Pupils must now have their parents’ or guardians’ permission to use a different name and pronouns at school, according to a memo sent to teachers and administrators, per Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Students will have to request the change to school staff, who will then notify administrators and school counsellors. When the young person’s parent or guardian gives consent, they must have a meeting with their family, school counsellor and administrator to complete a “Gender Support Plan”.
If they don’t receive permission, the young person will have to be deadnamed and misgendered by staff.
“If a student tells us that (they) are gay/gender questioning/trans, etc, parent must be notified,” the guidance says.
The new policy is a dizzying shift from the country’s previous view on LGBTQ+ pupils, where schools left it “up to the student, and the student alone, to share her/his/their identity”.
Board members did not vote for the 2018 policy to be scrapped. Instead, district officials say the change was done to comply with the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill and will be under review for several months.
But School Board members are divided about the new policy.
“The change is a win for parents, students, teachers and allows for the integrity of our public education institutions to be restored,” Sarasota school board member Bridget Ziegler told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Ziegler advised that outed students who feel unsafe seek help from district officials that report to the Florida Department of Children and Families.
School Board officials clashed on the new guidelines during a 10 August workshop, with one expressing unease at what little protections schools will now offer queer students.
School Board chair Jane Goodwin said she opposes the new policy.
“We’re at a precipice in not being able to support students as we have done in the past, which I thought was done in a good way, in a kind way, in a thoughtful way, in a way that protected students and kept them safe,” she said in a statement.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 1557 on 28 March. The legislation bans public schools from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade, or through the 12th grade if deemed “age-appropriate” by parents and guardians.
The backlash was swift. The White House, Disney, Hollywood celebrities and countless LGBTQ+ campaign groups called out the bill for robbing queer children of their childhoods.
Since silencing classrooms, Florida has already found a new target, In just days, a ban on trans Floridians using Medicaid, a public health insurance programme for low-income people, to obtain gender-affirming healthcare will come into force.
The state of Idaho has been ordered to pay $321,224.50 in legal fees because of an anti-transgender law it passed in 2020 that had already been ruled unconstitutional.
In 2018, U.S. Magistrate Judge Candy Dale ruled that it was unconstitutional for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW) to completely block transgender people from correcting the gender marker on their birth certificates. That case was brought by a transgender woman who was called a “tra**y” and a “fa***t” at a Social Security office when she showed them her birth certificate.
In 2020, state Rep. Julianne Young (R) introduced a bill to ban changes to birth certificates outside of a narrow set of exemptions. She claimed that the birth certificate is a “historical document” and that allowing transgender people to have birth certificates that reflect who they are threatens women.
“There is an ongoing discussion about this, but I will tell you, as a woman who is aware of the crime statistics related to the vulnerability of females as a group, this concerns me,” Young said at the time.
Later in 2020, Judge Dale ruled that IDHW had to follow her ruling and let transgender people correct the gender markers on their birth certificates.
The plaintiffs not only succeeded in getting the state to follow the Constitution, but they asked the court to have the state pay their attorneys’ fees. Instead of getting the nearly $450,000 that they initially requested, Dale awarded them $321,224.50.
The ruling would not have surprised opponents of the 2020 bill. State Rep. John Gannon (D) said at the time that it would be “a legal disaster” that would open the state up to “an expensive losing lawsuit paid for by taxpayers” since a federal judge had already ruled against it.
A hit-and-run car crash that killed three men and injured another in front of a Black-owned gay bar early Sunday morning “appears to be intentional,” the Chicago Police Department said in a press conference Monday. Officials said the incident is not currently being investigated as a hate crime.
Police said the crash occurred after an argumentinside the Jeffrey Pub turned into a physical altercation on the street. At one point, one of the parties involved got into his car and slammed it against the group standing outside the pub. Officials said they recovered the vehicle that rammed into four men outside the bar, but they are still searching for the driver.
Brendan Deenihan, the department’s chief of detectives, is asking the public to come forward with information.
“You can’t charge a car with a crime, obviously,” Deenihan said. “We need to know who the driver was, and we know that people out there know that.”
The four male victims were taken to local hospitals, with three succumbing to their injuries, according to the police.
