Trans Rights, Climate Rights
ON A WEDNESDAY MORNING in May, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis stood before a cheering crowd at the evangelical Cambridge Christian School in Tampa to announce the signing of some of the country’s most extreme anti-trans legislation. The proposed laws would ban gender-affirming care for minors, restrict even the discussion of personal pronouns in school, and penalize businesses for hosting drag shows. (Some of these laws have been temporarily blocked by the courts as potentially unconstitutional.) “It’s kind of sad that we even have some of these discussions,” DeSantis told the crowd, standing at a podium with a sign that read “Let Kids Be Kids.” “We never did this through all of human history until like, what, two weeks ago? Now this is something? They’re having third-graders declare pronouns? We’re not doing the pronoun Olympics in Florida.” In truth, human history is replete with cultures accepting of fluid gender categories. However, DeSantis, a presidential hopeful, has no use for such facts. In a distant second for the Republican presidential nomination, trailing far behind former president Donald Trump, DeSantis has positioned himself as an anti-“wokeness” candidate: “Florida is where woke goes to die,” he likes to repeat. Under his watch, the state has become increasingly hostile to any form of progressive politics. His agenda, the Florida Blueprint, is rife with conservative, extremist ideas that are reflected in the raft of new laws he has signed, including the Don’t Say Gay bill, abortion bans, anti-immigration policies, relaxed gun legislation, and the “sprawl bill” that is aimed at preventing citizens and organizations from challenging development decisions. DeSantis is also staunchly dismissive of climate change and most environmental protections, though he won the governorship, in part, on the conservation ticket.… This all puts Florida in company with other states that are hostile to both trans and gay communities and to the environment... In current US politics, anti-trans laws and anti-environment policies are often correlated. The deeper relationships between these hostilities can be complicated and hard to unravel. However, in his extremism and presidential ambitions, DeSantis and his “Great American Comeback” election campaign help demonstrate the underpinning structures that justice, climate, and environmental activists are all grappling with in today’s complex political arena. Environmental writer and activist Sage Agee unspools the connections between climate destruction and violence against marginalized groups and explains how these intersecting issues impact the lives of trans people like them in this article in the Journal's Autumn 2023 print issue.
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