A Blue Wave Built on Betrayal Will Break Before 2028

Amy Acton Had Choices

The Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio could have said that governors are required to enforce constitutional laws, even when they disagree with them. She could have said that sports governing bodies should develop evidence-based participation rules without politicians humiliating children for campaign applause. She could have acknowledged that Ohio law currently restricts transgender athletes while promising that every student would be treated with dignity.

Instead, when asked about transgender participation in sports, Acton said: “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports.” She then described Ohio’s ban as settled law and said she would enforce it.

Transgender girls are not boys.

That was not an unavoidable explanation of a governor’s constitutional responsibilities. It was a choice to adopt the language of the people attacking us.

It was also a choice made only weeks after Acton marched in Columbus Pride—a familiar Democratic ritual in which candidates celebrate LGBTQ people when the cameras are colorful, the crowds are friendly and nothing politically difficult is being demanded of them.

The question Democrats need to answer is no longer whether Republicans are coming for transgender people. They plainly are. The question is whether Democrats intend to defend us, or merely manage the speed at which our rights are taken away.

Because if Democrats capture a blue wave in November by validating the premise that transgender people are dangerous, deceptive or inherently unfair, they may win seats in 2026 while poisoning their coalition for 2028.

A wave built on betrayal does not become a governing majority.

It becomes a temporary sugar high followed by an ugly withdrawal.

This Is Becoming a Pattern

Acton is not operating in isolation.

California Governor Gavin Newsom; an ambitious Democrat who plainly understands that every sentence he speaks will be examined through the lens of 2028; invited conservative activist Charlie Kirk onto his podcast in 2025 and agreed that transgender participation in women’s sports was “deeply unfair.”

Newsom simultaneously spoke about the cruelty transgender people face. That may have made his answer feel more compassionate to him. It did not make the political calculation less obvious: express concern for transgender lives, then concede the central premise of the campaign being used to drive transgender people out of public life.

Pete Buttigieg took a more careful route, but he stumbled over the same political tripwire. He acknowledged what he called “serious fairness issues” and suggested that sports leagues and local communities—not national politicians—should determine participation policies.

That is materially different from endorsing a blanket ban. It is also far better than deliberately calling transgender girls boys.

But Buttigieg, one of the most prominent openly gay politicians in American history, still allowed the discussion to remain inside the right’s preferred frame: that transgender children themselves are the problem to be managed.

I love Pete. That is precisely why his answer was so disappointing. An LGBTQ politician should understand better than almost anyone what happens when the majority begins debating which members of our community are respectable enough, normal enough or politically convenient enough to defend.

During his 2024 Senate campaign in Texas, Democrat Colin Allred responded to attacks from Ted Cruz by declaring, “I do not support boys in girls’ sports.” Allred had previously compiled a substantially pro-LGBTQ voting record. Under political pressure, however, he answered an attack on transgender people by accepting the attacker’s language.

He lost anyway.

After the 2024 election, Representative Seth Moulton said he did not want his daughters competing against a “male or formerly male athlete.” Other Democrats, including Tom Suozzi, argued that the party had become too rigid or politically vulnerable on transgender sports.

Again, the language was not incidental. It transformed transgender girls from young people playing school sports into threatening male bodies invading girls’ spaces.

Now we have Ohio.

Acton is not the only Democrat in the state retreating. Representative Marcy Kaptur was one of eight House Democrats who voted for legislation that would threaten federal funding for schools over policies involving students’ names, pronouns, bathrooms, locker rooms and loosely defined “gender ideology.” Meanwhile, Sherrod Brown’s 2026 Senate campaign has also responded to the sports question by emphasizing that Ohio law is already settled rather than offering a clear defense of transgender Ohioans.

In New Hampshire, legislation restricting puberty blockers and hormone treatment for minors passed with support from two Democratic members of the state House before being signed into law in 2025.

At the federal level, 81 House Democrats voted for the final 2024 National Defense Authorization Act even though it included a provision restricting TRICARE coverage for certain gender-affirming care for the transgender children of military families. Some of those members opposed the rider and argued that they were voting for the enormous defense package despite it.

That explanation may describe the legislative trade-off accurately.

It also reveals the trade-off: transgender children became acceptable collateral damage.

In December 2025, three House Democrats joined Republicans to pass legislation that could expose providers of gender-affirming care for minors to severe federal criminal penalties. The measure passed the House 216–211.

One example can be dismissed as an awkward answer.

Two can be called strategic triangulation.

At some point, however, we have to admit that a section of the Democratic Party has decided transgender people are the easiest members of its coalition to sacrifice.

Apparently, “My Body, My Choice” Has an Asterisk

Democrats are overwhelmingly and correctly pro-choice.

The principle underlying that position is supposed to be larger than any single medical procedure: intimate health decisions belong to patients, families and qualified medical professionals; not governors, legislators, campaign consultants or cable-news panels.

That principle has been part of Democratic politics for decades.

During the Clinton era, Democrats repeatedly argued that government had no place inside the most intimate medical decisions made by patients, families and doctors.

It was a good principle then.

It is a good principle now.

So what happened to it when the patient became transgender?

Apparently, Democrats believe a pregnant woman and her doctor should be protected from government interference—but a transgender teenager, her parents, her pediatrician, her therapist and her endocrinologist can all be overruled by a state legislator who has never met her.

Apparently, bodily autonomy is sacred unless the body is transgender.

Apparently, the government should stay out of the examination room unless there might be puberty blockers inside it.

Apparently, parents should be trusted to make agonizing medical decisions for their children—until their child says she is a girl.

That is not a coherent principle.

It is a political exemption written in disappearing ink.

And let us be precise about the word choice.

Transgender children do not simply wake up one morning and choose to be transgender because they saw something on TikTok, wanted attention or were recruited by a public-school librarian.

What they may choose is whether to tell someone.

They may choose whether to stop hiding.

They may choose to ask their parents to use the name that no longer makes them flinch.

They may choose to walk into a therapist’s office and finally explain why puberty feels terrifying rather than exciting.

They may choose—with their parents and clinicians—to explore what care is appropriate, what care is not appropriate and what can safely wait.

For children who have not reached puberty, established gender-affirming care does not involve hormones or surgery. It may involve listening, family support, social affirmation and mental-health care.

For some adolescents, after assessment and consultation, care may eventually include puberty-delaying medication or hormones. Professional guidelines describe a staged process: no medical intervention before puberty, puberty-delaying treatment when clinically appropriate, hormones considered as adolescents mature and major surgery generally deferred until adulthood.

This is not a child marching into Walgreens alone and ordering a new body before algebra class.

It is health care.

It involves diagnosis, informed consent or assent, parental participation, continuing evaluation and professionals trained to distinguish gender dysphoria from other mental-health concerns.

Democrats understand every part of that argument when discussing reproductive care.

They understand that an abortion patient is not receiving treatment without medical consultation simply because the slogan says “choice.”

They understand that autonomy does not mean medicine without standards.

They understand that trusting patients does not mean abandoning informed consent.

They understand that protecting a medical decision from political interference does not mean every patient automatically receives every requested treatment.

Yet when transgender children are involved, some Democrats suddenly adopt the Republican fantasy that care is being dispensed recklessly by doctors, demanded impulsively by children and concealed from helpless parents.

The standard changes because the patient changes.

That should terrify every person who believes her own medical care is politically safe.

Which Children Count as Children?

When reports emerged that a United States military strike had hit a school in Iran, leading Democrats were rightly horrified.

They demanded investigations. They demanded accountability. They condemned the killing of children as appalling and unacceptable.

They were right.

Children should not be treated as acceptable collateral damage.

Children should not pay for the recklessness, ambition or ideological obsessions of adults.

Children should not be forced to carry consequences they had no role in creating.

But Democrats need to explain why that moral clarity becomes cloudy when the children are transgender.

The girls inside a bombed school are properly recognized as girls when their girlhood intensifies the horror of their deaths.

A transgender girl in Ohio becomes a “boy” the moment recognizing her girlhood becomes politically inconvenient.

One group of children inspires solemn press releases about protecting innocent lives.

Another group is discussed as a polling liability.

One group deserves immediate accountability when government action puts them in danger.

The other is told that its suffering is unfortunate, but the law is settled.

To be absolutely clear: a military strike on a school and a government restricting medical treatment are not the same act.

They do not inflict the same harm.

They do not operate on the same timescale.

One can kill children in an instant. The other can compound fear, dysphoria, isolation and hopelessness over months or years.

The comparison is not equivalence.

The connection is the question underneath both:

Do children deserve protection from government decisions that foreseeably place them in danger?

Democrats apparently know the answer when the danger comes from Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth.

They become far less certain when the danger comes from a politically convenient health-care ban.

Stop Using Suicide as a Footnote

Transgender children experience sharply elevated rates of depression, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts.

Those disparities are not evidence that being transgender is itself a disease. Medical organizations point to a combination of gender dysphoria, bullying, discrimination, family rejection, social stigma and distress associated with unwanted physical development.

No responsible advocate should claim that any single medication guarantees a child will not attempt suicide.

No honest researcher should pretend the evidence is complete, that every patient responds identically or that every clinical question has been conclusively resolved.

But uncertainty is not permission for politicians to invent their own medicine.

Medical organizations have warned that denying appropriately evaluated gender-affirming care can worsen mental distress for some young people. Observational research has associated access to puberty blockers or hormones with lower rates of depression and suicidality, while professional guidelines emphasize individualized evaluation and continuing mental-health support.

That does not mean every transgender teenager needs medication.

It means politicians cannot honestly claim that taking treatment away is a neutral act.

When lawmakers force a stable patient to discontinue care, prohibit a physician from recommending an available treatment or tell a child that the state considers her identity fraudulent, they are not merely “declining to affirm” something.

They are introducing a new source of distress into the life of a child who may already be vulnerable.

They are gambling with someone else’s daughter.

And then they have the audacity to describe the gamble as child protection.

Even worse, the political attack can reach beyond medication.

Gender-affirming care commonly includes psychological assessment, counseling, family education and treatment for depression, anxiety or trauma.

When politicians smear every affirming clinician as an ideologue or predator, families may become afraid to seek any care at all.

Providers leave states.

Clinics reduce services.

Children learn that even admitting how they feel may place their parents, doctors or custody arrangements at risk.

The cruelty is not limited to the prescription that never gets written.

It begins with the child who learns that honesty is dangerous.

Democrats would never accept this logic from Republicans in the abortion debate.

They would never say that because research continues to develop, legislators should be free to substitute their judgment for an obstetrician’s.

They would never accept that a minority of complicated cases justifies a blanket prohibition.

They would never shrug and say that because a court permitted an abortion restriction, the moral question was now settled.

They would correctly point out that abortion bans do not merely regulate procedures. They frighten doctors, close clinics, delay treatment and turn private medical crises into legal hazards.

The same institutional damage occurs when transgender health care is criminalized or politically terrorized.

A doctor should not need to consult a criminal-defense attorney before treating a depressed teenager.

A parent should not have to consider moving to another state so her child can continue receiving care.

A therapist should not have to wonder whether affirming a patient’s identity will be characterized as indoctrination.

A child should not have to become suicidal enough to be taken seriously.

Choice Cannot Belong Only to Politically Popular Patients

Bodily autonomy is either a principle or a campaign slogan.

If Democrats believe government should not force a pregnant patient to continue a pregnancy, they should understand why government should not force a transgender teenager through an unwanted puberty without allowing her family and physicians even to consider alternatives.

If Democrats believe medical decisions should account for the individual patient rather than a politician’s theology, they should apply that belief to gender dysphoria.

If Democrats believe doctors should be allowed to practice evidence-based medicine without threats of prison, they should defend endocrinologists, pediatricians and therapists with the same urgency that they defend obstetricians.

And if Democrats believe parents know their children better than the state, they should not abandon that conviction the moment a parent supports her transgender child.

There will be difficult cases.

There will be disagreements about age, treatment, evidence and informed consent.

There will be patients who receive care and later wish they had made different choices, just as there are patients in every other field of medicine who experience regret, complications or changing circumstances.

The existence of difficult cases is an argument for careful medicine.

It is not an argument for government prohibition.

The Democratic answer should be simple:

Being transgender is not a crime.

Gender dysphoria is not a campaign prop.

Parents are not child abusers because they listen to their children.

Doctors are not predators because they follow clinical guidelines.

And transgender children should not have to prove that they are close enough to death before Democrats decide their health care is worth defending.

The old Democratic formulation was that government should stay out of the doctor’s office.

It was never supposed to mean: Unless the patient is transgender.

The Argument Is About Far More Than Sports

The political obsession with transgender athletes is wildly disproportionate to the number of people involved.

When the NCAA’s president testified before Congress, he said he knew of fewer than ten transgender athletes among more than half a million NCAA competitors. That number was not a comprehensive census, but it gives us some sense of scale.

We are reorganizing national politics around a population small enough to fit inside a passenger van.

This does not mean there can never be a complicated question involving eligibility, age, puberty, hormones, competitive level or a particular sport. Serious questions deserve serious standards developed from evidence.

But that is not what Republican campaigns are offering.

They are not proposing careful distinctions among elementary-school recreation, high-school teams, elite competition and professional athletics. They are using a handful of athletes to construct an entire social mythology: transgender people as cheaters, predators, infiltrators and frauds.

Sports are the door.

Once the public accepts that transgender people are fundamentally dishonest about who we are, the same premise can be carried into bathrooms, schools, identification documents, health care, military service, prisons, employment and the right to exist in public.

That is why Democrats who believe they can concede “only sports” are fooling themselves.

There is no “only sports” campaign.

There is a campaign to define transgender people as illegitimate. Sports are simply the focus-grouped entry point.

Recent Supreme Court decisions upholding transgender sports restrictions will encourage even more Democrats to call the matter settled. But a Supreme Court ruling establishes what a law may constitutionally do at that moment.

It does not require a political party to embrace the law, repeat its propaganda or abandon efforts to change it.

Segregation was once settled law.

Bans on interracial marriage were once settled law.

The criminalization of same-sex intimacy was once settled law.

“Settled law” has always been one of politics’ favorite ways to disguise a moral surrender as reluctant professionalism.

The Dixiecrat Parallel… and Its Limits

The struggle over transgender rights is not the same as the Black freedom struggle.

Transgender sports restrictions are not slavery. They are not lynching. They are not the full machinery of Jim Crow.

Any comparison that erases the unique history, scale and brutality of anti-Black oppression is historically reckless and morally wrong.

But political movements do not have to be identical for their mechanisms to be related.

For decades, the national Democratic Party tolerated and empowered Southern segregationists because party leaders believed they needed the Solid South to maintain a national coalition.

Southern Democrats accumulated seniority and controlled powerful congressional committees, allowing them to obstruct civil-rights legislation even while other Democrats claimed to support equality.

The Dixiecrats who broke from the party in 1948 were not merely timid allies offering watered-down support. They were committed segregationists. Strom Thurmond’s States’ Rights Democratic campaign explicitly defended segregation and opposed federal civil-rights protections.

The relevant parallel is therefore not between transgender people and Black Americans, or between today’s nervous Democratic candidates and the Dixiecrats themselves.

The parallel is the political bargain surrounding them.

Party leaders decided that the rights of a vulnerable minority could be delayed, diluted or traded away to preserve an electoral coalition.

They told people suffering injustice to wait because the next election was too important.

Then the election after that became too important.

And then the one after that.

There is another lesson from 1948 that today’s consultants rarely mention.

President Harry Truman embraced a stronger civil-rights platform. Southern segregationists walked out of the Democratic convention and formed the Dixiecrat ticket. Political experts predicted disaster.

Truman won anyway.

The broader partisan realignment over civil rights took decades and cannot be compressed into one election or one heroic president. But Truman’s victory remains a useful answer to the belief that moral courage is automatically electoral suicide.

Sometimes voters respect a party that knows what it stands for.

Sometimes appeasement loses both the people being appeased and the people being abandoned.

A Blue Wave Can Still Be a Political Defeat

There is every reason for LGBTQ voters to understand the material difference between Democratic and Republican government.

Republican lawmakers are proposing and passing the overwhelming majority of restrictions on transgender health care, education, identification and public participation.

A Republican administration in Ohio would almost certainly be far more hostile to transgender people than an Acton administration.

That reality cannot be wished away.

But “the other side is worse” is an argument for harm reduction.

It is not a lifetime absolution from accountability.

Democrats cannot demand queer votes, queer money, queer volunteers and queer organizing while treating queer rights as an optional platform accessory.

They cannot march at Pride in June, misgender transgender children in July and expect unquestioning loyalty in November.

The danger to 2028 comes from several directions.

First, every Democratic concession teaches Republicans that the attack works.

When a Democrat answers an anti-transgender advertisement by repeating its premise, Republican consultants do not conclude that the subject has been neutralized.

They conclude that Democrats are afraid—and increase the volume.

Second, the retreat destroys trust among the people Democrats need most intensely.

Younger voters, LGBTQ voters, activists and volunteers are not interchangeable pieces of campaign machinery.

They notice when the party celebrates their labor but bargains away their lives.

That does not necessarily mean they will vote Republican. Many will still vote Democratic because they understand the stakes.

But some will stop donating.

Some will stop knocking doors.

Some will stop defending candidates in conversations with friends.

Some will become occasional voters instead of reliable ones.

Some will support primary challengers.

A coalition can lose its energy long before it loses every vote.

Third, concessions create a policy ratchet.

Republicans impose a new restriction.

Democrats decide reversing it would be politically risky.

The restriction becomes “settled law.”

Republicans then move to the next restriction, while Democrats congratulate themselves for preventing something even worse.

Rights disappear one compromise at a time.

Fourth, it guarantees more brutal Democratic primaries.

A candidate who asks transgender people to accept humiliation in 2026 should expect a challenger in 2028.

A member of Congress who votes for legislation criminalizing transgender health care cannot reasonably demand that the left forget the vote in the name of party unity.

Unity is not silence imposed on the people being sacrificed.

Unity requires a shared commitment that makes continued cooperation possible.

The Coming Intraparty Fight

The conflict is already visible between establishment Democrats, the organized socialist left and a broader progressive movement that does not always belong to the Democratic Socialists of America but shares many of its frustrations.

DSA has made explicit defense of transgender people part of its national political identity.

That creates the ingredients for a serious collision.

Establishment Democrats will argue that candidates such as Acton are contesting difficult states and must be permitted to neutralize culturally divisive issues.

The left will answer that calling transgender girls boys does not neutralize the issue.

It ratifies the right’s worldview.

Establishment leaders will demand unity behind incumbents because control of Congress is at stake.

Progressives will ask why unity always seems to require marginalized people to surrender first.

Candidates will not merely disagree over tax rates, health-insurance structures or appropriations.

They will accuse one another of either abandoning civil rights or imposing ideological purity tests that cost the party elections.

Those are not easy wounds to close after a primary.

