POLITICS
Nicole Malliotakis’ Dismal Record on LGBTQ Issues
Will homophobic, transphobic Staten Island GOP lawmaker bring her bigotry to Congress?
BY MATT TRACY
Time and time again,
Trump-loving State Assemblymember
Nicole
Malliotakis has used
votes and infl uence as an elected
offi cial to fi ght against efforts to
improve LGBTQ rights — and
there’s a chance she could bring
her bigoted politics to the national
stage.
Malliotakis, whose Assembly
district encompasses the eastern
side of Staten Island and a slice
of the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn,
is embroiled in a heated general
election race against incumbent
Democratic Congressmember
Max Rose in the battleground 11th
Congressional District. Many New
Yorkers, however, have only seen
a very limited glimpse of that race
through the lens of bitter political
ads that are sorely lacking in substance.
What those ads don’t spell out
is Malliotakis’ record on issues
important to queer Staten Islanders
and Brooklynites in a pivotal
swing district. In the Assembly, she
has voted against same-sex marriage
and the Gender Expression
Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA),
which added gender identity and
expression as protected classes in
the state’s human rights and hate
crimes laws last year, all while peddling
wildly false and transphobic
narratives about bathrooms and
cozying up to the fringiest fi gures
of the far right.
Malliotakis conveniently waited
until after she voted against samesex
marriage to claim that she apparently
had a change of heart on
the issue — but then she continued
to oppose other LGBTQ rights
more crucial to the daily lives of
queer New Yorkers, such as simply
going to the bathroom.
In a 2017 interview with Gay City
News, when she was the Republican
candidate for mayor, Malliotakis
said, “If a man were to follow
someone into a restroom… they’re
there because they want to commit
a crime against a woman and
they are caught, they can use that
Assemblymember Nicole Malliotakis, a GOP congressional hopeful, apparently think it’s a winning strategy
to cozy up to off-the-rails former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
law as a loophole. I believe there is
a loophole in the law that allows it
to be exploited for individuals… to
commit a type of sex crime.”
When pressed on that issue, she
was unable to name a single instance
of sex offenders invading a
female space under the cover of a
gender identity nondiscrimination
law. Nor could she explain how
such a law had operated without
such a far-fetched incident in New
York City in the years since gender
identity and expression were added
to the local human right ordinance
in 2002.
During that mayoral campaign,
she told Brian Lehrer on his WNYC
radio show, “It’s not about the
transgender individual, it’s an issue
where you have in other states
have seen that perverted individuals
are exploiting the law to gain
access… Again, it’s not about the
transgender individual, but I think
many parents would have a concern
about a sex offender or a male
following their little girl into the
bathroom.”
Of course, it is all about the
transgender individual — and,
in this case, transgender children.
Malliotakis’ dog whistles are
aligned with that of her Republican
friends across the nation who
continue to assert that somehow
the right to pee should be off-limits
to transgender or non-binary folks.
TWITTER/ @MAXROSE4NY
Most recently, the GOP, standing
hand-in-hand with the anti-
LGBTQ legal group Alliance Defending
Freedom, has also set its
sights on preventing transgender
student-athletes from participating
in sports.
Speaking of her Republican
friends, Malliotakis is neck-deep
in the GOP swamp of politicians
that have mounted an all-out assault
on the rights of LGBTQ folks
during the Trump presidency. She
has bragged on social media about
having the endorsement of Rudy
Giuliani, the former New York City
mayor who later became Trump’s
unhinged attorney, as well as
Trump himself, who said in a
tweet earlier this year that “Nicole
has my Complete & Total Endorsement!”
Malliotakis has also been
backed by police unions like the
Sergeants Benevolent Association,
which launched a blatantly homophobic
attack on out gay Bronx
Councilmember Ritchie Torres last
month when the union labeled him
a “fi rst class whore” in a tweet.
On her campaign site, Malliotakis
also touts the support of the
Log Cabin Republicans, which is a
group of queer Republicans led by
chair Robert Kabel, who wrote an
op-ed for USA Today that was fi lled
with inaccuracies about Trump’s
record and appeared to purposely
avoid mentioning the legal and
economic challenges transgender
Americans face until the end of
that piece.
But that omission of transgender
individuals was not a mistake.
Rather, it was consistent with the
party’s efforts to chip away at the
community’s rights across the
board. Malliotakis’ favorite president
has worked to strip transgender
and non-binary individuals of
healthcare protections, granted
taxpayer-funded foster care agencies
the right to reject same-sex
prospective parents, aggressively
fl outed the law by unsuccessfully
opposing the citizenship of children
with bi-national same-sex parents,
stripped transgender youth of protections
in schools, and banned
transgender people from the military,
among other actions.
On top of it all, the GOP’s 2020
party platform is blatantly homophobic,
saying that Republicans
“urge” the “reversal” of the
Obergefell ruling that usherd in
same-sex marriage rights nationwide
more than fi ve years ago. The
platform also rejects laws that prevent
businesses from discriminating
against LGBTQ patrons, along
with a series of other bigoted positions.
Malliotakis’ hostility to LGBTQ
causes extends beyond her voting
record. She was one of the few
elected offi cials still willing to participate
in the Staten Island St.
Patrick’s Day Parade earlier this
year despite the event’s ban on
LGBTQ folks. Rose, on the other
hand, bailed on the parade in consecutive
years in a sign of solidarity
with the queer community, a
boycott in which he was joined by
the Republican borough president,
James Oddo.
Furthermore, in 2018 Malliotakis
joined other Republicans in
lobbying the mayor to grant a cityfunded
sports team a waiver to
travel to North Carolina at a time
when New York City was boycotting
the Tar Heel State — banning
travel there for non-essential busi-
➤ NICOLE MALLIOTAKIS, continued on p.9
October 22 - November 4,8 2020 | GayCityNews.com
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