The fallout from Donald Trump’s decision to illegally rename the Kennedy Center to give himself top billing continues to grow, creating an embarrassing situation for the president. As it turns out, artists don’t want their work associated with Trump, despite legal threats from Ric Grenell, the president’s openly gay factotum who heads the center.
On Monday, just days before their scheduled New Year’s Eve concerts, the Cookers, a highly regarded jazz group, announced that they were cancelling their appearance at the Kennedy Center.
“With deep regret, we must share that we are unable to perform as planned on New Year’s Eve,” the group said in a statement, explaining that the decision came together very quickly. “We remain committed to playing music that reaches across divisions rather than deepening them.” The Cookers said that their decision was in line with what jazz is about.
“Jazz was born from struggle and from a relentless insistence on freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, and of the full human voice,” their statement said.
As it turns out, the Cookers are hardly alone in that decision. Last week’s Christmas Eve concert was canceled at the last minute for the same reason. Long-time host Chuck Redd, another giant in the world of jazz, said that Trump renaming the Center was the last straw.
“When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd told the Associated Press.
Kristy Lee, a folk singer from Alabama, announced last week that she was cancelling her January concert because of the Center renaming.
“When American history starts getting treated like something you can ban, erase, rename, or rebrand for somebody else’s ego, I can’t stand on that stage and sleep right at night,” she wrote on Instagram. “America didn’t get built by branding. It got built by people showing up and doing the work. And the folks who carry it don’t need their name on it, they just show up. That’s all I’m doing here. I’m showing up.”
Other artists are piling on as well. Doug Varone and Dancers, who were scheduled to appear at the Kennedy Center next April, announced Monday that they were cancelling their appearance as well. “We can no longer permit ourselves nor ask our audiences to step inside this once great institution,” Varone said.
The holiday cancellations in particular hit the Kennedy Center hard, because the season is “highly lucrative.” The bottom line already took a hit when Grenell signed off on a deal to let FIFA, the governing body for international soccer, use the Center free of charge over the holidays for its World Cup planning. That decision led to multiple holiday performances being cancelled or rescheduled.
In response to the cancellation of the Christmas Eve concert, Grenell threatened to sue Redd for $1 million, calling that Redd’s decision “classic intolerance” while lauding “President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure.”
The newest cancellations led Grenell to resort to trashing the artists.
“The artists who are now canceling shows were booked by the previous far left leadership,” Grenell said on X. “Their actions prove that the previous team was more concerned about booking far left political activists rather than artists willing to perform for everyone regardless of their political beliefs.”
When Amaka Agwu’s little brother was three years old, he turned to his darker-skinned father one night and warned that his lighter-skinned grandmother was coming to get him. “That’s what white people do to Black people,” the little boy said.
“It was a very funny thing to hear a three-year-old say,” Agwu reflected, “and very interesting to tell him, ‘That’s not how that works.’”
Agwu, an 18-year-old gay student activist at George Washington University in D.C., laughed at the recollection, but who could blame a young person today for thinking that white people are coming after people of color? Or, perhaps, that the so-called “normal gays” are targeting trans folks? It’s on screens everywhere – from the couches and kitchens where three-year-olds roam, to the college campuses targeted by the likes of Turning Point USA and the young conservatives enchanted by its mission.
Dinner conversations like the one her brother sparked are what spurred Agwu to activism. “My parents were always very cognizant about teaching us about different political systems and inequalities that exist in the United States,” she said.
Nowadays, Agwu feels disappointed that her fellow students aren’t rising to the moment that Donald Trump has forced upon them.
“We just need to do better,” she said.
Since the Civil Rights Movement, young people have been at the vanguard of political protest in the U.S., from North Carolina college students launching nationwide lunch counter sit-ins, to the death of four Kent State undergraduates who were shot by National Guard troops while demonstrating against the Vietnam War, to encampments on college campuses across the country protesting Israel’s invasion of Gaza. In all of these, students came to symbolize not just the causes they were fighting for but a generational struggle for change.
But those and other iconic protest movements, like nuclear disarmament, the invasion of Iraq, apartheid in South Africa, and Occupy Wall Street, involved single issues or ideas to rally around. This time, it’s been harder for students to focus amid Trump’s flood-the-zone strategy.
Add to that attacks on higher education (including student visa restrictions) explicitly designed by Trump advisors like Stephen Miller to undermine a liberal worldview on college campuses, and you have a successful effort to divide and conquer dissent.
