A Catholic “Pride Mass” at Duquesne University was canceled at the urging of the Pittsburgh diocese after being bombarded with messages from anti-LGBTQ+ protestors.
Planned by the organization Catholics for Change in our Church, the mass was meant to be promoted as a service held in solidarity with LGBTQ+ Catholics. But according to local news outlet WESA, all hell broke loose when a flyer referring to the event as a “Pride Mass” was obtained and published by the far-right Daily Signal. The flyer was reportedly put out by a parish member without approval from the organizers.
Her rhetoric is getting more combative, saying trans women are just faking it so that they can attack cis women in the bathroom.
In a letter calling for the cancellation of the event, Bishop David Zubik said the messages the diocese received “used condemning and threatening, and some might say hateful, language not in keeping with Christian charity.”
Zubik also emphasized he never approved the mass.
“This event was billed as a ‘Pride Mass’ organized to coincide with Pride Month, an annual secular observance that supports members of the LGBTQ community on every level, including lifestyle and behavior, which the Church cannot endorse,” he wrote.
He claimed that the Church welcomes LGBTQ+ people but that it “cannot endorse behavior contrary to what we know to be God’s law.”
“We are very sad and very frustrated,” said Kevin Hayes, president of Catholics for Change in our Church. Hayes said the organization just wanted to “have LGBTQ Catholics feel welcomed as beloved sons and daughters of a loving God and just be affirmed for who they are within the context of the Eucharist, which we feel is appropriate.”
Hayes also said that the group held a mass for LGBTQ+ Catholics last year and no one complained. But anti-LGBTQ+ vitriol from the right has been growing more and more extreme, and this year, extremists have made it their mission to take down any company or organization that supports Pride.
“It concerns me that our Christian brothers and sisters became angry over the mere support of the LGBTQ community by having them participate with us in a mass,” said Deacon Herb Riley of the St. Joseph the Worker’s LGBTQ ministry, who was helping to plan the service, to WESA.
Creighton University theology professor Todd Salzman added that despite the fact that polls show the majority of Catholics support LGBTQ+ people, bishops have been hesitant to follow suit.
Salzman said Zubik’s decision to cancel the event validated the protestors’ actions. He also called out the hypocrisy of stances like Zubik’s.
“The church does not exclude Catholics who practice artificial birth control, even though the church condemns that — the vast majority of Catholics do practice artificial birth control in a marital relationship,” he said. “So there’s a singling out of LGBTQ people.”
While speaking at the Politico Health Care Summit, out Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) expressed the need for the federal government to collect more data about LGBTQ+ people, especially when it comes to mental health.
Federally funded surveys, she said, rarely provide questions on LGBTQ+ identities.
“I think it’s so important people are counted. It’s hard to claim with great reliability how much greater risk gay and lesbian, bisexual, transgender children and adults are at risk for suicide. It is really important that we get that data because it helps us make our arguments for greater resources and greater services.”
As The Hill reports, Baldwin also voiced plans to reintroduce the “LGBTQI+ Data Inclusion ACT,” which would require federal agencies that collect demographic data through surveys to include questions on LGBTQ+ identities. The House passed the bill last year, but it died in the Senate.
During her time at the health summit, Baldwin also emphasized the need for filibuster reform, though acknowledged it would be “difficult at this particular moment” to make it happen.
In April, Baldwin announced she is running for reelection to a third term in Congress.
In a statement, Baldwin said she’s “committed to making sure that working people, not just the big corporations and ultra-wealthy, have a fighter on their side. With so much at stake, from families struggling with rising costs to a ban on reproductive freedom, Wisconsinites need someone who can fight and win.”
She made history in 2012 when she became the first out gay senator in the nation and the first woman senator from Wisconsin. At the time, she declared, “I didn’t run to make history. I ran to make a difference.”
Last year, Baldwin spearheaded the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act (RMA), which repealed the Defense of Marriage Act, federally recognizes interracial and same-sex marriages performed by states, and requires states to recognize marriages performed in other states.
“Thank you to the millions of same-sex and interracial couples who truly made this moment possible,” Baldwin tweeted after it passed. “By living as your true selves, you changed the hearts and minds of people around you.”
