Kate Sosin

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America could elect its first Black transgender member of Congress

She was the first transgender bride on the TV show “Say Yes to the Dress.” She and her husband are the first transgender parents in Illinois history to be listed as their accurate genders on their children’s birth certificates. “This idea of, ‘I won’t be erased,’ that’s something that brewed in my childhood,” she said. “I think that’s where the fight comes from. … I don’t want to fail, and I haven’t failed yet. I think that’s the scary part. I’ve never, ever had a floor beneath me.”  Brady-Davis is currently the only Black trans person holding public office in the United States, serving on […]

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The wild saga of FDR’s $1 million gay military sex sting

Had the consequences not been ruinous for the men entrapped, the story would read like a comedy.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt — before he served as 32nd president of the United States — in 1919 approved a secret operation to rid the U.S. Navy in Newport, Rhode Island, of “cocksuckers and rectum receivers.” Their method? Volunteer agents would have gay sex and then tell on the sailors they had sex with for being gay. Roosevelt was serving as assistant secretary of the Navy and, according to historian Sherry Zane, who published an article on operation “Section A,” he even consulted lawyers […]

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Native leaders fear for queer Indigenous youth as Trump slashes LGBTQ+ rights

On January 20, the day that President Trump again took the oath of office, Monique “Muffie” Mousseau got a slew of emails and phone calls.  “Homophobic people were saying the most horrific things,” she recalled. Two men threatened to kill her, and a woman said she wouldn’t exist any longer: “That I’m a virus to the United States.”  Mousseau is the executive director of Uniting Resilience, a grassroots organization based in Rapids City, South Dakota, that has advocated for LGBTQ+ Native youth since 2019. Following the inauguration, Mousseau and her wife, Felipa De Leon, made the difficult decision to stop posting about […]

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Transgender Advocacy Group Launches Spanish-speaking Crisis Hotline

In 2018, the nation’s only transgender-specific suicide prevention hotline started tracking an alarming trend. Trans Lifeline was getting call after call from trans people in serious crisis whom its volunteers couldn’t always help. From 2018 to 2019, the hotline took 23 times more calls from Spanish speakers than in previous years. Staff members and volunteers saw a 146 percent spike in calls from trans immigrants and a 386 percent increase in calls from Latinx trans people. Many of its hotline operators, however, couldn’t speak Spanish, leaving many trans callers without an affirming place to call during a crisis. This week, […]

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At San Quentin, LGBTQ Prisoners and Once-biased Inmates Try to Heal Together

Ten years ago, Rafeal “Nephew” Bankston landed in solitary confinement in San Quentin State Prison for refusing a gay cellmate. “Where I grew up, we called it gay bashing,” he said. “We hated them, robbed them,” Bankston added matter-of-factly. On a Wednesday afternoon in April, he told that story to a classroom of 15 other inmates. About half of them were LGBTQ. Photos of LGBTQ icons — Janet Mock, Ellen Degeneres, James Baldwin — smiled down from a whiteboard at the front of the room. No one said a word. Lisa Strawn, 60, a transgender woman, was sitting next to […]