California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday signed into law bills that include protections for queer children in foster care and require LGBTQ cultural competency training for staff working in public schools. But the day before, the Democrat vetoed a bill requiring judges making custody decisions to take into account a parent’s willingness to affirm their child’s gender identity. Newsom’s decision to sign some pro-LGBTQ bills but reject the one providing guidance in custody battles brings up an important question: Can meaningful allyship be piecemeal?
Selective allyship allows people to work within and support a system that is fundamentally designed to oppress, suppress and kill us.
No, it can’t be.
We’ve heard a lot about performative allyship. Carmen Morris was referring to racism in the workplace when she wrote for Forbes in 2019 that “performative allyship … maintains the status quo and renders illegitimate, any attempts to change processes that support structural racism, and other barriers.” Similarly, for LGBTQ people, selective allyship allows people to work within and support a system that is fundamentally designed to oppress, suppress and kill us. Real allyship would mean supporting calls from within the community for more aggressive overhauls, legislative and otherwise.
California Assemblymember Lori Wilson, the Democrat who proposed the bill, has an adult son who is trans. She said in a statement after the veto that she’d become “disheartened” over the last few years as she watched the rising hate and heard the vitriol toward the trans community. “My intent with this bill was to give them a voice, particularly in the family court system where a non-affirming parent could have a detrimental impact on the mental health and well-being of a child,” she wrote. Affirming a child’s gender identity was just one facet of many the bill proposed in order to ascertain the fitness of a parent during custody battles.
In a statement explaining his veto, Newsom said he supports trans rights, but urges “caution when the Executive and Legislative branches of state government attempt to dictate — in prescriptive terms that single out one characteristic — legal standards for the Judicial branch to apply.” He added, “Other-minded elected officials, in California and other states, could very well use this strategy to diminish the civil rights of vulnerable communities.”
One Democrat, Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil, joined all eight Republicans in California’s Senate to oppose the bill. In the Assembly, all the opposition came from Republicans. By vetoing the legislation, on this issue, Newsom aligned himself with those Republicans.
Conservatives’ political, rhetorical and legislative assaults on LGBTQ rights have been unapologetic and relentless.
Conservatives’ political, rhetorical and legislative assaults on LGBTQ rights have been unapologetic and relentless. From banning drag shows to banning trans athletes to “forced outing” bills that require teachers to tell parents when a child uses a different name or pronouns at school (even if said child does not consent), the GOP has proposed around 500 anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures this year alone. The last few years, we’ve seen other absurd additions to state laws, such as Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. And over a quarter of books banned in public school libraries include some kind of LGBTQ content.
“We have seen the scope and scale of these attacks increase over the last few years, starting around 2020-2021,” Gillian Branstetter, communications strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union, told CNN. “This year, it’s not just the total number that has gotten worse, but the extremity of the bills.”
Sincere and effective LGBTQ allyship and advocacy would mean meeting this onslaught with equal force, which selective allyship cannot do.
The authors of “Constructing Allyship and the Persistence of Inequality,” published in the journal Social Problems in 2021, examine how so-called allies at colleges “construct allyship in ways that ultimately reproduce patterns of social inequality.”
This pattern of convenient and selective allyship is well documented and, under the guise of progress, hinders the rights of the most vulnerable. Think of the white suffragists who made the conscious decision to exclude BIPOC people from their movement. Women of color did not have their right to vote ensured until four decades later.
Piecemeal support is not an option if queer people are to survive the ongoing assault on LGBTQ rights.
Yes, full-throated allyship is complicated. The LGBTQ community is not a monolith, and disparate stakeholders with disparate interests within the community lead to wide-ranging demands. In fact, a study on what allyship means to queer university students, published in 2020 in Sociological Perspectives, found “varied expectations for allies.” The study found that “diverse expectations complicate allyship as a form of support or advocacy between privileged and marginalized groups.”
That said, piecemeal support is not an option if queer people are to survive the ongoing assault on LGBTQ rights. Ensuring protections for trans youth, one of the most vulnerable subpopulations under the LGBTQ umbrella, should be non-negotiable. While the protections Newsom signed into law are encouraging within a vacuum, they aren’t nearly enough. Newsom — legislatively giving with one hand, while taking away with another — offers precisely the kind of insufficient allyship that will let the right win this war.
Noor Noman is a writer focused on culture, race and LGBTQ issues.