I went to a Catholic school for eight years, so I had no choice when it came to learning about the Bible. I remember being confused by scripture on many occasions. As a child, I could not comprehend how Noah got all those animals onto a small boat.
It was around the same time I began to wonder how Santa could carry presents for all the children in the world on his small sleigh. Nevertheless, I came to respect the Bible and what it stood for.
Some might say it was eight years of brainwashing, but I prefer to think of it as my parents doing what they thought was best by providing a Catholic education for their kids.
Now, Bibles in the classroom might not be limited to those classes at St. Teresa Elementary School in the suburbs of Pittsburgh.
In Texas, lawmakers and education officials are moving toward a decision that could make the state the first in the nation to mandate Bible readings in public school classrooms. It’s being framed as an exercise in literary and historical literacy.
But this is conservative Christians we’re talking about, and when it comes to the Bible, we know what their intent is. Students could encounter passages from Job, Ecclesiastes, and Noah, as I did, along with familiar parables, and end up not only confused but indoctrinated.
Many might say that a Bible education wouldn’t be so bad. After all, some outside conservative Christians see Bible study as part of understanding a cultural touchstone.
But let’s be real. This effort by Texas Christian fundamentalists isn’t about literature. It’s about power, and using it to bully, exclude, and harm vulnerable kids.
The children who will feel it most acutely are the ones already carrying the heaviest burdens, especially LGBTQ+ kids who are at this very moment being targeted. Putting Bibles in the classroom will compound this problem.
Public schools are supposed to be among the last truly secular spaces in American life. They are places where children from different religions, backgrounds, identities, and families meet on equal ground.
If you think about it, the system is supposed to be based on neutrality, in which the state does not tell any child that their identity is inherently right or wrong. Those of us in the LGBTQ+ community who went to public school, scared of being outed, know that hasn’t always been true. In fact, quite the opposite. There are still some schools in this country that would like nothing better than to tar and feather queer kids.
And matters will become much more ominous by mandating Bible readings that shatter that neutrality. And for LGBTQ+ students, the consequences aren’t hypothetical. They’re deeply, deeply personal.
We know from years of research that LGBTQ+ youth experience higher levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation than their peers. One driver is called “minority stress,” the strain of existing in environments that reject who you are.
I went through high school petrified of being found out, and millions have shared that experience. And to this day, there are millions of kids who know they will be rejected if their truth comes out.
Now imagine being one of those gay or transgender kids in a Texas classroom where passages from a religious text, ones often used to condemn your existence, are required. Leviticus 18:22 states: “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.” This Old Testament verse is traditionally interpreted as a direct prohibition of same-sex sexual activity, labeling it an “abomination” or “detestable” act.
You can bet your last dollar that Texas evangelicals will prioritize that verse, and others, to scare the hell out of gay kids, presumably, they think that will scare the kids straight.
Further, it doesn’t matter if a teacher frames those passages as literature or metaphor. What matters is the message: that the Bible is an authority on how to live – and love.
If you’ve already heard those same passages used to justify exclusion or rejection, the classroom becomes another site of harm. And students who aren’t dealing with minority stress may feel they have the license to bully because “it’s in the Bible.”
Supporters say the Bible is foundational to understanding Western literature and American history. That argument is unadulterated B.S. since many of the same voices support policies that target transgender kids or threaten to out students to their parents.
And here’s where the “literature” argument falls apart. There are countless other texts, traditions, and perspectives. Yet they are not mandating the Torah, the Quran, or the Bhagavad Gita. They’re not insisting on Indigenous spiritual narratives, which are a crucial part of American history.
So why this one book? The answer is obvious.
Because this isn’t about education at all. It’s about privileging one worldview over others, and, in doing so, signaling which identities and beliefs belong and which do not. When a state requires a religious text, it grants students and teachers a kind of moral permission structure under the guise of righteousness.
And if these demonic Christians can succeed in Texas? It will be a blueprint for other states to follow.
Imagine biblical passages embedded in English Language Arts curricula, on standardized tests, or used to justify bringing evangelical pastors into school assemblies. Getting the Bible into classrooms is only the first step. These so-called “Christians” don’t know how to repress the spreading of their abhorrent selfishness.
Yes, parents may have the right to opt their children out of certain lessons, but what happens when opting out means their children get an “F” in Bible courses?
For LGBTQ+ students, who may already feel isolated or unsupported at home, school is often a lifeline, a place where they can exist with at least some neutrality. Transforming that space into one shaped by religious doctrine risks eroding that fragile sense of safety.
Consider, too, the broader movement to ban books in schools. Efforts to inject Bible-based curriculum will likely coincide with, and bolster, current attempts to strip away inclusive materials, books that reflect LGBTQ+ lives and the full American story.
For Texas Bible-thumpers, the “American story” is white, straight, and evangelical, with no room for stories about slavery, Stonewall, or the equal rights fight for women.
The bottom-line issue is the state deciding that one religious text, at the expense of so much other history, deserves a place in every child’s education, whether that child or their family believes in it or not.
In a country where the separation of church and state is eroding, teaching the Bible in a public school should scare the bejesus out of all of us.
Since last fall, Thiel has been touring a four-part lecture series on the figure mentioned in the New Testament as the primary opponent of Jesus in the final days before his second coming. If that seems like an offbeat topic for a Silicon Valley millionaire, Thiel has always been known for his esoteric interests.
Thiel’s interest in the anti-Christ may date back to his own upbringing, as he was raised an evangelical. He now describes himself as a “small-o orthodox Christian.”
The concept of the anti-Christ is based on a handful of passages in the epistles of John and Paul in the New Testament. “Children, it is the last hour!” reads one passage. “As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. From this, we know that it is the last hour.”
As with any biblical passage, the language has been the subject of a dizzying range of interpretations.
The version of the anti-Christ that has taken hold in right-wing evangelical circles is a messianic figure who emerges after the rapture has taken all true believers to heaven. The anti-Christ imposes a one-world government and a ban on would-be Christians in the final battle for Earth before Christ’s second coming. The concept was popularized in a series of books written by anti-LGBTQ+ minister Tim LaHaye, several of which were turned into movies.
While recording or taking notes during Thiel’s lectures is forbidden, excerpts of his presentations have made it into the press. They are, to say the least, confusing and heavily dependent upon a bleak view of the world. “What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of anti-Christ: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times,” Thiel said, according to one account.
Thiel seems to equate the anti-Christ with a one-world government. He points to what he sees as the growing threat of the environmental movement, as well as fear of AI and nuclear war, as clearing the way for the rise of the “anti-Messiah.” He worries that the world will settle for an “unjust peace” that will make it easier for a leader to seize power in the name of security. The United States is “ground zero” for the emergence of the anti-Christ.
A lot of what Thiel worries about is “stagnation,” which is a recurring theme of his. Ever the pessimist, he believes that the past 50 years have been 50 years of meh, not technological advancement. Thiel once famously complained that we were promised flying cars in the future and “instead we got 140 characters.” In a New York Times interview, he claimed that “we’ve made zero progress in 40 to 50 years” of research on Alzheimer’s disease, which is probably a surprise to the scientists who have a vastly better understanding of it than they did in 1976.
Conveniently enough, Thiel’s view of the threat from the anti-Christ dovetails nicely with the tech world’s desire for unbridled expansion and its own economic interests. He describes the anti-Christ as a “luddite who wants to stop all science,” which, of course, throws a big wrench into Silicon Valley’s money machine. Among the “legionnaires of the anti-Christ” that Thiel mentions are Eliezer Yudkowsky, who advocates for safeguards around AI, and environmental activist Greta Thunberg.
Thiel’s most recent stop was in Rome, the backyard of the Vatican. Early Protestant reformers branded the pope and/or the entire Catholic Church as the anti-Christ, something that right-wing believers and politicians are still prone to claim. (Thiel has contented himself with simply calling Pope Leo XIV the “woke pope.”)
Not surprisingly, the Vatican was not amused at the prospect of a self-taught theologian preaching in the neighborhood. In a column presumably approved by the Vatican, Catholic theologian Father Paolo Benanti described Thiel’s description of the anti-Christ as “a prolonged act of heresy against liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence.”
