Lauren Ashley Simmons was heartbroken.
Simmons, a queer Black woman and labor organizer from Houston, watched her Democratic state representative break with her party and vote in favor of three Republican-led bills limiting rights for transgender teens and children. All of them became law.
Those laws supported by State Rep. Shawn Thierry “put a target on some families that are already extremely vulnerable and dealing with so much, living in a state like Texas,” Simmons tells The Independent.
“To know that this Democrat representative for a big blue district in a pretty blue city turned her back – that betrayed and hurt me,” she says. “But then knowing that people had to leave the state, it really sent me over the edge.”
So Simmons ran against her.
Thierry has represented the Houston-area district in the state House since 2017.
On May 28, Simmons defeated Thierry in a Democratic primary election with 65 per cent of the vote. Now the progressive candidate is widely expected to win in the mostly nonwhite and heavily Democratic-leaning district in November’s general election.
Simmons will join an incoming class of other recently elected LGBT+ lawmakers preparing for a GOP-dominated body that routinely legislates against them and their families.
“Something that I’m focused on is thinking about all of the LGBT families whose very first interaction with the government was having to come to the Capitol to fight for their children’s lives,” Simmons tells The Independent.
“After you call your state representative, after you’ve written letters, after you travel to the Capitol, and have them deny your existence and treat you like you don’t matter, what does that do?” she says. “We have a lot of work to do to heal some of those wounds.”
Nearly one-third of all state-level bills targeting LGBT+ Americans are coming out of Texas.
Lawmakers in the state – home to more than 30 million people – filed more than 140 bills threatening LGBT+ Texans in 2023, alarming civil rights activists to the point that they felt they needed to warn the United Nations about a looming “human rights crisis” in the state.
Texas Republicans outlawed gender-affirming healthcare for transgender teens, blocked trans college athletes from playing on teams that don’t align with their gender, and banned broadly defined “sexually explicit” books from school libraries.
Thierry voted for all three.
This year’s elections in Texas also saw the election of the first-ever openly LGBT+ state senator, emergency room nurse and community organizer Molly Cook, who joins a small but growing body of LGBT+ lawmakers at the capitol.
Simmons never planned to run for public office. She grew up in a “very, very typical” middle class family, “nothing too out of the ordinary,” she says, until she became a mother at 19 years old.
She lost her safety net – turned down from public assistance, evicted from her apartment, forced to shoplift for food, and then arrested on charges for theft that were later dismissed.
Simmons got involved with community organizing groups and labor unions to help other Texans learn how to navigate the same system she endured, and to fight for better wages and working conditions for Black women in a state with some of the weakest worker protections in the country.
She organized with the Houston Federation of Teachers, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and became a staff steward for the Communication Workers of America Local 1180.
“I love organizing in my community, helping people find solutions to problems, helping people realize their own power as an individual but also what it means to feel collective power,” she says.
Supporters encouraged her to run after her viral opposition to Republican threats to public education, but Thierry’s vote to deny affirming healthcare to young trans people was something of a last straw.
“There are so many things that have not been addressed,” she tells The Independent.
“I think about Uvalde, or our state refusing to accept millions of dollars of federal funding to feed kids over summer,” she says. “Like, it’s so infuriating, because we’re targeting a small group of families who are trying to make the best decision for their kids while totally neglecting a myriad of issues.”
Democratic House Rep. Jasmine Crockett decided to weigh in after Thierry dismissed Simmons’ supporters as “the gay ones.” Thierry claimed that her comments to the Houston Chronicle’s editorial board were “taken completely out of context.”
Thierry’s supporters also put out yard signs accusing Simmons of supporting “Black genocide” and the “castration” and “sterilization” of young Black people. Thierry denied having anything to do with the signs but didn’t denounce them.
Simmons has two children in Houston schools, including a child with a chronic health condition, “and there is nothing I wouldn’t do to make sure that my baby had access to the care that she needed,” she tells The Independent.
“There are families who are going to have to give up everything and leave this state,” she says. “Their lives have been upended by this. But I also thought about the people … even deeper in the margins who can’t afford to do that. Like, what do they do?”
Senate Bill 14, which was signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott last year, forces children off transition healthcare like puberty blockers and hormone treatments against the urgent guidance from major medical associations.
Many families with trans children are leaving Texas, unable to get the care they need, and forced to flee a state “that is not safe for them,” according to Emily Witt, senior communications and media strategist for the Texas Freedom Network and Texas Freedom Network Education Fund.
Fleeing your home is an enormous loss. “The kind of community we see in Texas and the south in general can’t always be found in blue states,” Witt says.
So-called “book ban” laws and policies across the country have taken aim at books and materials by and about LGBT+ people and Black history. Texas was no exception – House Bill 900 was labeled a “blatant attempt” to keep books out of students’ hands by the Children’s Defense Fund of Texas.
“Whose stories are worth telling, and whose stories are a part of the American experience?” Simmons asks. “As a Black woman, as a queer woman, being able to read stories and see myself bigger than stories is very important to my own foundation.”
More than 1 million students are enrolled in Houston’s schools. The Texas GOP’s 2024 platform calls for prosecuting educators and defunding schools and libraries that Republican officials believe are “sexualizing” children.
“I don’t think it meets the goal they’re trying to meet,” Witt tells The Independent. “Lauren Ashley Simmons is a pretty big emblem of that.”
Texas Republicans are expected to propose restrictions to gender-affirming care for trans adults and revive a so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill targeting state schools in 2025.
“Why are they so focused on LGBTQ families?” Simmons says. “They are keenly and solely focused stoking as much fear in their base as possible so people will go out and vote out of fear. … We’re supposed to be able to come together and pass budgets and legislation that make life better for everybody.”
The upcoming legislative battle will be a “fight,” she says, “but I’m a union organizer. I’m a labor organizer. Every fight is pretty much David and Goliath.”
