enjoy living in Kansas. Specifically, Lawrence, Kansas, where I can attend a watercolor painting class at the local plant shop on Wednesday, the weekly drag show on Thursday, and a vintage clothing pop-up on Friday. But despite the beauty of the rolling Flint Hills, there is something ugly happening in the place I call home. Growing hostility towards the transgender and non-binary community is being codified through policies and perpetuated through violence that threatens our basic human rights.
Rights activists see such rollbacks of hard-fought progress spreading across the US, and we’re bracing for new attacks that will test the country’s purported commitment to equality. The fight is the most grueling for those of us who are from Black and other marginalized communities.
In the last year, violence claimed the lives of at least 25 transgender and gender non-conforming people in the US, with violence disproportionately affecting Black transgender women. These numbers are most likely underrepresented, as attacks against the LGBTQ+ community often go undocumented.
Black and Brown trans people should be able to live as their most authentic self without fear of transphobic violence and discrimination.
To add to the growing animus, some states chose to attack transgender rights through legislation rather than protect them. This past June, the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, declared a state of emergency after more than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in 41 states. Hundreds of these bills specifically targeted transgender people.
Some of these anti-LGBTQ+ bills would limit the ability to update gender information on identity documents like driver’s licenses and birth certificates, weaken nondiscrimination laws and protections in employment, and restrict free speech and expression through book and drag performance bans. State bills also attempt to restrict access to medically necessary health care including bans on gender-affirming care for trans youth, prohibit access to public accommodations like public bathrooms, and prevent trans students from participating in school activities like sports. While introducing a bill doesn’t mean it will pass, 84 of these draconian measures made it out of committee and have been signed into law.
Even the introduction of these bills perpetuates harmful stigmas and allows misinformation to spread. I have witnessed how harmful the introduction of these bills has been on members of the trans community I am a part of. In Kansas, 14 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced and four were passed into law in the last legislative session. During that time, my trans friends and peers pleaded with conservative lawmakers to respect their dignity and protect their autonomy over their own bodies. Medical experts testified that the mere act of introducing these bills causes great harm to the mental health of transgender people across the state.
One bill, misnamed the Women’s Bill of Rights though it limits protections for transgender women, passed and went into effect on July 1st. In response, LGBTQ+ activists in Lawrence refused to rest until the City Commission enacted a sanctuary city ordinance, increasing protections for trans people. Despite the immense fear transgender people were feeling in this moment, their message rang loud and clear: LGBTQ+ people have the right to live without fear, and we are not going anywhere.
Make no mistake, allowing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation to be passed sends a message that legitimizes homophobic and transphobic sentiment.
There are some hopeful signs. Legislation to outlaw the LGBTQ+ panic defense was introduced in nine states as well as in the US House and Senate this year. Under that defense, people charged with violent crime against LGBTQ+ people can get a reduced sentence or evade criminal liability by stating that the victim’s real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity prompted the violent act.
As violence against the LGBTQ+ community continues to increase, it is important now more than ever for lawmakers in statehouses across the country and for the federal government to strengthen protections for trans people and especially for the most vulnerable members of this community—Black and Brown trans women. Lawmakers should be recognizing and protecting LGBTQ+ people’s equal dignity under the law. Legislators should support active efforts to quell discrimination, like Kansas’s HB 2178, and codify LGBTQ+ protections. The US Government should also meet its human rights obligations to respond to foreseeable threats to life and bodily integrity, and to address patterns of violence targeting the LGBTQ+ community.
While activists continue to fight for LGBTQ+ liberation, I am reminded to celebrate the small wins. I remain hopeful when I see young LGBTQ+ people organizing and exercising their right to protest in the name of egalitarianism. They remind me that pride is not something solely limited to the month of June, but a badge of honor we always carry with us.
Bria Nelson is a Researcher and Advocate on Racial Justice and Equity Issues with the Human Rights Watch U.S. Program. Bria is an attorney and concentrates their research on racial justice and equity issues across the U.S., with a particular focus on reparations for enslavement and its legacies.
As a movement lawyer, Bria has also worked to mobilize response and advocacy after the public murder of George Floyd, including undergoing an intensive fellowship training program with Law for Black Lives, an organization focused on grounding movements in Black queer feminism, abolition, and anticapitalism.
The Christian anti-LGBTQ+ legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — defined as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — is hoping the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn state bans on so-called conversion therapy for minors. Though the court hasn’t agreed to take on the case just yet, it provide insight into how ADF plans on challenging more conversion therapy bans in the future.
The ADF is providing legal counsel to licensed marriage and family counselor Brian Tingley in Tingley v. Ferguson, a legal challenge to Washington state’s ban. Tingley says the ban violates his rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, The New Republic reported.
Related:
Tingley’s petition to the court says that his speech as a therapist should be considered as “speech” and not professional “conduct.” He said he “lives in continuous fear of government persecution” because the ban “forbids him from speaking, treating his professional license as a license for government censorship.” Tingley says he should be able to offer conversion therapy — even though it has been widely disavowed as a form of psychological torture by numerous American mental health organizations — because some kids are actively seeking to change their sexual orientation.
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His case may actually be aided by the 2018 Supreme Court decision National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra which said that the government couldn’t “compel” or “regulate” anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers in California to inform pregnant people about state-funded reproductive health services.
However, Georgia State University law professor Anthony Michael Kreis told the aforementioned publication that the cases are different. Bans on conversion therapy aren’t trying to force Tingley and other therapists to say things they don’t want to say, Kreis argues. Rather, he reasons, state bans are trying to prevent medical conduct from resulting in “tangible harms.”
A 2013 survey showed that 84% of former patients who tried ex-gay therapy said it inflicted lasting shame and emotional harm. Additionally, March 2022 peer-reviewed study from The Trevor Project showed that 13% of LGBTQ+ youth nationwide had reported being subjected to conversion therapy. Of those, 83% were subjected to it before reaching the age of 18. The study showed that young people who underwent conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to attempt suicide afterward. Numerous conversion therapy advocates have later come out as still gay and apologized for the harm that conversion therapy causes.
Furthermore, Kreis notes that the bans provide specific exemptions for “purely religious” speech and also that the government already heavily regulates the professional fields of therapy and healthcare. Thus, the bans are just an extension of that.
Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia University, said the ADF will use similar free speech arguments to try and overturn regulations involving professional conduct.
“We have all sorts of regulations for licensed mental health professionals, and the patients rely on this kind of safety that those licensing requirements impose,” she told The New Republic. “Opening the door in this kind of case… opens the door to quite a few other situations where a person may have an objection to what is a public norm or an expert judgment about the safety of other people. It shouldn’t be your private decision that you’re not going to agree with that and therefore [will] not follow that law, when that is a condition of your licensure.”
The methods of so-called conversion therapists include encouraging queer people not to masturbate, redirecting their sexual energy into exercise, “covert aversion” (a fancy name for imagining possible negative consequences of being queer), Bible study, directing same-sex sexual desire onto opposite-sex partners, inflicting pain and humiliation anytime LGBTQ+ feelings arise, and forcing people to act out stereotypical gender roles in behavior and personal appearance.
Twenty-nine U.S. states have either passed full or partial bans on conversion therapy for minors. In three of those states — Alabama, Georgia, and Florida — court injunctions have stopped the bans from going into effect while legal challenges to the bans proceed in court.
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. The Trans Lifeline (1-877-565-8860) is staffed by trans people and will not contact law enforcement. The Trevor Project provides a safe, judgement-free place to talk for youth via chat, text (678-678), or phone (1-866-488-7386). Help is available at all three resources in English and Spanish.
Last September, Riley headed to their clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which was usually brimming with chatter about the day’s research and patient needs.
But that fall morning, Vanderbilt was thrown into chaos, and the clinic for gender-affirming surgeries, which serviced both trans youth and adults, had been shut down for the day. The health care worker, who is using a pseudonym in fear of retaliation from their employer, said the atmosphere among their colleagues in the trans health clinic was a mix of “fear and concern.”
Riley’s clinic remained open, and their colleagues debated whether they were safe at work or should go home. Riley said local police were lined up outside the medical center’s doors, serving as extra security for employees.
All day people whispered about the social media posts by right-wing blogger Matt Walsh, which had gone viral the day before for claiming that doctors at Vanderbilt’s transgender health clinic “castrate” and “sterilize” children.