Of course, that’s pretty much in keeping with Thiel’s worldview before he started citing the Bible to support it. He once said that “democracy and freedom are not “compatible.” He also bankrolled the president’s 2016 campaign, at a time when most other donors wouldn’t touch it.
Ironically, Thiel apparently never mentions his own gayness in connection with his anti-Christ lectures. As it turns out, a lot of evangelicals think that the anti-Christ is gay. So far, at least, no one has hurled that accusation at Thiel himself.
Throughout history, autocratic regimes, especially authoritarian or populist ones on the far left and the far right, have demonized what they have determined to represent their nations’ “internal enemies,” foes who, if left to thrive, would undermine the security and very existence of these societies.
Regimes have done this to consolidate and expand its power, to divert attention away from misdeeds and failed economic and social policy initiatives, to justify repressive tactics, to stifle critical thinking, and to create a more pliant and obedient population.
Though the processes of marginalizing and isolating these purported internal enemies vary by case and political objectives, some common patterns, nonetheless, have emerged.
Propaganda campaigns manipulate the narratives, which emphasize dehumanization, stereotyping, and scapegoating of targeted groups.
The Gnomon Wise Research Institute discusses the realities of “dehumanization,” writing, “Dehumanization, as a psychological and socio-political process, represents one of the most destructive phenomena in human history. It involves the denial of attributes that define individuals or social groups as human, thereby devaluing their moral status and legitimizing violence and cruelty against them.”
Professor Nicholas Haslam of Melbourne University has identified two specific forms of dehumanization exploited by authoritarian regimes.
The first of these he terms “animalistic dehumanization,” which represents the targeted group as lacking uniquely human traits such as rationality, morality, self-control, and a culture. Stripping away these attributes from groups presents them as lower forms of life: as rats, monkeys, pigs, disease-bearing insects, as primitive and dangerous creatures to be exterminated. Or they are seen as physically and psychologically diseased, or as delusional.
Attached to this group often are disease-related images, presenting target groups as “tumors,” “viruses,” or “infections” that threaten the health of the individual and the overall body politic. This “animalistic” dehumanizing narrative is intended to inspire fear, disgust, and danger of contamination.
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On the other hand, “mechanistic dehumanization,” Haslam’s second form, characterizes the group and individuals as lacking in essential aspects of human nature, like individuality, emotions, and empathy. Group members are conceived as objects without souls; they are machines or mindless robots lacking an interior consciousness, human feelings, or individuality.
This form of dehumanization portrays these supposed internal enemies as the personification of pure evil, as “immoral,” “domestic terrorists,” “Devil worshipers,” “agents of foreign governments,” without a sense of morality.
Using propaganda efforts throughout the overall process of dehumanization, the world is seen through the binary lens of good versus evil, right versus wrong, patriot versus traitor, us versus them. The result is a polarized, divided population that the regime can more easily control.
Following intensive systematic propaganda campaigns that articulate real and perceived threats posed by these “internal enemies,” an element or stage not included in the extant literature but one I consider as significant comprises the reliance by governments on the enactment of laws and other statutes curbing the civil and human rights of individuals within the groups targeted by the regime.
What follows are summaries of two comparative case studies: the first profiling the propaganda narratives of the German Nazis and their initial laws against Germany’s internal Jewish population. The second involves the dehumanizing propaganda campaigns currently circulating in the United States as well as a sampling of actual and proposed laws against transgender communities on the state and national levels.
How Nazis vilified Jewish people as Germany’s “internal enemies“
Dehumanization Campaigns
A clear and extreme example of a dehumanization strategy and laws opposing a targeted internal group was crafted in the regime of fascist Germany. Among other groups, including homosexuals, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with disabilities, communists, socialists, non-Aryan immigrants, and others, the Nazis singled out Jews as their primary objects of propaganda.
I use the term “objects” quite deliberately since these campaigns attempted to depict Jews as objects of scorn in attempting to deny them personal agency in defining themselves. As we know, the Nazis used contrived “racial” arguments as its philosophical cornerstone for justification in their persecutions of Jews, as well as most people of color and people with disabilities.
Nazis considered Jews and others as descendants of inferior “racial stands.” Nazi leadership argued vehemently that Jews were polluting the so-called “Aryan race.” They forced Jews to wear the yellow Star of David as a signifying marker, since to the Nazis, yellow represented a sign of “race pollution.”
A 1943 German anti-Semitic poster. ‘Der ist Schuld am Kriege!’ translates to ‘The war is his fault!’ The finger points accusingly at a Jewish man, depicted as rich and scheming, with a large nose, hands speckled with blood, and a yellow star (the Nazi symbol forced upon Jewish people). | Shutterstock
The Nazi regime capitalized and extended millennia of anti-Jewish antisemitic tropes that have depicted the Jewish people in multiple negative ways. A partial list includes:
Jews as Killers of God
In Service of / Fathered by the Devil
Host Desecrators
Poisoners of Drinking Wells & Transmitters of Diseases
Usurers
Ritual Murderers & Abusers of Christian Children
Forced Circumcisers of Non-Jews
Judaism as an Immature or Inadequate Religious Consciousness
They are Clannish
An Alien “Race”
Wanderers / “Stateless”
Holders of Dual / Multiple Loyalties
Proselytizers to Judaism
Freedom-Killing Communists and Socialists
Super Capitalists
Sexually Perverse
Oversexed or Sexually-Frigid Females
Lecherous Males of Christian Women
Feminized and Non-Athletic Males
Controller of World Economic Systems
Greedy for Wealth
Financially Cheap and Cheaters
Controllers of the Media
Exaggerators of the Extent of Anti-Jewish Oppression
Exploiters of the Oppressed
Under the direction of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, the regime used every means at its disposal to portray Jews in dehumanizing ways: by weaponizing grievance against the harsh realities brought about by the Treaty of Versailles (the international treaty negotiated by the winners of World War I to punishment Germany for its aggression in the conflict), for crime, and for severe economic privation.
The Nazi high command argued that Germany lost WWI because of its internal enemies: the Jews. Nazi campaigns of “moral, racial, and sexual purity” led to an intense and violent campaign against Jews and other groups, which ended in the Holocaust: the murder of an estimated 6 million Jews (equal to two-thirds of European Jewry, and one-third of the entire worldwide Jewish population).
In his book The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, historian David Welch discovered that Nazi propaganda focused on simplified, emotional, and repetitive messages. They transformed the notion that the Jewish people were a religious or ethnic group into what they portrayed as a biological threat – as vermin, race polluters, as an infection – that threatened the Aryan race and the very existence of German culture and nationhood.
The Nazis used the descriptive terminology of Untermensch to further establish Jewish sub-human status. This gave the regime legitimacy in passing anti-Jewish laws that led to incarceration, enslavement, and eventually to mass murder.
How Nazi laws criminalized Jewish existence & love
Jewish were forced to wear a yellow Star of David as a tool of humiliation, segregation and dehumanization in Nazi Germany | Shutterstock
The Nazi high command passed two distinct laws targeting German Jews in September 1935. Jointly known as the Nuremberg Laws, they exemplified the racial theories foundational to Nazi ideology. Separately they were branded as the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.
In the terms of the Reich Citizenship Law and several additional government pronouncements, the only people who could be classified as true Germany citizens were those of “German or kindred blood.”
The Law decreed that Jews were a separate race from Germans as defined by birth and by blood. People with three or more Jewish grandparents, even if they had never practiced religion or had converted to Christianity, were classified by law as being among the Jewish race and were, therefore, excluded from German citizenship.
The law included the additional complication of defining German residents as neither German nor Jewish if they had only one or two Jewish grandparents. Nazis termed people in this category as “mixed-raced” (known as Mischlinge). Though they were initially permitted some of the rights of “racial” Germans, these benefits were increasingly restricted and then fully denied by subsequent legislation.
The second Nuremberg Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, barred marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. It also criminalized sexual relations between them. These relations were labeled as “race defilement” (rassenschande).
The law also forbade all Jews from employing female German maids under the age of 45. This provision was drafted under the assumption that Jewish men would force German maids into sexual relations thereby committing race defilement. Ultimately, thousands of people were convicted of this crime and many were imprisoned in concentration camps.
