Despite wave of anti-LGBTQ efforts, SC advocates say they’re stronger than ever

Across the United States, state legislatures took up bills that targeted members of the LGBTQ community, including in South Carolina.

From bills that would ban transgender girls from participating in women’s sports to an effort to remove LGBTQ protections from the hate crimes bill, lawmakers in the Palmetto State filed and considered an unusually high volume of bills and initiatives that many say would have been harmful to the community.

But the numerous bills had an unintended result.

Queer advocates say the barrage of legislation made LGBTQ advocacy efforts in South Carolina stronger than ever.

“South Carolina has never seen this type of collaborative leadership in the LGBTQ community,” said Ivy Hill, the community health programs director for the Campaign for Southern Equality, an organization that supports LGBTQ initiatives in the South.

“The power that that has is even greater than the power legislators have,” added Hill, who uses they/them pronouns.

LGBTQ supporting organizations banned together to form a coalition: SC United for Justice and Equality. Members range from groups that specifically target the queer community — like the Alliance for Full Acceptance, the Campaign for Southern Equality, SC Pride and others — to groups that also focus on other issues, such as the ACLU of South Carolina, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and the Women’s Rights and Empowerment Network.

They hired a lobbyist to work on their behalf at the State House. They brought dozens of queer folks and allies to deliver hours of testimony to lawmakers on why the bills they were considering were harmful. They held outside meetings between lawmakers and transgender children to talk face-to-face about the issues.

Colleen Condon, a board member of the Alliance for Full Acceptance, a non-profit LGBTQ advocacy group based in Charleston, called the creation of such “powerful” alliances “tremendous successes.”

“That was such a great success this year because while there have been various groups that have advocated in the State House before for gay civil rights, but it was only in 2020 that we organized all the queer advocates across the state,” Condon said.

Nationwide anti-trans push

By March, before the legislative session in most states even ended, the Human Rights Campaign declared 2021 a “record year for anti-transgender legislation.”

In a press release, the group, which works to end discrimination against the LGBTQ community, said 80 anti-trans bills had been filed across the country, surpassing the 79 that were filed in 2020. By mid-April, the number of bills targeting the rights of transgender folks surpassed 100, spanning 33 states.

The bulk of the bills fall under two categories: bills that would ban transgender athletes, typically transgender girls, from participating in women’s high school and middle school sports and bills that would ban doctors from providing gender-affirming care to minors.

While in some states, like South Carolina, the bills failed to pass by the end of the working session, several states were able to pass legislation.

On June 1, the first day of LGBTQ Pride Month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would bar transgender girls from participating in public school women’s sports. Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee passed similar laws.

Arkansas’ legislature in March passed a law that would ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth, but it was vetoed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson. The legislature later overrode his veto in early April.

Queer advocates have said these initiatives have spread with the help of conservative groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious conservative group that has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

South Carolina House Majority Leader Gary Simrill said it isn’t uncommon to see an issue being discussed nationally make it’s way to the Palmetto State. Most of the LGBTQ legislation filed this year originated in the House.

“I think nationally, if there’s a topic or issue that’s gaining importance ... you will see those happen at a state level,” Simrill said.

Simrill pointed to last summer’s unrest after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. Floyd’s death sparked a lot of national conversation about police reform and racial inequity, and South Carolina lawmakers subsequently authored several bills concerning law enforcement.

Simrill said when the first bill to ban transgender athletes from playing in women’s sports was introduced in South Carolina, it was because there was a “nationwide realization in what was happening.” Since, two more transgender athlete ban bills were introduced, and a senator tried to get the ban inserted into the budget as a proviso.

But South Carolina doesn’t have many transgender children playing in high school sports. The state’s High School League has a process in which transgender students can apply for a waiver to participate in sports. Since 2016, only four students — two trans girls and two trans boys — have applied for the waiver, and two students, the trans girls, were granted them.

When asked why he thought anti-LGBTQ legislation came up again and again during the legislature’s working session, Simrill said he didn’t know.

“It’s hard to go and say, ‘This is why,’” Simrill said. “The reality is we live in a 24-hour news cycle society, so with that, many things that happen that are local in areas gain national attention.”

