a child. It doesn’t matter what their agenda is or what they think they thought they thought — there’s really no excuse that can merit putting another person’s child on social media and then allowing them to be attacked,” the girl’s father, Al van der Beek said, in an interview with Salt Lake City’s ABC affiliate.
Though Cox and other Republican leaders in Utah have rushed to condemn Cline for her social media post, their legislative track record presents a cognitive dissonance. Last year, Cox signed a bill to ban gender-affirming care for minors. And just weeks ago, Cox signed into law a bill which will ban transgender people from using bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity in public schools and government-owned buildings According to the Human Rights Campaign, this represents the first legislation this year to target transgender people’s rights to use bathrooms of their choice.
LGBTQ advocates and human rights organizations have argued that the implications of transphobia and the hypervigilance around people’s gender identity impacts everyone, cis people included. Last summer in Canada, a 9-year-old cisgender girl was harassed at a track meet by an adult who claimed the athlete was trans. South Africa’s two-time Olympic gold medalist Caster Semenya, who is a cis woman and is hyperandrogenous, meaning she has naturally high levels of testosterone, has faced harassment on a global scale about her gender identity. Beyond this harassment, she recently told CNN that having to take testosterone-reducing medication in order to compete internationally was “hell.”
Of course, trans people bear the brunt of this scrutiny. According to a 2021 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, “transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault.”
But in Utah, recent legislation is just one instance of a multitude of indications of the anti-trans law push across the United States. In Ohio, the Republican-controlled state legislature overrode Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of a bill that would bar gender-affirming care for minors (despite his veto, DeWine issued an executive order banning gender-affirming surgeries) and elsewhere in Idaho doctors brace themselves as a federal judge has temporarily blocked a state law that bans gender transition care for minors and threatens medical professionals with felony charges if they provide such care. In Tennessee, where transition care for minors is banned, trans youth and their families have petitioned the Supreme Court to intervene. The ACLU is tracking more than400 anti-LGBTQ bills currently in consideration across the country.