How the U.S. right wing vilified trans people as the nation’s “internal enemies”
A transgender protestor holds a sign during a demonstration on the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia | Shutterstock
Dehumanizing Campaigns
As fascists have scapegoated and targeted Jews and other groups, neo-fascists in the United States and other Western countries are targeting immigrants of color, Muslims, Jews, homosexuals, transgender people, communists, socialists, and all progressives, labeling them as being the causes of all the evils of their nations.
The U.S. political right-wing has spread and capitalized on anti-transgender transphobic tropes that have depicted trans people in multiple negative ways. A partial list includes:
Being transgender is merely a fad, a stage they are going through, comes about by peer pressure, it is a form of rebellion against parents and society
They prey on women and children in public bathrooms
They are psychologically confused and mentally ill
They all want puberty blockers, hormones, and transition surgeries
They are attention-seekers
They are incapable of maintaining meaningful relationships
They are spreaders of so-called “gender ideology,” which if allowed to continue, will destroy Western civilization
They are the result of bad parenting
They attempt to recruit young people into their “lifestyle”
They hate themselves and their bodies
Children cannot be transgender because it only occurs at puberty
All transgender people are prostitutes and hustlers
They threaten the safety and privacy of women and children
They identities are an erotic kink or sexual fetish
Since the Bible says that God made men and women, then transgender people don’t exist. Anyone who claims otherwise sins in the face of God.
Anti-Transgender Laws
Donald Trump’s actions by scapegoating and stereotyping targeted groups are intended to harden his appeal of his base of support for his failed policies and increasingly failing presidency.
President Joe Biden, shortly after taking office, signed an executive order allowing transgender troops to serve openly in the U.S. military.
Last May, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration has the right to enforce its executive order of January 20, 2025 (which went into effect on February 26), upholding a Department of Defense policy prohibiting transgender people from serving in the U.S. military.
Serving in the nation’s military has been one of the markers of citizenship in the United States. In denying transgender people the ability to serve their country virtually denies them their full citizenship rights.
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Donald Trump, amid his self-proclaimed “retribution” campaign, has specifically targeted members of the transgender community in his efforts to completely erase their existence from the human community. (No doubt he would attempt to wipe out gender diversity within non-human species if he could.)
Trump signed a mean-spirited and petty presidential executive order in his attempt to rewrite history by expunging trans activism and trans lives. The order demanded that transgender people be deleted from New York’s Stonewall Inn National Monument website, developed by the National Park Service. The acronym that once read LGBTQ+ has been reduced to LGB, standing for lesbian, gay, and bisexual.
During his short second regime (reich), another of Trump’s executive orders bans trans athletes from school and professional sports, from using the public facilities of their choice, and from choosing to have gender-affirming procedures to maintain their bodily autonomy because, according to Trump, “there are only two genders: male and female.” All else, to Trump, contradicts the “natural” world.
Government documents, including passports, visas, and employee records, can only show “male” or “female.” The government will no longer pay for trans-related health care, such as for government employees, military personnel, or federal prisoners.
In addition, all transgender women incarcerated in federal prisons he ordered thrown into men’s prison facilities, despite multiple court rulings blocking the president’s policy.
In another of Trump’s orders, the federal government will no longer even recognize the existence of trans people and will prevent federal funds from funding any programs that do so.
The order says, “Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology” and it directs the Bureau of Prisons to revise its policies to ensure that federal inmates do not receive “any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio banned Rainbow flags from flying at U.S. embassies.
The Trump administration, as was the case in other authoritarian regimes throughout history, have attempted to limit the bodily autonomy of women, trans, intersex, and lesbian, gay, and bisexual people for the purpose of attempting to control their minds and to limit their social power.
In 2026, anti-trans bills continue to be introduced across the country. These bills include anything from excluding trans people from receiving basic healthcare services, excluding them from classifications in civil and human rights protections, excluding them from participation in sports activities and teams other than those matching their sex assigned at birth, and excluding them from using public facilities other than those matching their birth sex. This exclusion from education, from legal recognition, and from social institutions, in fact, excludes them from the right to exist in civil society.
For example, Kansas Senate Bill 244 (2026), known as the “Women’s Bill of Rights,” defines “gender” as biological sex at birth for state law. It requires public building bathrooms and locker rooms to be separated by sex assigned at birth, and it mandates that all state agencies invalidate and reissue driver’s licenses and birth certificates to adhere to this definition.
Another example, WI AB100 is the Wisconsin legislature’s bill passed into law in 2025 that specifically restricts transgender athletes from participating on teams that are not aligned with their assigned birth sex.
According to the new law: “The bill defines “sex” as the sex determined at birth by a physician and reflected on the birth certificate. The bill also requires an educational institution to prohibit a male pupil from 1) participating on an athletic team or in an athletic sport designated for females and 2) using a locker room designated for females. Finally, the bill requires the educational institution to notify pupils and parents if an educational institution intends to change a designation for an athletic team or sport.”
“History doesn’t repeat but echoes”: There are no “superfluous people”
The acclaimed pioneer of discussions about totalitarianism, political responsibility, and the nature of evil is Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a German Jewish historian and philosopher. Her work focuses on the nature of political life. She explicitly explores the concepts of power, action, and totalitarianism, the latter defined as:
“a novel form of government characterized by the combination of terror and logicality, aiming to dominate and terrorize human beings from within, not just suppress political opponents. She emphasized its reliance on ideology, isolation of individuals, and the concept of ‘superfluous people’, where individuals are reduced to their bodies and deemed expendable.”
Arendt’s notion of “superfluous people” informs us how totalitarian regimes diminish and cheapen human life to mere bodies for the purpose of rejecting and disposing of them without any moral significance.
The often-quoted expression that “history doesn’t repeat but echoes” (often cited as “history rhymes”) proposes that though literal events rarely reappear, comparable patterns, themes, and human behaviors re-emerge over time. This notion highlights the point that studying the past affords us with insights into current developments and issues and alerts us to identify warning signs while learning from past mistakes.
The United States, by targeting members of our transgender communities and other marginalized groups, is treading down the path of our past mistakes.
On February 19, 2026, the Federal Bureau of Prisons issued a new policy on the “Management of Inmates with Gender Dysphoria.” The title sounds clinical. The reality is brutal: the federal government has now officially placed itself in the business of punishing transgender people for being who they are, by withdrawing their medical care, confiscating their personal belongings, and subjecting them to forced psychological treatment. It is, in every meaningful sense, a blueprint for a government-run conversion therapy program, one targeting thousands of incarcerated people who have nowhere to turn.
NCLR condemns this policy in the strongest possible terms. For now, a federal court order is blocking its enforcement, and we are committed to ensuring it stays that way. But the policy itself is a declaration of intent, and we are calling on everyone, not just those who are transgender, not just those who have loved ones in prison, to recognize what it represents and to oppose it.
What the policy actually does
The BOP policy does three things that, taken together, constitute a systematic program of forced psychological coercion.
First, it categorically bans hormone therapy for any transgender inmate not already receiving it. For those who are receiving it, the policy mandates a forced tapering and discontinuation, a medically and psychologically dangerous process that deprives people of care they may have received for years or even decades. There is no medical justification for this. Hormone therapy for gender dysphoria is established, evidence-based care endorsed by every major medical and psychiatric organization in the United States.
Second, the policy strips transgender inmates of social accommodations, the items, including clothing and personal care products, that allow them to live as who they are. Under the new policy, the BOP will not only stop providing these items but will “remove or confiscate” them from people who already have them. For a transgender person, these items are not accessories; they are the difference between basic dignity and daily humiliation. Confiscating them is not treatment. It is punishment.
Third — and this is where the conversion therapy framework becomes unmistakable — the policy substitutes psychotherapy specifically directed at reducing gender dysphoria symptoms, combined with psychotropic medication, for the evidence-based care that was previously available. The policy instructs clinicians to treat being transgender as a mental disorder to be “cured” through conversion therapy, contrary to decades of medical research and practice.
