Transgender people are under attack – perhaps worse than we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes – in Florida and many other parts of the nation.

The party in the supermajority of the Florida Legislature towed the agenda of Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2023 session, passing several laws targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) people. Transgender people have been hit hardest. 

Last month alone, the legislature banned gender-affirming treatment for minors and treats that care as “harmful,” rather than the lifesaving care that it is. Legislators banned teachers and students from using pronouns that do not match someone’s birth certificate. They barred transgender people and others from using bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity in government buildings, including in prisons. They imposed new punishments for establishments that allow minors to attend “adult live performances,” largely understood as an attack on drag shows. And their threats to the LGBTQ+ community continue. 

DeSantis and extremist Florida politicians have passed these and other laws under the guise of protecting children from what they call “wokeness.” While rarely defined, “wokeness” has become a catch-all term for what conservatives view as leftist or even socialist propaganda in the name of social justice that they believe has crept its way into the state’s institutions of power – from the classroom to the workplace to the courthouse. 

This political illusion is often described as the “culture war.” But, for transgender people and others directly in the crosshairs, it is much more. They are direct assaults on transgender and other people’s right to exist. Florida has a long history of attacking LGBTQ+ people, especially those most vulnerable among them – transgender folks and people of color.

The “wokeness” boogeyman isn’t new, either. It’s the same – or similar – script with a different cast. 

In 1959, a woman named Charlotte F. McLeod married in Miami in an unremarkable ceremony. Weeks later, the nation learned that McLeod was transgender, and her marriage made headlines. Because they rejected McLeod’s transgender identity, several institutions – including the courts, media, and church – panicked that Florida had just permitted same-sex marriage. 

As a result, McLeod was run out of town and made her way to California. She lived a difficult life and regularly endured abuse and discrimination.

This is not unlike the story of one of South Florida’s most famous families today: husband and basketball star Dwyane Wade and wife and actor Gabrielle Union, who recently relocated from Miami to California. They did so, in part, to make life safer for their transgender daughter amidst the onslaught of Florida’s anti-trans policies.

Back in 1959, when the world learned that McLeod was trangender, she got embroiled in a puritanical Cold War-era culture that treated LGBTQ+ people as threats to American families, children, and even national security. Many viewed McLeod as no different than communists who threatened to destroy the United States and the American way of life. 

By the 1970s, Miami housed some networks and organizations that helped build a community for transgender people, including the multi-ethnic Transsexual Action Organization. But by the end of the decade, the city had become ground zero for the nation’s so-called culture wars.

In 1977, Miami-based celebrity Anita Bryant launched a campaign called “Save Our Children” to undo a county-wide ordinance that had provided legal protections for lesbians, gays, and bisexuals in employment, education, and public accommodations. Bryant and her supporters argued that gay people were inherently predators who would corrupt their children. 

The language of the 1970s campaign is eerily similar to what DeSantis and other fundamentalists use today to garner support for their anti-LGBTQ+ measures.

Bryant took the issue to Miami voters, who overwhelmingly supported her argument that gay people posed a threat to children. As a result of Bryant’s support, the progressive and short-lived ordinance that offered gay and bisexual people legal protections was overturned later that year. The county would not secure those legislative protections for another two decades, in 1998. Securing similar protections for transgender people took even longer.

The county finally voted to extend the same protections based on gender identity and gender expression in late 2014. The issue, however, was met with great controversy. Many of its opponents deployed the decades-long “boogeyman” narrative that such protections reflected socialist influence and represented a danger to all children. 

The advancements hard fought to protect LGBTQ+ people, especially youth, are quickly being undone by state lawmakers. 

To protect the new generation – which certainly includes LGBTQ+ youth – the past is a prologue. If we dare to create a more perfect union, we must learn from our history and stand firmly in support of one another to achieve full liberation for us all.

Julio Capó, Jr. teaches history at Florida International University and is the author of the award-winning book "Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940."

In 2022, Alabama lawmakers passed anti-trans legislation that criminalized gender-affirming care and banned K-12 students from using restrooms consistent with their gender identity. LGBTQ+ organizers from across the state rallied for many years against these harmful bills and are still fighting to this day.

Throughout this stressful time, national press discussed the tragedy of being trans in Alabama and told us that the future, for most queer folks, would be of suffering and sadness. We also watched the media interview (mostly) white parents of trans youth, even though we know many Black trans folks are integral to community building in Alabama.