If Democrats win only a narrow House majority, the conflict could spill from campaigns onto the House floor.

A relatively small group of members can withhold votes on leadership, rules and major legislation. Republicans have repeatedly shown how effectively a disciplined faction can incapacitate its own majority.

There is no guarantee that Democratic progressives would reproduce that chaos.

Nor would every conflict be driven by DSA members.

But a party that refuses to resolve fundamental moral disagreements should not be surprised when those disagreements become procedural warfare.

You cannot build a functioning caucus by telling one faction that human rights are negotiable and another that objecting to the negotiation is disloyal.

That is not a coalition.

It is a ceasefire with no agreed border.

Democrats Need an Answer That Is Both Moral and Politically Competent

Republicans have spent enormous sums turning a tiny population into a national threat.

Democrats have often responded in one of two ways: complete avoidance or panicked concession.

Neither works.

Post-election research has suggested that anti-transgender policies were decisive for only a relatively small portion of voters, while voters motivated by LGBTQ equality overwhelmingly supported Democrats.

The lesson should not be that Democratic candidates must avoid the subject.

It should be that they need a competent answer.

The answer does not require every Democratic candidate to pretend that every athletic policy is simple.

It requires them to stop treating transgender identity as fraudulent.

A competent answer might sound something like this:

Transgender children deserve the same safety, dignity and opportunity as every other child. Athletic organizations can establish age-appropriate and sport-specific rules based on evidence, competitive level and the realities of each activity. Politicians should not impose sweeping bans or turn individual children into campaign targets. Our schools have more urgent problems than adults hunting for vulnerable students to humiliate.

That answer does not resolve every eligibility question.

It does something more important:

It refuses the lie that transgender girls are boys.

Democrats could also remind voters who benefits from the distraction.

While families struggle with rent, health-insurance premiums, child care and groceries, Republican politicians are demanding genital inspections, policing pronouns and investigating who may enter a school locker room.

The party should be capable of defending transgender people while making the opposition look as obsessive and invasive as it actually is.

That requires courage.

But it also requires basic political skill.

You Are Not Safe Because You Are Not First

Some gay, lesbian and bisexual voters may be tempted to view the attack on transgender people as a separate controversy—painful, perhaps, but politically containable.

It is not.

The same movement targeting transgender health care is attacking drag performances, inclusive books, LGBTQ teachers, same-sex marriage protections and the right of queer families to be recognized.

The vocabulary shifts, but the accusation remains familiar:

That LGBTQ people are dangerous to children, deceptive about our identities and unworthy of ordinary public life.

Transgender people are not being targeted because Republicans intend to stop with transgender people.

We are being targeted because strategists believe we are the part of the rainbow coalition that Democrats can be frightened into abandoning.

And once a party demonstrates that one group can be exchanged for a few polling points, every other group receives the same message:

Your rights are secure only until they become inconvenient.

If Democrats will sacrifice transgender children to win an election, why should gay parents trust them when same-sex adoption becomes the next focus-grouped wedge?

Why should nonbinary workers trust them when workplace protections become politically awkward?

Why should lesbians trust them when the right intensifies its campaign to portray queer women as predators or failed women?

Why should bisexual people trust a party that already treats their community as visible only when convenient?

Why should any racial, religious or immigrant minority believe that its place in the coalition is unconditional?

The answer cannot simply be that Democrats are better than Republicans.

They are better on LGBTQ rights.

They should be.

The relevant question is whether they are prepared to remain better when being better costs something.

A Warning Before November

Voting for a Democrat can be an act of harm reduction while criticizing that Democrat remains an act of survival.

Those positions are not contradictory.

LGBTQ voters are capable of understanding that Amy Acton would likely govern Ohio more humanely than her Republican opponent while also refusing to pretend that her words were harmless.

We are capable of helping prevent a Republican administration without granting Democratic politicians permanent ownership of our votes.

But Democratic leaders should understand the bargain clearly.

If they use transgender people as a shield in 2026—absorbing Republican attacks, conceding the premise and hoping the rest of the campaign can move on—they should expect consequences in 2028.

They should expect primary challenges.

They should expect furious activists.

They should expect young voters to question whether the party’s promises have any durability.

They should expect an organized left that is increasingly unwilling to treat civil rights as a messaging inconvenience.

And they should expect transgender people to remember exactly who stood beside us when doing so was difficult—and who waved from a Pride parade before walking away.

A blue wave may arrive in November.

But if Democrats build it by washing the rainbow out of their coalition, the water will recede before 2028.

And when it does, party leaders should not ask why the people they abandoned were no longer there to hold back the tide.

For the Children With No Safe Adult

There is one more reason I cannot treat Amy Acton’s words as harmless political positioning.

My first attempts to understand my own gender were not met with safety, patience or love. My mother—the person entrusted with protecting me—became the source of my sexual abuse.

I learned early what can happen when a child reveals something about herself that an adult does not understand or refuses to accept. I learned that honesty could be dangerous. I learned that the person society assumes will protect a child may instead become the person that child needs protection from.

Some children have no mother.

Others have a mother who is physically present but emotionally absent, unsafe or cruel.

Some have loving parents who are terrified by what politicians and television commentators tell them about transgender people. Some are being raised in homes where admitting who they are could cost them their family, their housing or their physical safety.

The state cannot replace the parent a child needed.

But it can refuse to become another adult who punishes that child for telling the truth.

Amy Acton has presented herself to Ohio as a physician, a mother and a protector of public health. As governor, she would not govern only children with supportive families, excellent doctors and safe homes. She would govern children whose first attempts to explain themselves are met with ridicule, rejection, violence or abuse.

For some of those children, the governor may become one of the most powerful adults speaking into their lives.

She may become the voice of the motherless.

She may become the voice heard by children who have mothers but have never experienced the safety that word is supposed to promise.

She may become the last adult in the room with the power to tell them that they are not broken, fraudulent or alone.

That is why her words matter.

When Amy Acton calls transgender girls boys, she is not merely expressing a position on athletic eligibility. She is reinforcing the lesson that many vulnerable children are already being taught at home: that what they know about themselves is false, shameful or dangerous.

Governor Acton, those children do not need another adult telling them that their existence is a problem to be managed.

They need someone willing to protect them.

They need a physician who remembers that medical decisions belong to patients, families and doctors.

They need a mother who understands that not every child has been safely mothered.

They need a governor who will not purchase political comfort with their dignity.

A blue wave may arrive in November.

But elections are not only about who wins power. They are about what those seeking power teach frightened children about their place in the world.

Amy Acton must decide what her voice will tell them.

That they are inconvenient.

That they are expendable.

That they must remain hidden to make other people comfortable.

Or that even when their own homes are not safe, their government will not become one more place where telling the truth about themselves is punished.

Amy, what is your answer?

The Reflecting Pool Is Doing Exactly What It Was Built to Do

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was built to reflect.

That is the one job in the title. Reflect.

It reflects the Washington Monument. It reflects the Lincoln Memorial. It reflects tourists, marchers, school groups, veterans, protesters, presidents, children licking melting ice cream, and anyone who has ever stood between those two monuments and felt the smallness and grandeur of being American at the same time.

And now, apparently, it reflects something else: the bruised ego of a president who would rather threaten citizens with prison than admit that a vanity project failed in public.

Over the past several weeks, the National Park Service carried out a hurried renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The pool was closed for cleaning, joint repair, and installation of a new lining. The price tag reportedly climbed into the many millions: more than $14 million for repainting and resurfacing, plus additional money for a filtration system meant to control algae.

The color was not subtle. It was not some quiet restoration choice designed to preserve the historic character of the National Mall. It was “American Flag Blue,” selected as part of the president’s personal beautification push ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday. It was supposed to be bright. It was supposed to be patriotic. It was supposed to be a triumph.

Instead, almost immediately after the pool was refilled, the water turned green.

Then workers were seen treating the algae. Bottles of hydrogen peroxide were poured into the water. Ozone nano-bubble technology was deployed. Crews vacuumed. Cameras rolled. Tourists looked on. And then, with the whole country watching, the brand-new blue surface began peeling from the bottom of the pool.

That is not vandalism. That is a public failure.

Maybe the failure was caused by rushed work. Maybe it was caused by incompatible materials. Maybe it was caused by residual algae, stagnant pipes, surface preparation, chemical treatment, heat, poor planning, bad luck, or some combination of all of the above. That is exactly why we have investigations, records, procurement reviews, inspectors general, contract documents, and people with actual expertise.

What we do not need is a president trying to turn embarrassment into a criminal dragnet.

Yet that is where we are.

After days of bad press and public mockery, President Trump took to Truth Social and blamed “vandals.” He claimed people had deliberately damaged the pool. He suggested chemicals had been used to sabotage the new surface. He announced that multiple people had been arrested. Then he escalated the rhetoric even further, calling the alleged acts serious crimes involving national monuments and promising “years in jail.”

Years in jail.

For what?

For standing near a reflecting pool that had already become a national punchline? For touching a loose piece of liner that was already peeling? For being curious about why millions of taxpayer dollars appeared to be floating to the surface in blue strips?

One of the people reportedly arrested was David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist from Bethesda. According to multiple reports, Hearn says he was on a long bike ride, stopped to look at the pool, noticed a piece of the new liner partially detached, reached down to feel it, and was then detained by National Guard troops and U.S. Park Police for roughly five hours. He denies vandalizing anything. He says he did not pull anything off. He says he did not destroy anything.

Let us be very clear: if someone actually vandalized the National Mall, etched threats into grass, dumped corrosive chemicals into public water, or intentionally damaged a national monument, that should be investigated. Evidence should be gathered. Witnesses should be interviewed. Video should be reviewed. Charges, if warranted, should be brought in court. The accused should be presumed innocent. The government should prove its case.

That is how a justice system works.

But that is not what this looks like.

This looks like a president saw his expensive blue pool turn green, saw the new surface peel up in front of cameras, saw the mockery coming, and reached for the oldest weapon in the authoritarian drawer: blame enemies, announce criminals, demand punishment, and make everyone else prove they are not part of the plot.

It is not just ugly. It is dangerous.

The justice system cannot function if the White House gets to narrate guilt in real time. Police cannot independently investigate if the president has already told the country that the suspects are vandals. Prosecutors cannot calmly evaluate evidence if the person at the top of the executive branch is publicly promising “years in jail.” Judges cannot preserve public trust when criminal cases begin with presidential humiliation and end with presidential pressure.

The Department of Justice has long had policies limiting communications between the White House and law enforcement about pending investigations for exactly this reason. The point is not that presidents are powerless. The point is that criminal law is not supposed to be a tool of personal ego. It is not supposed to be the customer service department for a failed construction project. It is not supposed to be the president’s mop bucket.

And that brings us to the hypocrisy.

For years, this president and his allies have claimed that the cases brought against him were proof of a “weaponized” justice system. They called the New York case a witch hunt. They called the federal investigations election interference. They claimed the Biden White House was pulling strings. They argued that investigations, indictments, prosecutions, and even a jury conviction were not law but politics in disguise.

Reasonable people can debate those cases. They involved different jurisdictions, different facts, different prosecutors, different judges, and different procedural histories. The New York case went to a jury. The federal cases were brought by a special counsel and later dropped after Trump’s reelection because of the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting a sitting president. None of that is the same as a president rage-posting about a pool.

But that is exactly the point.

If someone truly believes justice can be weaponized, they should be horrified by this.

If someone truly believes prosecutors can be pressured by politics, they should be alarmed when a president publicly labels people criminals before law enforcement has laid out the evidence.

If someone truly believes the machinery of government can be abused to punish political enemies, they should not cheer when that machinery is aimed at a cyclist, a bystander, a tourist, a protester, or anyone else who happens to be near the scene of presidential embarrassment.

Because due process is not a partisan perk. It is not only for presidents. It is not only for donors. It is not only for people with lawyers on speed dial and a television network ready to defend them. Due process is either for everyone or it is decoration.

And we should be especially careful when the alleged crime conveniently explains away the administration’s own failure.

The algae does not disappear because the president says “vandals.” The peeling paint does not magically reattach because someone posts about “Radical Left Lunatics.” A failed project does not become sabotage just because sabotage is more flattering than incompetence.

The pool is not lying. It is reflecting.

It is reflecting a government that rushed a multimillion-dollar project for appearances and then seemed shocked when appearances were not enough. It is reflecting a leader who treats public spaces like personal branding opportunities. It is reflecting a political movement that screams about weaponized justice when power touches its own, then demands prison when ordinary citizens touch a loose strip of blue coating.

And it is reflecting something much larger and much more frightening than one ugly renovation.

If this can happen over a reflecting pool, what happens when the stakes are not paint?

I do not ask that as a hypothetical.

As a transgender woman, I know what it feels like to see people like me described in the same breath as threats and terrorists in an official counterterrorism document issued by my own government. I know what it feels like to be told that I am not worthy, honest, disciplined, humble, or selfless enough to carry the flag of my nation into battle. I know what it feels like to sit down before a work trip, a vacation, or a community event and research whether I can safely enter a state because of how I dress, how I move through the world, and who I am.

So no, I do not look at this and see only peeling paint.

I see a government testing how easily it can turn embarrassment into accusation. I see a president testing how quickly his followers will accept “vandal” as a substitute for evidence. I see a justice system being dared to serve power instead of truth. I see a public being trained, one small spectacle at a time, to look away from what matters and stare at whatever shiny, ugly distraction is placed in front of us.

Green algae and floating paint are not policy.

They are not housing policy. They are not health care policy. They are not food policy. They are not wage policy. They are not immigration policy. They are not a plan for public schools, public safety, public trust, or public dignity.

They are a distraction.

They are a distraction from an administration that cannot govern without spectacle. They are a distraction from an embarrassing deal with Iran that even some of the president’s own allies have struggled to defend. They are a distraction from the Epstein files, from every name in them, from every unanswered question, from every powerful person who still hopes the public will lose interest before accountability arrives.

Stop being distracted.

Demand that Congress stay focused. Demand that state governments stay focused. Demand hearings. Demand records. Demand procurement documents. Demand independent investigations. Demand that prosecutors, not presidents, decide what evidence supports what charges. Demand that the justice system be allowed to do its work without being shoved around by a social media tantrum from the Oval Office.

And then vote accordingly.

Vote in primaries. Vote in November. Vote in school board races, city council races, state legislative races, congressional races, attorney general races, judicial races, every race where someone is asking for power over your life and your rights. Vote out the politicians who trade due process for applause. Vote out the cowards who know better and stay quiet. Vote out the bootlickers who cave to ego, fear, and convenience, then call it leadership.

We do not have to agree on everything to agree on this: the government should not be able to manufacture criminals to cover up its own failures.

Civil libertarians, queer organizers, immigrants’ rights groups, women’s health advocates, trans health defenders, journalists, local officials, lawyers, veterans, and anyone who still believes the state should not be used as a weapon of personal revenge need to say the same thing together:

No.

No to criminalizing curiosity.

No to presidential pressure on prosecutions.

No to punishing embarrassment instead of investigating failure.

No to “years in jail” as a social media tantrum.

No to a government that treats public criticism as sabotage and public property as the president’s personal mirror.

This is the moment for boots on the ground, voices in the streets, pressure in the halls of government, and power at the ballot box. Not someday. Not after the next outrage. Now.

Because if this is allowed to happen to innocent Americans over a reflecting pool, what prayer do the people already marked as enemies of this White House have? What prayer do LGBTQ people have? Immigrants? Women? Trans health care providers? Opposition lawmakers? Journalists? Teachers? Protesters? Doctors? Parents? Children?

The Reflecting Pool is doing exactly what it was built to do. It is showing us who we are becoming.

The only question is whether we are still brave enough to look.

And whether we are finally brave enough to revolt. 

Sitting With Our History at the Howard Theatre

There are evenings that feel like events.

Then there are evenings that feel like history.

This week I had the extraordinary honor of being invited by Dr. David J. Johns and the Center for Black Equity while joining my dear friends at the National LGBTQ Task Force as a guest at their table. Before I say anything else, thank you.

Thank you for opening the door.

Thank you for creating space.

Thank you for allowing me to listen.

The evening was held at the historic Howard Theatre, a venue that carries the weight of generations. Long before many of us were born, the Howard stood as one of the most important cultural institutions in Black America. Legends walked its stage. Communities gathered within its walls. History unfolded beneath its lights.

To sit in that space while honoring the legacy of ballroom culture felt profoundly meaningful.

The evening celebrated excellence, resilience, and community. But what I carried home with me was something deeper. I left thinking about history. I left thinking about elders. I left thinking about the responsibility each generation inherits from those who came before us.

Most of all, I left thinking about the people who built spaces of belonging when the rest of the world refused to make room for them.

As I looked around the room, I couldn't help but think about how many people never lived to see nights like this.

People who were thrown out of their homes.

People who lost jobs because of who they loved.

People who faced violence because of how they expressed themselves.

People who were criminalized, marginalized, ignored, and forgotten.

And yet somehow, against all odds, they kept building.

They built communities.

They built movements.

They built families.

They built hope.

Their fingerprints were everywhere in that room.

Nowhere was that more evident than in the presence of Ms. Rayceen Pendarvis.

For those who may not know her, Ms. Rayceen is Washington, D.C. royalty. She is a beloved transgender elder, activist, storyteller, community advocate, and one of the most important keepers of our city's LGBTQ history. For decades she has been a source of wisdom, joy, advocacy, and love for countless people throughout the District.

Listening to her speak reminded me of something our movement desperately needs to remember.

Our elders matter.

Not because they are older.

Because they remember.

They remember the battles.

They remember the victories.

They remember the names.

They remember the people who didn't make it.

They remember what it cost to get us here.

In an era of social media, instant commentary, and constant urgency, there is a temptation to believe that history began when we arrived. We celebrate Pride every June. We attend events. We post hashtags. We debate politics.

But how many of us have actually sat with someone who lived through the darkest chapters of our movement?

How many of us have listened to elders describe life before anti-discrimination protections?

How many of us have heard firsthand stories about surviving the AIDS crisis?

How many of us have listened to transgender elders talk about navigating a world that offered them almost no legal protections, almost no public understanding, and often very little safety?

Too few.

Younger members of our community need to spend more time sitting with our elders.

We need to hear their stories.

We need to learn their lessons.

We need to ask questions.

We need to understand not only what they fought against, but what they fought for.

Most importantly, we need to carry the torch they are passing to us.

There is a tendency within activist spaces to focus exclusively on what remains undone. There is certainly plenty of work left to do. But if we fail to understand how far we have come, we risk taking our victories for granted.

The freedoms many of us enjoy today did not arrive by accident.

They were earned.

They were fought for.

They were purchased through sacrifice, courage, heartbreak, and perseverance.

The least we can do is listen to those who paid the price.

That lesson felt particularly powerful because ballroom culture itself stands as one of the greatest examples of what happens when people create belonging where none exists.

Many people outside the LGBTQ community know ballroom through its most visible elements.

