The 2024 Presidential Election will be defining for trans rights.

In June 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex marriage is a constitutionally guaranteed right, many queer Americans believed that we were entering a new era of legal equality.

But, as we near the 2024 election season, queer rights — and in particular, trans rights — are increasingly the target of conservative political agendas. As Ella Ceron wrote for Bloomberg in March, “state lawmakers in the U.S. have already introduced more anti-LGBTQ bills this year than in the past five years combined.”

As of Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union is tracking 461 anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures throughout the United States. These bills threaten queer Americans’ access to healthcare, public bathrooms, and public school sports as well as our freedom of expression and protection under nondiscrimination laws.

This is truly unprecedented: only 18 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in 2018 despite the fact that the number of Republican controlled states was greater during that time. In light of these statistics, it becomes clear that this new wave of political queerphobia is both deliberate and strategic.

This phenomenon is not new. It hearkens to the politics of the late 1970s and 1980s, when the Evangelical Right became a major voting bloc for the first time in modern American history. Contemporary religious and political leaders sought to galvanize the support of religious Americans, and were able to do so by focusing on the specific issues of homosexuality and abortion, which they claimed posed a threat to morality.

While these positions eventually became ingrained in American conservative politics, their function at the time was simply to rally the masses to combat desegregation efforts by the Carter administration. With the support of the new Evangelical Right, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan defeated incumbent Jimmy Carter in a landslide in the 1980 election.

Nearly 50 years later, queerphobia is being used again to galvanize the Evangelical Right. But why now?

In 2012, the percentage of Americans who identified as white Christians of any denomination dipped below 50% for the first time ever, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. And in 2020, another first occurred: the number of evangelical white Protestants was surpassed by the number of mainline (non-evangelical) white Protestants.

As a result, the politicians who rely on the support of the Evangelical Right are focusing on anti-abortion, anti-queer and anti-trans agenda in a desperate attempt to rally the rapidly shrinking Evangelical voting bloc. And since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the brunt of this force is being directed against trans rights.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a favored choice for the 2024 Republican presidential candidate, gained widespread attention after he signed HB 1557, the notorious “Don’t Say Gay” bill, into law last year. He has continued to be the national face of queerphobia and continues to build a platform on his anti-queer political agenda.

Despite the decreasing power of Evangelical voters, there will be serious consequences for queer Americans as anti-LGBTQ bills continue to be introduced. The Trevor Project reported that, in 2021, “94% of LGBTQ youth reported that recent politics negatively impacted their mental health.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation found that hate crimes against trans and gender non-conforming individuals increased significantly from 2020 to 2021, with respective upward trends of 15 percent and 83 percent.

While only a small fraction of transphobic bills actually get signed into law, those that do have devastating effects. Recently, legislation in Idaho felonized gender-affirming care for transgender minors, and trans minors in Indiana who are already on hormone medication will be required to stop by the end of the year. Gender-affirming care has been shown to reduce the rate of suicidal ideation among trans youth, a population at high risk for suicide, by 73 percent.

As we enter the 2024 presidential election season, trans rights are likely to become more widely debated than we have seen before on the national level, and may become a dividing issue when presidential candidates begin debates later this year. As the overturning of Roe has demonstrated, the loss of rights for one group sets a precedent for more rights to be taken away. It is important for us as Americans, queer or not, to understand that threats made against trans rights are a threat to all of our freedom.

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