Condon called the bills an issue in search of a problem.

“Stop making a political situation over kids who are the least of these,” Condon said. “We’re supposed to love our sister and brother. If you really have a religious component of your life, show love to these people. Show love to these children. Don’t try to make them feel more awkward or more unwelcome.”

Queer issues in SC legislature before 2021

The last major initiative targeting transgender people that made headlines in South Carolina was in late 2016, near the end of the two-year legislative session, when Sen. Lee Bright, R-Spartanburg, proposed a bill mimicking the one passed in North Carolina.

The bill would have banned transgender people from using the public bathrooms, showers or changing rooms of their choice. It ultimately failed, as it was introduced near the end of the session.

Quickly, though, the bill received backlash from within Republican ranks.

Then-Gov. Nikki Haley said she didn’t believe the bill was necessary. She added that she hadn’t heard of any incidents involving transgender people using the restroom of their choice.

“When I look at South Carolina, we look at our situations, we’re not hearing of anybody’s religious liberties that are being violated, and we’re again not hearing any citizens that feel like they’re being violated in terms of freedoms,” Haley said.

“Like it or not, South Carolina is doing really well when it comes to respect and when it comes to kindness and when it comes to acceptance. For people to imply it’s not, I beg to differ,” she added.

However, a similar bill was prefiled for the next session in the House, keeping the initiative alive.

Again, the bill faced criticism from the state’s top Republican.

S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster, in the first year of his term after Haley was appointed U.N. ambassador, said he didn’t think South Carolina needed a bathroom bill.

“This is a great state, great people,” McMaster said. “As you know, we get along very well, and I think we’re doing just fine.”

For the next few years, anti-LGBTQ initiatives struggled to gain traction. Fewer bills were filed and none made it out of committee. During the 2019-20 session, Sen. Richard Cash, R-Anderson, introduced a transgender athlete ban, but that gained no traction.

Though the legislature experienced a lull in bills aimed toward the LGBTQ community, queer people were still experiencing discrimination within the state.

More than half of the queer community in Charleston surveyed in 2018 said they had been criticized by their family for their LGBTQ identity, according to a study conducted by the Alliance for Full Acceptance, the College of Charleston’s Community Assistance program and the Medical University of South Carolina. About 55% of those surveyed said they felt they could not be themselves in the workplace, and 41% said they had heard criticism of LGBTQ people from their colleagues.

Of the 1,436 people survey, 207 — or about 14% — said they’d been attacked on the street before because of their sexual orientation or gender expression.

According to a 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, 37% of trans respondents from South Carolina reported being fired, denied a promotion or denied a job because of their gender identity or expression.

According to the Williams Institute of Law at UCLA, as of 2019, only eight localities in South Carolina — Richland County, Charleston, Columbia, Folly Beach, Latta, Mt. Pleasant, Myrtle Beach and North Charleston — had adopted local laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity when it comes to private and public employment, housing and public accommodations. Those laws only offer protection to about 1% of S.C. workers.

South Carolina has also repeatedly failed to pass a hate crimes bill, leaving it as just one of two states without one on the books.

A hate crimes bill that only contains additional penalties for violent crimes passed the House and made its way to the Senate floor this year, but the entirety of the upper body never took it up for debate. Though they still have one more working session to take it up, Senate leaders have expressed serious concerns about the bill.

In 2020, the Human Rights Campaign rated South Carolina as a “high priority to achieve basic equality.”

It’s not that voters in South Carolina don’t support LGBTQ protections. A 2018 survey conducted by the nonprofit the Public Religion Research Institute showed that 58% of South Carolinians surveyed said they supported LGBTQ nondiscrimination laws.

The current legislative session

This working session, lawmakers pushed nine major bills dealing with queer issues — three that advocates considered pro-LGBTQ and six that were not.

Topics ranged from the hate crimes bill to pay equity to allowing foster care services to refuse service for religious reasons, meaning they could refuse to work with queer individuals. Most bills introduced, however, focused on minors, including the trans athletes ban from women’s sports and banning doctors from providing gender affirming care to transgender youth.

