‘Why am I any less of a person?’ Anti-trans legislation in Idaho sends harmful message | Opinion

AlexaLynne Fill, of Nampa, just wants to live her best life.

But with every anti-transgender bill the Republican-dominated Idaho Legislature passes or even proposes, it makes it all the more difficult for her as a transgender woman.

“I once testified (on a bill) and called it hateful, and they wouldn’t let me use those words, but that’s exactly the effect that it has,” Fill said. “They’re trying to erase us, just trying to make it impossible for us to live normal lives, which is all we really want. We just want to have the same rights and opportunities that everybody else has.”

Fill was at the Idaho Capitol on Tuesday as part of an event at which organizers gathered 48,000 paper hearts representing the estimated number of LGBTQ+ Idahoans. Several who were at Tuesday’s event threw all 48,000 paper hearts over the fourth-floor railing under the rotunda, sending them down to the second floor, where organizers cleaned them up afterwards.

“These hearts all represent hearts that are affected by the legislation that goes on in this building,” Fill said.

The national wave of anti-transgender legislation started crashing on states’ shores about five years ago. I remember writing the first story about Idaho Rep. Barbara Ehardt’s bill to ban transgender girls and women from girls and women’s sports in 2020.

From there, it’s spread to attempts to ban changing birth certificates and drivers licenses, protecting teachers who won’t use a student’s preferred pronouns, banning gender-affirming care for teens, changing the definition of “gender,” banning students from using certain bathrooms and prohibiting the use of tax dollars for gender-affirming care even for adults.

“The scope and pace of legislative activity targeting transgender individuals is nothing short of a gender panic,” according to University of Pittsburgh law professor Deborah L. Brake in a new paper on why state laws banning transgender athletes are unconstitutional. “From restrictions on medical care to the regulation of library books and the use of pronouns in schools, attacks on the transgender community have reached crisis proportions.”

Brake notes that a growing number of families must flee their states just to get health care.

“The sweeping anti-transgender attack that began in sports has now extended into other areas of public and private life, with great cost to the health and well-being of transgender children and their families,” Brake writes.

Fill said that even if a specific bill doesn’t directly impact her, all anti-trans legislation affects her everyday life.

“Every piece that they pass affects you,” she said. “There’s nothing that doesn’t affect every person that is either trans or queer or part of the LGBTQ community. If it affects one, it affects us all. It’s just the idea of being marginalized and treated as a non-entity without legal standing.”

Anti-transgender legislation also sends a message to the community as a whole that it’s OK to discriminate against transgender people.

“I think the level of hate, the level of active persecution has increased in the last six or eight years,” Fill said. “Before that time, it was there, but there was a little bit more of a certain understanding that people could be different, people were allowed to be different, and we’re not now.”

Fill said she has been living as a woman for the past 10 years but has known she was transgender since she was 6. I asked her what life was like before she came out.

“If you can imagine living your life tethered to somebody living a life, but not feeling like you were there, like a third party watching everything going on,” Fill said. “It’s the easiest way I can say it, just hiding, trying to not be found out.”

It was after a bout with cancer, Fill said, that she realized if she didn’t come out, she may never get the chance to live her true self.

But the anti-trans movement that’s sweeping the nation threatens all that.

“It’s all being fueled by hatred and in some cases religious ideas, and it frustrates me because I try to live my life full of love for everybody, and I don’t really hate anybody but I just don’t understand some people,” she said. “I just don’t know how my freedom impacts somebody else’s freedom. Why am I any less of a person than anybody else?”