At the time, Riley hadn’t heard of Walsh. They didn’t have social media and rarely watched the news.
But over the next year, Riley would witness firsthand — again and again — how misinformation and right-wing attacks on the transgender health clinic severely restricted the kinds of care they could provide at Vanderbilt. In those months,trans Tennesseans have felt more intimidated and desperate than ever, as they have been forced to decide whether to pack up their lives to find a place where they can exist without the fear of the government, or right-wing provocateurs, meddling in their private medical information.
One of the first changes Riley saw was Vanderbilt moving the stand-alone transgender health clinic inside the university’s main campus in Nashville, Tennessee. The clinic also adopted new security measures, including an armed guard behind the desk, and required patients and providers to be buzzed inside.
Riley said the medical center has even canceled appointments for certain surgeries for cisgender youth that currently do not fall into the category of gender-affirmation but that critics could see as “pathways to gender affirmation.”
By the end of September 2022, Tennessee’s attorney general, John Skrmetti, said his office had opened an investigation into Vanderbilt’s transgender health clinic. Over the next few months, Skrmetti broadened the scope, first requesting specific patient medical records, and then information on Vanderbilt employees and volunteers at the transgender health clinic. The following spring, Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender children, effectively suspending all operations at VUMC’s pediatric transgender clinic.
Riley said they were one of more than a dozen clinicians who were told by Skrmetti’s office that their emails could be subpoenaed as part of the investigation.
“It feels like a witch hunt,” Riley told HuffPost. “What are you going to find in my emails? Obviously, there’s not a conspiracy here.”
‘That Is Why I Am Working With Matt Walsh’
In September 2022, Walsh, a prominent Nashville-based right-wing talk show host and blogger, accused Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s transgender health clinic of only existing to turn a profit. He also claimed that Vanderbilt doctors “castrate, sterilize, and mutilate minors.”
In a series of tweets, Walsh argued that the clinic was drugging and sterilizing children, and used language that LGBTQ+ advocates and Vanderbilt employees say grossly distorted the reality of pediatric transgender care. Walsh posted a video of one Vanderbilt doctor ― Dr. Shayne Taylor, who founded the clinic in 2018 ― discussing how gender-affirming surgeries, like double mastectomies and genital surgeries, could bring in “a lot of money” for the medical center. (In this video, Taylor, who did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, was mostly referencing surgeries for trans adults, as Vanderbilt never performed genital surgeries for minors.)
In another video Walsh posted, a different doctor cautions that employees who don’t want to treat transgender patients on the grounds of religious objections “probably shouldn’t work at Vanderbilt.” At the end of the thread, Walsh wrote that the clinic’s peer support group, Trans Buddy Program, was in fact a “gang of trans activists” acting as “surveillance in order to force compliance.”
Walsh tweeted later that evening that his “report” was just the beginning. “We are not going to let up,” he wrote. “We will shut this down.”
Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital suspended all gender-affirming care at its pediatric transgender clinic after Gov. Bill Lee signed a ban on that care for transgender children.
The next day, Vanderbilt released a statement refuting Walsh’s claims. “Vanderbilt University Medical Center is now the subject of social media posts and a video that misrepresent facts about the care the Medical Center provides to transgender patients,” the statement read. “VUMC began its Transgender Health Clinic because transgender individuals are a high-risk population for mental and physical health issues and have been consistently underserved by the U.S. health system.”
Walsh did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story.
Even when gender-affirming medical care for minors was legal in Tennessee, the first step was still typically social transition, such as a change in name, pronouns, dress or hairstyle. Once a child hit puberty, their families might begin the long process of consulting with behavioral health specialists, endocrinologists and primary care doctors about taking puberty blockers ― medication to temporarily pause the effects of puberty ― while weighing whether hormone replacement therapy might ease a child’s gender dysphoria later in their teens.
Puberty blockers, which stop the body from making sex hormones, help slow unwanted secondary sex characteristics. They do not, as Walsh suggested, “sterilize” or “castrate” children, though the medication could pose some risks to fertility if they are administered too early in puberty. Studies show the effects are largely reversible, and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health recommends that providers talk with patients and their families about fertility preservation before starting medication.
In the years since VUMC began providing gender-affirming care for transgender youth and adults, it grew into a holistic network of care, not only involving health care providers, but also spiritual care from a staff chaplain, weekly support groups, and insurance specialists, according to a panel of VUMC practitioners at an LGBTQ+ health equity conference this fall.
VUMC performed fewer than a dozen top surgeries, or double mastectomies, each year for transmasculine patients in their late teens, according to Riley. Such surgeries require patients to undergo months of therapy beforehand, and a study published this summer showed that top surgery patients had little to no regrets decades after the operation. Both Riley and a VUMC executive, C. Wright Pinson, said that the hospital never performed “genital procedures” on minors.
But Walsh’s claims caught the eye of Republicans in Tennessee, which, with its Republican-controlled legislature, had become a paragon of a one-party state.
Hours after the tweets, Lee called for a “thorough investigation” into VUMC, and Skrmetti vowed to use the “full scope of his authority” to ensure the medical center was complying with state law.
The investigation appears to have started as early as the following morning, according to emails from Republican state Sen. Jack Johson, which HuffPost obtained through a public records request. “The Governor has already opened an investigation into Vanderbilt and I will be filing legislation to prohibit this when we come back into Session in January,” Johnson wrote to one supporter on Sept. 21, the morning after Walsh’s tweets. (The governor’s office told The Associated Press that day that it had passed along concerns about VUMC to the attorney general. Lee’s office recently told HuffPost over email that the attorney general has the “statutory authority” to open an investigation.)
The following day, Johnson responded to emails from supporters who were shocked by Walsh’s allegations, reassuring them that he was on the case — and had help.
“I absolutely agree that these surgeries should not be allowed on children,” Johnson wrote to one. “That is why I am working with Matt Walsh to introduce legislation in our upcoming legislative session to ban these transgender surgeries on children in Tennessee.”
Skrmetti’s office has said it began its probe in September 2022 after receiving a report about a Vanderbilt doctor who “publicly described her manipulation of medical billing codes to evade coverage limitations on gender-related treatment,” which raised concerns about possible fraud in the state’s Medicaid plan, TennCare. (The plan specifically excludes “sex change or transformation surgery.”)
In August 2023, a reporter with Nashville’s News Channel 5 interviewed Skrmetti. The segment showed portions of the video that Skrmetti says instigated the report: In it, Taylor discussed how she supports patients whose insurance plans don’t cover transgender health care, including saying she might write that a patient has a hormonal disorder for billing purposes so that she can order lab work for patients.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, whose office opened an investigation into Vanderbilt’s transgender health clinic.
Skrmetti, in the interview, said it was “very easy” to initiate the investigation because his office was “already aware of the potential billing issues there.” He acknowledged that the probe into medical records is “probably terrifying” for patients but said there is “no political exception to the fraud laws.”
When reached for comment, Skrmetti’s office referred HuffPost to the interview with News Channel 5 and did not respond to other questions for this story.
As the investigation went on, Skrmetti requested the private medical records of more than 150 Vanderbilt patients who used TennCare. John Howser, a Vanderbilt spokesperson, said the clinic was “compelled” to produce copies of the records, while also complying with state and federal law including HIPAA. However, many LGBTQ+ and privacy advocates across the state and country signaled they were upset that VUMC didn’t fight harder to prevent turning over patient information in the investigation.
Riley said they were “flabbergasted” to learn about the attorney general’s inquiry into the center’s billing process. “There’s so many levels of oversight and protection from that kind of false billing,” they said. “It doesn’t pass the test of reason. Providers don’t do the billing. There’s a whole department of people that review the documentation and the code.”
Patients were not told until June of this year that their records had been turned over to the attorney general. Skrmetti’s office had said it kept its “run-of-the-mill” investigation private in an attempt to avoid a “media circus” — even as it continued to broaden the scope. The attorney general requested additional patient and employee data, including the names of patients who had been referred to VUMC’s trans clinic but did not seek treatment there; information on insurance claims to TennCare; employee tax forms and emails about gender-affirming care, as well as employees’ resumes and employment contracts; and information about the clinic’s Trans Buddy volunteers.
Skrmetti’s investigation and Vanderbilt’s release of records have been criticized as an egregious overstep, and the latest ― and largest ― use of data requests by a state to undermine access to gender-affirming care.
