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.”
President Donald Trump just nominated transphobic Indiana attorney Justin Olson to serve as a federal judge in the Indiana Southern District Court. Olson works with the so-called Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS) to sue universities and the NCAA for their trans-inclusive sports policies.
In a social media post announcing Olson’s nomination, Trump wrote, “Graduating magna cum laude from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Justin previously distinguished himself at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Indianapolis and, as a litigator, has been fighting tirelessly to keep men out of women’s sports.”
Olson is a lead lawyer in an anti-trans lawsuit financed by ICONS representing three former University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) women swimmers who sued UPenn, Harvard University, the Ivy League (an athletic conference of eight private universities, including UPenn and Harvard), and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
The lawsuit alleges that the universities and NCAA violated Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex-based educational discrimination, by allowing trans swimmer Lia Thomas to compete on UPenn’s women’s swim team during 2021 and 2022, Daily Journal reported, something which left the plaintiffs “repeatedly emotionally traumatized.” The suit seeks a total ban on trans female athletes — citing opportunities “lost” and “taken” from trans women who allegedly “displaced” cis women “unfairly.”
“The UPenn administrators went on to tell the [plaintiffs] that if the women spoke publicly about their concerns about Thomas’ participation on the Women’s Team, the reputation of those complaining about Thomas being on the team would be tainted with transphobia for the rest of their lives and they would probably never be able to get a job,’” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit wants the NCAA to “render invalid and reassign and revise all awards, records, points, prizes, titles, trophies announcements or other recognition assigned, given announced, communicate or recognized by the NCAA which were based in any way upon the competitive results or participation of any male who competed in women’s events.”
Last June, UPenn stripped Thomas of her athletic swimming records and adopted an anti-trans sports ban, after pressure from the current presidential administration.
Olson is also an attorney in ICONS’ lawsuit against San Jose State University (SJSU) and the Mountain West Conference for allowing a trans volleyball player to participate in collegiate matches. The player — who participated for three seasons without any issues over her participation — didn’t cause any unfair advantage or injuries, but the lawsuit claims her presence still stifled other female athletes’ “free speech.”
The U.S. Department of Education is currently investigating SJSU for the situation.
ICONS has also used its social media to demean three successful high school trans girls, and collegiate track athlete Sadie Schreiner, referring to them as “men” and “cheaters,” even though each was fully eligible to compete by the regulations of the respective governing bodies of their event, Outsportsreported.
Olson’s legal efforts align with that of the Trump administration
This past February, Trump signed an executive order to block federal funding for schools that allow trans girls and women to participate in school sports as their authentic selves, and the order told the DOJ to prosecute schools that allow trans students to play sports. Additionally, the order pressured all national and international governing sports bodies to also ban trans athletes.
President Joe Biden’s administration interpreted Title IX as a law prohibiting anti-trans discrimination since it’s impossible to discriminate on the basis of gender identity without taking sex into account. That is, banning trans girls from playing school sports but not cis girls, solely because of their sex assigned at birth, is the kind of discrimination that Title IX was intended to prevent, the previous administration believed.
The current administration is arguing that allowing trans girls to play school sports takes away “critical visibility for college scholarships and recognition” from cis girls, who are also “denied awards” if trans girls win. Trump and ICONS have baselessly claimed that trans athletes endanger girls and women’s safety, echoing transphobic smears that encourage violence against trans people and their allies.
Aaaaaand he’s back…. Disgraced gay former Congressman George Santos has inserted himself in the presidential election with his “expert” take on hard-right, culture-warring Republicans with a drag-addled past.
The onetime Republican New York representative, who’s facing multiple campaign finance indictments following his expulsion from the U.S. House of Representatives, shared his reaction to the revelation that Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), attended a party while he was a student at Yale Law School dressed as a woman in an interview with TMZ.
According to Santos, the controversy surrounding Vance’s cross-dressing at a costume party is “disingenuous” and “most dudes at some point have played around” dressing up as a woman.
“It’s definitely not drag,” Santos said of Vance’s amateur ensemble.
Photos shared by a former Yale classmate revealed Vance posing seductively wearing a long blonde wig, black knit blouse, a colorful skirt and a chunky chain necklace. In one photo, he carries a black purse over his shoulder.
“Holy crap, is that bad drag,” Santos commented about the photos.
“I mean, the guy went to a costume party, put on a freakin’ cheap wig from Party City, or something similar,” the one-time Brazilian drag queen posited. “To call that drag is disingenuous, and I think most dudes at some have played around with costumes that were gender-bender.”
