How the Slippery Slope of Hate When We’re Silent Leads To Florida Bill
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“You’ve all known me as Wayne, but tomorrow morning I will arrive to work as Wynne.”
Across America, an estimated 1.4 million U.S. adults are transgender—double the number a decade before, according to a University of California, Los Angeles, analysis of government data—and more are coming out on the job. Far fewer have done it while leading a company. Not only has Ms. Nowland had to find support for her transformation in the workplace; she’s had to guide her employees, her board and a number of Bradley & Parker’s thousands of corporate clients through it.
Karen Weber, the firm’s vice president of operations, said the move made her respect Ms. Nowland even more, but she worried at first how some top salespeople and clients would react. “Insurance is a really conservative business,” she said.
Jonathan Carroll is vice president of business development and a member of Bradley & Parker’s executive team who had formed a close friendship with Ms. Nowland over the years. He said his immediate reaction to her news was discomfort. He struggled at first to use her female pronouns.
“I had never met a transgender person before or known someone going through that transition,” he said, adding that he quickly got over it. “How sad would it be for someone to have to live in hiding of who they are.
Nowland told CNBC last year: “I’m much more at peace with myself.”
Nowland is concerned bout the effect proposed Florida bills HB 7 and HB 1557, the “Don’t Say Gay’ bill, and the physical, emotional and psychological effects these bills can have on students, How uninformed legislation furthers prejudices, and fosters further adversity facing LGBT people outside of the school environment.
Nowland says:
It’s hard to imagine how anyone could view this bill as not harmful in all of these ways to the youth in these Florida schools. Schools should normally be places of learning, but also places of safe harbor. Bills like these are generally written by people with absolutely no experience in these very fluid situations. A one-size-fits-all approach never works. We should be encouraging understanding and support for kids. Doing so with finesse and thoughtfulness doesn’t equate to ignoring parental rights. Often the school is the only safe harbor the child has. Obviously removing that safe harbor is likely to be detrimental.”
This kind of legislation is seemingly used to appeal to the most extreme members of conservative parties. I’m pretty sure no LGBTQIA+ experts were consulted by the authors of this bill, yet here we are. I saw a recent poll that said only 34% of Floridians support this bill, but the march to pass it continues. One can only believe that the zeal to do so is to infringe upon the rights of those people in these under represented groups, no matter what the majority of the constituency believes.
This is not by any measure the only negative issue facing the community right now. There absolutely seems to be a coordinated attempt to infringe upon the rights of our people in many conservative-led states. Just yesterday the governor of Texas Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Child Welfare Agency to investigate reports of “gender-transitioning procedures” as child abuse. So, restated, that means a parent or parents working in consultation with medical professionals to come up with a course of action that is best for their child are now subject to investigation as child abusers. If this isn’t government overreach, I don’t know what is. This is the slippery slope that we embark upon when the majority are silent about these kind of governmental actions.
