‘Shame on Brown!’ Lil’ Rhody Visibility Brigade protest. Screenshot of video courtesy of Ash.

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When Ashe Shirazi moved from her conservative hometown in Florida to attend Brown University in Providence, R.I. she was expecting her life to become easier and safer.

“It was just so hard for me to exist within the administrative system,” she said. “I was at a very conservative school that wouldn’t allow me to transition or express myself … I wanted a school where my transition would be supported and protected.”

But now, in the second year of her four-year biochemistry degree, Shirazi feels neither supported nor protected by her university. “I’m always focusing on what rights I’m gonna lose today,” she told Trans News Network.

Shirazi’s feelings towards Brown University come as no surprise after its president, Christina Paxson, announced on July 30 that Brown, an historically very queer institution, had reached a voluntary agreement with the government to restore at least $50 million in federal research funding to the university.

For Paxson, this agreement is the crown jewel of Brown’s balancing act to keep the administration happy. In the announcement, which was sent in an email to the Brown community, she asserted there has been “a growing push for government into the fundamental academic operations of colleges and universities,” but that “Brown should uphold its ethical and legal obligations while also steadfastly defending academic freedom and freedom of expression.”

However, for the trans community at Brown, the agreement sends a clear message.

“They need this money,” Shirazi said, “and they need to sell out whoever they can with as little effort as possible to get it.”

What Brown Agreed to Do

The agreement is a sweeping attack on trans rights on campus. Brown signed on to ban trans people from athletic events, including informal competitions and “activity designated for women.” It also specifies that all single-sex facilities including showers, restrooms and on-campus housing must be allocated by sex assigned at birth. It also forbids Brown’s clinics and medical centers from performing gender reassignment surgery and prescribing puberty blockers or hormones to any minor if it’s “for the purpose of aligning the child’s appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex.”

In an email to Trans News Network, a spokesperson for Brown claimed that it is an “unfortunate misreading of Brown’s agreement with the federal government” to suggest the agreement “restricts Brown from continuing its existing gender-inclusive practices related to bathrooms, restrooms, showers or changing rooms. … Single-user, lockable restrooms, available in buildings across campus, are offered for use by individuals of any sex or gender identity.”

Essentially, that means that gender neutral facilities are still available on campus—the difference being that binary trans people now seem limited to non-gendered spaces.

Brown capitulates to Trump’s executive orders to take away the rights of trans students on campus. Screenshot from the agreement.

What It Means for Students

For Shirazi, this all came as a major disappointment.

“I want to exist alongside my cis female peers and students, but I won’t be able to do that. Instead, we have to use gender neutral bathrooms and gender neutral housing. But I’m not gender neutral, I’m a woman. I feel like we’re sectioned off.”

When it comes to housing on campus, nothing has changed. Brown still allows students to request what it calls gender inclusive housing, with priority given to trans and nonbinary students. But it is unclear if “priority” means trans and nonbinary students are given a guarantee of gender inclusive housing, though.

“As a trans student, I’m worried about how the administration is going to interpret and implement these demands,” Shirazi told TNN. “I don’t know if the amount that the administration has ceded on trans people is going to enable transphobic people at Brown.” She worries whether this agreement is “giving the green light for students to increase the amount of anti-trans harassment.”

It’s not just trans students who will suffer under this agreement.

As is consistent with many actions across the second Trump administration’s first year, the Brown administration has agreed to end all diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

“Brown will cease any provision of benefits or advantages to individuals on the basis of protected characteristics [across] the entire Brown University system,” the agreement declared. They are expecting “deep exploration of a new vision for realizing the goals of diversity and inclusion,” in 2026—whatever that means.

Brown has also agreed to hand over names and other personal information of students named in complaints alleging discrimination and harassment to the federal government. Shirazi says this poses a direct threat to students who protest in support of Palestine and against the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. It also requires Brown to “support … research and education about Israel … through … renewed partnerships with Israeli academics.”

“This deal,” Shirazi said, “does horrible things to so many communities at Brown.”

Liz Sepper, a law professor at the University of Texas, said that, for students attending the university, Rhode Island’s public accommodations law probably can’t stop them from implementing these rules. But she notes that if and when Brown opens its doors to the public—say at a sporting event—they may well end up breaking state law.

“The university can’t agree with the federal government that it’s going to violate state law.”

There are currently no federal laws that prohibit trans people using the restroom consistent with their gender identity. So, Sepper said, “what you have here is Brown, at least arguably, agreeing to do things that may violate state law.”

Paxson Faces Pushback

The deal was reached at the height of summer break, meaning that most students were away from campus and unable to make their voices heard. For Providence residents and friends Ash and Kristen, this is unacceptable and yet unsurprising.

“We were following everything that happened with Harvard and Columbia and were hopeful that Brown would hold out and not cave in the way they did,” Ash, who wanted to use only her first name due to fears of retaliation, told Trans News Network. “This isn’t the first thing that Brown has done which has upset that community,” she says, “They’re sort of known for not really giving back enough.”

So, they took action.

On Aug. 7, the Lil’ Rhody Visibility Brigade, a local anti-fascist group, hung a “Shame on Brown!” banner on the Smith St. overpass on Interstate 95 and chalked messages of solidarity with trans students around Providence to raise awareness of the deal and its impact. “We wanted our local community to know what this local university is doing. … I have to take on as much action as I feel like I can, because otherwise I feel complicit in what’s happening.”

Instagram post

For Ash, who is “a member of the LGBTQ community,” the deal is both another university caving to the federal government’s demands—”that’s the fascist piece,” she says—and the administration specifically targeting trans people. “It’s the old saying, ‘first they came for…,’” she says, referring to the poem by Martin Niemöller:

“We felt a need to speak out because it impacts our community,” Ash told Trans News Network. “Providence and Rhode Island, but also our LGBTQ community both locally and nationwide.”

She adds that those who are able to, need to get out there and be visible.

What is Happening Elsewhere?

At the time of publication, as many as six universities have signed deals with the federal government. The University of Pennsylvania was the first to bend the knee in June 2025, which, perhaps most notably, targeted awards and records won by Lia Thomas during the time the NCAA champion swam for the UPenn women’s team.

UPenn agreed to review NCAA Division I swimming records, titles, honors and awards won by trans female athletes and hand them to the next fastest cis female athlete, along with a “personalized letter of apology to each impacted [cis] female swimmer.” Other universities to capitulate include Columbia, University of Virginia, as well as Cornell and Northwestern Universities in November 2025.

Compact for Higher Education

On top of individual agreements, in early October 2025, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and the Department of Education invited nine universities to provide feedback on, and sign the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” by the federal government. Brown was one of them. The so-called compact goes further than initial agreement, making confusing, vague, and at times redundant, demands including “equality in admissions,” “nondiscrimination” in hiring and “student equality”—which again targets trans rights on campuses—and brings further crackdowns to pro-Palestine protests on campuses by redefining it as support for so-called terrorist organizations.

Isaac Kamola, president of the American Association of University Professors, notes seven demands the compact makes that universities are already required to follow by law in an AAUP commentary.

One notable difference between this compact and the agreement Brown signed is that it takes further steps to restrict academic freedom. Kamola noted that the compact requires universities to commit to “rigorous, good faith empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints.”

“This is patently absurd. A spectrum from what to what? Facism to communism? How many fascists do you need to have in the chemistry department to counteract the democratic socialist in the physics department?”

Further to the viewpoint diversity—which usually just means conservative viewpoints—the compact demands institutional neutrality, a term which requires universities to maintain silence on social or political matters—in this case both in classes and publicly—and in turn threatens academic freedom, including the freedom to speak out on matters that pose a threat to higher education

The compact also targets international students.

“No more than 15 percent of a university’s undergraduate student population shall be participants in the Student Visa Exchange Program, and no more than 5 percent shall be from any one country,” because, according to the compact, student visas are only for students who are supportive of “American and Western values,” and universities with a high number of international students risk “saturating the campus with noxious … anti-American values.”

Kamola questioned “what American vs. anti-American values entail,” and notes that “Trump has a long history of condemning immigration from so-called “shit hole” countries, and favoring instead immigration from Europe and South Africa.”

This time, students and faculty were on campus to make their voices heard. Brown Rise Up, a student group fighting authoritarianism in higher education rallied to stop the university from signing the Compact. Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the first to reject it. Five days later, Brown followed suit and refused to agree to the demands.

“[T]he Compact by its nature and by various provisions,” Paxson wrote in an open letter to McMahon, “would restrict academic freedom and undermine the autonomy of Brown’s governance.”

Although Brown’s autonomy didn’t seem to matter to Paxson when it came to the rights of trans students.

McMahon has said a second, updated version of the compact is on its way.

—Edited by David Forbes

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Jeffrey Epstein in 2014 with scientists Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker

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Warning: This article contains descriptions of child sexual abuse, transphobia, and racism. While we have redacted slurs from the text of the article, many of the links include uncensored slurs and other offensive content from the DOJ data dump and other sources.

Last Friday, the Department of Justice released millions of new Jeffrey Epstein files mandated by a recently passed law. The information expands the body of evidence demonstrating that the predatory behavior of the prolific human trafficker and his close associates also involved a fetishistic and transphobic obsession with trans people, especially trans women.

Many of those associates were part of a group called Edge.org, an atheist organization run by literary agent John Brockman and bankrolled by Epstein, which has served as a loose predecessor for the far-right “intellectual dark web” (IDW). During the research for this article, Trans News Network uncovered at least eight prominent anti-trans figures affiliated with Edge or the IDW who received support from Epstein or even visited his island, often through connections with Brockman or physicist Lawrence Krauss.

The IDW is a loosely defined group of scientists and other figures who have made careers from attacking perceived “wokeness” in higher education and the media. In practice this involves encouraging hatred against trans people and other marginalized groups, often Muslims. They often denounce university processes against sexual harassment and discrimination on the dubious grounds of “academic freedom,” and have successfully lobbied the Trump administration to make it harder for women in college to prove sexual abuse.

The emails shed light on the true motivation for their ideology, showing how the billionaire backers of the early IDW social group had a vested interest in convincing the public that women who accuse powerful men of sexual abuse are liars, and spent millions of dollars and years of their lives bringing a right-wing movement that discredits victims into the mainstream.

In the early 2010s, the emails show, Brockman connected Epstein to a number of similarly-minded atheists, scientists and other billionaires, who proceeded to communicate extensively in email threads with the wealthy rapist over various personal matters and professional topics related to science.

Those email threads — which sometimes included Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk — later turned into private conferences at Epstein and Brockman’s properties as well as public events and debates. Brockman once bragged to Epstein that “the net worth of the 40 guests at my 2014 ‘billionaires dinner’ was equal to combined wealth [sic.] of 60% of all Americans.”

In the years since, many of those academics have gone on to become prolific public figures who have made careers out of hateful speech against trans people and other minorities.