Editor’s note: This article mentions suicide. If you need to talk to someone now, call the Trans Lifeline at 1-877-565-8860. It’s staffed by trans people, for trans people. The Trevor Project provides a safe, judgement-free place to talk for LGBTQ youth at 1-866-488-7386. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) signed two anti-trans bills targeting kids into law on Wednesday, one banning gender-affirming care for trans youth and one banning trans women and girls from playing on women’s sports teams.
S.B. 49, the “Missouri Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act”, is set to take effect on August 28 and bans all gender-affirming treatments (including reversible puberty blockers) until August 2027. Any healthcare providers who violate the law risk losing their license. Some states that have passed gender-affirming care bans have required trans youth already receiving this care to wean themselves off their medications and detransition, but this law allows those already undergoing care to continue.
“We support everyone’s right to his or her own pursuit of happiness,” Parson tweeted upon signing the bill. “However, we must protect children from making life-altering decisions that they could come to regret in adulthood once they have physically and emotionally matured.”
The anti-trans sports bill, S.B. 39, says both private and public schools all the way through college must require trans youth to play on sports teams according to their sex assigned at birth.
In his tweet about the bill, Parson declared that inclusivity was unjust “nonsense.”
“Women and girls deserve and have fought for an equal opportunity to succeed, and we stand up to the nonsense and stand with them as they take back their sport competitions. In Missouri, we support real fairness, not injustice disguised as social righteousness.”
LGBTQ+ advocates have roundly condemned the legislation.
“These bills represent a two-pronged approach to targeting trans youth and eliminating their stories, their perspectives, and their right to a happy, healthy childhood,” said Human Rights Campaign state legislative director and senior counsel Cathryn Oakley in a statement. “SB 49 tosses aside decades of scientific research and guidance from every major medical and mental health organization, representing over 1.3 million American doctors, in favor of the discriminatory whims of politicians in Jefferson City.”
Shira Berkowitz, senior director of public policy and advocacy for Missouri advocacy group PROMO said Parson has “showed just how little Missouri’s state government values LGBTQ+ lives and, in particular, transgender and gender-expansive youth. Berkowitz added that the laws are part of an “embarrassing history of elected leaders intentionally taking action to harm transgender Missourians.”
As GOP-led states continue to ban medically necessary care for trans youth and some adults, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) has signed an executive order protecting gender-affirming care.
“In the state of Maryland, nobody should have to justify their own humanity,” Moore saidwhile signing the order at a Pride event. “This order is focused on ensuring Maryland is a safe place for gender-affirming care, especially as other states take misguided and hateful steps to make gender-affirming care cause for legal retribution. In Maryland, we are going to lead on this issue.”
Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller said the order shows that “this administration is saying to all LGBTQIA+ Marylanders: You deserve to be your authentic selves, during Pride month and every month. You deserve to live safely, openly and freely; and receive the gender-affirming care you need.”
This is one of several moves state leaders have made this year to protect the more than 94,000 trans and nonbinary Marylanders. In March, Moore signed the Trans Health Equity Act, which requires state Medicaid plans to cover gender-affirming care. Among the treatments covered are hormone therapies, puberty blockers, and surgeries, as well as voice training, fertility preservation, and permanent hair removal.
Moore was also the first governor in state history to formally recognize March 31st as the International Transgender Day of Visibility.
The state also recently repealed an archaic law banning sodomy. Moore did not sign the bill overturning the Unnatural or Perverted Sexual Practices Act, but he allowed it to go into effect without his signature.
The Pride event at Government House – the state’s official governor’s residence – is the first to ever be held there.
“I want you to know that in this house, you aren’t just welcome, you are necessary,” said First Lady Dawn Moore.
A library in Montana has canceled a transgender Cheyenne woman guest speaker, saying that her appearance at the library could violate the state’s new drag ban.
Adria Jawort – who made headlines last year when she won a lawsuit against a conservative, straight, white male pastor who called her mentally ill – was set to speak at the Butte Public Library last Friday as part of the library’s Pride Month programming. She was going to speak about “Montana History of Two-Spirit and LGBTQ+ Peoples.”
But the library canceled her appearance on Thursday afternoon. A librarian emailed her and said that the county “decided that it is too much of a legal risk to have a transgendered person in the library. I really regret this.”
