Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination earlier this week. It was the end of his less-than-year-long presidential bid, in which he has repeatedly attacked the LGBTQ+ community in the hopes of scoring political points with Republicans.
When she saw the news that DeSantis was out of the race, Floridian Simone Chriss said she felt a brief moment of relief.
“Thank God he’s not going to be at the helm of our country,” she recalled thinking.
But Chriss, a civil rights lawyer at Southern Legal Counsel in Gainesville, is also worried about the governor turning his undivided attention back home. “The other side of me was like, ‘He’s not distracted now and campaigning and traveling and focused on the presidency. He’s going to have all of his volatility and hostility and whatever motivates him just to laser focus back on Florida.’”
The last year of campaigning has offered a window into what the future might look like for queer and trans Americans, as a record-breaking number of bills to restrict their access to public spaces and services have been filed in Florida and in statehouses across the country.
DeSantis built his extremely online campaign in part on promises to bring the anti-“woke” agenda he had pushed in Florida to a national stage, making fearmongering attacks on parents of trans kids and highlighting his record of restricting LGBTQ rights in Florida. Shortly after announcing his candidacy, his campaign even shared a cringeworthy, since-deleted video that highlighted the governor’s efforts to curtail the rights of LGBTQ people. This strategy, along with DeSantis’ general awkwardness and hostility to the press, failed spectacularly.
But even with his presidential aspirations ended, advocates and trans Floridians are still worried about other harms DeSantis could inflict on the LGBTQ community. In May 2023 alone, DeSantis signed six anti-LGBTQ bills in Florida, including bills restricting access…
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