This year’s observance of Transgender Day of Visibility takes place during a historically hostile political environment for the transgender community. Already in the first three months of the year, more than 700 anti-transgender bills have been considered in states across the United States on topics ranging from restricting transgender people’s healthcare to penalizing those who updated the gender marker on their identification documents to match their gender identity.

As the U.S. transgender community faces a historically hostile environment, there are many actions that allies can take — both large and small — to show support and solidarity.

Here are five actions to take in honor of Transgender Day of Visibility

1. Take a moment to learn about what it means to be transgender.

With fewer than one in three adults in the United States reporting that they personally know someone who is transgender, it’s understandable to have questions. Transgender people have always been part of every community, both in the U.S. and around the world, throughout history. To learn more about what it means to be transgender, read Advocate for Trans Equality’s resource, Frequently Asked Questions about Transgender People.

2. Watch, read, or follow transgender folks’ stories to get to know the people behind the political headlines.

While stories about transgender people continue to make headlines and gain traction on social media, many fail to include the voices of transgender people themselves. To address this imbalance, incorporate first-hand perspectives from transgender people into your preferred media format.

Each year, GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy organization, honors media for fair, accurate, and inclusive representation of the LGBTQ+ community through the annual GLAAD Media Awards. See the outstanding stories about transgender people honored this year for a diverse list of movies, documentaries, television series, books, podcasts, and more that highlight transgender voices.

3. Familiarize yourself with the transgender-led organizations and initiatives working to support trans people.

There are many organizations dedicated to supporting and protecting transgender people in the United States. Consider learning more about some of the country’s leading organizations below by visiting their website, subscribing to their email lists, following their social media accounts, or donating to support their cause:

• Advocates for Trans Equality (A4TE) is an organization that fights for the legal and political rights of transgender people in the United States. A4TE is one of the largest trans-led advocacy organizations in the U.S., bringing together experts, advocates, and communities to shift government and society toward an equitable future in which trans people live joyful lives without barriers.

• Transgender Law Center (TLC) is one of the largest national, trans-led organizations in the U.S. that advocates for self-determination for all people. TLC is dedicated to advancing the rights of transgender and gender-nonconforming people through litigation, policy advocacy, and legal services.

• The Transgender Youth Emergency Project, a program of the Campaign for Southern Equality, offers logistical and financial support to families of transgender young people seeking essential health care amid an increasingly challenging environment.

4. Look into your state’s current policies impacting transgender people — and those working to protect trans folks in your community.

Amid a continued wave of anti-transgender headlines, policies, and news stories, it can be challenging to keep up with the latest information or figure out what to do in response. Zeroing in on what policies and political activity are taking place in your own state or region can help.

Consider learning about the current policies impacting transgender people living in your own state by utilizing The Movement Advancement Project’s LGBTQ Equality Map. This resource regularly tracks and updates more than 50 LGBTQ-related laws and policies in each state, the District of Columbia, and the five populated U.S. territories — including those that specifically impact transgender individuals.

Once you’ve explored the laws and policies impacting your state, look into the organizations and individuals working to push back against anti-transgender activity in your community. Most states have regional, state-wide, or local LGBTQ+ organizations that are actively working to protect and support transgender individuals every day. Check out the Equality Federation’s network of more than 40 state-based LGBTQ+ organizations across the U.S. to connect with an on-the-ground group nearest you.

5. Make it personal: Assess how you might show up as an ally in everyday interactions and conversations with family and friends

While advocating for legal and legislative protections for transgender people is critical, it’s also important to take action to support this community on an individual level. You do not need to be an expert in transgender topics or identities to provide meaningful allyship. Supporting the transgender community can start with simply taking stock of your everyday conversations and if/how transgender people and topics come up. Consider asking yourself questions, such as:

• How am I currently using gendered language in my day-to-day conversations?

• What can I do to shift my language to be more gender-inclusive?

• What are the people around me saying about trans folks, or related political headlines?

• How might I respond to someone who makes an anti-transgender comment or joke?

Many leading LGBTQ+ organizations have created resources to support anyone, anywhere, in their efforts to support the transgender community. Deepen your allyship by reading free guides and resources from groups such as Gender Spectrum, The Trevor Project, and The Human Rights Campaign.

Transgender Day of Visibility is a great moment to reflect on how you are showing up for the transgender people in your life and in your community – not just today, but every day of the year.

“This has been going on for a very long time,” Yesenia Mendoza, director of development and communications at Latino Equality Alliance, which operates the Southern California nonprofit in partnership with the Los Angeles LGBT Center, tells Queer Agenda. “We were so innocent-minded that we didn’t think it was a hate crime. That happens to a lot of people, where you rationalize negative things that occur in your life. We didn’t think it could happen to us.”

Since late May, an as-yet-unidentified assailant has been throwing dog feces at Mi SELA, which provides leadership development and support groups for LGBTQ+ youth in Bell, a city of 33,000 in greater Los Angeles. In just one evening alone, dozens of bright green bags filled with fecal matter were hurled onto its front awning and deposited on the sidewalk near the building’s entrance.

Staffers didn’t realize that the vandalism was a biased attack until Latino Equality Alliance posted a TikTok video raising awareness about the situation. The post rapidly went viral as people flooded the video with thousands of anti-LGBTQ+ comments. Trolls cheered the vandal on, asking for Mi SELA’s address so they could toss feces at the building, too. Scrolling through the hate directed at them, Mendoza says she came to a long-delayed realization: “Wait a minute, this is not normal.”

What made the attacks especially violating for Mi SELA is that it’s the only place many of the youth who rely on its services can be themselves. The majority of LGBTQ+ young people who visit its drop-in center each day are closeted in their daily lives, largely hailing from culturally conservative Latino households. They come to do homework, to watch Netflix, and — as Mendoza puts it — to “just vibe.”

“It made me afraid, not for myself but for the people that come in,” she says of the vandalism. “I never want them to feel unsafe or targeted in our community center.”

Mi SELA is one of numerous queer and allied spaces that have been vandalized during the second Trump administration. Since the president was sworn in this January, more than a dozen properties have been targeted seemingly for their support of LGBTQ+ people, including community centers, churches, businesses, and even public spaces. Those incidents, as sources tell Queer Agenda, highlight not merely the increasing scrutiny facing LGBTQ+ Americans under Trump but also the community’s continued resilience in the face of adversity.

Among the countless locales reportedly targeted in 2025, Sinners and Saints, a Washington, D.C. gay bar, had its glass front door shattered and a homophobic slur painted on the inside wall. The headquarters of Long Beach Pride in the California city of the same name were tagged with Nazi symbols and pro-Trump graffiti. A Pride display at BookWoman, a longtime feminist bookstore in Austin, Texas, was defaced when a vandal pitched a piece of concrete through its front window. In cities ranging from Appleton, Wisc. and Atlanta, to St. Paul, Minn., LGBTQ+ Pride flags have been torn down from city light poles and private homes.

Many of these altercations appear to be connected. In Stockton, Calif., three LGBTQ+ nonprofits were hit in one day, including the Central Valley Gender Health and Wellness Center, which provides harm reduction, HIV prevention, and peer support to queer people of color. A rock was thrown through the building’s front window during Pride month June, seemingly targeting a Trans Pride flag that was on display. This October, at least four different LGBTQ+ owned businesses in Denver all had their windows smashed during the same week, including a local gym, a salon, and a boutique that chose to remain anonymous in press coverage. Also hit was the Center on Colfax, Colorado’s largest LGBTQ+ community center.

Although the wave of attacks against Denver LGBTQ+ spaces drew national coverage, they were not a new phenomenon. John Taylor, the Center on Colfax’s vice president of development, says that a local gay bar reported being vandalized frequently in recent months. The vandalism is “especially violating,” Taylor adds, because Denver “feels like such a safe space for the queer community.” After Gov. Jared Polis (D) signed a 2023 law declaring Colorado a trans sanctuary, many families have fled to Denver from hostile states targeting gender-affirming health care for youth.

“It makes me really frustrated that we’re trying to make sure we have this safe space, and then feeling like, no matter what we do, something like this is still going to happen,” he tells Queer Agenda.

Numerous allied spaces have likewise found themselves in the crosshairs, including LGBTQ+ affirming churches. In September, a vandal slashed a rainbow banner reading “All Are Welcome” at Indian Heights United Methodist Church in Overland Park, Kan. Rev. Fred Daley, a pastor at All Saints Catholic Church in Syracuse, N.Y., tells Queer Agenda that he has received at least three death threats since its Pride flag was torn down and burned in June. The vandalism was followed by an “explosion of hate mail to our parish, to our bishop, to our Catholic Diocese, many of them very violent, just based certainly on ignorance, but very, very hateful,” he says.

These faith centers, though, have chosen to defy the hate by continuing to signal their support for the LGBTQ+ community. When the entryway of Life in the City in Austin, Texas, was vandalized with the words “Pride is the First Sin” in July, the parish immediately went into action. Within hours, a community member designed a new mural to cover the vandalism: a pair of Progress Pride flags that now buttress the front entryway. And the very next weekend after its rainbow banner was defaced, All Saints held a public flag-raising ceremony to replace it.

“We just have to go forward,” Daley says. “All this negative and even violent reaction across the country, which is being fed by our present administration, is never going to win the day. You can step on a flower, but you can’t hold back the spring.”

For the team at Mi SELA, the vandalism they have faced is yet another reminder of how important the work they do is. Although many of the youth clients who seek out their services don’t have a great deal of support in their lives, having access to Mi SELA’s resources and programming helps them to be bolder in their identities. A young person who would come to the drop-in center to try on heels and experiment with makeup, Mendoza says, now performs drag at college. Even then, Mendoza saw how experiencing even a taste of freedom “lit up something in them, knowing that their identity is affirmed, and it’s not only affirmed, it’s celebrated.”

To ensure the space remains safe for years to come, Mi SELA recently installed high-quality security cameras to catch the vandal in the act, with the help of generous donations from the community. Security footage finally caught a glimpse of the perpetrator in October, although he has yet to be identified by local authorities.

While Mendoza is grateful that justice is closer to being served, she hopes this chapter is soon behind them so Mi SELA can focus solely on its mission: serving the vulnerable communities that rely on them to thrive. “I know that our community is resilient, but honestly, I have a weird relationship with the word resilient,” she says. “We have to go through hardship when we really shouldn’t, but this is not going to stop us. People can do whatever they want, but that doesn’t change who you are.”

“It’s like we are in this game: Whenever something in the world goes sideways, trans people are always one of — if not the first — targets for Republicans to blame,” Cadence Pierce, 40, tells Queer Agenda. “My friends and I often joke about the Iago meme: ‘I think I’m going to have a heart attack and die from not surprise.’ I’m used to it, but every time, I get frustrated and irritated. How does anyone buy the nonsense?”

Pierce is one of the estimated two million LGBTQ+ Americans who presently rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known colloquially as food stamps. Those benefits, which provide an estimated 40 million Americans with up to $100 billion in food assistance each year, will be dramatically reduced and significantly delayed amid the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. The closure has resulted from a congressional standoff over a federal budget bill: Democrats oppose proposed GOP cuts to Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies that would dramatically increase health care costs for millions of Americans.

As the impasse over the ACA continues, the official website of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) engaged in a particularly Trumpian obfuscation. In a message posted on October 27, the federal agency claimed that SNAP benefits are being blocked by Democrats who “continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures.” Over a week later, the statement remains pinned to the USDA’s homepage, despite the claim being patently false.

Even as trans people are unjustly censured for the SNAP quagmire, the reality is that they are disproportionately likely to rely on monthly assistance to meet their food needs. LGBTQ+ adults are 36% more likely to be enrolled in the SNAP program than their cisgender, heterosexual counterparts, according to an analysis from the Williams Institute, a pro-LGBTQ+ think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles. Of LGBTQ+ people who reported receiving regular nutritional assistance, 66% were disabled, and 69% had a household income under $35,000 annually.

It makes sense that the trans community would be uniquely reliant on these resources, which are designed to aid low-income populations: Trans people are disproportionately likely to be unemployed, unhoused, living under the poverty line, or a combination of all three. During the pandemic, trans respondents were three times as likely as cisgender people to report not having enough to eat, per the Williams Institute’s research.

Some trans Americans tell Queer Agenda that they aren’t sure how they are going to get by without the necessary benefits that SNAP provides. Iris Marrah, 29, receives the maximum allowable individual benefits every month, which are currently set at $292, and still struggles to pay her household bills. Marrah is unable to work due to a severe strain of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome — a connective tissue disorder that, in her case, has resulted in skin tears, bruising, and cyclical vomiting — and 80% of the monthly Supplemental Security Income she receives goes to rent. Marrah already overdrafts her bank account every single month, even if she doesn’t spend a dollar on food outside of her allotted SNAP budget.

With the future of SNAP now in limbo, not knowing how she is going to pay for electricity or where her next meal may be coming from has been a disquieting experience. Marrah has a history of disordered eating and worries that any changes to her usual food intake might retrigger old behaviors. “I have been in a very dark place, but what has kept me holding on is not wanting to give them what they want,” Marrah says, noting that she has experienced increased suicidal ideation in recent weeks. “It’s miserable. Existence is not great. Basically, I live out of spite.”

Others voiced the same anxieties: unsure of what the coming days hold without the certainty of being able to fill their pantries. Samuel James, 35, says that he has enough to get by for the next two weeks, but after that, he isn’t sure how he is going to feed himself. Howie Rhodes, 34, fears being forced to choose between paying for his groceries and his monthly medications. Without the generosity of her landlords, Tela Rose, 55, says that she would likely end up on the street: “All I know how to do is get through today. That’s where I have to keep my focus: on making sure I have something to eat and getting through each day.”

While conservatives have long painted SNAP recipients as “lazy” and “welfare queens,” many of those who spoke with Queer Agenda say that the program has helped them rebuild their lives. Marrah was forced to leave a previous job after her employer refused to give her accommodations for her disability, causing her to pass out during a shift. After a series of stays in mental health facilities over the past three years, Liz Phillips, 41, was hoping that being on SNAP would help her find some stability; instead, she now anticipates being forced to beg for money from friends on social media.

