- In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that love is love is love and marriage equality became recognized in all 50 states.

Today's guest warns, however, of legislative efforts across the country to roll back LGBTQ Rights.

He's Brad Sears this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright instrumental music) (bright instrumental music continues) (bright instrumental music softens) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- This week we're joined by Brad Sears, the founding executive director and Rand Schrader Distinguished Scholar of Law and Policy at the Williams Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.

He joins us today from California.

Brad, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you for having me.

It's great to be here.

- You know, so the Williams Center, to be honest with you, before we booked you, I was not familiar with the work of the center, but it is a remarkable resource.

Tell us a little bit about it.

- Yeah, the Williams Institute is part of UCLA.

We're part of the Law School at UCLA, and our mission is really to do rigorous research to inform policy discussions about LGBT rights and LGBT people, so all of the work that we do is focused at looking at legal analysis and also quantitative and qualitative data to inform public policy.

We've been doing this for about 20 years, and as I think we're gonna get into, you know, our mission is important today as it was when we were first founded in 2001.

- You mentioned sort of the broad agenda.

Are there specific issues within that agenda that are taking the lion's share of your attention now?

- Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.

When we started, you know, it was still criminalized for people of the same sex to have sex in a number of states in this country.

So initially we were focused on research that informed discussion about sodomy laws, about marriage equality, about parenting rights and discrimination.

Some of those issues in 2023 we're still working on.

There still, today, is no national, no federal law that explicitly prohibits discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

There was a recent Supreme Court case, as you know, kind of carving out a pretty big exception to our federal civil rights statutes based on kind of a combination of free expression and freedom of religion.

So we're still very much involved in just making sure there's basic discrimination protection so all people, including LGBTQ people can participate in public life.

There are still issues around parenting rights in many states for LGBT parents and same-sex couples.

And, you know, thanks to the Supreme Court decision a year ago on abortion, there's an open invitation, at least by Justice Thomas.

to re-litigate marriage equality so we are actually engaged in a lot of work that we thought we kind of put aside in about 2015, 2016, looking at, again, the arguments that can be proven and disproven with research about marriage equality.

What's really focusing our time today, though, is this kind of tidal wave of legislation that's been introduced the last several years but particularly this past year focused on transgender youth and adults.

And these include pieces of legislation to ban or limit access to gender-affirming care, limitations on participation in sports by transgender people.

And if we see more recently, even things that go at what can be taught in school curriculum, what kind of performances could be had in public and maybe even private settings.

And so a lot of our work is focused in responding to what was over 400 pieces of legislation, state legislation this past year.

- So Brad, can you give us a little more depth about these 400 pieces of legislation, where they have been proposed or where they're before general assemblies, and what's behind, what's the motivation behind it?

I asked, actually, three or four questions there, but can you give us an overview?

- Yeah, and they're all great questions.

And I'm gonna start kind of with the where question because you know, and again, this is, we've been around for two decades and some of this is taking me back to our earliest work.

You know, there was a geography in 2001 to the states that still had sodomy laws, and it looked like the South and the Midwest, and the rest of the states had kind of either legislatively or their state court systems had repealed those laws.

There's a geography to what's happening right now.

And I want to, I guess the easiest way to do that is to contrast two different types of laws that have passed in recent years.

One are laws that prohibit conversion therapy.

And so conversion therapy is when healthcare providers said they had a practice of changing people who are LGBT into straight people or trans people into non-trans people.

You know, there's a long history of these practices doing a lot of damage to a lot of people, and states have prohibited this as not actual medicine.

There's 27 states and D.C. that have taken that affirmative steps to prohibit that laws.

There's about 22 states now that prohibit gender-affirming care, so this is kind of the opposite.

When trans people need to seek gender-affirming care, which can mean anything from kind of hormone treatment to surgeries at kind of at the other end of the spectrum, but it's a broad spectrum of services and healthcare providers.

22 states now prohibit that either for youth or have limitations both for youth and adults.

Those states, the 27 that prohibit conversion therapy and the 22 that prohibit gender-affirming care are exact mirrors of each other.

And so the first set of states are on the West Coast, kind of the Great Lake states and New England.

The states that are prohibiting gender-affirming care, these anti-LGBT statutes are in the South and through the Midwest.

