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pride month
What We Can Learn From Trans People in the Fight for Dignity and Democracy
Given the position of exclusion and criminalization in society, trans people know how to fight and it’s a massive fight that we need to wage right now.
Jun 07, 2025
This year, Pride Month arrives at an especially dire moment for the LGBTQ+ community. Under the second Trump administration, homophobic vitriol and violence are on the rise. On Elon Musk’s X platform, a “deepfake” video of President Donald Trump canceling Pride Month has gone viral. And even as Pride celebrations continue as planned (in many places without as many corporate contributions), the attacks against LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender people, seem to be on steroids. After all, since taking office a second time, Trump has issued executive orders that ban transgender women in sports and transgender troops in the military, while limiting federal recognition to two genders. And his executive actions are only the spear tip of a significantly larger legislative attempt to target and scapegoat transgender people, who make up just over 1% of the U.S. population.
Believe it or not, so far this year, 701 anti-trans bills have been introduced in American legislative bodies at both the state and federal levels. More than $215 million was spent on anti-trans television advertisements during the 2024 election season alone. Now, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” barely passed by the House and at present in the Senate—which would gut Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other lifesaving safety-net programs—takes explicit aim at gender-affirming care for Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) patients. If the Senate passes it, the result will be devastating for trans people, who are already twice as likely as the general population to be unemployed and unhoused and four times as likely to live in extreme poverty. It should be no surprise, then, that almost half of transgender adults in this country have already relocated or are considering relocating to more trans-affirming places.
While executive orders, budget cuts, and other attacks threaten all trans and nonbinary people, the most vulnerable are, of course, at greatest risk, including the poor, people of color, the young, the disabled, and the incarcerated. In a recent report, the American Civil Liberties Union offers a horrific insight into this reality:
Some of the most immediate impacts will likely be felt by the more than 2,000 transgender people currently held in federal custody. [One] order specifically calls on the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to ignore the guidelines of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) and enforce a blanket policy forcing transgender women into men’s prisons and detention centers against their will. This puts them at a severely heightened risk of sexual assault and abuse by other incarcerated persons and prison staff. The order also mandates that BOP withdraw critical health care from trans people in federal prison.
The overwhelming majority of anti-trans bills target trans and nonbinary children, youth, and young adults by taking away their sense of safety and belonging in healthcare locations, libraries, schools, sports, and so much more, while only accelerating anti-trans bullying and hate. In fact, according to a study from the Trevor Project, “When states pass anti-transgender laws… suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth ages 13 to 17 increased from 7% to 72%.”
It’s important to note that none of this is happening simply because Donald Trump himself is a bigot or because the Republican Party is just deeply cruel. It’s happening because there is a highly connected, well-funded, and strategically positioned Christian nationalist movement pushing forward anti-trans policy and its accompanying social violence.
But in the struggle against religious extremism and political oppression, trans people know what losing strategies look like. Preemptive compliance from the institutions we have often relied upon—including healthcare providers, colleges, and philanthropic foundations—has been a losing strategy. Submission to divide-and-conquer rule, theological idolatry, and biblical distortion, as well as silence from supporters and allies, also loses the day.
Given the position of exclusion and criminalization in society, however, trans people also know how to fight and it’s a massive fight that we need to wage right now. Trans people, who have always had to live with their backs against the wall, are now being joined by those from all walks of life. Indeed, as Trump and the Christian nationalist movement attack everything from decent healthcare to decent housing, more and more people are poised to enter a struggle for survival. In the fight for dignity and democracy, trans people have much to teach everybody.
A History of Resistance
Transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people have long resisted unjust laws, as well as mistreatment and oppression from those in power. The Compton Cafeteria riot in August 1966 sparked transgender activism in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, years before the Stonewall Uprising. Police violence was common in San Francisco then, and the staff at Compton Cafeteria called the police on poor trans women and drag queens who were harassed, subjected to genitalia checks, and subsequently arrested for crossdressing, which was illegal at the time. Tired of the constant oppression, violence, and harassment, trans women resisted arrest, sparking resistance throughout the Tenderloin district. This led to a picket-line presence at the café, as the establishment continued to ban drag queens and trans women.