The deceased victims were identified as Donald Huey, 25, Jaylen Ausley, 23, and Devonta Vivetter, 27, according to Brittany Hill, a spokesperson for the Cook County Bureau of Administration. The surviving victim has not been named publicly and is still hospitalized, according to NBC Chicago.
Dashcam footage of the incident obtained by NBC Chicago shows several people on the street when a physical altercation broke out. The video also shows the moments just before the car is about to hit the men but does not show the actual hit-and-run incident.
A woman who witnessed the crash said she saw a car speeding down the street before “a lot of chaos” ensued.
“I was standing outside the bar talking to one of the victims,” she said. “I took like three steps, and a car came and hit him, and he flew over the car.”
The Jeffrey Pub shared a message on Facebook about the sad episode, offering condolences to the victims’ families and encouraging anyone with information to come forward.
“Our hearts heavy this morning that such tragic event has occurred,” the post stated. “And to those that lost a loved one or friend we stand with you.”
Residents of a small town in western Michigan helped raise almost $100,000 for their local library after it was defunded over the inclusion of LGBTQ books.
Primary voters in Jamestown Township, a community 20 miles east of Lake Michigan, rejected a proposal last week to renew tax funds to support the Patmos Library in nearby Hudsonville that serves Jamestown and the surrounding area. The rejection, which passed with nearly two-thirds voter approval, eliminates 84% of the public library’s annual budget, or $245,000.
Larry Walton, the library’s board president, told local news site Bridge Michigan that he was not expecting the loss of funds and that the library would likely run out of money late next year without those tax dollars.
“The library is the center of the community,” he said. “For individuals to be short-sighted to close that down over opposing LGBTQ is very disappointing.”
Walton did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment.
Two days after the vote, Jesse Dillman, a Jamestown resident and father of two, launched an online fundraiser to help raise the $245,000 to keep the library open.
“I am very passionate about this, and I have people that are behind me to do this,” he said in an interview. “I think I have to do it now, because the iron is hot. If this is going to happen, it’s going to happen now.”
As of Thursday morning, approximately 1,800 people had contributed more than $90,000. While many of those donors are local, people from as far away as Australia have contributed, Dillman said.
One donor, Michigan librarian Beth Pierson, wrote on the fundraising page: “I’m saddened and scared by what I’m seeing across the country regarding the attempts to limit freedom of access to information. Thank you for stepping up to do the right thing for the Patmos Library!”
Another donor, Georgia resident Shereen Mendelson, wrote, “People who ban books are never written well in history. You have my support from Georgia!”
More support came from a second donation page created by Michelle Barrows, also a resident of Jamestown. As of Thursday morning, she had raised almost $5,000.
Efforts to discontinue funding for the library can also be found on social media. In May, a private Facebook group called Jamestown Conservatives was launched. The group, which as of Thursday morning had 158 members, states that it was “created to help others of the community to be aware of the pushed agenda of explicit sexual content that is being infiltrated into our local libraries aiming toward our children.” The page also states that it stands to “keep our children safe” and “keep the nuclear family intact as God designed.”
The page administrator, Lauren Elyse, did not respond to a request for comment.
The controversy in Jamestown is part of a larger national debate over access to LGBTQ books in public libraries and schools. This debate has accelerated over the past year, with the American Library Association issuing a statement in November warning of a “dramatic uptick in book challenges and outright removal of books from libraries.” The association said LGBTQ books and books by Black authors were being targeted in particular. In 2021, five of the 10 most challenged and banned books in the United States were flagged because of their LGBTQ content, according to the group’s annual Top 10 Most Challenged Books list.
During a two-hour-long Patmos Library board meeting Monday, residents spoke both in favor of and against funding the library, WOOD-TV reported that most of the speakers were in favor.
Among the speakers was a former library employee.
“The purpose of a public library is to serve the public,” she said. “That includes everyone of all backgrounds, beliefs and interests. That means having material available from all viewpoints and topics, not what just makes some people comfortable. If you don’t agree with something, don’t check it out. That’s the beauty of a library. You have the choice to come in by yourself or your family and make the selections that best fit you.”
At the conclusion of the meeting, the board voted unanimously to place the issue of funding on the town’s November ballot.