Straight “couples do that all the time,” Santos claimed. “The wife will dress up as a guy. Husband will dress up as a woman. So it’s not drag. It’s definitely not drag.”
Like the self-loathing Santos, Vance has been consistently hostile to the LGBTQ+ community.
Last year, along with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in the House, Vance introduced legislation in the Senate to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth at the federal level and to make such care more difficult for trans adults to obtain.
Vance has expressed his support for Don’t Say Gay legislation prohibiting discussions of sexual orientation and gender identities in schools, writing, “I’ll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children.”
Vance spoke out against laws protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination following the 2020 Supreme Court Bostock v. Clayton County ruling, which found that anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination is a form of sex-based discrimination. He called the legal reasoning behind the decision a “betrayal of social conservatives and traditionalists.”
Vance also opposes the Equality Act, legislation to include sexual orientation and gender identity in federal anti-discrimination laws.
News of Santos’ own drag past in Brazil — as a pageant queen named Kitara Ravache — surfaced amid a tsunami of larcenous revelations about the Long Island Republican in 2023. The newly-sworn-in rep spent weeks denying the rumors before eventually owning up to his alter ego.
Roz Keith found out her son was transgender on his terms.
The suburban mom was asking about haircuts, and Hunter, just shy of 14 at the time, texted her some photos. “He started texting me pictures of boys with short haircuts. And I said, ‘Oh, these are very masculine. And Hunter said, ‘Uh huh,’ and walked out of the room.”
It was typical teenage behavior, but the conversation that followed was life-changing, Keith said.
“I went upstairs, knocked on his door, and said, ‘What’s going on?’ And that’s when he told me. He said, ‘I’m a boy. I’m transgender.’ That was how he came out to me.”
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Keith was caught off guard on multiple fronts. “All the little things from the time he was super little then became the hammer over the head.” She thought about Hunter playing with boy dolls, preferring time with boys to girls, choosing Narnia’s Prince Caspian over all the Disney princess costumes.
“I saw this one male avatar in a game, this buff, masculine character that he had created, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s a guy.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, okay.’ You know, no explanation. So, all along, I just kept saying ‘Okay,’ too.”
Keith wasn’t a helicopter parent. “We really encouraged our kids to be independent,” she said, “and we wanted them to be happy and successful and productive, whatever that meant for them.” But she also said a transgender child “just wasn’t in my consideration set.”
“In my world, I didn’t have a friend who had a trans child. We didn’t have any adult in our community who was trans or in the process of coming out or identified in any way remotely that way. So it was really a foreign concept from that perspective.”
While those conversations weren’t happening in Keith’s world, they certainly were in her precocious online teenager’s.
“He figured it out because he was watching YouTube, and he saw a trans person on this show talking about their coming out. And that was his light bulb moment. And he said, ‘Oh my God, that’s me.’”
Hunter spent a long time contemplating his revelation and researching what to do about it before he shared anything with his family.
“He’d been researching for two years,” Keith recalled. “He had a checklist of everything he wanted to do.”
With Hunter’s declaration, his state of mind came into focus for his mom.
“Based on things he shared when he was younger, he felt different, and he didn’t know why he felt different, and he didn’t have language to explain it,” Keith realized. “And it created a lot of struggle and conflict, and, I think, anger for him.”
“He said, you know, ‘I just felt like the weird kid.’”
Keith decided to close that gap – for her son and for others.
In 2015, she founded Stand with Trans, a support network devoted to trans kids and their parents and caregivers. The nonprofit provides transgender and nonbinary youth with life-saving programs like mental health services, peer support groups, educational resources, and, most importantly, Keith says, “validation and empowerment.”
Stand With Trans also provides critical support to parents or guardians of trans youth. Its Ally Parents program allows loved ones to text, call, or email other parents of trans youth for connection and advice.
Letting go
“Parents can have a hard time when their child comes out and wants to transition to a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth,” Keith said.
“They struggle to let go of the child they thought they had and the dreams that they had, right? If a child was assigned female at birth, a parent might say, ‘I just imagined her walking down the aisle in the white dress,’ you know? And they grieve this child as if the child has died.”
“I never took that approach,” Keith said, “because I knew that my child was very much alive and that it was my job to make sure that he stayed that way. You know, it was my job to make sure that he was mentally well and that he got what he needed so he could thrive.”
