Maryland advocates are anticipating early action from the new Trump administration to limit gay and transgender rights.
But at a town hall held in Easton last week, local leaders also said the state has many protections already in place — and they’re working to develop more.
Delegate Kris Fair is the LGBTQ+ Caucus Chair for the Maryland General Assembly. He said that the top concern he hears from the queer community is about access to gender-affirming health care through Medicaid.
That’s why he calls Maryland’s Trans Health Equity Act, which passed in 2023, “the greatest crystal ball legislation we could have ever put forward.”
“The Trans Health Equity Act doesn't say we ‘might’ or ‘can’ guarantee support for gender-affirming care in the state of Maryland; it says ‘we must,’” Fair said.
But the law doesn’t provide a guaranteed funding stream for the services, he added. And with the federal government paying $8.3 billion of the annual $14.3 billion Medicaid bill in Maryland, cuts to that stream could impact access.
“And so what we're going to do is everything that we can to try to secure a special fund to help pick up the difference,” Fair said at Wednesday’s town hall. “Because this won't just impact trans people. This will impact undocumented immigrants. This will impact documented immigrants. This will impact anybody that the federal government seeks to target through its mechanisms.”
Jonathan Smith, chief of the civil rights division in the office of the attorney general, said education issues are also an “enormous concern.”
“Either day one or shortly thereafter, there are going to be executive orders that are going to try to have an impact on education, probably through the funding stream, placing conditions on funding,” he said.
Smith said the new administration will likely target “divisive concepts” like critical race theory and access to sports and bathrooms for transgender students.
But he also said his office, and other state attorneys general, started meeting in the spring to figure out how to provide “maximal protection” to LGBTQ+ people in preparation of Trump’s re-election.
“There's a body of law that says the United States government cannot, through its funding powers, coerce states to make policy decisions that are not core to the function of the funding,” Smith said. “That's the doctrine that we're preparing to use to prevent the coercive effect of, ‘We're going to give you money to educate students, and we're going to control what bathroom students go to, or how they're being named.’”
Smith said he’s also monitoring Supreme-Court-bound cases popping up nationwide that attempt to justify misgendering students with appeals to First Amendment rights.
“I expect that Maryland will be intervening in some of those cases in coming months,” he said.
Fair said it’s important to keep in mind that Maryland has laws preventing common anti-gay moves in schools, like a ban on book-banning.
And Smith said he doesn’t think the Supreme Court will overturn same-sex marriage – but even if it does, state law will protect the right for Marylanders. That local-level activism, Smith said, is a source of optimism.
“This is where it really makes a difference,” he said. “That's what all of the noise and all of the news and all of the headlines miss, the fact that there's this very powerful movement that people are engaged in on a daily basis. We can't forget that.”