“Trust between patients and their doctors is essential to quality care, and we regret any concern this may have caused for our patients,” Howser said in a statement to HuffPost.
In the past year, as Republican-led states have increasingly passed anti-trans legislation, GOP officials nationwide have leveraged data requests about transgender residents as one of their many tools to restrict access to medical care. In Missouri, the attorney general requested and failed to obtain medical records on trans youth, while in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis probed state universities for data on how many students sought out gender-affirming care on campus clinics. More recently, 19 Republican attorneys general ― including Skrmetti ― signed a letter pushing back against a federal rule that would shield states from requesting data on patients seeking abortion out of state.
Many trans health advocates inside and outside the state said Walsh’s posts about Vanderbilt not only seemed to provide pretext for the probe and ban on gender-affirming care, but that his inflammatory language and framing took the doctors’ words out of context and grossly mischaracterized the kinds of care that minors were receiving at the clinic.
“The biggest thing I’ve seen is just the sheer amount of terror of families of trans youth. People are really terrified that the state is going to either try to take away their children from them or put them on some kind of watch list or try to invade their privacy. There’s just a lot of fear in Tennessee right now with families,” Lucas Cameron-Vaughn, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Tennessee, told HuffPost in July.
Cameron-Vaughn is one of the attorneys representing the families of trans kids in L.W. v. Skrmetti, the American Civil Liberties Union’s ongoing lawsuit against the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. The ban was recently upheld by a federal appeals court ruling.
“It may sound extreme to you when I say that we’re living in a totalitarian state,” Democratic state Sen. Heidi Campbell told HuffPost. “Before I became a state senator I don’t think those words would have come out of my mouth. But it’s really just the truth. There are no checks and balances in this government anymore. We’re seeing that with Skrmetti, who is hired by us to protect the people who live in this state, and is actively attacking our own citizens.”
‘State-Sponsored Intimidation’
On Sept. 21, 2022, just one day after Walsh’s initial “report” about VUMC, he tweeted that he had met with Johnson and Republican state Rep. William Lamberth to work on a bill to end gender-affirming care for youth. A few weeks later, ahead of the state’s midterm election on Nov. 8, Lamberth penned an opinion piece promising he would “partner” with Walsh to halt that care for minors if he were reelected to the House.
Cameron-Vaughn wasn’t surprised that Walsh’s posts lined up neatly ahead of the state’s election. “It seems like this sort of campaign against Vanderbilt was designed to scandalize Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s gender clinic by creating a deliberately false narrative right before the election,” he said.
Lamberth and Johnson both won their bids for reelection, and filed identical bills to ban care for minors months before the start of the 2023 legislative session. In February, as the bill passed swiftly through committee meetings, Walsh attended a House meeting to give an expert testimony.
State Rep. John Ray Clemmons, a Democrat who represents Nashville, was one of few legislators to question Walsh’s expertise and knowledge of best practices for transgender youth during a committee meeting on health.
“What qualifies me is that I am a human being with a brain and common sense and a soul, and therefore I think it’s a really bad idea to chemically castrate children,” Walsh said during questioning.
“You don’t use [your research] to get clicks on your publication?” Clemmons asked.
Matt Walsh, a right-wing blogger, claimed that doctors at Vanderbilt’s transgender health clinic “castrate” and “sterilize” children.
When the bill passed swiftly through each chamber of Tennessee’s government, it was clear to Clemmons that Walsh was something new. He was the gasoline reigniting an already burning fire in Tennessee. Republicans had long been trying to pass various bans on gender-affirming care, but had been largely unsuccessful. In 2021, Tennessee succeeded in barring doctors from prescribing hormone therapy for prepubescent minors — which in reality, advocates say, was not even happening in the state.
But this opened the door for Lamberth and Johnson to go further. Their legislation allows the state to ban puberty blockers, hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgeries for all transgender minors. Youth who are already receiving care will have to terminate it by March of next year, and providers have already begun weaning adolescents off hormones.
Walsh’s voice had eclipsed the dozens of opponents to the bills ― including transgender youth and their parents, LGBTQ+ advocates, and clinicians ― who showed up each week at the statehouse to share their stories about how access to gender-affirming care was very often the buffer between life and death.
Clemmons said he watched with horror as Walsh and his media outlet, the Daily Wire, helped steer conversations among some of his colleagues.
“Obviously the attorney general in this state is taking marching orders from him, which is embarrassing considering he’s not even elected,” Clemmons told HuffPost, referring to Walsh. “This is a new brand of extremism that’s very dangerous, that openly admits to wanting to burn books on the House floor, that openly admits to wanting to limit people’s rights. It’s scary.”
“This is state-sponsored intimidation and that’s never played out well in history,” he added.
The attorney general’s office declined to comment on its relationship with Walsh.
Lee, the governor, signed the ban into law at the beginning of March.
“This kind of bill had been filed in previous years and did not pass because there were divisions among Republicans on intervening in medical decisions. But there was an almost complete lockstep unanimity that they were going to pass the bill in 2023,” said Chris Sanders, the executive director of the Tennessee Equality Project.
“So Mr. Walsh is the first mover on this in a lot of ways in terms of getting a consensus built in the Republican caucus. He is not the first to think of it, but he’s partly responsible for jelling the consensus in Tennessee.”
By the end of the session in April, Tennessee had also become the first state to pass a ban on drag performances, in addition to enacting laws that defined sex as a person’s “immutable biological sex,” and allowed teachers to misgender students.
Since 2015, Tennessee has enacted 19 anti-LGBTQ+ laws, more than any other state in the country.
‘An Attempted Hostile Takeover’
This all might not have been possible if Walsh’s workplace hadn’t been given a royal welcome to the Volunteer State.
The Daily Wire, a one-stop-shop of conservative entertainment and merch — including original documentaries, TV shows, children’s programming and “woke free” razor blades ― has been likened to the right’s answer to Hollywood with a roster of conservative hosts including Walsh, Candace Owens and Jordan Peterson.
The company, which was co-founded by columnist Ben Shapiro, relocated its headquarters from Los Angeles to Nashville in 2020. The next year, Tennessee state lawmakers passed a resolution to embrace Shapiro and his “truth seekers,” and celebrate their move out of “liberal California.”
“We congratulate Ben Shapiro and his associates at The Daily Wire on their relocation to Tennessee and extend to them our best wishes for continued success in discovering and disseminating the truth,” the resolution stated.
Walsh (left) is among the Daily Wire hosts who relocated to Nashville when the company, co-founded by columnist Ben Shapiro (right), moved there in 2020.
Campbell is highly critical of how her colleagues rolled out the welcome mat for the conservative company. “This is an attempted hostile takeover of Nashville because they really want Nashville to be their first right-wing big city,” she said.
By the time Walsh moved his family to Nashville, he was already practiced in “exposing” the ills of same-sex marriage and laws that protected transgender Americans’ rights to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender.
“Millions of Americans have lost their grip on reality,” he wrote in a 2014 blog post arguing that trans people don’t exist. “This is the real crisis, and it’s far more urgent than most of what they’re talking about on the news right now.”
In the past few years, however, Walsh has turned toward a “just asking questions”-style attack on trans people. He built up mainstream notoriety and a career of lecturing at colleges after the release of his 2022 documentary, “What is A Woman,” which also sows doubt about the existence of transgender people. A self-described “theocratic fascist,” Walsh has also argued that trans people are “groomers” and part of a cult, and made posts mocking immigrants and Black people.
And last August, Walsh responded after the right-wing account LibsofTikTok posted a barrage of false claims about the care Boston Children’s Hospital provides. He called on his followers for “an organized effort to fight back against the drugging and mutilating of children.” Then the hospital, which is the country’s first pediatric transgender health program, received twoseparatebomb threats. Walsh brushed off the threats as a “leftist hoax.”
Tennessee Republicans have echoed similar anti-trans rhetoric.
At the end of 2022, the Tennessee Republican Caucus sent out a survey, asking constituents for their opinions about a number of issues including abortion and parental rights in schools. In a section called “protecting children,” the survey asks conservatives if they favor policies preventing “minors from cutting off healthy body parts in order to change their gender identity.” There weren’t any questions about guns or firearm reform in the survey, even though the Tennessee Department of Health found that the leading cause of death for children in the state was homicide, 86% of which were due to gun violence.
Late last October, Nashvillians had a glimpse of what Walsh’s version of the Music City might look like when he held his “Rally to End Child Mutilation” at the state Capitol, which garnered around 1,500 protesters, including some Proud Boys.