“This administration and the ruling party are pitting my existence and my ability to be myself against my ability to eat,” Phillips, who requested the use of a pseudonym in this story, tells Queer Agenda. “I’ve spent so much of my life trying to be someone I’m not, and when I actually am finally starting to become myself, it’s under threat. I’m going to do my damnedest to survive this.”

Government leaders are hopeful that a shutdown deal may be in sight after a 36-day standstill. In order to end the shutdown, at least eight Senate Democrats must cross the aisle to join Republicans in voting for the funding bill — thereby crossing the 60-vote threshold to avoid a filibuster. Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) expressed optimism that a compromise was in sight, telling reporters this week that he believes congressional lawmakers are “getting close to an off ramp here.” Although some centrist Democrats reportedly are open to concessions, others oppose giving in to the drastic ACA cuts that the GOP is seeking.

Befitting his tactic of laying the blame elsewhere, Trump has been sending mixed signals on his willingness to end the crisis, saying he will only negotiate after the government is reopened. Claiming that Democrats “have lost their way,” he predicted in a 60 Minutes interview that the party would cave: “I think they have to. And if they don’t vote, it’s their problem.” (It’s also unclear how Trump will respond to a federal ruling ordering the government to fully fund the SNAP program, given how often he has ignored court mandates before.)

Despite the fact that trans people have very little to do with the intraparty strife in Congress, it has played out a now-familiar pattern amid Trump’s second term in office. Since January, the White House has directly targeted trans access to accurate passports, affirming sports participation, and necessary health care. More than 21 hospitals have discontinued gender-affirming treatments for minors as a result of the federal administration’s threats, and the Department of Health and Human Services is currently pursuing a new rule that would effectively amount to a national ban on trans youth health care. Trans people have become such a cursory target that Trump even railed against transgender mice during a March speech to Congress.

If being scapegoated for the SNAP crisis is perhaps further insult to injury, trans people are doing what they always do: figuring out how to survive, often under unenviable circumstances. Many sources for this story credited food banks for stepping up to support vulnerable populations, and in Rose’s home state of Washington, Gov. Bob Ferguson (D) has issued an additional $2.2 million to local pantries during the government shutdown. “I feel really lucky that we have a community that really steps up when things are hard,” she says.

Some worried, though, that a breaking point may be coming soon: of being forced to bear too much of society’s burdens. Pierce insists that trans people simply want what everyone else wants — to live authentically and without scrutiny — but that can be difficult when certain government leaders don’t even want you to eat. “Every time another attack gets lobbed at trans people, it wears you down little by little,” she says. “When is too much going to be too much?”

On November 7, America’s highest judicial body will hear a long-shot bid from former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis seeking to reverse the Supreme Court’s own 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. In a petition to SCOTUS, Davis’s attorney, Mat Staver, said the 5-4 decision — which allowed queer couples to marry in all 50 U.S. states — is “egregiously wrong” and based upon a “legal fiction.” “The mistake must be corrected,” said Staver, who also serves as chairperson of the far-right extremist group Liberty Counsel. Deemed a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Liberty Counsel has claimed the legalization of marriage equality is “destructive to our very social fabric” and a slippery slope to pedophilia.

If Davis’ name seems familiar, she made national headlines in 2015 after refusing to issue marriage licenses to LGBTQ+ couples in Rowan County, Ky., leading her to be jailed for five days on contempt of court charges. David Moore and David Ermold, one of the couples who refused a license, eventually sued and were awarded damages of $50,000 each in a 2023 jury verdict (along with an additional $260,000 in legal fees). Although Davis pleaded with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to intervene in her case, her entreaty was rejected.

While Davis and her legal team might believe that the most conservative Supreme Court in 90 years would be sympathetic to her plight, the votes may not be on her side. Although the arch-conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have openly called to revisit Obergefell, other right-wing members of the bench may not be so inclined. Although Chief Justice John Roberts joined the minority in opposing the nationwide legalization of marriage equality, he was in the majority on Bostock v. Clayton County, a landmark 2020 decision finding that federal civil rights laws barring sex-based discrimination also ban anti-LGBTQ+ bias. Fellow conservative Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, personally authored the Bostock opinion.

Fears that the Supreme Court would nullify Obergefell outright were somewhat assuaged by a recent interview with Justice Amy Coney Barrett in The New York Times, during which she said the decision rests on “very concrete reliance interests” that would make it difficult to overturn. Defining “reliance interests” as referring to “things that would be upset or undone if a decision is undone,” Barrett claimed that deciding whether to undo precedent is not merely a question of: “Is this decision right or wrong?” “Because if a decision is wrong, then you have to decide whether you should keep it for many of the reasons you say: stability, reliance, interests, et cetera,” she said.

But even if the fickle tides of the Supreme Court turn against Davis, she can sleep soundly knowing that America doesn’t need her help in kneecapping the freedom to marry. Judicial and political authorities across the U.S. have repeatedly indicated their brazen willingness to methodically whittle down the rights of queer couples until their marriages are relegated to second-class status. When it comes to rolling back LGBTQ+ equality, this country much prefers the death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach.

The first blow to Obergefell was dealt in April 2016, when Mississippi passed what was, at the time, the single most extreme anti-LGBTQ+ law ever enacted by a U.S. state. Known as House Bill 1523, the statute allows people of faith to refuse goods or services based upon their “deeply held religious beliefs or moral convictions.” Although critics warned that the bill was so vaguely worded that it could potentially be used to ban women from wearing pants in the workplace, HB 1523 was an explicit response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the freedom to marry one year prior. The first protected belief outlined in its bill text is that “marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman.”

Although HB 1523 affected the entire LGBTQ+ community in Mississippi, the law particularly placed queer couples in the crosshairs. Under the discriminatory statute, landlords have the right to refuse housing to married LGBTQ+ partners on the basis of religion. Adoption and foster care agencies would have the ability to turn away queer couples seeking to give a child a loving home. The ACLU of Mississippi even predicted it would grant exactly what Davis is asking for: allowing county clerks to recuse themselves from being forced to certify LGBTQ+ unions.

HB 1523 has quietly stayed on the books for close to 10 years because the courts have declined to halt its enforcement. Although U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves initially paused HB 1523 due to his belief that it would ultimately be found unconstitutional, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed his injunction in June 2017. The court found that because plaintiffs had not yet been targeted under the law, LGBTQ+ Mississippians did not have a legal right to sue. In January 2018, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal challenging HB 1523, thereby allowing Mississippi to continue willfully discriminating against queer couples.

In the near-decade since HB 1523’s passage, numerous laws have been enacted seeking to prevent LGBTQ+ married couples from having the same rights and protections as other wedded partners. Getting to the punch early, Tennessee passed a law in 2017 mandating that words like “husband” and “wife” be legally interpreted as to their “natural and ordinary meaning.” While Gov. Bill Haslam (R) denied that HB 1111 was a swipe at marriage equality, conservative groups that lobbied for the bill, such as the Family Action Council, admitted that it was intended to prevent queer and opposite-sex families from receiving equal treatment under the law. A lawsuit seeking to void HB 1111 was thrown out of court later that same year, and it has since remained in place.

The attacks on marriage equality over the past decade have been extremely wide-ranging, and in truth, they are just getting started. At the time that Mississippi’s law was enacted, just two states restricted foster care and adoption for queer couples: Nebraska and North Dakota. At the time of publication, at least 14 states currently allow faith-based agencies to turn away prospective parents because they are LGBTQ+. At least two states permit judges or other officiants to refuse to perform queer ceremonies: Tennessee (yet again) and Texas. The latter move came courtesy of the Texas Supreme Court this very month.

The nation’s most powerful legal authorities have not only done little to stop the escalating war on marriage equality, but they have also, in many cases, encouraged it. When Christian baker Jack Phillips pleaded with the Supreme Court to let him ignore Colorado laws that would compel him to treat queer couples equally, the justices ruled narrowly in his favor. SCOTUS gave a similar pass to Arizona designer Lorie Smith, who was granted permission to refuse to create LGBTQ+ wedding websites (even though she had never been asked to do so).

Civil rights advocates have declared many of these decisions to be split: neither an outright defeat for LGBTQ+ equality nor an unbridled victory for conservatives. When the Supreme Court ruled that Philadelphia discriminated against a Catholic foster care agency by requiring that it work with queer couples, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) noted that the verdict actually upheld the validity of laws protecting the LGBTQ+ community. “The Court ruled that governments can enforce nondiscrimination laws as long as they do so neutrally, but that the city of Philadelphia was not neutral in its application of its nondiscrimination laws,” HRC said in a press release at the time.

The Supreme Court has left many of the biggest questions unanswered, though, as it effectively kicks the can down the road on equality.. Because many of its rulings are idiosyncratic and not intended to be sweeping, it’s not always clear how broadly they can be applied: Is it OK now for bakers not to bake cakes for gay weddings? Can website designers just say no to queer ceremonies? Illustrating the mass confusion over where LGBTQ+ couples stand, a “No Gays Allowed” sign at a Tennessee gas station went viral on social media following the SCOTUS ruling on wedding websites. The display actually dated back to the days of Obergefell — posted just hours after the decision came down — but people shared the message as if it just happened.

It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will entertain Davis’s wish to negate the marriages of more than 820,000 queer couples. (The smart money is they don’t, especially given that they already snubbed her once before.) But no matter the outcome, the truth is that LGBTQ+ Americans do not have true marriage equality. Despite our community’s hard-won progress, the U.S. is just as it was in the days before Obergefell: a country that operates under a patchwork of protections for marginalized people, where an individual’s rights are dependent upon their zip code.

A system in which queer couples can get married on Sunday but are refused a table at a restaurant for it on Monday isn’t full equality. It’s lip service.

A new report touted by The Welcome Party, a centrist political action committee turned nonprofit, finds that 70% of voters believe that the Democratic Party overemphasizes issues like “protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans” and “fighting climate change” in its messaging. Deeming Democrats to be “out of touch” with the average voter, its polling research stresses that the party should instead focus on issues like “securing the border” or “lowering the rate of crime.” According to Semafor, The Welcome Party intends to present its findings directly to elected Democrats in the coming weeks.

As Democrats continue to wring their hands over U.S. President Donald Trump’s second victory this past November, the too-online have predictably seized upon the report to heap misdirected blame on LGBTQ+ Americans. Frequent poster Joe Walsh, a former Republican Congressman who recently converted to the Democratic Party, posted on BlueSky that anyone who was on the ground last year “speaking with middle class/working class voters… heard from these voters every single day the same.” Stephen Richer, a fellow at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, concurred that the report is simply common sense: “Anyone outside of a college cafeteria could have told.”

The trouble with common sense, however, is that sense is increasingly uncommon. If anything, the above research indicates that the U.S. public has short memories: Democrats did perilously little to engage LGBTQ+ equality in the 2024 presidential election, thereby ceding the issue to the right. The last time that Democrats made full rights and protections for the LGBTQ+ community a centerpiece of their messaging, they won the White House resoundingly.

If 2020 now seems a lifetime away, so do its politics. More than two dozen Democrats ran for president at the time, making it the largest Democratic field in at least four decades and the most diverse in history. After four years of Trump decimating LGBTQ+ rights under his first term, nearly every mainstream candidate spoke to their stance on equality. Democratic hopefuls like former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, and former South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg (himself an out gay man) released detailed platforms outlining how they would fight for the LGBTQ+ community as president.

Let’s take a closer look at some of those platforms. New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand promised to cover gender-affirming treatments under a universal health care plan. Former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke pledged to appoint more LGBTQ+ allies in the federal government and ensure that data collection on sexual orientation and gender identity is included in the U.S. Census. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren released a comprehensive 12-page plan vowing to ban discrimination against queer couples seeking to foster or adopt, institute a nationwide conversion therapy ban, decriminalize HIV transmission, and ease the asylum process for LGBTQ+ immigrants fleeing to the U.S. for safety.

As the deputy editor for Out magazine during the Democratic primaries, I worked directly with several of the 2020 presidential campaigns to ensure that LGBTQ+ prospective voters knew where they stood. To name just a few, our staff coordinated op-eds with the teams for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and former Vice President Joe Biden (who would eventually win the nomination) that highlighted the candidates’ records on LGBTQ+ issues and what they hoped to achieve in office.

“Bernie is committed to guaranteeing comprehensive, free at point-of-service health care to everyone,” wrote Victoria Rodriguez-Roldan, then a national surrogate for Sanders’ campaign. “His Medicare for All plan would not only confront the massive health disparities faced by the LGBTQ+ community, it would cover gender affirming surgeries, increase access to PrEP, remove barriers to mental health care, and bolster suicide prevention efforts.”

Candidates had the opportunity to speak to queer voters in their own words at not one but two dedicated LGBTQ+ forums. At an October 2019 town hall organized by GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Klobuchar called to recognize a third gender on federal documents, and Booker declared violence against the LGBTQ+ community to be a “national emergency.” Warren apologized for a 2012 remark in which she claimed that providing gender-affirming care to trans people in prison isn’t a “good use of taxpayer dollars.” Prior to a frankly surreal non-sequitur on “round-the-clock gay sex” in San Francisco, Biden waxed about how far society has progressed on LGBTQ+ acceptance in recent decades: “It’s normalized. It’s not anything strange.”

Supporting LGBTQ+ people wasn’t what won Democrats the 2020 election all on its own, but being vocal allies to the community certainly didn’t hurt. In defeating Trump in the November general election by 4.5%, Biden earned not merely the largest number of votes from any presidential candidate in history but also record support from the queer community. In an HRC poll, 83% of LGBTQ+ respondents said they backed Biden in 2020, a significant 5% increase from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s numbers four years earlier.

That picture is the near mirror image of 2024, when Democrats were notably silent on the major issues affecting queer Americans. After Biden withdrew from the race, former Vice President Kamala Harris declined to release a detailed policy outlining her vision for LGBTQ+ equality. Her presidential campaign platform devoted just three sentences to the LGBTQ+ community and did not mention trans people. Her only explicit action item was supporting passage of the Equality Act, a landmark civil rights bill that would enshrine LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination in all areas of public life, including housing, health care, education, and credit.

When contacted by this writer in September 2024 to expand on her platform, a representative for Harris’s team offered no additional clarification on how she would fight for equality as president. While reaffirming her support for the LGBTQ+ community, the email notably did not reference a single piece of proposed policy.

