As Kamala Harris rose to national prominence over the years, lawyer and lifelong LGBT advocate Shannon Minter felt a growing sense of alarm. Not about Harris’ success—but about what was being said about her by Minter’s fellow transgender activists and writers.
“Harris’s work has contributed to some of the most violent conditions faced by trans people,” wrote ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio in 2019, during Harris’ presidential primary run. Harris “has a concerning record of endangering our community’s most marginalized members,” a Them magazine article warned.
“Absurd,” Minter told Slate. “It’s just wrong. It is wrong.”
Minter should know. He became famous for facing off against Kenneth Starr in California’s Supreme Court, arguing against Prop 8—the ballot initiative that would have banned same-sex marriage in the state—in 2009. But he was there in 2006 when Harris, not yet a national figure, drew together a coalition of cops, prosecutors, academics, and activists to talk about how to protect the human rights of trans people in criminal courts.
“It was historic,” recalled Minter. “She just genuinely cared about the issue.”
But the criticism Harris has faced hasn’t died. Even now, many transgender activists and writers are skeptical that Harris really has their back. (It didn’t help that the Biden administration came out against surgery for trans minors in late June, before reversing course this month.) In a way, the skepticism is understandable for a politician viewed with suspicion by many leftists for her “tough-on-crime” years as California’s attorney general and her selection as vice president to proud moderate Joe Biden. But her record is clear: Harris has been a strong advocate and progressive for transgender rights for 20 years. And she started this work long before it entered the center of national politics.
In the mid-2000s, trans rights were barely on the radar of most politicians. In 2004, Hillary Clinton was still tepid on marriage equality, pronouncing marriage a “sacred bond between a man and a woman” from the Senate floor.
That same year, Minter sat in a California courtroom as lawyers argued that a teenager’s transgender status had justified her killing. Two of the men who murdered 17-year-old Gwen Araujo after realizing she was trans ended up being convicted only of second-degree murder; two others pleaded no contest to lesser charges.
Throughout the process, Minter and other trans lawyers tried to reach out to the prosecutors to help them counter the defense’s “gay panic” strategy, he said. “I and others tried so hard to work with those prosecutors, and they were not interested in that,” he said. “It was frustrating.”
As the Araujo case made its way through the courts, another prosecutor, San Francisco’s then–District Attorney Kamala Harris, was under attack from the local police. An officer had been killed, and Harris refused to seek the death penalty for his killer. Cop unions were, predictably, furious; one leader accused Harris of being in an “ivory tower” and having “no clue to the reality of the street.” Her own political mentor, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, also publicly pressured Harris to back down.
While Harris stood her ground, she was also following the Araujo case. It wasn’t in Harris’ jurisdiction, and she had no personal stake. But she already had a record of looking out for the LGBTQ+ community: She had performed marriage rites for gay couples right after such ceremonies began in California, started a hate crimes unit dedicated to protecting queer teenagers, and even spoke at her city’s third annual Trans March, where she was honored as having “championed transgender rights.”
So in July of 2006, after Araujo’s killers had been sentenced, Harris convened a two-day national conference to discuss ways to counter the “gay panic” defense, drawing together law enforcement personnel, academics, activists, and even the prosecutor and defense lawyers from the Araujo case.
Minter was there. He recalls being “stunned” that Harris went out of her way to address not just “gay panic” defenses in general but specifically their deployment against trans victims.
“That was so unexpected and extraordinary and impressive,” he said last week, in a phone call from Texas, where he works as legal director of the San Francisco–based National Center for Lesbian Rights. The conference “was genuinely focused on how to address these issues and problems,” he said. “It had no flavor of performativity … I just remember thinking at the time, This is the real deal.”
Minter says Harris didn’t go into detail about why the issue was important to her; later, in her memoir, she wrote only that she found the defense strategy “ludicrous.” But she told a reporter at the time: “Hopefully this conference symbolizes the fact that we take seriously these crimes and our responsibility to protect these victims, and that [the victims] will be treated with dignity because we understand who they are and understand their experience.” She added of the gay-panic defense, “We can’t outlaw it, but we can combat it.”
Over the course of her career, however, she would indeed help to outlaw the defense: In 2014, as California’s attorney general, she co-sponsored legislation to ban panic defenses in court. The passage of that bill made California the first state to do so, and the language of the bill became a model for other states up to the present day. (Last week, Michigan became the 20th state to pass such a ban.)