This gap in storytelling brought about Black Trans Futures, an exhibit and storytelling project. In the wake of hate legislation, the ACLU of Alabama and the Knights & Orchids Society (one of the only Black, trans-led healthcare organizations in the country) came together to highlight the futures being built between Black, trans folks. Queer youth and their mentors discussed what keeps us safe, who we show up for, and how we make a road to a Black Trans Future. Here is what they shared:

Credit: Jose Vazquez

Credit: Jose Vazquez

Credit: Jose Vazquez

Along with this storytelling project, we created the Black Trans Futures Organizing School — a month-long intensive program with Black, queer youth from across Alabama. These 10 individuals met weekly to develop their practices of protest, resilience, storytelling, and rest.

For the culmination of this project, all the photographs and interviews were transformed into a one-night only art exhibit at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. This was the first event of its kind at the museum. Trans youth saw themselves on museum walls and shared excitement about the history they’re currently making and the futures they’re building while revering the elders that made it possible.

So what is a Black Trans Future? It’s assuring that all needs are met for the community. It’s helping trans youth step into their power. It’s a liberated future free of harm, full of love, and forever beautiful.

For much of the last century, the “American dream” has centered on homeownership by married, white families. Alongside explicitly racist policies like racial segregation enforced by redlining, banks and realtors routinely rejected applications for mortgage loans and housing from single or divorced adults of any race, prizing the married heterosexual white man as the most “deserving” debtor and homeowner. The further away from this ideal someone happened to live — by virtue of their race, gender, marital status, or sexuality — the less likely they were to find housing outside of the country’s growing and strictly segregated urban centers.

This put many single white people — including gays and lesbians unable to legally marry — in the same housing market as Black and immigrant families, but with their white privilege firmly in hand. Following the distribution of GI grants after World War II, many white gay men found homes in city centers like Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., quickly forming what are still colloquially known as “gayborhoods” — despite the presence of active queer communities within the Black and immigrant neighborhoods which long predated them.

In Washington D.C., for example, Black queer communities had long carved out a public existence under the cruel and enduring shadow of the city’s racial segregation. As early as the 1880s, former slaves such as William Dorsey Swann led drag balls in D.C. to the sensationalized criticism of the city’s white residents, a tradition sustained by the growth of the District’s literary salons and jazz renaissance during the early decades of the 1900s as led by queer poet Alice Dunbar Nelson (a reality that likewise shaped the prominence of queer artists in the more famous Harlem Renaissance). But as the growth of New Deal government agencies during the Great Depression and the military during World War II brought many gay white men to D.C., they took advantage of the city’s housing segregation and displaced many of those same communities, enforcing racial segregation even as they endured sexual segregation.

This process repeated in cities across the country, fostering the national vision of queer urban life as both very white and very male to the exclusion of queer people who were neither. This remained true even as queer people of color played a central role in organizing for queer rights, including during the 1966 uprisings at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco and the more famous 1969 resistance at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. Even after the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 promised the end of both racial and sexual segregation, discriminatory housing practices continued to shape queer urban life.

In the 1980s, as AIDS began to spread through queer communities across the U.S., many portrayed it as a consequence of gay men’s “promiscuity” and their failure to assimilate into that normative straight and white model of the family that realtors and banks still imagined as the ideal homeowner. As economic historian Melinda Cooper has shown, economists went so far as to argue local and federal agencies should withdraw efforts to stop the spread of AIDS in favor of prodding gay men towards marriage as a more “efficient” means of stopping the disease’s spread, integrating them into the heterosexual imperative towards homeownership and thus a more “stable lifestyle.”

In more recent decades, queer urban life has been shaped by further displacement and rising housing costs at the same time the legalization of same-sex marriage made many queer families more attractive to banks and realtors. The flight of many Black families to the suburbs has been followed by an adjacent flight of white queer people starting families and adopting the signifiers of “normalcy” and “stability” denied prior generations.

Housing discrimination against LGBTQ people still persists, particularly for transgender people. Fueled by widespread poverty, employment discrimination, and the criminalization of sex work, trans people continue to be far less likely to be homeowners and far more likely to be homeless than our cisgender peers while struggling to access low-income or even temporary housing. And as the history of LGBTQ housing shows, the present for queer people can’t be untangled from the reality of racism any more than the past.