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Rylan Hynes is an author, artist and communications director living in central Maine.
The suite of eight bills up for consideration in the Maine Legislature targeting transgender people are a localized symptom of a broader national effort to dehumanize the transgender community. They paint us as a dangerous, violent, aggressive, and ambitious opposing team, when in fact, we are all simply Mainers who deserve the same respect and consideration as everyone else, no matter our age.
LDs 233, 380, 868, 1134, 1337, 1432 and 1704 are a blatant attack on the human rights of an extremely vulnerable group of people. According to a 2022 survey from the UCLA Williams Institute, it estimated that 0.6 percent of the population of the United States identifies as transgender. Less than one percent. And yet what percentage of resources, media coverage, and vitriolic legislation has been directed towards attacking the transgender community in recent years?
In 2025 alone, 923 bills in 49 states are being considered that aim to erode human rights protections for transgender people, deny transgender people healthcare, forcibly out transgender students in educational settings, bar transgender athletes from participating in sports, and even block access to bathrooms. Sound familiar? That’s because bills touching on all of those areas of our lives as transgender people are being considered here in Maine. Of those 923 bills nationwide, 113 have already passed.
The LGBTQ+ community is a tight knit group. Word of mouth travels fast, and over the past few years I have seen multiple accounts of people — who have the resources to do so — relocating their lives in more inhospitable states across the country to move to Maine, a place where at least for them, for the time being, it was the way life should be. All these people want, all we want, is a place where we can live safely, where we can access healthcare, send our kids to school, cheer on from the sidelines as they play sports. Who knows, maybe we’ll even use the bathroom while we’re here.
What Maine has the opportunity to do this month is to decide which side of history it will be on. Will we be known as a state that stands by its vulnerable citizens, one that upholds its two-decades of protections for our transgender community? Or will we, like so many other states have been, be cowed by flimsy threats, corrosive rhetoric, and baseless attacks from oppressors who will do anything, say anything it seems, and dehumanize anyone as long as it helps them cling to their fragile power?
There are a number of real, tangible challenges that Mainers are facing, such as lack of affordable housing, hospitals shutting down vital services and wards, recovering from and preparing for extreme weather events, workplace wages not keeping up with the rising cost of living, and ensuring that each home and community in Maine has clean, safe drinking water. These are all issues that deserve our immediate attention.
I believe Maine must remain a safe haven for transgender people. Our human rights must not be up for debate. We, the transgender community, will not be erased, no matter how many strike-throughs appear over us in policy and law. We will not be erased, no matter how much hate is spewed at us. We will not be erased, because we have always been here. And we always will be.