Agwu saw the writing on the wall during the Biden administration, with the slew of anti-trans state legislative attacks and the passage of Florida’s notorious Don’t Say Gay law that inspired copycat legislation around the country. “I was seeing all that, and I was like, ‘Wait, there’s now a president in office who actually isn’t going to fight against it, but on all that will actively support those types of things?’”
She describes Trump’s inauguration one year ago as “scary.”
“I just felt like this deep-seated fear entangled with how the country would go.”
“He’s kind of exposing underlying currents of conservatism that have already existed in the United States that just haven’t been fully addressed,” she said. “Now we have a president who’s willing to exploit those to get power.”
“I think he’s just making us fully aware — and the people who weren’t aware of it to begin with — that these deep-seated, hateful notions still exist, and that we just need to do better to fight back against them.”
Agwu is fighting back as the head of logistics for the “startup” activist group Revs Rise Up, a play on the school’s revolutionary school mascot.
“Basically, we’re trying to fight against authoritarianism with the Trump administration,” she said.
Their latest action was a banner signing and letter drop demanding that GW refuse to join Trump’s so-called university “compact” dictating anti-diversity initiatives and assaulting academic freedom.
“No one’s really gone out and rejected it, right? And we’re saying our school should preemptively reject it before you start requiring that all schools start to accept it.”
For Agwu, Trump’s requirement for sex assigned at birth on passports ranked as his most egregious attack on the LGBTQ+ community, a literal manifestation of his effort to erase trans identity from American society.
“In a very legal sense, it delegitimizes someone’s transition journey, and it’s inherently harmful to thousands upon thousands of trans people who have gone through the process of medically and/or legally transitioning,” she said.
It’s one example, Agwu explained, of Trump’s thirst for power.
Asked if change can be effected on screens, Agwu, who’s studying international affairs and English, replied, “Not entirely.”
Social media is “a very easy and very powerful tool to help people learn more about issues,” and to “see themselves as though they’re being involved,” Agwu said.
But she cautioned against “hashtag activism.”
“If people only engage in that, it doesn’t enact effective change,” she said.
“You still need to get people who are going out onto the streets, or who are lobbying to their Congress members and going and saying, ‘We need this to change, because this matters to me, and this is hurting thousands of people.’ So I do think it’s a great tool, but it’s not entirely what will generate change.”
Cailey Chin, a freshman studying economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says Trump has dominated her history and politics education since elementary school.
“My first memory, I guess, was my library elective, and they made us debate the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump race, and we had a fake election about it, which I think was a little bit too advanced for third graders, but nonetheless, it was still a debated topic within my school.”
Chin’s activism started several years later, in high school, with a failed effort to expand sex education in her Pennsylvania school district. By that time, a previously bipartisan issue had become contentious in her swing state county.
The growing red-blue divide “definitely affected” her efforts, Chin said. “I was pushed back. I was ignored oftentimes.”
At Penn, she works with a group called Our Space, which connects Philadelphia-area high schoolers and her school’s LGBT center through educational sessions focused on comprehensive sex ed, “like healthy boundaries, communication, and things targeted specifically at queer youth.”
That’s a segment of the population under direct attack by the Trump administration and its allies, with executive orders attacking gender beyond the binary, bans on queer content in school libraries, and federal funding slashed for gender-affirming care.
“Just being able to connect and having a safe space to talk about these topics and educate our youth” ensures they’ll be “well-equipped to fight back,” she said.
Chin called Trump’s first year back in office “harrowing” and cited cuts to HIV funding and his failure to acknowledge World AIDS Day as two of his most grievous actions.
“HIV is a very bipartisan issue that obviously does not just affect the LGBTQ community, but disproportionately affects it,” she said. “Cutting these funds only harms the entirety of our nation and really hurts the health of not just queer people, but people in marginalized communities, people of color, people in poor communities.”
Chin said there’s a clear understanding among students at Penn of the harm caused by the Trump administration, but thinks the Ivy League’s competitive culture is holding students (including herself) back from public protest, both IRL and online.
“UPenn’s pre-professional culture, alongside just like fear in general, makes people very quiet in terms of political issues,” she said, “and I can relate to that. Sometimes I’m hesitant to talk about my activism or just do simple things like this interview, because of my digital footprint.”
“If employers see that I’m outspoken and that I’m passionate about the things that I am passionate about, it might lead to me losing a job.”
Ironically, though, Chin has a large online presence focused on another cause that’s been caught in the Trump administration’s crosshairs: equity in education.