Butte-Silver Bow city-county Chief Executive J.P. Gallagher cited the state’s new law, H.B. 359, which is intended to ban drag story hours. The law bans both drag queens and kings from reading in front of children. It also defines both as “a male or female performer who adopts a flamboyant or parodic” male or feminine persona “with glamorous or exaggerated costumes and makeup.”
Gallagher still proclaimed June Pride Month at the Butte-Silver Bow Courthouse that same day.
Gallagher said that he would have let the performance happen if not for the state law. “But we would be in violation of state law if we allowed this person to give her presentation,” he said. According to Jawort’s Substack, Gallagher was reportedly getting legal advice from County Attorney Eileen Joyce.
Jawort said that she testified in the state legislature against the drag ban.
“I did so by explicitly doing a little dance (it was the beginning of the dance by that robot girl in the M3GAN) and saying that this bill’s broad definition targets trans people, what I had just done would be illegal under it,” she wrote. “Then I explained First Amendment Law to them – which seemed to be beyond their comprehension.”
Jawort said that there was already going to be a police presence at her lecture on Friday because the library “had been receiving harassing calls” about it.
“Now, what we have here is like a version of 21st Century ‘masquerade laws’ used to target trans people with back in the 1950s and 60s with [SIC] to arrest them for wearing articles of clothing of the opposite ‘biological’ gender,” she wrote.
In 2021, pastor J.D. Hall, a former darling of the far-right wing in Montana, called Jawort a “Gothic Transvestite,” called her “mannish,” and said she was mentally ill because she is trans. He also said that she threatened state officials.
She sued him for libel and they reached a settlement involving Hall paying Jawort $250,000, retracting the libelous article from his website, and publicly apologizing to Jawort.
“I apologize to Adrian Jawort,” Hall’s public apology in 2022 said. “The information I published about Adrian was false. Adrian did not threaten or harass Senator Butch Gillespie. I regret the error and sincerely apologize to Adrian for publishing it.”
Members of a culture-warring Florida school district spent a contentious eight-and-a-half hours at a school board meeting expressing their exasperation with the divisiveness plaguing the schools.
According to the Tampa Bay Times,topics at the meeting included book bans, LGBTQ+ rights, and the “overall direction of the … district and its closely divided board.”
Many speakers (there were over 100) denounced the right-wing propaganda claiming teachers are indoctrinating children to be LGBTQ+.
“No one is teaching your kids to be gay!” said former math teacher Alyssa Marano, who recently resigned from the Hernando school district. “Sometimes, they just are gay. I have math to teach. I literally don’t have time to teach your kids to be gay.”
The district gained notoriety in May when the Florida Department of Education began investigating a Hernando fifth-grade teacher, Jenna Barbee, for showing her class the Disney movie Strange World, which contains a scene where one of the male characters says he has a crush on a boy. Barbee has since resigned.
But Barbee is just the beginning. About 50 teachers are reportedly planning to resign due to the school’s hostile environment.
At the board meeting, teacher Daniel Scott decried the “draconian working conditions that are causing many such as myself to abandon this honored career.”
“I don’t feel that I can adequately provide a safe environment for my students anymore,” Scott said.
Students and parents also spoke, with one saying the school’s “war on woke” is actually a war on the students’ futures.
Amelie Howell, a sophomore in high school, held a sign that said “Education is not indoctrination” and told the board, “It feels like a lot of people are speaking for us. Nobody is asking what we want.”
According to the Times, meeting attendees also included Proud Boys and members of the anti-LGBTQ+ organization Moms for Liberty.
As part of his own war on so-called “woke” culture, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has been helping Moms for Liberty members get elected to local Florida school boards.
Shannon Rodriguez, a Hernando board member who was endorsed by Moms for Liberty, is the one who reported Barbee for showing the Disney film.
Both Rodriguez and fellow Board member Mark Johnson – whose campaign was focused on opposing critical race theory – have caused controversy in the district after campaigning to remove Superintendent John Stratton, whom they have accused of supporting “indoctrination.”
Stratton survived the vote of no confidence, with one board member, Susan Duval, saying you “could never find a better superintendent.”
Meetings like this are the product of a Florida culture war continually stoked by DeSantis, who recently announced his campaign for President.