Walsh speaks during a rally against gender-affirming care in Nashville, Tennessee, at the War Memorial Plaza on Oct. 21, 2022.
There was Walsh, the bespectacled and bearded 37-year-old, standing on stage alongside Johnson and Lamberth, as well as other conservative figures including Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), who announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party last year. Other right-wing media stars, including Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old detransitioner who has testified across the country in support of bans on transition care for minors, also took the stage to speak.
“We are all here today because of this information that Matt brought forward and showed what was taking place just down the street right here in Nashville, and showing how the radical left is trying to put their woke agenda on every single family in this country,” Blackburn told the crowd.
State Sen. Janice Bowling (R) was also present, passing out fliers with what she called “graphic” photos of genital reconstruction surgeries some transgender people may choose to undergo. After the event, she wrote to Johnson that many of the rally’s attendees didn’t know “about the assaults these surgeries are on the bodies of these children,” according to emails obtained by HuffPost. (Two Vanderbilt employees have confirmed to HuffPost that the center never performed genital surgeries on children, as is standard among clinicians of trans care.)
“Upon looking at the photos, their resolve to ‘stay the course in our opposition’ was magnified,” Bowling wrote. “A picture is truly worth a thousand words.”
‘Misinformation Is Like A Snake’
Patients were shocked to find out that their personal medical information had been shared with the attorney general — and some experienced emotional whiplash when they learned they might have been misinformed about their records being turned over. One family of a trans teen who spoke to HuffPost was first notified in June that Vanderbilt had turned over the teen’s records; two months later, the medical center told the family the teen’s records weren’t among those given to Skrmetti.
By then, the family, which requested to remain anonymous due to concerns for their safety, had already driven hundreds of miles to North Carolina to make sure their child could continue hormone therapy.
“We depend on our care providers to be honest with us,” the mother told HuffPost. “They have precious lives in their hands. I don’t know whether to believe this or not.”
In early September this year, a spokesperson at Vanderbilt confirmed that not all of the 150 records that were originally requested by Skrmetti were shared with his office.
“We have since confirmed that records for only 82 of these patients were provided to the Attorney General’s office,” said Howser, the spokesperson for VUMC, in an emailed statement to HuffPost. “After learning of this, we notified the remaining patients, whose records were requested but not provided, that their records have not been produced to the Attorney General’s office.”
Howser did not respond to further questions about why only 82 records were shared and whether the records of the remaining patients could be shared with the attorney general in the future.
“Obviously the attorney general in this state is taking marching orders from [Walsh], which is embarrassing considering he’s not even elected.”
– Democratic state Rep. John Ray Clemmons
The chaos, fear and lack of clarity surrounding the investigation has affected how VUMC operated over the last year. In addition to changes in health care offered, the medical center has removed some information about gender-affirming care from its website.
Riley said they can understand why Vanderbilt did what it could to avoid unwanted attention ― but said such changes did a disservice to those who might look to the clinic as a resource.
“Because of people like Matt Walsh, it forces that whole practice into the shadows, which has a negative impact on patients in that now they may not know about the practice because there’s no media presence about it,” Riley said.
Even with multiple statements rejecting Walsh’s claims, it has been an uphill battle to dispel the factual errors about the clinic. “Misinformation is like a snake,” Riley said. “It just moves and shifts and you can say anything you want about facts and have all the patients that have had excellent outcomes…but it doesn’t make a bit of difference to the attorney general.”
Though the clinic can no longer provide gender-affirming medical treatment for youth, Riley said they and their colleagues are “more in it than ever before” as they continue to service trans adults.
“We’re more supportive even if we’re not able to do all the things we were able to before. It kind of galvanizes a community of people to say, ‘This is wrong. We’re going to keep doing the right thing,’” they said, emphasizing that the care they provide complies within the bounds of the state’s law.
Clemmons believes that Skrmetti is “abusing his discovery powers that require no judicial oversight,” and the state’s actions are ushering in “a whole new day of invasion of privacy.” But he is hopeful that the time will come, not too far down the line, when the flames fan out.
The results of the national midterm elections showed that running on anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric has been a losing battle for Republicans.
Still, right-wing media continues to influence voters in a way that has shifted their political ideology to further extremes ― and now politicians are trying to play catch-up.
Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director at Media Matters, who has spent much of her time tracking Walsh’s rise, said Walsh was able to capitalize on his boost in followers after the Boston Children’s Hospital incident and translate that into a similar push of vitriol in his home state.
“I think part of the dynamic is that many Republican politicians, including in the presidential race, are competing in a field of voters who’ve been radicalized by personalities like Matt Walsh and who are expecting to hear the same rhetoric from politicians that they’re hearing in podcasts and on YouTube,” she said. “And so I would say that it’s a case of politicians chasing Walsh’s audience more than the other way around.”
“Nashville has fought hard to be a community that welcomes everyone, and Matt Walsh has just come in and disregarded that by homogenizing the politics in the city.”
– Roberto Che Espinoza, a trans divinity scholar and Baptist clergyperson
The impact of Walsh’s rhetoric ― and Skrmetti’s ongoing investigation ― could not be any more palpable than in the stories of transgender youth and adults who are trying to find the ways to relocate to more trans-friendly states or venture on long journeys to receive medical care elsewhere.
The Tennessee family of a trans teen said their out-of-state trip was only possible with the help of a $500 grant from a nonprofit. They worry about future appointments, which will be expensive and are increasingly challenging to find. States across the South — including North Carolina, which had for many been a safe haven in the region — are banning transition care for youth.
“We’ll probably have to shuffle some things around to pay for it,” the mother said. “We will still have electricity and running water and a house to live in. There may not be as many fun or extra things going on.”
Vanderbilt is now the subject of a larger federal investigation by the Department of Human Health Services for its allegedly “unauthorized” release of medical records. And in July, two former Vanderbilt patients filed a class-action lawsuit against the medical center, alleging it had violated their privacy by turning their records to Skrmetti. The suit is ongoing but VUMC’s attorney has filed motions to ask the judge to dismiss the case.
Howser, the Vanderbilt spokesperson, declined to comment on the federal investigation or the class-action suit.
‘Weaponization Of Religion’
For some Tennesseans, the only path forward is to leave.
Roberto Che Espinoza, a trans divinity scholar and Baptist clergyperson, left the state last month after learning his medical records had been shared with the attorney general. (Espinoza, who is in his 40s, has not received an update about his records from Vanderbilt.)
Espinoza lived in Nashville for six years. He was active in the local LGBTQ+ community and often participated in social justice movements across the South, including protesting against white supremacists at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
When Espinoza saw Walsh’s posts about Vanderbilt, he went on Twitter to speak up about what he saw as a hateful distortion of Christianity.
“I was really vocal about the weaponization of religion and the dehumanization that the extreme right is peddling,” he told HuffPost. “I just tried to do my part as both a Christian minister and for my fellow trans comrades who are just trying to live their fucking lives.”
After that, Espinoza said he started getting harassed on Twitter.
“Nashville has fought hard to be a community that welcomes everyone, and Matt Walsh has just come in and disregarded that by homogenizing the politics in the city,” he said.
The week before he was set to receive gender-affirming surgery at Vanderbilt, Espinoza said the Proud Boys targeted him on Telegram. His wife told him, “I don’t know how much longer I have with you.”
Espinoza said he went from being active in Nashville’s queer religious community to feeling like a prisoner in his own home: “It was a very scary time and no way to live.”
The release of his medical records this summer was the last straw. Espinoza crowdfunded $12,000 to leave the South.
He and his wife have been building a new community in the woods. Espinoza has been enjoying grilling outside and lifting weights, and is grateful for the mundane moments of life. “I am sleeping at night and eating three meals a day,” he said. “I am able to leave my house without anxiety. It’s wonderful.”
At certain times of day, Espinoza cannot help but feel those twitches of grief. He never wanted to leave the South. He misses the “slow time.” He misses porch visits. But he would rather be “exiled” in the north than feel the weight of fear and anxiety he shouldered not too long ago.
Riley, however, is determined to remain in Tennessee, even as they worry that they and their colleagues will one day be pushed out of the state because of fear for their own personal and professional safety.
“I think the right thing to do is to stay,” they said. “If we all leave, then that’s exactly what they want. It just becomes one homogenous place.”
