City Council of New Orleans:

As a progressive city in a conservative state, we need to protect the vulnerable communities that make New Orleans so wonderful from attacks from state and federal legislation. LGBTQ people represent a huge portion of the culture bearers, local organizers, and the service industry that keeps our tourism economy bustling.  Imagine our city without our performers, our activists, our tour guides, our bartenders, our servers, or our baristas.  With increasing anti-trans rhetoric from state and federal levels, New Orleans’ transgender community faces an existential threat to our health, our safety, and our basic dignity, intending to force us out of town, into closets, or into mental health crises.  As laws not founded in reality attack trans students in schools, employees at work, and private individuals in their doctors’ offices, New Orleans needs to improve upon its existing legislation to create a city that is a true safe haven for its trans residents.

New Orleans’ City Council has already passed a declaration of solidarity with the LGBTQIA+ community, but it does not have the teeth to take legal action against discriminatory parties, nor does it protect those providing or seeking gender-affirming healthcare with any formal regulations.  Additionally, the City’s HR codes surrounding gender identity are vague and often incorrect, accidentally attributing gender identity only to trans individuals. 

Our state has already passed legislation refusing coverage of HRT and affirming care for minors and those on Medicaid, and appears to be preparing to ban life-saving affirming care for every trans person in Louisiana. It is restricting which shelters and public facilities transgender individuals can use, even though trans people are at a higher risk of receiving violence rather than enacting it. Louisiana has enacted laws requiring the forced outing of students to potentially hostile families. It is barring teachers from using the names and pronouns that make students feel seen and safe, and locking transgender kids out of their bathrooms at school.  Despite well-documented research indicating that acceptance and healthcare reduce suicide rates in trans kids, teens, and adults.  State laws ban gender affirming surgery on minors, but explicitly make an exception for modifying the bodies of intersex children, often with no medical reason and without the child’s knowledge or consent.   

To create a safe haven for the transgender community, we demand that New Orleans look to other “blue-dot” cities such as Columbia, MO and Dane County Wisconsin, to create strong legislation to protect the trans and LGBTQIA+ community.  Such an ordinance would include:

• Protected medical care and the freedom to seek it, giving minimal priority to enforcing laws prosecuting doctors for providing affirming healthcare, patients for seeking it, or families and friends transporting patients to receive care.
• Refusing to consider affirming a child’s gender, socially or medically, as child abuse and deprioritizing the enforcement of laws that do   
• Protecting the sanctity of queer families-those with trans kids and trans parents
• Non-enforcement of hateful anti-trans laws including: bathroom bills, drag bans, and laws banning trans people from using certain public facilities, such as shelters.
• Noncompliance with or deprioritizing of requests for medical records intended to out trans people 
• Protecting queer youth from forced outing at schools
• Non-enforcement of policies prohibiting the use of students’ chosen name and pronouns, and any other affirming treatment by teachers
• Workplace protections for trans employees, including categorizing misgendering as sexual harassment and requiring affirming care coverage for employees of city contractors
• Provision of updated intersex healthcare education to the city’s pediatric medical professionals 
• A revision of citywide HR policy and definitions to properly reflect gender identity and protect workers around the city

Such protections would not only give trans and queer New Orleanians a place to safely live to their fullest potentials, but would make New Orleans one of the few cities in the south that can protect other queer southerners, keeping them closer to their families as they seek the medical care, education, and happiness they deserve.