The fashion.

The categories.

The performances.

The creativity.

The fierce competition.

All of those things are beautiful.

But ballroom was never just about performance.

Ballroom was about survival.

For generations, LGBTQ people… particularly Black and Brown LGBTQ people… found themselves rejected by institutions that were supposed to protect them.

Families turned them away.

Churches condemned them.

Employers discriminated against them.

Housing became unstable.

Safety became uncertain.

So they built something new.

They built houses.

Not houses made of wood and nails.

Houses made of love.

Houses made of mentorship.

Houses made of accountability.

Houses made of protection.

Houses made of family.

The genius of ballroom culture is that it recognized a simple truth long before the rest of society caught up:

People need somewhere to belong.

House mothers and house fathers became exactly that source of belonging for countless young people. They stepped into gaps left by biological families. They provided guidance, support, structure, encouragement, and love.

They saw people the world had overlooked.

They celebrated people the world had dismissed.

They reminded people they mattered.

Sometimes that reminder saved lives.

When we talk about chosen family within LGBTQ spaces, ballroom culture represents one of the most profound examples of that idea in practice. Entire generations survived because someone looked at them and said, "You belong here."

That is not merely community building.

That is life-saving work.

And while the language may differ, the need remains exactly the same today.

People still need belonging.

People still need community.

People still need places where they are seen, valued, and loved.

Ballroom has been teaching that lesson for generations.

But perhaps the most important lesson I carried home from the evening was one of solidarity.

Real solidarity.

The kind that demands something from us.

The kind that challenges us.

The kind that requires action rather than words.

One of the most powerful observations shared during the evening has stayed with me ever since.

The slave ship didn't care about your sexual orientation.

The chains didn't give a damn about your gender identity.

That statement is important because it reminds us of a truth that can sometimes be overlooked.

Black queer people have always existed.

They existed before Stonewall.

They existed before Pride.

They existed before ballroom.

They existed on plantations.

They existed during Reconstruction.

They existed during Jim Crow.

They existed during the Civil Rights Movement.

They have always carried multiple identities simultaneously because those identities are inseparable parts of who they are.

Too often conversations about race and conversations about LGBTQ identity become separated from one another. But for countless people, those experiences cannot be separated.

They never could.

As a white transgender woman, I understand discrimination.

I understand fear.

I understand rejection.

I understand what it feels like to have people debate your humanity.

But I also have to acknowledge something that can be uncomfortable.

I am still white.

And that matters.

Too often white LGBTQ people convince ourselves that because we have experienced hardship, we no longer possess privilege.

That simply isn't true.

The reality is that many white LGBTQ people can choose when to engage conversations about race.

Many Black LGBTQ people cannot.

Many white LGBTQ people can step away when discussions become uncomfortable.

Many Black LGBTQ people live those realities every single day.

Recognizing that truth isn't about guilt.

It's about responsibility.

Responsibility to listen.

Responsibility to learn.

Responsibility to show up.

Responsibility to understand that our liberation is interconnected.

I was reminded throughout the evening of something President Barack Obama often challenged Americans to understand: our destinies are tied together.

The same is true within the LGBTQ community.

We cannot afford to be Black queers over here and white queers over there.

We cannot afford to separate transgender people from gay people.

We cannot afford to divide lesbians from bisexual people.

We cannot afford to fracture ourselves into smaller and smaller groups while expecting to build a stronger movement.

Our opponents rarely make those distinctions.

The people attacking LGBTQ rights do not stop to sort us into categories before they act.

The people attempting to erase our history do not care whether their target is Black, white, gay, transgender, lesbian, bisexual, or nonbinary.

They simply see someone they wish to silence.

Our answer must be unity.

Not performative unity.

Real unity.

The kind that shows up.

The kind that listens.

The kind that advocates.

The kind that fights alongside rather than merely cheering from the sidelines.

For white members of the LGBTQ community, that means supporting organizations led by people of color.

It means amplifying Black voices.

It means making room at the table.

It means recognizing that equality is not achieved simply because our own immediate needs have been met.

It means understanding that none of us are truly free until all of us are free.

That is not a radical concept.

It is the very foundation of community.

And community is exactly what I witnessed at the Howard Theatre.

I saw elders and young people sharing space.

I saw history and future sitting side by side.

I saw activists, artists, organizers, advocates, ballroom legends, and everyday people united by a common belief that every human being deserves dignity.

I saw what becomes possible when people choose connection over division.

For one evening, surrounded by the history of the Howard Theatre and the legacy of ballroom culture, I was reminded how much our community has overcome.

I was also reminded how much work remains.

That work belongs to all of us.

To the elders who continue teaching.

To the young people preparing to lead.

To the organizers who build movements.

To the artists who tell stories.

To the house mothers and house fathers who continue creating spaces of belonging.

To the Black LGBTQ leaders who have carried this movement forward despite burdens many of us have never had to bear.

And yes, to white LGBTQ people like me who must continue learning how to listen better, show up better, and stand more firmly alongside our siblings of color.

So once again, thank you.

Thank you to Dr. David J. Johns.

Thank you to the Center for Black Equity.

Thank you to the National LGBTQ Task Force.

Thank you to the ballroom community.

Thank you to Ms. Rayceen Pendarvis and every elder who continues to share their wisdom.

And thank you to those who came before any of us were here.

The torch is still burning.

May we prove worthy of carrying it.

Wishing each of you a happy and safe pride

Love

Allie

SHOW UP ANYWAY

Last week I heard a conversation that has been sitting in my chest ever since.

A trans man from Florida was talking about a recent interaction he had with a congressional candidate. Somewhere in the conversation he said something that stopped me cold.

“I’m not registered to vote here and I won’t register to vote here until I can get a proper ID.”

I understood it immediately.

Florida is one of several states that no longer allow transgender people to freely update gender markers on driver’s licenses. For many people, that is not an abstract policy debate. It is deeply personal. It is paperwork that feels like erasure. It is pulling out your wallet and seeing a version of yourself you fought to survive.

I understand the anger. I understand the protest.

I even understand the instinct to say: If the state refuses to recognize me, why should I participate in its systems at all?

But that sentence stayed with me because another question followed it.

What happens if thousands of us make that choice?

What happens if we stay home?

What happens if the people most directly affected by anti-trans policy remove themselves from the electorate?

And what happens if the candidates willing to fight for us lose because we were not in the room?

That question is uncomfortable.

I am asking it anyway.

There are multiple states where transgender people face severe restrictions around updating gender markers on identification documents. Kansas is one of them.

Kansas also gives us a lesson worth paying attention to.

In 2022, the governor’s race in Kansas was decided by roughly fifteen thousand votes. The estimated adult transgender population of Kansas exceeds twenty thousand people.

That does not mean transgender voters elected the governor.

It does mean something else.

Presence matters.

Margins matter.

Participation matters.

Kansas elected a governor who, while imperfect and certainly not a universal hero, repeatedly opposed legislation viewed by many transgender Kansans as harmful. The alternative likely would have looked very different.

That should make all of us pause.

Because if a community disappears from the electorate, intentionally or accidentally, consequences follow.

Movements have always wrestled with this question.

Do we participate in systems that hurt us?

Or reject them entirely?

History gives us examples of people doing the harder thing.

Women organized before they had the vote.

Black Americans fought, registered, marched, and voted under systems that often denied their humanity.

LGBTQ people voted before marriage equality, before workplace protections, before visibility became common.

Participation was never approval.

Participation was leverage.

Silence is not always resistance.

Sometimes silence is simply absence.

And systems continue moving without the people who leave.

The ballots are still counted.

The laws still move.

The governors still sign bills.

The school boards still vote.

The machine keeps running.

That reality is painful.

But it is real.

I also think we need to be honest about something else.

Some people would be perfectly happy if transgender people simply stopped showing up.

Low turnout is easier to overcome.

Invisible communities are easier to legislate around.

History is brutally honest about that.

Marginalized groups rarely gain power by disappearing.

They gain power by becoming impossible to ignore.

I keep returning to Kansas because it shows that small communities can exist inside meaningful margins.

And statewide races are only part of the story.

School boards matter.

City councils matter.

State legislatures matter.

Judges matter.

Curriculum matters.

Healthcare access matters.

The future is often built in rooms most people never watch.

I want to challenge another idea too.

Voting under unfair rules is not surrender.

Registering with documents you hate is not surrender.

Showing up despite frustration is not surrender.

It may be one of the bravest things a person can do.

It says:

You do not get to erase me by making participation painful.

You do not get to push me out of the room.

You do not get to make me disappear.

Imagine two futures.

In one, thousands walk away.

No registration.

No ballots.

No voice.

The policies continue without them.

In the other, those same people stay.

Still angry.

Still fighting.

Still demanding change.

Still voting.

Which future is more threatening to exclusionary politics?

I know my answer.

This is not a plea for acceptance.

Fight the policies.

Challenge them.

Organize.

Raise money.

Support litigation.

Write.

March.

Advocate.

Do all of it.

But do not surrender your place first.

Do not leave the field before the game begins.

Because power rarely sends invitations back to people who leave.

I hate that this conversation exists.

I hate that anyone has to hold documents that feel like grief.

I hate that identity can become bureaucracy.

You deserve better.

You deserve systems that recognize you.

You deserve identification processes built with dignity.

Fight for that.

Demand that.

Never stop demanding that.

But while you fight:

Show up anyway.

Vote anyway.

Register anyway.

Stay anyway.

Because history has not been changed by communities that vanished.

It has been changed by communities that refused to.

We are still here.

We are still voting.

We are still fighting.

And we are not leaving.

Is This How I Will Die?

I used to think authoritarianism would arrive wearing combat boots.

I thought it would look obvious. Loud. Cinematic. I thought there would be tanks in the streets, flags hanging from government buildings, screaming speeches broadcast from marble podiums while everyone with a functioning moral compass stared in horror and said, “Jesus Christ, how did it get this bad?”

Instead, it arrived the way most modern American horrors arrive: wrapped in policy language, buried inside PDFs, disguised as “security,” “stability,” and “common sense.”

A counterterrorism strategy.

A document.

A signature.

A sentence.

And suddenly people like me — transgender Americans and the people who love us — are staring at official federal language describing “radically pro-transgender” groups as part of a domestic threat framework.

Read that again.

Not criminal organizations.

Not armed militias.

Not terror cells.

“Radically pro-transgender.”

Do you understand what that sounds like to us?

Do you understand what it feels like to watch your identity slowly migrate from culture-war talking point to national-security vocabulary?

Because I do.

I understand it perfectly.

And no amount of smug conservative gaslighting is going to convince me I imagined what I read with my own eyes.

The defenders of this administration are already doing what they always do. They are already sprinting to social media to insist everyone upset by this language is “overreacting,” “hysterical,” or “misreading the context.” They want us to ignore the broader pattern and focus entirely on grammar. They want us debating punctuation while the political machine that has spent the last year portraying transgender existence as dangerous, predatory, unstable, and anti-American escalates again.

No.

Absolutely not.

Context matters.

History matters.

Patterns matter.

And this administration has spent months constructing a rhetorical universe where transgender people are no longer described as ordinary citizens with equal rights, but as ideological contaminants corrupting schools, medicine, sports, entertainment, and American culture itself.

That is not accidental.

That is political conditioning.

You do not repeatedly describe a minority group as diseased, predatory, dangerous, mentally unstable, anti-American, and corrosive to civilization unless you are trying to prepare the public to tolerate cruelty against them later.

That is how this works.

That is how it has always worked.

The language comes first.

Then the isolation.

Then the legal restrictions.

Then the surveillance.

Then the social permission structures.

Then the violence everyone pretends was unforeseeable.

And before someone says, “Nobody is coming after trans people,” let me stop you right there.

We have watched states criminalize healthcare.

We have watched politicians openly discuss removing transgender people from public life.

We have watched elected officials call us groomers, mentally ill, predators, degenerates, and threats to children.

We have watched school boards turn our existence into moral panic theater.

We have watched libraries threatened, teachers fired, doctors investigated, and families terrorized.

We have watched armed extremists show up outside drag events because political leaders taught them queer visibility itself was dangerous.

And now the federal government has decided the phrase “radically pro-transgender” belongs inside counterterrorism rhetoric.

Do you honestly expect us to believe that means nothing?

Do you think we are stupid?

Because I need people outside this community to understand something clearly: fear like this does not emerge in a vacuum.

Trans people are not reacting to a single document.

We are reacting to the cumulative weight of years of escalating hostility from people with power.

We are reacting to hearing the President of the United States describe gender-affirming healthcare as mutilation.

We are reacting to a media ecosystem that talks about trans people the way previous generations talked about communists, immigrants, Muslims after 9/11, or gay people during the AIDS crisis.

We are reacting to lawmakers who fundraise off our existence while pretending we are simultaneously weak, pathetic, omnipresent, and civilization-ending.

We are reacting to a movement obsessed with making us afraid to be visible.

And here is the part they still do not understand:

It is not working.

I am angry. Furious, actually. There are moments lately where I feel like my nervous system is plugged directly into a wall socket. Every headline feels like another demand to justify my humanity to people who have already decided I am too inconvenient, too political, too different to deserve peace.

But fear has limits.

At some point fear mutates.

At some point survival instinct becomes defiance.

At some point you realize there is no magical version of yourself quiet enough, polite enough, apologetic enough, or invisible enough to satisfy people who fundamentally resent your existence.

So you stop bargaining.

You stop asking permission.

You stop trying to win respectability contests judged by people who would hate you no matter how carefully you performed normalcy.

And you say the only thing left worth saying:

No.

No, I will not disappear.

No, I will not shut up.

No, I will not cooperate with my own erasure to make reactionaries more comfortable.

No, I will not pretend this rhetoric is harmless because it makes moderates uncomfortable to admit where this road can lead.

If your political strategy requires treating vulnerable minorities like existential threats to the nation, then the problem is not my identity.

The problem is your movement.

And if this administration believes intimidation will make transgender Americans less visible, less outspoken, or less committed to defending one another, then they profoundly misunderstand the kind of people they have created through this pressure.

Because pressure does create things.

It creates solidarity.

It creates resilience.

It creates communities that know how to survive hostile governments because history forced us to learn.

And most dangerously for authoritarian movements, it creates people who stop being afraid of social punishment.

You can only threaten someone’s dignity, livelihood, safety, and future for so long before they realize they have already been pushed to the edge you hoped they would fear approaching.

That is where many of us are now.

You want us quiet while politicians debate whether our existence is legitimate.

You want us calm while government documents casually position “radically pro-transgender” ideology beside terrorism frameworks.

You want us measured while media figures spend years depicting us as predators corrupting civilization.

No.

You do not get calm anymore.

You do not get politeness from people who feel their government slowly teaching the public to view them as dangerous.

You certainly do not get silence.

And if this is the direction this country is choosing — if America truly wants to walk further down the road of using state power, cultural panic, and national-security rhetoric against vulnerable minorities — then understand this clearly:

Some of us would rather go down fighting for our dignity than spend another decade begging cowards to recognize our humanity.

I am done apologizing for existing.

I am done negotiating over whether people like me deserve basic peace.

And I am absolutely done pretending I do not see what is happening just because acknowledging it makes other people uncomfortable.

There is another reason this moment feels so heavy to me personally.

A few days ago, Washington’s queer community lost one of our elders.

SaVanna Wanzer.

And if you are outside this community, maybe you do not fully understand what that means.

“Elder” in queer spaces is not just about age. It means survivor. It means teacher. It means someone who stood in front of the storm long enough to show the rest of us where shelter might exist. It means somebody who kept fighting for visibility, dignity, and humanity back when doing so came with consequences many people today cannot even imagine.

SaVanna founded Trans Pride DC because she understood something America still struggles to understand now: visibility is survival.

People do not protect communities they are taught not to see.

And for years, she pushed anyway. Through hostility. Through indifference. Through systems that treated transgender people as disposable until they needed us as political scapegoots. She fought before corporate logos turned rainbow-colored every June. Before half the politicians now pretending to care could even say the word “transgender” in public without looking nervous.

She fought because she believed we deserved to exist openly.

Not quietly.

Not conditionally.

Openly.

And now, almost immediately after losing someone who spent her life demanding visibility for her people, we are watching the federal government drift toward rhetoric that once again frames transgender existence as suspicious, destabilizing, dangerous, anti-American.

Do you understand how cruel that timing feels?

A woman spends her life demanding visibility for her people, and the response from modern American politics is to increasingly speak about those same people through the language of extremism and security threats.

That is why so many of us are angry beyond words.

Because we know exactly how much people like SaVanna sacrificed to drag this country even an inch closer to decency.

The younger generation of trans people did not invent this fight.

We inherited it.

Inherited from people who lost jobs.

Inherited from people rejected by families.

Inherited from people beaten, mocked, criminalized, institutionalized, abandoned, and erased.

Inherited from people who kept showing up anyway.

SaVanna Wanzer was one of those people.

And if this political era has taught me anything, it is that visibility alone was never going to save us forever. Rights are not magic. Progress is not permanent. The distance between inclusion and persecution is apparently much shorter than this country likes to pretend.

But here is what I also know:

People like SaVanna planted something bigger than fear.

They planted endurance.

They taught us how to find each other.

They taught us how to survive governments that wanted us invisible.

They taught us that community itself is resistance.

And most importantly, they taught us that surviving openly in a world trying to shame you back into silence is not weakness.

It is courage.

So no, we are not backing down.

Not now.

Not while politicians try to turn our identities into a security threat.

Not while opportunists build careers demonizing vulnerable people.

Not while media figures profit from convincing frightened Americans that trans people are the collapse of civilization.

And certainly not after losing one of the women who helped build the foundation we are standing on now.

We will carry this fight forward because people like SaVanna carried it for us first.

We will survive in her honor.

We will love louder in her honor.

We will remain visible in her honor.

And every single day we refuse to disappear, they lose.

Erasure in Plain Sight: When Identity Becomes a Liability Again

There is a particular kind of silence that history leaves behind. It is not peaceful. It is not reflective. It is the kind that settles in after something has been taken. After voices are removed, after stories are buried, after entire identities are pushed so far out of view that they begin to disappear.

We have seen this before.

During the Holocaust, the world did not just lose millions of lives. It lost possibility. It lost artists who never finished their work, writers who never told their stories, thinkers who never got the chance to shape the world.

Oppression does not only destroy people. It destroys what they would have created.

And today, in the United States, we are watching a quieter version of that same mechanism take shape. Not identical. Not equal in scale. But disturbingly familiar in pattern.

A pattern where identity becomes dangerous. Where visibility becomes a risk. Where people are told, in a thousand subtle and not so subtle ways, that the safest version of themselves is the one that takes up the least space.

This is not theoretical. It is legislative.

The New Architecture of Silence

Across the country, a specific kind of policy is gaining traction. It does not announce itself as oppressive. It rarely uses harsh language. It arrives dressed as common sense, protection, and tradition.