Eddie Ashley was looking for a hookup. So like countless others on a Saturday night in New York City, he went to The Ritz, a gay bar in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.
He drank too much, he said. And he did end up going home with someone — one of his victims.
Eighteen months later, Ashley, 30, was sentenced to nine years in state prison for robbing the man he left the bar with in May 2022, along with various other crimes he pleaded guilty to committing in recent years.
Authorities said Ashley and the victim went to the victim’s apartment several blocks north of the bar, and Ashley stole the man’s phone and wallet.
But this was not, prosecutors said, a one-off robbery among so many others across the city on any given night. The encounter was part of a broader crime ring in which authorities said at least 16 victims, many of them gay men, were targeted from September 2021 to August 2022 at bars and nightclubs, then often drugged and robbed of thousands of dollars while they were incapacitated. In several cases, surviving victims and their family members believe the assailants used facial recognition technology to unlock their mark’s phones. Two of the men were killed. Ashley denies knowledge of the wider crime ring and was not charged with murder.
The attacks happened quietly throughout the city’s busy nightlife, striking run-of-the-mill bars, multistory nightclubs, and underground gay leather bars across two Manhattan neighborhoods, with intoxicated gay men often the targets. The danger lurking in the venues didn’t come into broad public view until May 2022 — eight months after it started — when NBC News reported that a 25-year-old gay man had been killed.
After months of pressure from the victims’ families, the news media and politicians, the New York City Police Department said it had finally cracked the case: Officers arrested six suspects earlier this year who they said were part of the drugging-and-robbery ring. The arrests were announced at a news conference that included the mayor, police commissioner and the Manhattan district attorney — and was met with long-awaited relief within the city’s gay community.
People hold signs for a vigil commemorating Julio Ramirez in New York in June 2022.Julius Constantine Motal / NBC News
Five of the suspects pleaded not guilty charges that included murder, conspiracy and grand larceny.
Eddie Ashley, though, admitted he was guilty.
One of the four crimes to which he pleaded guilty, the May 2022 robbery, was linked by prosecutors to the broader crime ring. Awaiting his sentencing three weeks ago, he asked if theexpected punishment fit the crime.
“I lost a lot being in here, financially, I lost my grandma — so I’m kind of messed up. This is basically a bad situation right now for something that was just one night,” Ashley told NBC News at Rikers Island jail complex in his first interview about the crimes.
Ashley’s sentencing is the most significant development in the year-old case, and it provides the best insights yet into how the investigation unfolded. But it also highlights how much is still not known.
A separate crime ring was committing similar crimes at bars in Manhattan’s Lower East Side within the same time period, according to prosecutors. Some victims still don’t know if their specific cases are linked to one or the other alleged crime ring — or neither. And there’s even bigger gaps: One man remembers being victimized in March of this year by a woman — yet all the people who have been charged are men.
And almost all of the victims who spoke with NBC News say they wonder whether the reign of terror afflicting New York City’s nightlife still continues, unnoticed once again.
Julio Ramirez and John Umberger.Ramirez family photo; Linda Clary
Julio Ramirez was a 25-year-old social worker. John Umberger was a 33-year-old political consultant. Both went out to gay bars in Hell’s Kitchen 38 days apart last spring. Both ended up drugged, robbed and dead.
Police initially told relatives that their deaths appeared to be self-inflicted: accidental overdoses, the families said.
But that didn’t add up to the families. They suspected foul play.
Both Ramirez and Umberger each left a bar with at least one man. Both had their bank accounts drained. Both appeared to be reading text messages on their phoneafter their bodies were found.
“Right away I knew something was wrong,” Ramirez’s brother, Carlos, said. “He would never intentionally take any drugs or anything that could harm him.”
Umberger’s family was similarly not convinced by the police explanation.
To them, “it looked like John had gone out to a club, been robbed, emptied his credit cards out of his wallet — but he still had his wallet, no phone — and he came home and did a bunch of drugs because he was so depressed over what happened,” Umberger’s mother, Linda Clary, previously told NBC News. “That’s where it was like, ‘I’m sorry, that’s not my child.’ I can assure you if that were to happen, that’s not what John would have done.”
Both families were determined to take matters into their own hands.
In the days following her son’s death last spring, Clary flew to New York from her home in Georgia, seeking answers. With the help of six family members and her son’s friends, she retraced his last steps from what she gathered from his bank transactions, phone records and those who saw him last. Similarly, after several failed login attempts to Ramirez’s computer, Carlos Ramirez gained access and uncovered suspicious banking records from his brother’s accounts. Clary and Ramirez both said thousands of dollars had been drained from their loved one’s accounts following their deaths.
Both families took their findings to the NYPD.
“They looked at us like we were from outer space,” Clary previously said. “No one was interested in finding out the truth.”
Two days after speaking with authorities, Clary said a homicide detective was assigned to her son’s case.
But still frustrated with the pace of the investigations, both families brought their stories to the media, hoping it would put pressure on authorities.
Had she not gone to reporters, Clary speculated, “it would have continued to be pushed under the carpet, and things would still be going on.”
Linda Clary in her home in Highlands, N.C. Will Crooks for NBC News
Once the news of Umberger’s death became known, gay men who said they had survived similarly harrowing experiences stepped forward to share their stories publicly.
NBC News spoke with six people who say they or their family members had been the victims of crimes from December 2021 to this March that broadly fit the pattern of the Ramirez and Umberger cases. Many of the victims say the suspects used their faces while incapacitated to unlock their phones, via facial recognition technology, and access their bank accounts. Some of them asked that their names not be published out of fear of retaliation by the people who harmed them. All of the men say they filed police reports shortly after their encounters occurred and most said their cases are ongoing.
In December 2021, Tyler Burt, 28, was walking home after a night out with friends when he stopped in at the Boiler Room, a gay bar in Manhattan’s East Village for one last drink. Sitting alone at the bar was the last thing he remembered before waking up the next day in his apartment fully clothed, with his shoes still on and roughly $15,000 and personal belongings stolen, Burt said.
“I feel lucky in a way that I didn’t get murdered,” Burt said. “Something horrible happened to me, but I’m still alive to tell the tale. I’m very grateful for that.”
Tyler Burt in New York.Vincent Tullo for NBC News
In July 2022, a 51-year-old Manhattan resident said he woke up on his living room floor in a pile of his own vomit after having a single drink at the 9th Avenue Saloon, a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen. The last thing he remembered was saying goodbye to his friends. He said that he had a single drink the entire evening and that roughly $8,000 had been taken from his account.
“The only reason I didn’t die was because they left me on my stomach,” he said. “And thank God I wasn’t raped.”
“Why can’t I go out and have fun and not worry that I’m not going to make it home?” the man added.
And this March, Michael, a 30-year-old gay man, said he was approached by an unknown woman after visiting The Eagle NYC, a gay bar in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. When he came to, he said, the same woman — who he said knew his name — was shaking him on an empty street in East Harlem, about 80 blocks north of the bar, “trying to get rid of me.” The next day, he realized that $5,000 was missing from his bank account.
“The way that they systematically went through all of my banking and credit card apps on my phone, it was like practice,” he said. “You could tell that they’d done this before.”
The medical examiner’s office ruled in March that Ramirez and Umberger’s deaths were homicides caused by a “drug-facilitated theft.” Multiple drugs were found in their systems, including fentanyl, lidocaine and cocaine.
In the following weeks, six men — Ashley, Jayqwan Hamilton, 36; Robert Demaio, 35; Jacob Barroso, 30; Andre Butts, 29; and Shane Hoskins, 32 — were chargedin connection with the crime scheme that led to the deaths of Ramirez and Umberger. Three — Hamilton, Demaio and Barroso — were charged with murder.
While many of the victims were gay men, all were targeted for financial gain and not because of their sexual orientation, prosecutors said.
The initial court appearance in April for three of the suspects — two of whom were charged with murder — was tense.
The small Manhattan courtroom was packed with family members and friends of the deceased sitting across a tight aisle from the family and friends of the men accused of killing their loved ones.
When the three defendants appeared, they were surrounded by a swarm of roughly a dozen court officers. Carlos Ramirez and his parents were visibly distressed, realizing they were seated directly behind where the defendants would be sitting, prompting others in the gallery to make room for them to move.
“It was such a bad, dark feeling just thinking that these were the last people my brother was with when he died,” Ramirez said. “That just really messed me up.”