She counts over 34,000 followers on Instagram and hundreds of thousands of likes on TikTok for her content advising high schoolers on how to ace college admissions applications.
Chin said her work online is a matter of accessibility.
“Social media, obviously, is accessible to a large amount of people with their phones. Via my content creation, I’m able to provide information at no cost to anybody following me, and those people following me and viewing my content come from a very diverse set of backgrounds. So that really helps in spreading information and getting things out there, whether it be advocacy or not.”
Trans student-activist Amber Va describes Trump’s worst actions as legion, and defined by the tragic flaw in his “Make America Great Again” slogan.
“Truth be told, it was never that great in the first place,” Va said.
“And now you have this great big bill that’s enacted, along with attacks on trans people and the trans community, and the passport recognition, and right now, especially, with the ICE raids — you know, it’s just really insane.”
For Va, a 24-year-old sidelined from school by the pandemic and now a freshman at Valley College in Los Angeles, “The [anti-trans] stigma that’s been going on in the media that we’re forced to believe” is personal. She was already facing it among her Cambodian family.
“It’s all intertwined,” she said. “The intergenerational trauma and now the political climate.”
Her own experience living as a trans woman and queer person of color inspired her advocacy work. She serves on the queer youth advisory committee for the Foundation for California Community Colleges and partners with nonprofit organizations to get resources to young people in her work as a grassroots community activist.
She wants to parlay a communications degree into a queer-focused public relations specialty.
Regarding the attention economy, Va agreed that young adults and teenagers are focused on social media but need to exercise discretion in who they listen to.
“There’s a bunch of social influencers who will do it just for clout, you know, just for attention,” she said of some influencers’ advocacy. “It depends on who you talk to and who’s a credible source.”
But community is where you find it, she said.
“There’s a lot of people throughout the nation who can’t attend protests because of the era we’re in, or where they are. We’ll take as much support as we can for the rallies, the marches, for protests, for sit-ins and all of that, you know? I mean, that’s what I count as community. There’s only so much you can do within your power and for your safety.”
Va likened the choice to resist Trump’s onslaught to Neo’s in The Matrix, before the right-wing manosphere co-opted that movie’s message.
“You have the red pill, or you have the blue pill, take your pick.” Either way, “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
Then Va turned to a more definitive movie analogy.
“Like, in Star Wars terms, I’ll join the resistance, right?”
However young people may choose to resist, Va advises them, “Everything takes time.”
“Something I learned from my activism is that patience is a virtue,” she said.
Students may be in some kind of interregnum right now, caught between the rise of the #metoo, Black Lives Matter, and trans rights movements and Trump’s broad assault on everything “woke,” along with the overall radicalization that historically follows similar illiberal backlash.
If young people like Va are looking to movies for their cultural cues, One Battle After Another is another more contemporary example, drawing on militant groups of the 1960s and 70s, like the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army — all armed in deed or simply rhetoric — to depict a level of resistance equal to the assault they’re confronted with; orthodoxy on both sides of the political spectrum comes in for a critical beating.
The message, like Va’s, is that the struggle is never-ending.
Despite a portion of Agwu’s student body “who seem a bit jaded, like there’s nothing we can do,” she does see fresh evidence of young people stirred to action. An appearance by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on campus in December inspired a “huge protest” against Trump administration policies, even during finals.
“We are the closest school to the White House. I can see it from my dorm,” she said. “Because there’s such a large population of students who came here specifically because they want to study political science or international affairs in the capital of the U.S., it’s a very politically charged environment.”
While “there hasn’t been enough protest and action,” fellow students are “willing to fight for or against whatever they personally believe,” she said. It’s her role as an activist “to empower and inspire other people to enact change and participate in their own way.”
“So many students are very energized to fight back.”
Chin considered whether the Trump era is a “blip” in history or an enduring turn to authoritarianism.
“In the face of resistance, you still have the ability to make change in your local community, in your state, at the national level. It’s not impossible,” she said after cataloguing her own efforts and disappointments. “I think that it’s important to remember that this is just a temporary wave.”
“You might feel discouraged, and you might feel like you’re helpless, but there are still people that want to connect with you. They want to fight back with you, and they want to unite to make change.”
Va reached back to words spoken by Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur from prison in 1973, a call to action for those ready for a reckoning.