Lawrence Krauss

The emails reveal new details of the sexual misconduct allegations that led to Arizona State University suspending Lawrence Krauss, a right-wing physicist,in 2018. Krauss retired from ASU a few months later, with a university spokesman saying he “chose to retire” rather than proceed to another hearing.

Back in 2006, Krauss organized a small scientific conference on Epstein’s island, which included scientists like Stephen Hawking and other Nobel laureates. He also helped organize another island conference in 2010.

In 2011, skeptic writer Rebecca Watson criticized Lawrence Krauss for defending Epstein in the name of “science,” despite Epstein’s 2008 conviction for raping children. Krauss denied that Epstein ever raped children and said he didn’t “feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.”

Epstein clearly noticed Krauss’ vigorous defense—and rewarded him for his loyalty. He pledged $100,000 to Krauss’ project at ASU between 2014 and 2018, and Epstein’s billionaire benefactor (and alleged child rapist) Leon Black subsequently pledged a whopping $2 million in 2015.

Krauss claimed he raised a total of $4 million for the project in 2018, meaning that a large portion of his funding came from extremely wealthy men accused of child rape.

The full letter sent to Krauss by ASU that iterates the body of the university’s findings and evidence against him is also in the released Epstein files, likely because the file was sent to Epstein at some point. This letter has new information compared to the previously released letter by ASU from 2018, which had not included his sexual comments about trans women.

These comments include one incident in September 2016, when Krauss commented to staff "she's really got balls" in reference to a trans woman who wanted to make an appearance at one of his events. Krauss admitted to making the statement, according to the letter.

In another instance, the ASU document states that staff claimed Krauss said “Oh wow. She’s hot.” after seeing a picture of a trans woman sometime in 2015-2016, which Krauss admitted to in another document.

The document also says that the university concluded that Krauss grabbed a woman’s breast during a gala reception.

“It is clear from the investigation that Respondent fostered a work environment where sexual banter was not uncommon,” the report concluded, after listing many other allegations of sexual comments about women gathered from other staff.

While Krauss’ anti-trans beliefs may have motivated the alleged sexual misconduct that got him fired, the ASU letter stated that Krauss’ beliefs fell within his right to academic freedom and did not violate the institution’s nondiscrimination policy and were not considered during the investigation, contrary to what he has often insinuated.

The files also include the email sent to Krauss from a Buzzfeed reporter about the allegations that led to the ASU investigation, which included details of six separate incidents of alleged sexual impropriety in professional settings, some never published.

During the peak of the #MeToo movement that year, many similarly powerful men had their careers ended by similar accusations. But Krauss benefited from his connection with one of the world’s top experts at fighting complaints of serial sexual abuse–Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein and Krauss exchanged hundreds of texts and emails over the several months between the initial Buzzfeed investigation and his retirement.

Epstein personally helped him craft a defense strategy to the allegations and media reports, provided emotional support, edited his correspondence with the university, and even talked him down from suing ASU–the experienced rapist knew that Krauss had no case.

Unluckily for Krauss, the entirety of the draft of his (very angry) “confidential” retirement letter–including portions that were edited out by Epstein and others–is now publicly available because he chose to send it to a prolific sex criminal.

While he has long denied many of the allegations from his time at ASU, Krauss admitted to, and even tried to justify, gratuitous sexual comments about trans women he made around coworkers in one later-removed section of his retirement letter. He also helpfully included a “grade school” sketch of a “light bulb” that he drew in front of colleagues.

Since Krauss’s retirement from academia (and hopefully sketch art), Epstein continued to advise and fund him as he pivoted to building an anti-trans podcast on his YouTube channel and accompanying Substack, where he has interviewed a large number of TERFs and other anti-trans figures, including other Epstein associates like Richard Dawkins.

But Krauss’s admiration for Epstein grew well past the point of just a professional relationship. Over time, the messages show, Krauss developed a deeply emotional, personal bond with the serial rapist, formed through almost a decade of supporting each other through cases of women taking the difficult step of accusing them of sexual abuse.

“You are one of the most amazing people I have ever known,” he texted Epstein during his fight with ASU leadership in 2018, after some drinks.

Just a few months after Krauss’s retirement, the Miami Herald published its bombshell report that swung the Epstein case back open and exposed the corruption behind the federal non-prosecution agreement against the billionaire.

Grateful for his recent support, Krauss made sure Epstein knew he had his back after that too.

Epstein brushed the article off at the time, but the pressure only grew. After months of growing pressure on the billionaire from newspapers and federal investigators, Krauss offered Epstein support and even refuge.

A few weeks letter, the physicist tarred by sexual harassment allegations texted Epstein that a landmark Nature study finding that sexual harassment was pervasive in U.S. physics programs was “hysterical if it weren’t so stupid.” Krauss argued that a sample drawn from a women in physics conference was a “biased sample” for determining the experience of women in physics.

All the way to the end, Krauss stayed a loyal friend to Epstein, always keeping the increasingly ostracized billionaire in his thoughts. Just weeks before his arrest (and two months before his alleged suicide), Epstein advised Krauss to take his podcast in a more reactionary direction, encouraging him to lean into his identity as a “provocateur.”

Epstein finished the conversation by offering his support. “As you know. I truly hope this works for you. So I'm looking forward to see the results.”

In the years since 2019, Krauss has followed that advice, growing his Epstein-funded podcast considerably. He has brought on a number of anti-trans activists and scientists as guests such as Karleen Gribble, Judith Suissa, Alice Sullivan, Sabine Hossenfelder and Kathleen Stock.

Each one of these transphobic influencers have come on his show despite the fact that it has been public knowledge for many years that Krauss was a close affiliate of Epstein and was forced into retirement from academia due to sexual harassment allegations.

Many anti-trans activists earn a living by spreading propaganda against trans people, often in the name of “science” or “women’s rights,” despite plainly working against both. Coming on his show elevates their careers and helps bump their visibility in the increasingly lucrative marketplace for billionaire-funded anti-trans bloggers and podcasters, exemplified by the buyout of Bari Weiss’s anti-trans Substack by CBS for $150 million.

Richard Dawkins

Dawkins, Pinker, Brockman on Epstein’s plane in 2002 for ‘billionaires’ dinner’ that included Jeff Bezos, shared publicly by Brockman’s Edge website.

Another reason transphobic influencers don’t mind platforming Krauss is much simpler: they couldn’t avoid Epstein’s associates if they tried. Krauss was hardly the only anti-trans activist who was affiliated with Epstein.

Richard Dawkins, a biologist and longtime ally of Krauss, has made a name for himself through his open bigotry against Muslims and trans people and has made many public appearances with Krauss. He was also invited to Epstein’s island at least twice.

The public has known about his visit to Epstein’s island in 2002 since 2019. But the documents reveal that Dawkins was invited to the island once more in 2010 alongside another anti-trans scientist, Steven Pinker, years after Epstein’s conviction for sex crimes involving a minor.

The 2010 island event included an advisory board meeting for Krauss’s academic project that he later started at ASU with Epstein’s financial support. Krauss assured the recipients, however, that “the organized sessions will occupy only a modest fraction of the time there and that we will plan some interesting activities around the actual meeting.”

According to their agenda for the event, most of the time was spent as a conference on various scientific topics. But on the last day, the time after 5 p.m. was blocked off vaguely as “Evening.. entertainment of some sort.”

Pinker and Dawkins ultimately were unable to come due to logistical issues. But their invites reveal the proximity of the atheist friend group to Epstein.

The U.S. government has described Little Saint James in a criminal complaint as “the perfect hideaway and haven for trafficking young women and underage girls for sexual servitude, child abuse and sexual assault.”

The year after his invite to the island, Dawkins alerted Brockman (which he forwarded to Epstein) to Rebecca Watson’s criticism of Krauss mentioned earlier in this article, referring to the atheist blogger as a “rather nasty young woman” who was “running some kind of witch-hunt against Lawrence Krauss because of his defence of Jeffrey Epstein.”

Watson responded to the new information earlier this week on her website.

“This email is very funny to me, because it really highlights how much I got under Dawkins’ skin without even trying and without even knowing. For me, his post came out of nowhere, and then I watched as he blackballed me from every major skeptic, atheist, and humanist organization in the world. His employees let me know that a person couldn’t even say my name in his presence without him blowing up, and one volunteer even related how she saw him scream at the president of American Atheists for even suggesting I be invited to Reason Rally.”

Steven Pinker

Photo: Steven Pinker, Robert Trivers, Jeffrey Epstein, Larry Summers at a dinner in 2004.

Another affiliate of the intellectual dark web found across many emails —and on the invite list for the 2010 island visit —is psychologist Steven Pinker, described by Andrea James of Transgender Map as a “central figure in anti-transgender extremism” going back to the early 2000s.

Pinker was quoted twice in J. Michael Bailey’s 2003 anti-trans book The Man Who Would Be Queen, according to James, and was once defended by Jesse Singal in The New York Times.

He was part of the same atheist social group as Krauss, and sometimes met with Epstein in meetings arranged by Krauss (who once told Epstein he thought Pinker was “cute”), alongside other figures like Dawkins. Pinker even once met with Bill Gates, possibly through Epstein.

More recently, he appeared on a racist podcast exploring the debunked concept of “race science.”

The psychologist’s name showed up on several invite lists sent to Epstein for private events in 2011 and 2013, alongside Krauss and another anti-trans figure Jonathan Haidt. Like many others, Pinker benefited indirectly from Epstein’s support for Krauss through appearances at Krauss’s events at ASU. Once, Epstein and Krauss even helped him connect to the late physicist Stephen Hawking.

Robert Trivers

Photo: Epstein and Robert Trivers had a close personal relationship with one another.

Another academic tied to the group of atheists through Brockman is biologist Robert Trivers, who has regularly produced openly transphobic “research,” funded by Epstein, about LGBTQ people. The emails reveal Trivers’ interest in studying trans people was primarily motivated by his sexual fetishization of trans women and Epstein’s financial and verbal encouragement to study trans people.

After Trivers’ initial request for funding in 2010, Epstein sent the biologist between 20 and 30 thousand dollars multiple times through at least 2017, possibly longer.

Trivers, like Krauss, was also eager to defend Epstein publicly. In 2015, Trivers minimized Epstein’s Florida conviction for raping children to the media in an attempt to defend Epstein’s integrity, arguing that girls mature earlier than in the past. “By the time they're 14 or 15, they're like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don't see these acts as so heinous.”

After this article was published, he received a large amount of hate mail from disgusted academics and other members of the public, which he jovially passed along to Epstein in order to mock them for their outrage against his minimization of child rape.

Epstein forwarded the article to former White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler, who commented “Trivers needs media training.” Not included by the lawyer, who is now Goldman Sach’s top counsel, was any outrage of his defense of raping children.

Trivers permanently parted ways with Rutgers University not long after the affair. Likely impressed by Trivers’ depraved show of loyalty, Epstein continued to back Trivers with money and ideas, even offering emotional support when Trivers expressed his “homicidal” urges.