As the judge spoke, a relative of one of the defendants got into a verbal altercation with a police officer after the officer asked them to quiet down. When the man asked why, the officer got in the man’s face and screamed: “Because I said so! You’re in our house.” When the man yelled expletives back, he was escorted out of the courtroom by several officers.
Once the courtroom became quiet again, all that could be heard through the whispers were the sniffles of tearful grieving family members.
Outside, supporters of one of the suspects, Barroso, went in front of the news cameras and yelled that he is “not a murderer. You guys got this backwards. We will prove his innocence.”
A few weeks later, Clary flew from Georgia to New York to attend the first court appearance for Hamilton, one of the two men charged in her son’s murder.
It was the first time she had been to New York since recovering her son’s body.
At the courthouse she was swarmed by a gaggle of reporters and news cameras, which she described as “overwhelming.” The attention on Clary was unsurprising.
After months of raising awareness about the gay bar killings, Clary — a devout Christian from the South — had become somewhat of a leading voice for the safety and well-being of New York City’s gay men.
“It does strike me as being odd the more that I think about it though,” Clary said. “Here you are in New York, the bastion of progressivism, and yet I’m the one having to raise the flag.”
“Life is full of ironies,” she added.
Linda Clary in her home in Highlands, N.C. Will Crooks for NBC News
Ashley grew up downtown. As a high school dropout, he said he had been working toward earning some sort of employment certificate before he was sent to Rikers. He was living with his elderly grandmother in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and taking care of her.
“I had a lot of s— going on before,” Ashley said. “I was trying to get my life together.”
On May 14, 2022, Ashley went to The Ritz — the same bar where Ramirez was last seen a month before — looking for a hookup, he said. He said he had been to the bar two or three times before.
Prosecutors said Ashley left the bar and went to the apartment of the man whose phone and wallet Ashley would later steal. Ashley said he does not remember going back to the man’s apartment but does remember that he had not met the man before. He described the man as being in his 20s and Latino.
The Ritz Bar and Lounge in Hell’s Kitchen.Julius Constantine Motal / NBC News
Police obtained security footage of Ashley using the victim’s phone to pay for Taco Bell that same morning via Apple Pay, according to prosecutors. Ashley said he does remember getting Taco Bell but suggested the victim could have bought him food.
In April, Ashley was arrested and charged with robbery, grand larceny, petit larceny and identity theft for four incidents from October 2021 to August 2022, including the May 2022 encounter, which was linked to the broader crime scheme, according to prosecutors. Unable to make bail, he was sent to the notorious Rikers Island jail.
After nearly seven months there, Ashley said he changed his plea to guilty so he can serve time in prison elsewhere. For years, the massive jail complex has been under scrutiny by criminal justice activists and lawmakers from around the country for its allegedly “inhumane conditions.”
Ashley had one word to describe his time at Rikers: “rough.”
He said he’s been in fights with inmates, adding, “Maybe two or three altercations with officers’ use of force, but that’s about it.”
Being in custody has also taken an immense emotional toll, he said. His grandmother died while he was behind bars.
He explained that, regardless of the other crimes he committed, he believes the May 2022 encounter had an outsize impact on his sentencing because it was linked to the wider scheme.
Ashley was not charged with murder and was not present on the nights of either Ramirez’s or Umberger’s deaths, according to prosecutors. He said he only found out about the wider crime scheme when he obtained an attorney upon his arraignment.
“I knew it had nothing to do with me,” he said of victims who were drugged and died.
Prosecutors allege that another one of the six suspects, Hamilton, who was charged with murder in the deaths of both Ramirez and Umberger, was present on the night Ashley committed the robbery in May 2022. Hamilton was accused of giving Ashley’s victim an unknown illicit substance outside the bar and using the victim’s phone to steal $2,000 from his bank accounts. Hamilton’s lawyer declined to comment.
Ashley said he remembers Hamilton being at the bar that night, but he maintains that he never saw Hamilton drugging anyone. Ashley declined to say how he knew Hamilton, citing Hamilton’s ongoing case, but said they were not friends. He also denied knowing any of the other four defendants.
After sitting with NBC News in the Rikers visitors’ hall — a nearly empty room that could seat hundreds — for about 15 minutes, Ashley called a correction officer over to end the meeting.
“I don’t even care anymore,” Ashley said when asked about being connected by authorities to a broader scheme that led to the death of two men, walking off. “It’s behind me.”
People hold signs for a vigil commemorating Julio Ramirez in New York in June 2022.Julius Constantine Motal / NBC News
For the victims and families of the deceased, the yearslong crime scheme has been difficult to leave behind.
Many of the victims who spoke with NBC News described re-entering New York City’s nightlife scene with apprehension.
The 51-year-old man said he’s been out only once or twice since he was robbed. He said he’s afraid that his assailants — who he said do not appear to be any of the suspects arrested in recent months — might recognize him.
“I go straight to work and straight to home,” he said. “I’m always looking around; I’m always suspicious of everything.”
Michael said he is slowly trying to re-enter New York’s nightlife scene after being abandoned in East Harlem.
“My therapist has told me to be more discerning around people, and that’s a good defense mechanism, but I don’t really like that, you know?” Michael said. “I like the person I am. I like being friendly and trusting and open, and it would really suck if that’s something that was permanently changed by this experience.”
Michael went back to The Eagle NYC for the first time last month. Instead of opting for a late night out, he went for happy hour earlier in the evening.
All but one of the surviving victims who spoke with NBC News said they still have facial recognition software on their phones out of convenience. Some note that the larger issue is the danger of being drugged, regardless of whether a criminal can unlock a person’s phone and steal their money.
The Ramirez family did not celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas last year, Carlos said, and does not plan on doing so this year either. For Carlos personally, he said he misses his best friend.
“When something happens and it’s good news and he’s not here, I can’t share it with him. It kind of takes away from it,” Carlos said. “That’s really hard.”
Clary said she hasn’t built up the courage to go through her son’s belongings in his apartment in Washington, D.C. More recently, she’s made a handful of trips to New York City for the pretrial court appearances of the suspects charged in connection with her son’s death.
Clary has been enjoying her new role as a grandmother in recent months. But even that, she said, has been challenging at times.
“That whole experience is diminished because John is not here,” she said. “At some point I have to let go of John not being here and trust God that He has a plan that this life, that we think is everything, is so small compared to eternity.”
When she’s in New York, she said she likes to frequent some of her son’s favorite restaurants in Manhattan: The Waverly Inn in the West Village, Minetta Tavern in Greenwich Village and La Goulue on the Upper East Side, across the street from the apartment where her son died.
“It is a kind of ridiculous, not logical thing,” Clary said. “But you like to go to the places he enjoyed being at because you’re thinking, ‘Yeah, this is the closest thing you have to him being here.’”
Linda Clary holds a family photo of her and her son John Umberger at her home in Highlands, N.C. Will Crooks for NBC News
It’s been more than two years since authorities say this crime ring, which largely targeted gay bars, began. Yet victims of similar crimes to the ones that killed Ramirez and Umberger say they are still nearly as perplexed about the encounters as they were when they first regained consciousness immediately afterward.
Michael said police and prosecutors told him his case was linked to the same group being charged in the two men’s deaths. Police sources also confirmed the connection with NBC News.
However, Michael said authorities were never able to identify the sole person he remembers from the encounter: an unknown woman.
“That tells me that there are still people on the streets who did this to me, to other people,” Michael said. “There’s no way they caught everyone who were doing these robberies.”
Some survivors have even less clarity. They say police told them their cases have not been connected to the ring related to Ramirez and Umberger or the second known ring.
A 48-year-old man, who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation from people involved in his encounter, said he was drugged and robbed after visiting The Eagle NYC in October 2022. He said his case is still ongoing.
“I know what happened legally with the Hell’s Kitchen cases, but I feel like The Eagle cases just sort of fell off the radar,” the man said. “Were they connected to other cases? Have they all been caught? Are there suspects still at large? Is this still happening?”
The NYPD and mayor’s office launched a program in June to re-examine unsolved drugging, robbery and homicide cases involving LGBTQ victims, which was largely seen as a response to criticisms surviving victims made in the news media.
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office said that the NYPD has not received any requests to have cases re-examined as of last month and that the lack of applications could suggest that there is not a need to re-examine any cases.
However, Burt said he applied to have his case re-examined in June. He said he tried following up with the NYPD in July, but he did not receive a response to his last emails, which he shared with NBC News.