Following Monday’s meeting, Dillman said he’s optimistic that the library will be able to get its funding back. In addition to continuing his fundraising efforts, he said he signed up to be on an independent town committee to help secure tax dollars for the library.
Anti-LGBTQ hate surged onlinefollowing the passage of a Florida law thatlimits classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, a new report found.
This particular surge involves rhetoric implying that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people are “grooming” childrenand includes such slurs as “groomer,” “pedophile” and “predator” in relation to the LGBTQ community.
The month after the Florida Senate passed the Parental Rights in Education bill, or what critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, on March 8, tweets mentioning the LGBTQ community alongside these slurs increased 406%, according to the report, which was conducted by the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign and the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.
The law, which took effect July 1, bans instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity “in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
To evaluate the increase in rhetoric related to “grooming”, researchers collected a sample of 989,547 tweets that were posted between Jan. 1 and July 27 and that mentioned the LGBTQ community alongside words including “groomer” and “pedophile.” They found that an average of 6,607 tweets a day used such rhetoric in the month after the bill passed, a significant increase from 1,307 tweets the month before.
On March 28, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the bill into law, there was also a marked increase in the use of the “#OKGroomer” hashtag, which the report said was often used as a derogatory response to tweets from LGBTQ educators, organizations and health care providers, among others. On the day after DeSantis signed the bill, “OK groomer” tweets peaked with 9,219 total, or about one every nine seconds, the report found.
“Grooming” rhetoric was spread by a “small group of radical extremists as part of a coordinated and concerted effort to attack LGBTQ+ kids to rile up extreme members of their base,” the report said.
Tweets from just 10 people — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’ press secretary — were viewed an estimated 48 million times and were “responsible for driving” the “grooming” narrative, researchers found.
“We’re in the middle of a growing wave of hate and demonization targeting LGBTQ+ people — often distributed digitally by opportunistic politicians and so-called ‘influencers’ for personal gain,” Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said in a statement, according to a press release. “Online hate and lies reflect and reinforce offline violence and hate. The normalization of anti-LGBTQ+ narratives in digital spaces puts LGBTQ+ people in danger.”
In an emailed statement, Pushaw stressed that Florida’s new law affects those in “kindergarten through third grade.” However, critics of the law argue the language can be applied to those beyond grade 3.
“By definition, then, opponents of the law support adults talking to young children about sex and gender behind their parents’ backs. If you know a politically correct word for such behavior, I’ll gladly use it instead,” she said. “There are groomers of all sexual orientations and gender identities. My tweets did not mention LGBTQ people at all. Florida’s parental rights law likewise does not single out any identity or orientation.”
Pushaw added, “The only side playing into the hands of bigots, are the progressive activists who pretend that ‘grooming’ is somehow unique to the ‘LGBTQ community.’ It is not, and I do not understand why the Human Rights Campaign would want the public to think otherwise.”
A spokesperson for Greene did not answer questions about the report’s findings but encouraged NBC News to “be objective” and shared several links to the congresswoman’s Twitter posts and articles from the conservative news site Washington Examiner.
Boebert did not immediately return a request for comment.
Ahmed said Facebook and Twitter claim in their rules that they prohibit the use of “grooming” rhetoric to target LGBTQ people, but the report found that the platforms don’t always enforce those rules.
Researchers used Twitter’s “Report an issue” feature to report the 100 most-viewed tweets that used “grooming” rhetoric after July 21, when Twitter told the Daily Dot that calling transgender people “groomers” violates its policy against hateful conduct.
Twitter didn’t act on 99% of the 100 tweets, the report found.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Twitter confirmed that use of the term “groomer” is prohibited under the site’s policy when it is used as a descriptor “in the context of gender identity.” The spokesperson said Twitter remains committed to combating abuse motivated by hatred or intolerance.
Researchers identified a similar problem on Facebook, whose parent company, Meta, also told the Daily Dot that calling LGBTQ people “groomers” violates existing policy.
Researchers identified 59 paid ads on Facebook and Instagram that promote the narrative that the LGBTQ community and its allies are “grooming” children. After researchers reported them, Meta removed only one of the ads and has continued to accept and run other similar ads since, the report said.
The report also found that Meta profited off the ads. According to statistics from Meta’s Ad Library, the company accepted up to $24,987 in payment for the 59 ads, which received more than 2.1 million impressions, the report said.