A court order is currently blocking enforcement, but the threat is real
The BOP did not issue this policy in a legal vacuum. On June 3, 2025, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction in Kingdom v. Trump, requiring the BOP to continue providing hormone therapy and social accommodations to transgender inmates under the policy that existed before the administration’s January 2025 executive order. That injunction remains in force.
The BOP’s own General Counsel acknowledged the injunction in the memorandum accompanying the new policy, instructing prison officials that the BOP “remains obligated to comply” with it even as it issues this new policy. That acknowledgment is notable: the BOP is formalizing a policy that a federal court has already found unlawful, with the clear intent to enforce it at the first opportunity.
This is conversion therapy. Full stop.
NCLR has been fighting conversion therapy since 1993. We launched Born Perfect to end these practices, and we have seen this playbook before. Conversion therapy is not defined by the use of any particular technique. It is defined by its goal: to punish and pressure a person into suppressing their sexual orientation or transgender status.
The BOP policy meets that definition exactly. It punitively withdraws medical care. It subjects people to therapy designed to force them to suppress and deny who they are. It uses psychotropic medication as a coercive tool in that process. And it forces people to wear clothing and conform to grooming standards that contradict who they are, while they are imprisoned and cannot leave.
A person in a free-world clinical setting can walk out. A person in federal prison cannot. The coercive power of the state is at its maximum inside a prison cell, and the BOP is deploying that power against some of the most vulnerable people in the country.
Part of a catastrophic pattern
The BOP policy did not emerge from nowhere. It is one piece of a coordinated, comprehensive federal campaign to eliminate health care for transgender people.
The administration has expelled transgender service members from the military and stripped their health care. It has eliminated health care for transgender federal employees. Proposed HHS rules would cut Medicaid and Medicare funding to hospitals and providers that offer health care to transgender youth, effectively ending this care by bankrupting anyone who provides it.
The chilling effect of this environment is already causing providers to end care for transgender adults even without any law requiring them to do so: Vanderbilt University Medical Center recently announced it will no longer offer surgical care to transgender adults, and community health clinics that serve low-income patients are quietly ending hormone therapy for transgender adults, citing fear of federal retaliation. Subpoenas have been issued to health care institutions for patient data. And the FBI has run public tip campaigns inviting people to report providers of transgender health care.
What we are witnessing is the systematic dismantling of every pathway through which transgender people access medically necessary care in prisons, in the military, in federal health care programs, and increasingly in the private sector. The BOP policy is the most visible and perhaps the most naked expression of this agenda, but it is not an isolated act. It is a test — a test of whether the courts will stop it, whether the public will demand accountability, and whether people with power to protect transgender lives will use it.
Why everyone should care
If you are not transgender and do not have a transgender loved one in federal prison, it might be easy to experience this as someone else’s emergency. It is not.
The government’s authority to impose psychological coercion on incarcerated people, to withhold medical care in order to punish someone for who they are, and to forcibly confiscate personal items to strip a person of their dignity does not stop at the transgender community. The same legal framework that permits the BOP to do this to transgender people can be deployed against anyone the state decides is a suitable target. The power being claimed here, that the government can use its custody of a person to punish them for who they are, is a power without principled limits.
This is also an Eighth Amendment case. The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. For thirty years, courts have recognized that denying medically necessary care to incarcerated people constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. If the government can redefine what counts as “medically necessary” based solely on the political preferences of whoever is in power, stripping courts of the ability to independently evaluate that question, then the Eighth Amendment’s protection of every person is weakened.
Beyond the constitutional stakes, this policy is medically dangerous. Abrupt discontinuation of hormone therapy can cause serious physiological and psychological harm. The policy’s own text acknowledges this, which is why it includes provisions for “tapering” in some cases, but the framework is designed around cessation rather than care. If this policy is enforced, people will be harmed. Some of those harms will be irreversible. And the institution proposing to do this is a federal agency with custody over human beings.
If you believe that government power over imprisoned people should have limits, that the state should not be in the business of forcing people to be someone they are not through the systematic withdrawal of medical care and coercive “therapy,” then this policy should alarm you regardless of how you feel about any other aspect of this debate.
What NCLR is doing
NCLR is closely monitoring compliance with the preliminary injunction in Kingdom v. Trump and working with our partners to ensure that transgender inmates receive the protections the court has ordered. We are representing incarcerated transgender people in a companion case challenging this administration’s attempt to force transgender women to be exposed to rape and sexual assault in male prisons. And we are working to ensure that every person in BOP custody affected by this policy knows their rights.
We will also keep the public informed. The BOP issued this policy and hoped it would pass quietly into the bureaucratic record. It will not. Every provision of this policy, the denial of necessary medical care, the confiscation of personal items, and the coercive “therapy” regime, is a federal constitutional violation. This policy was issued in the dark. We will litigate it in the light, and we will win.
Shannon Minter is the Legal Director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR). He has litigated on behalf of LGBTQ+ rights for more than thirty years.
I’m old enough to remember what it looked like when the government decided AIDS wasn’t its problem.
I remember the silence from the Reagan White House as funerals piled up. I remember watching and hearing about brilliant sons, partners, uncles, friends, entire communities disappear while officials shrugged and said this was a “gay” disease, something that happened to people who had brought it on themselves.
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Working on the Hill at the time, I listened to the horrid bigotry and homophobia coming from disgusting people. There was no one more detestable than North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, with California Congressman William Dannemeyera close second. I remember passing Dannemeyer in the hallways now and then. It took everything in me not to punch him in the face.
They were vicious.
But I also remember the brave and courageous activists who had to scream and disrupt just to get legislators, and Ronald Reagan, to say the word “AIDS” out loud. And to finally, after years of agony, get legislation passed that helped fund HIV-related programs and the search for a cure.
Now, we are fighting again. Well, we’ve always been fighting, but in 2025 and into 2026, the second Trump administration initiated significant cuts to both domestic and global HIV programs. These actions include eliminating CDC HIV prevention branches, cutting research funding, reducing grants to state health departments, and scaling back PEPFAR funding, raising serious concerns about rising infection rates and disrupted care.
It’s been 40 years since the ravages of AIDS tore through this country, and that horror is far removed from anyone now nearing 50. That means the decision-makers, those in state, local, and national elected office, most likely don’t consider funding HIV programs a priority, or for that matter, fully understand the deadly consequences of the disease when left untreated.
Those of us who lived through those horrible days are aging, giving way to a generation far removed from the hell that transpired.
The New York Timesreported earlier this week that states across this country, red and blue alike, are pulling back access to life-saving HIV medications, cutting the programs that keep people with HIV alive and undetectable, and quietly dismantling the safety net that took decades of activism, science, and grief to build.
Budget pressures, political indifference, and the bipartisan mistake of thinking that HIV is “over.”
HIV care is often compared to diabetes care because both are managed as chronic, long-term conditions requiring daily medication, regular monitoring, and consistent lifestyle management to prevent severe, life-threatening complications.
So if you’re diabetic, just imagine government officials declaring that the threat of diabetes is over and starting to cut back your life-saving drugs and support programs. Wouldn’t you be angry and afraid?
But that wouldn’t happen because most likely, there isn’t a homophobic bias built into your disease.
There is for HIV. The Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, the nation’s primary safety net for low-income people living with HIV, is under siege. Constrained budgets are squeezing HIV care and prevention programs, and limiting access to Ryan White services will directly affect people’s ability to stay engaged in treatment.
Meanwhile, the proposed federal budget calls for over $525 million in cuts to the Ryan White Program and the elimination of all HIV prevention funding at the CDC, the very infrastructure that identifies people living with the virus and connects them to care before they can unknowingly pass it to others.
These cuts have devastating consequences. A recent study projects that cuts to Ryan White programs could produce nearly 24,000 additional HIV infections by 2030, a roughly 17 percent increase.
And the Foundation for AIDS Research estimates that eliminating HIV prevention funding alone could cause an additional 144,000 new HIV diagnoses, 15,000 deaths, and 128,000 more people living with HIV in the U.S. by 2030, with resulting costs to the health care system reaching $60 billion.
That is $60 billion to “save” money now, and ignore the catastrophe ahead.
There’s yet another dangerous assumption at play: that HIV is no longer a serious problem, and that if it still is, it only affects gay men.