“Vice President Harris knows that freedom is the very foundation that our country was built on,” a Harris spokesperson wrote. “She’s spent her entire career fighting to make sure every single one of us has the freedom to love who we love and be who we are. From attacking LGBTQ+ rights to spewing hatred about the LGBTQ+ community, Donald Trump has made clear that he stands firmly against the fundamental freedoms that unite us. Americans deserve a President who will fight for their freedoms — not against them — and that leader is Kamala Harris.”

The contrast with 2020 is stark: Four years earlier, Harris had released one of the most expansive and wide-ranging pro-LGBTQ+ platforms of any candidate in the Democratic primaries. Among other policies, it included pledges to require insurance providers to cover HIV-prevention medications like PrEP, reverse Trump’s ban on open trans military service, appoint a White House Chief Advocate for LGBTQ+ Affairs, and prohibit “religious freedom” laws from being used to deny goods and services to LGBTQ+ people on the basis of faith. Her platform also promised to create a first-of-its-kind “transgender fellowship” in the White House that would “help lift up promising young leaders within the transgender community.”

Rather than continuing to sell the ideal of an America that uplifts and protects its LGBTQ+ citizens, Harris allowed Trump to dominate the conversation, likely in fear of alienating the same moderates that some insist Democrats don’t pander to enough. That strategy did not work. One of the most consequential moments of the 2024 presidential race was a multi-million-dollar ad campaign painting her, in now familiar fashion, as an out-of-touch liberal: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” The commercial reportedly ran more than 55,000 times in a two-week span, often during NFL games.

While Harris dismissed the ads as a distraction, her milquetoast response ignores that the blitz was actually fundamental to Trump’s plan, which was to fill the vacuum she had created on LGBTQ+ issues with fear, disinformation, and total lies. Without a clear message to combat the commercials or a proactive agenda for equality, taking the low road was what stuck in voters’ minds. Ultimately, it won the day.

Showing Democrats have learned nothing, Harris has suggested her real mistake was not that she did very little to speak to a sizable base of the Democratic Party — one totalling 9.1% of Americans — but that she should have thrown trans people under the bus more forcefully. After losing the November election by 86 electoral college points, Harris expressed regret in her new book, 107 Days, that she wasn’t more critical of policies allowing trans athletes to compete in alignment with their gender. “I agree with the concerns expressed by parents and players that we have to take into account biological factors such as muscle mass and unfair student athletic advantage when we determine who plays on which teams, especially in contact sports,” Harris wrote.

Imagine the difference if, rather than running scared from LGBTQ+ equality, Democrats actually held firm to their principles. Imagine if they fought as fiercely for queer people as Trump is fighting to eradicate the community. There’s a long-held idea in psychology that it takes three positive messages to outweigh one negative message, and so if Democrat leaders hope to counterbalance the hate, they need to not only be louder; they need to be much, much louder. Many have instead chosen silence, allowing the far-right to portray them as obsessed with LGBTQ+ rights even when they have abandoned the topic.

As party leaders grapple with their own enthusiasm problem, it’s telling to consider the grassroots support behind 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee who looks likely to sail to victory in New York’s closely watched mayoral race. While it’s difficult to name a single policy that Harris put forward in 2024, three that Mamdani has backed come to mind immediately: universal rent freezes for tenants, no-cost childcare, and a $65 million investment in trans health care. Even after the latter proposal generated bizarre, unfounded fears that Mamdani would institute “trans sharia” as mayor, the New York assemblyman stuck to his guns. During LGBTQ+ History Month, he released an ad celebrating trans civil rights leaders Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.

If Democrats want to address the mistakes of the past, the time is not to heed centrists who tell them that the only way forward is to further water down and dilute their values. It’s time to stand for something, or else they stand for nothing at all. When a sweeping anti-trans medical care ban crossed the desk of Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear in 2023, he swiftly vetoed it. Despite presiding over one of America’s reddest states, the Democratic leader did not hide from his vote, instead responding via public statement: “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God.” Less than a year later, Beshear won reelection by five points.

On October 21, Oak Lawn United Methodist Church in Dallas announced that the congregation was in the process of painting its steps in rainbow colors after Gov. Greg Abbott (R) threatened Texas municipalities if they did not follow federal directives limiting LGBTQ+ public displays. After Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a July directive to sitting U.S. governors ordering them to remove “political messages of any nature, artwork, or anything else that detracts from the core mission of driver and pedestrian safety,” Abbott promised to withhold critical funding if cities and counties across the state do not comply.

While Dallas’ crosswalk has remained intact as city leaders reportedly explore their legal options, the removal of several rainbow walkways from Houston last week signals that further targeting of the LGBTQ+ community could be imminent. Oak Lawn UMC’s front entrance faces out into a busy intersection adorned with a colorful crosswalk, in tribute to the church’s own namesake: the city’s historic gayborhood. Located in central Dallas, Oak Lawn is the state’s first officially recognized LGBTQ+ enclave, home to just over 50,000 residents.

Rev. Ryan Weger, who has lived in Dallas for 15 years, says the possibility that the neighborhood’s iconic crosswalk could soon be erased has been disappointing. He says it was important for the church to let both the community and the public know that they fiercely oppose the federal and state government’s efforts.

“To the wider world, we are saying we resist,” Weger tells Queer Agenda. “Our United Methodist baptismal vows say that we’re committed to opposing evil and injustice in whatever forms they present themselves, and we clearly see evil and injustice happening in the world and as a part of the federal and state government. It’s our job to stand up for justice and those who need it, and that’s what we’re here for.”

As Florida likewise bends to the White House’s will, LGBTQ+ business owners in the state have also signaled their resistance to erasure. Hours after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) forced the removal of a rainbow crosswalk outside Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, the local gay apparel company MojoMan Swimwear painted a large rainbow flag in front of its business. After the store’s owner, Lane Blackwell, first heard that the Pulse crosswalk had been painted over on August 20, he says that his first thought was, “Somebody needs to do something,” and then, before he knew it, he was at the store buying paint. MojoMan’s new rainbow walkway was unveiled the very next day.

“There were a lot of people that were [at Pulse], that made it out, and that are still traumatized by it,” he tells Queer Agenda. “You can’t let a political administration just wipe you off the map and not do something about it.”

A former patron of Pulse nightclub, Blackwell lost numerous friends during the shooting on June 12, 2016, when a gunman opened fire during the Orlando gay bar’s monthly Latin night. Just over a month after that horrific attack, a rainbow crosswalk was installed outside Pulse as a tribute to the 49 people killed and 53 injured. The display was, at the time, approved by the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), the exact same agency that would be tasked with its eradication eight years later. In July, the head of FDOT, Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue, issued a memo claiming that “non-standard surface markings… can lead to distractions or misunderstandings, jeopardizing both driver and pedestrian safety.”

What was most upsetting to Blackwell about Florida’s about-face on rainbow crosswalks, he says, is the way the decision was finalized: overnight, without any prior notice reportedly given to Orlando municipal leaders. Blackwell can’t help but recognize the unfortunate parallels to the tragedy itself.

“Pulse happened at 2:00 am, and then they came in the middle of the night and removed the rainbow crosswalk without telling the city officials or anybody else,” he says. “We painted our rainbow flag in the parking lot in the middle of the day because we were showing that we’re out here in the daylight. We’re not going to hide in the darkness, and we have to do what we can to let everybody know that we’re not going anywhere.”

Other Orlando companies have also stepped up as DeSantis sets his sights on eliminating rainbow crosswalks throughout the state. Displays that have already been removed include colorful walkways in Gainesville, Jacksonville, Key West, Miami Beach, St. Petersburg, and Tallahassee, while Fort Lauderdale has instead chosen to contest the mandate. As justification for the crackdown, the governor has alleged that — in addition to the federal edict — a new law passed in June effectively forces his hand on the issue, even though that law never mentions rainbow crosswalks. (The legislation also did not alter any of Florida’s preexisting guidelines on approved road displays.)

One Orlando business to stand up for the LGBTQ+ community was Se7en Bites, a local comfort food restaurant owned by Chef Trina Gregory. After the Pulse crosswalks were painted over, Gregory converted the eatery’s parking lot into an art installation by allowing artists to paint rainbow murals on 49 different parking spaces. Gregory says that thousands of artists have reached out in hopes of participating, and she has received phone calls and messages from all over the world to thank her.

“A man in Kentucky said that he feels like he hasn’t been seen or felt safe in his city, but knowing that there’s a place where we’ve created this safe space for people [meant a lot],” she tells Queer Agenda. “It reminds me to be grateful for the fact that we all have each other, and we have each other’s backs. One person can make a big impact, even when you don’t think you’re going to.”

Many say it is that very solidarity that is giving them hope as the fight to preserve America’s rainbow crosswalks proceeds. The removal of colorful walkways in Houston and Orlando was met with vociferous protest, including demonstrators chalking new makeshift murals in the streets to replace those that were removed, leading to several arrests. After activists reportedly returned to the site of the former Pulse nightclub with paint, police officers were stationed outside the bar to enforce FDOT’s orders. When the Miami Beach crosswalk was erased on October 5, community members reportedly chanted in protest, “Miami Beach, forever proud.”

For its part, Oak Lawn UMC is doubling down on its newly unveiled rainbow steps by adding an inscription: “Let justice roll down like waters,” referencing a passage from the Book of Amos in the Old Testament. According to Rev. Weger, those words are a powerful illustration of both his church’s values and what he believes God’s wishes to be. Oak Lawn UMC typically sees around 600 each month as part of its LGBTQ+ focused 12-recovery program and does extensive work feeding local unhoused populations, he says, because it is what they are called to do: to care for others.

“We want more people to know that in this world, where Christian nationalism and authoritarianism is becoming the celebrated style of being a Christian, there are churches that are open to those that need them,” he says. “It’s an act of not only resistance, but also of hospitality.”

On Tuesday, former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines announced her appointment to the Sumner County Library Board in the greater Nashville area, remarking that she was “honored to serve the community I grew up in and the one where we’ll raise our daughter.” “If you want to see change, don’t wait for someone else to make it happen,” Gaines said in a post on X. “Step up and be that change yourself.”

Gaines initially gained attention in 2022 after tying for fifth place in the 200-yard NCAA freestyle championship with University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who is an out trans woman. Despite the fact that both she and Thomas were beaten by four cis women, Gaines would appear in a campaign ad for Sen. Rand Paul (R) just months later, in which she lamented women’s dreams of glory being “taken away by men competing in women’s sports.” At the time, estimates suggested that just 32 trans athletes, in total, had competed in college sports within the past decade.

Over the past three years, Gaines has used her platform to repeatedly doxx and harass trans people, including a trans student who won homecoming queen at her Missouri high school in 2023. “Another reminder to all girls that men make the best women,” she tweeted at the time. Less than a month after that incident, she would declare October 10 to be “Real Women’s Day,” a fictitious holiday intended to demean trans women. Gaines has also launched a nationwide tour to keep trans women out of sports.

In an interview with The New York Times this August, Gaines admitted the goal of her advocacy is to decimate trans rights. “The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it’s lying on that sports issue,” she said. “This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.”

Gaines’ appointment drew sharp criticism from members of the local LGBTQ+ community, who worry about the impact that it could have on Sumner County’s queer population, particularly youth. Morgxn, a singer-songwriter who moved to Gallatin with his husband in 2021, says her installation to the library board is a “sad grab for relevancy for a person who’s made an entire career out of demonizing other people.”

“The thing is: Libraries are meant to be safe spaces,” he tells Queer Agenda. “If you have a problem with a book that your child is reading, then you should not have your child read that book. That is for a parent to have that [conversation] with their child, and to mandate it from a f*cking fifth-place swimmer is a joke.”

Critics of Gaines’ appointment note that her nomination was pushed through under unusual circumstances. Although the Sumner County Commission was scheduled to meet on Monday evening to discuss whether to reduce the number of library board members from nine to seven, the subject turned to Gaines. Earlier the same day, she posted photos to X of two trans-inclusive children’s books allegedly housed at Sumner County Libraries: Call Me Max and Fred Gets Dressed. Gaines urged librarians to “remove this filth” in an accompanying caption, and by the morning, she was the newest member of the Sumner County Library Board.

Emma Diaz, a local psychologist and LGBTQ+ advocate, tells Queer Agenda that the queer community and its allies had no prior notice that Gaines’ candidacy was under consideration, giving them no time to organize against it. It’s unclear, she adds, whether Gaines is even qualified for the position. Although she attended high school in Gallatin and reportedly lives in the area, her background is not in Library and Information Science. She graduated from the University of Kentucky in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in Health Science.

“I think there are some questions about: Were they allowed to make this nomination without any application process, without any transparency? Were they allowed to put this for a vote?” Diaz says. “Her interest was a mean tweet that was sent. I don’t see any world in which that is the same as applying and showing that you’re qualified for a position as a government official.”

Supporters of inclusion say their hope is to contest Gaines’ appointment, which many believe was intended to stack the deck in favor of a potential LGBTQ+ book ban. Although conservatives have been attempting for months to force through a policy removing queer-affirming literature from the shelves, the vote was gridlocked at 4-3 against the ban. With two open seats on the board, the issue put before the Sumner County Commission on Monday was whether to keep the board the way it was — in which liberals had a slim majority — or fill the two vacancies.

Conservatives elected to seize an opportunity. In a Facebook post the following day, County Commissioner Tim Jones openly admitted that having another right-wing voice on the Sumner County Library Board gave book banners the numbers that they needed.

“The Library Board will return to a conservative board!” he wrote. “The question at stake was the fate of our county libraries. Removing transgender ideological books was not technically on the agenda, but reducing the board from nine to seven was. This would’ve shifted the majority to a nonconservative board, which would bury any attempt [to] get rid of the woke transgender literature that is so damaging to our youth.”

Although Sumner County Indivisible organizer Hilary Lounder admits that the 11th-hour move was “demoralizing,” she says that local progressive groups are already fighting back. But with the necessary votes in place, for now, she predicted that a book ban would nonetheless be imminent. “We’ve got people looking into the legalities of all that — if you can even do that — which won’t slow them down, because they’ll steamroll ahead,” Lounder tells Queer Agenda. “When these kinds of policies get enacted, it’s always hard to backpedal out of them.”