It wasn’t long before Trivers’ “research,” more dependent than ever on Epstein’s support, took a much darker and overtly fetishistic tone. On more than one occasion, he sent emails to Epstein that included perverted transmisogynistic rhetoric familiar to any trans person who has encountered chasers, misogynistic cis people (usually men) who have an obsessive desire to have sex with trans people because of their genitals.

In one email to Epstein in 2016, Trivers wrote, “If you as a heterosexual male [sic.] and have a minor desire to suck a dick then what better organism to do it with than a transsexual?”

Around the same time, Epstein elevated Trivers’ research to Peter Thiel, a far-right venture capitalist who has long had close ties with Trump and the MAGA movement.

In 2018, Trivers discussed the quantity of trans pornography on the internet in another message laden with fetishistic rhetoric, and then tells Epstein a common far-right lie that three-year-old children are given hormone therapy. Trump repeatedly used the same lie to fearmonger about trans healthcare in the 2024 election.

In another email that year, he discussed “trans-sexual rodents,” an idea far outside the mainstream of science – and another lie that was repeated by Trump in a 2025 speech — which has since been used to attack federal funding for actual science about gender.

In case you weren’t counting, that’s two lies about trans people sent from Trivers to Epstein that ended up in Trump’s mouth just a few years later.

Epstein, a “true believer” of his talents, encouraged and funded Trivers to continue down this path of “study” up until the year of his arrest. He also nudged Trivers away from studying the honor killings of women, a practice Trivers objected to by arguing that it wouldn’t benefit a father to kill his 17 year old daughter who is “physically beautiful.”

Through this time period, Trivers relied heavily on Epstein when faced with what appear in the emails to be allegations of sexual abuse that threatened his appointment at Chapman University.

In November 2019, according to an FBI crisis intake document, an individual who had met Trivers to “discuss science” reported in a phone interview that they had witnessed Trivers sexually assault a 15 year old girl during the meeting.

Trivers contributions to science over the last several years have bizarrely fixated on studying the finger digit ratios of different ethnicities, ages, sexualities, and genders. One paper of his published in 2020 – likely funded by Epstein – used transphobic language describing trans people as having “transgendered belief,” which the study defines as “the conviction that one is the opposite gender to one’s natal gender.”

Trivers’ creepy sexualization of trans women can’t be separated from his harmful scientific “research,” public defense of child rape, and his own allegations of sexual abuse. It shows how some academics have ulterior motives when studying trans people or other marginalized groups.

Other Atheists and IDW Figures

Jonathan Haidt is another psychologist with a history of advocating against the rights of trans people. He has written about the unscientific concept of “social contagion” theory (also known as “rapid onset gender dysphoria”), suggesting that gender dysphoria is related to social media trends.

Like others many affiliated with the IDW, he has strongly spoken out against “wokeness” and resigned from his professional association because he opposed the organization’s DEI and anti-racism diversity statements.

Brockman spoke positively about Haidt and encouraged Epstein to meet him in 2011, praising his conservative leanings and connections with Edge. In the years after, Haidt appeared on multiple invite lists for private events organized by Brockman sent to Epstein.

Another prominent figure on one of those invite lists, Sam Harris is yet another atheist famous for his bigoted beliefs against Muslims and trans people. His name was frequently mentioned in the emails for his work adjacent to others in the Edge network, and was once personally invited to lunch by Epstein.

Michael Shermer, another scientist affiliated with Brockman who has faced accusations of sexual misconduct by Buzzfeed News, has also repeatedly attacked the rights of trans people in sports, trans kids, and the organization WPATH.

He seemed to have a friendly rivalry with new age guru Deepak Chopra, often having debates in email threads including Epstein, who was also invited to one of their public events. Robert Trivers once mentioned Shermer's name in an email to Epstein that later discussed trans science.

While not every far-right affiliate of the IDW social group had a close personal relationship to Epstein, they shared the same social spaces as him and clearly had no problems affiliating with their friends who were close to him. Other anti-trans figures associated with IDW making appearances in the emails include Matt Ridley and Jerry Coyne.

And there’s no doubt that the careers of the academics in the group greatly benefited from their associations with Epstein. As just one example, an email thread offering speakers for the defunct educational project NEURO.tv in 2015 included the names of Trivers, Dawkins, Krauss, Pinker, Haidt, and Harris.

‘The Free Press’ Founders

Epstein’s connections to transphobic figures extended outside of the atheist circle around Krauss and Brockman. One of the central figures on the media end of “intellectual dark web” movement has been far-right pundit Bari Weiss, whose Substack was purchased last year by CBS for $150 million. Weiss’s wife and Free Press cofounder Nellie Bowles visited Epstein for a private meeting in 2018, scheduled just before his meeting with billionaire Leon Black.

Bowles has responded to criticism of her visit by arguing that she only did so in the service of reporting a story.

But that’s contradicted by the email trail which shows that she was connected to Epstein due to her friendship with Masha Bucher rather than a standard journalistic request for comment. Bucher is a venture capitalist who flirted with Epstein almost right up to his final arrest and appeared in the emails over a thousand times.

“I have a new friend who's fun and smart…Let me know if you'd like to meet her. No agenda. Just for fun. I like her a lot,” she wrote to Epstein in her pitch to arrange a meeting with Bowles.

Bari Weiss herself has connections to several other anti-trans Epstein associates as well. Last December, a new series of town halls hosted by CBS News and The Free Press included Steven Pinker. She also had Michael Shermer as a guest on her podcast, Honestly with Bari Weiss, which also once reposted an episode featuring Richard Dawkins as a guest from another TERF podcast called UnHerd.

And Weiss is also a founding member of the far-right unaccredited “University of Austin” (UATX), one of the flagship products of the “intellectual dark web” movement meant to push fascist ideas into the academic mainstream. The “university” has received criticism even from right-wing academics for suppressing academic dissent despite its supposed principles of “free expression and academic freedom.” UATX originally included Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt as advisors when it launched in 2021.

Epstein’s personal transphobia

The files available on the DOJ website also provide more evidence of how Epstein also deeply, personally hated trans people – especially after he was sued by one trans survivor. These include many other examples of overt transphobia from Epstein and his associates.

Epstein himself used the slur “t****y” on multiple occasions up through 2018. On one occasion, he used the slur in a conversation with top Goldman Sachs lawyer and former Obama White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler. In 2010, American collector Al Seckel bragged to Epstein about removing allegations of sexual abuse including “transexual stuff [sic.]” from his Wikipedia page in order to launder his reputation.

A few years later, Epstein joked in one iMessage exchange that a picture of a woman sent to him “looks transgender.” He followed up with another misogynistic joke implying that women can’t be funny, showing how his transphobia and misogyny were linked.

If more people had believed trans survivors, we might not be here right now

The new revelations show that Epstein and his cadre of anti-trans influencers have used a collective form of DARVO – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim-Offender – to paint trans people as predators and groomers, to distract from the wretched abuse of trans people by billionaires and other elites. This abuse comes both politically, through targeted attacks on our healthcare, civil rights, and dignity, as well as physically through sexual abuse and exploitation, especially of young trans people.

And we know it’s not just atheist billionaires and scientists pushing the anti-trans narrative. The role of far-right Christian billionaires and evangelical pastors in pushing anti-trans rhetoric and policies to the forefront of the MAGA agenda has been well documented.

Trans kids are twice as likely as cis kids to face sexual abuse, and far less likely to be believed when they report it. Abusers like Epstein intentionally target vulnerable children who have been ostracized by their families and by society as their victims.

When a Latina trans woman named Ava Cordero sued over Epstein’s raping her as a child, the same New York Post which smears trans people as pedophiles vigorously defended the billionaire pedophile in 2007 by running a story accusing Cordero of being an “Uppity T****y” who was trying to frame Epstein for money, according to court documents from a lawsuit between Epstein and Scott Rothstein. The article now has the headline “Gender-Bend Shocker” on the Post’s website.

The story spread to other tabloids across the political spectrum such as Gawker and New York Magazine, as the media pushed the narrative that Epstein was the victim, and Cordero was in fact the abuser for daring to be a trans woman who was suing him – in other words, DARVO.

In 2009, Cordero lost a libel suit against the Post that argued for damages due to the tabloid’s hateful attacks. She later settled for a small sum from Epstein, but her story is a reminder that trans people have always been among the first to raise the alarm bells about abusive people. Epstein’s abuses could have been stopped far, far more quickly if the horrific truths Cordero bravely revealed were seen as a cause for action, not mockery and hatred.

Maybe next time, cis people should listen.

But now we know the truth. A conspiracy that would have sounded like satire 10 years ago, has all been concretely laid out to us in black and white: that the attacks on trans lives and communities have been driven by a cadre of billionaire child rapists who bankroll creepy “anti-woke” influencers to push bigotry with propaganda that covers up their wretched abuse.

So, the next time you see someone posting one of the anti-trans figures mentioned in this article, make sure to remind them who their friends are.

—Edited by David Forbes

Note: An image of a headline whose text appeared in a lawsuit involving Epstein was removed from this article, as upon further inspection we could not verify that the specific image was authentic. However, the New York Post headline was originally found in the Epstein files from court documents related to that lawsuit, and that information has been retained in the article.

Community members rally in support for a Jan 7. vigil, less than 12 hours after the murder of Renee Nicole Good

I moved to Minnesota in late 2024. This move was the biggest of my life — 11 hours, starting in my prior residence in Cincinnati, Ohio, and ending at my new apartment in Minneapolis. I had only ever lived in the Eastern timezone, moving between northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. Prior to this move, I had never even set foot in Minnesota.

This wasn’t a journey done for fun. At the time, Ohio had introduced new health rules that would have, in part, forced adult trans people to detransition. While these fortunately were mostly overturned, the fear was instilled. Virtually overnight, I had a realization that I wasn’t safe.

Minnesota was the leading candidate, without question. It was affordable, it was safer for trans people, I had a ton of friends and connections there, along with a slew of smaller benefits. The journey itself didn’t turn me off from how good it’d be as a place to live.

It was, however, extremely exhausting. In the four years prior, I had moved states four separate times. The mere act of doing that once is enough to turn people off from moving for years – having to do that several times, while battling homelessness and immense poverty, really fucking sucked.

But the move was worth it. I was immediately welcomed by some of the friendliest people I’ve ever met, and felt like I was instantly a part of the community. Everyone who I saw on a regular basis was queer, an immigrant, or marginalized in some way. There was a feeling of solidarity among everyone, the idea that if you’re living there, you’re one of us. I never once felt unsafe or unwelcome. Before this, I never had a place I could call home. Now, I never want to leave.

In late 2025 things changed. ICE began to deploy across the city. They started bursting in the doors of people in my community, kidnapping parents in front of their children, denying people the resources they need while in detention.