This is the same deadly mindset we lived through in the 1980s. Then as now, the logic goes: It’s a gay disease, so why should we prioritize it?
Then as now, the science says something completely different.
This has been said a million times, but it needs to be said again. HIV has never respected the boundaries we draw around it. It infects people across every demographic, every geography, every political affiliation.
Nearly 90 percent of CDC HIV prevention funding goes directly to state and local health departments, including those in the South, which carry over half of all HIV cases in the country. The South. Red states. Where some of the most aggressive budget cutters live and govern.
When people stop HIV treatment, the virus doesn’t disappear; it spreads. Without medication, viral loads rise, increasing the likelihood of transmission. When care is interrupted because of cost, clinic closures, or long waits, HIV finds new hosts, mutates, and can become resistant to existing drugs.
We’ve seen this playbook with COVID, where new mutations emerged from lapses in vaccination, and more recently with measles, where falling vaccination rates allowed a nearly eliminated disease to come roaring back in numbers that shocked us all.
HIV is no different. The virus doesn’t care about our politics. There are still approximately 32,000 new HIV cases in the United States every year, and clearly, the problem isn’t solved.
The only reason the epidemic hasn’t exploded again is because of these programs: testing, treatment, surveillance, and medication assistance. Remove those pillars, and the structure collapses.
The people making these cuts may be ignorant of history, and those who do know it probably believe it won’t repeat. They most likely see HIV as a gay man’s or poor people’s problem, so cutting these programs doesn’t feel to them like a public health catastrophe. It feels like a budget line.
They are wrong.
What’s different today is that we have no excuse of ignorance. We have the science, the modeling, and the projections from leading AIDS, scientific, and government organizations. What we appear to lack, particularly in the era of Trump, is the political will to treat a virus like the virus it is: indiscriminate and opportunistic.
The communities that will suffer first from these cuts are already marginalized. They will likely suffer in silence, because stigma around HIV remains powerful despite decades of hard-won progress.
But the virus will not stay quiet, and it will not stay contained to the populations we’ve decided don’t matter enough to protect. We did this once before. Political ideology overrode science, and we paid for it in a generation of utter destruction and lost lives.
History is yelling at the top of its lungs. The question is whether anyone in power is listening, or whether we’ll need another catastrophe to teach another generation the same lesson all over again.
On Saturday morning, in the southern Iranian city of Minab, an airstrike struck a girls’ elementary school shortly after classes began. Rescue workers spent hours digging through the collapsed building. By the end of the day, between 165 and 180 people were dead, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve.
The strike was part of a widening military campaign carried out jointly by the United States and Israel against Iran, a conflict that has already spread across multiple countries and killed hundreds of civilians.
Events like this should force a moment of moral clarity. The deliberate or reckless killing of civilians in pursuit of political or religious goals has a name in both international law and ordinary moral language. We call it terrorism.
When powerful states produce the same result, the language changes, becoming deterrence, strategy, and the defense of civilization.
The people directing this campaign increasingly describe it in exactly those terms.
Pete Hegseth, the United States secretary of defense, has spent years portraying global politics as a civilizational struggle between the West and Islam. In his book American Crusade, he writes that his “planetary purpose” is to destroy Islamist enemies and urges Americans to see themselves as modern crusaders defending a threatened civilization.
This is not simply overheated rhetoric. It is a worldview. In that worldview, conflict is not primarily about diplomacy or competing national interests. It is a moral confrontation between civilizations in which compromise begins to look like weakness and coexistence like surrender.
Once violence is framed this way, restraint becomes difficult to sustain. Civilian casualties become tragic but acceptable losses in a struggle for civilization itself. The rules designed to limit war begin to look less like moral safeguards and more like obstacles.
Hegseth has made that logic explicit. He has argued that international law and the Geneva Conventions too often tie the hands of American soldiers and prevent victory.
To question this worldview is not to defend the Iranian regime. The government in Tehran is authoritarian and deeply repressive. Women face severe legal restrictions, political dissent is crushed, and LGBTQ+ people are persecuted. For queer people in particular, Iran’s laws remain among the most brutal in the world. But the brutality of one government does not erase the moral questions raised by another.
The United States has long claimed to stand against theocratic extremism and the idea that religious certainty should guide the use of military force. Yet the language surrounding American power now increasingly echoes the moral absolutism that defines the movements it claims to oppose. Increasingly, that language reflects the worldview of Christian nationalism, a political ideology that frames American power as the instrument of a religious mission.
Military action in the Middle East is often justified in the West by pointing to the brutality of the Iranian regime. That justification is frequently framed as a struggle for civilization itself. Women in Iran face severe legal restrictions. LGBTQ+ people are persecuted. Political dissent is crushed. These realities are not disputed. But the argument that military intervention automatically produces liberation ignores a complicated and uncomfortable truth. Some of the most aggressive anti-LGBTQ political movements in the world today are deeply intertwined with American religious activism.
In countries like Uganda, American evangelical groups have helped shape political campaigns and legislation targeting LGBTQ+ people, including laws that criminalize homosexuality and threaten severe punishment for those accused of violating them. Similar networks have promoted anti-LGBTQ+ policies across parts of Africa and Eastern Europe, exporting a vision of Christian nationalism that mirrors the same religious absolutism now appearing in American political life.
The same ideological networks that claim to defend civilization abroad have helped export repression elsewhere. And the ideology they exported is no longer only operating overseas.
Across the United States, a growing wave of legislation has begun asserting government authority over gender identity in ways that would have been difficult to imagine only a decade ago. In Kansas, a recent law invalidated driver’s licenses and other identification documents for many transgender residents whose IDs reflected their gender identity, forcing them to revert to sex assigned at birth and restricting their access to public facilities.
At the same time, courts are increasingly being asked to determine how much privacy transgender young people are allowed to have even within their own schools. In a recent emergency order, the Supreme Court allowed policies requiring schools to notify parents if a student identifies as transgender to take effect while litigation proceeds, overriding California’s attempt to prevent schools from automatically disclosing a student’s gender identity without their consent. The decision places the machinery of the state directly inside some of the most intimate questions of identity, family safety, and childhood privacy.
For transgender Americans, the logic behind many of these policies is beginning to look disturbingly familiar. Governments are increasingly asserting the authority to define gender in law, regulate where people may exist in public space, and determine when private identity must be disclosed.
The campaign unfolding across the Middle East is not solely an American project. It is a joint military effort between the United States and Israel, combining intelligence, political coordination, and overwhelming military force.
That reality matters because the consequences extend far beyond the governments directing the strikes. Decisions made in Washington and Jerusalem now reverberate across Lebanon, the Gulf, and the wider Middle East. Cities are bombed, civilians are displaced, and entire populations are forced to live under the shadow of retaliation.
Israel’s government describes these actions as necessary security measures. The United States describes them as the defense of regional stability.
That language will not reach the civilians beneath the American and Israeli bombs.
The idea that bombs can liberate societies from religious authoritarianism becomes harder to sustain when the ideology driving those bombs is itself rooted in religious certainty.
James Baldwin once observed that America often exports the violence it refuses to confront within itself, projecting its own moral struggles onto distant battlefields.
The nation has long told a story about its wars in which its motives are reluctant, and its power is exercised only in the service of freedom. That story has always been comforting, and therefore dangerous. Because the moment violence is wrapped in moral certainty, the ability to question it begins to disappear. If a conflict is framed as a righteous struggle between civilization and barbarism, every civilian casualty becomes easier to justify.
The tragedy unfolding in places like Minab should force a difficult question. If terrorism is violence against civilians intended to impose a political or religious worldview, the line separating it from state violence becomes difficult to discern when nations adopt the same logic. America rarely confronts these questions while the bombs are still falling. The reckoning comes later, when the language of necessity fades and what remains are the ruins of cities, the photographs of the dead, and the quiet realization that the moral lines once believed to be clear were crossed long before anyone was willing to admit it.
Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. Follow at @momdarkness and listen to music on Spotify.
This story was produced with the support of MISTR, a telehealth platform offering free online access to PrEP, DoxyPEP, STI testing, Hepatitis C testing and treatment and long-term HIV care across the U.S. MISTR did not have any editorial input into the content of this story.