And there's, you know, maybe one state that overlaps and has both pieces of legislation.

So you really see kind of this difference in geography based on where these laws are being introduced.

- You know, Brad, we've had on a number of other guests who have talked about sort of that political geography of the United States.

As you described those maps, does that break down the way states typically vote for presidential candidates?

Am I thinking of a red-blue split here?

- Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And you can think about that in terms of like, votes in the national elections for president.

If you also map what states have either kind of both houses of their legislature and a governor of the same party or at least two houses of the legislature, either Republican or Democrat, that's almost a perfect map of what I just described as well.

- So let's drill down on gender-affirming care.

What is the objection to that?

- So, I think what conservatives, and this is usually coming from a kind of a conservative religious kind of fundamentalist perspective, their argument is that, I think basically that transgender people don't exist.

And it's been interesting in a couple of very recent decisions, that's where judges have pushed back and struck down these laws and say, "Hey, you're saying trans people don't exist.

We just had a bunch of medical testimony.

They do.

And so your, just, premise for your opposition is inaccurate."

I think beyond that, it's raising the specter of very young people getting surgical interventions that can't be reversed later in life.

That's actually inaccurate.

That's not the type of gender-affirming care that youth get.

Mainly what trans youth get in terms of care is puberty blockers, which are also taken by non-trans youth.

Some children develop puberty, go into puberty way too early and hormones are used to block that so that they go into it, you know, in a regular time with the rest of their peers.

That's done so trans kids don't start puberty as one gender that's actually not their gender, not the gender that they identify with.

I think what's similar about this issue and an issue like marriage is a lot of people, this is new stuff for most people, right?

And so that creates space for misinformation and kind of false research and kind of false assertions.

And I think part of the success of these statutes right now really lies in the fact that this is unfamiliar to a lot of people.

It's easy for them to be misled, and just like there were a lot of arguments about marriage equality and all the harmful things it would do and that was unfamiliar in the early 2000s, most Americans are still unfamiliar with trans people and things like gender-affirming care.

And the right is using that, I think, to mislead people and get these laws passed.

- So what can be done to counter these efforts and both in federal level and on the local and state level?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, so that's kind of where our role as a research center is still very important is to get the facts out there.

Some of the research that we do that helps inform discussion in this area is just how many people are transgender.

It's actually a fairly small percent of the population.

In terms of youth, if they're transgender, are they seeking gender-affirming care?

And what types of care that they're seeking.

As I said, I think the right is really passing these laws based on the specter of surgery, and kind of frankly, someone's gonna change their kind of genitals in a way that can never be reversed and that decision's being made by kind of doctors and parents.

That's not the type of gender-affirming care that youth are getting.

I think the other thing, and I'm really encouraged by a couple of recent court decisions, including one in Arkansas and one in Texas that are really having the medical experts come in, you know, having them present all the research and what they know and really getting, what I think is a great comparison is like, what happens to youth if they get gender-affirming care and what happens to trans youth if they don't?

And if you put on the table, if they don't, you see depression, you see risk of suicide.

You see lifelong consequences from not receiving that care.

The other thing is, some of these judges aren't liberal judges, and they have strong beliefs, which are core beliefs, I think, by a lot of us, is that parents' rights do matter and this is actually removing that decision from the parents.

That my relationship with my doctor is a personal relationship.

I want that healthcare provider to provide their expertise and their recommendations and us to make a decision together.

I don't want the state coming in and interfering with that decision.

So I think some of these judges, you know, are going back to those kind of core values and saying, "Hey, you know, some of these conservative groups, they've opposed the Affordable Care Act."

I don't know if you remember the talk about death panels and government making decision about your healthcare.

And they opposed vaccination mandates and mask mandates.

And it's like, hey, this is the government once again coming in interfering with healthcare decisions.

If we're consistent in that value, we wouldn't pass these gender-affirming care bans.

And I'm taking some hope from these recent judicial decisions that judges are getting the accurate information and they're getting the inconsistency with really strongly-held values in this country of these laws.

- So Brad, before we began taping, we were talking about parental knowledge and participation, and it seems that that is a legitimate issue.

Parents do, as a parent, I would want to know certain things about my children back when they were in school.