It’s not apparent, at the time of publication, what a possible challenge might entail or whether LGBTQ+ supporters will pursue legal action. For many, that potential fight is not merely over inclusive literature but one of the few safe spaces that queer people in Sumner County have. The northern Tennessee county is deeply red, voting to re-elect U.S. President Donald Trump in the 2024 election by a nearly 41-point margin. Following the assassination of far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ influencer Charlie Kirk in September, the Sumner County School Board chose to recognize October 14 as the “Charlie Kirk Day of Peaceful Discourse.”

The politics of Sumner County, which borders Kentucky to the north, have been so divisive in recent years that the location of its 2025 Pride event wasn’t even announced publicly. According to Loundes, prospective pridegoers were required to RSVP and be personally vetted before they were cleared to attend. “Trying to have anything associated with Pride out in the open was going to be met with some problems,” she says.

For Rex Hoffman, his local library is one of the few places in Sumner County where he feels welcomed and seen. Although his son isn’t yet old enough to read, Hoffman loves browsing the collection together to share what that space meant to him as a child. As a young trans person slowly coming into his own identity, he tells Queer Agenda that the library was the only place knew that he could go to “be myself, find books, find characters that I could relate to.” For someone who “didn’t necessarily fit the norm,” it allowed him to access the outside world and envision what a future might look like, Hoffman adds.

Knowing that those glimpses of the future could be taken away from other kids, including his own, is devastating. “Families don’t always look alike,” says Hoffman, who requested the use of a pseudonym in this story. “You’re saying that my family is going to be invalidated because it doesn’t fit your picture, but I’m also sitting here paying taxes just to make sure that you get the resources that you need.”

Gaines isn’t the first anti-trans activist to be controversially appointed to a local library board. In 2024, far-right influencer Chaya Raichik was named to the Oklahoma Library Media Review committee, even after reportedly instigating bomb threats targeting schools in the state.

In the famously frosty city’s October 8 mayoral race, Mindy O’Neall — a longtime queer ally — ousted anti-LGBTQ+ incumbent David Pruhs in a decisive victory, according to preliminary results. O’Neall defeated Pruhs by a 54 percent to 46 percent margin, marking the first time in 10 years that a Democrat has held the office of Fairbanks mayor. Although elections in Alaska’s second-largest metropolitan area are typically nonpartisan, O’Neall notes that it was clear where the candidates stood. Pruhs is staunchly conservative, and O’Neall is a former campaign coordinator for the Alaska Democratic Party, which endorsed her in the race.

“Everybody knows I’m a Democrat,” she tells Queer Agenda. “I’ve run campaigns across the state for the Democrats. I’ve worked for Democrats. I’ve been involved in Democratic leadership. I’m not shy about being a Democrat.”

The win is proving to be part of a larger blue wave for Alaska Democrats in 2025. Progressive candidates took all but one seat in the October elections for Fairbanks City Council and the Borough Assembly — the latter of which included an openly gay candidate, Patrick Roach, winning his race by 13 points. Palmer’s former Democratic mayor, Jim Cooper, retook the position earlier this month with a commanding 20-point win in a crowded five-candidate field.

While Alaska’s leftward trend has drawn much attention outside of the state, which has voted for Donald Trump in three consecutive presidential elections, O’Neall doesn’t feel that partisan politics played a significant role in her win. She believes that her victory illustrates the power of bringing a diversity of voices to the table, particularly groups who feel that city leaders don’t represent them.

“I worked my butt off,” she says. “I had an excellent campaign team. We mobilized volunteers, we mobilized stakeholders, and we mobilized pockets of our community that have not typically mobilized for a local election. I can say it’s my win, but it’s not. It’s our community’s win.”

O’Neall’s election has a special resonance for the LGBTQ+ community in Fairbanks, which is still reeling from the defeat of its 2019 nondiscrimination ordinance, which would have enshrined sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes. Even after the ordinance passed the city council on a 4-2 vote, the city’s former mayor, Jim Matherly, vetoed it in a surprise move. Despite the fact that he had personally sponsored the measure, Matherly instead urged that the issue should be put up to voters. His proposed ballot initiative, however, never came to fruition.

The shock veto was extremely painful for members of the local LGBTQ+ community. Rinam Kowalski, director of Fairbanks Queer Collective, says that advocates and allies spent months listening to opponents of the ordinance urge that LGBTQ+ people should be eradicated. Then-councilmember Pruhs openly admitted that he didn’t believe the stories of LGBTQ+ people who came forward to share testimony about discrimination they had experienced on the basis of their identities. “In the last 2.5 months, I’ve never heard how bad Fairbanks is… in my life,” said Pruhs, who was ultimately one of the two votes against the measure. “And I think they are full of s**t.”

After the ordinance was unceremoniously killed, Kowalski says that LGBTQ+ locals would call each other just to cry. “It was traumatic to have to go through that and listen to community members who would prefer you to just be dead or not exist,” they tell Queer Agenda. “We were literally begging people to see us as human beings. It’s wild that we had to ask for that, and then having it taken from us, it was gut-wrenching. It was horrible. I think we all still feel it.”

To date, Fairbanks still does not have an LGBTQ+ inclusive civil rights policy on the books, although three other Alaska cities do: Anchorage, Juneau, and Sitka. In 2018, Anchorage became the first city in U.S. history to uphold its nondiscrimination ordinance after far-right groups challenged it at the ballot box. The ordinance survived by 4,100 votes.

As a vocal supporter of that ordinance, O’Neall agrees its defeat left a bad taste in the mouths of many Fairbanks residents. She says community members began to wonder: “Why should I participate in local government? Nobody cares about me.” That refrain was one she heard very frequently during her mayoral run, as she recalls. O’Neall estimates that she knocked on more than 1,200 doors — often visiting the same residence multiple times — to find out what voters wanted from their leadership, and during those visits, people told her they didn’t feel heard by those in power. No politician had ever come to their home before to ask them what they think.

In response, O’Neall’s campaign focused on engaging groups that felt as if they had been shut out of the decision-making process, including Native Alaskans. During her conversations with the public, she says that she very quickly learned that Native populations are a “huge economic driver in our town” but that leaders rarely take time to meet with them. For instance, Pruhs made waves earlier this year after appearing to blame Native people for homelessness in Fairbanks, later offering a quasi-apology. “If you deem that as racist, I do apologize,” he said.

As mayor, O’Neall says that she is excited to finally make city hall “into a vibrant place where people believe that their government reflects back on them.” “I’ve always said this about my public service: I’m accessible,” she says. “You can call me. You can text me. I’ll have coffee with you. I’ll have a beer with you. I’m interested in hearing whatever anybody has to say, as long as it’s respectful and true.”

When it comes to another push to codify LGBTQ+ protections in Fairbanks, O’Neall admits that it needs to be “a long conversation before it gets to the point of being an ordinance.” What that would entail, she says, is talking to local business leaders and community members to demystify equality, so that fear and misinformation don’t flourish: “The thing about Fairbanks is you have to move slow and you have to overcommunicate, so you’re making an earnest attempt to bring everybody along. Where things go wrong is when people feel like things are moving too fast and they don’t understand something.”

While another nondiscrimination ordinance fight could be well away, LGBTQ+ community members are hopeful that change is coming. As O’Neall’s campaign manager, Paul Rasmussen says that one of the first events they attended was a Pride festival in Ester, a tiny town of 2,400 people just on the outskirts of Fairbanks. Seeing O’Neall connect with LGBTQ+ people to envision what the future could look like reminded him of why he moved to Alaska to begin with.

“There’s a tolerance for difference,” he tells Queer Agenda. “The people who live here really love it because it’s not the easiest place in the world to live. You have to deal with weather that’s negative-40 degrees, and you have to plug your car in when it gets too cold. You have snow and ice and darkness. What unifies people is just their love for this place, this place that is worth living in.”

That quote, often attributed to former British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, gained ever-renewed relevance in the past week following a headline-grabbing claim that students in the United States are no longer identifying as nonbinary. The allegation originated with a study from the Center for Heterodox Social Science claiming to draw on surveys from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the Higher Education Research Institute, among others, indicating that nonbinary identification has plummeted among young people. At Brown University, students are (allegedly) half as likely to identify outside the binary in 2025 as they were three years ago: from 5% down to 2.6%.

The research was breathlessly cited by outlets like The Daily Mail, Newsweek, and Vice to drum up clicks and immediately deployed as agitprop by anti-LGBTQ+ outfits like The Manhattan Institute and The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Whilst quote-tweeting the data, far-right extremist Matt Walsh deemed the trans movement “effectively over.” “We destroyed it,” he said in an October 14 tweet. “Clearest and most decisive cultural win that conservatives have ever achieved.”

But among the myriad factual issues with proclaiming the end of nonbinary people, the most glaringly obvious is that the data on which their declarations rest is transparently, nakedly, laughably wrong. In my humble opinion, everyone who has cited this research without even the tiniest asterisk next to it should be absolutely ashamed, if this toxic country has any shame left to feel.

As others have already pointed out, the Canadian academic who originally posted the data on X, University of Buckingham’s Eric Kaufmann, grossly mischaracterized the research. He claimed that the numbers illustrated that “trans identification is in free fall among the young,” when that isn’t what they showed at all. Even if the figures happened to be 100% accurate (we’ll get to that), they solely refer to students who do not identify as strictly male or female — whether they consider themselves to be both genders, somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, or neither male nor female. Other kinds of trans people are not indicated.

Before making bold claims about data, one may consider it helpful not merely to be able to read it correctly but to know how to collect it to begin with. That basic, foundational knowledge likewise appears to be lacking: The researchers behind the report forgot to weight the data to make sure that the findings were nationally representative, ensuring that they ended up with skewed, largely useless results. To wit, if I polled 100 people to make claims about the views of U.S. voters, but 96% of respondents were white, it wouldn’t be an accurate cross-section of the country’s population (which is about 59% white). When the sample is weighted correctly, the data indicates that nonbinary identification is increasing, not shrinking, as journalist Erin Reed reported at length.

And even if the data had shown the thing it does not — which is a drop in young people outwardly identifying as nonbinary — that is still a very different thing than actually being nonbinary. There are many reasons that a nonbinary youth might not indicate themselves as such on a public-facing survey, such as the ubiquitous presence of a federal administration hostile to their very existence. Just over a month after U.S. President Donald Trump took office for a second time, he issued a sweeping executive order rewriting the federal definition of gender as exclusively male and female — thereby erasing all those who live their lives outside those definitions.

The explanation that nonbinary young people are increasingly terrified of visibility, even in the form of a seemingly harmless college survey, might seem a too-neat explanation, but it’s hardly a far-fetched one. As the White House progresses in its crusade to criminalize gender-affirming care and persecute the doctors who provide it, the administration has demanded confidential data from hospitals that treat trans youth patients, in violation of federal law. Why wouldn’t students then conclude that Trump officials might try the same thing at their college? Such a concern may be particularly worrying to some in a year that has seen countless universities bow to the Oval Office’s demands, including closing their campus LGBTQ+ centers.

As an investigative reporter who has spent more than a decade covering the LGBTQ+ community, I have witnessed firsthand how profoundly fearful young people are amid the current presidency. Nervous that they could be the next target, many families that I have worked with over the years have either fled their home state and moved to a more liberal community or left the country. This used to be the case only with high-income families that could afford to do so; now even those who don’t have any expendable income to spare on a costly move are figuring out how to get to safety. Nearly every single week, another family that I know feels they have no choice but to run.

It hardly needs explaining that, if a nonbinary young person’s family has fled the country in fear of being criminally prosecuted as child abusers, they are not available to take a college survey at a university they are not present to attend. But even nonbinary kids who have remained in the U.S. are hiding, in their own ways. Many have gone stealth, and their parents have gone off the grid for their family’s well-being. They have stopped doing any form of public advocacy whatsoever, focusing on mere survival. Last October, I published American Teenager — a nonfiction book highlighting the lived experiences of trans and nonbinary youth — and almost none of the eight children whom I profiled would have signed up for that project today. Three have been forced to move to safer states with Trump in office, and one left the U.S. altogether.

And trust me, kids aren’t the only scared people. Adults are, too. In all my years of LGBTQ+ journalism, I have never found it so difficult to get interviews for my coverage, even for stories that are fairly low stakes. An activist whom I have known for many years refused to be quoted (even very briefly) in a fluffy human interest piece, all because she is so petrified of being doxxed and harassed by right-wing trolls. Who can blame her? When the Federal Bureau of Investigation is talking about classifying trans people as terrorists, being out and proud, while absolutely worthwhile, comes with very real dangers.

What is reassuring, though, is how many people haven’t been forced back into the closet by the Trump administration or any other fascist enterprise. According to Gallup’s polling data, LGBTQ+ identification has consistently increased for every single survey since 2012, and its most recent report saw the biggest single-year jump on record: a 1.7% bump. Members of Generation Z — the group falsely alleged to be going back into the closet en masse — are the most likely to identify themselves as queer: at 23%.

Although we do not yet have 2025 data, it’s unlikely these trends will abate all that significantly. Given that the number of respondents willing to tell Gallup that they are LGBTQ+ also increased the last time Trump was in office, it stands to reason that people will continue coming out and claiming their identities, just as they always have.

For as long as Trump remains in power, far-right culture warriors are going to continue grasping at every possible straw to try and prove that they have won. When it is necessary to invent victory, they will do so. If anyone is looking for an easy way to call their bluff, just read the fine print: The Center for Heterodox Social Science is an explicitly anti-social justice think tank housed at a U.K. university with close ties (by its own admission) to the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, an anti-LGBTQ+ conservative. Kaufmann, who boosted the research, is an anti-woke professor who has previously suggested that LGBTQ+ identification is linked to mental illness and claimed that people are being socially pressured into being queer.

So please, next time, check the source. And if you’re a journalist looking to confirm whether or not nonbinary people are still here, give me a call. We are. I am.