Evidence of this early trans resistance was nearly erased from historical memory. Thanks to the work of transgender historian Susan Stryker and other activists and organizers, however, the important legacy of such organizing was confirmed to have indeed occurred.
It could not be more important to invoke this powerful lineage of protest and resistance today, not just for the trans and nonbinary community but for everyone.
Three years later, across the country in New York City, the Stonewall Uprising was led primarily by poor people, particularly poor, gender-expansive folks of color, who faced continual police harassment, violence, and discrimination. The Stonewall Inn, a dingy bar reputedly owned by organized crime and frequented by those in the poor gay and trans community in New York’s West Village, was raided by the police in June 1969. The liberation movement that followed saw heroic activism, organizing, and community care by poor, unhoused trans women who resisted constant erasure and violence from the government (and even from within the gay rights movement). Some of those leaders, including Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Maxine Feldman, Bobbie Lea Bennett, and Miss Major Griffin Gracy, were as much a part of the movement to end poverty as they were of the gay rights movement.
Both Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were poor, unhoused trans women and sex workers, as well as organizers advocating for deep social transformation. In 1970, they founded S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) House where they worked to meet the material and community needs of poor trans youth. They held monthly political education meetings, offering support for queer folks who were arrested and couldn’t pay bail. They provided both jail and street support in tough times, while working to organize poor trans folks into a larger movement for transformational change.
The story of S.T.A.R. House is replete with lessons for anyone committed to resisting political violence, systemic immiseration, and authoritarian-style rule. In their melding of community-care and political activism, Johnson and Rivera successfully modeled ways to organize and build power in the shadow of extreme state repression. They insisted that everyone in their community had a right to live with dignity and that even the most marginalized among them should have a role in all movements for collective liberation. Through their work, they developed and protected a new generation of queer grassroots leaders, at a time when no one else was willing to do so. Theirs was a political ethic rooted in a deep understanding of the classic movement slogan: “When you lift from the bottom, everybody rises.”
Today, 2025 Pride organizers are doubling down on that radical history of protest and resistance. In fact, NYC Pride has made “protest” its theme of the year. As Kazz Alexander, its co-chair, explained:
The challenges we face today, particularly in this political climate, require us to stand together in solidarity. We must support one another, because when the most marginalized among us are granted their rights, all of us benefit. Pride is not merely a celebration of identity—it is a powerful statement of resistance, affirming that justice and equity will ultimately prevail for those who live and love on the margins.
Unholy Attacks on Children, the Poor, and the Vulnerable
It could not be more important to invoke this powerful lineage of protest and resistance today, not just for the trans and nonbinary community but for everyone. In the Trump years, the slew of homophobic and transphobic attacks has been inseparable from the rise of Christian nationalism and religious extremism. In many ways, the contemporary legislative, executive, and judicial attacks on trans and nonbinary people closely parallel a decades-long strategy of the Christian right to politicize abortion access, an issue previously not considered political by a majority of Americans, including a majority of Christians.
An eerie argument about “defending innocent children” is being deployed by Christian nationalists in their war on gender-affirming care, despite overwhelming medical evidence that such care saves young people’s lives. In fact, denying such care is part of a growing Christian nationalist mission to remake this country as an extremist Christian dominion, starting with our children.
For example, Oklahoma Senate Bill 129, introduced in 2023 to ban gender-affirming care to anyone under the age of 26, was named the “Millstone Act.” That title reflected an unsettling, even violent interpretation of Matthew 18:6 in the Bible, falsely asserting that gender-affirming care harms children and insinuating that anyone providing it should have “a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
In January, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee for Religious Liberty released its annual report, “The State of Religious Liberty in the United States.” It identified five areas of critical concern: immigration, antisemitism, in vitro fertilization mandates, parental choice in education, and scaling back “gender ideology” laws. It directly took up the rhetoric and politics of the soon-to-be-in-office Trump administration on trans rights and more.