Later, as a U.S. senator in 2018, she again co-sponsored legislation that would have banned the defense nationally. (By this time, Republicans were working to make trans rights a wedge issue and held the Senate majority; the bill did not pass.) While it’s difficult to determine exactly how Harris has influenced the rest of the Biden administration on trans rights, and though there have been grave missteps in the past three and a half years, this White House has made admirable progress on a few fronts: a law to curb trans conversion therapy, a move to gender-neutral passports, restoring protections against discrimination in health care, and more. Harris has, at the very least, been a public face for LGBTQ+ initiatives, doing events like a surprise Pride Month speech at the Stonewall Inn last year.
The pursuit of equal justice for trans people is a sustained throughline in the presumptive nominee’s career. Yet when Harris launched her first presidential bid, Strangio and other trans critics described her record as mixed at best, dangerous at worst.
In part, their criticisms stem simply from the fact that Harris was a part of the carceral state. “I will never trust prosecutors whose job it is to send people to cages,” Strangio wrote in his critique.
It’s true that Harris is far from a prison abolitionist. She will be unlikely to satisfy arch-leftists, and, if elected, will surely do things the radicals wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean she’s motivated by a desire to oppress. “I always got the impression with [Harris] that she saw the law as a tool to defend vulnerable people,” Minter said. “She wanted to use the power of the state’s criminal law to help people who are preyed upon and harmed.”
As a reform-minded prosecutor, Harris has found herself at odds with both law enforcement, as when she defied the police union in San Francisco—and also progressives, as when, in 2016, then–California Attorney General Harris was instrumental in the effort to take down Backpage.com, a classified-ads website that was widely used by sex workers as a (relatively) safe and straightforward way to find and screen clients. “Raking in millions of dollars from the trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable victims is outrageous, despicable and illegal,” Harris said then. “Backpage and its executives purposefully and unlawfully designed Backpage to be the world’s top online brothel.”
This hostility to sex work, too, was a continuing theme in her career. Once in the Senate, she also supported FOSTA/SESTA, a law that has been devastating for other online tools that sex workers use.
While Harris has more recently stated that she would be in favor of decriminalizing sex work, there’s no denying how much her past actions endangered sex workers. And because a disproportionate number of trans people do that work, “a public official’s policies regarding sex work can be understood as an extension of their policies regarding the LGBTQ+ community,” wrote Them’s Wren Sanders. Strangio, too, used Harris’ record on sex work to claim that Harris was no trans ally.
More problematic, however, is an incident in 2015, when Harris signed off on her office’s appeal of a court order that had directed the state to provide gender-affirmation surgery for a trans inmate named Michelle-Lael Norsworthy. “It remains to be seen whether the action will be politically harmful for Harris, who has a reputation for being a champion of LGBT rights,” the Washington Blade commented at the time.
In 2019, confronted by a reporter about the 2015 anti-trans briefs from her office, Harris said the state’s policy of denying surgery to transgender incarcerated people predated her tenure, and that the brief she’d signed didn’t reflect her own views on the subject.
Related From Slate
Jim Newell
The Coconut Revolution Has Begun
Read More
“There are, unfortunately, situations that occurred where my clients took positions that were contrary to my beliefs,” she said. “The bottom line is the buck stops with me, and I take full responsibility for what my office did.”
She further claimed that she worked “behind the scenes” to change the state’s policy—andindeed, the policy did change later that same year.
Harris’ record on other issues dear to progressives is more murky. After standing against the death penalty as DA, she reversed herself in 2014, when as AG she appealed a U.S. District Court decision that might have shut down executions in the state. And while as the presumptive candidate she recently delivered some harsh words to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, her critics see her as having been complicit in an administration that facilitated an ongoing genocide.
But on trans issues, her record is surprisingly consistent, especially compared to other politicians. For Trump and the GOP, trans people are at best a convenient culture-war scapegoat, while others in the party seem to genuinely feel disgust for anyone who doesn’t conform to their idea of the gender binary. For moderates such as Biden, trans people may be an exotic minority whose interests are niche. But for Harris, her repeated actions across nearly two decades of her career indicate that the humanity and rights of trans people, and the need to protect those rights, are all a firm part of her moral worldview—neither an afterthought nor a fringe interest.
“She’s not just an ally—she’s a longtime, steadfast, committed, and well-informed ally,” Minter said. “She has repeatedly used her position and influence to help build more institutional and public support for our community. She has constantly strived to bring other people along with her and to create more allies for us—and that is the best kind of ally to have.”