But strip away the branding, and the throughline is unmistakable.

Control who gets to be seen.
Control who gets to be named.
Control who gets to exist comfortably in public.

In some states, books are being pulled from shelves with surgical precision. Not randomly. Not evenly. Stories about queer lives, about racial truth, about anything that complicates a narrow worldview, disappear first.

Not debated. Not challenged. Removed.

Because if you cannot see it, you do not have to acknowledge it.

In others, educators are told that respect is optional. That dignity can be withheld. That identity is something up for debate in the very spaces that are supposed to foster growth and understanding.

And then there are policies that reach into something as routine as identification and turn it into a tool of enforcement. When the state insists on defining who you are in ways that contradict your reality, it is not paperwork. It is power.

And now, layered on top of all of this, comes something even more revealing. The idea that representation itself should carry a warning. That the mere presence of a transgender character on screen might require a disclaimer.

Let’s stop pretending that is neutral.

A warning label is not information. It is instruction.

It teaches the audience how to feel before they even see the story.

You are not being warned about content. You are being trained to be uncomfortable with a person.

And once a society accepts that, it is not a long step to deciding those people should be seen less. Heard less. Written less.

When a government starts labeling people  with a warning, it has already decided they are a problem.

The Geography of Selective Freedom

It is impossible to ignore where these policies are taking root.

They are not random. They are not evenly distributed. They are clustering in places with long, documented histories of deciding who deserves full dignity and who gets something conditional.

States that once fought integration now regulate information.
States that resisted religious difference now police identity.
States that treated women’s autonomy as negotiable are once again very comfortable drawing lines around bodies and lives.

No one has to say the quiet part out loud.

The same places that once decided who counted as fully human are once again very interested in drawing that line.

The same machinery that once enforced hierarchy has not been dismantled. It has been repurposed.

History does not disappear. It adapts.

Patterns We Pretend Not to Recognize

There is always a temptation to treat each of these developments as isolated. A book ban here. A policy tweak there. A “misunderstood” law somewhere else.

But history does not operate in isolated incidents. It operates in patterns.

It starts with controlling information.
Then it moves to controlling language.
Then it defines which identities are acceptable in public life.

During the early years of authoritarian systems, artists were not immediately silenced by force. They were labeled. Marginalized. Made controversial. Their work was reframed as dangerous or inappropriate.

Some adapted. Some fled. Some disappeared into safer versions of themselves.

And the world lost what they would have created.

We do not remember all their names.

We only feel the absence they left behind.

The Cost of Making People Smaller

Let’s stop soft-pedaling what this actually does.

This is not about removing identities. It is about exhausting them.

Make every interaction harder.
Make every space conditional.
Make every expression something that might carry consequences.

And eventually people adjust.

They edit themselves before anyone else has to.
They shrink before they are pushed.
They disappear without being formally removed.

You do not need mass censorship when you can convince people to silence themselves.

That is cleaner. Quieter. Easier to defend.

And just as effective.

You do not have to ban people to erase them. You just have to make existing exhausting enough that they start doing it themselves.

Language as a Weapon with Good PR

Everything is wrapped in language designed to sound reasonable.

“Transparency.”
“Accuracy.”
“Parental rights.”

It all sounds measured. Responsible. Thoughtful.

But these are not neutral frameworks. They are filters.

They define what counts as real. What counts as appropriate. What counts as acceptable to exist in public.

Control the language, and you do not just shape the conversation. You decide who gets to be part of it.

And once someone is outside that boundary, they become optional.

The Illusion of Protection

The justification is almost always the same. This is about protecting children.

But protection for one group is being built on the erasure of another.

Some kids are being shielded from discomfort.
Others are being taught that they are the discomfort.

That they are the thing that requires explanation.
The thing that needs a warning.
The thing that might be too much.

If your version of safety depends on someone else being treated as a problem, it is not safety. It is hierarchy with better branding.

The Quiet Disappearance

This is how it happens.

No single moment. No dramatic turning point.

A teacher leaves.
A writer shelves a story.
A show never gets made.
A character gets rewritten into something safer.

Each decision makes sense on its own.

Together, they hollow things out.

Until one day, the world feels simpler. Cleaner. Less complicated.

And far less honest.

What We Stand to Lose

The real loss here is not political. It is cultural.

It is the loss of stories that challenge us.
The loss of perspectives that expand us.
The loss of art that reflects the full reality of who we are.

Because when people are forced to shrink, what they create shrinks with them.

And what we inherit is smaller, flatter, and less true.

The Choice Before Us

We are not repeating history in exact form.

But we are standing at a familiar crossroads.

One path leads to a society that tolerates complexity. That allows people to exist fully, even when that existence challenges assumptions.

The other path leads somewhere quieter. More controlled. More curated.

A place where identity is acceptable only when it fits.
Where stories come with disclaimers.
Where people come with conditions.

A place where freedom exists, but only for those who do not test its limits.

Final Thought: The Art That Never Happens

There is a question that should haunt us more than it does.

Not just what was lost during the Holocaust.

But what was never allowed to exist in the first place.

The art that was never created.
The ideas that were never spoken.
The lives that were edited down until they left no trace.

That kind of loss does not announce itself. It accumulates.

Quietly. Legally. Respectably.

And if we are not paying attention, we will not notice what is disappearing.

We will just inherit a world that feels smaller and call it normal.

By the time a society starts labeling people as something to warn about, it has already decided whose humanity comes with conditions.

A Flag Is Important… So Is the Person Carrying It

Stonewall, Sacred Ground and What We Mean by “History”

A flag is important.

So is the person carrying it.

When the Pride flag controversy unfolded at Stonewall National Monument, statements were swift. Organizations emphasized that Stonewall is sacred ground. The message echoed across platforms: You can’t erase our history.

They are right.

Stonewall Inn is not just brick and mortar. It is a cultural origin story. It is where queer and trans people, many of them Black, brown, poor, undocumented, resisted systemic humiliation and violence.

But here is the deeper question hiding beneath the defense of a monument:

What is history, exactly?

History is not a building.

History is not a plaque.

History is not a federal designation.

History is risk taken in the present tense.

Stonewall was never about stone. It was about defiance. The monument is a memorial to risk, not a replacement for it.

If that is true, then defending Stonewall must also mean defending the people taking risks now.

Otherwise we risk turning rebellion into heritage branding.

Visibility, Vulnerability, and the Cost Paid in Real Time

When Amber Glenn spoke candidly about her identity and the pressure she was carrying heading into the Olympics, she embodied everything the movement claims to celebrate:

Authenticity.

Courage.

Visibility.

She did what queer youth are constantly encouraged to do: live openly.

And when backlash followed, harassment, threats, coordinated attacks, she stepped back from social media to protect her mental health.

The silence from major national organizations was noticeable.

Large advocacy groups are not obligated to comment on every controversy. They must prioritize legal battles, legislative fights, and strategic positioning.

But optics shape culture.

“When someone at that level gets targeted and no one big says anything, it feels like a warning. Like visibility is conditional.”

Conditional visibility is dangerous.

We cannot tell queer people that coming out is powerful and then leave them to manage the fallout alone when that power provokes hostility.

“The most terrifying moment isn’t speaking up. It’s realizing you might be speaking alone.”

The Retail Retreat and the Disposable Artist

The pattern is not new.

When Dylan Mulvaney became the face of a corporate partnership, backlash intensified. Corporate messaging shifted. The cultural firestorm continued, largely directed at her.

When Target scaled back certain Pride merchandise following threats and hostility, the company cited employee safety concerns. That concern is legitimate.

But artists whose designs were removed described feeling blindsided.

“They wanted the rainbow when it drove traffic. They didn’t want the rainbow when it drove headlines.”

Store employees remained on the front lines of hostility. Drag performers saw bookings canceled “out of caution.” The institution preserved stability. The individual absorbed volatility.

“The logo stayed safe. We didn’t.”

Risk management is rational. But when the burden of that management consistently lands on queer individuals, creators, employees, performers, the message becomes clear:

Brand allyship is resilient. Human allyship is negotiable.

Policy Debates and the Abstraction of Harm

In legislative battles across the country, including developments restricting aspects of trans youth healthcare, the language often becomes clinical.

“Policy debate.”

“Regulatory clarity.”

“Child protection framework.”

For families living it, there is nothing abstract.

“When they say it’s about process, they’re talking about my kid’s prescription. When they say it’s about safety, they’re talking about denying care.”

Organizations issue statements. They lobby. They litigate. That work is vital.

But the tone sometimes shifts from urgent to procedural.

“Institutions speak in legal language because courts require it. But people hear that language and wonder if anyone sees their fear.”

When we fight policy without centering people, we risk sanitizing harm.

The monument fight is clear.

The healthcare fight is messy.

But both involve lives.

Why Institutions Default to Protecting Structures

Institutions are designed for sustainability. They protect:

Donor trust.

Legal credibility.

Access to power.

Strategic alliances.

Monuments are stable symbols. Individuals are dynamic variables.

“A monument fight is definable. It’s contained. It’s symbolic. A personal controversy can spiral unpredictably. Institutions are built to avoid unpredictable exposure.”

That instinct is understandable.

But movements were never built on predictability.

They were built on moral clarity.

If the calculation becomes: defend what is safe to defend, we must ask what that teaches the next generation.

The False Scarcity of Solidarity

There is no finite supply of support.

Defending Stonewall does not prevent defending Amber Glenn.

Protecting a monument does not prevent protecting a trans teenager.

The idea that institutions must choose between structure and people is a false scarcity model.

“The moment solidarity feels rationed, trust erodes.”

Trust is the currency of movements.

VII. How We Expand Protection Without Burning Bridges

Outrage alone does not build durable change. Structure does.

Rapid Public Affirmation.

Human-Centered Language.

Shared Amplification.

Visibility Reciprocity.

Internal Risk Recalibration.

“Silence feels safe internally. Externally, it often reads as indifference.”

Movements cannot afford to be perceived as indifferent to their own.

The Baton Is Still Moving

Stonewall was not protected because it was stone.

It was protected because people put themselves between erasure and existence.

A flag is important.

But a flag does not receive threats.

A monument does not step off social media to preserve mental health.

A building does not wonder if it is too much trouble to defend.

People do.

If we become a movement that instinctively protects our artifacts but hesitates to protect our artists, we risk preserving memory while losing momentum.

History is not something we guard behind velvet ropes.

History is happening on the ice.

In exam rooms.

On retail floors.

On small stages in hostile towns.

The Pride flag is powerful because someone is brave enough to carry it in the wind.

If we truly believe you can’t erase our history, then we must protect the people writing the next chapter.

Because the future is not a monument.

It is a person.

And they are still standing under that flag.

WHERE THE HELL IS EVERYONE AGAIN

INTRODUCTION: THE SILENCE IS THE STORY

There are moments when silence becomes louder than any speech. Moments when the absence of response is not neutral, not cautious, not strategic. It is damning. We are in one of those moments now.

Right now, one of the most visible queer athletes in the world, Amber Glenn, is standing alone in the public square. Not because she lacks community. Not because she lacks courage. But because the institutions that profit from the rainbow have decided that speaking up is inconvenient.

This is not new. And that is the problem.

I am frustrated. Not in a performative way. Not in a fleeting social media way. But in the bone deep way that comes from watching the same failure repeat itself with different victims. Frustrated at the silence. Frustrated at watching Amber Glenn treated as expendable. Frustrated at the way we gather at protest after protest, conference after conference, preaching unity and family and we have your back, only to lose our collective voice when the fight actually arrives.

And yes, this is why we lose so damn often.

WHY AMBER GLENN MATTERS AND WHY THIS IS BIGGER THAN HER

Amber Glenn is not controversial because of her performance. She is not divisive because of her talent. She is controversial only because she refuses to shrink.

She is openly queer in a sport that survives on palatability. She is candid about mental health in an ecosystem that rewards silence and compliance. She stands publicly, visibly, and unapologetically. Not just for herself, but for the community she belongs to.

That visibility is precisely why this moment matters.

Corporate LGBTQ organizations love visible queer figures when the visibility is convenient. When it sells Pride merchandise. When it decorates donor decks. When it fits neatly into a campaign slide labeled impact.

But visibility becomes a liability the moment it requires defense.

Amber Glenn did not hesitate to stand up. For herself. For queer people. For trans people. For anyone who has ever been told to make themselves smaller to stay welcome. Yet when the moment arrived that demanded public backing, institutional pressure, or even vocal solidarity, the response from many of the largest LGBTQ organizations was nothing.

Silence.

And silence is not accidental.

WHAT AMBER SAID AND WHAT SHE GOT BACK

Amber Glenn did not issue a carefully focus grouped statement. She spoke honestly about identity, about mental health, about the pressure placed on queer women in elite sports, and about existing openly in a system that punishes deviation.

The response was swift and ugly.

She received harassment. She received threats. She became the target of coordinated backlash that was both gendered and queerphobic in tone. The familiar mix of policing, sexualized hostility, and demands that she just skate and stay quiet.

This is the exact moment where institutional advocacy is supposed to show up.

It did not.

THE ILLUSION OF ADVOCACY

We need to say something plainly, even if it makes people uncomfortable. Much of what passes for LGBTQ advocacy at the national, corporate level is branding, not protection.

Branding is easy. Branding is safe. Branding is rainbow logos in June, carefully worded statements, and donor friendly language about visibility and inclusion. Branding thrives when queerness is inspirational, digestible, and non threatening.

Advocacy is harder.

Advocacy requires risk. It requires confrontation. It requires the willingness to make powerful people angry, including the people who write checks.

And when advocacy would require challenging power instead of flattering it, too many organizations choose to disappear.

Amber Glenn is not the first person to discover this, and she will not be the last.

THE MISOGYNY QUESTION

It is worth asking a question many organizations would rather avoid. Is misogyny part of this silence?

In recent years, major LGBTQ organizations mobilized aggressively, and correctly, to defend drag queen story hours. Drag queens are overwhelmingly portrayed by cisgender men, and those defenses were loud, visible, and institutionally coordinated.

That support mattered.

But contrast that response with the near total silence when a queer woman athlete faces threats for speaking openly.

If our advocacy infrastructure reliably mobilizes to protect queer expression associated with men, but falters when queer women are targeted, that is not coincidence. It is a blind spot. Blind spots have consequences.

Queer women have long been expected to absorb hostility quietly. To be grateful for partial inclusion. To understand when their defense is deemed too complicated.

Amber Glenn fits that pattern. That should disturb us.

A PATTERN NOT AN ANOMALY NEW HAMPSHIRE 2025

If this silence feels familiar, it is because we have seen it before.

In 2025, trans restrictive health care legislation advanced through the New Hampshire legislature with the help of Democratic votes. This was not a surprise ambush. This was not a fringe maneuver. This was harm enabled from inside the tent.

And what happened next?

There were no emergency press conferences. No donor alerts. No endorsements paused. No donations pulled. No sustained public pressure campaign aimed at the political machines that made those votes possible.

Silence.

We are told endlessly that Republican led anti trans bills justify urgent mobilization because they are existential threats. That is true.

But when Democrats participate in the same harm, the response from major LGBTQ organizations collapses.

If accountability only flows in one direction, it is not strategy. It is abdication.

THE DOUBLE STANDARD WE PRETEND NOT TO SEE

In 2025, corporations were loudly condemned, correctly, for rolling back DEI language, removing website pages, or quietly distancing themselves from public commitments under pressure from the Trump administration and allied movements.

Statements were issued. Campaigns were launched. Boycotts were threatened.

But when a young, highly visible queer skater receives threats for speaking openly, where is that urgency?

If a missing web page triggers outrage but a real person facing harassment does not, then we are no longer talking about values. We are talking about optics.

THE COST OF SELECTIVE ACCOUNTABILITY

Here is the lie we keep telling ourselves. That silence preserves influence.

What silence actually preserves is access, not power. Access to meetings. Access to donors. Access to political machines that depend on our loyalty but rarely reciprocate it when it counts.

The other side does not suffer from this delusion.

Conservative movements are perfectly willing to manipulate, contort, and even contradict their stated values in order to consolidate power. They punish disloyalty. They reward aggression. They understand that power yields nothing to politeness.

Meanwhile, we agonize over tone. We worry about unity. We avoid confrontation in the name of coalition, even as members of our own community are sacrificed for political convenience.

Amber Glenn is paying the price for that cowardice in real time.

UNITY WITHOUT CONSEQUENCES IS THEATER

We gather constantly. Panels. Summits. Marches. Fundraisers. We chant family, community, belonging. We tell one another and ourselves that we are stronger together.

But unity that evaporates the moment it demands consequences is not unity. It is theater.

What does we have your back mean if it disappears when a queer woman in a highly visible, high risk space needs public defense?

What does allyship mean if it survives only as long as it does not cost donations, endorsements, or invitations?

And what exactly are we building if the most visible members of our family can be quietly abandoned when defending them becomes inconvenient?

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

This is not a call for purity tests. It is not a demand for ideological exile. It is a call for symmetry.

If organizations claim to represent LGBTQ people, they must be willing to publicly challenge allies who enable harm, pause or reconsider endorsements when red lines are crossed, attach consequences to actions not just words, and defend visible community members when the backlash is real.

Anything less is branding.

A STATEMENT FROM RAINBOWS IN REVOLT

Rainbows In Revolt exists because silence has become the default, and silence is killing us.

We believe advocacy that does not show up when it costs something is not advocacy at all. We believe queer women, trans people, and visibly outspoken members of our community deserve defense, not abandonment. We believe accountability must apply to friends as well as enemies.

We are done waiting for permission. We are done mistaking access for power. We are done applauding institutions that vanish when courage is required.

If the largest voices in the room will not speak, we will.

The revolt starts right now.

Creating Change

For most of my adult life, the National LGBTQ Task Force existed to me in the same way a lot of national organizations do: as an idea more than a presence. A name that appeared occasionally in articles, on conference flyers, or at the bottom of policy statements I agreed with but didn’t actively engage in. I knew they were important. I knew they had history. I knew, in the abstract way many of us know such things, that they were “one of the good ones.”

But they were not part of my life.

I was living locally. Working locally. Loving locally. Building community in the messy, imperfect, deeply human ways that don’t always come with branding or national reach. My queerness… my transness especially; was shaped far more by chosen family, late-night conversations, barroom organizing, mutual aid asks passed hand to hand, and the constant low-grade vigilance that comes with simply existing in public. Institutions, even well-meaning ones, felt distant. Sometimes necessary. Rarely personal.

And then the past year happened.

It’s impossible to talk about this period without acknowledging the atmosphere we’ve all been breathing. Chaos doesn’t begin to cover it. The legislative attacks. The rhetorical escalations. The deliberate cruelty aimed at trans people; particularly trans women and trans youth, disguised as “debate” or “concern.” It wasn’t just policy; it was narrative warfare. Every headline felt like another reminder that our lives were being treated as theoretical, negotiable, or expendable.

