'Still live in fear': LGBTQ Americans hope push for Equality Act will finally end bias
The day Tanya Asapansa-Johnson Walker coughed up a mouthful of blood in her Harlem apartment in 2013, she didn't go to the VA hospital because she didn't want to be harassed by health care workers.
When she went in later, a doctor and nurse aggressively questioned her before they would X-ray her chest, she said.
"They asked me what I have in my pants. And I’m there coughing up blood," said Asapansa-Johnson Walker, who served in the U.S. Army in the 1980s. "I felt like if I didn’t tell them what my genitals were that they would not have treated me. That they would not have tried to find out what was wrong with me. ... I’m shaking, and I’m looking at this doctor and this nurse, and I’m afraid."
That day, Asapansa-Johnson Walker's lung cancer was misdiagnosed as pneumonia, she said.
When she got the cancer treatment she needed months later, she said hospital staff refused to clean her recovery room and she was repeatedly misgendered – even though she had updated her ID and birth certificate with her correct gender marker.
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The transgender New Yorker is part of a massive push launching Wednesday that aims to pressure the Senate to pass the Equality Act. Organizers said the act would protect LGBTQ people from the kind of ordeal that Asapansa-Johnson Walker – and many like her – regularly experience.
The Equality Act would expand the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include LGBTQ people, providing federal nondiscrimination protections based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity. Protections provided by the law would extend to housing, credit, health care, taxis and ride shares and government services.
“A lot of us fall through the cracks in society as a result of not having the Equality Act. ... Our needs are not met, and we end up dying," Asapansa-Johnson Walker said.
Equality Act languishes
The Human Rights Campaign unveiled the nationwide campaign Wednesday, which highlights the 29 states lacking comprehensive protections against discrimination and harassment for LGBTQ residents. The campaign features LGBTQ advocates from across the political spectrum.
President Joe Biden vowed his administration would pass the Equality Act during his first 100 days in office to address the lack of protections for LGBTQ Americans in much of the nation.
The House of Representatives passed it in February, but the Senate has not voted on the bill.
Biden's deadline is long past, and the Equality Act languishes in the Senate despite receiving support from the majority of Americans.
The "Reality Flag" campaign takes its name from the project's redesign of the U.S. flag, which removes 29 white stars representing the states where LGBTQ people lack nondiscrimination protections.
The campaign aims to remind Americans that LGBTQ people live in small towns as well as big cities, said Jay Brown, HRC's senior vice president of programs research.
"It’s about people going through life’s journeys – the beauty and pain of life – just like everybody and navigating a whole other set of challenges because of who they are," Brown said, referring to the lack of federal protections for LGBTQ people.
Nearly two-thirds of LGBTQ people have reported experiencing discrimination, according to HRC, the nation's largest LGBTQ civil rights organization.
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Some involved in the Reality Flag campaign remember how their views shifted when they realized someone in their life was LGBTQ.
In Hokes Bluff, Alabama, where David Fuller is a police sergeant, conservative political values are dominant and most of Fuller's friends are Christian, right-wing Republicans, he said.
There were no "out" transgender people in town, but Fuller said his fellow officers regularly made disparaging remarks about them. The comments picked up when Caitlyn Jenner publicly came out in 2015, Fuller said.
Fuller said at the time he didn't bother to think more about LGBTQ issues.
"If I had any prejudice in the old days, it’s because I never bothered to look, I just made assumptions on who people were. It was pure ignorance," he said.
Things changed for Fuller about six years ago when his daughter Jess came out at age 16.
"Suddenly I’ve got to worry about where I sit down to eat with my daughter, because she’s transgender," Fuller said. "Now, I should not have to worry about that. I never did before. I never had to before."
The mean-spirited conversations about trans people continued among Fuller's fellow police officers while he "laid low."
“I sat there, and little did they know their boss had a transgender daughter at home," Fuller said.
When the Fullers did come out about Jess' identity, “they realized for years all the things they’d been saying in front of me, there were a lot of wide eyes and like, ‘Oh my God, I never really put a human face on folks in this community,’” Fuller said.
Since then, officers in Hokes Bluff have been "quietly supportive" of Jess, who at age 22 is a video game streamer on Twitter, YouTube and Twitch. She has aspirations of being a therapist and started a mental health Discord server, an online space where people can talk and text about different topics for free.
Fuller's colleagues' reversal of their perspective on trans people gives Jess and her dad hope, Jess said.
“All it takes – even if they don’t necessarily agree with it, even if they don’t understand it, even if they’d don’t even accept it – there can at least be a tolerance, just live and let live," she said.
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'All of this was legal'
Queen Hatcher-Johnson, who does not use any pronouns, remembers being pleasantly surprised when a landlord asked questions and wanted to learn more about the Pride flag and transgender flag in Hatcher-Johnson's Lexington, North Carolina, apartment in 2013.
Instead, the outcome of their conversation ended up sending Hatcher-Johnson's life into a downward spiral.
The landlord was aware of what the Pride flag meant, Hatcher-Johnson said, but didn't know what the transgender flag meant.
When Hatcher-Johnson told him, the landlord said Hatcher-Johnson's transgender identity went against his religious beliefs. Two weeks later, the landlord told Hatcher-Johnson to leave.
“The most painful part for me was that I found out that all of this was legal ... everything he did was legal," Hatcher-Johnson said. "I mean he did this free and clear within his right, within his legal right."
There are no state laws in North Carolina that prohibit discrimination in housing based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
“If the Equality Act was an actual law when this happened to me, I know it probably wouldn’t have happened because there would have been some sort of recourse," Hatcher-Johnson said. "If it did happen, then there would have been a level of accountability.”
Being evicted caused a "snowball effect," and a month later, Hatcher-Johnson was fired as general manager at a gas station. Hatcher-Johnson spent the next four years "couch surfing" and bouncing around between New York, Virginia, Florida, South Carolina and Georgia.
Hatcher-Johnson works at an HIV clinic in Atlanta and devotes time and energy toward LGBTQ advocacy but fears retaliation without federal protections.
"I still live in fear," Hatcher-Johnson said.