ICE started off with a relatively small force, but enough to try to instill fear. Among plenty, it also sparked a desire to resist. Protests were common but not super widely-attended. Then more trainings and actions emerged, and there were always more seats available to learn more. The community had banded together, and it felt like we had a good defense up. Things were scary, horrible things were happening, but life mostly went on for a majority of people.

Then the year turned, and everything started becoming a blur. Thousands of agents were sent to the city. More than Chicago, for a city with less than a quarter of the population. People tackled, assaulted, teargassed daily. Thousands signed up for ICE response trainings. Children screaming, assaulted, kidnapped. More kept coming. More community members showed up. Confusion hit, terror hit, and more learned and mobilized.

Then Renee Nicole Good was murdered.

She wasn’t the first person shot by ICE and, tragically, she would not be the last. In a day, everything had changed. Every single person I encountered became terrified. People learned once again, this time in far greater numbers, what plenty under the most direct attack already faced; it can be any one of us. A vigil for Renee was organized in less than 12 hours, same day. Over 10,000 people showed up. Every person had a look in their eyes, one of terror, one of trauma. It gets worse, more hollow, more angry every single day.

We became unified against ICE in a way I’ve never seen before. Actions are decentralized, every single person is mobilizing, ready to put themselves on the front lines for their neighbors. More people are shot. Another person, Alex Pretti, is killed.

Time starts to lose its meaning. I’m dissociating most of the day every day. I keep my whistle on me, have a supply kit ready to go and a plan if things escalate. I still have to work, pay bills, do errands, attend appointments, do chores. Meanwhile, people are kidnapped, infants are choking on tear gas. ICE is beating minors and abandoning them with nothing on their person in places they’ve never been. I’m checking every license plate I see, jumping at every bang I hear, running to the door at every gut-wrenching feeling I get. Local and state cops — along with the National Guard — continue working with ICE. People deny it, but the knowledge hits in that no one will save us, no authority will liberate us. More and more realize this is real, and this is now the way things are

Like many trans people in poverty, I’ve dealt with no shortage of oppression and violence in my life, but for the first time, it properly sinks in how myself and everyone I love, everyone I know, everyone I see and could have contact to, can die in an instant. Before I know it, I could be next. My loved ones can be next. My neighbors can be next. I have no way of knowing. No one does.

It sinks for everyone here that the only way out is through, to keep organizing. Any of us can be next.

These thoughts repeat, over and over every day. It’s harder to remember things. It’s harder to have a sense of self. Hours pass in seconds, weeks pass that seem like years. I try to distract myself. My friends have stories of getting teargassed. An undercover ICE agent tries to run me off the highway. People are getting followed home, ICE is keeping track, it seems, of damn near everyone. Suspicious cars are infrequent, but common enough that I’m hypervigilant. Every cop car, every federal agent’s car is a new potential threat. Every time I see someone pulled over, I wonder if this is a kidnapping. There is no end in sight.

When will it be my time? How will I be remembered if I become a martyr? How will I remember my loved ones if they’re in the headlines? What will I do if I lose it all?

Thousands of people line the streets of Minneapolis in support of Renee Good as the downtown skyline looms in the background.

As I’m starting to write this, it’s late January. It feels like a century has passed since 2026 began. The old normal, the old status quo is dead. Even if ICE vacated Minnesota tomorrow, there will be no end to this feeling, this knowledge that at any time, the government could decide to kill anyone I know with impunity. The only next step is how it can be stopped from happening again.

Just today, I jumped up and checked on four different bangs, perked my head at the sound of anything quite like a whistle. I try to distract myself, but every problem is huge and small at the same time, and there is no way out of hell when every moment is a reminder of what you’re living through.

It’s hard to talk to people outside of here about what’s going on. The only ones I’ve found who have related are those who have gone through large-scale civil conflicts outside the U.S. I feel isolated from many people I knew, because there isn’t any way to properly verbalize how this feels.

Many tell me with confidence what they think will happen, how they think this will end, how they feel about what’s happening, how they would approach this and cope with it. I just smile and nod because I don’t have it in me to argue with people who just can’t understand by virtue of not having to go through this.

Few outside of the Twin Cities seem to get it when I say that everyone is affected by this, everyone has their own story or knows someone affected. But we’re all unified, because we recognize ICE won’t stop until they target as many people of color, as many immigrants as possible. Resistance isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

This is a community of people who welcomed me, and now I’m willing to put myself on the line for it. So is everyone else here. We can’t let ICE take anyone else, we have to minimize it as much as possible.

The vibe shift is bizarre. Small wealthy white, predominantly Republican towns, distant from the metro, have responder trainings completely booked out, with organizers pleading to audiences of dozens to hundreds to listen to and center the people most affected. This isn’t white people in the suburbs, it’s the people who spearheaded this fight, those that have gave it wind, those that are targeted every day. It’s immigrants and people of color that need to be centered.

The public view is unified, and the organizing is decentralized. The only way to respond to this properly is with decentralized, community-run efforts. While there are people taking on a great deal of the effort and who got the ball rolling, there are also no leaders here, no central authority on which everything relies on. This is self-sustaining, it’s growing bigger than anyone could’ve imagined. Everyone, from once-Biden-loving wine moms to the owners of the bodega around the corner, is realizing the impact, and is working to protect each other. We all only take on roles temporarily, never as an immutable figure.

There is no waiting for November, or any other election. They are not letting up just because one commander was removed, while the brutal violence against our communities continues non-stop. People increasingly are seeing people like Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey as weak and useless, given their tendency to play softbody and write strongly worded letters to murderous ICE agents. No politician can or will save us. Certainly no police or military will.

The silver lining, of course, is that the people of these cities are more unified than ever.

People are learning how to protect their neighbors, how to build a stable community, how to create effective resistance and ensure that each of us is able to live and thrive here in Minnesota. People are learning about mutual aid, taking legal courses, taking medical classes, getting trained on how to protest and defend themselves effectively, how to unionize, how to do whatever it takes to keep each other safe. We are all willing to put ourselves on the line to protect one another.

We are bonded in a horrifying collective trauma on a scale few of us have ever seen. Each person has a distinct look in their eyes, one of exhaustion, of terror, of anger. We have a fighting spirit, and we will not quit. We are unified in this together.

If there ever was an organic anarchist movement in the United States, this is such an example. People are resisting in a way that is natural, that comes as easy to humans by our nature to care for one another, and are doing so non-hierarchically. These movements are the key proof that we do not need centralized bodies of authority to tell us what to do and how to do it. We do not need masked men with guns at our doors to keep each other safe.

I’ve never been more hopeful in my life. At the same time, I’ve never been more terrified in my life. While I’m optimistic for the future, I also recognize that no path there is easy or comforting. Too many have already shed blood, and at the rate ICE is terrorizing us, many more will follow. Our motivation for resistance is simple – we want to minimize the amount of suffering and help each other any way we can.

We cannot forget what’s happening to us. We will never forget this. Even if every immigration agent and law enforcement officer were to leave Minnesota tomorrow, the trauma would not go away. We would all be scarred for years, with our first thought being how we can prevent this from happening again. We can only hammer in that we want to keep each other safe, and the only way to do this is to fight.

If people outside of Minnesota want to take one lesson from us, take this: the knowledge that no one is free until all of us are free, and the skills we’ve developed and cultivated amidst hell. Fascism comes for us all, and the only way to be prepared is to organize. To achieve liberation is to build solidarity with your community.

We fight for all of us.

—Edited by David Forbes

An image of the Prairieland Detention Center enter sign. Taken from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration public domain archive.

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Last year’s July 4 began as an eventful, if typical, day in the small town of Alvarado, Texas. While the Dallas exurb held a two-day long Independence Day celebration, few seemed to acknowledge that within their town’s borders hundreds of immigrants are held in horrific conditions in an ICE detention center.

This complacency is something that Meagan Morris, alongside 17 other activists, aimed to disrupt by holding a peaceful protest outside the detention center’s walls. However, the night quickly went awry when a local cop was shot in the neck. All levels of government quickly politicized the shooting as an “antifa" terrorist conspiracy, aggressively launching a campaign of repression and propaganda against protestors who, according to their own statements and even plenty of the government’s own scanty “evidence,” had no plans for violence.

“The government line about a targeted attack [would be] a ridiculous suicide attack. I'm a middle aged housewife with arthritis and a whole family and home and dogs to lose,” Meagan Morris, a trans woman and defendant in the case, told Trans News Network from jail in FMC Fort Worth. “Neither myself, nor any of my friends are in some hurry to throw our lives away and live either in jail or on the run or something for a pointless act of violence. I'm not even physically capable of something like that!”

Morris is one of over a dozen activists who were arrested on outlandish allegations of a terrorist conspiracy to attack the facility. But prosecutors have provided no evidence that she nor any of her co-defendants had any involvement in the shooting. The defendants have been held on bail worth millions per individual, due to the charges’ legal severity. A separate individual, Benjamin Song, was dubiously charged with the shooting. The trial is set for Feb. 17.

And yet, the government insists that they’re an “antifa cell” that was hellbent on attacking federal officers. According to The Intercept, an FBI official was not even able to say with certainty whether the police officer in question shot first. Since the shooting of Charlie Kirk last September and Trump’s publication of the NSPM-7 memo targeting “domestic terrorism,” the federal government has ramped up its targeting of left-wing individuals under the conspiratorial lens of “antifa.”

Due to the fact the government’s case heavily relies on the defendants’ political views rather than their actions, groups that defend the incarcerated consider them to be political prisoners. These are people who are incarcerated not for violating laws, but for “their thoughts and ideas that have fundamentally challenged existing power relations,” according to the 2009 Encyclopedia of Race and Crime.

The treatment of the defendants is largely guided by their alleged ideological affiliation with what prosecutors describe as the “militant enterprise” of “antifa,” an organization that does not actually exist but has long served as a boogeyman to demonize any resistance to the far-right.

The Prairieland detention facility finished construction in early 2017 and was initially reported to have specific housing for trans migrants. But, as was later revealed, this never came to fruition.

Instead, the detention center set a course to treat trans women as nearly all jails and prisons do; perpetuating the institutional oppression of guards and officials working in tandem to turn a blind eye to transphobia and brutal sexual assault. Meanwhile, many Alvarado residents only saw the facility as a way to get new jobs and bolster their local economy.

Violations of human rights quickly – and predictably – became routine after Prairieland’s opening in 2017. Just one year into operations, ICE covered up the death of an Armenian immigrant at the facility – only revealed five years later in an investigation by Prism. 

Early in 2020, a Guatemalan immigrant died from a treatable medical condition, just a month after being transferred to Praireland. The detention center later that year faced a class-action lawsuit from detainees over unsafe conditions that continued into the Biden administration as COVID-19 spread to nearly 200 immigrants by 2021, according to the ACLU.

In a separate investigation, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ruled that the facility was legally allowed to withhold some unknown materials from a state Freedom of Information Act request.

