Take Out Trans, and It Passes in a Minute
Pelosi refused.
Pelosi refused. The people who pressured her never left.
I am a transgender woman. In 2009, before I had the word for what I was, a group of people in Washington decided that protecting people like me was part of a hate crimes bill you could give away to make it move faster.
They were wrong about who would let them. Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House, has now put their offer on the record. “People told me, ‘You can pass this in a minute if you take out trans,’” she told the Washington Blade this June. “I said, ‘I won’t pass it in 100 years because I’m not ever taking out trans.’ We passed it with trans protections included.”
The headlines that followed called it good news, and it is. Read the sentence again, though, and notice what it assumes. Before anyone could refuse to take trans people out, someone had to ask. The story worth telling is not the refusal. It is the request.
So I want to ask the question that the celebration skips. Who wanted trans people cut from a law about violence, and what did they think they would get for it?
What the law actually says
Start with the part that is not in dispute. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act became law on October 28, 2009. The statute it created, 18 U.S.C. § 249, makes it a federal crime to injure a person for their actual or perceived “religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.” Gender identity is in the text. Pelosi’s “we passed it with trans protections included” is not a memory she is polishing. It is the law of the United States.
Which means the pressure she describes was a push to write a smaller law. One that would have said the federal government takes violence against a gay man seriously and has nothing to say about violence against a trans woman. That smaller law had supporters in both parties. Some of them were supposed to be on my side.
Inside the tent
The pressure on Pelosi was neither hypothetical nor new. Two years earlier, the same maneuver had already run in her own chamber, with her cooperation.
In the fall of 2007, Representative Barney Frank took the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill barring employers from firing workers for being gay or transgender, and split it. He introduced a version covering sexual orientation that dropped gender identity, arguing the votes for an inclusive bill were not there. The gay-only version passed the House 235-184 on November 7, 2007. Pelosi brought it to the floor.
The reaction told everyone what had happened. More than 300 LGBTQ organizations formed a coalition called United ENDA to fight the split, refusing a bill that protected part of the community by leaving the rest out. Frank’s defense then is the same one offered for every version of this trade. Years later, he put it plainly: the transgender community, he told Georgia Voice, had a “mistaken view that if Nancy Pelosi waved a magic wand, transgender would be included,” and the votes simply were not there.
To her credit, Pelosi spent that fight trying to undo the damage, backing an effort by Representative Tammy Baldwin to restore gender identity. That effort was lost. The lesson she seems to have taken from it shows up two years later, when the people doing the vote math came back with the same offer on hate crimes, and she refused it. That is the inside of the tent: trans people as the part you sacrifice for the win, and one leader who decided, the second time, not to.
