After South Dakota’s primary election results rolled in earlier this month, Amy Rambow bought herself a chocolate cake to celebrate.
“It tasted so, so sweet,” Rambow says, noting that the gooey confection was slathered in fudge drizzle.
Her doctors say she isn’t allowed to have sweets because of her gastric bypass surgery, but the occasion called for a little risk-taking: State Sen. Fred Deutsch (R), the state’s most controversial far-right legislator, had been voted out in the GOP primaries. First elected to the state legislature in 2014, he was defeated 51% to 49% by state Rep. Stephanie Sauder (R), losing by just 64 votes. He is contesting the results, but multiple sources in South Dakota say the difference, while slim, would be near-impossible to overcome. (Deutsch’s own Wikipedia page reports that he lost the race.)
The lawmaker’s near-guaranteed defeat certainly inspired strong reactions from South Dakota’s LGBTQ+ community after years of legislation targeting trans rights. In 2016, Deutsch became one of the first lawmakers in the country to introduce a bill seeking to bar trans students from using restrooms and locker rooms consistent with their identities. Although the bathroom ban was vetoed by Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R), Deutsch introduced new anti-LGBTQ+ legislation almost every term, finally getting a victory in 2023 when Gov. Kristi Noem (R) signed his bill restricting doctors in the state from providing trans medical care to minors. (Noem has also approved a law preventing trans student athletes from competing on sports teams in alignment with their gender.)
Rambow’s family was among those affected by Deutsch’s hyperfocus on opposing LGBTQ+ equality. Her son is transgender, and when a queer classmate took her own life in 2019, Rambow founded Watertown Love, a support group for LGBTQ+ youth and adults. Although Rambow lives just outside of Deutsch’s district, many of the families who attend its monthly meetings are his constituents and have been directly impacted by his extremist rhetoric. In 2020, the lawmaker compared necessary transition care to Nazi medical experiments.
“It’s taxing on you,” she says. “It’s stressful. It’s emotional. There’s so much more in South Dakota to worry about, that really needs attention and is just not dealt with. We’re last in teacher pay and in infrastructure. One of our reservations has the highest suicide rate in the nation.”
Civil rights advocates hope that Deutsch’s probable ouster is a sign that the Republican Party is slowly shifting away from the anti-LGBTQ+ hostility that had defined the post-Obama political landscape. Of the more than 520 bills targeting the community to be put forward to state legislatures in the U.S. this year, 39 have been signed into law, according to data provided directly by the Human Rights Campaign. While that is a significant number, Cathryn Oakley, HRC’s senior director of legal policy, notes that it’s much lower than the 90 laws that were enacted during the previous year’s legislative session. The majority of state legislatures have wrapped for the year, and advocates expect that few more laws will be passed in 2024.
“It’s not that they haven’t continued to try,” Oakley says. “They’ve continued to introduce anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, but there’s a diminished appetite for it. These pieces of legislation that have been put forward by powerful anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups who have been convincing legislators that this is a winning issue. Legislators are starting to see that that’s just not true.”
For the better part of the past decade, stoking fears of trans visibility served a specific purpose for the GOP. After Republicans lost a decades-long battle against marriage equality in the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex unions in all 50 states, targeting trans rights kept their base mobilized, as conservative activist Terry Schilling admitted to The New York Times last year. “We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” said Schilling, president of the anti-LGBTQ+ lobby group American Principles Project. “And we threw everything at the wall.” Recent election results, however, suggest that momentum could be fading.
“These pieces of legislation that have been put forward by powerful anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups who have been convincing legislators that this is a winning issue. Legislators are starting to see that that’s just not true.”
Cathryn Oakley
Across the country, school board candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty—a far-right group that has campaigned against LGBTQ+ inclusion in schools—lost 67% of their races in 2023. That win rate is 14 percentage points lower than the year prior, according to the nonprofit think tank Brookings Institute. In the same election cycle, Kentucky—one of America’s most conservative states—reelected Gov. Andy Beshear (D), who has repeatedly vetoed anti-trans legislation, over Secretary of State Daniel Cameron (R), who campaigned against trans inclusion in sports.
As anti-LGBTQ+ candidates come up short at the ballot box, their queer opponents are continuing to fare well. At least 238 LGBTQ+ hopefuls won office in 2023, the largest-ever field in a year without a presidential election or midterm races. Those wins include a record number of LGBTQ+ state lawmakers in Virginia, where Danica Roem became just the second trans state senator in U.S. history. In this year’s Texas Democratic primaries, Lauren Ashley Simmons, a queer progressive, crushed incumbent state House Rep. Shawn Thierry (D), who broke with her party to vote in favor of a medical ban for trans youth in 2023. Simmons won by 29 points.
Sean Meloy, vice president for political programs for the pro-LGBTQ+ political action group Victory Fund, says advocates expect to see queer candidates break records again in the 2024 presidential election. He says what’s often referred to as the “Rainbow Wave” shows that Americans are wising up to anti-LGBTQ+ scaremongering.
“For the folks who are anti-equality, they’re very excited to try to make us the boogeypeople,” he says. “They’ve done it for decades, whether it was in the 1950s with the Lavender Scare or it was George W. Bush saying we need a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage. People are saying, ‘Wait a second, you always say the sky’s going to fall? It didn’t. Why are you distracting us with these made-up problems?’”
Queer and allied South Dakotans fear getting too optimistic, even despite signs that their state may be moving on from anti-LGBTQ+ monomania. The only two anti-trans bills introduced in South Dakota during the 2024 session — both of which sought to restrict public performances of drag — failed to pass legislative committee. And having Deutsch potentially absent from the legislature could impinge upon the introduction of future anti-LGBTQ+ bills: Deutsch was an influential member of a coalition of lawmakers and far-right activists that worked in concert to push anti-trans legislation across the country. According to a Mother Jones report, Deutsch’s trans medical care ban formed the basis for model bills introduced in more than a dozen states.
“People are saying, ‘Wait a second, you always say the sky’s going to fall? It didn’t. Why are you distracting us with these made-up problems?’”
Sean Meloy
But Susan Williams, executive director of Transformation Project, South Dakota’s leading statewide trans advocacy group, has learned the hard way to temper her hope. She and her son, who is transgender, were forced to begin traveling out of state for gender-affirming treatment after South Dakota voted to restrict trans youth health care last year. Each time he needs to see his doctor, the trip is an hours-long drive each direction.
“It feels really helpless when the people that are governing your state are trying to take away your rights,” she says. “In almost everything that they do, the Republicans in our legislature will say that they want limited government, but here they are, coming in between a parent and your child.”
Williams says that still hasn’t sunk in yet that Deutsch’s time in the legislature may be nearing its end. After years of trips to the state capitol to fight legislation that he himself authored, speaking directly to lawmakers to try and appeal to them, she still can’t allow herself to believe it. As tears fill her eyes, Williams says that she is feeling a “complicated joy.” “It’s incredible to think that the state legislature could work on things that need to be done in our state rather than pick on people like my son,” she says.