“It has been the busiest session legislatively regarding queer issues in quite a number of years,” Condon said.

Hill, who is also the executive director of Gender Benders, an Upstate organization that works with transgender and gender diverse people, said the volume of bills targeting transgender youth “sends a really terrible message to trans youth in South Carolina.”

“Its incredibly invalidating of your identity,” Hill said.

As lawmakers debated bills that would affect trans youth, Hill said there was an increase in rates of depression and anxiety. They added that when anti-trans legislation is introduced in a state, it is typically followed by an increase in calls to trans crisis phone lines.

“Folks in the community are aware of what’s happening,” Hill said.

Condon questioned why lawmakers were trying to find “a solution for a problem that doesn’t really exist,” at the expense of the mental health of queer children.

“It is something that we know for a fact that kids who are trans have a five time more likely situation to consider suicide. ... Why create a situation in which a kid that already feels so unwelcome by their school, so unloved in many situations, why put them through that?”

Advocates for the bills have said that banning trans girls from women’s sports creates a more even playing field for girls. They have also said they believe that transgender girls have a natural athletic advantage against their cisgender counterparts.

On the bill that would ban doctors from providing gender-affirming health care to trans youth, lawmakers argued that children are too young to make decisions, particularly decisions that include surgery, for themselves. It’s very unusual for minors to be allowed to get gender-affirming surgery.

And the community fought back. Dozens of queer people, advocates and allies showed up to multiple committee and subcommittee meetings to testify for hours on end against bills they said attacked the queer community. They were joined by teachers, doctors and, for the bill banning transgender athletes, S.C. Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman.

Outside of the State House, Condon said groups that were part of the SC United for Justice and Equality coalition organized counseling sessions for those impacted by the bills. They organized a meeting between the transgender athlete ban bill’s sponsor, Rep. Ashley Trantham, R-Greenville, and a group of transgender youth, though that didn’t slow efforts to push the bill forward.

Days after the legislature let out for the year, queer advocates held a field day for transgender and LGBTQ youth, kicking off their event on the State House grounds.

Terry Livingston with Grand Strand Pride, a member of the coalition, said the coalition was instrumental in helping get news on the legislation out of Columbia and getting it shared on social media across the state.

“The timely spread of the news most likely helped defeat the legislation,” Livingston said.

Progress seen on hate crimes bill

Condon said there were some successes this year like the progress that the hate crimes bill made.

Condon attributed some of the success on that bill to another alliance: Stamp Out Hate SC. That coalition includes a diverse group of religious leaders, business leaders and minority advocacy organizations from all walks of life. Among its members are the Alliance for Full Acceptance, the Anti-Defamation League, the Charleston Hispanic Association, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Charleston, Mother Emauel AME Church and the NAACP of Charleston.

“I look at those tremendous successes of creating those powerful alliances over the last year that have allowed us to move (the) hate crimes (bill) ahead,” Condon said.

But even during debate on a bill that advocates considered to be pro-LGBTQ, the hate crimes bill, there was some discussion about excluding protections based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

During a subcommittee meeting, S.C. Rep. Chris Murphy, R-Dorchester, said the bill wouldn’t be able to pass the House with those protections in it.

“If it was in that bill to say ‘sexual orientation,’ we have an issue in the body as a whole,” Murphy, the Judiciary Committee chairman, said in an interview with The State at the time. “We’re trying to mitigate that issue with the body as a whole. The goal is to keep the legislation moving down the track.”

Ultimately, the language was kept in the bill, and the hate crimes bill, with LGBTQ protections, overwhelmingly passed the House 79 to 29 with no debate.

The hate crimes bill was the only bill concerning LGBTQ issues to make it out of committee in either chamber. However, lawmakers only voted to kill two of the bills — both of which would have banned transgender girls from women’s sports — meaning lawmakers could come take them up when they come back to Columbia in January.

“Stop attacking trans kids,” Hill said. “This year has been so disproportionately difficult for youth in general, ... then you add being trans or queer on top of that as well.”

“You’re elected to serve us too,” they added. “We’re also South Carolinians.”