There were moments when it felt less like weathering a storm and more like being asked to stand calmly while molotov cocktails were lobbed into the room… one after another… while we were still expected to smile, educate, and remain “reasonable.”

Even within the broader LGBTQ+ community, the pressure points were clear. Trans people were being isolated rhetorically, strategically separated, asked, implicitly or explicitly, to wait, to soften, to be patient for the sake of “the bigger picture.” It was exhausting. It was enraging. And at times, it was profoundly lonely.

Hope, in that environment, starts to feel naïve. Faith in “the movement” becomes harder to access when survival itself feels like full-time work. I believed in community, yes—but I wasn’t sure I believed in infrastructure anymore. Not really. Not the kind with national names and long histories. I didn’t distrust it; I just didn’t feel held by it.

That was the mindset I was in when an invitation arrived that would quietly, completely disrupt that distance.

When I was asked to serve as a local ambassador for the Creating Change Conference, my first reaction wasn’t excitement. It was pause.

Not because I didn’t want to help, but because I understood what that kind of invitation implied. Being a local ambassador isn’t ceremonial. It isn’t a title you wear for clout or a bullet point you add to a bio. It’s a role rooted in responsibility: showing up, helping others navigate unfamiliar space, representing not just an organization but a city, a community, and a set of values in real time.

It meant visibility. It meant accountability. It meant being present not only for the celebration but for the hard parts, the vulnerable moments, the quiet crises that never make it into recap posts.

And maybe most importantly, it meant stepping inside an institution I had only ever observed from the outside.

Accepting that invitation required me to interrogate my own distance. My own assumptions. My own tendency… born of both survival and skepticism, to keep large organizations at arm’s length. It asked me to move from observer to participant, from abstract agreement to embodied involvement.

Before the conference officially began; before badges were printed, rooms filled, and schedules took over; there were the gatherings that don’t always get remembered in formal recaps. The dinners. The informal meet-ups. The quiet moments where people showed up without an agenda, without a microphone, without needing to perform anything other than being present.

It was in those early spaces that something inside me shifted.

I met other local folks; people who lived in the same region, breathed the same political air, navigated the same cultural fault lines, who I might never have crossed paths with otherwise. Activists, organizers, volunteers, professionals, community members whose work didn’t always overlap with mine, but whose commitments absolutely did.

What surprised me most was meeting the national leaders of the Task Force. I had expected distance, polish, celebrity. What I found instead were genuine members of the LGBTQ community… authentic, grounded, human. People who wake up every day doing this work, absorbing the blows, building strategy, and carrying a fight I had been so afraid I was carrying alone.

By the time the conference doors officially opened, something fundamental had already changed. I was no longer walking in braced for disappointment. I was walking in accompanied.

The lobby of the Washington Hilton came alive with a DC go-go band, drums echoing through marble and glass, joy demanding space. I watched the exhibition hall take shape as vendors, nonprofits, local organizations, and national media arrived with rainbows and banners—reaffirming their commitment at a time when it often felt we were losing corporate allies for political convenience.

People arrived from all fifty states, Puerto Rico, and several countries beyond. They represented college campuses, Pride programs, faith-based queer organizations, healthcare providers, mental health professionals, political researchers, campaign managers, and so much more. For the first time since WorldPride, I felt the community exhale. For five days, we were safe. We could preach to the choir. We could regroup.

The programming covered everything, sexual health, trauma recovery, protecting trans youth, countering the weaponization of faith, preparing for legislative attacks, data and polling studies. There were caucuses for nearly every identity and experience. And there were moments that slowed us down… an Indigenous ceremony, asking permission to gather on stolen land.

We were also in mourning.

Renée Nicole Good was a lesbian with a wife. She was family to those of us at Creating Change. Her killing by ICE agents in Minneapolis was not abstract. It was spoken about in hallways and held in silence. It was a reminder that the violence was real, and the war had barely begun.

We knew the first year of this administration was not the apex… it was the opening shots. But we were better prepared now. We would not be caught flat-footed again. We were ready to fight. And we were ready to win.

This is where I want to end, with gratitude.

Thank you to the National LGBTQ Task Force for trusting me and allowing me to be a small part of something so impactful. Thank you to Washington, DC, and the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs for keeping this city a safe space. Thank you to everyone who showed up and refused to be scared away.

I came into this skeptical and expecting disappointment. I found none. This was real. It was authentic. It was important. It was big. I was there. I learned I was not alone. I didn’t have to fight this war by myself. I got to be me. I got to feel love.

For that, I will always be grateful.

When Safety Nets Break: Why Our Community Must Rally Behind My Sister Susan’s House

Picture this: a 17-year-old, pregnant, terrified, standing outside a locked door that was once home. Maybe her parents found out. Maybe she ran to escape something worse. Maybe she’s just run out of options. She’s carrying a new life and fighting to hold on to her own.

For fifteen years, there’s been a place that would have taken her in. A place that promised more than a bed—a shot at dignity. That place is My Sister Susan’s House in Greensboro, North Carolina.

And right now, the rug’s being ripped out from under them.

The Lifeline: What My Sister Susan’s House Actually Is

My Sister Susan’s House—“MSSH” to the people who know it—isn’t some faceless institution. It’s a home for pregnant or parenting youth ages 16–21 who are homeless, escaping abuse, or otherwise in crisis.

The program, operated by Youth Focus, opened in 2010 as one of the first of its kind in the region: a 4,400-square-foot, home-like space where up to eight young women and their babies can live safely while rebuilding their lives.

Each mom has her own private, studio-style room and bath. A live-in staff member keeps the environment stable and nurturing. The stay can last up to 18 months, during which every basic need is met: housing, food, healthcare, clothing, and childcare support.

But MSSH isn’t just about survival. Residents work toward finishing high school or a GED, take vocational classes, learn financial literacy, and practice parenting and independent-living skills. They get counseling and mentorship. They leave not just housed, but ready.

Since opening, over 150 moms and babies have passed through those doors. Many arrived scared and exhausted. Many left strong.

The Stories That Prove It Works

One of the earliest graduates was a teenage mother escaping domestic violence. At My Sister Susan’s, she learned self-advocacy, completed job training, and found stable work. A year later, she was renting her own apartment; her child thriving.

Another resident remembers the day she finally got the keys to her first independent home: she ran from room to room screaming with joy. That’s the power of dignity restored.

Each of these women walked in as a statistic and walked out as a success story. MSSH doesn’t just change lives—it creates futures.

And the numbers show the need is overwhelming. In the last full year before the funding crisis, MSSH received 134 referrals for pregnant or parenting teens. Capacity: only enough for 18. For every seven who needed help, only one could get in.

Now imagine what happens when even that one loses her spot.

The Crisis: Federal Funding Cut Despite a Perfect Score

For more than a decade, My Sister Susan’s House received steady federal funding through youth-housing and maternity-support grants. They passed every audit. Their outcomes were stellar.

Then came 2025, and a government decision that defies logic.

Their annual funding application received a perfect score of 100. No weaknesses. No performance flags. Yet the funding was denied.

MSSH was told it could not reapply until 2027, leaving a two-year funding vacuum. Overnight, they lost roughly $250,000, almost half their annual operating budget.

The organization had no warning, no explanation that made sense. After thirteen years of flawless partnership, the door just slammed shut.

For a program already stretched thin, that’s catastrophic. It means fewer beds. It means layoffs. It means pregnant teens—literal children, some victims of abuse—will be turned away because there’s no money to keep the lights on.

Is This Political? Maybe Not Directly, But It’s Definitely Ideological

There’s no public smoking gun tying this decision to a specific politician. No leaked memo saying “cut the funding to My Sister Susan’s.”

But it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to see the pattern.

Across the country, the federal government has been quietly pulling back funding for programs dealing with teen pregnancy, transitional housing, and family services, especially those that don’t fit neat ideological molds.

North Carolina nonprofits have been hit hard. Nationwide, social-service grants are being reframed under “family values” or “non-ideological content” standards that critics say punish organizations simply for being inclusive, trauma-informed, or comprehensive in the education they offer.

It’s austerity with a moral agenda, and its victims are often the most vulnerable.

Whether or not My Sister Susan’s House was specifically targeted, the result is the same: fewer lifelines for people who need them most.

And yes, we should say it plainly—this is happening under the Trump administration, which has reprioritized federal spending away from many social programs in favor of what it calls “community-driven” initiatives. When the scorecard is perfect and the funding still vanishes, political feels like the only word left.

The Human Cost of Bureaucratic Indifference

When you strip $250,000 from a small transitional housing program, you don’t just lose line items. You lose human beings.

You lose the night-shift counselor who sits up with a new mom who hasn’t slept in three days. You lose the parenting coach who teaches how to hold a colicky baby at 3 a.m. You lose the staffer who drives a teen to her GED class. You lose the next 134 referrals.

And if you live anywhere near the South, you know how fragile that ecosystem already is.

In states where abortion access is being rolled back, programs like MSSH are the literal embodiment of “support for life.” These young women chose to carry pregnancies to term. The least a civilized society can do is help them survive the aftermath.

Cutting them loose isn’t just bad policy—it’s moral malpractice.

Why This Fight Belongs to the Queer Community Too

When I look at those young mothers, I see echoes of queer kids across the South… the ones who came out and got kicked out. The ones who bounced between couches, shelters, and friends’ floors because family stopped being safe.

The details differ, but the feeling is the same: isolation, shame, survival.

Many of us built our strength from that same rubble. We learned to be our own safety net when society wouldn’t catch us. We built chosen family when blood turned its back.

That’s why this matters to us. Because our movement, the LGBTQ+ movement, is about more than rainbow flags and Pride floats. It’s about liberation, compassion, and standing in the breach for anyone who’s been told they don’t deserve care.

If we only defend our own, we’ve missed the point.

When pregnant teens lose their shelter because of politics, that’s our cue to step forward… to say, we’ve been there too.

The Intersection of Struggle

Oppression doesn’t care about categories. Homelessness, poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia; they travel in packs.

A queer kid thrown out for coming out and a teenage mom thrown out for being pregnant are living two sides of the same coin: shame-based rejection.

Programs like My Sister Susan’s House break that cycle. They don’t ask who’s to blame. They ask, “What do you need to survive?” That’s the same ethic that built queer community centers, AIDS-era care networks, and modern mutual aid collectives.

If we want to build a truly intersectional movement, one that preaches solidarity instead of slogan-shopping, this is it.

Standing with My Sister Susan’s House isn’t charity. It’s alignment.

The Bigger Picture: What Happens When We Stop Caring

The United States has roughly 4.2 million youth experiencing homelessness each year. Among them are an estimated 44% who identify as LGBTQ+ and a rapidly rising number of pregnant or parenting teens.

In the South, social stigma and lack of safety nets amplify that crisis. Faith-based shelters often exclude young mothers or queer youth. Government programs are chronically underfunded.

That’s why local, targeted efforts like MSSH matter so much. They fill the gap where the system fails… quietly, efficiently, compassionately.

When federal funding vanishes, these micro-safety-nets disappear first. And when they’re gone, it’s nearly impossible to rebuild them.

The Immediate Goal: $250,000 to Keep the Doors Open

Youth Focus has launched an emergency fundraising campaign titled The Future of My Sister Susan’s House. They’re asking for help from foundations, businesses, and individuals to replace the lost federal support.

$250,000 keeps the lights on, staff paid, programs running, and residents safe for another year. It buys time; time to lobby for renewed funding, build private partnerships, and protect the next wave of young mothers who’ll knock on that door.

For most of us, that number feels huge. But community math works differently:

5,000 people giving $50. 2,500 people giving $100. 500 businesses giving $500.

Any of those combinations reach the goal.

We’ve raised more for drag fundraisers and bar-rescue campaigns. We can do this.

What Rainbows In Revolt Will Do, and What You Can Do Too

Rainbows In Revolt has always been about turning compassion into motion. We fight for queer rights, yes, but we fight for human rights first.

So here’s what we’re doing:

1. Raising Awareness: We’ll dedicate this week’s social channels to sharing MSSH stories, stats, and donation links. Every post will link to their fundraiser.

2. Small-Business Challenge: LGBTQ-owned bars, salons, and boutiques; consider pledging 1 day of sales or hosting a benefit night.

3. Holiday Giving Push: Encourage customers, friends, and chosen family to match what they’d spend on a night out.

4. Visibility and Solidarity: Tag posts with #SaveMSSH and #RiseForMothers. Visibility drives dollars.

5. Press and Policy Pressure: Contact local representatives in North Carolina; ask why a program with a perfect federal score lost its funding.

And you, reading this right now, can do something too.

Donate directly: https://www.youthfocus.org/future-of-mssh/ Share this post, tweet it, thread it, shout it from your group chats. If you know foundations or faith groups that truly walk their talk—send them this link.

Beyond the Donation: The Cultural Shift We Need

Money keeps the doors open. But solidarity keeps the mission alive.

We have to challenge the narrative that says helping young mothers, queer youth, or homeless teens is somehow “someone else’s problem.”

It’s everyone’s problem. Because the mark of a society isn’t how it treats its most powerful, it’s how it treats its most vulnerable.

We’re living in a time where empathy itself feels like rebellion. So be rebellious. Care loudly.

To the Next Generation of Fighters

To every queer kid who ever packed a bag in the middle of the night. To every teenage mom who ever wondered if she’d make it through the week. To everyone who has ever been told “you’re on your own.”

You are not.

We see you. We’ve been you. And together, we build something better.

When safety nets break, we don’t walk away, we weave new ones.

The Hard Truth, and the Hope

We shouldn’t have to be here. We shouldn’t have to scramble to replace funding that never should’ve been cut. But here we are.

The government may have turned its back. We won’t.

My Sister Susan’s House has been a sanctuary for fifteen years. It has proven itself again and again. Now it’s our turn to prove that community isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a verb.

Let’s show that the rainbow doesn’t just rise for Pride month. It rises when humanity calls.

Donate. Share. Advocate. Let’s keep that door open—for the next scared young woman who needs it.

Quick Links

Donate to Youth Focus: The Future of My Sister Susan’s House Learn about the Maternity Housing Program Contact North Carolina Representatives

Written by Rainbows In Revolt: Because justice isn’t selective.

WE DON’T LOSE WHEN WE SHOW UP: WHY LOCAL LGBTQ WINS MATTERED MOST ON NOVEMBER 4TH

“You don’t tell someone you love them then vote for someone who will hurt them.”

Sometimes the truth is simple, sharp, and so obvious it glows. That one sentence is the moral backbone of what happened on November 4th, 2025. While the rest of the country was glued to cable news chaos about the government shutdown and the endless churn surrounding the Epstein document dump, actual voters in actual communities were doing something more grounded and more important. They were choosing who would run their schools. They were choosing who would fund their libraries. They were choosing who would protect their kids, build their neighborhoods, shape their towns, and set the tone for their daily lives.

And when they made those choices, something beautiful happened.

Across state after state, voters said no to the political theater that has consumed America for years. They said no to fear-based messaging, no to culture-war fantasies, no to the constant drumbeat of anti-LGBTQ panic. They said yes to calm. They said yes to community. They said yes to leaders who are focused on real issues and real people. They said yes to every kid who deserves to feel safe at school. They said yes to every family who wants their library to be a place of discovery, not a battlefield. And they said yes to queer people, loudly enough that even the national media feels a little silly for missing it.

This was not a national wave. It was not a headline-making historic sweep. It was something more powerful: a widespread refusal to be manipulated. Voters chose what mattered. And the LGBTQ community felt the impact immediately.

What made this election night so remarkable was not a single victory or one shocking upset. It was the pattern. The consistency. The clear trend of voters rejecting extremism and choosing stability and fairness. The story of November 4th is not a story of Washington, and honestly, thank goodness for that. The story of November 4th is a story of school boards, city councils, library boards, county commissions, and ballot measures. These arenas are quieter, smaller, and more intimate than Congress, but they shape queer life far more directly. And they are where voters delivered a message that deserves to be written in bold across the sky.

When people know their queer neighbors, they choose to protect them.

When voters see the real stakes of elections, not the manufactured ones, they choose decency over cruelty.

When the fear machine runs out of steam, humanity fills the space.

And that is what happened on November 4th.

This is a full breakdown of why November mattered so deeply, what the numbers show, where the wins happened, how voters broke the back of the anti-trans panic, which races still demand our attention, and why Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District is about to become the next major test of this political moment.

So sit down, settle in, and pour something nice. This is the long version, the detailed version, the version with receipts and reality and hard-earned joy. This is the version that makes clear that the LGBTQ movement is not losing ground at the community level. We are gaining strength where it counts the most.

And we are not done.

ANTI-LGBTQ ADS FLOPPED, FIZZLED, AND FACE-PLANTED

Let us begin with the most satisfying trend of the entire cycle. The anti-LGBTQ messaging that dominated the last few years simply did not land in 2025. It did not resonate. It did not motivate. It did not convince the middle. It barely even energized the conservative base. This was the cycle where the fear-based ads, the grainy videos, the “won’t somebody think of the children” mailers, the misinformation campaigns, and the non-stop focus on drag artists and trans teenagers finally fell flat.

The political right treated this cycle as if 2023 and 2024 were still happening. They assumed the same strategy would keep working. They assumed all they needed to do was shout “gender ideology” into the void and voters would sprint toward their candidates. They assumed the panic was still fresh. They assumed voters hadn’t moved on.

They were wrong.

Let’s take Virginia, for example. The conservative ecosystem poured money into the Northern Virginia suburbs. They targeted school boards with a level of investment that should frankly embarrass any political strategist with a sense of proportion. They assumed Loudoun County, which has been a symbolic trophy for years, would give them the kind of ideological return they had grown used to. But voters had other plans.

In Loudoun County, there were nine school board seats up for grabs. Four were high-profile battlegrounds flooded with national money. These races were supposed to be showcases for the anti-trans messaging machine. In the end, only one anti-LGBTQ aligned incumbent kept their seat, and even that one barely held on. Voters elected a majority of candidates who explicitly rejected culture-war messaging. Several of the loudest anti-trans candidates were defeated by comfortable margins. It was not a subtle result. It was not ambiguous. It was a direct and unambiguous repudiation of fear-based campaigns.

In Fairfax County, the story was similar. Pro-equality candidates retained their seats, and extremist challengers underperformed across multiple districts. In Prince William County, conservative challengers ran heavily on anti-trans rhetoric but were defeated by moderates who focused on education and community stability.

New Jersey saw the same trend. School board candidates who supported book bans, censorship, or anti-trans messaging lost in multiple districts. The candidates who ran on education, public safety, and basic governance won. In several cases, the winning candidates explicitly supported LGBTQ students and inclusive policies. Anti-trans messaging simply didn’t motivate voters.

Ohio saw culture-warrior candidates lose across suburban districts that were once considered vulnerable. Maine saw pro-equality candidates win in districts where conservatives thought anti-trans messaging would be effective.