Roberts, one of our best actresses, lends her immense skill at hurling insults to the otherwise abysmal After the Hunt, a rare misfire from Challengers maestro Luca Guadagnino. The film has been branded as a #MeToo thriller set in the world of academia, in which Roberts plays a Yale professor whose colleague (Andrew Garfield, going big) is accused of sexually assaulting a queer doctoral student (Ayo Edebiri, trying). But for all its alleged interrogation of campus politics, After the Hunt is far less interested in exploring rape culture than it is in pointing the finger at, well, you name it. The movie offers a laundry list of critiques lobbed against all the usual suspects: PC culture, coddled college students, fourth-wave feminism, pronouns, and just about any other topic that has occupied a Fox News chyron in the past five years.

In the film’s lowest moment (which is truly saying something), Roberts’ character is confronted by a group of campus protesters who seek to question her regarding grievous professional misconduct. (The shortest possible version: Rather than supporting a sexual assault survivor, she repeatedly berates the student, among other misdeeds.) As you may guess, the gaggle is treated not as the voice of reason but as a punchline. When a nonbinary activist charges toward her, proclaiming, “We just want accountability,” my theater guffawed in recognition of the stereotype they were being fed: the self-serious, perpetually aggrieved trans person. After the Hunt views the most outrageous sin as not a young woman of color being violated, but caring about it in too cringeworthy a manner.

Sometimes it feels like the discourse about LGBTQ+ lives feels as if it takes place in an alternate universe from the one we actually occupy: in which a years-long assault on equality has come home to roost. The current occupant of the Oval Office, who got reelected by claiming schools are forcibly transitioning kids without their consent, has used his second term to cash in the far-right’s most gleeful fantasies of trans subjugation. A year that began with the White House targeting trans people’s passports and health care has devolved so rapidly that leading government figures have called to investigate whether trans people are literally terrorists.

Things are very bad, but somehow LGBTQ+ people keep being told it’s our own fault, that we did this to ourselves. Into this morass walked the former U.S. president this week, sitting down for the farewell episode of WTF with Marc Maron, which aired on Monday. In a wide-ranging conversation, Obama briefly paused to blame fascism not on actual fascists but on its victims. (The podcast’s eponymous host, for his part, called it liberals’ “buzzkill problem” in a recent standup special.)

You can’t constantly lecture people without acknowledging that you’ve got some blind spots, too, and that life’s messy. I think this was a fault of some progressive language, was almost asserting a holier-than-thou superiority that’s not that different from what we used to joke about coming from the right moral majority and a certain fundamentalism about how to think about stuff that I think was dangerous.

If it weren’t immediately clear that Obama was talking about trans people, he proceeded to clear up any doubts.

If I talked about trans issues, I wasn’t talking down to people and saying, “Oh, you’re a bigot.” I’d say, “You know, it’s tough enough being a teenager. Let’s treat all kids decently. Why would we want to see kids bullied?”

Here, Obama is engaging in several rounds of historical revisionism. While he appears to suggest that his administration broached freely the subject of trans issues, Obama often played LGBTQ+ rights close to the vest. Just days before the November 2012 election, it was actually his vice president, Joe Biden, who gave his full-throated support for the trans community, not Obama himself. Shortly after beating his boss to the punch on publicly endorsing the freedom to marry, Biden called trans equality the “civil rights issue of our time.” After his eventual reelection, Obama would omit mention of trans people from references to the Stonewall Riots in his second inaugural address, and it took until 2015 for him to say the word “transgender” in the State of the Union.

However, the more significant revisionism is this sadly pervasive idea that the reason America has devolved into its current state is due to the very same progressive overreach that After the Hunt attempts to critique. It’s the worst possible kind of both-sidesism: an insistence that because illiberalism is bad, its counterbalance must be equally objectionable. If only the vulnerable people who stand to be harmed most by the downfall of our delicate democracy could simply be more chill about it, perhaps others would deem them worthy of rights. It’s essentially a plea to embrace respectability politics, but with a different Instagram filter slapped on.

For the record, queer people have tried this sort of thing for decades, and it never really works. The notion that LGBTQ+ equality, if only packaged differently, would be more palatable to our political foes motivated the removal of trans people from a landmark nondiscrimination bill — known familiarly as ENDA — in 2007. The legislation didn’t pass anyway. Mike Pence, then a member of the House of Representatives, warned that even the gay-only version of the bill would “wage war on the free exercise of religion” in a speech before Congress. When LGBTQ+ advocates pivoted to the fight for marriage equality after the ENDA fallout, leading conservatives were unmoved by the reemphasis on the white-picket-fence values of “love is love.” They claimed that letting queer couples marry would result in bestiality, polygamy, incest, and pedophilia.

There is no way to engage in a debate on terms that will be agreeable to people who wish that your community didn’t exist. It does not matter if LGBTQ+ people are nice and polite or whether they are encircling Julia Roberts in a Yale common area. The distinction matters little because zealots seeking a pretense to discriminate will certainly find one, even if they have to invent it; now they have an entire anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda industry to grease their fabrications. Only in this era could Charlie Kirk, who certainly cared little about whether he was “talking down to people,” be lionized as a civil rights hero while trans people are being tone policed.

If you want to know how we got here, it has nothing to do with outraged queers or liberal cringe. It has everything to do with religious extremists seeking to win at all costs. When queer people got marriage equality, not because of respectability politics but sheer hard work, far-right groups spent years figuring out which minority group they could pick on — a segment of the population so persecuted that even a Democratic icon would have no issue asking them to be cool about their rights being stripped away. The GOP has undoubtedly found its perfect scapegoat.

When Obama neglected to mention trans people during his aforementioned 2013 inauguration speech, an 11-year-old trans girl wrote him a letter. Entitled “Sadie’s Dream for the World,” it was not filled with the lefty wokescolding about which we hear so much these days. It was a simple plea for humanity.

The world would be a better place if everyone had the right to be themselves, including people who have a creative gender identity and expression. Transgender people are not allowed the freedom to do things everyone else does, like go to the doctor, go to school, get a job, and even make friends.

Transgender kids like me are not allowed to go to most schools because the teachers think we are different from everyone else. The schools get afraid of how they will talk with the other kids’ parents, and transgender kids are kept secret or told not to come there anymore. Kids are told not to be friends with transgender kids, which makes us very lonely and sad.

When they grow up, transgender adults have a hard time getting a job because the boss thinks the customers will be scared away. Doctors are afraid of treating transgender patients because they don’t know how to take care of them, and some doctors don’t really want to help them. Transgender patients like me travel to other states to see a good doctor.

It would be a better world if everyone knew that transgender people have the same hopes and dreams as everyone else. We like to make friends and want to go to school. Transgender people want to get good jobs and go to doctors like they are exactly the same. It really isn’t that hard to like transgender people because we are like everyone else.

Maybe it’s time we finally hear what she has to say.

Patients say Boston’s Fenway Health notified them on Monday that the community health center would no longer offer treatments like puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to individuals under the age of 19. In an electronic letter, Fenway’s chief medical officer, Will Giordano-Perez, claimed that the changes were in “response to a shifting federal landscape that requires us to adapt in order to remain compliant, sustainable, and able to provide health care, support, and services to all our patients and the community.” Ignoring threats from the Trump administration targeting health care providers could jeopardize Fenway Health’s federal funding and its ability to remain operational, he explained.

“Being a [federally qualified health center] allows us to continue delivering high-quality comprehensive care for more than 30,000 residents of New England and beyond,” Giordano-Perez said of a potential funding shortage. “Its loss would significantly challenge our ability to meet the needs of all who rely on us.”

Jude Stevens, an 18-year-old patient at Fenway Health, says the news totally blindsided him. After relocating from a conservative state that outlawed trans youth medicine in 2023, Stevens believed that his health care would finally be safe in Massachusetts. The Bay State is one of nearly two dozen in the U.S. with comprehensive LGBTQ+ civil rights protections on the books, and in May, Massachusetts’ out lesbian governor, Maura Healey (D), signed an expansion to its existing shield law. Enacted in July 2022, the statute bars the prosecution of trans patients and families traveling from red states to seek gender-affirming treatments.

Stevens was shocked then to see Monday’s message in his My Chart portal — which Fenway Health uses to communicate with patients — abruptly ceasing care. When he went to the pharmacy the same day to refill his HRT prescriptions, Stevens says he was forced to pay out of pocket and only given a month’s supply, with no refills. While the letter provided recipients with a phone number if they wished to speak with their provider, there was no one around to take the call. Fenway Health’s communique was sent on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a national holiday.

“I feel exhausted,” Stevens, who requested the use of a pseudonym, tells Queer Agenda. “I’m very disappointed that this happened, especially in a state that I thought was going to offer some of the strongest protections in the nation for trans kids. At this point, I’m not even a kid anymore. I’m an adult seeking care, and I’m still not able to get that.”

Fenway Health is not the only major medical provider to restrict gender-affirming care as a result of pressure from the White House. After President Donald Trump signed a week-one executive order vowing to revoke federal funding from affirming medical providers, at least 21 U.S. hospitals have either paused their trans youth health care programs or discontinued them altogether. These have included Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago. Kaiser Permanente, meanwhile, announced in July that it would no longer offer gender-affirming surgery for youth in its 55 U.S. hospitals — a practice which was already performed only in rare instances of extreme medical need.

As federal authorities force medical providers into compliance, sources tell Queer Agenda that they did not expect Boston’s longest-running LGBTQ+ health care provider to follow suit. At the September 10 launch party for her book, Raising Trans Kids, gender specialist Rebecca Minor says that Fenway Health’s executive vice president of donor relations, Dallas Ducar, vowed that its staff would “double down on our commitment to the work we have been doing for 50 years.” Briefly addressing audience members, Ducar said at the time, “We’re not backing down.”

“I feel both horrified about what this means for the families that I work with, but also somewhat betrayed, knowing that Fenway had made such a loud and proud commitment to never backing down in the face of executive orders,” Minor says. “While I understand that they’re being forced to choose between their funding and their values, it’s kids that are paying the price.”

Other critics of Fenway Health’s decision to halt gender-affirming care took issue with the way patients were notified. Beth Niernberg, a Boston-based mother of a trans child, notes that the letter references “federal requirements that went into effect October 1,” but that information was not relayed for another 12 days. And as a licensed mental health counselor, she feels the news should have been communicated in person: “No one should open an email in a portal to find out that their child can’t get the gender-affirming care they were supposed to receive next Thursday.”

Although Fenway Health’s message promised to help youth and their families find new gender-affirming care providers, Niernberg says that she and her colleagues spent most of Monday fielding questions from panicked parents over the phone: Where do I go now? How do I explain this disappointment to my child? Many specialists in the field of trans youth medicine are already facing high demand, potentially leading to long wait times for new patient referrals.

“I think that there is a level of responsibility you have when a patient belongs to you,” Niernberg tells Queer Agenda. “As a therapist, if you’re my client, you’re my responsibility. Until you’re someone else’s client, you’re my responsibility. I feel like all of these patients who are freaking out at home right now are still Fenway’s responsibility.”

Despite the ongoing fallout from the Trump administration’s assault on trans health care, experts say these treatments remain safe, effective, and in many cases, life-saving. Jack Turban, a pediatric psychiatrist and author of the book Free to Be, says that gender-affirming care has been repeatedly shown to alleviate anxiety, depression, and gender dysphoria among trans youth, while also helping them navigate everyday life.

Some of the patients he has treated, he adds, are “unable to shower or go to school” without the medications that help them feel like their most authentic selves. Because of the care they have received, Turban says that many of his young patients are living their best lives, but he worries that, with yet another critical resource being lost, fewer trans youth will have that opportunity.

“For a long time, the script was that trans kids were always struggling,” he tells Queer Agenda. “But with the advent of these gender-affirming care models, I have patients who are going off to college, graduating from Ivy League universities, and just doing really well. The concern is that, as the Trump administration is attacking this care, we’re going to lose that progress. A lot of these kids are going to be hurt in the process.”

Many families say the drastic reduction in access to gender-affirming care across the U.S. has already caused immense harm. Gloria Reed, a parent who asked that her family’s real names not be used in this story, says that her teenage daughter, Mia, had been waiting to start HRT at Fenway Health, but now, with the shuttering of its trans youth gender clinic, the girl worries about being forced back to square one. When Mia learned on Monday that she would have to get her gender-affirming care somewhere else, she refused to believe the news. She got into bed and pulled the covers over her head, insisting that it couldn’t be real.

Reed’s daughter has been through a lot, whether it’s dealing with bullies at school or being forced to delay medical care. Even before this week’s letter, Mia had faced pervasive barriers to treatment that kept her from getting the one thing she has ever really wanted: a typical, ordinary childhood. She just wanted to feel like she fit in with the other girls at school, and until Monday, she had hope that that goal was finally within reach.

“She was in a good place,” Reed tells Queer Agenda. “Now to be hit with this, it’s just devastating. I want her to have an easier life. It’s hard enough being 16. To have to be 16 and have all this is just unfair.”

When reached for comment on this story, a representative for Fenway Health referred Queer Agenda to a shortened version of the statement sent to patients.

Several states have, over the past several months, ordered municipal leaders to paint over their rainbow crosswalks at city intersections at the direction of the federal Department of Transportation (DOT). In July, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent a letter to every sitting governor directing them to remove from their roads and walkways “political messages of any nature, artwork, or anything else that detracts from the core mission of driver and pedestrian safety.” States were given a 60-day deadline to respond to the administration’s demands. “Intersections and crosswalks need to be kept free from distractions,” Duffy’s edict stated.

Although governors in the majority of states have not acknowledged the letter, some have mandated strict compliance with the order, which the White House claims is part of its broader “SAFE ROADS Initiative.” On Wednesday, the office of Gov. Greg Abbott (R) gave Texas cities 30 days to scrub artwork conveying “political messages” from Texas’ streets, stating that these displays “may cause confusion, reduce roadway uniformity, or impair safe navigation.”

“This prohibition includes the use of symbols, flags, or other markings conveying any message or communications,” Texas DOT Executive Director Marc Williams clarified in a letter, threatening to withhold key funding if cities do not comply.

The response from Texas cities has varied widely. Fearing reprisal, Galveston moved swiftly this week to remove a pair of rainbow crosswalks adjacent to its City Hall. Austin officials have confirmed that the city will follow Abbott’s order by painting over a rainbow crosswalk at Fourth and Colorado, while leaders in Dallas, which is home to at least nine rainbow crosswalks, are currently weighing their options. San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones (D), meanwhile, confirmed that its rainbow designs are staying put, at least for now.