“I’m just disappointed in how this whole thing has been handled,” Burt said. “Every step of the way has made me feel like this is not a priority.”
Tyler Burt in New York.Vincent Tullo for NBC News
The NYPD defended how the cases were handled.
“The Detective Bureau is committed to conducting solid, high-quality investigations and ensuring that each investigation is handled efficiently with dedication and professionalism,” an NYPD spokesperson said in an email.
Michael suggested that while it is important to find and punish those who were responsible for the past crimes, it is equally paramount that people understand that the technological tactics used to access their financial accounts are likely being replicated by others.
“As long as there is a convenient way for you to unlock your phone without having to enter a pin, people are going to use it and people are going to find ways to exploit it,” he said. “Awareness is the most important thing.”
“Maybe they’re laying low, maybe it’s hard to find them,” he added, “but they’re definitely still out there.”
On November 12, Paul Glass and Charles D. Evans of Falmouth were honored with this year’s AARP Andrus Award for Community Service. It’s AARP’s most prestigious and visible state volunteer award for community service. They are the first married and Black gay couple in AARP’s history to receive the award.
AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, is one of the largest organizations in the country. With a membership of over 38 million members as of 2018, it focuses on issues affecting Americans over the age of fifty. The AARP Andrus Award for Community Service is an annual awards program developed to honor individuals whose service is a unique and valuable contribution to their community and society, reflecting AARP’s vision and mission.
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“I am beyond honored and grateful for this recognition. I feel we are not put on this earth to exist but to be of service to others and our community,” Evans told LGBTQ Nation.
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When AARP Massachusetts was looking to honor the state’s top volunteer, Glass and Evans’s names rose to the top. They have made a difference in the lives around them, sharing their knowledge, experience, talent, and skills to enrich the lives of our community. Since childhood, their indefatigable spirit to give back to their community was ingrained in them.
“Paul and Charles have channeled the many negative experiences they endured into positive, healing, and inspiring volunteer work and leadership,” wrote Barrie Atkin of Swampscott, who nominated the couple.
“Their signature work co-founding LGBTQ+ Elders of Color in 2013 in Massachusetts was innovative, unusual, and courageous. No such organization existed at that time. In collaboration with the LGBTQ+ Aging Project, they identified the need and turned the need into a reality. They didn’t just co-found the organization along with others. Their continued leadership inspires many others to be involved.”
People of color are underrepresented and underserved when it comes to aging services and resources. Paul and Charles understand the intersectional challenges and complexities of growing older as African-American gay men.
LGBTQ+ senior communities with multiple identities confront multiple challenges. Their organization, LGBTQ+ Elders of Color, fills the gap missed by Massachusetts LGBTQ+ organizations and local, state, and federal public health systems. Outreach is essential because the challenges facing Black LGBTQ+ seniors intensify with age.
According to Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders (Sage) and the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), approximately one-third of LGBTQ+ elders live at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, with 40 percent being Black.
These seniors often feel more vulnerable, invisible, and isolated by retirement. Historical and ongoing discrimination has created significant lifelong challenges for this demographic: limited wealth and savings, low wages, few labor protections, housing instability, food insecurity, stigma, immigration, HIV status, and higher mortality from treatable conditions. All have contributed to a lack of well-being and a lower quality of life.
By 2050, POC seniors will comprise over 40 percent of the elderly population, and approximately 3 million seniors will identify as LGBTQ+. With this projection, specific cultural and linguistic competence training and nondiscrimination policies are needed to support a rapidly growing demographic group that has experienced a lifetime of health, educational, and economic disparities.
In 2018, Massachusetts legislators passed “An Act Relative to LGBT Awareness Training for Aging Services Providers” mandating LGBTQ+ cultural awareness training for all state-funded and licensed aging service providers within 12 months of employment.
The challenges experienced by aging LGBTQ+ people of color can only be remedied by policymakers and aggressive programs invested in expanding care and services specifically targeted to these racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse communities.
These Dapper Dans, as I fondly dubbed them, provide unique and invaluable resources for LGBTQ+ elders of color. Their impact reverberates throughout the Bay State.
“Since relocating to Massachusetts on Cape Cod in 2002 and our subsequent retirement, we have enriched our lives with stronger connections to the community through outreach and advocacy,” Glass told the audience at the award ceremony. “To some, retirement may mean the opportunity to relax and take it easy. To us, retirement has provided an opportunity to find new ways to help others.”
Without the foundation people like Paul and Charles have laid for LGBTQ+ elders of color, we wouldn’t be the vibrant, visible, and growing community that we are.
Law enforcement authorities in Nigeria are using the country’s same-sex prohibition law to target the LGBTQ community while ignoring abuses against them, rights groups and lawyers say, in the wake of fresh mass arrests of gay people.
Nigeria is one of more than 30 of Africa’s 54 countries where homosexuality is criminalized in laws that are broadly supported by the public, even though the constitution guarantees freedom from discrimination, and the right to private and family life.
Mass arrests and detention of queer Nigerians that continued this week were done without proper investigations and could further expose them to danger amid the anti-LGBTQ sentiments in Africa’s most populous country, rights groups said.
The country’s paramilitary agency on Monday announced the arrest of more than 70 young people — 59 men and 17 women — in the northern Gombe state, accusing them of “holding homosexual birthdays” and having “the intention to hold a same-sex marriage.”
Following a similar detention of more than 60 people at what the police called a gay wedding in the southern Delta state in August, the arrests show “an uptick in this trend of witchhunt and gross violation of human rights” of the individuals, Isa Sanusi, director of Amnesty International Nigeria, told The Associated Press.
The arrests also suggest states are emulating one another “to get accolades” under the law, according to Anietie Ewang, Nigerian researcher with the Human Rights Watch’s Africa Division. She said concerns highlighted by the organization in a 2016 report — about the abuse and stigma that gay people face in Nigeria — have remained.
Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2013, which has been condemned internationally but is supported by many in the country of more than 210 million people, punishes gay marriage with up to 14 years in prison and has forced many Nigerian gays to flee the country, according to human rights activists.
Arrests under the law have been common since it came into effect but the largest mass detentions yet have been in recent weeks in which some of the suspects were falsely accused and subjected to inhumane conditions, according to lawyers and rights groups.
After dozens were arrested at what the police called a gay wedding in a Delta state hotel, the suspects were paraded in front of cameras in a live social media broadcast despite a ruling by a Nigerian high court last year that pretrial media parades violate the nation’s constitution.
One of those paraded said he was at the hotel for another engagement. Another suspect said he does not identify as a gay individual and was arrested while on his way to a fashion show.
In Gombe, where the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) said its personnel arrested people who “intended” to organize a gay wedding, the prime suspect identified as Bashir Sani denied the allegation.
“There was no wedding, only birthday,” he said in a broadcast aired by local media.
Among those arrested were the photographer and the disc jockey at the event, Ochuko Ohimor, the suspects’ lawyer, told The Associated Press.
It is part of a trend that shows how the anti-gay law is being “exploited” without due process, said Okechukwu Nwanguma, who leads the Rule of Law and Accountability Advocacy Centre, which advocates for police reforms in Nigeria.
One evidence of such a flawed process, lawyers said, is the failed trial of the 47 men arrested in 2018 and charged with public displays of affection for members of same sex at a hotel in Lagos. A local court dismissed the case in 2020 because of what it described as the “lack of diligent prosecution” after the police failed to present some witnesses.
“They (law enforcement authorities) are exploiting the law to target people whether or not they are queer … There is a tendency to target them based on assumptions or allegations, not based on any investigation,” said Nwanguma.
Such blanket arrests and media parade are not only discriminatory but also pose a high risk of further endangering people for their real or perceived sexual or gender orientation, said Amnesty International’s Sanusi.
“Since the signing of Same Sex Prohibition Act into law in 2014 attacks, harassment, blackmail and extortion of the LGBTQ+ community is rising, at disturbing speed. The Nigeria Police should be prioritizing keeping everyone safe, not stoking more discrimination,” he said.
Police spokespersons at the Nigeria Police Force headquarters and at the Delta state command did not respond to enquiries from the AP to speak on the arrests and on the allegations about the lack of due process in handling such cases.
Lawyers also spoke to the AP about instances where the police failed to act in handling cases of abuse against the LGBTQ community in Nigeria.