Beginning with the 2022 passage of the Don’t Say Gay law – which prohibits class instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade – DeSantis and the Republican-controlled legislature have devoted their tenure to demonizing LGBTQ+ people and making schools less safe for LGBTQ+ students.
DeSantis and the Florida GOP have been so hostile to the LGBTQ+ community that the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) – the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organization – joined Equality Florida to issue a travel advisory for the state.
On May 17, DeSantis signed a slate of laws targeting LGBTQ+ people, including a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, restrictions on such care for adults, a ban on all-ages drag shows, and an anti-trans bathroom bill.
DeSantis has gone to war with Disney over its opposition to the Don’t Say Gay law, has launched numerous blindsides attacking “woke indoctrination” in schools, and has taken control of the state’s education system with handpicked administrators and the power of the bully pulpit. His staff has regularly smeared LGBTQ+ people and allies on social media with vile slurs and insinuations of sexual abuse.
The Don’t Say Gay law – which has been expanded to all grades – has led to the banning of LGBTQ+ books in schools and the forced outing of students to their parents by school administrators.
In 2021, DeSantis signed a bill banning trans students from participating in school sports.
DeSantis has ranted against “woke gender ideology” and once claimed, “In the state of Florida, we are not going to allow them to inject transgenderism into kindergarten.”
LGBTQ+ students in Florida are so scared of repercussions that many have refused to speak with LGBTQ Nation about their experiences. A non-LGBTQ+ student told us that terrified queer students are learning to “shut up and keep their head low.”
The North Face became the latest company attacked by the right for advertising to LGBTQ+ people for Pride Month, but unlike some other giant corporations, they are standing by their brand partner and issued a statement supporting LGBTQ+ equality.
Conservatives – including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) – were outraged last week that the outdoors-themed drag queen Pattie Gonia made a video announcing The North Face’s “Summer of Pride” event on Instagram, part of a brand partnership. The video didn’t include any nudity, sex, or coarse language, but that didn’t stop the right from getting angry at it.
“Big name brands sexually targeting children makes me want to buy all generic brand clothing now,” Greene wrote in response to the video, adding the hashtag #BoycottGroomers, an accusation that LGBTQ+ people are child sex abusers.
“Well, I guess North Face wanted to get a taste of what conservatives did to Bud Light and Target,” Boebert wrote. “How many times do we have to explain to the woke marketing departments at these disgusting companies that America is not a nation of degenerates?”
But, unlike Bud Light and Target, The North Face isn’t backing down.
“The North Face has always believed the outdoors should be a welcoming, equitable, and safe place for all,” the company said in a statement. “We are honored and grateful to support partners like Pattie Gonia who help make this vision a reality.”
“Creating community and belonging in the outdoors is a core part of our values and is needed now more than ever. We stand with those who support our vision for a more inclusive outdoor industry.”
The North Face turned off comments on their Instagram posts about the Pride Month event but comment sections on other posts are full of anti-LGBTQ+ messages.
In April, the right attacked Bud Light for its brand partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which involved a short Instagram video as well.
Anheuser-Busch, which owns Bud Light, released tepid statements about how the company “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people” but did not stand up for Mulvaney or LGBTQ+ people more generally.
“The North Face is following hundreds of other businesses that include and stand with LGBTQ people and our allies,” said GLAAD CEO and president Sarah Kate Ellis. “At a time when over 20% of Gen Z is LGBTQ and a supermajority of Americans support LGBTQ people, The North Face’s decision should be a signal to other companies that including LGBTQ people and allies is better for business than siding with a small number of violent extremists who want to keep LGBTQ consumers and employees invisible.”
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) has signed an education bill that includes several anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
S.F. 496 bans instruction on LGBTQ+ identities through sixth grade and requires schools to out trans youth to their parents. It also bans all books containing sex acts from school classrooms and libraries, which will undoubtedly lead to the banning of several LGBTQ+ books.
And despite the fact that Iowa has already banned gender-affirming care for trans youth, the bill explicitly establishes that parents and guardians have “the fundamental, constitutionally protected right, to make decisions affecting [their] child, including decisions related to the minor child’s medical care….”
The section clarifies that it does not authorize parents and guardians to “engage in conduct that is unlawful,” and as such, parents of trans youth still do not have the right to seek gender-affirming care for their kids.
Democrats and LGBTQ+ rights groups have blasted the bill.