Indeed, there is nothing innate or organic about the rise of anti-trans and anti-queer hate in the United States. As the research of Translash Media has made clear, organizations like the National Christian Foundation, the DeVos Family, and the Council for National Policy have been instrumental in funding, developing, and workshopping anti-trans and anti-queer sentiment, policies, and theology. Fundamentalist Protestant organizations like Focus on the Family, the Family Policy Alliance, and the Family Research Council have also been crucial to the launching of the anti-trans movement within the last decade, including the drafting of the first anti-trans legislation at a Summit on Protecting Children from Sexualization conference in 2019.
Such Christian nationalist-fueled attacks aren’t just about hurting the queer community. They are also a key way of wielding supposedly “traditional” values and identities to discipline dissent and nonconformity in Christian ranks as well, while sowing distrust of “the other” in this all-American world of ours. All of this, of course, played out in the 2024 elections, when trans rights were weaponized into a hot-button and divisive issue by the Trump campaign (with only the most half-hearted pushback from the Biden-Harris crew), despite the trans community being such a microscopic minority of the population.
What the Bible Really Says About Gender Justice
Christian nationalists like to weaponize the Bible as a primary way of justifying their attacks on trans and nonbinary people. And yet, like all Christian nationalist theology, theirs is heretical when it comes to actual Christian scriptures and the subject of Jesus’ teachings.
After all, the creation story in Genesis is fully inclusive of God’s greatness—from the creation of light and darkness to the nonbinary sunrises and sunsets in between. It should be a reminder that all of us are created in God’s image. While the anti-trans crew has sought to use the biblical phrase “male and female God created them” from Genesis 1:27 in defense of exclusionary violence, some of the oldest interpretations of that text hold that God created the first human beings to contain both “maleness” and “femaleness” inside one body. Indeed, the Bible repeatedly names third-gender people as important.
If Christian nationalists insist on using the Bible to underwrite their social and political violence, those of us who call ourselves Christians must be willing to defend LGBTQ+ people with fervor and theological rigor.
In Isaiah 56:3-5, for instance, God affirms not only the sanctity but the spiritual importance of people who exist outside of the gender binary, in essence promising LGBTQ+ people, “an everlasting name, a name better than sons and daughters.” The Book of Esther, for instance, identifies no fewer than 10 gender non-conforming people, some of whom are identified as playing a role in assisting Esther’s defense of her people against imperial violence. The Jewish Talmud reflects a similar affirmation of gender diversity, legally recognizing no fewer than seven genders.
This inclusivity carries through to the New Testament and the stories about Jesus as well. In Matthew 19:12, Jesus teaches that there are human beings who exist outside of the gender binary from birth. Acts 8:26-39 explicitly lifts up the spiritual leadership of gender nonconforming people of African descent in the story of the Ethiopian eunuch. In our time, that eunuch would have been far more welcome at the Stonewall Inn than at the Family Research Council’s annual summit.
There are numerous other biblical examples of gender diversity and of Jesus’ celebration of and identification with gender nonconforming people. The point is that if Christian nationalists insist on using the Bible to underwrite their social and political violence, those of us who call ourselves Christians must be willing to defend LGBTQ+ people with fervor and theological rigor.
This is a “Kairos moment” for faith communities that affirm the dignity and rights of LGBTQ+ people—especially trans and nonbinary people. Christian nationalism’s spiritual and political attacks on LGBTQ+ people are also an attack on our deep belief in God’s inclusive love. Isn’t it time, especially in the age of Donald Trump, to leverage our public witness, our pastoral presence, our theological voice, and the power of our institutions in defense of the surviving and thriving of all people?
