From the trans youth sports ban to the governor’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation to a fetal personhood bill, the Alaska Legislature saw a sharp rise in the amount of time and attention put toward conservative culture war issues in the 33rd legislative session.
While conservative legislation isn’t anything new, the Republican-controlled House provided a platform for these issues in the form of committees chaired by extreme-right legislators. It produced many, many hours of hearings—with the public, by and large, pleading with legislators to rethink their positions—that opponents say has a material toll on youth, the LGBTQ community and, particularly, trans youth.
In a particularly spectacular showing, the Republican-led House dedicated one of the final days of the legislative session to forcing through a bill restricting how trans youth can play sports. But just as the House’s political layout gave a platform to these issues, the bipartisan-controlled Senate’s political layout stopped it from becoming a reality.
That’s because one of the key guiding principles of the 17-member bipartisan Senate supermajority is its refusal to entertain deeply divisive issues—meaning issues like abortion restrictions, restrictions on trans youth and other anti-LGBTQ policies are dead on arrival—but advocates worry that may change with the coming election.
“If the balance remains the same in the House and the balance shifts in the Senate, then we can absolutely expect to see bills like we saw this session and possibly see them pass,” said Rose O’Hara-Jolley, the Alaska state director for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates.
O’Hara-Jolley credited the Alaska Senate’s bipartisan coalition for being a firm roadblock to such culture war issues and focusing on things that are more broadly important, such as healthcare access and tackling the state’s high rate of sexual violence. Still, O’Hara-Jolley said that the last two years of the Republican-controlled House have taken their toll on the community as youth and their families who must repeatedly testify in defense of their existence, particularly in hearings where trans people are being portrayed as wrongdoers.
“It’s not even just a time waste and a distraction. It’s harming youth in this state, and it’s actively harming a group of children, the LGBTQ+ community, which already has the highest rates of suicide and will experience bullying and violence,” they said. “It’s telling kids in schools that they should be afraid, that they should bully, and that’s having a direct impact on youth in this state.”
The point about the toll on the community has been echoed by legislators and other LGBTQ+ advocates, such as Vincent Feuilles, the director of Community Development & Support at Identity Health Clinic. Feuilles said the focus on trans issues has been particularly frustrating because trans people make up a tiny segment of the state’s population, while other issues have gone largely ignored.
“The trans community is less than 1%, so why is so much time and energy focused on controlling what other people do?” he said. “Why is that focus on that and us and not something like the homelessness issue? We could be putting that time and effort into the homeless problem in Alaska. How can we justify that?”
Feuilles said it’s particularly distressing to see such harmful talk about trans people when it’s trans youth who are at some of the highest risk of harm. Instead of focusing on imagined harms done by trans people, he said, legislators should be looking at ways to support youth and reduce harm. He pointed to ongoing research that shows trans youth in supportive home environments are far less likely to experience harm.
“How do we make it better?” he said. “Well, stop being a jerk.”
Most of those problematic hearings have come from two committees: The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by extreme-right Homer Republican Rep. Sarah Vance, and the House Education Committee, co-chaired by Eagle River Republican Rep. Jamie Allard. Allard, in particular, has been key in driving much of the conservative pushback to tans youth with allegations that they’re dangerous or intentionally seeking unfair advantages in sports.
Feuilles said that kind of language takes its toll.
“We talk about resilience a lot when we’re looking at how to support any minority community,” he said during the legislative session. “There’s resilience that goes into how any group can continue to stand up and say, no, this isn’t right, or this is what we need. You can only go so long before that resilience starts to wear down. We can see that a lot. We’ve got parents of LGBTQ youth, particularly trans youth, who are speaking regularly, and you can see it on their faces, you can hear it in their voices that they’re tired and they’re sad that something that is really a non-issue here in Alaska.”
Of course, not all lawmakers agree with Allard and Vance.
In the House, Democrats and independents mounted as near a filibuster as is allowed under legislative rules to stop the trans sports bill from passing. And the measure only ultimately passed with a razor-thin margin. As expected, the measure was never taken up by the Senate.
For Rep. Andrew Gray, an Anchorage Democrat who sits on the House Judiciary Committee and is openly gay, it’s been a challenge to balance the toll of the fight in the House with the knowledge that much of it is dead on arrival in the Senate. In an interview in the final days of the legislative session, Gray said that he’s chosen to fight because he says it’s what’s right.
“I know I’m on the right side of history, and 20 years from now, people will look back and ask, ‘what the heck were we talking about?'” he said. “‘How was this a thing?’ I’m going to do this because I know when we look back on this period, I will have been morally sound. I will have been on the right side of history.”
This story has been updated with additional perspectives.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