“We need all Iowa trans kids to know, LGBTQ kids to know, that you belong here,” House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst (D), reportedly said as the legislative session came to a close.
After Reynold’s signed the bill, the Iowa Senate Democrats tweeted that the law seeks to “ban books and marginalize kids just because they’re different.”
“Censorship and singling out LGBTQ Iowans is wrong for kids, and wrong for our state,” the tweet concluded.
Courtney Reyes, the executive director of One Iowa, said in a statement that the law “will harm an already vulnerable group of children and will benefit no one.”
The bill was part of a slate of education bills signed by Reynolds last week. In a statement, she said the state has “secured transformational education reform that puts parents in the driver’s seat, eliminates burdensome regulations on public schools, provides flexibility to raise teacher salaries, and empowers teachers to prepare our kids for their future.”
“Education is the great equalizer and everyone involved – parents, educators, our children – deserves an environment where they can thrive,” she said.
Reynolds has made her anti-trans views a cornerstone of her tenure. She has also made “parental control” a centerpiece of her public messaging, claiming a far-left “woke” agenda is threatening the health and well-being of the state’s children.
While campaigning for reelection in 2022, she aired a TV spot highlighting what she called her values of faith, freedom, and hard work.
“Here in Iowa,” she declared, “we know right from wrong, boys from girls.”
At the end of March this year, Reynolds signed two bills targeting trans youth. One forbids minors from accessing puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy and forces trans teens currently receiving gender-affirming care to de-transition. It also threatens the professional licenses of any medical practitioners who provide such care. Studies show that gender-affirming care is safe, reversible, and essential to trans people’s overall well-being.
The other prohibits people from using school restrooms that don’t correspond with the gender a person was assigned at birth.
Last year, Reynolds also signed an anti-trans sports ban.
Months after the war to end all wars came to a close in 1918, a German researcher named Magnus Hirschfeld opened his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology) in Berlin, the world’s first academic institution devoted to the study of sexuality.
He bought the building from the defeated government of the Free State of Prussia in the leafy Tiergarten district. It would house a research library and a large archive with tens of thousands of volumes; a marriage and sex counseling office; a museum of sexual artifacts; medical exam rooms; and a lecture hall.
Hirschfeld, who was openly gay and Jewish, would occupy a building next door that he later acquired. The institute became a gathering place for colleagues, patients, and friends who were both. Christopher Isherwood, Margaret Sanger, André Gide and Nehru were honored guests. The Soviets were repeat visitors.
Fourteen years later — and 90 years ago this month — it was sacked by Nazi youth, a milestone in the construction of the Nazi state, and a harbinger of an even more devastating conflict to come.
On May 6, 1933, just weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power, the Nazi-dominated German Student League marched to the Institute and sacked it while a brass band played. Hirschfeld was in Switzerland at the time and later watched newsreel footage in Paris of his beloved Institut destroyed.
What volumes the Nazi youth — and later that afternoon, the SA, the Nazi paramilitary wing — didn’t destroy were hauled out of the building four nights later and thrown atop the enormous bonfire of books at Opernplatz, the most iconic of the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s. A bronze bust of Hirschfeld from his Institut was set atop the pyre.
The tens of thousands of books, papers, research documents, films and photographs represented decades of work by Hirschfeld and his colleagues, reaching back to Hirschfeld’s visit to the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, where he first encountered a gay subculture similar to what he’d experienced in Berlin. So began a career dedicated to the study of, and advocacy for, sexual minorities of all kinds.
While Hirschfeld is best known to history for his Institut and the enormity of its loss, he first gained international fame in turn of the century Germany testifying as an expert witness in a libel case involving Kaiser Wilhelm II’s close friend, the politically powerful Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, who was accused of having a sexual relationship with a German general, Kuno von Moltke.
Hirschfeld famously testified he could confirm Moltke was gay, there was nothing wrong with it, and that “homosexuality was part of the plan of nature and creation just like normal love.”
He represented everything the Nazis would come to loathe.
Ninety years after Hitler began building his National Socialist state by tearing down the work of enlightened scholars like Hirschfeld, LGBTQ Nation spoke with Jonathan Friedman, Director of Free Expression and Education Programs for PEN America, to find out what lessons an authoritarian leader and his devoted followers from the past can teach us about the power of censorship today.