“The clear message from social media giants is that they are willing to turn a blind eye,” Ahmed said. “LGTBQ+ rights have been transformed after decades of hard-won progress, but progress is fragile unless you continue to defend it.”
A Meta spokesperson said in an email, “We reviewed the ads flagged in the report and have taken action on any content that violates our policies.”
Joni Madison, interim president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement that the rise of online vitriol “doesn’t just have political implications — there are deadly, real world consequences as violent rhetoric leads to stigma, radicalization, and ultimately violence.”
The report provides recommendations to Facebook and Twitter, including that they hire, train and support moderators to remove hate and enforce their community standards, act on hashtags that fuel anti-LGBTQ hate, and be liable for harm when they fail to enforce their community standards.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf signed an executive order Tuesday to ban conversion therapy, a discredited form of therapy that seeks to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, for minors.
The executive order directs state agencies to discourage conversion therapy for people of all ages, and to instead promote evidence-based practices for supporting LGBTQ people. The order also directs the Department of Human Services, among other agencies, to ensure that state funds are not being used to provide or reimburse for conversion therapy.
“Conversion therapy is a traumatic practice based on junk science that actively harms the people it supposedly seeks to treat,” Wolf, a Democrat, said in a statement. “This discriminatory practice is widely rejected by medical and scientific professionals and has been proven to lead to worse mental health outcomes for LGBTQIA+ youth subjected to it. This is about keeping our children safe from bullying and extreme practices that harm them.”
Survivors of conversion therapy have said that it can include talk therapy and being urged to take on traditional gender roles. A 2020 United Nations report found that it can also include more extreme practices such as aversion therapy, which can involve administering electric shock or medication to induce nausea while exposing the patient to same-sex erotic images.
The executive order makes Pennsylvania the 26th state to at least partially bar the practice for minors, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank. Twenty other states and Washington, D.C., completely ban the practice, while five states partially ban conversion therapy for minors. A federal court has barred three states — Alabama, Georgia and Florida — from enforcing conversion therapy bans. The remaining 21 states have no law or policy on conversion therapy.
Mathew Shurka, a conversion therapy survivor and co-founder of Born Perfect, a national campaign to end conversion therapy, said Wolf is “taking a critical step to protect LGBTQ minors” in Pennsylvania.
“LGBTQ kids and their families are targeted by so-called therapists causing lifelong harm,” Shurka said in a statement. “This executive order demonstrates that our political offices have the power to protect our youth and it is their responsibility to do so.”
The governor’s executive order cited research that has found conversion therapy contributes to negative mental health outcomes among LGBTQ youth.
A national survey published in March by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, found that 13% of all LGBTQ respondents ages 13-24 reported being subjected to conversion therapy, and 83% of those reported being subjected to it before they turned 18. The number was higher for transgender and nonbinary young people, 18% of whom reported being subjected to conversion therapy.
A 2020 peer-reviewed study published by The Trevor Project in the American Journal of Public Health found that LGBTQ youth who experienced conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to report having attempted suicide than youth who had not experienced it, and more than 2.5 times as likely to report multiple suicide attempts in the past year.
“Taxpayers’ dollars must never again be spent on the dangerous and discredited practice of conversion ‘therapy’ — which has been consistently associated with increased suicide risk and an estimated $9.23 billion economic burden in the U.S.,” Troy Stevenson, senior campaign manager for advocacy and government affairs at The Trevor Project, said in a statement citing the research the group published in March.
He added, “We urge the state legislature to pass comprehensive state-wide protections and for governors across the nation to follow the Keystone State’s lead in ending this abusive practice.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
A school librarian in Louisiana is suing two conservative activists for defamation after they falsely accused her of putting “pornographic” material in local libraries.
“I’ve had enough for everybody,” Amanda Jones, a librarian at a middle school in Denham Springs, Louisiana and president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, told NBC News. “Nobody stands up to these people. They just say what they want and there are no repercussions and they ruin people’s reputations and there’s no consequences.”
Jones’s suit, filed last week, argues that Facebook pages run by Michael Lunsford and Ryan Thames falsely labeled her a pedophile after she spoke against censorship at a July 19 Livingston Parish Library Board of Control meeting. She has also filed criminal complaints with the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office against Lunsford and Thames.
