Austin City Council likely to take up activist calls for ‘transgender sanctuary city’ designation
AUSTIN (KXAN) — An effort is in the works at Austin City Hall to potentially act on calls from local activists to adopt protections for the transgender community, which they contend will remain a target by state leaders.
Artemis Lesgaux and Jennifer Hughes are among those circulating an open letter to Austin City Council members and even confronting some of them about designating Austin as a “transgender sanctuary city.” As part of their effort, they’re offering local leaders a number of policy recommendations. Those include forbidding the city from assisting with an investigation into a transgender person’s medical decisions or those who provide such care.
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Other proposals address communicating official support for drag performers in the city and even setting up a legal fund to assist Austinites who might face consequences for violating state laws, like Senate Bill 12 and Senate Bill 14. Each of those bills passed during the regular legislative session earlier this year. Senate Bill 12 limits minors from seeing a “sexually oriented performance,” which opponents argued could apply to drag performances. Senate Bill 14 banned doctors from providing certain health care treatments to transgender minors.
“There’s an attitude that Austin is safe. There’s an attitude that we are kind of a blue island in the middle of a red state, but that’s not really the case,” Lesgaux said. “We are still affected by the laws of the Texas legislature. We’re not safe in a lot of ways.”
“Basically, I would have them do what the queer community here in Austin has been asking them to do,” Hughes added, “which is stand up for us and not just say, ‘Hey, we’re a nice liberal city that protects our minorities,’ and then just kind of help the state whenever it wants to oppress us.”
State lawmakers introduced a historic number of bills this year that would impact LGBTQ+ Texans, and several restrictions eventually passed and became law. While several of these laws drew legal challenges in the past few months, Lesgaux and Hughes worry this is only the beginning of what’s to come in future legislative sessions, and Council Member Ryan Alter agrees with that view.
“If you look, we have seen session after session, more and more of the civil liberties, especially of the LGBTQ community, be restricted. This has not been just a one-off issue,” Alter said. “This has been like I said, years and session after session where it just gets more and more aggressive, more and more invasive, and so I think they are right to say that this is an ongoing concern.”
Alter, who represents District 5 in south Austin, said he’s now working with other council members on a measure that he hopes will align with some of the activists’ goals. While the language is not yet finalized, he said it will likely mirror what the council did last year when it passed the GRACE Act, a series of resolutions aimed at protecting reproductive rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. One of those measures de-prioritizes enforcement of criminal laws surrounding abortion.
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Alter said what he’s working on now would have a similar approach, except it likely would apply this time to transgender health care.
“Our authority is in how we prioritize the enforcement for [the Austin Police Department] or local law enforcement,” he explained, “so what we can do is make sure that within the bounds of the law because we can’t change state law, but we can say we want APD to focus on these things that actually make people safer rather than stepping in between a doctor and a patient.”
There is no timeline available yet for when Alter said he’ll put forward the resolution to the rest of the council. A few members already expressed support for this idea, including Vanessa Fuentes, Zo Qadri and José Velásquez. Alter said he does not think “it’s going to take too much longer” before the language is formally written. However, he noted a factor is how state leaders may react to this.
“We have to just be very careful that whatever rule we put in place does ultimately comply with state law and so we are going to be very careful about that,” Alter said. “But the end of the day, we can’t not act and not protect our constituents and serve our values just because we’re afraid that the state legislature is going to come in and do something that we disagree with, and it is our job to stand up for those we represent and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Lesgaux called it “fair” when council members told her previously they’d have to consult with the city’s legal counsel before they move forward on any proposals.
“We expect them to be supportive of the initiative regardless of what they think they can do,” Lesgaux said. “We want them to find ways to protect trans people because they have the power to, and they have the responsibility to because they have that power.”
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Randy Erben, an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said he anticipates state leaders will watch closely how this effort proceeds and what the city decides to do — even potentially setting up another fight over local control at the statehouse. Earlier this year, for instance, the governor signed what opponents called the “death star” bill into law. It bars local governments from adopting stricter laws than the state has in several areas, including labor and the environment. Critics pointed out how it will nix some local rules like mandatory water breaks for construction workers, eviction moratoriums and protections against predatory lending.
“I think that [city leaders] are going to be very sensitive to that because the last thing they want to do is pass something that is going to, you know, go to court and be overturned, so I think they’ll be careful,” Erben said. “Now, that’s not to say that the majority of the council may differ with that, but I think there’s some, especially with the mayor, there’s going to be some sensitivity to bumping up against being inconsistent with state law.”
The group of activists behind this effort also gathered Monday evening outside Austin City Council for a vigil on Transgender Day of Remembrance, which is recognized each year to honor the lives of transgender people lost to violence. The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ civil rights group, released its annual report on fatal violence against transgender and gender-nonconforming people in the U.S., describing the past year as an “epidemic of violence” targeting the community.
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