And today, protesters are held in prison for a crime that there’s no evidence they committed. Some weren’t even at the protest.

‘A normal protest’

“What happened July 4th was a normal protest, and regardless of what transpired that night, it’s clear that the scale and aggression of the police response is a fear tactic to send a message not only to DFW but across the country of how this administration will treat anyone standing against their rising authoritarianism,” the Dallas-Fort Worth Support Committee (DFWSC), a group of friends and family directly supporting the defendants in their legal battles, declared on their website.

DFWSC alleges that not only are some of the defendants incarcerated in spite of “likely never setting foot in Alvarado,” but that defendants saw their homes and families hit by militarized raids against unarmed civilians.

“Ongoing raids of several other homes across Texas have created hardship for defendants’ friends and families: agents deployed flashbang grenades, caused extensive damage, and detained spouses, family members and housemates without cause.”

“In one instance, federal agents tackled the adult child of a defendant and put a bag over their head before arresting them and transporting them to jail,” DFWSC’s accounts claim “‘I was terrified, I had no idea what was going on,’ the child later said. “During this interrogation, agents offered this person monetary bribes in exchange for information, which of course were refused. Police also attempted to extort them by offering to ‘get rid of a warrant’ if they cooperated with the law enforcement investigation.”

Meagan Morris

Meagan Morris taking a selfie in a mirror. Image provided by Morris’ partner.

As of publication, Meagan Morris is still incarcerated. Throughout the case, prosecutors have exclusively referred to her by her deadname, even though she legally changed it nearly two decades ago.

After her arrest, Morris was initially held in the Johnson County Jail for three months in solitary confinement, and told TNN that the jail’s attention to medical care and health hazards was nonexistent.

“They only grudgingly gave me my medications, especially my HRT, when I made a big stink in the media and they had direct attention. They never gave me pain killers for my arthritis, I had to purchase them from commissary. Same with the lotion for my skin condition, I had to purchase that out of my own money,” she wrote, adding that the water quality was “gross and gives everyone there the runs.”

Due to the confinement, she had scarce means to interact with other people. On occasion, she was able to call her family and talk to them on tablets. She could talk to the inmates directly across from her, and any guards on duty – especially one who she describes as “a nerd and we talked about Stellaris and Helldivers a bunch.” Save for these minimal interactions, she was held in total isolation for three months, a length of solitary confinement internationally recognized as torture.

As Trans News Network has reported in previous coverage on Maryland and Florida, prisons routinely put trans women into solitary confinement to “protect” them from sexual assault. But this “protection” comes at a steep psychological cost, and is an inadequate replacement for placing trans women in safe housing conditions with other women or trans people.

She was eventually moved to a second ward, where a separate detainee would yell transphobic slurs at her. A guard, rather than stepping in, said that he agreed “trans people were against God’s will.”

Currently, Meagan asserts she still deals with poor facilities and treatment after her transfer to FMC Fort Worth, a federal men’s prison for inmates with specific medical needs. While she is getting some medical care such as her hormones, she has again been denied adequate care for her arthritis, with medical staff only offering ibuprofen.

She notes that in spite of the cold weather of early winter, staff have refused to turn the heaters on. Additionally, her toilet has been overflowing –– staff have refused to fix it.

Most humiliating, however, has been the continuous deadnaming and misgendering by government officials, prison staff, and even her own state-appointed lawyer.

“[Prosecutors] refuse to use my legal name, instead using my dead name which hasn't been legally mine since 2007,” Morris wrote.”When they use my dead name, they are very specifically violating a court order that's almost 2 decades old. Calling me by my birthname is simply flagrant disrespect both of me, and of the basic principles of rule of law.”

She also added that “most of the other inmates have been more affirming of my gender than the federal government.”

Shockingly, even Morris’ Texas public defender has spent his time engaging in transphobic tirades about her, drawing community concerns over whether she is receiving the fair legal representation that she’s supposed to.

“I do not care what [she] calls [her]self,” Robert Luttrell, her public defender, wrote in an Aug. 18 email to Morris’ partner rife with misgendering. “[Her] legal name is [Deadname] Morris. That is what is on all of [her] legal documents. Therefore, [she] is [Deadname] Morris. [She] is being held in the male portion of the Johnson County jail as well.”

In the email, Luttrell falsely claimed Meagan has not legally updated her gender and commented on her genitals, which needless to say has no relevance to her case.

The emails were circulated to the community by local news, and then later spread on social media, leading to multiple people reaching out to the state-licensed attorney to voice concern about his treatment of Morris. At the time of publication, Luttrell has never met her in person.

“Unless [she] has somehow manages[sic] to change [her] genetics [she] is a male in the eyes of the law. If [she] doesn’t want me as [her] lawyer [she] can always hire one,” Luttrell said to one social media user.

In another email, he compares his legal defense of Meagan to cases where he has defended child rapists, murderers and traffickers in court. Luttrell wrote, “I don’t have to support what my clients do, or who they are in order to defend them. If I did support them wouldn’t that make me a bad person?”

In the same email, he went even further in his tirade.

“Under the eyes of Texas law [she] is a man and will go to male prison if convicted. What do you think they will do to [her] in prison when [she] identifies as female? Have you thought about that? Because I have. Do you think the guards will protect [her]? They shot a cop in the neck. Maybe you should think about the reality of the situation and not your feelings.”

Luttrell doubled down on this violent transphobia towards his client in an email reviewed by Trans News Network, stating “someone shot a cop… I’m taking a position that I hope will save [her] life but maybe I should follow your advice and set [her] up to be harmed or killed in prison.”

In another email posted to Tumblr, he threatened someone who reached out to him. “Why don’t you come down to my office and speak to me this way. I dare you.”

Luttrell is still representing Morris for her Texas state charges as she searches for a more suitable attorney while detained before the trial. She is represented by a different attorney for her federal charges, and has not reported any issues with him.

Autumn Hill

An image of Autumn Hill. Photo provided by Meagan Morris’ partner.

Another trans woman facing charges is Autumn Hill, who didn’t even attend the protest. One of Morris’s partners who stayed home on July 4, she recounted her experience and denied the government’s claims of conspiracy in emails exchanged with TNN from jail.

“I waited all night for Meagan to come home. It was very distressing. No plans were made to commit any illegal activity, and it is a tragedy to me that the night ended in violence and mass arrests,” she wrote.

“I sat at the corner at the end of our street where it connected to the main road outside our house for something like an hour waiting for Meagan to come home that night, desperately hoping that she hadn't been caught up in whatever ploy the police intended to use to attack her reputation and take away her liberty.”

Hill recounts how, because her wallet was in the van used to transport protesters, police decided that was probable cause to arrest her.

“Later that afternoon, I heard multiple loud bangs in the front of the house,” she remembered. “The police knocked down our front door with a battering ram and flew a drone into the front door, loudly ordering us to come outside with our hands up.”

She did as the police told, fearing she would be shot if she displeased the heavily-armed officers.

“I walked out of the front door to find multiple guns immediately pointed at me and my family, including the infant daughter of one of our housemates, a new mother who was relying on us for housing at the time. I remember being ordered not to move, and then ordered to turn around and walk backwards to be handcuffed. At the time, I was wearing only a red houserobe. We were detained outside our house for hours.”

Hill was initially held in Johnson County jail, where she also describes facing numerous human rights violations.

“Living at Johnson County for 80 days was the longest time I’ve felt hunger cramps every single day before every single meal,” she wrote.

It took over a week for her to receive needed medications, even then only after pleading with the jail’s medical staff.

Like Morris, she was held in conditions that meet the UN definition of torture.

“We were in Administrative Segregation the whole time, so I only had contact with other inmates through the ‘bean chute’ - the slot they used to feed us - for 80 days,” she recounted. In spite of this, she found solidarity with others behind bars.

“I could see the indoor Rec Yard for my unit C5C through my bean chute, though, and the boys from the main eight person pods could tell that I was a trans woman - I would sit by the bean chute, using the tablet to read or make phone calls most of the day, and when they would go to rec yard, they would look at me, wave, and blow kisses sometimes. It made me laugh.”

Currently, she’s held at FMC Fort Worth with Morris, where she has had less trouble receiving her medications and said that the other incarcerated people at the facility were “much more gender-affirming to me throughout the entire process than any representative of the government has ever been since my arrest."

Initially after transferring to the federal facility, she felt immense fear, owing to the extremely high rates of sexual assault against incarcerated trans women housed with men. Nevertheless, the community she formed inside has been instrumental in helping her approach this situation.

“Outside of those first few days of uncertainty, I have felt nothing but a sense of community here. Jail reminds me more than anything else of Boy Scout Camp - my co-defendants describe it as being like living in poverty or at high school, but with extremely steep penalties if anyone is caught fighting, doing drugs, or having sex,” she wrote. “It's like a little village in here, and the guards are much more problematic to us than the other detainees, who mostly like to make delicious cakes and soups and other recipes with what's available on the commissary and share with their neighbors.”

America’s Political Prisoners

After hearing concerns that Morris and the other DFWSC prisoners count as political prisoners, Trans News Network analyzed court records for the case and spoke to experts on authoritarianism about its implications.

Michael Coppedge, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and an investigator for the Varieties of Democracy Project, specializes in research on authoritarianism across the world.

“I think there's some similar techniques being used. Arresting people with little propagation who have not really done anything to break the law, but are just creating a nuisance for armed forces or the police, or just filming things that seem to threaten the agents of the government who don't want to be held accountable for their actions,” Coppedge told TNN. “Creating excuses to arrest people as a way of suppressing dissent.”

“Police or ICE agents do it while wearing masks and not identifying themselves to avoid accountability. Arresting people and then holding them incommunicado, that's not happening with everybody, but it's been happening with some people from what I understand,” he continued. “That's sort of like disappearing people, at least temporarily. I certainly hope they're not taking dissenting people and killing them and hiding it. I don't see any evidence of that, but it's disturbing.”

Just weeks after this interview, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, a queer woman who was protesting the agency’s invasion of her city.

Coppedge further elaborates that he believes democracy in the United States has been eroding since the first Trump administration.

“We've seen some erosion of democracy in the United States. As of the end of 2024, which is the most recent data we have… was with respect to the ability of the courts to hold the executive accountable and the willingness of Congress to hold the executive accountable and then take investigations. There's also some erosion in media freedom.”

Ari Shaw, senior fellow and director of international programs at the Williams Institute, agrees. With his research primarily specializing in Hungarian authoritarianism, he told Trans News Network that “attacks on LGBTQ people can be an early indicator of a more fundamental erosion of democratic norms and institutions.”

When asked about the Prairieland case, he drew a comparison to his prior work.

“We certainly see in our research cases where LGBTQ and trans people in particular are scapegoated within the context of rising authoritarianism,” Shaw said. “In many cases we see public officials weaponizing homophobia and transphobia for political purposes, whether to mobilize voters or to distract from domestic, social, or economic crises.”