For Hunter and his family, checking off those steps to transition wouldn’t come easily.
“There were no pediatric gender clinics who were seeing trans youth covered by our insurance. There were no therapists who we could find who were trained to see trans adolescents. There were no support groups. There were no parent groups. There was nothing for youth. Like, literally every phone call was a brick wall,” Keith said.
But Hunter wasn’t waiting on the details. He decided to come out on Facebook.
“My daughter came to me and said, ‘Did you see what Hunter posted?’ And I said, ‘No.’”
While Keith and her husband had talked to a few close friends about Hunter, the family hadn’t been sharing much “because it wasn’t our story to share — that was up to him.”
With Hunter’s announcement, “It was like the floodgates had opened,” Keith said.
The family agreed to tell their story.
They began speaking publicly about their experience. “And there was just like this swell of relief, I guess, and joy from families in the community who had been trying to manage this process with their kiddo and had no one to talk to. There was really nobody — medically, psychologically emotionally — just literally no one was there.”
“Families like mine, trans adults, multi-generational families, like, every member of the community were reaching out and saying, ‘Oh, my God, I could have uttered those words. Your son reminds me of my son.’”
Hunter’s story had inspired an outpouring of empathy and recognition, but the story he shared online didn’t address his lingering sense of isolation.
“Even my son said, ‘I don’t know anyone like me.’ And so as we started to meet families,” Keith said.
Stand With Trans founder Roz Keith | Stand With Trans
“I was literally arranging play dates for my 14-15-year-old. Like, I was inviting kids to come over and just hang out, and — fly on the wall — they talked about stupid stuff, like, ‘Oh, don’t you hate getting socks for Christmas presents?’ And it showed these kids that being trans didn’t mean that you weren’t like other kids. You know, you were just another teen.”
Those interactions became the heart of the mission that guides Stand with Trans today.
The rise of parents’ rights
The founding of Stand With Trans accompanied a rising awareness of gender diversity in the 2010s, but with that also came a conservative backlash wrought with anti-trans animus.
Before Hunter came out, “Nobody was talking about bathroom bills and trans girls in sports. Those conversations weren’t happening,” Keith said.
Since then, trans kids like Hunter have been buried under an avalanche of discriminatory legislation, from gender-affirming care bans to a trans-erasing, book-banning frenzy organized by groups like Moms for Liberty to an online hate campaign led by accounts like Libs of TikTok.
Adding fuel to the fire: the president’s obsession with “gender ideology” and his “us” vs “them” politics of division.
The right has hawked its anti-LGBTQ+ agenda under the same, one-sided banner: parents’ rights.
Keith said the phrase is self-serving.
“I don’t think that any government should be allowed to say what my child has or doesn’t have access to, because I’m the parent. They’re not in my home parenting my child, so they don’t know what they’re going through. How do you make that global statement?” she asked.
“It is up to me to make a decision about my child’s medical care,” Keith said. “And as far as my child goes, if he was denied the opportunity to go on testosterone and not medically transition, I think our conversation would be very different.”
Keith points to a perversion of theology as one basis of the far-right’s anti-trans animus.
“I’m not Christian. I was raised Jewish. But my understanding from my friends who are Christian and very affirming and very accepting, their response is, ‘The Jesus I know would open the door for everyone, and would welcome everyone to the table.’ There’s really a disconnect between saying you’re a Christian and then not being open to accepting people as they are, as they show up.”
“Far be it for me to tell anyone what they should believe,” Keith added, “but you don’t get to bring it into my home and tell me how to care for my child, because those aren’t my beliefs. That’s not what I understand, right? It’s a secular society.”
“Your belief system should not infringe on my rights.”
Seeing around the corner
Stand with Trans was born to help protect trans kids from the attacks by providing love, knowledge and support — and power over their own lives.
“Our mission is so simple,” Keith said. “It’s empowering and supporting trans youth and their loved ones. So that’s it. We know that if we educate and support the caregivers, the loved ones, the parents, that the young people are going to do better, and if we find ways to make life better and easier for them, they’re not only going to survive, but they’re going to thrive.
“I know with my own kid, they couldn’t see themselves having a future. I think it’s hard enough for young people who don’t see around the corners, right? It’s hard to even imagine, like, ‘What do I want to be when I grow up.’ But for trans kids, it’s even harder.
“So it’s really important for us to show these young people that they can do whatever they want to do,” Keith said.
“Being trans is one part of their identity. It doesn’t define who they are.”