All of this adds up to a simple truth. The anti-LGBTQ playbook is no longer working at the local level. Voters appear to have hit their saturation point. They have been exposed to the same talking points for too long. They have realized that none of the issues described in these ads affect their daily lives. When every political ad is about bathrooms and pronouns while schools are dealing with teacher shortages and safety concerns, voters notice the disconnect.

Pollsters noticed it too. In late October and early November, multiple surveys showed that trans-related issues had dropped out of the top ten concerns for suburbanites and independents. Only eleven to thirteen percent of suburban voters cited anti-trans rhetoric as influential in their decision. Younger voters showed even less interest. Women voters overwhelmingly rejected candidates who used anti-LGBTQ messaging as their primary strategy.

And the best indicator of all: pro-equality turnout in targeted areas routinely exceeded expectations.

The fear machine is breaking down. And this cycle proved it.

THE POLLING SHIFT THAT BROKE THE BACK OF THE PANIC

Now that we have looked at where the messaging failed, let us examine why.

Polling tells a story that political strategists should have listened to earlier. The anti-trans panic was already losing steam before this election. National surveys, statewide polls, and targeted demographic snapshots all showed signs of a shift. For once, the numbers are not depressing. They are encouraging.

Seventy-two percent of voters support nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. That number has remained stable or grown slightly over the last two years.

Seventy-one percent support marriage equality.

Sixty-seven percent support inclusive school policies, including the availability of LGBTQ resources.

Support for LGBTQ people is stable across a wide range of demographics. And this stability, combined with the exhaustion many voters feel after years of cultural warfare, contributed to a political climate in which voters simply tuned out anti-LGBTQ messaging.

Gen Z is a major part of the shift. Nearly one in four Gen Z adults identifies as LGBTQ. Eighty-six percent support trans rights. Seventy-eight percent support LGBTQ inclusive education. And Gen Z showed up to vote. They turned out in off-year elections at rates that political scientists did not expect.

Women voters played a critical role too. Sixty-one percent of women in Virginia cited abortion rights, gender equality, or school quality as their top concerns. When candidates tried to package anti-trans rhetoric as a “parental rights” issue, women rejected it. They saw the tactic for what it was, and they did not appreciate being patronized.

Moderate Republicans also made a difference. While the GOP base continues to include anti-LGBTQ voters, the center-right is fracturing. Many Republican voters are tired of the constant focus on culture wars. They want fiscal stability, safe communities, functional schools, and basic competence. They do not want to spend another two years fighting over which books teenagers can borrow from the library.

Taken together, these shifts created a political landscape in which anti-LGBTQ messaging was a liability, not an asset.

And voters responded.

LOCAL RACES WERE THE TRUE FRONT LINES, AND WE WON WHERE IT COUNTS

Local elections matter more to queer life than federal politics. If you want to know what it feels like to be LGBTQ in America, the answers are not found in Congress. They are found in your school board’s meeting agenda, your public library’s budget, your city council’s ordinances, your sheriff’s enforcement priorities, your county’s social services funding, and your local government’s willingness to invest in safety, inclusion, and fairness.

Here is where this election becomes extraordinary.

School boards rejected candidates backed by Moms for Liberty and similar groups. Library boards rejected book bans and censorship campaigns. Candidates who ran on community stability, mental health resources, student support, and practical governance consistently beat candidates who ran on anti-LGBTQ messaging.

In Virginia, the shift was substantial. In Loudoun County, a moderate majority emerged on the school board. In Fairfax County, pro-equality candidates held their ground. In Prince William County, voters chose candidates who ran on competence, not chaos.

In New Jersey, similar trends emerged. Book-banning candidates lost. Candidates promising inclusive schools won. Voters saw through the vitriol.

In Ohio, voters rejected culture-war candidates in suburban districts where, just a few cycles ago, those same candidates might have gained traction.

In Maine, conservative attempts to seize control of school boards failed, and pro-equality candidates won in several competitive areas.

Library boards across multiple states saw candidates who defended inclusive materials win or hold seats. Some counties even increased library funding despite high-profile attempts to paint libraries as dangerous.

LGBTQ candidates themselves also performed well. There were 171 openly LGBTQ candidates on ballots across the country. Dozens won. Representation is continuing to increase in off-year elections, not decrease.

These victories matter. They shape the daily lives of queer people. They determine whether schools are supportive or hostile. They decide whether libraries offer resources that help young queer people discover themselves. They influence whether city councils adopt nondiscrimination ordinances, fund diversity training for police departments, or recognize LGBTQ Pride Month.

Local elections are the front lines. And this cycle, those front lines moved in our favor.

WHY LOCAL MATTERS MORE THAN NATIONAL

National politics gets most of the oxygen. But local politics gets most of the impact.

School boards decide whether trans kids are respected or humiliated. Libraries decide whether queer books stay available or disappear. City councils decide whether nondiscrimination laws exist or whether queer residents have no recourse for discrimination. County commissions decide whether LGBTQ youth shelters receive funding.

These positions determine how safe, affirmed, included, and supported queer people feel in their daily lives. They determine whether queer kids grow up feeling protected or persecuted.

And on November 4th, voters across the country chose leaders who will respect and protect queer people.

This is the foundation we need for the long-term fight.

THE BATTLES STILL AHEAD

As good as November 4th was, the larger fight is nowhere near finished.

State legislatures are still pushing bills aimed at restricting trans healthcare, censoring LGBTQ topics in schools, banning drag performances, and creating legal loopholes that allow discrimination. Federal courts are still stacked with judges who interpret Title IX and the Civil Rights Act in outdated ways that exclude gender identity. State attorneys general are issuing advisory opinions that intimidate doctors, teachers, and administrators. Book bans are shifting to statewide review boards. Trans adults still face discrimination in housing and healthcare.

Local wins soften the blows, but they cannot stop the attacks coming from higher levels of government.

This is why continuing to build local power matters. Because local governments carry the moral authority of community. And when communities consistently choose inclusion over extremism, it becomes harder for state and federal officials to justify their hostility.

But we also need to keep an eye on upcoming elections that could shift momentum again.

THE TENNESSEE SEVENTH DISTRICT SPECIAL ELECTION

Here is where the next test begins.

Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District has been a Republican stronghold for decades. Yet the Cook Political Report moved this special election from Solid Republican to Leans Republican. That shift does not happen without reason.

Former Representative Mark Green resigned. The special election to replace him will be held on December 2. Aftyn Behn is the Democratic nominee. Matt Van Epps is the Republican nominee. Turnout in the primary was down by seventy-five percent compared to the 2024 general election. Outside groups are spending heavily. The national parties are treating this like a real race. And they should.

If LGBTQ voters and allies want to continue the momentum created on November 4, this is the next place to focus. A close result or a flipped seat would change the political narrative going into 2026. It would show that even historically conservative seats can become competitive when voters are given a real choice and a real reason to care.

This is the moment to call friends in Tennessee. This is the moment to ask people to get involved. This is the moment to build on the energy and show that November 4 was not a fluke.

CONCLUSION

The heart of this entire moment is simple. On November 4, voters chose not to harm their neighbors. They chose not to engage in cruelty. They chose not to let moral panic override their humanity. They chose to protect and respect the people who live beside them.

This was a night where America remembered something important. That love is a choice. That community is a choice. That empathy is a choice. That solidarity is a choice. And that votes are the tool people use to express those choices.

People are better than the worst politicians give them credit for. And when given the chance, voters will choose fairness, inclusion, and stability. They will choose to protect LGBTQ people. They will choose to defend trans kids. They will choose to support libraries. They will choose to build communities worth living in.

Because you do not tell someone you love them and then vote for someone who will hurt them.

On November 4, America remembered that truth. And if we keep showing up, keep organizing, keep educating, keep building power from the ground up, and keep supporting our communities, then we will continue to win where it matters most.

Our lives deserve it. Our dignity deserves it. Our futures deserve it. Our communities deserve it.

And we are not done.

The Gospel of Power: How MAGA Turned Charlie Kirk’s Death Into a National Loyalty Test

Introduction

Charlie Kirk is dead, and America is watching his corpse be transformed into a relic of authoritarian worship. He was no soldier, no statesman, no public servant who laid down his life for country or community. He was a talker, a provocateur, a well-paid megaphone for Trump’s culture wars. Yet in the days since his death, the United States government commandeered by Trump’s second regime and its loyal shock troops has twisted this man’s passing into a national spectacle of loyalty oaths and scapegoating.

This is not mourning. This is mobilization.

When an ordinary American dies, even one killed in shocking circumstances, the president does not rush to weaponize their death. The commander-in-chief does not order the flags of a nation lowered in their honor. The vice president does not dispatch government aircraft, funded by taxpayers, to ferry their remains. Congress does not rush to criminalize speech about them. And federal law enforcement does not blur the line between investigation and public eulogy.

But Charlie Kirk was not an ordinary American. He was the chosen prophet of a movement that has made grievance its gospel, cruelty its communion, and sycophancy its sacrament. And so, with his sudden death, Trump and his acolytes did what they always do: they seized the moment, distorted the facts, and demanded the country kneel.

The authoritarian impulse here is not subtle. It is not hidden behind ceremony or sanitized by careful language. It is on full display, raw, shameless, unrepentant. And it shows us exactly where we stand in Trump’s America: a land where power is hoarded for the loyal few, rights are conditional on obedience, and even death becomes a stage for state-sponsored propaganda.

The Script Was Written Before the Body Was Cold

The news of Kirk’s murder had barely broken before Trump lunged for a microphone. And what came out of his mouth was not grief, not caution, not the sober voice of a leader calling for unity in the face of violence. No; it was the same bile-soaked script we’ve heard for nearly a decade: blame the left, blame the marginalized, blame the enemies list.

Facts didn’t matter; they never do. Within hours, Trump thundered about “radical left terrorists,” casting a net so wide it included millions of Americans whose only crime is opposing him. And woven into that reflexive accusation was the now-familiar undercurrent: the implication that the trans community, the most convenient scapegoat of MAGA’s current crusade, was to blame.

This is the new normal under Trump: to turn every crime, every tragedy, into a cudgel against the people his movement already hates. The evidence can be absent, the narrative nonsensical, but the conclusion is preordained. It doesn’t matter who the shooter is, or what the circumstances reveal. The story is written in advance: if there is blood on the ground, then the left is guilty.

We’ve seen this play out again and again. When a shooting erupts, MAGA influencers swarm to social media with accusations that the killer must be trans, must be queer, must be an immigrant. Sometimes they fixate on old photos, doctored images, or random people with vaguely similar names. They are never concerned about accuracy; they are concerned about utility. If the accusation can stir fear, then it is useful. If it can harden hatred, then it is truth enough for their purposes.

And so, when Kirk’s life was cut short, the gears of this propaganda machine whirred into motion with mechanical precision. By the time the first news conference even began, trans people across the country were already being smeared as killers, again. A whole community was once more placed in the crosshairs of suspicion, not because of evidence but because scapegoating is MAGA’s default setting.

But here is the brutal irony: the suspect in custody fits not the fantasy villain MAGA conjures, but the very real, very consistent profile of mass shooters in this country. Young. Male. White. Raised in a conservative household. Steeped in gun culture. By all accounts, a “law-abiding” citizen, until the day he wasn’t.

This is the profile we have seen again and again, from Columbine to Uvalde to Buffalo. It is the profile of nearly every mass shooter in the modern American era. And yet, somehow, this truth remains taboo in the halls of power. Because to acknowledge it would mean confronting uncomfortable realities: that violence in America is not primarily the product of marginalized communities, but of the so-called “backbone of America” that Trump praises at every rally.

Trump’s baseless accusations in the hours after Kirk’s murder were not just a moment of grief-stricken misjudgment. They were the logical extension of a politics built on projection and scapegoating. For years he has told his followers that trans people are violent predators, that queer activists are existential threats, that immigrants are criminals waiting to strike. He has blurred every individual case into a generalized indictment. Now, in the moment when the evidence points squarely back toward his own base, he doubled down.

This is how authoritarian propaganda works: first the narrative, then the facts. The truth is not discovered; it is imposed. The death of Charlie Kirk was not a tragedy to be understood, it was a stage to be used. And the message was clear: loyalty means repeating the lie, and dissent means siding with the enemy.

Air Force Two, for a Partisan Court Jester

In a democracy, symbols matter. And there is no symbol more glaring, no spectacle more absurd, than the sight of Air Force Two ferrying home the remains of a partisan sycophant. Charlie Kirk was not a general returning from a battlefield. He was not a fallen president, senator, or Supreme Court justice. He was not even an elected official. He was a propagandist, a glorified podcaster whose entire career was built on flattering Trump and spitting venom at Trump’s enemies.

Yet there it was: Air Force Two, the vice president’s official jet, dispatched at taxpayer expense to carry his body home. The same aircraft meant to serve the nation’s second-in-command, repurposed to honor the corpse of a man whose highest achievement was inventing new ways to sneer at marginalized people.

We are told this was a gesture of respect. Respect for whom? Respect for what? If Air Force Two is the chariot for partisan mouthpieces, then what does that say about the value system of this administration? It says loyalty to Trump buys you honors normally reserved for heroes. It says sycophancy outweighs service. It says that in the Trump regime, bending the knee earns you the kind of privileges that ordinary citizens, the people who actually keep this country running, could never dream of.

This has no precedent. Soldiers killed in action have been flown home quietly, without the pomp of government jets. Civil rights leaders and community builders have been mourned without official aircraft deployed. Even Rush Limbaugh, Trump’s favorite radio blowhard, did not receive this kind of military-grade transport. Why? Because until now, America understood there was a line between personal loyalty and public honor. That line is gone.

Make no mistake: this was not a decision made to comfort Kirk’s family. It was a decision made to broadcast a message. It was propaganda with wings. Trump and his court wanted the world to see the state’s full power wrapped around the body of a man whose only qualification was servitude to MAGA. It was a performance of loyalty, not a gesture of grief.

And the message to the rest of us could not be clearer: If you flatter the throne, the throne will bend the nation’s resources to serve you. If you oppose it, you can rot in anonymity. Air Force Two is no longer a plane, it’s a reward. A loyalty perk. A platinum card for the MAGA elite.

Legislating Loyalty

Even before Kirk’s body had cooled, MAGA members of Congress were scrambling to turn his death into law. Their proposal? A grotesque piece of legislative theater: to permanently ban anyone from social media who dared to “praise” Kirk’s death. Not to punish threats, not to sanction incitement, but to criminalize dissent itself.

Think about that. The American right, which has spent years howling about “cancel culture” and “free speech,” now proposes to erase people from the digital public square for the crime of failing to worship their fallen comrade. They want permanent exile from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, not because someone made threats, but because they expressed the wrong opinion.

This is not lawmaking. This is loyalty enforcement.

And it is naked hypocrisy. These are the same voices who insisted that it was their right to mock George Floyd, to sneer at dead immigrants, to celebrate the deaths of their political opponents. They claimed their “First Amendment rights” when they posted memes about Paul Pelosi’s assault. They laughed when trans people were murdered. They shrugged when women seeking abortions were attacked. Free speech for them has always meant free cruelty. But now, the minute someone dares to mock the death of one of their own, they want lifetime bans.

We need to call this what it is: authoritarian creep. The idea that government officials would move to regulate what private citizens can say about a partisan figure’s death is not democracy. It is not liberty. It is state-sponsored idolatry. It is the erection of a cult, codified into law.

And we should be very clear: this is not where it ends. Today it is Kirk. Tomorrow it is Trump. The groundwork is being laid for laws that criminalize mockery of the regime, laws that punish dissent as treason, laws that turn satire into sedition. The bill floated this week is a test balloon, a loyalty oath disguised as legislation. And if the country does not recoil in disgust, more will follow.

The First Amendment for MAGA, Silence for the Rest

The United States Constitution is supposed to be a shield, a guarantee that every citizen, no matter how small, no matter how powerless, has the right to speak without government reprisal. But under Trump’s regime, that shield has become conditional. The First Amendment is alive and well if you are praising Charlie Kirk, if you are worshipping the MAGA gospel, if you are chanting the party line. For everyone else? Silence, punishment, surveillance.

Consider Florida. Within hours of Kirk’s death, the state’s education commissioner blasted teachers who posted irreverent comments online. Some educators were suspended, threatened with termination, or warned that their licenses could be stripped. Their crime was not violence. Their crime was not incitement. Their crime was failing to cry the right kind of tears.

And then there’s the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stood before cameras and declared that the military would be “monitoring” service members’ online activity for anything mocking Kirk’s death. “We will not tolerate it,” he thundered, as if free speech for soldiers and civilians alike were privileges to be revoked by decree. In truth, the First Amendment has always been more limited for those in uniform, but this wasn’t about military discipline. This was about political loyalty. It was about telling every soldier, sailor, airman, and marine that their freedom of conscience ended where MAGA’s grief began.

This is authoritarian logic in its purest form: the idea that rights are not universal, but contingent. That they apply to some but not others. That they can be toggled on or off depending on whether you flatter the throne.

And let’s be honest, we’ve seen this pattern before. The same politicians who howl about “cancel culture” when their own speech draws criticism are the first to demand firings, suspensions, and bans when it is their turn to feel mocked. They insist that conservative speech must be in schools, but liberal teachers can be silenced. They demand that their rallies be covered on social media, but dissenters must be censored. Theirs is not a philosophy of free speech. It is a philosophy of conditional speech. Speech for me, silence for thee.

The hypocrisy is galling, but the danger is worse. Because once the state begins enforcing reverence, there is no natural stopping point. Today it is Kirk. Tomorrow it is Trump. Next week it is “the regime.” And soon enough, a citizen’s silence is no longer enough, they must actively perform loyalty. They must not only refrain from mockery, but participate in praise.

That is how authoritarianism metastasizes. Not through sudden silencing, but through the slow conditioning of a nation to equate obedience with patriotism. And make no mistake: that is the conditioning on display now. If you’re not praising Kirk, you’re suspect. If you’re not posting the right memes, you’re an enemy.

The First Amendment was written precisely to prevent this, to protect the irreverent, the mocking, the unpopular voice. But under Trump, it is being rewritten by precedent: rights exist only if they serve the cult.

Saints, Sycophants, and Scripture

If there is one thing more grotesque than the political theater of Charlie Kirk’s death, it is the religious theater. Evangelical leaders who spent years nodding along as Kirk vilified immigrants, demonized queer people, and belittled women are now draping him in sainthood.

In sermons across the country, he has been called a “martyr for truth,” a “modern apostle,” even “the Lord’s servant struck down by evil.” Worship services that once read the Beatitudes now treat Kirk’s podcast soundbites like holy scripture. Pastors preach that his death is proof of Christian persecution, that mocking him is mocking God himself.

This is not Christianity. This is idolatry.

Let’s be blunt: Charlie Kirk was no saint. He was a man who trafficked in cruelty. He mocked the marginalized. He sneered at the oppressed. He made a career out of bastardizing scripture, twisting Christ’s message of compassion into a cudgel of exclusion. And now, in death, those same distortions are multiplying.