“It’s a way of deflecting attention or scrutiny from existing controversies or things that may be more politically challenging for them. I can't say definitively that's what's happening in this case, but it's certainly something that we see in other contexts of a more authoritarian regime.”

He believes there are direct comparisons to Hungary’s persecution of LGBTQ+ people and what we’re witnessing in America today.

“Hungary in many ways is a paradigmatic example of this. Viktor Orban, who's been in power for much of the last decade, has really made attacks on sexual and gender minorities a central part of his political strategy for consolidating power and executive control over many areas of political and civic life,” Shaw told TNN. “We've seen within the last few years constitutional amendments [in Hungary] that have specifically endangered the lives of, or have rolled back rights for trans people, whether by defining sex in binary terms, or by limiting opportunities for legal gender recognition.”

“It's this focus on casting LGBTQ people and trans people in particular as sort of outside the norm of ‘tradition.’ This sets up this false enemy, and it's a way to rally the nation around his political agenda and it's been unfortunately remarkably effective.”

When asked for specific examples on this kind of action, he cited the Floridian “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which was modeled after Hungary’s “anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda law.” This was, in turn, modeled after a 2013 anti-LGBTQ+ law in Russia. “We’re seeing almost a direct influence of those strategies and efforts to restrict rights, in almost exact replica, in US states.”

“The Prairieland Defendants have been confined now for nearly 4 months, battling both state and federal Charges,” The Anarchist Black Cross, an organization supporting political prisoners in the United States, declared in a November statement. “Many have been moved far from their homes, having had their lives upended due to the government’s war against ‘antifa,’ and a fearmongering of anyone who holds dissenting beliefs.”

“This case is scary, and each person detained right now could have been anyone on the outside who went to a protest against ICE, expecting to go home right afterwards.”

“This is the first instance where the Trump Administration has framed ‘antifa’ as a terrorist group in a criminal case,” an October public statement from the National Lawyers Guild declared, “The National Lawyers Guild stands with anti-ICE dissent and calls for solidarity with the Prairieland Defendants. We cannot tolerate the dangerous criminalization of a noise demonstration against ICE.”

The NLG, a legal organization which fights for the rights of political prisoners, went further, condemning the government’s continued incarceration of these defendants with severe charges.

“We are alarmed by the appearance of federal prosecutors and agents coordinating with the Alvarado Police Department and Johnston County District Attorney’s Office to indefinitely detain the Prairieland Defendants through concurrent, extreme state and federal charges,” they continued. “Despite this incident occurring over three months ago, with allegations against defendants who weren’t even at the noise demonstration, the government is only now declaring that there was a so-called “antifa terrorist cell”, pursuant to Trump’s new directive.

The Government’s Absurd Case

An image of the direct outside of Prairieland Detention Center. Taken from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration public domain archive.

The trial is scheduled to start Feb. 17, with Trump-appointed judge Mark Pittman saying he does not anticipate granting further delays in a court order. The government’s assertion that the actions of protestors last July amounted to terrorism will likely rely heavily on “expert” testimonials during the trial, according to their Notice of Expert Testimony.

One of the experts the government will rely on, according to those court documents, is Center for Security Policy employee and far-right political activist Kyle Shideler. Shideler has spent years spreading racist propaganda against Muslims and Black people under the guise of “counterterrorism.”

More recently he’s switched his targets to “antifa" and trans people, including using an anti-trans slur. In spite of the supposed requirement for court experts to have a commitment to objectivity in their subject matter, Shideler routinely engages with far-right trolls like Andy Ngo, and recently declared he “could be talked into drone striking marijuana smokers on U.S. streets."

The rest of the governments’ case lies largely on the existence of two Signal chats used by protestors, and an in-person meeting before the protest, according to the indictment. The other “evidence,” scanty as it is, includes fireworks, first aid kits, body armor, and alleged minor property damage to a CCTV camera and some tires. But their own evidence suggests that these materials align with equipment for a peaceful noise demonstration, and were only brought to protect from violence by ICE and police, a very real threat.

The government’s own allegations even admit that the protest was discussed in the larger chat as a peaceful noise demonstration, which coincided with the U.S. holiday known for countless civilians shooting fireworks to make noise.

The government’s sole supposed evidence of “intent” was the alleged shooter, Benjamin Song, carrying a rifle for what the indictment alleges was intimidation and self-defense purposes – a kind of open carry that is legal in Texas – and stating that he does “not want to go to jail.” Nowhere in the indictment is a stated intent to kill or harm alleged, nor is any evidence even given that Song is the shooter.

Further, the federal government has said it will “not give [the defendants] a detailed exposition of how it will prove knowledge and intent” prior to trial, stating that it will rely on the evidence in the chat messages, and people’s “adherence to a violent and extremist Antifa ideology for purposes of motive and intent.”

Beyond just alleged acts of violence, the indictment seeks to create a precedent that First Amendment-protected acts such as creating zines, practicing operational security, and having left-wing beliefs are evidence sufficient to escalate crimes to the level of terrorism, which carries some of the most severe legal penalties. One defendant in the case has even been charged merely for “concealing" zines.

Where do we go from here?

While the brutality of the U.S.’s authoritarianism has ramped up since Trump’s reelection, the country has a long history of using similar authoritarian tactics to arrest Black, Indigenous, Muslim, queer, and environmental activists as political prisoners. Throughout this long history of oppression, activists have built community networks, even from behind bars and persevered with new tactics that adapt to the times.

Everyone reading this has a chance to play a part in doing that in our current time too.

When asked what people at home could do to support her and her co-defendants, Morris said, “It would help a lot for the public to donate to our fundraiser. It would help *a lot* for the public to understand and spread the point I made, that the government line about a targeted attack is a ridiculous suicide attack.”

“The most urgent thing we need is filthy lucre!” Hill said when asked the same question. “I hate to beg, but our fundraiser can always use more donations. Other than that, spreading news of the truth of what has happened to us, talking amongst themselves, and making their dissatisfaction about our case known loud and clear to the administration is, in my opinion, the best thing our friends can do. Let the voice of the people be heard!”

Currently, the organizers of the DFWSC have set up a GiveSendGo campaign to raise $80,000 for each of the defendants’ legal costs. DFWSC also has set up a page outlining ways people can get involved, including sending money and resources to the prisoners directly, setting up letter writing campaigns to keep inmates’ spirits up, and helping organize actions to raise awareness.

No matter what happens, this is an important reminder for the public to build connections in their local communities and rely on support from their family, friends, and neighbors to make it through to tomorrow. The only way out of oppression is by solidarity, and by rejecting and pushing back against efforts to single people out, to keep us terrified, weak and alone. The solution can only be found together.

—Edited by Mady Castigan and David Forbes

The New York Times headquarters, taken from Wikimedia Commons.

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To say Billie Jean Sweeney's had a storied career in journalism would be an understatement. Over more than two decades of experience in the field the longtime journalist, editor and press freedom advocate has worked at the Hartford Courant, the Associated Press, the Committee to Protect Journalists and, most recently, as a volunteer editor at Assigned Media.

She also worked at The New York Times for over a decade, until her retirement in mid-2024, eventually becoming the day assignment editor at the international desk. There, as one of the Times’ few trans staffers, she witnessed the highest echelons of the paper's management increasingly push anti-trans bigotry and disinformation.

Trans communities have known, and sounded the alarm, about the NYT’s increasingly anti-trans stance for years. Sadly, too many cis people have ignored these warnings, especially as many of the details have often remained obscured behind the paper's extensive corporate hierarchy and established reputation.

No more. In this in-depth interview, Sweeney details how the NYT shifted to openly attacking trans people and why directives to do so came from the very top of the organization. She also recounts how some within the Times — including her — tried to push back, and the widespread damage done by the influential paper legitimizing hatred.

In keeping with Trans News Network's commitment to not platform bigotry, we will not link to any NYT stories in this piece. For clarity — as this interview covers a lot of ground and goes into the details of anti-trans coverage at the Times — we will note which stories Sweeney is referring to, which reporter wrote them, their publication date and particularly relevant facts about them.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

David Forbes: You've written a bit recently about how the NYT handled trans coverage, including some shocking revelations around the Cass review.

Billie Jean Sweeney: That episode came in the midst of a years-long campaign that really began back in 2022 when the new masthead was put in place by [NYT publisher A.G.] Sulzberger — [executive editor] Joe Kahn and [managing editor] Carolyn Ryan in particular — and the handling of the Cass report came as the Times was re-energizing, so to speak, its coverage of trans people that was highly biased in a conservative direction.

That brings up a really interesting point. During your time at the NYT how did you see the treatment of trans people in coverage change?

I came out in 2019. The first time I got really involved in, or very aware of things was back in 2021. At that point Dean Baquet was the editor. The coverage wasn't always great, and the Times didn't make any particular attempt to hire trans journalists, but I don't think it had that sustained, single-minded focus on promoting disinformation and legitimizing bias, really.

That came to pass with the new editor, Joe Kahn. It began really in the Spring of 2022. There was a series of stories that in hindsight, looking back, were intended to win prizes. It had all the hallmarks of a series of stores that's intended to make a campaign to win a Pulitzer or whatever they had in mind.

An anti-trans Pulitzer, as it were.

Exactly, right. There was a series of stories that challenged every aspect of being trans. It challenged the medical science of being trans. It even challenged small things like gender-inclusive language and somehow made a case that undermined women and abortion rights issues. Which, of course, is a stretch.

To put it mildly, yes.

Yes. It passed along different disinformation, like top surgery being easy to get, when of course it was never easy to get. I think it culminated in January 2023 with a story about parental rights [“When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don't Know” by Katie J.M. Baker, Jan. 22, 2023] that didn't actually quote the young individual involved directly and it cast these people who turned out to be members of a very anti-trans activist group, which the Times did disclose in the story but kept calling these parents liberals. It was just a very tendentious story that just asserted the notion that parent's rights took precedence over the individual's rights. That was kind of the culmination of that. [Note: In the context of this interview, Sweeney was using "actually" to mean "meaningfully." The trans youth in question is briefly quoted in the piece.]

During the midst of this, there was a staff group within the Times, it was the LGBTQ ERG [Employee Resource Group], it was very active and really pressed hard to get management to talk with us and to discuss the concerns we really had.

I wrote a series of notes to the publisher, to Sulzberger. The first one I wrote was back in 2021, but I wrote a series of notes after that to him beginning in 2022 that was focused on the coverage and the lack of trans reporters, and the lack of any trans involvement, input even, in the coverage.

There was a build-up during that time expressing internal dissent about the coverage. As that big string of anti-trans stories came to its end with the story about parental rights, you may remember there was a letter from hundreds and hundreds of Times contributors saying these stories are tendentious, it's spreading bias.

There was a protest outside the offices, and the Times’ response was to run a story defending J.K. Rowling [“In Defense of J.K. Rowling” by Pamela Paul, Feb. 16, 2023]. They ran that story the next day. That was their attitude towards it.