For too long, religion has been used to attack LGBTQ+ people. Today, Christian nationalists are amassing power by claiming a monopoly on morality. But beneath theological distortions and manipulations exists an untarnished gospel that teaches love, inclusion, diversity, and justice. We must be brave enough to proclaim this gospel for all to hear.
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The Club Is Our Safe Space, and No One Will Rob Us of It
Jun 16, 2016
"That could have been me."
Those are the words that play repeatedly in my mind as I see the continued coverage of the tragedy at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. For young Black and Latino gay, bisexual, and same-gender loving men like me, the club is our place to gather as a community, and last Sunday, its sanctity was violated with the same violence we experience by unapologetically living our lives outside its doors.
The club is our safe space. It is there that we can escape the very real danger that LGBT Black and Latino folks face for being who we are around our families and in our neighborhoods. The club gives us space away from the violence that persists in our heteronormative culture, and on Sunday morning, that safety, as illusory as it might have been, vanished with the lives of 49 young queer Black and Latino people and the injuries of 53 others.
The fact that this tragedy was at a gay club, on a night that appreciated a predominantly Latino community matters. It matters because, in those moments, behind those walls, we are able to dance and love without being afraid of physical violence and verbal abuse. We are able to be who we are for those few hours, before returning to our daily lives that force us to edit ourselves for survival.
We must remember and uplift the stories of those affected because our stories are not often told: stories of brilliance, creativity, and perseverance in the face of daily adversity. Stories that ended much too soon, due to violence and hate fueled by the rhetoric many have endured because of who they are and whom they love.
Where I live, there are very few places where I can feel affirmed in the intersections of my queerness and Blackness -- spaces that offer the opportunity to hold both identities, without choosing one over the other are few and far between. Coming out at 16, I had the privilege of finding an LGBT serving youth center, a place where I found a community and a support system that many young people desire but cannot find.
We are able to be who we are for those few hours, before returning to our daily lives that force us to edit ourselves for survival.
When I turned 18, I entered my first club, joined by other LGBT young people who stayed there from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., because they did not have an affirming home to go to for the night. When the club ended, they walked around until either school started or their service agency reopened in the morning.
Moving to New York, I find that despite the many events that happen for LGBT people of color, I can always count on the club as a consistent space to be myself. There I can dance and socialize without the fear of being harmed. For my gender-nonconforming peers, there they can be who they are without apology.
In this Pride month, as we mourn those we lost, we must remain mindful that the spectrum of violence that affects LGBT Black and Latino people remains. Some will try to understand the motives of the shooter, but we must not let the lives of those harmed be overshadowed. We must march louder, love harder, and rebuild those spaces that allow us to be ourselves while continuing to make every space a safe one.
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This LGBT Pride, Let's Celebrate Difference Not Sameness
Jun 04, 2015
It's hard to imagine an American poet more celebrated than four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost, whose most famous poem concludes:
"Two roads diverged in a wood and I --I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."
When the most celebrated poet's most well-known lines praise difference why is it that we're so scared of it?
Maybe we need more poets. That's what John F Kennedy said just weeks before his death, at the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College. It was soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War was raging on, ten million Americans needed jobs, and America needed strength, said Kennedy, but strength, he said, "takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant."
The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation's greatness, the President continued, "but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable... for they determine whether we use power or power uses us."
Music and poetry and the arts push us, said Kennedy. "When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence."
That was half a century ago. Today we have entire months supposedly dedicated to "diversity", including this one, June, LGBTQI Pride Month.
Mostly, we don't celebrate diversity; we celebrate sameness. We honor all the progress that we lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans Americans have made, becoming "accepted" as, well, just like everybody else.
Now I'm all for everyone enjoying the same rights in these United States. I support that - on-going - project. But I'd like to celebrate something else too: roads less travelled. Especially the roads less travelled that LGBTQI people take daily, opening up the possibilities for everybody.
The same old roads will take us to the same old destinations. It's divergence, as the straight, white poet once wrote, that makes all the difference.
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