“As mayor, I remain committed to balancing our community’s transportation needs with ensuring everyone in our community feels safe, welcomed, and supported,” Jones, who is an out queer woman, said in a statement. She added that the city is “awaiting additional information from TxDOT to ensure we understand the full scope of what may be impacted.”

But despite Republican officials’ claims that they are protecting the public by ridding the roads of rainbow crosswalks, sources say there is absolutely no research supporting these actions. To the contrary, Ruth Rosas, program manager for the pedestrian advocacy group America Walks, contends that “numerous studies have shown that colorful crosswalks reduce crashes,” including rainbow designs. She says that crosswalks that are “high contrast with bold colors” are easier to see than white paint, which she says can “fade or blend into a road” at night or during poor weather conditions.

“The more eye-catching the crosswalk can be, the more visible it becomes, and that means that people pay attention,” she tells Queer Agenda. “That usually means they put in more caution.”

Rainbow crosswalks are not alone in increasing pedestrian and driver safety, according to studies on the subject. An April 2022 report from Bloomberg Philanthropies found broadly that asphalt art, whether in the form of rainbow crosswalks or other designs, led to a sharp decrease in automobile collisions. After asphalt art was installed at roadway intersections, the report found a 37% drop in car crashes resulting in injuries and a 50% reduction in incidents impacting pedestrians. The total crash rate fell by a significant 17%.

In reaching out to dozens of road safety experts and urban planning professionals for this story, not a single respondent cited research indicating the opposite: that rainbow crosswalks increased traffic accidents. Neither Duffy nor Abbott has mentioned any such studies in their public statements on the issue.

But despite the lack of evidence supporting their removal, many crosswalks have already been eliminated. At the direction of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), state DOT officials reportedly painted over the rainbow crosswalk outside Pulse nightclub in the middle of the night on August 20. The Orlando gay bar was the site of a 2016 mass shooting that resulted in 49 dead and 51 more injured, and the crosswalk was intended as a tribute to victims and survivors of the attack. LGBTQ+ community members initially protested the display’s removal by chalking their own crosswalk in the road, but officers have since been stationed near Pulse to ensure enforcement.

Florida cities like Key West, Miami Beach, and St. Petersburg have also removed their crosswalks following threats from DeSantis’ office. When Miami Beach’s rainbow intersection was painted over on October 5, protesters reportedly picketed its removal while chanting: “Miami Beach, forever proud.”

If federal and state authorities actually wanted to increase road safety, there are numerous practical ideas they could implement, sources contend. Rosas suggested a reduction in speed limits for areas with high foot traffic, narrowing lanes, and creating pedestrian islands — concrete bumpouts that encourage drivers to pay closer attention to the roadway. In spite of GOP officials’ suggestion that any break from the expected norm could endanger drivers, Rosas asserts that the opposite is actually true: “Anything that becomes monotonous on the road can pose a safety risk.”

As an example of effective road safety design, Reed cites the example of West Philadelphia. Sometime around the 1990s or early 2000s, the city began installing “three-dimensional shapes that looked like a speed bump,” Reed says, in order “to trick drivers into slowing down.”

“There are so many things we can do to make our streets safer,” they say. “We have a real road safety crisis in the United States, whether it’s due to speeding or reckless driving or a lack of safe places for people to walk and bike. I myself was hit by a car in my neighborhood back in May and have been fighting for a crosswalk at that intersection. To see folks using public safety as an excuse to take out a rainbow crosswalk is really frustrating.”

If rainbow crosswalks actually contribute positively to public safety, they may do so in more ways than one, others add. Aaron Greiner, a social entrepreneur and urbanist, argues that visible affirmations of the LGBTQ+ community “can be actually a really powerful signifier of safety” for marginalized groups. The reality is that queer populations in the U.S. remain disproportionately likely to be targeted for violence: According to the most recent report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, bias attacks on the basis of sexual orientation accounted for 17.2% of all hate crimes, while 4% are motivated by the victim’s gender identity.

While a rainbow crosswalk alone won’t solve the complex, nuanced issues surrounding the physical safety of LGBTQ+ people, Greiner affirms that seeing one’s own identity represented “can help you feel more safe when you’re walking down the street in a neighborhood.” As the executive director of Massachusetts-based CultureHouse, he says that there’s a reason that the urban design nonprofit has a Pride flag hanging outside its office: Symbolism matters.

“The ability to have that public display is a signifier of safety, and then the removal of that is a signifier of a lack of safety,” he tells Queer Agenda.

Recognizing the critical importance of visibly supporting the LGBTQ+ community, a handful of cities have pointedly elected to ignore the White House’s orders, including Atlanta; Lexington, Ky.; and Milwaukee. On October 8, the latter installed a new rainbow crosswalk in the historic LGBTQ+ neighborhood of Walker’s Point. At the revamped intersection’s unveiling, Mayor Cavalier Johnson said the display was a matter of proclaiming Milwaukee’s values: “Everyone, everybody, and every single person can feel safe in whoever they love everywhere in this city.”

As the Trump administration continues to advocate the erasure of those ideals, Greiner believes the real target has nothing to do with safety concerns. “This is quite clearly about asking that queer people do not show their identity in public,” he says. “That’s really what it’s ultimately about.”

On Tuesday, America’s highest legal authority heard a challenge brought against Colorado’s ban on “pray the gay away” treatments by Kaley Chiles, a Christian therapist who claims that the 2019 law violates her First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Entitled the “Minor Conversion Therapy Law,” the statute prohibits licensed medical professionals from encouraging clients under the age of 18 to “change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.” The law carves out an exception for religious leaders providing counseling outside the medical profession and does not apply to adults.

While the Colorado law threatens medical providers with a $5,000 fine and potential loss of licensure for violating the ban, Chiles has never faced the risk of either of those outcomes. Colorado has yet to investigate Chiles — or any other medical provider — following the law’s passage. In fact, Colorado’s solicitor general, Shannon Stevenson, affirmed during this week’s oral arguments that Chiles wouldn’t even be liable under the statute: The therapy she provides, as the state noted, doesn’t actually seek to change patients’ attractions, just to offer support. Her work, thus, is not at issue.

“If the therapist told [a patient] or he asked, ‘Can you help me become straight?’” Stevenson clarified of the law, “the answer would be, it would be banned.”

But despite the fact that the named plaintiff in Chiles v. Salazar is not actually affected by the law she is challenging, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority expressed support for her case anyway. If SCOTUS does not outright overturn Colorado’s conversion therapy ban, justices are likely to return the case to a lower court for reconsideration.

During a swift 90 minutes of oral arguments, the Supreme Court’s right wing continually questioned whether conversion therapy — an ineffective, widely debunked practice that has been condemned by virtually every leading U.S. medical association — is even all that dangerous. Justice Samuel Alito, one of the more conservative members of the bench, questioned whether, in the past, there have been times “when medical consensus has been taken over by ideology.”

“Was there a time when many medical professionals thought that certain people should not be permitted to procreate because they had low I.Q.s?” he asked. “Was there a time when there were many medical professionals who thought that every child born with Down syndrome should be immediately put in an institution?”

And despite the fact that there is overwhelming consensus regarding the fact that conversion therapy results in dramatically increased rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation among survivors of the practice, fellow right-wing Justice Amy Coney Barrett falsely asserted there are “competing strands” of medical opinion on the topic. “Let’s say that you have some medical experts that think gender-affirming care is dangerous to children, and some that say that this kind of conversion talk therapy is dangerous,” she posited. “Can a state pick a side?”

Under questioning from Barrett, the state of Colorado reaffirmed what the data actually shows: Conversion therapy, a loosely defined set of practices ranging from the talk therapy that Chiles offers to shock treatment and water torture, is destructive and even deadly. A 2019 report from The Trevor Project, the nation’s leading LGBTQ+ suicide prevention group, found that 42% of conversion therapy survivors had contemplated taking their own lives within the past 12 months.

“The harms from conversion therapy come from when you tell a young person you can change this innate thing about yourself, and they try and they try and they fail, and then they have shame and they’re miserable, and then it ruins their relationships with their family,” Stevenson said.

While dismissing the expertise of groups like the American Psychological Association and American Medical Association, both of which staunchly oppose conversion therapy, attorneys for Chiles held that she was being censored by a law that doesn’t actually affect her. Jim Campbell of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ legal outfit that has previously defended bans on consensual same-sex intimacy, claimed that Colorado’s law forces therapists to become “mouthpieces for the government” by prohibiting them from expressing support for “state disfavored goals.”

“Ms. Chiles is being silenced,” he stated. “The kids and families who want help — this kind of help that she offers — are being left without any support.”

Even though the state of Colorado confirmed that it has no plans to take action against Chiles, the ADF attorney argued that his client had been engaging in self-censorship in fear of future scrutiny. Campbell also claimed that, due to the notoriety of being a Supreme Court plaintiff, complaints targeting her had been brought in recent weeks. (These alleged complaints were not referenced in court documents, nor was evidence of them submitted during Wednesday’s proceedings.) He asserted that there remains a “credible threat of enforcement” against Chiles.

Both conservative and liberal Supreme Court justices signaled sympathy with Campbell’s argument, suggesting there may be bipartisan opposition to the Colorado conversion therapy ban. Alito referred to the law as “viewpoint discrimination,” claiming that it would be permissible for therapists to express support for a patient’s LGBTQ+ identity but not opposition to it. Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal appointed by former President Barack Obama, seemed to agree.

“Let’s just assume that we’re in normal free-speech land rather than in this kind of doctor land,” she said. “And if a doctor says I know you identify as gay, and I’m going to help you accept that, and another doctor says I know you identify as gay, and I’m going to help you change that, and one of those is permissible and the other is not, that seems like viewpoint discrimination.”

Should the Supreme Court find Colorado’s conversion therapy ban unconstitutional, it would be only the most recent time that justices sided against LGBTQ+ rights based upon a hypothetical fear of persecution. When Christian website designer Lorie Smith appealed to SCOTUS for an exemption to Arizona’s nondiscrimination law, which she said would force her to violate her beliefs by making a webpage for a gay wedding, no same-sex couple had ever reached out to solicit her services. Furthermore, Smith didn’t even make wedding sites at the time that the 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis case was originally brought. In June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled narrowly in the plaintiff’s favor anyway.

Wielding its most conservative bench in 90 years, the Supreme Court is unlikely to let details get in the way of another ruling against LGBTQ+ equality. SCOTUS has been on an anti-LGBTQ+ tear over the past year, ruling in favor of parents who wish to opt their children out of LGBTQ+ affirming curricula and permitting states to restrict gender-affirming medical care for minors.

As the Supreme Court debated Chiles v. Salazar this week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson bluntly questioned her colleagues’ hypocrisy on the subject of what medical treatments are permissible for minors. In Skrmetti v. United States, Jackson noted that SCOTUS was willing to allow conservative lawmakers to regulate trans youth health care, medical treatments that they alleged were harmful. (This is despite the fact that medications like puberty blockers have consistently been found to be safe and effective in alleviating minors’ gender dysphoria, when supervised by a medical professional.) She wondered why, under that logic, letting states ban conversion therapy isn’t the “functional equivalent” of that ruling.

“The regulations work in basically the same way,” Jackson said. “So it just seems odd to me that we might have a different result here.”

A decision in Chiles v. Salazar is expected in the summer of 2026. Currently, at least 27 states (and Washington, D.C.) restrict at least some forms of conversion therapy from being performed on minors, including California, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, and Pennsylvania. Outside the U.S., the practice has been banned in 25 countries and likened to torture by United Nations human rights experts.

“His rhetoric is what really was so divisive and so problematic,” Bobo tells Queer Agenda. “It caused so much stress in teachers’ lives. He called teachers ‘terrorists’ within his first, like, three months in office. He was not liked in the state, but he stayed on like a tick.”

That jubilation has been shared across the state in the wake of a September 24 interview with Fox News in which Walters announced that he had accepted a new position as CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a far-right, anti-union education nonprofit. For the past 32 months, Walters has served as the Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, using his platform to push an extreme, far-right agenda in Oklahoma schools. Among his numerous controversies, Walters mandated that President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election be taught in history courses and proposed that a new 50-question test be given to new teachers to root out “radical leftist ideology.” A staunch Christian nationalist, he has claimed that the separation of church and state is nothing more than a liberal “myth.”

Sara Cunningham, the Oklahoma City-based founder of Free Mom Hugs, says that she was “elated and relieved” at the news of his departure, calling his impact on the state “frightening.” “He’s a perfect example of what happens when bad theology, abuse of power, and white Christian nationalism are all rolled into one,” she tells Queer Agenda. “If you needed a picture of what all that looks like, it’s Ryan Walters. How it went on for so long is beyond me.”

Of the tumultuous legacy Walters leaves behind, perhaps most infamous is his assault on the LGBTQ+ community. In February 2024, more than 350 LGBTQ+ and allied organizations called for Walters’ resignation following the passing of 16-year-old Nex Benedict, who died one day after being beaten by three female students in an Owasso High School bathroom. An open letter attached to the petition accused Walters of “fostering a culture of violence and hate against the 2SLGBTQI+ community in Oklahoma schools,” one which they say led to Benedict’s tragic death.

Walters drew additional condemnation for repeatedly deadnaming and misgendering Benedict, a trans youth of Choctaw descent who reportedly used he/him pronouns. He doubled down on his mistreatment of Benedict in an interview with The New York Times in which he dismissed the existence of trans and nonbinary people altogether: “There’s not multiple genders. There’s two. That’s how God created us.” When an autopsy alleged that Benedict died by suicide (a claim his family disputes), Walters accused LGBTQ+ groups of “pushing a false narrative” regarding the student’s death and called civil rights advocates “one of the biggest threats to our democracy.”

Elsewhere, Walters controversially named Chaya Raichik, the anti-LGBTQ+ extremist behind the far-right social media account Libs of TikTok, to the Oklahoma Education Department’s Library Media Advisory Committee. Critics found the appointment shocking for many reasons. Raichik does not live in the state and has no background in education, and her posts have reportedly resulted in numerous bomb threats targeting schools and libraries, including institutions within the state. (Walters himself shared some of the content that allegedly led to those threats.)

