State rep with ties to hate groups files similar anti-LGBTQ+ bill that was vetoed last year.

A conservative local House member endorsed and aligned with Christian nationalists has proposed legislation to end the legal recognition of people with sexual differences and prevent their access to gender-aligned public facilities.

Newly elected Rep. Lisa Fink (R-Glendale) is president of Protect Arizona Children Coalition, an organization that spreads disinformation about gender identity and sexual orientation since 2019. Protect Arizona Children Coalition’s original website now redirects to a project by Family Watch International, an anti-LGBTQ+ Southern Poverty Law Center-identified hate group based in Gilbert.

She was also recommended for state office by Arizona Women of Action’s political action committee. The local organizing group recruits parents to run for school board, and mentors current governing members in anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience through monthly virtual meetings since January this past year.

In a leaked web meeting, school board candidates doubled-down on anti-trans rhetoric.

The webcast, organized by Arizona Women of Action, is part of a campaign to use LGBTQ+ issues as a galvanizing issue this November.

LOOKOUTTori Gantz (she/they)

Tamra Farah has been a director of one of the network's programs (she's still named as such on their website, although another director at the organization said she has not worked with them since October). She is also on the advisory council for Scottsdale-based Turning Point USA, which both the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League  identified as aligning with hate groups that promote Christian nationalism.

People within both organizations Fink is aligned with have made claims that schools are indoctrinating children, and called people “groomers”—a popular slur that tries to equate LGBTQ+ people with pedophiles—in various online posts. That anti-LGBTQ+ stance is now showing up in her bills as a freshman representative.

Ahead of opening day at the Capitol, Fink filed a bill familiar to queer folks in Arizona that explicitly says there are only two sexes, excluding transgender, nonbinary and intersex people from existing state laws. People with intersex traits are born with reproductive anatomy, chromosome, or hormone levels that fall outside of the strict binary understandings of male and female sex.

House Bill 2062, labeled the “Arizona Sex-Based Terms Act,” is nearly identical to last session’s Senate Bill 1628 pushed by the Center for Arizona Policy, a conservative lobbyist organization that promotes policies aligned with evangelical Christians. That bill was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.

SB1628, also labeled the “Arizona Women’s Bill of Rights,” would have prevented trans and gender nonconforming people from obtaining or updating identity documents to accurately reflect their current gender presentation, among additional prohibitions. The bill had the possibility of impacting 7,300 trans youth in Arizona, according to data from the Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles.

According to the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality, just under a quarter of respondents who reported showing someone an ID with a name or gender that did not match their presentation said they were “verbally harassed, assaulted, asked to leave a location, or denied services.”

Known by queer people and their allies as an “erasure” bill, SB 1628 was based on model legislation from the political arm of right-wing think tank Independent Women’s Forum and anti-trans advocacy group Women’s Liberation Front.

Fink’s new bill, advocates said, is attempting to do the same thing.

“The bill is so obsessed with intersex people,” said Jeanne Woodbury, senior associate at the progressive lobbying firm Creosote Partners. “Their definition of female is essentially just ‘produces eggs’ surrounded by a bunch of caveats for people who don’t quite live up to their standard.”

Through enacting narrow definitions of “boy,” “father,” “female,” “girl,” “male,” and “man,” “mother,” Woodbury said that the bill has essentially twisted evangelical conservatives into knots trying to define trans people out of public policy.

“They’ve managed to come up with a definition even more controlling and dehumanizing than what women already have to put up with,” Woodbury said.

The repurposed legislation propped up by Fink could have unintended consequences, such as effects on “a queer person’s ability to effectively parent their child,” said Aven Kelly, policy analyst at Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona.

“We tend to have to fight these wars on the floor or in committee because people are just hateful of our community,” said Rep. Patty Contreras (D-Phoenix), co-chair of last year’s LGBTQ+ Legislative Caucus who is interested in retaining leadership. “There's so much literature out there and such scientific proof about the whole spectrum of sexuality.”

Contreras told LOOKOUT that she plans to bring back legislation to ban conversion therapy–a proliferate practice across the state–and to make discrimination against LGBTQ+ people illegal. Her monthly event Conversations with Contreras at Brick Road Coffee in Tempe occurs from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. every third Friday.

Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona works closely with Hobbs and her staff. It is ready “to ensure that she doesn't sign [Fink’s] bill if it were to make it to her desk,” said chief external affairs officer Erika Mach.

LOOKOUT reached out to Fink via email and left a message with her office to discuss HB 2062. She could not be reached for comment before the time of publication.