LGBTQ NATION: What does it say about Nazi tactics that they started their intellectual purge at a gay academic institution?
Jonathan Friedman: When we think about the Second World War, we sometimes forget what a multifaceted assault the Nazi regime was propagating. It was really never about only one group of people that was being targeted. It was many. It was people being targeted for religion, for ethnicity, for race, for their professions, for their political beliefs and their organizing for their sexual orientation. And, to some extent, for their gender, even at a time when maybe those weren’t the words that people used.
And so it’s astounding, I think, to reflect on what was lost, but then also, in an interesting way, in which historical chapters are now being highlighted in ways that we may have not been aware of before this one book burning, and the destruction of the Institute. It reminds us of the violence with which it began.
LGBTQ NATION: What parallels do you see in the tactics of that authoritarian regime with groups like Moms for Liberty?
JF: For many people, the drastic spread of this movement to totally erase certain identities from books in schools seems certainly of a similar vein, in the sense that both are tactics of erasure. I think a lot of the time right now, people want to downplay what’s happening. They say, “Well, if you can buy it on Amazon, it’s not a book ban,” or, “If you can get permission from a parent to go into a backroom in a library, then it’s not really banned.”
But the truth is, on the road to total censorship, there are many steps. It can be a ladder, a sliding scale. It does not happen that we go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning, and now we’re in an authoritarian country. It can be a slide, a kind of daily normalization, or routinization, of state censorship. It’s something people come to expect and come to live with. And when I speak to teachers and librarians around the country in places where these issues are intense right now, they do feel like they’re already living under McCarthyism.
LGBTQ NATION:What does the sacking of the Institute in Berlin have in common with the Don’t Say Gay law in Florida?
JF: I would say that both are cut from the same cloth, in the sense that they start from a place of intolerance, and they’re trying to weaponize that intolerance to spread misunderstanding, disinformation, marginalization, and to empower one group of people over others.
And you know, the reality is that in the United States right now, in Florida — anywhere — we’re actually living at a time of a kind of blossoming of freedom of expression, gender expression and sexuality. In fact, there has been so much circulation of ideas and information and identity that more people feel more affirmed in who they are today. And these tactics are undeniably an effort to push those identities back in the closet, to make people more uncomfortable in their bodies once again.
That might not start with book burnings. It might not start with closing of institutes. But where does it start? I think it starts with laws like Don’t Say Gay in Florida.
LGBTQ NATION:It’s like the definition of reactionary.
JF: It’s the very definition of a reactionary.
LGBTQ NATION:What characteristics do you think National Socialism and Christian Nationalism have in common?
JF: The common ideology I see would be a kind of supremacist notion that one group of people ought to be able to control society for everybody else, ought to be in positions of power, and ought to be able to keep anyone — any group of people that didn’t have historic power — at the margins. That’s a degree of commonality.
LGBTQ NATION: What do you think the ultimate aim of groups like Moms for Liberty is? What’s driving them?
JF: I think you can’t deny that there is a degree of political opportunism at work in all of this, where a particular movement is trying to galvanize people to the polls. You know, a lot of this intensified after the election of Governor Youngkin in Virginia in 2021. It has continued to have very clear political elements in both the involvement of some politicians in local school board affairs and in the passage of more and more laws.
So you can’t really distinguish anymore in a lot of states between the book bans that might be pushed by a group of local parents who are associated with Moms for Liberty and the laws that they’re taking advantage of, which are being promoted and passed in state houses in order to make that local activism easier. There’s a fundamental connection.
It’s not clear, I would say, what their ultimate aims are, beyond perhaps an effort to destroy public education.
LGBTQ NATION: How should writers today respond to censorship, and what lessons can they learn from what happened in Nazi Germany?
JF: I think we are seeing more and more solidarity. I think we’re seeing more people come together to speak out. But it’s already clear, in the second year of this, that it’s attacking more and more writers. So if censorship hasn’t come for your books yet, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to.
In a lot of places, censorship works in a chilling manner. And so people get more and more cautious. They want to restrict more and more content. They see concerning content in more and more places. And so there’s this whole effort to move the Overton windowaround how people think that libraries and schools should operate, from places that champion open inquiry and opportunities to learn about the world, to places where there are questions that one cannot ask, identities that one cannot learn about, histories that cannot be discussed.