“It is our duty to fight for freedom,” Va said, quoting Shakur. “It is our duty to win. We must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
A far-right political action committee says it has collected enough signatures to potentially get a trans sports ban onto Washington state’s ballot in November, and that ban would require girls to undergo physical examinations to participate in school sports.
As the Washington State Standard reports, Let’s Go Washington collected 445,187 signatures in support of Initiative Measure No. IL26-638, exceeding the 386,000 needed to advance the measure. The initiative would ban transgender girls from competing in girls’ school sports statewide.
IL26-638 interprets existing state law as requiring students “to undergo a routine physical examination prior to participation in interscholastic sports, which includes documentation of the student’s sex assigned at birth.” It would require school districts and nonprofit entities to “prohibit biologically male students from competing with and against female students in athletic activities with separate classifications for male and female students.”
Under the proposed measure, students who want to participate in girls’ sports would be required to provide “a health examination and consent form or other statement signed by the student’s personal health care provider that verifies the student’s biological sex, relying only on one or more of the following: The student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.”
As journalist Erin Reed notes in her newsletter Erin in the Morning, trans sports bans with similar requirements have been highly controversial, as they could potentially result in minors being subjected to invasive physical exams simply to participate in school sports.
Reed cites the failure last March of the so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would have amended Title IX — the federal civil rights law prohibiting sex discrimination in government-funded schools and education programs — to prohibit schools from allowing trans female athletes to participate in athletic programs or activities “designated for women or girls.” The Congressional Equality Caucus noted that the bill could have forced “any student to answer invasive personal questions about their bodies & face humiliating physical inspections to ‘prove’ that they’re a girl.”
Along with the signatures in support of IL26-638, Let’s Go Washington also submitted 416,201 signatures in support of a measure repealing changes to another of the PAC’s recent initiatives. The Let’s Go Washington-backed Initiative 2081, approved in 2024, codified the rights of the parents of public school students into law. As Reed notes, however, state lawmakers watered down provisions that would have reportedly mandated that schools out trans students to their parents.
According to Reed, Let’s Go Washington’s IL26-001 would restore language to the 2024 parental rights law that would effectively require the forced outing of trans students to their parents.
As the Washington State Standard reports, Let’s Go Washington submitted signatures in support of both measures to the Washington Secretary of State’s office on Friday. The Secretary of State’s office told the outlet that it may take up to four weeks to verify the signatures for the initiatives. Once verified, the initiatives will go before the state legislature, which can either approve them or reject them. If the state legislature rejects them, they will either appear on the November ballot on their own or alongside alternatives proposed by lawmakers.
Brian Heywood, the millionaire hedge fund manager and Republican megadonor who leads Let’s Go Washington, claimed that roughly half of the signatures the PAC had collected in support of the initiatives were from independent voters and Democrats. “This is not a partisan issue, this is a common sense issue,” Heywood said, according to the Standard. “This has broad support.”
However, in a statement issued by WA Families for Freedom, Gender Justice League board member Sophia Lee accused Let’s Go Washington of “playing political games with the lives of vulnerable trans and queer kids.”
Reed, meanwhile, notes that the trans sports ban is likely to face constitutional challenges should it become law. But it’s unclear whether the measure would succeed on the ballot. Reed notes that anti-trans messaging from Republicans last year coincided with significant GOP losses across the country in November’s off-year elections.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis – who was among several employees who publicly resigned from a leadership position at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in August – is returning to the local health sector. He has been appointed Chief Medical Officer for the historic NYC health organization, Callen-Lorde Community Health Center.
“My career has taken me from local to federal,” the out physician told health and science publication STAT10 after his appointment. “This is when it’s time to go back to local.”
“Demetre has a wealth of experience that will help him guide Callen-Lorde through new clinical initiatives and challenges while remaining steadfast to our mission to care for our communities regardless of ability to pay,” Callen-Lorde said in an announcement of Daskalakis’ appointment. “His passion and experience make him particularly suited for this new role.”
The infectious disease specialist started his career doing HIV clinical work in New York City as an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital. He moved on to the NYC Department of Health, where he served as deputy commissioner before joining the CDC.
Daskalakis came to public prominence as head of the Biden administration’s Mpox outbreak response in 2022, which employed a successful strategy of “Education and outreach, as well as vaccination” based on hard data.
Now Daskalakis is “taking his skills back to the city where they were honed.”
For the moment, Washington is “an environment where I really don’t think that federal public health is able to actually execute on its mission,” he said.
Daskalakis reached a breaking point at the CDC over the summer as the full extent of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-science agenda was coming into view.
