Arizona Senate Chairman Silences Speaker After He Calls Anti-Trans Bill “Genocidal”

A community member was forcibly removed from an Arizona Senate Governing committee hearing yesterday after condemning a Republican-backed resolution targeting transgender people and accusing GOP lawmakers of advancing “genocidal” policies.

Albert Levenshon was speaking against SCR 1006, a resolution that would restrict transgender youth from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity and could criminalize the use of preferred pronouns. His comments were directed at Republican members of the committee.

“I am against the adoption of SCR 1006,” Levenshon said. “This bill and others introduced in this Legislature this year and in years past — as well as similar laws passed in Republican-controlled states — are nothing more than further actions by your party attempting to carry out a genocide of transgender and intersex queer people.”

Senate Government Committee Chairman Jake Hoffman immediately interrupted Levenshon’s testimony, striking the gavel and saying, “I’m going to stop you right there.”

When Levenshon attempted to cite recent reporting — including from LOOKOUT — that references the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Genocide Watch, which has warned that anti-trans laws in the U.S. reflect “early stages” of genocide, Hoffman cut him off again.

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As security approached, another committee member attempted to raise a point of order questioning why Levenshon was being removed. Hoffman refused to recognize it until Levenshon sat down.

“You’re done,” Hoffman told him.

“I have a First Amendment right to speak,” Levenshon screamed while being removed.

Sen. John Kavanagh, the Fountain Hills Republican who sponsored the resolution, then instructed security to remove him. “Get him out of here,” Kavanagh said.

“You are being removed from this room,” Hoffman told Levenshon, later adding that the committee would “engage in civil debate” and that the remarks were “absolutely uncalled for.”

Sen. Lauren Kuby, a Democrat from Tempe, said Petersen “sparked” the confrontation and the speaker’s removal. Hoffman rejected her objection, ruling it out of order.

“You are not recognized,” Hoffman said. “That is not a point of order.”

You can view the moment on Capitol TV services at the 1:46:00 minute mark.

Levenshon’s removal came just one day after LOOKOUT published an in-depth Q&A with Lori Shepherd, executive director of the Tucson Jewish Museum and Holocaust Center, examining how genocide is defined — and how recent statements made by genocide scholars and institutions that track human rights warned how the United States culturally and politically is in "early stages" of genocide.

In that interview, Shepherd laid out the internationally recognized framework used by genocide scholars, including the definition established by Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide” in 1948 after the Holocaust. Genocide, she said, is not limited to mass killings, but includes the intentional, systematic destruction of a group through policies that cause serious bodily or mental harm or deliberately inflict conditions of life meant to make survival impossible.

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Shepherd also detailed the “ten stages of genocide,” developed by Genocide Watch founder Dr. Gregory Stanton, emphasizing that genocide does not start with extermination — it starts with classification, discrimination, dehumanization, and government-backed policies that isolate and target a group. Stanton was one of the scholars who warned about American politics echoing genocidal tactics in other countries.

When asked directly about transgender people, Shepherd noted that trans people — who make up less than half of one percent of the population — have been subjected to hundreds of bills nationwide regulating where they can use the bathroom, access health care, or exist in public. That volume of legislation, she said, constitutes dehumanization and polarization — early warning signs that genocide scholars monitor closely.

Shepherd also warned that denial is not a final stage, but one that appears from the very beginning. “If we wait for someone else to decide whether this is genocide,” she said, “it may already be too late.”

It was those same scholarly warnings — including findings from the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention — that Levenshon attempted to reference before Senate leaders cut off his testimony and ordered him removed from the room.