What does it say about evangelical America that they have chosen Kirk as their martyr? It says that their faith is not in Christ, but in grievance. It says their gospel is not about love, but about domination. It says their scripture is not the Bible, but the party line.

And the danger is not just theological. It is political. Because when religion baptizes authoritarianism, it gives it divine cover. When pastors preach that Kirk was struck down by “the enemies of God,” they are not just mourning. They are declaring war. They are telling their congregations that political dissenters are not fellow citizens but heretics, that resisting Trump is resisting heaven itself.

We’ve seen this fusion of church and state before, and it never ends well. In fascist Italy, Mussolini wrapped his dictatorship in Catholic ritual. In Nazi Germany, pastors preached Hitler as God’s chosen vessel. In Franco’s Spain, the cross and the sword marched hand in hand. Now, in America, we are watching the same marriage of convenience: Trump provides the power, and the evangelical establishment provides the sanctification.

Charlie Kirk is their bridge. He is their saint of spite, their martyr of meanness. And in sanctifying him, they sanctify Trump’s entire project.

The blasphemy here is staggering. Jesus spent his life with the marginalized, the poor, the outcast. He washed the feet of prostitutes, healed the sick, welcomed the stranger. Kirk spent his life doing the opposite: excluding, mocking, ridiculing. To equate the two is not just bad theology, it is sacrilege.

But that is the heart of this new evangelicalism: to take the radical compassion of Christ and invert it into the radical cruelty of MAGA. And in the process, to drag millions of Christians into a faith that worships grievance more than God.

Kash Patel, Judge and Mourner

If there was ever a moment that crystallized just how far the lines have blurred between justice and loyalty in Trump’s America, it came at the press conference announcing the arrest of a suspect in Charlie Kirk’s murder.

There stood Kash Patel, not just the FBI Director, but one of Trump’s most trusted fixers, a man whose career has been built on service to the regime rather than to the rule of law. This was supposed to be a sober announcement, the kind of briefing where facts are delivered with precision and care. Instead, Patel turned the podium into a pulpit, and the presser into a eulogy.

He didn’t just announce an arrest. He praised Kirk as “my brother,” called him a warrior, and closed with the chilling line: “See you in Valhalla.” This wasn’t justice speaking. This was allegiance. It was a man entrusted with the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency using that moment to broadcast his personal devotion to the deceased.

And then came the admission: Patel was not just the nation’s top investigator in this case, he was Kirk’s personal friend. By every standard of ethics, this is a conflict of interest screaming for recusal. No prosecutor, no judge, no investigator with an ounce of integrity would stand in front of cameras and declare friendship with a victim while still running the investigation. But Patel is not in the business of integrity. He is in the business of loyalty.

The American people should see this for what it is: the justice system itself bent into the service of one man’s cult. If Trump demands loyalty above all, then Patel is his perfect enforcer, a lawman who makes clear that his allegiance is not to impartial truth, but to the tribe.

And think about the precedent this sets. If the FBI director can mourn a personal friend on national television while announcing charges, what confidence can any of us have in the fairness of the process? What happens when the next suspect claims bias, when the next defense attorney points out the obvious conflict? What happens when dissenters are targeted, and the line between justice and politics has been completely erased?

The answer is simple: the system collapses. Justice becomes performance. Law becomes theater. And the stage is always rigged to flatter the regime.

The Suspect and the Real Profile of Violence

For all the noise about trans scapegoats and “radical left terrorists,” the suspect in custody tells a far more familiar story. He is not the caricature MAGA conjured in the hours after the murder. He is not a trans woman with a grudge, not an immigrant sneaking across the border, not a queer activist radicalized by drag shows. He is, in fact, the same type of man who has been pulling triggers in this country for decades.

Young. Male. White. Raised in a conservative household. Steeped in gun culture. By all accounts, a “law-abiding” citizen, until the day he wasn’t.

This is the profile we have seen again and again, from Columbine to Uvalde to Buffalo. It is the profile of nearly every mass shooter in the modern American era. And yet, somehow, this truth remains taboo in the halls of power. Because to acknowledge it would mean confronting uncomfortable realities: that violence in America is not primarily the product of marginalized communities, but of the so-called “backbone of America” that Trump praises at every rally.

For twenty years, America’s epidemic of mass shootings has followed this pattern. The killers are overwhelmingly men. Overwhelmingly young. Overwhelmingly drawn from conservative communities where guns are not just tools, but talismans of identity. And when the blood dries, the same politicians who loosened gun laws, who fanned the flames of grievance, who wrapped masculinity around the barrel of a rifle, are the first to find scapegoats elsewhere.

So it was with Kirk’s murder. Before a single fact emerged, the regime rushed to pin the blame on trans people. And when the truth became undeniable, when the suspect’s profile fit the same tired, tragic mold, there was no apology. No correction. No reflection. Just silence.

Charlie Kirk’s death could have been a moment to confront these realities. To acknowledge the true profile of American violence. To look squarely at the culture that breeds shooters and say, “Enough.” Instead, it became just another excuse to double down on lies, to smear the marginalized, to protect the myth that MAGA is innocent of the violence it inspires.

Conclusion – A Nation on Its Knees

Let me be clear: I rebuke the shooter. I rebuke the violence. I rebuke the lies that fuel it. There is no glory in murder, no justification for blood. But what makes this tragedy even more unbearable is the way it has been weaponized.

Charlie Kirk is dead, and I will not pretend to mourn him. I cannot. This was a man who spent his life trying to make queer people, and especially trans people, guilty without charges. He sought to convict us in the court of public opinion without evidence, without process, without truth. Again and again he smeared us as predators, as criminals, as threats to national security. He wielded words like a club, swinging at anyone who dared to live authentically outside his narrow vision of America.

And now, in death, the regime has made him into something more dangerous than he ever was in life: a martyr, a saint of grievance, a rallying cry for authoritarian consolidation. His voice is silenced, yes, but the machinery he helped build roars louder than ever, grinding down truth, rights, and dissent under the weight of its propaganda.

I do not mourn his death. I will not miss his voice. But I do mourn this nation. I mourn the America that once dared to call itself a beacon of hope, a land that welcomed the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I mourn the Constitution that once promised that no matter how powerful the rulers, the people had the right to speak, to mock, to dissent. I mourn the churches that once claimed to follow Christ but now worship grievance and power instead.

Because what we are left with today is not that America. We are left with a nation where loyalty to one man outweighs loyalty to the truth. Where flags are lowered for sycophants, but rights are stripped from citizens. Where taxpayer planes become chariots for propagandists, but ordinary people are told to shut up and obey. Where evangelicals call a political operative a martyr while mocking the very teachings of the Christ they claim to follow.

This is not the America the world once looked to. This is not the America my grandparents believed in. This is a country twisted by fear and by power, a place where the message from the top is clear: conform to authority, or get the hell out.

And so yes, I weep, not for Charlie Kirk, not for the cult of loyalty that now parades his corpse as a holy relic, but for the America that has been lost. I weep for the communities who will again pay the price of scapegoating. I weep for the trans kids who will see their identities linked to violence they had nothing to do with. I weep for the immigrants and women and queer people who will be blamed, policed, and silenced to prop up a myth.

What we are witnessing is not grief. It is not mourning. It is mobilization. A government in thrall to authoritarianism is using death as theater, loyalty as law, and propaganda as scripture. And until we name it, rebuke it, and resist it, America will continue to fall further from the ideals it once claimed to hold.

The shooter has been caught. The bullets have stopped. But the violence of the lie, that endless, corrosive violence of propaganda and scapegoating, continues. And unless we end that, too, we will find that Kirk’s death was not the tragedy. The tragedy will be what his death allowed this country to become.

History Repeats: How Trans Kids Became America’s Latest Scapegoats

The fact that transgender children are fighting for access to bathrooms in 2025 isn’t evidence of national moral decay—it’s proof that state power is being deliberately weaponized against the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community. We have entered a moment where transgender lives are no longer described merely as “controversial,” but as strategically useful. Television ad campaigns, legislative hearings, and school board meetings from the 2024 election through the first half of 2025 have turned trans children into talking points, campaign fodder, and scapegoats. This didn’t happen in a vacuum. It reflects a growing political calculation: that fear of trans visibility is a profitable and vote-generating commodity.

What makes this especially chilling is that many of the same politicians pushing anti-trans narratives previously expressed public support for LGBTQ+ rights. This is not about policy. It is not about safety. It is about deploying marginalized identities as tactical weapons during election cycles. We have seen this pattern before—when integration was framed as a “threat” to public education and when women entering the workforce were said to be“damaging American families.” Every time this country has approached a more inclusive democracy, someone finds a group to demonize.

THE 2024 TV AD BLITZ: TRANS VISIBILITY AS CAMPAIGN STRATEGY

In the final stretch of the 2024 election, political campaigns and independent expenditure groups aired tens of thousands of television ads invoking transgender athletes, bathrooms, and school curricula. In swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona,“protect women’s sports” spots ran more frequently than economic messages. These ads rarely mentioned actual legislation. Instead, they relied on ominous music, angry parents, and distorted claims that trans inclusion represented an assault on childhood itself. By November 2024, political strategists were openly admitting that attacks on trans rights were being “tested as a voter-mobilization issue.” That testing paid off. The rhetoric didn’t fade after the election. It intensified throughout 2025, finding its way into statehouse speeches, GOP fundraising emails, and finally, into the direct confrontation now unfolding between the Department of Education and multiple school districts in Northern Virginia.

THE TITLE IX FIGHT: WHO IS PROTECTED, AND WHO ISN’T?

Trans rights opponents love to claim that Title IX “was written to protect women, not boys who say they’re girls.” What they rarely mention is that federal courts do not agree with each other on that interpretation—and never have. The text of Title IX simply says that no one shall be excluded “on the basis of sex” from any educational program receiving federal dollars. It does not define “sex,” nor does it restrict protection to “biological women.” That ambiguity has produced a series of competing court decisions that point in opposite directions:

● Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board (4th Cir., 2020) – A transgender student sued his school board for refusing him use of the boys’ restroom. The Fourth Circuit held that the policy violated both Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, stressing that discrimination based on gender identity is discrimination “on the basis of sex.”

● West Virginia v. B.P.J. (4th Cir., 2023) – A transgender girl challenged West Virginia’s athletic ban. A lower court upheld the ban, but the Fourth Circuit temporarily blocked enforcement, signaling serious doubt that the state’s policy can survive Title IX review. The Supreme Court has yet to weigh in.

● Hecox v. Little (9th Cir., 2023) – Idaho’s ban on trans women in women’s sports was challenged. The Ninth Circuit issued an injunction, holding that the plaintiff was likely to succeed because the policy discriminates “on the basis of sex.”

● Doe v. Highland Local School District (S.D. Ohio, 2016) – A district court found that forcing a transgender girl to use a separate restroom caused irreparable harm and violated Title IX.

● Adams v. St. Johns County School Board (11th Cir., 2022 en banc) – The Eleventh Circuit took the opposite position, ruling that Title IX does not require schools to accommodate gender identity and defining “sex” strictly as biological sex at birth.

Taken together, these cases make one thing clear: there is no national consensus. Title IX’s\ scope varies dramatically based on jurisdiction. That legal uncertainty leaves room for political maneuvering—and it is precisely why the Virginia school districts believe they have a legitimate foundation for refusing compliance with anti-trans directives.

HISTORICAL RESISTANCE TO FEDERAL CIVIL RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT

The tactic of local officials defying or undermining federal civil rights protections is not new. In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to block Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, compelling President Eisenhower to send in federal troops. Between 1959 and 1964, Prince Edward County in Virginia shuttered its entire public school system rather than integrate, forcing Black students to go without formal education for five years. State leaders claimed they were acting in the “best interest” of students. They were weaponizing public education to protect a discriminatory status quo.

VIRGINIA SCHOOL DISTRICTS: A NEW FORM OF RESISTANCE

Today, five Virginia school districts—Fairfax, Arlington, Loudoun, Prince William, and Alexandria—have refused to roll back protections for transgender students, even under threat of losing more than $200 million in federal aid. Unlike the segregationist defiance of the 1950s and 60s, this modern resistance is aimed at preserving civil rights, not eliminating them. By keeping inclusive policies in place, these districts are prioritizing the safety and dignity of trans students over financial security.

And this requires a real conversation:

If federal threats escalate, and the only alternative becomes compliance or closure, which one are we willing to support?

Would the moral imperative to protect marginalized kids justify shutting down schools—just as officials once shut them down to preserve discrimination?

Because neutrality in this moment is not neutrality. It is capitulation.

THE FAMILY MUST STAY TOGETHER: LGBTQ SOLIDARITY OR STRATEGIC DIVIDE

There is disturbing rhetoric emerging—even within the broader LGBTQ community—that suggests trans people are being targeted “first,” and that LGB people might be spared if they quietly step aside. That is both morally indefensible and strategically disastrous.

The Kim Davis case before the United States Supreme Court illustrates why. Davis refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and took her case all the way up the judicial chain. In 2023, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled against her—but multiple justices openly signaled they were prepared to revisit Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that guarantees same-sex marriage nationwide. They did not mention gender identity. They questioned all LGBTQ marriage rights.

Trans people are not the canary in the coal mine—they are the current mine. And the rest of the LGBTQ community is already on the legal radar.

CONCLUSION: SOLIDARITY OR SURRENDER

This is not a debate about bathrooms or pronouns. It is a coordinated effort to roll back decades of progress by weaponizing fear, confusion and electoral strategy. Attacks on trans youth are the first step—because marginalized children are politically easy targets. But the end goal is much larger: make the entire LGBTQ community fair game again.

History tells us exactly what happens when we downplay early attacks as “somebody else’s problem.” The target widens. The rhetoric intensifies. The legal strategies multiply. Today it is trans students. Tomorrow it will be marriage rights, adoption, anti-discrimination protections, and the validity of queer existence itself.

That is why the Virginia school districts deserve not just quiet admiration—but our full-throated support. They are not resisting progress; they are defending it.

So the question is no longer “should we politicize trans rights?” The question is “are we willing to surrender them without a fight?”

Because if the cost of protecting transgender kids is that we must stand up, speak out, even disrupt — then let us pay that cost proudly.

We protect the most vulnerable first. Or we protect nobody at all.

We Are Still Winning: Quiet Joys in a Loud World

Every morning, before my mind fully wakes, I brace for the barrage: more bathroom bans, new anti-trans bills, another court fight. The rainbow community, especially trans folks and BIPOC communities, can feel locked into a permanent defensive crouch. National headlines often treat our existence as a flashpoint rather than a community. And honestly? That constant drumbeat is exhausting.

But here’s the fuller truth I refuse to let go of: far from the cameras and the outrage algorithms, our people keep building. Quiet victories are unfolding every day — beds made, meals shared, flags raised, elders housed, teens welcomed, neighbors protected. These wins don’t lead the six o’clock news. They don’t spike ratings. But they change lives.

So I collected a handful of stories, most from places where we’re told there’s no hope, and I’m sharing them here as a love letter to us. Call this a field report from the other side of the narrative: soft-spoken, deeply felt, and stubbornly optimistic. Even in the hardest states and the hardest seasons, we are still winning.

1) Ace’s Place in Queens: A Beacon of Trans Futures

Let’s begin in Long Island City, Queens, where New York City quietly and beautifully made history this month. Ace’s Place opened its doors as the first city-funded homeless shelter exclusively for transgender and gender-nonconforming people. One hundred fifty beds. That may sound like numbers, but to me, each bed is a breath of safety, a small chapter of dignity.

What makes Ace’s Place remarkable is not only its size but its wraparound care. The facility offers mental health support, job placement, culinary and GED classes, and assistance transitioning into permanent housing. It is run with heart by Destination Tomorrow, a Bronx-based LGBTQ+ organization. The city committed multi-year funding through 2030 because stable housing is a prerequisite to stable everything: work, wellness, belonging.

When I read about Ace’s Place, I thought of all the nights I’ve spent staring at the ceiling and wishing policy makers could feel what we feel: that home isn’t only four walls; it’s a place where your pronouns are respected, your safety is non-negotiable, and your future feels possible. Ace’s Place is a love letter from a city to its trans residents: we see you. We’ll fight for you. We’ll house you. And even if the national narrative says otherwise, we’ll keep proving that care is a public value, not a private luxury.

2) Brave Local Leaders Where Pride Refuses to Be Banned

If national politics can feel like a wedge between us and basic dignity, local leaders often step in quietly and bravely to fill the gap. Two western cities in states with hardline legislatures offer a master class in creative courage.

In Salt Lake City, Utah, state lawmakers passed a broad flag ban aimed at removing non-official banners, including Pride and Trans flags, from government buildings. Instead of backing down, Mayor Erin Mendenhall and the City Council moved swiftly. They adopted new official city flags that incorporate Pride and Trans colors into the city’s Sego Lily emblem. With one elegant civic act, they turned a prohibition into protection. It wasn’t about scoring points; it was about saying, in law and in love, that queer people are part of the city’s very fabric.

Just over the border in Boise, Idaho, a similar ban arrived. The response? Mayor Lauren McLean and the City Council declared the Pride flag an official city flag. Boise chose not to retreat from values nearly a decade in the making. I think about young people walking past their city hall and seeing, in the most public of spaces, a symbol that says: you belong here. That matters. Symbols aren’t just fabric; they are public hearts beating outside your window.

These acts may look symbolic, but they are substantive. In places where our visibility is politicized, leaders used municipal law to build a shelter of light. They risked blowback because protecting dignity is worth it, and they offer a replicable blueprint for other cities navigating hostile state policies.

3) Law Harrington Senior Living Center: Queer Elders at Home (Houston, TX)

Across the country, queer elders are often pushed to the margins, priced out of neighborhoods they built, and forced to hide who they are to access care. Houston’s Law Harrington Senior Living Center answers that with a full-hearted yes to safety, affordability, and joy. It is the largest LGBTQ-affirming affordable senior complex in the nation, with independent apartments and community spaces designed for dignity and connection.

I picture lunchtime there: a dining room full of chatter, a flash of sequins from a resident’s jacket, a plate of something warm passed across a table. Staff and neighbors greet each other by first names. No one is asked to split themselves in two to be served. There’s a gym and a dog park, game rooms, and programming that acknowledges community history. In a state where the legislature has taken aim at trans healthcare and basic recognition, Law Harrington quietly insists that our elders deserve ease. It’s not flashy; it’s foundational.

4) The Montrose Center: 47 Years of Tender, Fierce Advocacy (Houston, TX)

Law Harrington didn’t appear out of thin air. It belongs to the Montrose Center, an institution that has steadied Houston’s LGBTQ+ community for nearly five decades. Under the leadership of Avery Belyeu, the first openly transgender leader of a center its size, Montrose has weathered an onslaught of bills and political headwinds. And still, they serve tens of thousands every year with mental health services, housing supports, youth programming, and community space.