During public comment at the July 19 board meeting, Jones voiced her concern that a motion under consideration to evaluate the content of certain sex education books available at the public library would lead to the banning of books containing LGBTQ content.
“‘While book challenges are often done with the best intentions, and in the name of age appropriateness, they often target marginalized communities such as BIPOC and the LBGTQ community,” Jones said at the meeting according to the lawsuit.
“The citizens of our parish consist of taxpayers who are white, Black, brown, gay, straight, Christian, non-Christian, people from all backgrounds and walks of life, and no one portion of the community should dictate what the rest of the citizens have access to. Just because you don’t want to read it or see it, it doesn’t give you the right to deny others or demand its relocation.”
“If we remove or relocate books with LBGTQ or sexual health content, what message is that sending to our community members? Why is your belief system any more important than others’?”
Lunsford, who runs conservative group Citizens for a New Louisiana, attended the meeting and spoke in favor of restricting books with sexual content. In the weeks following the meeting, Citizens for a New Louisiana’s Facebook page posted numerous posts about Jones.
“Why is she fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kid’s section?” one post, which featured Jones’s picture, read.
Thames’s “Bayou State of Mind” Facebook page also posted a meme depicting Jones and accused her of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.”
Jones said she has not left her house in two weeks due to comments on some posts encouraging violence against her. At the same time, she has raised $20,000 to fund her lawsuit against Lunsford and Thames via a GoFundMe campaign.
“If this takes four or five years, I’m going to fight these people on this,” she said. “Even if I lose, I could say I stood up to them.”
Janani Ramachandran, 30, says she’s always lived at the intersection of two isolations.
As an openly gay South Asian woman growing up post-9/11, she felt that few people could understand her specific experience — and that representation was nonexistent.
“I think it definitely is difficult for LGBTQ South Asians to feel their full selves in different spaces,” she told NBC Asian America. “I can feel uncomfortable in predominantly LGBTQ spaces, because I see very few people that look like me. In predominantly South Asian spaces, I also sometimes feel uncomfortable in not being reflected.”
Running for Oakland City Council this year, Ramachandran hopes to change that. If she’s successful, she’ll be the city’s first South Asian councilmember and the only LGBTQ woman councilmember in the state.
Her run is reflective of what experts say is a demographic shift in the country’s politics. Since 2018, the number of LGBTQ Asians running for office has more than doubled. This year, that group is bigger than ever.
“We’re navigating a very challenging last couple of years with anti-Asian hate combined with anti-LGBTQ hate,” said Albert Fujii, press secretary of Victory Fund, an organization that supports LGBTQ people in politics. “It really says something about these candidates that they’re willing to be very visible.”
Two years into the Stop Asian Hate movement, Fujii says the changing climate for Asians has caused a dramatic increase in community members getting political.
“I think that for so many folks who are interested in public service, sometimes it takes an event or a rough couple of years to be the catalyst for getting to that moment where enough is enough,” he said.
In 2018, only 20 candidates nationwide identified as both Asian and LGBTQ. In 2020, that number only marginally increased, with 23 Asian LGBTQ names on the ballot. This year, there are 41, according to Victory Fund.
“Obviously, we have a long way to go in terms of addressing that representation gap,” Fujii said. “But we’ve come a long way.”
Sam Park, 36, a Korean American and the first openly gay man ever elected to Georgia’s state Legislature, says being the only Asian person at his Atlanta elementary school was surprisingly good practice.
“I was terrified of running as an openly gay candidate, especially with my experience of growing up as a gay Asian in the South,” said Park, who is a Democrat and was elected in 2016. “As a son of immigrants who came from humble beginnings, politics seemed inaccessible.”
He watched laws pass over the years codifying discrimination in Georgia and demonizing the LGBTQ community. Even in his own home, he said, he battled layers of conservatism.
“One was just being in the South and being in a conservative culture,” he said. “That was reinforced by growing up in a Korean house, which leans more conservative. … And then, I grew up a Southern Baptist. So I heard growing up that if you’re gay you’re an abomination. You go to hell.”