Can you give us a little more on that?

How that breaks down and where the Institute and where you stand on that.

That doesn't seem to be a black-and-white issue.

It seems more complicated than that.

- Yeah, look, I think all parents are concerned about, you know, what their kids are learning, the information that they're learning.

And I think when you think about how this is playing out legislatively, it's not only in the gender-affirming care context.

You have participation of trans youth in sports and then you have these kind of restrictions on curriculum like Florida's Don't Say Gay law.

And the most recent development of this type of legislation is these bans on drag performances.

So you've probably seen stories about drag story time at a library or even drag, any sort of performances where people are dressed of the same gender.

And I think all of those are hitting on fears about, your children are being exposed to something, you know, too soon, too early that's unknown and that could potentially be damaging.

And I think if you look at public opinion data, including some research that we've recently done, people are concerned about kids at a very young age.

So we're talking about kindergartners if we're, you know.

Florida's law goes up to third grade.

There's big concerns there.

I think that falls off as kids age because parents know, particularly today with social media and everything else, kids are being exposed to a lot.

There's no way to control that.

And the idea of getting them accurate information is actually very helpful.

I think parents also understand that their kids go to school with kids who are very diverse and who are raised by parents who are very diverse.

And that's just part of, kind of part of life.

So I think we're still having...

I don't think there's a lot of support for these restrictions where it's voluntary if your kid participates or if your child's, you know, a little bit older than that period marked out by the first iteration of Florida's law.

I think the national discussion and kind of debate still seems to be around kids of very young ages.

And here's where misinformation creeps in as well.

And I don't think what's being interjected in the classroom in kindergarten or third grade is a deep dive on gender identity or sexual orientation.

We're talking about, when you talk about families, do you talk about all families and also mention, you know, Johnny has two moms or, you know, Billy has two dads?

Like, that's the level of discussion.

I don't think any kindergarten to third-grade teacher actually has a curriculum about sexual orientation, gender identity, but that's not what you're hearing from the right.

That's not the scare tactics- - And you know, we've had other episodes where we've talked about this, but there's also a parallel effort that involves the banning of books and the removal of particular books that have LGBTQ+ themes from public school libraries, from public libraries.

- Yeah.

- I'm wondering, can you put this in sort of the broader political context?

We're coming into 2024.

We know that there are candidates like Ron DeSantis who seem to have built his political identity around the Don't Say Gay law in Florida's public schools.

How does this actually play out politically?

Is it popular at the national level?

Is the political geography of it such that it's gonna matter in some states and not in others?

What's it gonna mean for 2024?

- Yeah, and I mean, I think this is another one of those issues where there's restrictions, but it's hitting this core value that I think most Americans believe in, which is free speech, free access to information.

The book should be on the shelves.

And again, this is where it's like, well, if a parent, you know, if a parent wants to talk to a child about a book or not have them read a book, then that's there, but you don't remove the book from the shelf and not let anyone have access to that book.

And when these cases are hitting the courts challenging those laws, I think judges are once again like, we have a long history here of free expression and knowledge that's accessible and these laws that restrict expression and information which include the book bans and the drag performances, this is just against strongly held American values, and they have a chilling effect on a lot of discussion.

So what is DeSantis hoping to accomplish with this and what might the other Republican candidates?

They're really playing to their base.

We have a study that's coming out in the next couple weeks that polls, the study's focused on parents kind of polling them about their attitudes about the Don't Say Gay law.

It's a random sample of parents so it's LGBT and non-LGBT parents.

If you're Republican, you're very supportive of the law, about 90%.

If you're a Democrat, about 80% oppose the law.

If you're independent, it's an even split.

So he's not picking up any new voters in his own state with the law.

He's really appealing to his base.

The other big split between people who support the Don't Say Gay law and those who don't, those who support the law really see it in terms of parental rights.

Those who oppose the law, their main frame is hostility towards LGBT people.

And so there's just different messages people are receiving about the same law.

- And that poll is a Florida-specific poll?

- Yeah, yeah.

This is Florida-specific.

National polls look similar with kind of, again, the party divide on support and opposition to that type of law and with, you know, presidential elections are close in this country.

You have to appeal to independent voters.