“Should we order some more drugs?” asked the half-naked, blurry-eyed accountant from across the room filled with half a dozen other guys.
My first reaction was confusion. It was 9 a.m. and we’d been partying, fucking and awake for 38 hours. One person was passed out in the corner of the room, two others were fighting on the balcony. We had smoked, drank, sniffed, kissed, sucked, fucked, cum, laughed and cried more than others do in a year of socializing. What reason could there possibly be to keep the party going?
I looked over to our host, to whom the question had been directed. Only he had the power to end the bender which was quickly approaching its second full day.
“Sure, why not?” he responded.
Photo by Laura Proctor for Uncloseted Media.
Lately I’ve been finding myself at more and more of these parties—colloquially called “afters.” Parties where going to the bar or club is a formality, and the real fun begins after Toronto’s 2 a.m. last call.
Unlike drunk pizza, my kind of afters are characterized by drugs, sex and—most importantly—an unflinching desire not to fade into sleep or isolation.
It’s a phenom that the gays in particular enjoy. According to 2025 data from Sex Now, the largest health survey of LGBTQ people in Canada, about three quarters of respondents say they’ve gone binge drinking or taken drugs in the past six months. Of these, roughly 12% report having taken cocaine, meth or MDMA—the kinds of stimulants you need to stay up for afters. This is compared to just 3-6% of all Canadians who have used these drugs in 2023. The same trends exist in the U.S., where LGBTQ people are almost twice as likely to suffer from a substance use disorder than their straight counterparts.
My entry point into the world of afters was, unsurprisingly, through sex. Young, horny, 19 years old and desperate for validation, I’d loved the feeling of being whisked from the bars to men’s homes. We’d strip off our clothes and hungrily take each other in—our mouths sore from kissing and sucking, skin rough from bites and stubble. Mid-way through sex I’d be offered things to heighten the experience or to take the edge off. It started with poppers, cocaine and MDMA. Eventually, it led to meth.
It’s a seductive setup. Discard the images of anti-drug PSAs where sketchy men pull up in unmarked cars offering illicit substances. Instead, you’re naked, imbibed on drinks and hormones, and in the warmth and safety of someone’s bed. Here the risks feel softer, the edges dulled.
The first time I smoked meth was at 22 years old, when it was blown into my mouth by a lover—a kiss with a promise of so much more. I’m not the only one who found the combo alluring. About 1 in 10 gay men have engaged in chemsex, also known as Party and Play.
Chemsex opened the doors to a realm of sensuality I’d always considered myself too anxious to delve into. Suddenly, I was enjoying group sex, sex with women, role play and kink. I can still recall the double-take my psyche did when I snapped out of a high and I was one forearm deep into fisting someone. A far cry from the shy boy who, prior to mixing sex and drugs, gave a handjob with trembling fingers.
All of it was on the table, as were the drugs—supplied generously and taken liberally. But as time passed, the sex—though still great—fell to the background.
Being in a room with people as high and drunk as you are can be an incredibly liberating atmosphere. As an insecure, queer kid, I spent years in deep fear of judgment—of saying or doing the wrong thing. The thing that would make people say, “Ah yes, this is why you’re unlovable.” These insecurities were coupled with a diagnosis of depression and anxiety. Still, understanding my mental health issues did little to relieve them, at least not as immediately as chemsex and afters did.
At an afters, there’s this specific point—typically in the 4-6 a.m. sweet spot—when the drinks, drugs and vibes are hitting right. The drugs are making you feel more comfortable being vulnerable, and you can be assured that no one will label you the biggest mess in the room because they likely think the same about themselves.
It’s the perfect storm for confessions. Some of the most intimate conversations I’ve ever had have been at afters.
I’ll never forget the 40-year-old lesbian I’d met only hours before telling me—teary-eyed—how she knows her partner does not love her and that she’s too scared to confront or leave them. Or the go-go boy pointing out the scars on his arms as he recounts years of abuse from his father. I, too, have shared about heartbreaks, pains and suffering from decades prior. These are the types of conversations people take years, sometimes decades, to reveal to friends or therapists.
It’s this cathartic release that keeps bringing me back.
And no, I’m not delusional. I know these intimate moments are enhanced by drugs. I know that when the comedown hits, many of these party-goers will return to being strangers, some of whom I’ll never see again.
Yet catharsis is not marked by its duration, but by its immediate release. It’s by sharing a thought—saying it out loud, again and again—that makes it, ultimately, easier to understand or live with.
I had craved that kind of nonjudgmental intimacy for years, and I found it at afters. It’s gotten to the point where sometimes I don’t want to go to the bar, putting up with the charade of dancing or surface-level conversations. Instead, I long for closing time when I can mix in with the folks pouring out into Toronto’s Church and Wellesley gay village—going up to those I’d known or remembered and asking if they’re heading to an afters.
To paint afters as intoxicated therapy is half the story, however. There have been many moments when I’ve flown close to the sun and been incredibly lucky to emerge okay.
There’s the time when one afters was closing prematurely at about 4 a.m., so I hopped into a car with a group of guys who had heard of another happening on the other side of the city. The driver was just as high and drunk as the rest of us. Another time I’d gotten into a car with a man I’d shared a single drink with at the bar after he promised an afters. I didn’t notice when he hit the highway and we were leaving the city limits. Ninety minutes later I found myself in a barn with seven or eight gay strangers, all naked.
In both instances, I emerged unscathed—and in the farm case, with a basket of fresh produce. But other times, less so. I’ve had wallets, shoes and jackets stolen from after parties. I’ve been pressured to have sex with people or cross boundaries because they were the ones supplying the drugs. This has happened implicitly through body language, where guys feel entitled to grab or kiss me after a hit; explicitly, I’ve been told, “If you’re not going to party our way, get out.”
These are among the immediate risks, but I’m also aware of downstream ones. Chemsex is strongly linked with higher rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections—part of why I take PrEP and doxyPEP. There’s also the dangers of long-term addiction, tainted drug supply, overdosing, or a hard comedown that can exacerbate my existing mental health challenges.
Still, with all this laid bare, I know I have not attended my last afters. Every rational part of me is screaming to pull back. There will be a day I don’t get so lucky, where something happens that takes more than a good-night’s sleep and gallons of Gatorade to heal.
At the same time, turning away from the night is turning away from all that comes with it: the joy, the freedom, the sex. The feeling that I could do or say or fuck anything, and who gives a damn? It’s dawn, the drag queen has taken off her wig and someone’s hand is down my pants. There is nothing else to concern myself with.
As I walk toward my next weekend, part of me believes that one day, I’ll find something that can scratch the same itch an afters does. Something, or someone, that feels as free and unencumbered. But while I wait for that, should I really deny myself the hedonistic pleasures of life, as late into the night as they go? Is happiness—fleeting, chemical, tinged with danger—not still happiness?
To that, I don’t have an answer. I’m not sure I ever will.
This past Friday, I was asked point blank: “What would happen if we don’t have funding for your Ryan White Part B program in April?”
It was framed as a hypothetical. For our organization, it is not.
As Executive Director of Health Brigade, I have led through uncertainty before. We are one of Richmond’s longstanding providers of HIV prevention and care, and the need for our services has always exceeded available resources. But in May 2025, Virginia cut $20 million in Ryan White Part B (RWB) funding at the state level. For Health Brigade, that meant a 75% reduction in funding for services proven to keep people with HIV healthy, in care, and preventing transmission.
Ryan White Part B supports case management, mental health care, transportation, housing assistance, and other wraparound services for low-income Virginians living with HIV. When that funding disappears, the safety net that keeps people in care disappears with it.
The RWB cut did not happen in isolation. Over the past two years, our Comprehensive Harm Reduction Program lost 33% of its state funding, our HIV Testing Program lost 70%, and $850,000 in federal funding for critical maintenance on our 1952 facility was eliminated in Congress’s budget reconciliation bill.
The math became impossible.
Nearly overnight, we were forced to operate with drastically fewer resources as demand grew. We implemented a hiring freeze, reduced services, and even put our building up for sale. Still, a 75% funding cut is devastating.