What’s likewise unusual about her appointment, as Bobo claims, is that there are “no records of this board existing at all.” “The library board probably never met,” he says. “She’s probably the only member of this board. It’s just political garbage, but it puts real fear and real harm into children.”

LGBTQ+ advocates confirm that Walters had a dramatically negative impact on youth mental health during his time in office. Since Benedict’s death in February 2024, Oklahoma has consistently been the number-one state for calls to the Rainbow Youth Project’s crisis hotline, according to the organization’s executive director, Lance Preston. Rainbow Youth Project receives around 1,400 contacts on average from Oklahoma each month, and of those callers, he says that around 64% cite Walters “specifically as one of the primary sources of their distress.” Those numbers are both “very shocking and very telling,” Preston adds.

But following Walters’ resignation, Rainbow Youth Project has seen a tide begin to turn. While Preston says that calls from Oklahoma haven’t slowed, young people reaching out to the group’s support team have begun to express a new optimism. “We have parents calling who are relieved,” Preston tells Queer Agenda. “We have young people calling in tears, saying, ‘I’m hopeful that we get someone who actually will care about us, someone who will try to protect us.’ There seems to be a glimmer of hope.”

It may take years for the damage Walters did to be undone, as sources tell Queer Agenda. Among his many other infractions, Walters spread misinformation about students who identify as cats relieving themselves in litter boxes in school classrooms. He sent a memo to publishers claiming that their textbooks “will not be welcome in Oklahoma” if they were too trans inclusive. He alleged that the presence of trans youth in schools threatens the safety of other students. And following the assassination of anti-LGBTQ+ activist and right-wing propagandist Charlie Kirk, Walters announced that all Oklahoma schools will have chapters devoted to Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit Kirk co-founded.

Many of Walters’ worst ideas never came to fruition or were blocked in court, and Bobo predicts that his replacement — who has yet to be named by Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt — is likely to drop some of his more tendentious mandates. For instance, a lawsuit filed in July challenged contentious new standards requiring social studies courses to teach about how Jesus Christ “influenced the American colonists, founders, and culture.” “Now that he’s gone, the lawsuit will go away because they don’t want to deal with it,” Bobo says of Walters’ successor.

While next steps remain to be seen, the eagerness for a new chapter in Oklahoma appears universal, no matter one’s partisan leanings. Nate Morris, a community advocate and former educator, tells Queer Agenda that Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike are “all pretty stoked that he’s leaving.” A January poll from The Oklahoman newspaper found that an overwhelming 95% of respondents would give his job performance an “F” grade, just before the release of a WalletHub survey ranking the state 50th in education under his tenure. Those survey findings were one more indication to Oklahomans, Morris says, that Walters has “consistently put himself and his own political career before the kids of the state.”

Rev. Shannon Fleck, a faith leader based in Oklahoma City and an outspoken critic of Walters, summed up the prevailing sentiment across the state in six words: “Don’t let the door hit you.” “To be able to have some healing potentially begin here in Oklahoma after what he has done is a great source of joy,” she tells Queer Agenda. “We’ve been through a lot.”

Walters’ official last day as Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction was September 30. While he faced an investigation earlier this year over nude images allegedly broadcast on a television in his office, he was not removed over the controversy.

Standing against the backdrop of a white kitchen, McCall proceeds to acquaint the viewer with his anti-trans bona fides. During his tenure as Oklahoma House Speaker, lawmakers in the Sooner State have voted to limit trans sports participation and restrict necessary medical care for trans youth. In June 2024, the state also enacted a law defining biological sex as binary and assigned at birth.

“Gender is god-given, and there’s only two of them,” McCall says. “That’s why we outlawed sex change surgeries for minors and banned boys from girls’ sports.”

The commercial is intended to target McCall’s closest GOP competition in the governor’s race, Attorney General Gentner Drummond, as insufficiently anti-trans. In May 2023, Drummond delayed enforcement of the state’s trans medical care ban amid a federal lawsuit, a decision that proved controversial among supporters of the measure. At the time, Drummond claimed in a statement that the decision was intended to give the state “more time to mount the strongest possible defense” of its law and said the pause “should in no way be interpreted as a concession of any kind.”

With scarcely little daylight between their polling numbers, McCall has opted to pound Drummond from the anti-LGBTQ+ right. Ahead of the June 2026 primary, a September survey found that Drummond leads the race with 35% of prospective votes. McCall was right behind with 32%. In a press release, McCall’s campaign concluded that the results were a sign that his message is “breaking through and conservative voters are rallying to his candidacy.”

With an implicit finger pointed at Drummond, McCall concludes his ad by returning to the cutting board. “I’m Charles McCall, and I have a simple message for any lunatic pushing sex change for kids: You first,” he says, slicing yet another banana.

LGBTQ+ advocates strongly condemned the commercial following its September 26 release. Hailey Briggs, executive director of Oklahomans for Equality, calls the message “dangerous and unacceptable,” adding that “dehumanizing children to score political points puts lives at risk and fuels hostility toward already vulnerable communities.”

“Oklahomans for Equality condemns this rhetoric in the strongest possible terms,” she tells Queer Agenda in a statement. “Our youth deserve dignity, respect, and access to the full spectrum of affirming care and support, not to be vilified for political gain.”

The advertisement’s airing is particularly notable following the February 2024 passing of 17-year-old Nex Benedict, a trans student of Choctaw descent who died one day after being assaulted by three girls in an Owasso High School bathroom. Although an autopsy alleged that Benedict took his own life following the violent altercation, his family disputes the claim and has pursued their own investigation.

McCall drew significant criticism over Oklahoma lawmakers’ handling of the attack. A letter addressed, in part, to McCall on behalf of more than 350 advocacy groups called for the removal of anti-LGBTQ+ extremist Ryan Walters, the state superintendent of public instruction, for allegedly “fostering a culture of violence and hate” in Oklahoma schools. McCall, however, refused numerous requests to investigate Walters, despite claims that the divisive official had incited bomb threats against Oklahoma schools over LGBTQ+ inclusion. (Walters recently resigned from his post voluntarily to work for an anti-union organization.)

While declining to press for Walters’ removal, McCall reportedly posed for a photo-op with far-right state Sen. Tom Woods (R). In the aftermath of Benedict’s death, Woods made national headlines for referring to the queer community as “filth.”

Especially given McCall’s anti-LGBTQ+ history, Free Mom Hugs Founder Sara Cunningham tells Queer Agenda that she is “deeply disturbed” by his recent campaign ad. “Our trans youth are fighting to stay alive, and this is what Charles McCall brings to the table,” she says in a statement. Cunningham, who is based in Oklahoma City, adds that the advertisement is “cruel” and “beneath the dignity of Oklahoma.”

The banana-themed ad isn’t McCall’s first swipe at the LGBTQ+ community in the 2026 governor’s race. On September 14, he released a commercial bragging about his role in passing Oklahoma’s trans sports ban. After opining that “boys competing in girls’ sports is just wrong,” an unseen narrator credits McCall for “putting a stop to it in Oklahoma.”

“Others talk a good game,” the ad concludes. “McCall delivered.”

The assertion that McCall is uniquely responsible for Oklahoma’s regulations on trans athletics neglects a few key details, though. Its state legislature is among the most heavily conservative in the U.S., with Republicans controlling 121 out of 149 total seats, and those supermajorities make a trans sports ban nigh inevitable in the current political climate. Furthermore, 28 other states have also passed their own restrictions on sports participation, making Oklahoma’s law hardly unique.

It also remains to be seen whether doubling down on anti-trans rhetoric will prove a winning strategy for McCall. In May, Omaha’s first female mayor, Jean Stothert, fell short in her reelection bid after airing a series of ads alleging that her opponent, Democrat John Ewing, intends to “transition minors without their parents’ consent” and is “backed by radicals who will allow men in girls’ sports and bathrooms.”

But what is certain, as Freedom Oklahoma’s Mauree Turner tells Queer Agenda, is that McCall shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a kitchen.

“While McCall seems to be attempting to garner attention through his ad campaign antics, he’s only let everyone know that he’s got a strange approach to eating bananas, can’t correctly choose a knife, and is still willing to put inflammatory politics in front of the well being of Oklahoma kids,” says the LGBTQ+ group’s director of communications in a statement. “McCall’s brand of backseat leadership is dangerous and has allowed some of the most nefarious actors in our state unchecked power to enact harm. Also, someone tell him most of us just eat bananas with our hands and mouths.”

That program, which launched in 2022, served an estimated 1.5 million young people, according to the Trevor Project’s 2024 report. It provided culturally competent crisis intervention during a period of escalating anti-LGBTQ+ political hostility and record rates of suicide ideation among queer youth. Hostility toward the LGBTQ+ community continues, but this guardrail has been ripped away.

The federal government said the shutdown was the result of budget cuts by Congress. Officials claimed that continuing the service would require diverting funds from the core 988 system–essentially saying it costs too much to protect queer youth. The Trevor Project’s leadership called it a political move, warning that it sends a message that LGBTQ+ lives are less valued, especially as the broader political climate in 2025—fresh with new barriers to gender-affirming care and heightened stigma—heightens mental health threats.

The removal of this service coincided with Pride Month, during which Harvey Milk’s name was removed from a Navy ship and replaced with the name of a confederate, and just ahead of a Supreme Court decision upholding healthcare restrictions for transgender youth in America.

States like California and Pennsylvania quickly responded by allocating their own funds to maintain dedicated crisis hotlines and support lines specifically for LGBTQ+ young people. Their state programs were fast-tracked to ensure continuity of care, training local crisis staff, and working with advocacy organizations to reach young people in need.

Dedicated hotlines are vital for LGBTQ+ youth, who are more than four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers due to discrimination, family rejection, and bias. When LGBTQ+ youth contact counselors who share cultural understanding and lived experience, they are more likely to open up and address the issues they are dealing with. Removing federal support undermines this crucial bridge to safety and belonging, but the determination of state governments and organizations offers a model for defending vulnerable youth when federal protections falter.

In these turbulent times, reaffirming a specific, affirming place for LGBTQ+ youth to turn to in crisis is not just about mental health—it is a statement about dignity, inclusion, and the collective responsibility to ensure that no young person feels alone or unseen.

The confrontation took place in Sioux Falls two days following the murder of Kirk, an influential conservative propagandist who was assassinated during a public engagement at Utah Valley University. As the situation escalated, Halbach says the neighbor began to hurl a stream of homophobic invective before accusing him — and the LGBTQ+ community at large — of being directly responsible for Kirk’s death. “Liberal f***ots killed Charlie Kirk,” Halbach says the neighbor told him. (Kirk’s killer was reportedly dating a trans woman prior to the deadly attack, although his exact motives remain unknown at the time of publication.)

“I didn’t ask for this,” Halbach tells Queer Agenda. “I didn’t antagonize it. I didn’t seek this out. He did it without any provocation whatsoever, to someone who was sleeping in their own bed.”

Halbach believes that the nightmare he has experienced is a result of an increasingly incendiary political climate following Kirk’s death, one that has put LGBTQ+ people in the crosshairs. In the wake of the assassination, the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation is reportedly pressuring the Federal Bureau of Investigation to declare trans people and their allies as “violent extremists.” In an interview with Fox News, Vice President J.D. Vance did not refute a suggestion from host Jesse Watters that the “militant transgender movement” poses a “domestic terrorist threat.”

In the weeks since the far right began scapegoating LGBTQ+ people for Kirk’s murder, the community has collectively braced for the fallout. An Arizona man, for instance, was reportedly arrested for telling police that he intended to commit a mass shooting at a local gay bar in hopes of avenging Kirk. Calling himself a martyr, he reportedly said that he hoped to “send a message”: “Radical left violence breeds a far-right response.”

Halbach, too, has feared escalation ever since he was harassed on his own lawn. Before law enforcement officials arrived, he says that his neighbor briefly went back to his home, shut off his lights, and then came back. He was concerned that the man had returned with a gun. “South Dakota is very gun forward,” Halbach says. “People in the state are avid hunters.” Halbach has filed for a protection order, but since the incident, he has been afraid to go home — afraid of what his neighbor might do next.

“I am feeling very emotionally vulnerable in a way that I have never experienced in the 20 years that I’ve lived in the state,” he says. “It’s a really odd feeling to come home and feel like I need to be quick and hurry and gather up whatever I need to so I can get out of there because I feel unsafe. That’s a really odd feeling.”

Halbach’s home isn’t the only property to be targeted in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder. The same evening that Halbach was harassed, Rachelle Broveleit — who resides on the same street — says she was startled to hear the neighbor yelling from outside her front window. The 48-year-old recognized his voice almost right away: Broveleit says the man has had numerous disputes with her husband over the years regarding the couple’s support for LGBTQ+ equality, as the parents of a trans son. After they hoisted a Pride flag outside their home in 2023, Broveleit recalls that the neighbor texted her husband, “condemning us and people like us for the evil in the world.”

“I got very scared, very fast,” she tells Queer Agenda of that night. “Rusty said the most terrible things I’ve ever had said to my face. He kept calling me a f*cking bitch and kept using the C-word repeatedly, at the top of his lungs. When I called my husband, my husband could hear it through the phone. That’s how loud he was.”

Broveleit was so terrified by the scene unfolding outside her home that she couldn’t move. Being frozen in place was a major issue, as it quickly dawned on her that, in addition to her blinds being raised, her front door was open. In the 21 years that Broveleit has resided in her home, she has never felt that she needed to worry about these things. When Broveleit telephoned 911 for help, she says the emergency operator ordered her to get up and to do so immediately. “You need to go lock your door,” the operator said, “and then pull your shades.”

Although the neighbor was ultimately arrested by police, he was released on bond after a few hours. Text messages that the Broveleits shared with Queer Agenda show that he resumed communication with them at 4:47 am: “Your friends… called the cops and had me arrested… all because I called them f***ots. From a public sidewalk. Part of tolerance. FREE SPEECH! Charlie died for this.”

Broveleit is currently staying at her parents’ house while her husband is out of town for work. Although she joined Halbach in seeking a protection order, she notes that her kitchen window is 10 feet from her neighbor’s home. She says that she’s “cried more in the last week than in the last year total.”