As you were witnessing this, what was your position at the Times?

I was there about 11 years in total, almost all of it on the international desk. I was the day assignment editor at the time. I'd been the night editor prior to that. The day assignment editor does what you might imagine: to respond to breaking news, to make sure we're covering things properly, to make sure the stories say what we think they're going to say, we're matching up the right reporters with the right editors, etc.

Billie Jean Sweeney, who worked at The New York Times for over a decade and directly witnessed the increasingly anti-trans bias in its coverage. Photo courtesy of Billie Jean Sweeney

When that happened, from your view within a pretty key spot within the times, what did you see as the internal reaction to this dissent that was, understandably, coming up in response to their coverage?

I think, initially, there was a sense that maybe the dissent that was emerging within the paper — but also outside the paper, expressed by its own contributors — that maybe they would recognize that as a signal that they were going off the rails.

They made some attempts. In hindsight I look at this very cynically, but at the time I hoped maybe this is something we can build on. You look back on these things and think you were kind of naive, that I actually thought they were genuine. But they had a couple of meetings that were attempts at trying to talk with trans people at the Times.

With trans staffers and workers at the Times?

Yes, there weren't many. But I guess that's who they were trying to reach out to. They had two of these sessions, one of which they didn't invite me to until the day of. Take that for what it was. I was one of the most outspoken people about [the anti-trans coverage].

The second one they scheduled on a day that I was away. I don't know if that was purposeful or not, but in any case that's what happened. They had a couple of those [meetings], but I don't really think they accomplished very much. I think they were a way they could say that they reached out. I don't know how much of this was an internal public relations campaign. In hindsight I think it was almost that entirely.

I think there was some sense the Times could change course, but again that was my view at the time. I was hopeful I could persuade people. But looking back on it I think that was pretty naive, really.

This is what happens throughout 2023. After the big protest, after the expression of dissent we seem to think that maybe we can persuade them to improve things. Maybe hire trans reporters, which is something I had always advocated for and never got anywhere with. They still don't have any trans journalists covering trans news in the newsroom. They have M. Gessen on the opinion side, but no trans news reporters.

I think there was a period there where we had some hope that maybe we could make a difference. But I think with the end of 2023, beginning into 2024 there were some pretty dark signs.

One actually came from within the Times. There was this militant anti-union group formed, within the union, that were pro-management in a lot of their opinions. Including trans coverage, which really wasn't a strictly union issue. But they're a small group, they're militant about their views.

Militant about their anti-trans views?

Exactly. In the sense that they would leak stories that would accuse the union of taking pro-trans stances.

But probably more significantly, [the Times‘ management] announced at the end of 2023 that they had a new communication policy that essentially shut down all avenues for internal discussion. That was actually a bad sign for me, and told me it was probably time for me to start winding down my time there as well.

Up until that time, they didn't like it, but they allowed people to raise questions, they allowed people to offer critical views. That is the point of these groups [the Employee Resource Groups], supposedly, to allow discussion of it. This was a management-run channel, they did have final say, but they were supposed to at least allow people to voice their opinions. They said, though, that you could no longer do that and equated that with publicly tweeting. Of course there's a big difference between posting something on an internal Slack channel and posting it on Twitter or Bluesky.

So that was a bad sign. It kind of coincided with the ramp-up of the 2024 election, where things escalated.

So there was this lull in most of 2023 and then things escalated in 2024. How did they escalate?

One of the things that happened was that Sulzberger kind of came around and gave a stump speech to every part of the paper, including the international desk. He talked for 40 minutes about how we were going to cover the election 'fairly' and that sort of thing. The international desk wasn't really that involved in the coverage of the election, so it was a little off-key for us. We were all like 'why are we talking about this?'

I call it a stump speech because he gave it to every single desk. He delivered the same message. Clearly this was going to indicate how the times was going to cover the 2024 election. It treated both sides as having equal weight in terms of factual basis, in terms of their viewpoints.

And this was in the middle of the most virulent anti-trans campaign, from one of those sides, in American history.

Exactly. Sulzberger himself, right before this episode with Cass — and this wasn't a good sign for me — gave a speech at the Reuters Foundation in March 2024. He talked about how the Times had 'protected' young people through its coverage of trans youth.

A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times and primary architect of its barrage of anti-trans coverage. Photo by the Knight Foundation, taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Which is a straight-up anti-trans propaganda view.

Exactly, yes. So that was a bad sign. I guess there was an awareness that the Cass report was coming up. She had put out a report a couple of years earlier. It wasn't real high on my radar at the time, but it was certainly out there. I think they — Sulzberger and his newsroom lieutenants — saw that as an opportunity to seize this and give to the right, including Trump, an issue that they could run with.

You've talked about the paper's treatment of the pretty infamous Cass report, especially from your spot at the international desk. What happened in that case?

It wasn't on my radar as much as it ought to have been. I was starting to wind down my time. I left the Times at the end of May of that year. There was an awareness that [Hilary] Cass was coming out with a report. The day before it officially came out, there was a lot of coverage in the BBC and UK media. Cass was already talking about it before its official release.

The day editor's counterparts are in Seoul and London. My counterpart in London — who was actually filling in that day, but did so on a regular basis — assigned a UK reporter to do a story.

That was standard practice, to be clear.

[Chuckling] There’s so many examples of how standard it was. She assigned it to a UK correspondent, who wrote it in the context of UK politics, talked about it being very contentious, talked about the criticisms of its findings. Cass was talking about them herself, this isn't jumping to any conclusions at that point. It really put it in the context of being this very contentious, very political sort of document.

When I saw it, because we're a few hours behind, there were 600, 700 words written. I had a pretty good sense of how the story was going to turn out. But within a few hours the story was to the top New York editors, and I don't know who exactly it was who did that. I assume it was Carolyn or her intermediary. They said ‘oh no, we want the science desk to do that,’ specifically that was Azeen [Ghorayshi], who had been a key reporter in a lot of the other anti-trans coverage.

Indeed, infamous among trans communities for how anti-trans her coverage is.

Exactly. So we stood down, that was a directive from above. It's not crazy for a science desk to do a story like this, rather than the geographic desk, in theory. But how it played out in practice was the story the Times put out in the next day's paper cast this not as a news story, but already declaring this to be part of a trend all across Europe, that was restricting care in light of new evidence.

[Note: The stories were "Youth Gender Medications Limited in England, Part of Big Shift in Europe," April 9, 2024 and “Hilary Cass Says U.S. Doctors are 'Out of Date’ on Youth Gender Medicine", May 13, 2024, both by Azeen Ghorayshi. Unusually, as Sweeney's emphasized, the latter was framed as “A conversation with” Cass rather than a traditional news story. — D.F.]

I went back and looked at that story earlier today to refresh my memory. The first few references were to Finland in 2020 — not in 2024 — making a recommendation that adolescents should go through therapy [as part of receiving trans care]. But that's not a rejection of gender-affirming care, as Cass was.

It referred to an earlier Denmark decision, but again that was not a rejection of gender-affirming care. The references that Azeen used to support this conclusion that this was part of a trend sweeping Europe were old and not even supportive of its main premise. These were places saying 'this needs to be examined, it needs to be done in context with therapy' which had always been the case.

The story ignored, both then and later, reports that were emerging in France, Switzerland, Austria and Germany that were directly in opposition to Cass.

The science desk covered these things when it served their narrative. But when the France report came out, when the Austrian report came out, when the German report came out the science desk ignored those. The directive from above was that the international desk was to ignore it as well [Note: Sweeney clarified that these directives were pointedly communicated down from the top of the Times’ hierarchy by conversation, not via email or internal announcement].

No coverage was done, in The New York Times, about these reports that were in direct opposition to Cass.

Another example was when that Utah report was done at the behest of the legislators and they found that a review of the evidence showed that gender-affirming care has a sound basis and is grounded in the same science cited by major medical associations. They ignored that too. Azeen ignored it, though she was really doing the bidding of her bosses.

It's certainly still a choice to do that.

Oh she was absolutely along for the ride, but she was still doing their bidding.

That's an important point. You've mentioned 'a directive from above' several times now, and you've mentioned a shift around 2022. This was all coming from the very top, correct?

Oh yeah, most definitely. It was really three people: Sulzberger, Kahn, Ryan. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if any of them would be more receptive. I wrote to Sulzberger directly, because he was the one who animated this, and I still believe that.

I think he saw this as a political project, that he could take a stance that the hard right would like, that the Trump campaign might like. Whether it was an explicit agreement [with the Trump campaign], probably not, but this was coverage he knew the right wing would like.

And he pursued that, because he thought it was a position — spreading anti-trans discrimination, spreading anti-trans disinformation — was something he could push and most readers would say 'well I don't know much about it.' He thought it was something there'd be no cost for.

There probably wasn't any cost to it, from that view, except for trans people and young trans people especially.

You mean no cost for the NYT?

Exactly, and no cost to its broader reputation. For most readers, it's like 'well we don't know too much about [trans healthcare], maybe they did go too far, the Times keep telling us they did, so maybe they did.'

That brings up one of the big questions in all of this: what do you see as the wider impact of this anti-trans stance, as someone who worked at the NYT and has worked in the media world for a long time?

I think they basically legitimized, they mainstreamed disinformation. I did a story about how disinformation worked its way into the mainstream, and the Times played a big role in that, as did Bari Weiss [former NYT op-ed staff editor, currently the openly pro-Trump editor-in-chief of CBS News]. As did organizations like that phony pediatrics association that has like 700 members and was led for some time by someone who wasn't even a licensed pediatrician.

It's one thing for Bari Weiss, when she was just running the Free Press or whatever, to report this. It's another thing for The New York Times to report this. I think they put a stamp of legitimacy on medical falsehoods. They also legitimized anti-trans hate, really.

Some of the worst New York Times stories are really contemptuous. There was a story written right after the election by Jeremy Peters that just oozed with contempt. I think it was the most biased lede I ever read. I think it basically said 'trans people are too much to endure.' Well, ok, thanks for starting that off in a way that's open-minded and level-headed.

[Note: the story was “Transgender Activists Question Movement's Confrontational Approach,” by Jeremy Peters, published Nov. 26, 2024. The lede Sweeney's referring to is “To get on the wrong side of transgender activists is to endure their unsparing criticism,” stated as unchallenged fact. As anti-trans coverage in establishment media tends to, “activists” is used, in practice, to refer to all vocal trans people. — D.F.]

Crazily enough, the first person he quoted in a story about U.S. politics, was J.K Rowling.

Who is not exactly a power broker in U.S. politics.

No, and is certainly not going to give any sort of open-minded way of talking about the issue. Then there was that whole story that went after the ACLU for doing its job in the Skrmetti case [“How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost” by Nicholas Confessore, June 19, 2025]. That was a personal attack on [trans ACLU attorney Chase] Strangio. That was an outrageously contemptuous story.