In 2020, David Bakare, a gay person, petitioned the police about a group of men who beat him up after he shared a video of himself dancing. The suspects were freed on bail after which they continued to threaten Bakare to withdraw the petition, a copy of which his lawyer shared with The AP.
Bakare then petitioned the police a second time to alert them that his life is in danger but no action was taken in response, he said. He had no choice but to flee to another part of Lagos.
“Since you can’t trust the police to do the necessary things, those guys will come again,” the 26-year-old said of his abusers.
The problem of delayed justice is not new in Nigeria where the criminal justice system has been criticized as corrupt. But it is far worse for groups such as the LGBTQ community seen to be vulnerable, said Chizelu Emejulu, an activist and lawyer who has handled many cases involving queer people.
“When we get the perpetrators arrested, the consistent thing we have noticed is that people always claim their victims are queer and once they say that, the police begin to withdraw from these cases,” said Emejulu.
“What the LGBTQ community in Nigeria is asking for is to be left alone to live their lives,” Emejulu added.
The nation’s largest LGBTQ rights group released its latest data on fatal attacks on transgender and gender-nonconforming people, describing an “epidemic of violence” targeting the community, especially young Black trans women.
The Human Rights Campaign found that at least 33 transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been killed in the United States since November last year. Of those deaths, 26 have been recorded so far this year, following a total of 41 recorded deaths last year. The annual report was released Monday to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance.
“The epidemic of violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people is a national embarrassment,” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson wrote in the report. “Each of these lives taken is a tragedy — the result of a society that demeans and devalues anyone who dares challenge the gender binary.”
People of color have made up the largest share of trans and gender-nonconforming victims of fatal violence since the group began tracking such data in 2013. This year, 69% of all victims were Black, and 51% were Black trans women, according to the report. Hispanic people were the second largest group of victims, making up 21% of all deaths. White people made up 9% of the deaths.
The data also showed that most of the victims were under the age of 35. In the past year, the average age of victims was 28, according to the report.
Human Rights Campaign has identified at least 335 transgender and gender-nonconforming people killed in the past decade. The past four years have been especially fatal for the community, with 171 recorded deaths. In 2021, the number of deaths recorded by the rights group in a single year peaked at 59.
The report emphasized that their numbers are likely an undercount, because “data collection is often incomplete or unreliable when it comes to violent and fatal crimes against trans and gender-nonconforming people.”
It also included a call for lawmakers to take action to address violence toward LGBTQ people by passing legislation such as the Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in numerous arenas, including employment, housing and education. The bill passed a House vote in 2021 but has not seen movement in the Senate.
Human Rights Campaign declared a national state of emergency for LGBTQ people earlier this year in response to growing numbers of anti-LGBTQ bills introduced nationwide. The majority of the bills target transgender people, according to the rights group, and aim to limit their use of bathrooms, access to gender-affirming care and participation in sports.
The Uzbekistan government should urgently act on recommendations made on November 8, 2023, during its fourth Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of its human rights record at the UN Human Rights Council, Human Rights Watch said today. The government should take particular action to uphold the rights of human rights defenders, journalists and bloggers, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.
Several UN member states also said that Uzbekistan should ensure accountability for human rights abuses during protests in 2022 in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region of Uzbekistan.
“The range and scope of concerns and recommendations that governments expressed during Uzbekistan’s review shows just how much work Uzbekistan has to do to meaningfully improve human rights conditions in the country,” said Mihra Rittmann, senior Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “It’s important for Uzbekistan to act upon all the recommendations and not to pick and choose among the issues raised.”
All UN member states participate in the UPR process, a comprehensive review of the human rights record of each UN member state every four and a half years. The country under review, local and international organizations, and the UN itself can provide written input to inform the review process. Human Rights Watch submitted a briefing on Uzbekistan’s human rights record in March.
The Uzbekistan government claimed that out of 198 recommendations received at its last review, in 2018, it had fully implemented 171. At the review, countries praised Uzbekistan, including for ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, criminalizing domestic violence, and progress in eradicating forced labor in the cotton fields since its last review.
Yet, despite noting improvements in Uzbekistan’s law, countries from across all regions called on Uzbekistan to take concrete action to end gender-based violence, to uphold the rights of women and children, and to uphold the rights of people with disabilities.
Over a dozen UN member states urged Uzbekistan to improve the environment for nongovernmental organizations and to better protect the rights of human rights defenders, including streamlining the burdensome registration process for civil society groups. At the review, the Uzbekistan delegation dismissed the criticism. Human Rights Watch and other rights organizations have documented that the registration process is a barrier to independent human rights groupscarrying out their activities in Uzbekistan.
It is disappointing that other countries that had previously urged Uzbekistan to carry out an independent investigation into the human rights violations committed during the Karakalpakstan events, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and EU member states other than the Czech Republic, did not reiterate that call during the review process, Human Rights Watch said.
Over a dozen countries commented on rights issues pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity, urging the Uzbekistan government to decriminalize consensual same-sex conduct and stop subjecting detainees in prosecutions of gay men to forced anal exams, an abusive practice that constitutes cruel, degrading, and inhuman treatment that can rise to the level of torture and sexual assault under international human rights law.
The Uzbekistan government supported all the recommendations expressed by states, except for the 15 recommendations related to the rights of LGBT people. The government official’s reference to “generally accepted norms” to deny LGBT people’s rights deflects responsibility for abusive state practices and laws that exclude LGBT people from accessing their basic human rights, Human Rights Watch said.
With a notable increase in prosecutions of bloggers and journalists in the last two years, 14 countries spoke to the worrying situation for media freedom in Uzbekistan, making recommendations that Uzbekistan should create a “safe environment” for journalists, bloggers, and media workers, and ensure they can “work free from intimidation” both online and offline. Norway urged Uzbekistan to “immediately grant pardons” to all imprisoned journalists, bloggers, and activists.
Multiple countries also urged Uzbekistan to investigate allegations of torture, and to hold those responsible for torture and other forms of ill-treatment accountable, with a view of ending impunity. Many countries, including Brazil and Maldives, recommended that Uzbekistan ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture.
“Given how serious the human rights situation is in Uzbekistan, it’s important for UN member states to follow up with the Uzbekistan government directly,” Rittmann said. “The work begins now to ensure that Uzbekistan takes concrete, meaningful action to advance the human rights of everyone, including LGBT people, in line with the UPR recommendations and international human rights law.”
LGBTQ+ people in the military once faced dishonorable discharge if they came out (or were outed), and although they can serve openly now, some of their stories have been overlooked. But the Library of Congress’s collection “Serving in Silence: LGBTQ+ Veterans,” part of the library’s Veterans History Project, is shining a light on them.
“It’s been a long road to making sure that we are able to collect, to preserve for posterity, to make accessible and therefore discoverable, the fullness of the human story of America’s veterans, and that includes necessarily those of LGBTQ+ experience,” Monica Mohindra, director of the project, recently told New Jersey newspaper The Record.
Throughout LGBTQ+ history, the experience of bisexual people has often been ignored, even though they make up the largest portion of the LGBTQ+ population. Cliff Arnesen, one of the veterans featured in “Serving in Silence,” is seeking to address this.
“You don’t know how many bisexual people have made enormous contributions to the overall” LGBTQ+ movement, Arnesen told The Record. “People like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Freddie Mercury, David Bowie — all bisexual. But none of that comes up in certain history books. That’s why the bisexual community is up in arms all the time and we’re trying to educate.”
Arnesen came out as bi when he was under arrest for being absent without leave from the U.S. Army base at Fort Dix in New Jersey in 1966 (he had been visiting his mother, who was suffering domestic abuse at the time). He was dishonorably discharged the following year. He eventually channeled the anger he felt at the military into activism, becoming the first bi veteran to testify before Congress and helping found American Veterans for Equal Rights.
He also worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs and became president of New England Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Veterans Inc. His discharge was upgraded to “general under honorable conditions” under an amnesty program established by President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. During President Joe Biden’s time in office, Arnesen and other bi vets have been meeting with administration officials to talk about issues faced by bisexuals.
Arnesen is one of 22 LGBTQ+ veterans whose stories are posted on the “Serving in Silence” web page, but Mohindra noted that it’s “not fully encompassing of all of our collections of the LGBTQ+ experience.” The Veterans History Project has more than 118,000 individual narratives, and the public can add to this. Anyone can contribute, and there are online instructions for interviewing veterans for the project.