“I’m a physician assistant,” she says. “I work in psychiatry. I’ve done it for 22 years, so it’s hard for me to not always go: What could the possible outcome be? What if we don’t do something? A flip switched last Wednesday, so what’s the next switch to flip? I was taking the dog out for a walk the other night, and I thought, ‘Is he watching me through his window with a gun?’ I definitely don’t feel like that’s not a possibility.”

While they await news as to whether a protection order has been granted, Halbach hopes to raise awareness about the far-right vitriol the LGBTQ+ community is currently facing. In a September 13 Facebook post that spread quickly throughout their tight-knit community, he warned that “political language that dehumanizes or vilifies others gives permission for violence, for harassment, for neighbors to treat one another as enemies rather than as people.” “Words have consequences, and we’re seeing them play out almost daily,” he wrote.

Although Halbach initially hoped to file hate crime charges against his neighbor, law enforcement officials informed him that he would not be able to do so in South Dakota, which does not recognize LGBTQ+ identity as a protected status. As a local attorney, he believes that those laws need to change, but knows he has little power to do so. Republicans currently hold 91% of seats in South Dakota’s state legislature.

Seeing firsthand how vulnerable his community is in times of crisis has been sobering for Halbach. “If he would not have broken a single branch off of my tree, they probably could not have arrested him that night,” he says. “The homophobic slurs that he was screaming at me were irrelevant.”

In its latest strike at the LGBTQ+ community, the Mormon Church has claimed that full trans equality under the law would “undermine religious freedom.”

The assertion appears in a September 19 amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court filed in the cases of Hecox v. Little and B.P.J. v. West Virginia State Board of Education, which concern the constitutionality of laws banning trans athletes from competing in alignment with their gender. In July, the Supreme Court agreed to jointly hear the cases during the 2025-2026 term, and an 18-page plea authored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints argues that, should SCOTUS side with trans athletes, “religious freedom would be less free.”

“Constitutionalizing transgender status will diminish religious freedom by unsettling settled legal rights and protections for religious organizations,” the brief states. “They and their members would face legal and social stigma because their faith teaches that sex and gender are inseparable.”

Among its grievances, the LDS Church claims in its brief that recognizing trans people as a “quasi-suspect class” under the U.S. Constitution may serve to consign “religious people and institutions to second-class status in American life.” In its argument, the church claims that people of faith would be labeled “bigots” and their views likened to racism if the Supreme Court were to decide that discrimination against trans people merits “heightened scrutiny.” Also referred to as “intermediate scrutiny,” such a declaration on the part of SCOTUS would mean that any state law targeting trans people would merit closer review to ensure it does not infringe upon the community’s inalienable rights.

Elsewhere, the LDS Church expresses fear that, should trans rights be constitutionally expanded, it might be forced to hire trans people. “Equality claims would generate conflicts affecting religious freedom in employment,” the brief says. “Novel questions would cast doubt on whether religious organizations can exercise their faith without facing penalties and lawsuits.”

Given the tumultuous history between the LDS Church and the LGBTQ+ community, trans people and their allies say that news of the brief hit them hard. Laurie Lee Hall, a former LDS religious leader who was forced to leave the church in 2015 following her decision to transition, says the church’s statements are “toxic, unsafe, and incredibly harmful.” While she argues that it’s not surprising that the church’s positions have evolved so little since her dismissal, Hall adds that what struck her about the brief is Mormon leadership’s choice to paint themselves as the vulnerable parties in the equation.

“It’s extraordinary to me that they’re using the concern that they don’t want to be marginalized and they don’t want to be looked at as bigots, so they need the courts to continue to protect them so they can continue to go about being transphobic bigots,” she tells Queer Agenda. “This language of this just amazes me, that they cry about the attitude of the public chilling toward themselves as religious organizations, when in reality, it’s their own behavior.”

The brief isn’t the first time that LDS leadership has taken a public stance against LGBTQ+ rights. Shortly after backing Utah’s LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination law, the church released a controversial proclamation in November 2015 branding the children of same-sex couples as “apostates.” It also barred them from being baptized in the LDS faith until they disavowed their parents’ marriage. The policy, which was largely viewed as retaliation against the Supreme Court’s historic ruling on marriage equality just five months earlier, was partially repealed in 2019, but in the years since, the church has made numerous controversial, anti-LGBTQ+ moves. Among them, LDS leadership issued new guidance in August 2024 prohibiting trans members of the church from working with children or serving as teachers.

While the LDS Church did reverse its one-time opposition to marriage equality by publicly backing same-sex marriage rights in November 2022, the very same year it authored a separate amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting a Christian website designer who believes her faith should preclude her from being forced to provide services to gay weddings.

Elle Mills, a scholar on religion who left the LDS faith when she was 18 years old, says this month’s Supreme Court brief “felt like just one more nail” after so many blows from the church. “The messaging that they send repeatedly through things like this is: Your existence is a threat to us,” Mills tells Queer Agenda. “That’s really what I got from this amicus brief, that my existence as a trans person is an affront to their liberty. What a message to be sending to youth who struggle to try to reconcile their faith with what they feel and know about themselves.”

The LDS Church’s amicus brief arrives at a particularly fragile time both for the LGBTQ+ community and the church itself. Amid the second Trump administration, trans people have found themselves under constant attack, whether regarding their access to necessary health care, right to obtain accurate passports, or ability to serve openly in the military. More recently, Trump’s White House has sought to restrict trans people’s Second Amendment rights to possess firearms and to classify members of the community as terrorists. And over the weekend, an LDS Church in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan, was reportedly targeted in a deadly mass shooting. The assailant was reportedly a former Iraq War veteran and apparent Trump supporter.

Some LGBTQ+ people and their supporters worry about the further traumas that the brief could cause for communities that are already grieving. Lisa ​​Tensmeyer Hansen, the clinical director and founder of Utah-based Flourish Therapy, Inc., says that research has consistently shown that religious groups publicly opposing equality increases “depression, anxiety, and suicidality” among the LGBTQ+ community, particularly youth. Following the November 2015 proclamation on same-sex families, LGBTQ+ support groups reported that more than 30 young people took their own lives in less than three months’ time.

“The LDS church still has many members who are gender diverse and trying to maintain their faith, and they hear this as the church actively lobbying against their mental and physical health, reinforcing the rejection they’re already navigating,” Hansen tells Queer Agenda. “We know what thwarted belonging does. It’s one of the major factors in suicidal ideation. It starts that ideation rolling, of feeling like I really don’t belong, and I fear that happening with the message that this amicus brief is sending.”

It remains to be seen what impact, if any, the LDS Church’s brief will have on the Supreme Court’s deliberations on the trans athlete cases set for its docket. The conservative-majority court has not yet announced a formal date to begin hearing oral arguments, but proceedings are likely to begin by the end of the year. The most recent trans rights case before the Supreme Court, United States v. Skrmetti, resulted in a narrow victory for states that wish to restrict the ability of minors to access gender-affirming treatments like puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy.

Following the assassination of far-right influencer Charlie Kirk, prominent Republican figures have pushed claims that liberals are responsible for the majority of politically motivated violence in the United States. President Donald Trump told reporters during a September 15 press briefing that “the radical left causes tremendous violence, and they seem to do it in a bigger way.” His Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, further alleged that U.S. progressive groups constitute “a vast domestic terror movement.”

Further cementing the purported association between the so-called “radical left” and ideological violence, Trump signed an executive order this week declaring antifa as a “terrorist organization” (even though it’s not actually an organization). He has threatened a coming EO targeting left-wing groups more broadly.

“The continuing violence from Radical Left Terrorists… must be stopped,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday. “I will be signing an Executive Order this week to dismantle these Domestic Terrorism Networks.”

As the president ramps up his attacks on his avowed political opponents, the vast majority of research indicates that the pretense behind his administration’s campaign is untrue. Although researchers on gun violence say that politically motivated attacks in the U.S. remain fairly rare, the vast majority of such violence is not the result of left-wing actors. When politically motivated attacks do occur, experts say they are largely the result of far-right ideologies.

Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, says that the lion’s share of political violence in the U.S. comes from “white supremacist, anti-government organizations.” The Montgomery, Alabama nonprofit’s most recent data shows that there are 1,371 such groups currently operating domestically.

“When there have been disruptive actions on what we would call the left in the United States, those have primarily been related to property destruction,” Carroll Rivas tells Queer Agenda. “The right is generally an all-means-necessary movement, and those means include manipulation and force. We see that in what we document from particularly neo-Nazi, militia-style organizations, who are more focused on direct action as their tactic and are advocating violence.”

The Reality of Political Violence

Although it can be difficult to determine the motivations of bad actors, most reputable studies on the subject strongly suggest that political violence is far more common on the right than on the left. Data released earlier this month from the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank, examining 50 years of terrorist incidents — beginning in 1975 — indicates that these attacks are six times more likely to be motivated by far-right, authoritarian ideologies than leftist ideals. When excluding the September 11 attacks, the organization found that left-wing actors were responsible for just 10% of all political violence on U.S. soil.

This pattern holds true even when examining only our current era. Research from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that every single extremist murder committed in 2024 was perpetrated by a far-right actor: Eight were white supremacists, while five were anti-government. “This is the third year in a row that right-wing extremists have been connected to all identified extremist-related killings,” the ADL’s data notes.

As the Trump administration attempts to scapegoat the left for political violence, the White House has purposefully attempted to hide the link between the right and ideologically motivated attacks. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) archived its own internal research finding that “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists.” The DOJ’s 2024 report found far-right political violence to be five times as common as attacks from the left.

Mark Bryant, founding executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, finds the Trump administration’s insistence — against its own evidence — that liberals are solely responsible for violence to be highly contradictory. “They have a little cognitive dissonance going on: that the left wing is a bunch of wusses and then on the other side of that, they’re the ones causing all the violence,” he tells Queer Agenda. “ There’s no statistics to support that.”

The GOP’s naked attempt to obfuscate the reality of political violence extends to the trans community, Bryant notes. Although the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation is reportedly attempting to pressure the Federal Bureau of Investigation to classify trans people and their supporters as “nihilistic violent extremists,” trans Americans are responsible for very few of the attacks in the Gun Violence Archives’ database. Of all 450,000 mass shootings that have occurred in the last 10 years, Bryant says that just 22 of the perpetrators were trans. That’s just .004%.

Trans people are far more likely to be the targets of violence than the cause, as the data shows. A 2024 report from the Williams Institute, a pro-LGBTQ+ think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that trans people are four times as likely as the general population to be victimized by a violent crime. Since 2013, more than 370 trans people have lost their lives to violence, per the Human Rights Campaign.

“It’s very, very frustrating that they will just make up numbers,” Bryant says of far-right attempts to paint trans people as disproportionately violent. “It doesn’t matter how much you prove them wrong.”

How to Curb Gun Violence

Experts believe that falsifying the root causes of America’s epidemic of violence — and particularly gun violence — will make these issues more difficult to address. As the American right continues to point the finger at the other side, what is seldom recognized is that a preponderance of violence in the U.S. has no political motivation at all. For instance, the majority of domestic mass shootings (defined as crimes involving four or more victims) are actually acts of domestic partner violence, in which a shooter targets their family members. Most children killed in mass shootings are murdered not in their schools or classrooms but by a family member, according to a Stanford Medicine analysis.

Daniel Webster, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says this pattern of violence is “remarkably common,” but it doesn’t capture the public attention as often as headline-grabbing news like Kirk’s death. “Most of these are people who have some grievance,” he tells Queer Agenda. “Obviously, they have access to firearms. Mental health plays a role in probably about a third of them.”

Rather than scapegoating, Webster believes that U.S. leaders need to focus on tangible policy solutions to curb the country’s gun violence problem. Although gun deaths have declined slightly since their 2021 peak — when an estimated 21,383 Americans lost their lives to gun violence — he says that the fact remains that the U.S. has “more firearms and the weakest gun laws among high-income nations.” Nearly every single state has a higher rate of deaths from gun violence than the majority of foreign countries do.

Creating good gun policies, Webster says, would target high-capacity magazines, which allow shooters to fire a greater number of shots before they reload, and accessories that are used to “turn a semi-automatic gun into something that fires like an automatic gun.” He also advocates for requiring a license prior to firearm ownership, as data shows that many shooters acquire a gun shortly before committing violent acts. Licensure requirements typically slow down firearm acquisition by mandating a slower process involving a background check, fingerprinting, and even gun safety training.

“Licensing suppresses violence from firearms, as does bans on large-capacity magazines,” he says. “The weaponry matters.”

LGBTQ+ Americans are facing turbulent times as our hard-fought rights face renewed threat from political leaders at all levels of government who are attempting to roll back protections when it comes to discrimination in healthcare, education, and even family recognition. But rather than accept this regression, queer people are taking matters into their own hands and running for office in unprecedented numbers.

According to a July 2025 email from the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, at least 196 LGBTQ+ individuals have already declared their candidacies across the country in 2025, with many more expected to join the field before the year is over. These campaigns are setting the stage for unprecedented and historic victories in both 2025 and 2026. This could be the beginning of a powerful shift toward representation and resilience.

Currently, only 0.26% of all elected officials in the United States identify as LGBTQ+; this is a stark underrepresentation when compared to the percentage of Americans who identify as part of the community.

This gap means that laws and policies impacting LGBTQ+ people are often debated, written, and enacted without the firsthand perspective of those whose lives are most impacted. For minority groups, representation in government is not symbolic—it translates into an informed voice during legislative debates. These groups deserve a seat at the decision-making table and a chance to advance policies that reflect the lived experiences of marginalized communities.

When LGBTQ+ officials hold office, the effect extends beyond policymaking. Their presence itself challenges stereotypes and reshapes public perception. Seeing openly queer or trans leaders in visible positions of power signals to younger generations that they belong in civic life and can assume leadership roles without having to hide their identities. It also forces colleagues and constituents to contend with LGBTQ+ people not as abstract issues but as dedicated public servants embedded in the fabric of American democracy.

The political moment unfolding now suggests that marginalized communities are no longer waiting on others to defend their rights. Instead, they are claiming their own political power. This wave of LGBTQ+ candidates represents not just a quest for fair representation, but a broader demand that the American government reflect the diversity of its people. If successful, these candidacies will not only help safeguard hard-won rights but also foster a more inclusive democracy that serves the interests of all.