Last week, as I watched Christian nationalist celebrity Charlie Kirk and anti-trans activist Riley Gaines riling up a MAGA crowd at San Francisco State University, I was surprised to hear a California state senator come up by name.
“Right now, there’s somebody who is opposed to protecting minors from sexual predators, and his name is Scott Wiener,” Gaines, best known for losing a swim meet to a trans woman, declared as fans jeered in response.
The attention from far-right critics is nothing new for Wiener, who represents San Francisco and parts of San Mateo County in the California Senate. But a wave of hate and misinformation is again cresting because of his opposition to elements of a trio of bills, which he argues could hurt LGBTQ people.
“The attacks started back in 2020 when I authored a bill to end discrimination against LGBTQ young people via the sex offender registry,” Wiener told me in a phone call last week. “These are right-wing extremists who get cachet from attacking and demonizing LGBTQ people. And they hate me because I stick up for the most marginalized people in that community.”
Two of the bills currently in consideration, SB 311 and SB 337, focus on resources and restrictions for trans women in women’s prisons, and the safety of inmates under state Department of Corrections supervision, respectively. A third bill, AB 379, is designed to elevate punishments for people who solicit sex from a minor — seemingly a challenge to Wiener’s previous 2022 bill, SB 357, that decriminalized loitering for the purpose of prostitution.
Wiener was motivated to author SB 357 by the potential for disproportionate harm toward trans and minority sex workers, because law enforcement is inconsistent and subjective about who it polices on the street. The issue also came up last year with the bill SB 1414, which increased penalties for the solicitation of sex from a minor but provided an exception for 16- and 17-year-olds when there is no evidence they are being sexually trafficked.
Confused yet? So are we, given the major overlaps on the bills and the confusion around why some minors need to be exempted from tougher prosecution. These nuances have made it easy for Wiener’s opponents, both in the California Legislature and on the sidelines, to claim that he is pro-crime, ignoring victims, and even more egregiously, supporting pedophilia.
Wiener says that predatory sexual solicitation and activity should have major consequences; he supported a 2023 law that made trafficking of minors a serious felony that counts as a “strike” in California’s three-strikes policy.
But Wiener also observed that some California laws make it too easy to criminalize the sex lives of young people, which can have unintended long-term consequences. As an example, he noted that a 20-year-old having sex with a 17-year-old is already a crime — statutory rape under existing law. Making said 20-year-old have a felony and register on the sex offender list for “soliciting” a minor, however, likely has little effect on public safety: “You have to ask yourself, is that really the right approach?” he said.
Wiener elaborated by pointing to a history of young people in same-sex or interracial relationships being wrongly affected by sex-crime laws when parents get involved, seeking recourse based on their disapproval of the relationship and weaponizing law enforcement to intervene.
“When you have this kind of criminalization, it always disproportionately hits LGBTQ people and people of color,” he said. “It’s been happening for generations.”
Wiener did eventually support SB 1414 after pushing for some exemptions around 16- and 17-year-olds, and he’s asked for a similar carve-out in AB 379 — a move that the bill’s author is opposed to, given a goal of the legislation is to literally reverse the previous exemption.
Elsewhere, Wiener is embroiled in claims that he does not care about protecting women in prisons. It stems from his stance that SB 311 should not prevent any trans woman who is on the sex offender registry from being housed in a women’s facility. The bill exempts “biological women” from the same standard, and Wiener told me the distinction is fueled by conspiracies that trans people are “faking” their gender identity to victimize women.
Wiener’s research indicates that there has only been one trans person in a state correctional facility who committed a sexual assault, he said. That person is actively being prosecuted, Wiener added.
“Sexual assault is a problem in women's prisons. The vast majority of sexual violence in women's prisons is from prison staff. We have several bills this year to address that very real problem,” Wiener continued. “But to make it seem like the problem in women’s prisons is driven by trans people, that’s just made up. 311 is a bill in search of a problem.”
All three bills are currently being considered further in state legislature committees, which means the rhetoric around them is unlikely to cool down.
And although the fight in the legislature is to be expected in a state with a massive range of political representatives, its distillation into a hateful critique of Wiener, especially in online spaces like X, reflects a national trend of conservative voices weaponizing a moral panic around queerness and sexual “deviancy,” with the blame for all manner of offenses landing on Democrats.
In addition to Kirk and Gaines, Wiener has been a target of ire from some of America’s most mainstream conservative voices, including former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson. Given his track record of advocacy around sex workers and the LGBTQ population, Wiener will probably continue to be viewed as a punching bag for bad-faith voices, going viral thanks to endless posts from a right-wing chorus.
The senator, for his part, seems barely fazed by the whole “controversy.” He assumes that his fellow legislators are working out of genuine concern, but dealing with outside death threats and years of trolling has left him with a tougher skin.
“They’ve realized they can make money and influence off of spouting extreme things about me,” he told me. “So that’s what they’ll keep doing.”