Citing “radical non-transparency,” “unskilled manipulation of data,” and “people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor,” Daskalakis, then the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the agency, resigned in August, following Kennedy’s firing of CDC director Susan Monarez.
“After much contemplation and reflection on recent developments and perspectives brought to light by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I find that the views he and his staff have shared challenge my ability to continue in my current role at the agency and in the service of the health of the American people,” Daskalakis wrote in a searing condemnation of the current administration’s stewardship of the nation’s public health agencies.
“Enough is enough,” he said.
Daskalakis was introduced to the clinics at Callen-Lorde as an NYU medical student on rotations in 1997. More than 25 years later, the organization honored him at this year’s annual Community Health Awards for his numerous contributions to public health.
Reflecting on his early years as a physician, Daskalakis said, “At Callen-Lorde, I learned the true meaning of service: to uplift and protect the very community I hold most dear. I witnessed a safe space based in science, a mission lifted by and for community.”
Three Democrats crossed party lines yesterday to vote for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) bill to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth, and the party needs to kick them out. Reps. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Vincente Gonzalez Jr (D-TX), and Don Davis (D-NC) all voted alongside 213 Republicans yesterday to pass Greene’s anti-trans bill. If they had not voted for it, it would not have passed.
Yes, Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) is generally right that the party needs to be a “big tent” and allow some ideological diversity. But there are some lines that should not be crossed, and this is one of them.
The bill is extreme. It makes it a crime to provide safe and effective health care to trans youth (and only to trans youth! The same procedures for cis youth are exempted in Greene’s bill), punishable with up to 10 years imprisonment. This includes the parents of trans kids, who are only trying to do what’s best for their kids, who happen to be the target of a five-year moral panic that gripped the GOP so that they could get people to stop talking about the failures of the president’s first term and his attempt to overthrow the federal government on January 6, 2021.
All the reasons to support Greene’s bill are terrible. There are the pseudoscientific reasons that you can read about on social media, like the idea that puberty blockers aren’t reversible (they are), that most trans kids change their minds (they don’t), or that puberty blockers destroy trans kids’ health (they don’t).
All the major medical professional organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, and the American Medical Association support gender-affirming care as the standard of care, but people like Greene will still tell people to “do your own research” if they bring up the fact that real researchers who spend their lives studying the subject support gender-affirming care.
And what kind of research is someone with no background in science supposed to do from their home? At best, the research they’ll do will be orders of magnitude less rigorous than what those scientific bodies already did, and they probably won’t even do that. Instead, what right-wingers mean when they say “do your own research” is “watch this YouTube video made by someone who knows nothing” or “share this garbage Facebook meme.” That’s how little these people know about what real scientific research looks like.
It’s no coincidence that Greene introduced this bill and is also a major opponent of vaccines. She has no respect for scientists, which gives her license to believe whatever she wants, facts be damned. Who cares how many lives are lost, right? The Democratic Party should stay away from that arrogant and harmful mentality.
Perhaps the most anti-scientific belief these people buy into is the idea that a teacher or a parent or whoever else can turn a kid transgender by reading them a book or letting them play with the wrong gender’s toys.
That’s just dumb. That is not how it works. We need to make fun of people who believe silly ideas like this and mock them out of polite society.
This is a purposeful lack of trust in people in positions of authority that makes running a society hard. We tell scientists, etc., that they have to achieve certain goals, and when they try, we don’t just criticize the results; we deny that they should even have had the power to do their jobs in the first place.
Parents, teachers, doctors, researchers… all of these people are wrong not because they are working with different information than the rest of us. No, they are bad people who want to hurt children because they’re bad. That’s it.
Again, this is the meat and potatoes of the anti-vaccine movement. In order to get people to believe in pseudoscientific lies, they have to convince them to stop listening to the actual experts, and to do that, they need to paint them as evil-doers. And quite literally. Many anti-trans activists have made it no secret that they believe that demons and the devil are behind any support for trans rights.
Democrats should be working with people who have different belief systems, but there has to be a common basis of understanding the world and a respect for people’s humanity. People who think that public health officials who support trans kids are literally “demons” need to be excluded. They cannot be reached. And the party should not be lending them support.
Greene’s bill is also a multi-pronged assault on the party’s fundamental values. It restricts people’s access to health care. And real health care, not supplements that conservatives sell on their podcasts. That’s a big deal for Democrats and should be a line in the sand: Patients should have control of their own bodies, and their doctors and parents can help them make those decisions without government interference.
