LGBTQ+ community expresses concerns

Members of the LGBTQ+ community in central Illinois have expressed fear, bewilderment and frustration after the Nov. 5 election of Donald Trump to a second nonconsecutive term as president.

About 80 people attended a “post-election support group” Nov. 7 at Phoenix Center’s Out on Second site at 120 E. Scarritt St., and many said they worry the hate and ignorance fueled by Trump’s successful campaign will lead to more prejudice among the general public and mental stress for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or nonbinary, center Executive Director Jonna Cooley said.

“There was a range of emotions, but mostly people are scared, they’re angry and they’re sad,” Cooley told Illinois Times.

The attendance was “pretty overwhelming,” she said, with the strongest reactions coming from transgender people who watched while trans rights, medical care and LGBTQ+ participation in sports were portrayed erroneously and ridiculed by the Trump campaign and the Republican Party in general.

Trans people were upset that their parents, while supportive of their children’s situations, still voted for Trump, Cooley said. Parents told their children Trump probably wouldn’t carry through on his anti-trans promises and voted for him in hopes that economic conditions would improve, Cooley said.

The anger and sadness come from people “who are in families that supposedly love them” and are upset with family members “voting for a person that doesn’t respect them, or even, in some cases, acknowledge their existence,” she said.

Gay people were worried that same-sex marriage and their ability to adopt children may be denied or made more difficult if Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, leads to anti-LGBTQ+ lawsuits and unfavorable court and legislative action at the federal and state level, Cooley said.

More support group meetings and educational outreach about LGBTQ+ issues are planned, she said.

A few people at the Nov. 7 event said they already have noticed a change at their workplaces in which derisive comments toward LGBTQ+ individuals appear to be more tolerated and people are more likely to voice those sentiments, she said.

“It seemed like the people who were anti-LGBTQ felt more empowered to be rude and disrespectful (after the election),” Cooley said.

At a time when less than 1% of the U.S. population identifies as transgender, Trump’s campaign and pro-Trump groups spent about $95 million on advertising between Oct. 7 and Oct. 20, and more than 41% of the ads funded by that money were “anti-trans,” according to the PBS NewsHour.

Anti-trans ads often aired during major sporting events, and apparently were intended to influence the votes of men, PBS reported.

The ads and Trump’s own statements on the stump slammed participation by trans athletes in sports, public funds used to fund incarcerated persons’ gender-affirming surgeries, and included allegations that adolescents were going to school and receiving gender-affirming surgeries before returning home.

Cooley, who is a lesbian, said the ads’ claims were either false, misleading or derogatory toward LGBTQ+ individuals.

PBS reported that only a handful of incarcerated trans people have received publicly funded gender-affirming surgeries.

Regarding trans athletes in sports, Cooley said the ads failed to mention that rules put in place by organizations such as the NCAA and Illinois High School Association prevent trans athletes from competing in situations in which they would have an unfair advantage.

Andy Lee, 42, a trans man and state worker who lives in the Springfield area and voted for Harris, said Trump’s election was “disappointing but not completely unexpected.

“I am concerned,” said Lee, who also works on contract for Phoenix Center. “I am worried that my human rights and the human rights of some of the people I’m friends with, and family members, will be impacted. I think a lot of Trump’s policies, especially in health care and education, are discriminatory towards LGBT people, especially trans people.”

Trump probably will enact policies or push for legislation to make gender-affirming care – such as medicine, surgery and mental-health counseling – harder to obtain, especially for adolescents, Lee said.

Through the federally supported Medicaid and Medicare programs, Trump “has the power to disrupt that completely,” Lee said.

Even the president-elect’s threats to enact public policy will have a chilling effect on health care providers, he said.

“I think a lot of times the language that he uses is so broad that those providers become fearful of repercussions,” Lee said.

Lee, whose partner, Jasper Bagwunagijik, 25, also is a transgender man, said he is glad to live in a state that “protects my rights.” Lee said he appreciated Gov. JB Pritzker’s recent comments that he would work to defend trans rights from intrusion by the federal government.

But Trump could make it more difficult for public school teachers to educate students about “different kinds of families” and roll back workplace initiatives in “diversity, equity and inclusion,” Lee said.

Even the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage could be rolled back by future Supreme Court justices under Trump, Lee said. “We never thought that Roe v. Wade would go in this direction, so I don’t know that anything is safe,” he said.

Lee said it’s ridiculous that Trump and his allies spent so much time on anti-trans rhetoric instead of finding solutions for the unhoused or the opioid crisis or “really any problem that Americans are facing right now, like the economy.”

This article appears in Low attendance holds back school performance.