That’s what’s so troubling, and so alarming, about the spread of this movement in our country.
Over the last year, Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Utah — four states bordering New Mexico — have all banned gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Meanwhile, New Mexico passed two laws ensuring that such care will remain legal statewide and that no government entities will ever help another state prosecute someone who obtains or provides that care.
As a result, New Mexico is quickly becoming a refugee state for those escaping their state’s anti-trans policies. That creates a unique challenge for the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico (TGRCNM). The Albuquerque-based center is the state’s only brick-and-mortar center run by trans people, for trans people.
“We’re geographically situated in between states that are struggling with treating people like human beings and allowing folks to have the bodily autonomy to take care of themselves in whatever way suits them best,” TGRCNM’s executive director T. Michael Trimm tells LGBTQ Nation. “So folks are fleeing here in droves.”
It’s difficult to quantify how many trans people have migrated to avoid trans healthcare bans. At least 17 states nationwide have passed laws restricting or banning such care for minors. Other states have also recently passed laws denying trans people restroom access, sports teams, and pronouns matching their gender identities.
While Republican legislators claim such laws are necessary to protect children from “indoctrination” and harm, opponents accuse the GOP of inserting itself between families and doctors as part of its larger culture war on queer people, leaving some no choice but to flee their home states.
New Mexico’s laws mimic those of California, Minnesota, and other “sanctuary states” which promise to protect the right to gender-affirming healthcare for youth and their families. As a result, out-of-state immigrants have increasingly sought help at TGRCNM, turning the Center into a sort of “trans Ellis Island,” Trimm says, referring to the New York center in the early 1900s that processed European immigrants and refugees.
The influx is challenging the TGRCNM to meet additional people’s needs in an already under-resourced state, Trimm adds.
Statistics suggest that trans newcomers may suffer from higher rates of poverty, familial rejection, workplace discrimination, and other oppressions that result in increased houselessness, food insecurity, and poor healthcare. As such, some newcomers may need a lot of assistance to establish new lives.
While many larger cities in surrounding states have LGBTQ+ centers with programs to help trans folks, the nearest centers focusing solely on trans people are located in Missouri and California, both over 800 miles away, leaving TGRCNM as the only nearby option for untold numbers of trans people seeking support.
“We do not feel equipped to handle the needs of these folks,” Adrien Lawyer, TGRCNM’s co-founder tells LGBTQ Nation. Trimm adds, “This is incredibly overwhelming and has continued to stretch the limits of our capacity.”
A room inside the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico. Credit: TRCNM
The TGRCNM already offers “direct services” for trans people in need, including a drop-in center three days a week that provides showers, washers and dryers, prepared meals, an open donation clothes closet, a computer lab, a lending library, and workers who can help people access food benefits, healthcare (including STI testing, needle-exchange, and mental health counselors), legal services, as well as housing and employment assistance.
The center also offers statewide services, including assisting with name changes on government ID documents, providing trans body shaping items (like binders and gaffes), an online directory and referral for trans-friendly healthcare providers, a support program for incarcerated trans people, and also nine weekly in-person and online support groups for trans people of color, children, parents, partners, and others who live inside and outside of the state.
“We have grown so much since we started in 2007, but one of our challenges remains finding and sustaining the funding to do the statewide work that we set out to do here,” Lawyer says.
Trimm agrees.
“New Mexico isn’t the most resourced state, yet we are offering the most protections for folks,” he says. “Funding would allow us to further serve the people already in our state, who may be unintentionally harmed by the influx of [transgender and non-conforming] refugees who come to the state, occupying housing, which raises market rent for everyone.”
Lawyer says TGRCNM’s immediate mission is “to not let people die here in our local community,” but he adds that the Center doesn’t just “want to just be trying to patch up people’s bullet holes with band-aids all the time” either. The Center wants to keep shifting the state’s culture towards valuing trans lives.
Doing this requires progressive legislation to ensure that trans people will be able to thrive in peace throughout the state. Recently passed legislation has made New Mexico “the safest state in the country for LGBTQ people,” according to Marshall Martinez, executive director of Equality New Mexico.