It’s also an affront to free speech and expression. The same people who are against gender-affirming care are also against letting trans people dress and identify and act as they want to. To borrow an expression, the right hates trans people for their freedom, because they defy society’s expectations of their sex in a profound way. Democrats are the party of personal freedom when it comes to social issues, and that should mean something.
Last, this bill is an attack on a vulnerable minority because they are a vulnerable minority, and Democrats are the party of fighting oppression. Gender-affirming care has been around for a long time. Kids have been getting puberty blockers for decades. And mainstream Republicans never really cared until 2021.
And the only reason there was even a vote for Greene’s bill yesterday was political haggling. Republicans could have put this bill up for a vote all year if they really believed in it, but instead only did so in exchange for support for a military funding bill.
At the very least, Democratic leadership needs to realize that Cuellar’s, Gonzalez’s, and Davis’ disloyalty to the party gave Republicans a political win.
I would not have written this column about most other LGBTQ+ issues because there can be some reasonable debate on them. For example, I fully support LGBTQ+ inclusive antidiscrimination legislation. I could also imagine a situation where someone else disagrees with how a specific law is written, without their values being so different from mine that we couldn’t work together on anything.
But not here. Kids need health care, and Marjorie Taylor Greene should get exactly zero say in what kind of care doctors across the country provide. There is no redeeming value to Greene’s bill. Democrats need to take action.
MAGA infighting erupted at Turning Point USA’s America Fest in Phoenix, Arizona, as conservative broadcaster Ben Shapiro blasted Candace Owens for spreading conspiracy theories about the murder of Turning Point’s founder Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson for platforming neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, and Steve Bannon for aiding the president’s poor handling of files related to convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
“The conservative movement is in serious danger… from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty,” Shapiro said, according to Politico.
Elsewhere, both ex-gay provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos said that Fuentes is gay and MAGA broadcaster Benny Johnson “gets trashed and has sex with young boys in the latter’s hotel rooms at Turning Point conferences, leaving his wife weeping in the arms of other men downstairs amid the AIPAC leaflets and trestle tables,” gay journalist Michaelangelo Signorile noted.
“One of the most distinctive things about the right wing in this country is its homosexual overtones,” Yiannopoulos said while speaking to MAGA podcaster Tim Pool. “Benny Johnson posts pictures of his children every two days—it’s weird. And everybody knows what went on with Benny Johnson in those lobbies and those hotel rooms at SAS [Student Action Summit, at Turning Point USA]. Everybody knows.”
Yiannopoulos also told Pool that he thinks Kirk was gay too and was planning to divorce his wife, Erika Kirk, who delivered the opening address at Turning Point USA’s America Fest.
Three Democrats crossed party lines yesterday to vote for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) bill to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth, and the party needs to kick them out. Reps. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Vincente Gonzalez Jr (D-TX), and Don Davis (D-NC) all voted alongside 213 Republicans yesterday to pass Greene’s anti-trans bill. If they had not voted for it, it would not have passed.
Yes, Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) is generally right that the party needs to be a “big tent” and allow some ideological diversity. But there are some lines that should not be crossed, and this is one of them.
The bill is extreme. It makes it a crime to provide safe and effective health care to trans youth (and only to trans youth! The same procedures for cis youth are exempted in Greene’s bill), punishable with up to 10 years imprisonment. This includes the parents of trans kids, who are only trying to do what’s best for their kids, who happen to be the target of a five-year moral panic that gripped the GOP so that they could get people to stop talking about the failures of the president’s first term and his attempt to overthrow the federal government on January 6, 2021.
All the reasons to support Greene’s bill are terrible. There are the pseudoscientific reasons that you can read about on social media, like the idea that puberty blockers aren’t reversible (they are), that most trans kids change their minds (they don’t), or that puberty blockers destroy trans kids’ health (they don’t).
All the major medical professional organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, and the American Medical Association support gender-affirming care as the standard of care, but people like Greene will still tell people to “do your own research” if they bring up the fact that real researchers who spend their lives studying the subject support gender-affirming care.
And what kind of research is someone with no background in science supposed to do from their home? At best, the research they’ll do will be orders of magnitude less rigorous than what those scientific bodies already did, and they probably won’t even do that. Instead, what right-wingers mean when they say “do your own research” is “watch this YouTube video made by someone who knows nothing” or “share this garbage Facebook meme.” That’s how little these people know about what real scientific research looks like.