And independent voters, you know, they're worried about a lot of other issues like national security and inflation and the economy, and they're not so worried about this issue and they're kind of evenly split on it.

- You know, Brad, we're talking about this in the realm of sort of numbers and data.

- Yeah.

- And I'm mindful, though, as we head into 2024 in a campaign season that already seems to be scapegoating gay and trans members of our community, I think about our brothers and sisters who are LGBTQ.

And do we have a sense of what this political dialogue is doing to them at the human level?

- Yeah, yeah, such a great question.

And we do, we do.

This is an area that our center is currently in the process of researching, but we've done this research over a number of years.

And again, I'll go back to marriage.

The fight for marriage equality is a parallel where there were these intense political clashes and campaigns and particularly in specific states about marriage equality.

And there was a lot of kind of discussion and advertising that was negative.

We know from studies in those states, that had an impact on LGBT people and particularly youth.

And that impact was negative, right?

That impact was negative and it impacted people's mental health.

Having your rights and who you are discussed for months in these very public ways in some of those states with advertisements kind of over and over has a huge negative impact.

I'll mention one campaign that's going on right now.

Ohio is considering a constitutional amendment that's about abortion, but I think conservatives are realizing the country is more supportive of access to abortion than they thought.

So those ads are not talking about abortion.

They're talking about gender-affirming care and trans kid even though that's not the focus of the constitutional amendment.

But imagine if you're a parent, you're raising your kid who's trans or gender non-binary.

And what's coming across the television is just these negative ads painting trans people as either, either they don't exist, they're really men in dresses, or there's something wrong with them or something threatening about them.

That's really gonna be hard on your family, and talk about a discussion that's probably hard to have is that discussion between the parents and their kid getting kind of that onslaught of advertising that's happening right now in Ohio.

- So, Brad, beyond the large population that you study, there are smaller groups that you study that have the larger issues, but also issues specific to them.

One group is people of color.

What are their unique issues?

And- - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Again, in addition to, you know, the larger issues that we've been talking about here.

What's unique to them?

What are their concerns?

- I think when you talk about LGBT people of color, you really start to see having more than one kind of marginalized identity in this country starts to have an effect that's more than just kind of the addition of two negative effects.

It has a more profound combined effect.

And so let me just talk for a second about lesbian and bisexual women of color.

And so if I kind of created a list of, and let's go again to parents with kids.

Parents with kids by race and by sexual orientation, the wealthiest household with the most access to resources and education for their kids would be white different-sex couples.

And if I then went to the bottom of the list in terms of resources and access to resource and education for their kids, it would be female same-sex-headed couples with kids who are Black.

The rates of poverty with race, gender, and sexual orientation get much higher.

Lack of healthcare, health problems, over-incarceration, almost any metric of wellbeing that we could consider would be worse for people of color who are LGBTQ.

We find it really important in our research to not just say, LGBT people are more likely to be poor than non-LGBT people.

That's a true fact, but if we break it down, really that higher rates of poverty is concentrated among LGBT people of color and trans people.

And so it's very important for us to be more specific and say really where these disparities, particularly in income and health, really where they lie in the community.

- So we've got about two more minutes left.

Maybe you can just briefly get into another group, which is older people.

You study them as well.

What are their specific issues?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think when you think about older LGBT people, you have to think about, these are folks who lived where there still were sodomy laws, where you could be fired from your job, where there was, you know, public opinion was not at all supportive of LGBT people.

They've lived their lifetimes through all that.

That's had health effects, mental health effects, which we know then manifest into physical health effects.

It's probably, it does mean, as our research shows, they have less income and resources when they retire so they're more vulnerable when they reach retirement age.

That vulnerability is offset by having social support, and that's usually family.

We find that older LGBT people are more likely to live alone as well and so they don't have that support.

What we do find, and which is a sign of kind of some resilience and hope is that when you ask LGBT people and non-LGBT people how likely they are to have helped another kind of friend who's elderly or received help, their friendship circles are much stronger and they are getting more community support than non-LGBT people.

- That's a hopeful note to leave it on.

Community matters.

Brad Sears, it's the Williams Center at UCLA.

Thank you so much for being with us.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you want to know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us at pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes or look for us on social media too.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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