I am considering moving to Tennessee, but anti-LGBTQ laws make me think twice | Opinion

Sean Patterson
·4 min read
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My husband, daughter, and I boarded a 6 a.m. flight from Hartford, Connecticut to Nashville, Tennessee in anticipation of a job interview at Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital.

After a tour of Nashville neighborhoods and two margaritas, we started googling LGBT legislation in Tennessee to see how welcoming the area was for queer people.

One day before we arrived, the “Rally to End Child Mutilation” took place at the Tennessee state capitol to protest a gender affirming care clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn and Tennessee state House Majority Leader William Lamberth among other conservative figures spoke to a crowd of nearly 2000 people about how the hospital I was applying to work at was dismembering children and forcing liberal ideology on vulnerable patients.

This language was familiar. I spent the first two decades of my life in Mississippi witnessing similar ignorance and understood that moving back to the South could mean putting my family in danger. Tennessee has gone out of its way in the last several years to target the queer community.

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Legislation and court cases have taken on LGBTQ rights

In 2021, the Tennessee General Assembly passed House Bill (HB) 1182 requiring that any business that has transgender friendly bathrooms must put up a warning sign about the potential danger to their customers. That same year, legislation passed preventing transgender children from participating in girls’ sports or using their chosen bathroom.

In 2019, HB 563 passed, which allows local businesses to discriminate against queer people and prevents local governments from creating protections. In 2016, Senate Bill (SB) 1556 passed allowing for counselors and therapists to refuse queer patients.

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There have been several times that the Supreme Court has had to step in to prevent the state from persecuting queer people. In the case of RG and GR Funeral Homes v EEOC and Aimee Stephens, the court ruled that the 2016 “Religious Freedoms Restoration Act” did not allow businesses to fire employees because they were queer.

The Supreme Court also rejected the SB 2305 prohibition of same-sex marriage with the important Obergefell v Hodges decision that legalized same sex marriage nationwide in 2015.

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Anti-LGBTQ legislation poses a risk to children

What does all of this legislation look like for queer children in Tennessee? The CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey that tracks youth suicidality did not delineate their data for queer individuals in the state of Tennessee unlike most other states.

Will Shull goes to put a rainbow tiara on his three-year-old daughter Jubilee Shull’s head during Jackson Pride Fest in the Carl Perkins Civic Center on Saturday, October 8, 2022, in Jackson, Tenn. Allison Shull, Jubilee’s mother, said this is the second time she and her family have attended the event and they wanted to come to support their community.

There is actually no great indicator of the severity of queer youth mental health in the state because none of the politicians at these rallies care to invest in actually protecting queer youth.

Looking at national trends, the Journal of the American Medical Association released research that showed a significant decrease in queer youth suicide when legislation promoting equality was introduced to a state.

The Trevor Project reported in a survey of 40,000 queer youth that supporting a transgender youth’s pronouns decreases the rate of attempted suicide by half. Simple interventions can make drastic changes to the lives of queer children.

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'Brain drain' should be an urgent concern for Tennessee

The political climate of Tennessee has also consistently encouraged skilled workers not to move into the state despite growing job opportunities.

Sean Patterson
Sean Patterson

The phenomenon in which skilled or educated workers move out of an area is known as brain drain. The U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee released information from the Social Capitol Project, which shows that Tennessee has had a consistently growing rate of brain drain every decade since 1970.

Currently, there are 14% more educated skilled workers in the group leaving the state than in the group that is staying. While it is difficult to attribute all of this to discriminatory legislation, national outrage towards transphobic legislation in many states has led to loss of major business investments.

So, should I move my family to Tennessee?  While watching the hour-long video of protestors at the “Rally to End Child Mutilation," I felt the growing desire to let the whole state burn itself to the ground. But you can’t watch the house burn with so many good people still in it.

I want to be close enough that queer people in the South can hear me cheering them on. I want to be close enough that Gov. Bill Lee can hear me screaming the names of the children that have died because of his words. Right now, I can’t tell how close that has to be.

Sean Patterson is an LGBTQ+ advocate and program wide chief resident in the Yale University Department of Psychiatry.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: I am might move to Tennessee, but anti-LGBTQ laws make me think twice