We were one of just 14 organizations in Virginia to receive any RWB funding this year—down from 33 community-based organizations previously supported. Our neighbors at Capital Area Health Network and CrossOver Healthcare Ministry received nothing, forcing program shutdowns, layoffs, and agency expenses that should have been reimbursed.
We were told to connect displaced clients from shuttered programs with funded organizations. But when programs close, people do not transfer seamlessly across town. They disappear.
For people living with HIV, Ryan White is not extra. It is the difference between stability and survival mode—the structure that keeps the ground from falling out.
Janet, a 63-year-old woman who has lived with HIV for 40 years, worried about losing access to her medication. She knows what happens if there is a gap: missing doses can cause resistance and limit future treatment options. When she asks me, “What if I can’t get what I need? What if this is the thing that finally pushes me under?” I do not have an easy answer. She is aging with HIV and managing other chronic conditions. She is also worried about potential Medicaid cuts. For her, uncertainty is life and death.
Branson, a 55-year-old man living with HIV, returned home from incarceration with nothing. Without housing, he sleeps outside. Each day, he trades his safety for a place to stay while navigating probation requirements that can feel designed for failure. Managing HIV treatment under those conditions is a daily act of endurance.
Many of our community members live at the intersection of HIV, poverty, addiction, housing instability, and stigma. Funding cuts do not create those struggles, but they intensify them and increase the likelihood that people fall out of care.
The emotional toll extends to providers. One of our two remaining RWB case managers told me, “What hurts most is not just what’s being taken away, but the silence that follows. The ones who disappear because the system lost them, or decided they were expendable.”
We can only ask for so much resilience. Many will not remain healthy without access to the services that make treatment possible.
At Health Brigade, we will continue to hold the line. Private donations and emergency funding have helped, but they replace only a fraction of what was lost. A safety net this essential cannot depend on temporary charity, hiring freezes, and building sales.
The $20 million reduction in Ryan White Part B funding shocked providers across the Commonwealth. The consequences unfold every day in exam rooms, in housing courts, and in the quiet absence of patients who never make it back into care.
As members of the General Assembly consider amendments to the state budget, they face a clear choice: restore stability to Virginia’s HIV care system or allow further erosion of the infrastructure that keeps thousands of Virginians healthy.
Fully restoring funding will not undo months of instability overnight. But correcting the drastic reduction in Ryan White Part B support is a necessary first step.
Let’s get it right.
Karen Legato, MPS, MSW, is Executive Director of Health Brigade (formerly Fan Free Clinic), a Richmond-based nonprofit health clinic where she has served for more than 15 years.
“That’s fine dude. I’m not mad at you.” Those are the first and last words I heard Renee Good say, seconds before she was brutally murdered on Jan. 7 by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.
I came across the video as I watched my fiancée scroll through her social media feeds while sitting in our Brooklyn apartment. We proceeded to scour TikTok to gather more information. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of videos of the shooting—all from various angles—I asked her to put the phone down.
We sat in silence as I interrogated the pit forming in my stomach. I was sickened by the ease of which we just witnessed violence, and began questioning my decision to try and build a life in the U.S. with my soon-to-be wife.
I was born in London to Black parents who migrated from Nigeria in 1990. It was a classic immigrant story: They were in search of a better life overseas, desperate to give their unborn children the opportunities they never had growing up in a country that was rebuilding after centuries of British colonial rule.
My immigration journey, however, is a classic lesbian love story. My fiancée, an American citizen from Los Angeles, met me at a party while she was studying in Europe. She moved back to the U.S. soon after our first date, and serendipitously, I’d just been accepted to grad school to study journalism in New York City. So, after a year of long-distance, I flew across the pond and she moved across the country, and we started a life together.
I was ecstatic to embark on this journey. I was raised on Black television, music and film from the U.S., feeling a strong affinity to African-American culture from a young age. I was always watching “My Wife and Kids” and “That’s So Raven,” and was obsessedwith listening to Beyoncé, Usher and gospel music.
Although I inherently knew that the American Dream was built on broken promises, my inner child still romanticized it. I watched women in New York City newsrooms and magazine offices build electric lives: Jenna Rink running through Manhattan in “13 Going on 30”; Andy Sachs surviving the chaos of “The Devil Wears Prada”; and Betty Suarez stubbornly proving she belonged in “Ugly Betty.”
I believed that I could be like them. That I could work in New York media and earn enough to live alone and write long, beautiful stories. The U.S. felt bigger than England. Like a place where a girl could arrive with nothing, but leverage her talent and hunger, and somehow make it.
But just three months after arriving in August 2024, Trump was elected for his second term. And a few months after that, my dream was punctured as he introduced a slew of executive orders attacking people like me: He ended DEI programs; he introduced harsh anti-trans policies; and he enacted some of the strictest immigration enforcement the country has ever seen.
Good’s murder was a consequence of Operation Metro Surge, which started in December 2025 as a supposed attack on illegal immigration. Yet many—mostly Black and Brown—lawful residents and U.S. citizens have been subject to violent attacks and unlawful detention.
This wasn’t the diverse country that enamored me. Unlike the media I’d consumed growing up, I’m now the intersecting face of the identities the federal government is targeting.
I am a Black. I am gay. I am an immigrant. I am a journalist. I am a woman. And I am scared.
Renee Good’s murder was a chilling development in an already dark time in the U.S. If white citizens are not safe, what chance do I really have to build a life here?
As a Black lesbian, my existence has always felt political. Wanting to exist on my own terms has required constant defense and justification. I left England because I could no longer handle living in the same country as my parents. After I came out to them at 22, they told me that I was a sinner in the eyes of their God. “She won’t be joining me in heaven,” my mom once told my sister.
Now, in the U.S., my resident status is under scrutiny too.
I’m working with an immigration lawyer, and will be submitting my supporting documents for a marriage-based green card in a few weeks. And even though I’m doing everything by the book, I’m still worried: ICE agents have shown up at court dates and immigration interviews.
My lawyer says I shouldn’t worry, but she can’t guarantee it won’t happen to me. And experts agree: “People are trying to follow the rules and they’re being arrested, detained and deported,” Rachel Kafele, director of programs and advocacy at Oasis Legal Services, told me. “There’s a sense that all the pathways for people are really closing, and that’s just created a huge climate of fear.”
I know that my situation isn’t as dire as it is for the many LGBTQ asylum seekers who fled countries where identifying as LGBTQ is a crime.
“[The federal government] is doing whatever they can to not give asylum to anyone,” Kafele says. “And that’s what really worries me, because LGBTQ people need asylum. It’s a human rights safety issue. People will die.”
And on Jan. 29, former CNN journalist Don Lemon—who is Black and gay—was arrested. After that, my fiancée and I contemplated whether I should be honest about my journalism career in my green card application, in case this increases my likelihood of running into ICE.
That’s why I decided to write this article anonymously.
I’ve had thoughts of terminating my immigration application out of fear of being in contact with such a hostile administration. What will happen if I get caught by ICE, with no proof of legal residency? What if my Blackness betrays me when I’m running errands? What if my extensive digital footprint exposes me as a “traitor”?
People on both sides of the aisle aren’t doing enough to stand up to the Trump administration, says Isa Noyola, director of programs at the Transgender Law Center. “We are lacking leadership in the Democratic Party around being pro-immigrant and pro-trans and pro-queer,” she says. Just recently, seven Democrats voted in favor of funding ICE.
Alex Brophy of Brophy Lenahan Law Group says immigration judges are also being targeted: “They’re creating this culture of fear not only amongst immigrants and their attorneys, but also amongst the judges, because there’s definitely the message that if you don’t follow the program, they’re just gonna fire you.” In 2025, more than 100 judges with a history of showing favor to asylum seekers have been fired in the U.S.
It’s terrifying for me to think that some of the judges who still have their jobs might be afraid of being let go and wanting to make the administration happy at my expense. We are all just in “survival mode,” Noyola says.
“What worries me is that the courts may become complicit in the breaking of the law,” says Aaron Morris, executive director at Immigration Equality. With less immigrant-friendly judges on the bench, those left behind might show more support of the government’s illegal activities, including its use of detention centers. “Unfortunately, now we’re seeing … people getting caught up in the immigration detention and deportation machine who are not even undocumented.”