There is a special kind of courage in capacity building. Passing a law gets headlines. Building a clinic, a shelter, a counseling program — that’s the work that endures. Montrose is a reminder that while some try to legislate us out of public life, our institutions are patiently and persistently laying down the infrastructure of care.

5) Upstate Pride SC: Quiet Power in the Deep South

Let’s head to South Carolina’s upstate, where queer visibility is often painted as improbable. Upstate Pride SC proves otherwise. Through education, health fairs, Black Pride Week, support groups, and affirming public events, they cultivate belonging. It’s grassroots and it’s gorgeous: neighbors taking care of neighbors, one porchlight and potluck at a time.

I love their ethos: amplify acceptance, provide practical help, and keep showing up. There is nothing theoretical about it. This is community maintenance, the work of stitching dignity into daily life. You can feel the throughline: if the state house refuses us, the clubhouse down the street says come in.

6) Brave Space Alliance: A Black and Trans-Led Sanctuary (Chicago, IL)

On Chicago’s South Side, Brave Space Alliance has built something profoundly hopeful: a Black-led, trans-led LGBTQ+ center that puts mutual aid and housing at the core. Their housing program provides temporary residence for up to 18 months in an affirming environment, with wraparound support to help community members take their next steps. It is the sort of practical care that turns fear into future, providing stability you can hold in your hands.

Threading the Needle: What These Wins Have in Common

These stories span urban cores and smaller cities, blue coasts and red legislatures. What they share is a stubborn commitment to dignity and a belief that the public square belongs to all of us — on the street, in a shelter, and above a city hall.

• They are rooted in resilience. Even where laws are hostile, local communities keep crafting love-driven solutions.

• They look far into the future. From senior housing to youth programs, these wins plan for decades, not news cycles.

• They are led by neighbors. The heroes here are not always famous, but they are deeply effective.

If you only read national headlines, you might believe we’re losing everywhere at once. The ground truth is more complicated, and far more hopeful. Local wins are blooming in places that outsiders often write off. Hope is not a theory; it is a practice.

A Love Letter to Us — and a To-Do List

Here’s what I want us to hold: there is bad news, yes. But there is also this. Ace’s Place turning keys and turning pages. Flags protected in hostile climates. Elders eating together without fear. Youth finding mentors. Black and trans-led groups building homes and redistributing care. The story of this moment is not only what we’re losing; it is how we keep making more of what we need.

What we can do next:

• Share these stories so your feeds carry strength, not only struggle.

• Donate what you can to Destination Tomorrow, the Montrose Center, Upstate Pride SC, and Brave Space Alliance.

• Write to your city council. Ask how your town can protect Pride symbols or expand shelter access now.

• Stay gentle with yourself. Joy is not a distraction; it is a strategy.

In between the headlines, we are building. We are shielding. We are healing. And yes, we are still winning.

Activism w/ Perspective: Fighting Loudly, Loving Strategically

Introduction

Activism is a sacred labor—born from pain, sustained by hope, and driven by a vision of a better world. It demands resilience, empathy, and most of all, perspective. In today’s world, where progress can feel both rapid and glacial, it’s easy to confuse disappointment with betrayal, and frustration with failure. But we must take care: not every trans elected official must lead with their identity. Not every ally must be loud. And not every setback is a sign of surrender.

This is not a call to quiet down. Quite the opposite. We must keep shouting. We must keep organizing, educating, marching, and disrupting when necessary. But we must also remember that movements are long, and victories are layered. They are won in courtrooms, in backrooms, in ballot boxes—and yes, in uncomfortable, quiet compromises.

Let us revisit the stories of movements that have shaped this nation. The women’s suffrage movement. The civil rights movement. Let’s understand the slow churn of progress and the balance between activists and elected officials. Let’s celebrate the necessity of both roles—and the limitations they each must wrestle with.

The Myth of the Single-Issue Representative

The expectation that any marginalized person who steps into political office must become a full-time symbol of that identity is a dangerous one. Yes, representation matters. And yes, a trans lawmaker's presence is itself a revolutionary act. But these individuals were not elected solely to be icons. They were elected to serve—and that service must encompass every constituent in their district, not only the LGBTQ+ community.

That doesn’t mean we let silence or inaction slide. Accountability is key. But there’s a difference between constructive accountability and purity politics. We must resist the urge to cannibalize our own movement by calling for the removal of trans politicians who don’t center their entire legislative agenda around trans identity.

Identity can inform action, but it should not be weaponized as a measuring stick for worthiness.

Lessons from the Women’s Suffrage Movement

The women’s suffrage movement in the United States was not a singular, sweeping success. It was a bitter, fractured, and decades-long struggle marked by internal disagreements and slow legislative advances. The fight for the 19th Amendment began in earnest in the mid-1800s—but it wasn’t ratified until 1920. And even then, it excluded many women of color.

Some of the most prominent voices—Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton—were deeply flawed in their approach to intersectionality. They sidelined Black suffragists and framed white womanhood as more “worthy” of enfranchisement. Yet, their activism still moved the needle.

Meanwhile, activists like Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell continued to fight on dual fronts—for gender equality and racial justice. They were often overlooked or outright rejected by white-led feminist organizations. Still, they persisted. Their advocacy wasn’t always reflected in the laws of their day—but it laid the groundwork for the future.

The lesson here? Progress is rarely clean or equitable. It is often marred by contradiction. But the change that eventually comes is built on the backs of many—not just the few who were visible at the top.

The Civil Rights Movement: Loud Voices, Strategic Patience

When we remember the civil rights movement, we often picture Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., standing at the Lincoln Memorial, thundering “I have a dream.” But for every King, there were thousands of organizers working quietly—often invisibly—in communities across the country.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not spring forth from inspiration alone. They were the result of relentless pressure campaigns, legal challenges, marches, boycotts, and negotiations. Activists did not stop yelling. But they also understood the power of strategy and timing.

Consider John Lewis—a man who was both activist and lawmaker. He knew what it meant to bleed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and what it meant to compromise in Congress. His legacy is a masterclass in duality.

And yet, even Lewis was sometimes criticized by younger activists who wanted faster, more radical change. That criticism was part of a healthy tension between generations—but it did not require his erasure or rejection.

Activists and Elected Officials: A Necessary Dance

Activists are not meant to be liked. We are meant to challenge, to provoke, to stir the pot. Elected officials, meanwhile, must build coalitions, navigate bureaucracy, and represent a broad spectrum of voices—including some that are in direct opposition to ours.

The relationship between activists and lawmakers must be symbiotic. One pushes from the outside, the other maneuvers from within. We must be wary of trying to collapse these roles into one.

A trans state representative who supports public education funding, tenant protections, and racial justice but doesn’t sponsor a new trans healthcare bill every session is not abandoning their community. They are doing their job. Our job, as activists, is to make the next trans bill impossible to ignore. Not to punish our allies for having multiple priorities.

Navigating Disappointment Without Turning on Each Other

We will be disappointed. That is the nature of activism. We ask for the moon and get a paper lantern. But we cannot confuse disappointment with betrayal. We cannot afford to eat our own in the name of ideological purity.

Trans people—especially trans women of color—are under siege in this country. We are being legislated out of existence in some states, ignored in others, and tokenized in many. This is not the time to alienate the few who have made it into the rooms where decisions are made. Hold them accountable, yes—but with compassion and context.

And we must also be strategic in choosing our battles. Take, for example, the fight for trans inclusion in sports. In early 2025, Eliza Munshi, a senior at Falls Church High School in Virginia, competed briefly with the girls’ track team before state policy abruptly changed, barring her from participating. She later joined the boys' team to avoid penalties for her school—despite having no competitive advantage—and described the experience poignantly: “Sometimes I forget I’m transgender. People around me forget too.”

This issue has been weaponized beyond recognition. While we know the fight is just—while we know inclusion is non-negotiable—the unfortunate reality is that there is, at present, no national palate for it. The conversation has been so twisted, so saturated with misinformation and fear-mongering, that we may need to place that particular fight further down the road.

This isn’t surrender. It’s not abandoning the mantra, “If one of us isn’t free, then none of us are.” It’s about paving the road with the battles where we can build consensus and momentum—so that, when the time comes to take up the fight again, we are stronger, louder, and harder to ignore.

Strategic patience does not mean complacency. It means investing our energy where we can make change today, while never losing sight of the fights we’ll take up tomorrow.

Let us also be honest with ourselves: sometimes the loudest critics are not the most involved. Keyboard warriors who drag public officials online often fail to show up at school board meetings, testify at hearings, or volunteer at mutual aid events. Rage is easy. Movement work is hard.

The Power of Local Action and Long-Term Vision

Change doesn’t only happen at the federal level. Some of the most impactful queer-affirming policies begin at the city council, school board, and county supervisor levels. Don’t wait for the next trans senator to save you. Be the trans candidate who runs. Be the volunteer who canvasses. Be the neighbor who educates. Be the witness who shows up when others stay silent.

Change also doesn’t happen on a one-year timeline. The civil rights movement spanned generations. The LGBTQ+ rights movement—stretching back to the Mattachine Society, the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, and Stonewall—is still unfinished. Let us commit to playing the long game.

A Call to Stay Loud and Stay Strategic

Here is what we must do:
- Keep marching. Protest is visibility, and visibility brings power.
- Keep organizing. Systems don’t collapse because of a hashtag. They collapse from pressure and planning.
- Keep educating. Silence is often the result of ignorance, not malice.
- Keep voting. It’s not everything, but it’s still something.
- Keep creating. Art is activism. Joy is resistance. Queer life itself is defiant.
- Keep perspective. Not every disagreement is disloyalty. Not every politician is a savior. Not every setback is the end.

Conclusion: The Future Is Collective

We are all necessary in this fight. The disruptors and the diplomats. The radicals and the reformers. The queer elders and the new generation.

Let’s be clear-eyed about the work ahead. Let’s be relentless in our advocacy and generous in our solidarity. Let’s demand better without destroying our own.

The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice—but only if we pull together.

And we will.

The Power of Trans Joy: A Reflection on TransPride DC

Last weekend, I had the profound honor of attending TransPride DC, and I am still glowing from the experience. In a time when transgender lives are so often politicized, erased, or endangered, stepping into a space filled with love, celebration, and unapologetic authenticity was nothing short of revolutionary.

From the moment I walked in, I was surrounded by a sea of affirming smiles, vibrant expression, and visible pride. There was laughter echoing in every corner, chosen family reuniting, allies listening and learning, and a powerful energy that said: we are here, we are whole, and we are worthy of joy.

TransPride DC wasn’t just an event—it was a homecoming. It was about more than visibility; it was about belonging. There were panels and performances, hugs and healing, and the undeniable beauty of people simply being themselves without fear. I saw trans elders embraced with gratitude, trans youth lifted up with hope, and nonbinary folks taking up space with pride and purpose.

As someone who works with Rainbows In Revolt, this was a moment to recharge, to remember why we do what we do, and to connect with the community that fuels our fight. The trans joy on display reminded me that joy itself is resistance. To celebrate our lives, our bodies, our identities—in public and without apology—is a radical act.

To everyone who made TransPride DC possible: thank you. You created a sanctuary in a storm, a celebration in a season of struggle. And to every trans and nonbinary person who showed up: you are loved, you are seen, and your joy is a beacon that lights the way for others.

We will carry this joy forward, into every protest, every Pride, and every place where our voices must be heard.

In solidarity and celebration,
Rainbows In Revolt

We Are Not Dishonorable

On January 23, 2025, just three days into his return to office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning transgender Americans from serving in the United States military. The order—titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness”—revived and expanded upon his earlier ban, this time with a darker clause: active-duty transgender service members could face dishonorable discharge simply for identifying as trans.

And on May 6, 2025, the United States Supreme Court allowed that order to take effect. The Court issued a stay of a lower court’s injunction, permitting the ban to proceed while legal challenges continue. You can view the stay here.

With the stroke of a pen and the silence of a majority, the highest court in the land sanctioned a policy that equates transgender identity with misconduct—an act punishable by the same terms reserved for desertion or insubordination. No trial. No context. Just discharge, and disgrace.

Let’s be clear: the transgender service members who now face this threat are among the finest our nation has to offer.

- Colonel Bree Fram, a high-ranking officer in the U.S. Space Force, continues to serve with distinction while advocating for inclusion and strength through diversity. [Wikipedia]

- Commander Emily Shilling, a decorated Navy pilot with 19 years of service, now leads the legal challenge against this order in Shilling v. Trump—risking everything not just for herself, but for every trans soldier who follows. [GLAAD]

- Edit… The Navy Seal I had listed turned their back on the community. Removed Name and informaiton

- Lieutenant Commander Blake Dremann, the first openly trans service member promoted post-transition, is a symbol of leadership earned through merit, not conformity. [Military Times]

- Staff Sergeant Patricia King, the first openly transgender infantry member in the U.S. Army, who deployed to war zones while living in quiet authenticity. [WNYC Studios]

- Colonel Sheri Swokowski, Major Jamie Lee Henry, Monica Helms, and so many others have served with honor, not only in uniform but in advocating for equality once they left active duty.

From Pittsburgh to D.C.: A Call for Unity Amid Renewed Threats to LGBTQ+ Rights

A Night of Celebration Turned Ominous

On May 2, 2025, P Town Bar, a cherished LGBTQ+ venue in Pittsburgh, was hosting a vibrant drag event featuring local icon Indica and the legendary Amanda Lepore. The atmosphere was electric until approximately 20 Pennsylvania State Police officers and undercover agents abruptly entered the establishment around 11:30 p.m., interrupting the festivities. Patrons and staff were forced to wait outside in the rain as officers conducted a search of the premises.

Attendees described the incident as reminiscent of the police raids on gay establishments during the 1960s and 70s. One witness recounted, “Dozens of state police, geared up with bulletproof vests, flooded the bar and told us to get out. None of the officers would explain what was happening.”

Echoes of a Troubled Past

This recent raid is not an isolated incident but part of a historical pattern of law enforcement targeting LGBTQ+ spaces. The most infamous of these was the 1969 raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York City, which sparked six days of protests and became a catalyst for the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.

Other notable instances include:
- The Hazel's Inn Raid (1956): In Pacifica, California, police arrested 77 gay men and 10 lesbians during a raid on Hazel's Inn, one of the earliest recorded mass arrests of LGBTQ+ individuals in the U.S.
- Operation Soap (1981): Toronto police raided four gay bathhouses, arresting nearly 300 men in what became the largest mass arrest in Canada since the 1970 October Crisis. This galvanized the Canadian LGBTQ+ community and led to the founding of Pride Toronto.

Lessons From Other Movements

The LGBTQ+ community is not alone in this experience. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, millions across the U.S. and around the world rose up in solidarity under the Black Lives Matter banner. What followed were not just protests, but changes—some symbolic, many substantive. Cities re-examined police budgets, Confederate monuments fell, corporations were compelled to address systemic racism, and public discourse around racial justice shifted in a way unseen for generations.

Likewise, the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings following the brutal police beating of Rodney King—an event captured on videotape and broadcast across the nation—led to momentous outcomes, including federal civil rights charges against the officers involved, and deeper scrutiny of LAPD practices.

The Legacy of Matthew Shepard

On the night of October 6, 1998, 21-year-old Matthew Shepard, a gay college student at the University of Wyoming, was brutally beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die outside Laramie, Wyoming. After being discovered 18 hours later by a cyclist, barely alive, Matthew succumbed to his wounds on October 12.

The outcry led to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009. His legacy is a reminder: we must not wait for another tragedy before we act. We will not be silenced. We will not be closeted. And we will not be treated as second-class any longer.

We Shouldn’t Wait for a Tragedy

We in the rainbow community cannot afford to wait for a mass-casualty event, a national tragedy, or a government-sanctioned crackdown to awaken us. We cannot allow another Pulse Nightclub or a Stonewall to be the flashpoint that brings us together. The time to unify—trans, queer, lesbian, gay, intersex, nonbinary, ace, two-spirit, and beyond—is now.

We must also recognize the interconnectedness of struggles. The erosion of trans rights today—whether in schools, sports, or healthcare—is a harbinger of broader rollbacks. Marriage equality and reproductive freedom are not guaranteed. An attack on any one of us is an attack on all of us.

Where Was the Outcry?

In 2025, the New Hampshire House passed a bill banning puberty blockers and hormone therapies for minors, effectively criminalizing essential healthcare for transgender youth. Disturbingly, this legislation advanced with minimal public condemnation from national Democratic leaders or prominent LGBTQ+ advocacy groups. Similarly, blue states like California saw the introduction of bills aiming to restrict transgender girls from participating in high school sports.

Transgender individuals have historically stood at the forefront of LGBTQ+ rights movements. They marched alongside their peers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, fervently advocating for marriage equality. Their unwavering support was instrumental in achieving significant milestones for the community. Yet, when faced with targeted legislation and discrimination, the trans community often finds itself isolated.

Intersectionality and the Legacy of Marsha P. Johnson

Understanding the LGBTQ+ struggle requires acknowledging its intersectionality. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black transgender woman, was a pivotal figure during the Stonewall uprising. She famously stated, "You never completely have your rights, one person, until you all have your rights."

The challenges faced by transgender individuals today are not isolated incidents. Eliza Munshi, a transgender high school athlete from Falls Church, Virginia, was compelled to join the boys' track team due to new anti-trans regulations. Eliza expressed her frustration, stating, "I just want to run with my friends. I want to compete as who I am, not who the state says I have to be." Her experience underscores the personal toll of discriminatory policies.

Raising the Standard: It Starts with Us

At this moment in history, we can no longer afford to rely on elected officials to carry the water for us. Too many have gone silent when we needed their voices the most. We must start this movement, sustain it, and turn it into a voting issue in 2026 and 2028.

We demand:
- WorldPride 2025 must proceed without harassment—at airports, in streets, at events.
- No federal surveillance of LGBTQ+ gatherings.
- Full cooperation and protection from D.C. leadership.

This movement must be led by us: from the bars, sidewalks, kitchens, classrooms, and everywhere we exist.

We Are the Beacon Now

Before the current Trump administration, the United States was seen as a global ambassador of human rights. We can no longer rely on federal officials to ensure our nation remains that beacon.

It must be us.

We must persevere and do the difficult things. We must stand on shaky legs amidst our fears and keep showing up. If we back down now, decades of hate and Christian nationalism win. We must be the light. We must rise.

A Call for Unity and Vigilance

Let the memory of Stonewall guide us, and the urgency of this moment compel us. We don’t need permission to demand dignity. And we don’t need tragedy to demand justice.

We must come together as one community—fierce, diverse, and united. If those in power attempt to disrupt WorldPride, let them be met with the full power of a rainbow coalition that will not be pushed back into the shadows.

This is not just about parades or parties. This is about power. About people. About pride.

And we are ready.