By Kelsey Cowger

We’re just a couple weeks into the Trump presidency, and right now, trans people are under threat. That’s not hyperbole; that’s not a metaphorical statement where “threat” means “subject to mild inconvenience.” The threats to trans people are both real and immediate. We have just come out of a brutal campaign season where the Republican Party spent 222 million dollars, almost a quarter of their total ad spending, specifically on anti-trans ads. These ads were a cynical attempt to rouse a bunch of disaffected maybe-voters with narrow cost-of-living concerns and get them to translate their general dissatisfaction into a vote for Donald Trump. And it worked. Trump has promised to sign an executive order banning schools and federal agencies from “promoting gender transition;” he wants to go after doctors and hospitals who provide gender-affirming care; he wants to roll back Title IX protections that protect trans kids who want to play sports with their friends. And the American people, 60% of whom claim to want stronger anti-discrimination policies against trans people, didn’t care enough about protecting the rights of their neighbors to keep Trump out of office.  What that means is that we’re going into a new year with an emboldened and powerful Republican Party who believes that the best way to shore up support for their broadly unpopular policy agenda is to punch a few trans kids. 

But not in Virginia. While every other Southern state fell to Trump, Virginia voted for Harris 52% to Trump’s 46%, putting us on par with New Jersey and better than New Hampshire or Minnesota.  About [ ]% of Virginians support LGBTQ+ rights, and we’re currently the only Southern state with laws explicitly prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. This is not to say that trans people don’t get used as punching bags in Virginia politics: a slew of opportunistic Republicans have tried to get into office by ginning up fears about trans kids trying to play soccer and use the bathroom. Last year, the General Assembly had to go into recess twice when Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears misgendered Senator Danica Roem, our first openly trans legislator, on the Senate floor; the virulently anti-LGBTQ+ Earle-Sears is now a leading candidate for Governor in the Republican primary.  We have public sentiment on our side, but we need to do more than just be blandly affirming: now, more than ever, we need our Commonwealth to be a safe harbor for trans people just trying to live their lives and raise their families.

With that in mind, let’s look at some of the bills pending in the upcoming General Assembly session. With the caveat that not all bills have been filed, it’s already looking like LGBTQ+ rights, and trans rights specifically, are going to be live issues in the 2025 session. 

Bills We Need To Pass:

• Rep. Laura Jane Cohen has authored HB502, which would require a non-binary sex designation on all forms and applications. Not only would this allow non-binary Virginians to access basic government functions in accordance with their authentic selves, it would smooth the way for gender non-conforming people to navigate every aspect of bureaucracy, from rental applications to drivers’ licences. This bill would not affect any person with a binary gender identity in the slightest while making life significantly easier for people whose genders fall outside the binary. It’s consistent with previous laws passed by the General Assembly, just more broadly applicable, and should pass.  

• Trans people are four times more likely than cis people to be victims of sex-based violence or harassment. That’s why people who care about building safer spaces for trans people should also care about HB 369, carried by Delegate Marty Martinez: this bill would convene a task force to combat sexual violence on college campuses and would provide some specific regulations for how campuses are required to respond to incidents. It has some real teeth in the form of civil penalties for campuses that don’t comply with regulations or don’t take incidents of sexual violence seriously. 

• Senator Ghazala Hashmi’s SB 278 has been carried over from 2024 and should be heard again in the 2025 session. The bill enacts sweeping protections for both abortion access and gender affirming health care, and protects out-of-state patients who seek care in Virginia from extradition back to their home states.

Bills We Need To Kill: 

• Senator Tammy Mulchi, a particularly unhinged anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, anti-book, anti-history wingnut, has reintroduced a bill that was soundly killed in last year’s session. SB749 would require doctors to sign a letter affirming the biological sex of any kid who wants to play sports and would ban trans girls from playing sports with girls assigned female at birth (these bills, by the way, never target trans boys, presumably because the authors of the bills don’t think trans boys would win at sports? These are never about “protecting” cis kids from trans kids, they’re just about the weird and baseless assumption that trans girls are, I guess, going to be some kind of superathletes that trounce all the cis girls. You get the feeling that these people don’t normally watch a lot of women’s sports and have never seen the incredible level of athleticism by the women who play them.) Anyway, this zombie bill needs to get staked.