Former U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, a gay political trailblazer, died Wednesday at 86. Frank was the first member of the U.S. House of Representatives to publicly come out as gay and the first member of Congress to marry a person of the same gender.
Frank was undoubtedly a legend of his time. He represented his Massachusetts district in Congress for more than 30 years, and his high profile helped pave the way for the broader acceptance of gay people we see today. He founded the Stonewall Democrats, a pro-gay caucus focused on advancing LGBTQ rights within the party. He helped pass several pieces of landmark legislation. He was the “Frank” in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 and helped shape the legislation as a co-writer of the bill. He also played a key role in loosening federal regulations on marijuana use and helped pass the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expanded federal hate crime protections to include LGBTQ people. As chairman of the House Financial Services Committee in 2008, he helped bail out the banking system during the Great Recession.
Frank was undoubtedly a legend of his time.
For all the above reasons, Frank was a memorable and monumental lawmaker.
But as eulogies marking his passing begin to flow, many queer people in the U.S. — particularly transgender people who were around for the fights on Capitol Hill in the late 2000s — will be remember other aspects of Frank’s political career with far less fondness and, indeed, with disappointment.
Even as he fought for protections for gay Americans, Frank insisted that trans rights not be included in the protections he was trying to advance on Capitol Hill. In 2007, he triggered a civil war within the LGBTQ rights movement when he stripped trans protections from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill a Democratic supermajority was attempting to pass to give queer people Title IV protection.
That bill was meant to prohibit employees from discrimination based on their sexuality or gender identity, but the inclusion of transgender people left some in the House’s Democratic supermajority worrying it wouldn’t pass. Though Frank agreed to exclude trans people in order to help advance the bill through the House, it ultimately still died in the Senate.
The fight over ENDA nearly ended the queer rights movement, as long-simmering differences came to a head in the debate. Frank and many other centrist figures in the movement, along with the likes of the Human Rights Campaign, fought for the exclusionary bill’s passage, arguing that getting something would be better than getting nothing and that trans people should just wait for society to become more accepting of us.
In response, the more leftist organizations fought back or split entirely from the mainstream queer rights movement.
And in the end, despite the division his fight created, the scheme still didn’t work and the bill failed to pass. Though it’s clear Frank never had a change of heart regarding protections for trans people, in 2009 he introduced a transgender-inclusive version of the bill that passed the Senate but died in the House Rules Committee.
Following the disaster of ENDA, progressives moved on to the Equality Act, which would provide nondiscrimination protections across various parts of civil rights law — including education, employment and public accommodations — for both transgender and gay people.
To date, that bill hasn’t passed. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock that LGBTQ people, both transgender and cisgender, earned equal protection under employment law.
A 2010 article in TransAdvocate, a trans-focused news site that has long documented the trans rights movement, reported multiple public instances of Frank commenting on the private parts of trans women.
In fact, he constantly validated conservative narratives about trans women in women’s spaces. In a 2010 interview with journalist Karen Ocamb, Frank said transgender people with “one set of genitals” would not be able to go to a bathroom for people with another set of genitals. “They can’t sit there with a full beard and a dress,” Frank said.
Many trans people, myself included, never forgave him for that.
Even if there were trans people who were willing to let bygones be bygones, when Frank entered hospice care, he began giving interviews to promote an upcoming book in which he said the key to beating Trump and the conservative movement was to abandon “extremists,” including, for example, trans people who want to use the restroom in peace.
In his dying days, Frank made sure to remind us of his view that the way forward for Democrats is leaving trans people behind.
In an interview for The Atlantic published this week shortly before Frank’s death, the octogenarian scapegoated trans people for Democratic Party failures. As The Atlantic put it, “Frank lamented that by subjecting Democrats to litmus tests on highly controversial issues—such as ‘male-to-female transsexuals playing sports designated for women,’ as he put it—progressives set their causes up for defeat.”
In his dying days, Frank made sure to remind us of his view that the way forward for Democrats is leaving trans people behind.
Frank was one of the architects of the neoliberal political order that is dying on the vine in the face of Trump’s fascism. Supporting trans people and our rights is the right thing to do and that should be good enough for the Democratic Party.
I don’t want to live in the world Frank built, nor his vision for the future where I am a second-class citizen even among the LGBTQ community. He was indisputably a gay trailblazer, but today’s LGBTQ community will take it from here.
Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England.