This year alone, New Mexico passed House Bill 207, which added gender identity to anti-discrimination and hate crime laws; House Bill 31, which made it easier for trans people to legally change their names; House Bill 7, which forbids anyone from restricting access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care; and Senate Bill 13 is a “shield law” that forbids the government from assisting with any out-of-state investigations into people who provide or receive such care.
The latter two laws are especially important since Texas and other states have threatened to prosecute doctors and parents for “child abuse” if they help kids access such care. Similar laws also threaten anyone who assists in obtaining an abortion.
Martinez says New Mexico’s trans-inclusive laws passed thanks to a strong, cooperative coalition consisting of Equality New Mexico, the TRCNM, local Planned Parenthood affiliates, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the reproductive justice organization Bold Futures New Mexico, the healthcare access advocacy group Strong Families New Mexico, and a “ton of other groups.”
The coalition’s organizations regularly communicate with each other every day, he says. Throughout the year, they make sure one another’s issues are represented at meetings with community and political leaders across the vast state. Each organization also uses its pre-existing relationships with legislators to educate lawmakers about one another’s key issues, gradually introducing leaders to lawmakers over time.
These groups all share a common enemy, Martinez notes: conservatives who hate LGBTQ+ people — they’re the same ones who want to dictate people’s medical decisions, he says. As such, it made sense for the coalition members to support healthcare legislation that bundled abortion access with access for gender-affirming care.
“These are the only two health care procedures being criminalized,” Martinez says. “At the end of the day in New Mexico, either you believe that a patient can make decisions about their health care and their body or you don’t. And if you believe that, then you must believe it about everything.”
“Liberation is bodily autonomy, and bodily autonomy is the same regardless of whose body it is and what decisions you’re trying to make,” he continues. “The ability to decide whether or not I take hormones to transition my gender is equally as important as the decision I or my partner or sibling may make about having or not having children…. [It’s] the same level of bodily autonomy as being able to sue the cops when they harm you [or] violate your civil rights… which is the same as being able to make an adult decision about using cannabis.”
Under this reasoning, the coalition has helped pass other progressive laws, including ones that will enable residents to purchase a state health insurance option, enable cannabis entrepreneurs of color to benefit first from legalized sales, remove “qualified immunity” protections from abusive cops, and repeal older anti-abortion and anti-sodomy laws. Martinez doesn’t see these all as individual policy changes so much as the victories of a movement that has been successful on multiple fronts.
Granted, New Mexico’s Democratic-leaning electorate differentiates it from other states in ways that could make this strategy difficult to replicate elsewhere. New Mexico has a pro-LGBTQ+ governor, Michelle Lynn Lujan Grisham (D), and its legislature has been controlled by Democrats for almost all of the last 30 years. Its population of just over two million — 30% of which is non-white, including 21 indigenous sovereign nations — has helped Democratic presidential candidates win seven of the last eight elections.
I am deeply honored and humbled to continue serving our beautiful state as governor of New Mexico.
As I begin my second term, I will continue doing the work to ensure that the next fifty years are the greatest and most prosperous in New Mexico history – progress is our destiny. pic.twitter.com/0PPKDpHLAS— Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (@GovMLG) January 3, 2023
But Martinez says the state’s progressive victories at least disprove the idea that religious people of color are among the most conservative. “It has proven to be incredibly untrue amongst Hispanic, Latino, and indigenous Catholics across the country,” he says.
“People in New Mexico have been learning how to live with people of different cultural and religious values and backgrounds for 200 years,” he adds. “And at the end of the day, our values have always been that we love accept and affirm our neighbors, even when we don’t understand or agree with.”
He encourages advocacy organizations in larger states not to operate from a territorial and scarcity model, one that sees other progressive causes as a potential drain on an organization’s resources or influence. In New Mexico, he says, progressive groups inquire about one another’s legislation, asking how each can help apply equal pressure on legislators over a wide range of issues. Over the years, such coalition building has made it so that New Mexican lawmakers don’t pursue bad laws, he says.
It’s likely that the state’s trans protections will eventually be legally challenged by conservatives either inside or outside of its borders. But Martinez remains confident that the laws will withstand legal challenges, especially with a broad coalition supporting them.
“We’re not doing something radically new by protecting trans people,” he says. “We’re doing what we’ve always done, which is protect people from hatred and discrimination because that’s a New Mexican value.”