Even as a New York resident, I’ve had to reckon with the possibility of being detained if I go through with the green card application. This isn’t me being overly cautious, but realistic: ICE has been knocking on doors in neighborhoods close to me.
“ICE and DHS generally do not provide adequate health care, particularly for people that are transgender or for people living with HIV,” Morris says. I’m on life-saving hormone medication to treat a long-term health condition, and not having access to it for a few days could be fatal. Detainees with diabetes have had access to insulin denied and others have had requests to visit cancer doctors rejected.
Brophy says most detainees whose immigration proceedings continue in detention don’t have access to their files and are not informed of their hearings. “It’s incredibly hard for lawyers to prepare a detained client,” he says. “[The detainees] are not getting enough time and access for counsel to be able to effectively present their case.”
As terrifying as this is for me to think about, Kafele says immigrants outside of big blue cities are arguably in greater danger. “In more rural areas and areas where the local government is very conservative and anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ, those people are more at risk. Their local governments, their police officers, the sheriffs, they’re working with ICE and Border Patrol to help detain immigrants and deport people.”
There was an acronym brought up in my conversations with experts: ACAs, or Asylum Cooperative Agreements, which are pacts made between the U.S. and other countries where asylum seekers are transferred to process their claims. Agreements have been made with countries like Uganda, whose 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act means that gay intimacy in some cases can lead to the death penalty. “You have people who are not only afraid to go to their home country, they’re being threatened to be removed to a country they have no ties to that may be even more hostile,” Brophy says.
While I feel incredibly lucky to hold an English passport, I can’t move back because I want to live far away from my parents. But even if my green card application is successful, my fiancée and I don’t feel safe under Trump: We’ve talked about moving to Europe or Canada once I am more financially stable.
Still, part of me wants to make it work. I’ve found my voice as a writer in New York. The events I attend, friends I’ve made and communities I’ve been exposed to have made my decision to move here worth it.
When I told Brophy I was afraid that my work as a journalist could put me at risk, he quickly responded, “Clearly your passion and your interest is in being a journalist. I wouldn’t want to tell you to stop doing what you’re doing any more than I would tell someone to change their gender identity or their sexual orientation.” Then he said something that really stuck with me: “Because once you do that, we’re all just giving into this.”
I think about that often. About what it would mean to shrink myself in order to survive. I’ve done that with my parents, and I don’t want to do it again. I will continue to follow the legal judicial process, not as a statement or act of defiance. Simply because, for now, I am choosing to stay for the woman I love.
Jayden is a 16-year-old Black queer teenager living in a low-income neighborhood on Atlanta’s west side. When he was unable to attend school because of his worsening panic attacks, he finally asked for help, but his cries went unanswered. The mental health system in this country wasn’t made for queer kids of color, which is why even when they go out to search for mental health care, too many are met with doors closed or closed minds.
Jayden isn’t real, but his story is. It is built from interviews, national survey data, and the experiences of BIPOC LGBTQ+ youth in low-income communities who tried, but failed, to access mental health care.Half of LGBTQ+ youth who said they wanted mental health care in the past year have been unable to get access to such resources and treatment.
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The result is an escalating crisis in which the young people who most stand to benefit from treatment for depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts are the least likely to get it.
According to the Trevor Project,Transgender and nonbinary (TGNB) youth in 2023 were nearly twice as likely to report anxiety (70% vs. 42%) and suicidal ideation (53% vs. 28%) compared to cisgender peers. This pattern persisted a year later in 2024.
This isn’t a story about lack of awareness or “kids being silent.” It is a piece that raises awareness and a call-to-action about systems designed at the intersections of racism, poverty, and anti-LGBTQ+ bias that determine who receives care, waits for it, or never gets access to it in the first place.
The Barriers No One Talks About
For some BIPOC queer young people, the obstacle to mental health care isn’t cost or access, it’s safety. For some, coming out to a therapist can result in being inadvertently (or directly) outed at home, judged by a provider, or being treated as if their identity is something that needs “fixing.”
When it comes to counseling, some young queer people of color say they steer clear not because they don’t believe in therapy, but because they’ve learned that medical spaces are not made for them. Instead, they’re there to observe, diagnose, or discipline them.
When mental health care professionals don’t understand racism, culture, or queerness, the burden changes. When receiving assistance, young people are expected to either explain themselves, defend themselves, or remain silent. In communities where therapy islooked down upon, the risk of it being misunderstood and punished far outweighs the possibility that it might be understood and helped.
It’s not that these kids don’t want help. It’s just that they are being asked to put themselves in harm’s way to get it.
The Provider Problem
There’s a shortage of qualified, affirming, and multicultural competent therapists forLGBTQ+ youth of color, where mental health services are available.
The vast majority of providers are trained to focus on treating white, cisgender, middle-class patients, leaving BIPOC LGBTQ+ youth in challenging positions of having to “translate” their identity and their traumatic experiences for someone who doesn’t share or may not fully comprehend their world.
Instead of getting relief, many young people say therapy is yet another place where they’re misgendered, stereotyped, or corrected, or where their life experience is talked about as if it were something that exists only in a dusty textbook.
Some youths have reported not sharing their whole self because the emotional labor of educating a therapist felt heavier than whatever mental health issue brought them in the door. The takeaway is this:representation in mental healthcare isn’t a bonus; it’s a barrier when absent.
The Cost of Care
For low-income LGBTQ+ youth of color, therapy isn’t just emotionally out of reach; it’s financially unfeasible. Even a “cheap” therapist charges $80 to $120 per session, but treatments can go for months, so that adds up.
For many families,Medicaid is the only insurance available. Yet, most private therapists won’t accept it, and those who will are often so booked up that they can’t take new patients for months.
According to the Trevor Project,forty percent of LGBTQ+ youth cannot afford mental health care. For children who don’t have access to their own money, health insurance, or even transportation, the idea of ‘just finding a therapist’ is more than an inconvenient privilege masquerading as advice.
Mental health care costs don’t stop after the session fee is paid. There are prices of drugs, bus fares, telehealth data costs, and the psychological cost of soliciting help from a system that already doesn’t include you.
When your family is deliberating whether to spend on groceries or rent, a $100 therapy hour is not “care,” it’s math.
Why Intersectionality Matters
BIPOC LGBTQ+ youth inhabit the intersection of both race and sexuality, and it’s at that crossroad where systems leave them out in the cold. The mental health care system in the United States is designed around whiteness, wealth, and heteronormativity, which means that anyone who doesn’t fit into those categories will have to fight their way into a system that was never meant for them.
Multiple systems of oppression influence Queer POCs’ lives. “The most relevant social systems of oppression for an individual, group, or community depend on their unique identity intersections … and the social contexts in which they are embedded.” They experience racism not separate from queerness; poverty not separate from identity. These facts pile up, overlap, and compound one another.
A queer youth are traversing medical racism, class barriers, and a broader culture of silence all at once. By flattening identities, we flatten the harm and erase the very youth who are most affected.
What’s Being Done (and What Isn’t)
There are people and programs committed to closing the gap, but not in sufficient quantity to meet the crisis.Community-based organizations, particularly those run by queer people of color, are among the service providers that fill in where the mental-health system won’t go.
Many programs intended to provide support are underfunded and understaffed. They are forced to function like Band-Aids on a systemic gaping hole. Meanwhile, state and federal-level funding continues to pour into other institutions. The solutions exist. What’s needed is investment and scale, and political will.
The reality is that communities have been doing the work all along. It’s the system that won’t catch up. The true crisis isn’t that BIPOC LGBTQ+ youth are suffering. Instead, it’s the structures designed to help them that are choosing not to.
Whenever care is denied to a BIPOC LGBTQ+ youth, the country is asking them to be “strong,” “hang on,” or “reach out again.” Resiliency is not a treatment plan, and access to mental health care should not depend on your zip code, race, insurance status, or whether a provider thinks your identity is valid.
The question now is not whether this crisis is real, but whether we’re willing to fix it, and it starts by revamping the system that keeps on shutting them out.
Toy Ingram is a 24-year U.S. Army veteran whose life experiences have shaped a passion for promoting social justice and activism in the community.