He spent his youth and early 20s reconciling being Korean American and being gay, he said, and as a community leader, both now feed seamlessly into his work. Much of his time in office is spent combating anti-Asian hate, whether that be granular incidents of violence or organized rhetoric from political machines.
“The blatant xenophobia and racism that we’ve seen from Trump and Republicans in trying to scapegoat Asian Americans for the worst public health crisis in this country’s history,” he said. “I think it’s really made us [Asian Americans] understand why political participation is so important.”
Running for reelection, he sees an entirely different landscape for Asian representation than when he first started.
“When it comes to Asian American political power and participation, we’ve seen a marked increase over the past five to six years, but really highlighted during the 2020 election,” he said. “In 2016, I was the only Asian American serving in the state Legislature. Now, I think there’s five or six, and each of them have made history in their own right.”
Having lived in both the U.S. and India, Ramachandran says she can draw parallels.
“Bangalore shows a lot of the same problems that Oakland does when it comes to gentrification, affordable housing, pollution, infrastructure and, of course, corruption,” she said.
She’s grown up watching her mom fear dealing with police, and she’s experienced firsthand the misogyny that comes with trying to succeed as a woman. When she ran for the California state Assembly last year, she recalls many people in her life urging her not to.
But her campaign was more successful than she could have imagined, she said. After making it to the runoff, she ultimately lost to Mia Bonta.
The race ahead feels distinct, she said. There’s a potential for it to culminate in many “firsts” for her, but overall, Ramachandran says it represents a much broader cultural shift in who gets to run for office.
“I remember so clearly everyone telling me not to do it just over a year ago,” she said. “I want to show people that this is changing. Voters are ready for things that are new. And if we’re going to say we support LGBTQ leadership, API, women leadership, our own communities have to step up.”
Leigh Finke has won Tuesday’s Democratic primary election for Minnesota’s state House district 66A. The journalist, advocate, and filmmaker will now advance to November’s general election, where she will face off against Republican nominee Trace Johnson.
A win in November would make Finke the first out transgender state legislator ever elected in Minnesota.
On Tuesday morning, Finke posted a photo of herself and her team on Twitter, along with a simple celebratory message: “We did it. We won.”
Endorsed by the LGBTQ Victory Fund, Finke was named one of the organization’s “Spotlight Candidates.”
“From safeguarding abortion rights to addressing economic inequality to expanding protections for trans people, Leigh has a persuasive and critically important agenda that voters are clearly enthusiastic about,” Victory Fund president and CEO Mayor Annise Parker said in a statement Tuesday. “We are confident Leigh’s win tonight is a clear sign to our community—and LGBTQ kids in particular—that hate will not triumph. Leaders like Leigh prove over and over again that our community is strong, united and ready to lead our nation into a kinder and more accepting future. Backing down has never been in our DNA, especially when our freedoms are on the ballot.”
Last year, Finke spoke at a rally for former Hastings, Minnesota, school board chair Kelsey Waits, who faced harassment after her daughter Kit was outed as transgender.
“Kit’s trans identity was turned against their mother,” Finke said. “This is a despicable, vile act that must be condemned.”
“Take a look around,” she said. “This is what happens when trans kids are attacked. We show up. We show up and that’s not going to stop.”
Becca Balint, Vermont’s state Senate president, has won the Democratic nomination for the state’s at-large congressional seat, NBC News projects.
The victory makes her likely to become the first woman to represent the heavily Democratic state in Congress. Vermont is the only state that has never had a female member of its congressional delegation.
Balint, a state senator since 2014 who rose to Senate president two years ago, would also be the first openly gay lawmaker to represent the state on Capitol Hill should she win in November.
Balint, 54, a progressive Democrat backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and the Vermont icons Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the co-founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, defeated Lt. Gov. Molly Gray.
The more centrist Gray had the backing of fellow Democrats like former Vermont Govs. Madeline Kunin and Howard Dean, while retiring Sen. Pat Leahy had donated $5,000 to her campaign.
Leahy’s retirement announcement set the race for the House seat in motion. Democratic Rep. Peter Welch is running for the seat he is vacating.
Leahy, a Democrat, was elected to the Senate in 1974. Sanders, an independent and a former at-large representative, was elected to the Senate in 2006, the same year Welch was elected to the House.
The state has only three representatives in Congress — its two senators and an at-large House member.