It’s no coincidence that Greene introduced this bill and is also a major opponent of vaccines. She has no respect for scientists, which gives her license to believe whatever she wants, facts be damned. Who cares how many lives are lost, right? The Democratic Party should stay away from that arrogant and harmful mentality.
Perhaps the most anti-scientific belief these people buy into is the idea that a teacher or a parent or whoever else can turn a kid transgender by reading them a book or letting them play with the wrong gender’s toys.
That’s just dumb. That is not how it works. We need to make fun of people who believe silly ideas like this and mock them out of polite society.
This is a purposeful lack of trust in people in positions of authority that makes running a society hard. We tell scientists, etc., that they have to achieve certain goals, and when they try, we don’t just criticize the results; we deny that they should even have had the power to do their jobs in the first place.
Parents, teachers, doctors, researchers… all of these people are wrong not because they are working with different information than the rest of us. No, they are bad people who want to hurt children because they’re bad. That’s it.
Again, this is the meat and potatoes of the anti-vaccine movement. In order to get people to believe in pseudoscientific lies, they have to convince them to stop listening to the actual experts, and to do that, they need to paint them as evil-doers. And quite literally. Many anti-trans activists have made it no secret that they believe that demons and the devil are behind any support for trans rights.
Democrats should be working with people who have different belief systems, but there has to be a common basis of understanding the world and a respect for people’s humanity. People who think that public health officials who support trans kids are literally “demons” need to be excluded. They cannot be reached. And the party should not be lending them support.
Greene’s bill is also a multi-pronged assault on the party’s fundamental values. It restricts people’s access to health care. And real health care, not supplements that conservatives sell on their podcasts. That’s a big deal for Democrats and should be a line in the sand: Patients should have control of their own bodies, and their doctors and parents can help them make those decisions without government interference.
It’s also an affront to free speech and expression. The same people who are against gender-affirming care are also against letting trans people dress and identify and act as they want to. To borrow an expression, the right hates trans people for their freedom, because they defy society’s expectations of their sex in a profound way. Democrats are the party of personal freedom when it comes to social issues, and that should mean something.
Last, this bill is an attack on a vulnerable minority because they are a vulnerable minority, and Democrats are the party of fighting oppression. Gender-affirming care has been around for a long time. Kids have been getting puberty blockers for decades. And mainstream Republicans never really cared until 2021.
And the only reason there was even a vote for Greene’s bill yesterday was political haggling. Republicans could have put this bill up for a vote all year if they really believed in it, but instead only did so in exchange for support for a military funding bill.
At the very least, Democratic leadership needs to realize that Cuellar’s, Gonzalez’s, and Davis’ disloyalty to the party gave Republicans a political win.
I would not have written this column about most other LGBTQ+ issues because there can be some reasonable debate on them. For example, I fully support LGBTQ+ inclusive antidiscrimination legislation. I could also imagine a situation where someone else disagrees with how a specific law is written, without their values being so different from mine that we couldn’t work together on anything.
But not here. Kids need health care, and Marjorie Taylor Greene should get exactly zero say in what kind of care doctors across the country provide. There is no redeeming value to Greene’s bill. Democrats need to take action.
In a moment of resistance and queer solidarity, a drag show went on despite patrons and performers being kicked out of a bar by about 20 police officers in bulletproof vests.
Police raided Pittsburgh LGBTQ+ venue P Town Bar on Friday in the middle of a drag event.
Drag artist Indica was performing alongside trans model and nightlife legend Amanda Lepore when police began to gather in the back of the establishment, QBurgh reported. When Indica finished her rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” police directed patrons to exit the bar but did not explain why beyond saying it was a “compliance check.”
“We waited 30 minutes outside for them to inspect every crevice,” Indica told QBurgh. But the patrons and performers refused to let the cops quash their spirit and instead created their own public performance space.
Video captured during the wait shows the crowd belting Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club while Indica dances up and down the sidewalk, collecting tips.
“Guess what, divas?” she said when the performance ended. “This is why queer people have gotta stick the f*ck together in 2025… Make some noise for the queer people in your life everybody.” The crowd cheered.
QBurgh described the moment as one of “resistance, solidarity, and improvisational beauty” and one that “reminded everyone there that drag isn’t just entertainment, it’s political. And when the music stops, the queens don’t.”
Police proceeded to allow 70 people to reenter the bar, saying it had been over capacity with the 130 people who were in attendance.
“The raid was a jarring experience in 2025,” one witness said. “Dozens of state police, geared up with bulletproof vests, flooded the bar and told us to get out. None of the officers would explain what was happening. We stood in the rain for maybe 30 minutes or so until most patrons were let back in. Fortunately the situation was calm and orderly, but they really just overtook this queer space with an entire fleet of police to ‘count heads’ or whatever their excuse was.”
Corey Dunbar, a security guard for P Town Bar, praised the way the staff handled the incident, saying they “ensured patrons’ safety and nerves during the process” since “many people were shaken up.”
State police told QBurgh the raid was instigated by the Allegheny County Nuisance Bar Task Force. It is not known who made the initial complaint that led the cops there.
Witnesses said officers would not look the queens in the eye and would not answer their questions about why things like this never happen at straight bars. Indica also said that some officers even asked to take selfies with Lepore.
Trans rights have taken a big hit in the United Kingdom this year, but one community project is working to give trans youth a reason to smile this holiday season.
Over the past few years, Trans Secret Santa UK has provided over a thousand gifts to trans youth under 25. But the group’s call for donations this year acknowledged that this year was especially tough.
Earlier this year, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman under the country’s 2010 anti-discrimination law, The Equality Act, is based on “biological sex.” Following the ruling, the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has recommended policies to ban trans people from restrooms and other public single-sex spaces.
“While trans adults might be struggling, imagine what that must feel like as a child,” said activist Jude Guaitamacchi in a fundraising video for Trans Secret Santa. He said many trans youth feel “isolated and powerless over their environment,” and Trans Secret Santa wants to “bring a little bit of joy to their lives this year.”
In a video spotlighting the program, one of the group’s founders explains that many of the gifts have been purchased from trans authors, artists, and other trans creatives. “We put money directly back into the community,” they said.
“We’ve already had messages from young people just thanking us for this project even existing,” one volunteer said, adding that it’s “important people know their authentic self is respected and cherished.”
“I grew up just not wanting any young person to go through what I went through,” said another.
This year, the group will deliver gifts to 896 trans young people who applied, which it described as a record number.
The CEO of an anti-trans clothing company is trying to bribe professional women’s soccer players into speaking out against trans athletes – but none of them are taking her up on it.
Jennifer Sey, a retired artistic gymnast who won the 1986 National Gymnastics Championship, runs the anti-trans clothing company XX-XY Athletics, which donates money from each purchase to organizations fighting against trans inclusion in sports.
Sey regularly spouts anti-trans rhetoric on social media and recently wrote that she’d give $10,000 to the next player in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) “to stand up in defense of keeping women’s soccer female.”
“A full-throated defense,” she emphasized. “A press conference. Nothing mealy-mouthed.”
Her offer aimed to build on an anti-trans New York Postessay by NWSL player Elizabeth Eddy in the wake of her team, the Angel City Football Club, signing an intersex player. Eddy claimed to be fighting for the “integrity of women’s sports.” In other words, she was arguing to exclude trans and intersex players from women’s leagues.
After Sey’s post, others offered to add money to the pot. Two anonymous people added $5,000, and Clay Travis – founder of the anti-LGBTQ+ sports site Outkick – offered $15,000, bringing the total to $35,000.
But according to Out, not a single player has taken Sey up on her offer. What’s more, there are reportedly no trans players currently in the league.
In fact, after Eddy published her essay, Angel City captain Sarah Gorden and vice captain Angelina Anderson spoke out in support of trans athletes.
“That article does not speak for this team and this locker room,” Gorden said during an October 30 press conference.
She said her teammates were “hurt,” “harmed,” and “disgusted” by Eddy’s words.
“We don’t agree with the things written, for a plethora of reasons, but mostly the undertones come across as transphobic and racist as well.” (The essay used a photo of cisgender woman player Barbra Banda, who is from Zambia.)
Anderson added that Angel City “is a place for everyone” and that Los Angeles is “a place that was founded upon inclusivity and love for all people.”
Sey, on the other hand, appeared on Fox News after Eddy published her essay to claim that there are “several males” in the NWSL. She then claimed Banda, who plays for the Orlando Pride, is a man.
The NWSL does not have a formal policy when it comes to gender eligibility, which has earned the league criticism from folks on all sides of the debate.
“You have to take a stance,” sports writer Julie Kliegman told The Athletic. “It has to be clear, it has to be transparent, and it has to be inclusive. Otherwise, this neutral ground isn’t really so neutral, because it’s leaving room for players like Eddy to steer the conversation.”