The Times is basically working through a lot of these news stories to establish a narrative that trans people went too far. 'If only they hadn't gone too far, then things might be different but we just have to stand up for ourselves' is the narrative they sought to push.

Some of what you just described, that's just outright bigotry from these reporters.

Yes, but the stories are also edited too. Somebody had to approve that lede. I don't know if it was Carolyn, who was known to be directly, hands-on involved in the line editing of stories. I don't know if she was or made known her preferences. Those stories had editors.

Certainly there are plenty of reporters that were fully on board with this, and others who do it out of ambition because this is what the bosses want and they want to get ahead so they insert what the bosses want.

Acts of appeasement, as it were.

Yeah. The editor who edited most of the science desk's anti-trans coverage [Virginia Hughes] ended up getting a big promotion. She's now co-head of the investigations desk. So she got ahead, and she knew the way to get ahead was to give the bosses what they wanted.

She was Azeen's editor. And just for a behind the scenes view, I mentioned that pro-management caucus in the union. She was among the most militant members of that.

It's hard to know whether this is a convergence of belief and ambition or just ambition alone.

At a certain point, after enough time, what's the difference?

That's right.

You've laid out a pretty severe situation. You mentioned one of the things Sulzberger and the other higher-ups expect is there's not going to be a cost to this. What do you think members of the public who are against the anti-trans bigotry should do in response to this course of action by the NYT?

I think there's probably a growing awareness that the Times' coverage has been tendentious at best and outright biased, bigoted at its worst. Having that awareness is a good thing.

They can stop subscribing to the Times. I'm not against that. Or they can simply not amplify the Times‘ coverage. I'm hopeful that's already happening.

It may, somewhat, be too late, in many people's view. The damage, to a fair degree, has already been done. But having people understand that these are people who are not committed to giving factual, unbiased information.

It's not like there aren't still occasionally good stories at the Times. There was a story about a trans cancer patient that was one of the best I've read all year.

But will that ever get through to those who edit the Times? I don't think so. They're so wedded to their positions. I think they believe in them. I don't think that's probably going to change, at least not with this group of leaders. And Sulzberger's a young guy, he'll be around for a long time.

What else would you like our readers to know?

I was talking with Kae Petrin at the TJA [Trans Journalists Association], and one thing they mentioned was the emergence of a lot of independent news outlets. This is not just about trans issues, but other issues as well.

I think the awareness that independent news sources are really vital, and that maybe just reading the Times and subscribing to the Times isn't really the best investment of your money or your time.

—Edited by Mira Lazine

Editors’ Note, 1/1/26:

In the interview, M. Gessen was erroneously referred to by an incorrect name. We regret the error, and this piece has been updated to reflect this.

Editors' Note, 1/4/26:

A spokesperson from The New York Times emailed Trans News Network the Sunday after publication, disputing various parts of the interview. We reject their disputes as unsubstantiated, nitpicking or willful misreads. We have added minor clarifications at two points in the interview alongside the transcript, which remains as published. We stand by our reporting of the interview with Sweeney, former editor and 11-year veteran of the Times.

The Times also provided TNN a statement responding to the interview, which we have declined to publish due to its inclusion of overt transphobia (such as framing the existence of trans people as “fiercely contested medical and legal debates”). Even in their PR, it seems that the Times can't stop denigrating our lives and communities.

We do not have an obligation to publish damage control on the behalf of a news outlet undergoing a legitimacy crisis because of their own actions.

Trans News Network (@transnews.network)

Trans News Network (TNN) is a worker-run nonprofit LGBTQ+ newsroom publishing articles that impact trans communities. Follow our work at https://transnews.network/ Donate to our launch fundraiser at https://transnewsnetwork.networkforgood.com/

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Rainbow graffiti in Helsinki, Finland saying ‘Pride was a riot. From Wikicommons.

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“What is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves,”

— Mark Twain, 1889

“They murdered folks in Alabama, they shot Medgar in the back.
Did you say that wasn’t proper, did you stand out on the track?
You were quiet just like mice. Now, you say that we’re not nice.”

— “It isn’t nice,” civil rights movement song

Our daily lives are filled with unacknowledged victories, won by immense bloodshed against oppression. Throughout much of history those making any move towards liberation, any meaningful social change have faced scolding and lectures by the gentry for daring to raise their fists. In an effort to silence any action that might threaten their power, the same gentry have created an artificial debate around the science of “nonviolent” revolt. Their assertion is that (an often misunderstood or deliberately misportrayed) version of nonviolence is the only way forward. This debate is, like so many others they manufacture, little more than a tool used to silence radicals.

Debates over the role of force can be, and often are. held in good faith by those who acknowledge the need for immense change to capitalism’s unnatural hierarchies. But to a much greater extent, especially as capital finds itself in crisis through mass resistance, proponents of a tame version of “nonviolent” change will find themselves arguing from the megaphone of leading, international institutions, which produce some of the most powerful elites in history, that the public needs to quiet down and resist civilly. This is in spite of the fact that many of those elites are themselves instigators of mass murder, often outright war criminals, even under current, deeply-flawed international laws.

This is hardly new. Karl Marx in his 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League famously railed against the moderates of the time who asked for quiet, tepid revisions to the oppressive state, especially when it is used to disarm the working class.

“At the moment, while the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach to the proletariat general unity and reconciliation; they extend the hand of friendship, and seek to found a great opposition party which will embrace all shades of democratic opinion,” Marx declared in the 1850 speech. “That is, they seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization… Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat… Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”

It is important that those who seek to crush liberation today must sanitize and erase the movements of the past, particularly the civil rights movement. They conflate its nonviolence with passivity and a lack of disruption. Some, like 50501, do this explicitly. In doing so they even get nonviolence wrong. The civil rights movement had its own disagreements and differences with other groups in the wider Black liberation struggles, but its use of nonviolence was explicitly a set of highly disruptive tactics aimed at making injustice impossible to maintain.

Its groups and organizers intentionally defied laws and police while refusing “moderate” offers of compromise. “It isn’t nice” was one of their songs for a reason. Today, there’s good odds those organizers and activists would be condemned as “provacateurs” and turned over to the police by those who invoke their memory to shut down militant demonstrations today.

Their attitudes on armed defense — and even violence — were also much more complex, rooted in the reality of the cold terrors they faced. It is also much more complex than portrayed in today’s liberal mythology.

Martin Luther King, Jr., while not expressly advocating violent revolt himself, nevertheless refused to condemn tactics used by others in the fight for Black liberation, especially in his later years.

“It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society,” King said in his 1968 lecture The Other America. “These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention.”

”And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard,” King continued to the audience of high schoolers in Grosse Point, Mich. “And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”

In 1965 King even pointedly refused to condemn Annie Cooper, a Selma, Ala. woman who punched the notoriously racist sheriff square in the face and knocked him to the ground, noting that her actions were clearly “provoked” by his racist violence.

In Charles Cobb’s seminal book on the role of armed resistance in the struggle for Black liberation, especially in the American Civil Rights Movement, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, he recounted how journalist William Worthy stumbled upon two firearms in King’s house. The civil rights leader noted these were “just for self-defense.” Another activist described King’s home as “an arsenal.”

Cobb holding a copy of his book This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed. Photo by Deborah Menkart, from Wikicommons.

“The claim that armed self-defense was a necessary aspect of the civil rights movement is still controversial,” Cobb, a legendary journalist and former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary, wrote. “However, wielding weapons, especially firearms, let both participants in nonviolent struggle and their sympathizers protect themselves and others under terrorist attack for their civil rights activities. Their willingness to use deadly force ensured the survival not only of countless brave men and women but also of the freedom struggle itself.”

He lays out a multitude of examples, like the heavily-armed Deacons for Defense and Justice group that mobilized against segregation and worked closely with civil rights organizers.

“If we had a picket line, these guys were standing on the corner, on both sides of the street,” CORE organizer Fred Brooks recalled. “Wherever we went it was like a caravan; these guys in their pick-up trucks with their high-powered rifles.”

Renowned radical civil rights organizer Fannie Lou Hamer put it bluntly: “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom, and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.”

Cobb wrote his history to counter the ongoing sanitization of the realities of that struggle. He’s honest about divisions within the movement over the use of armed force, but also emphasizes that fears that armed demonstrations and defense would lead to overwhelming retaliation proved unfounded. Instead, in plenty of cases local segregationist governments folded in the face of them.

“It may be that ‘nonviolent’ is simply the wrong word for many of the people who participated in the freedom struggle and who were comfortable with both nonviolence and self-defense, assessing what to do primarily on the basis of which seemed the most practical at any given moment,” Cobb concluded.

Shortly after the Stonewall riots, according to Susan Stryker’s Transgender History, moderate cisgender gays and lesbians broke off from their queer siblings and formed the Gay Activists Alliance. While they started off more militant than the “homophile” movement that preceded Stonewall, by 1973 the leadership veered away from radicalism in favor of currying favor with the establishment. They pushed out militant activists in favor of working with the political status quo in elections, political campaigning and drawing all their resources towards the gentry. GAA went on to influence the first Pride march years later. Stryker dishearteningly noted how in 1973 trans activist Sylvia Rivera was “forcibly prevented from addressing the annual commemoration of Christopher Street Liberation Day.” While GAA disbanded a year later, their legacy lives on through efforts to whitewash Stonewall and the utilization of the riots’ name to endorse political candidates.

A photograph of the moderate Mattachine Society’s graffiti’d plea to shut down the Stonewall riots in 1969 in favor of passive, ‘peaceful’ protest. It didn’t work. From the Digital Public Library of America.

This is all in spite of Stonewall’s reality as not a protest, but a violent riot that was widely supported by people in the local community.

“Bottles, rocks, and other heavy objects were soon being hurled at the police, who began grabbing people in the crowd and beating them in retaliation. Weekend partiers and residents in the heavily gay neighborhood quickly swelled the ranks of the crowd to more than two thousand people, and the outnumbered police barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall Inn and called for reinforcements,” Stryker wrote. “Outside, rioters used an uprooted parking meter as a battering ram to try to break down the bar’s door, while other members of the crowd attempted to throw a Molotov cocktail inside to drive the police back into the streets.”

“Minor skirmishes and protest rallies continued throughout the next few days before finally dying down. By that time, however, untold thousands of people had been galvanized into political action.”

Violent resistance to oppression still exists today, including among trans activists internationally. In early 2025, the Mexican sex workers’ activist group Alianza Mexicana de Trabajadoras Sexuales protested two judicial buildings in Mexico City after the man who tried to murder transfeminine activist Natalia Lane was set to be released.

A screenshot from a video of the protest, depicting a protester smashing a window with a hammer. The video is posted on Instagram by user maximmagnus.

Lane, who was stabbed in mid 2022 by a man named Alejandro “N,” openly revealed that this assault was motivated by pure transmisogyny. A local magistrate allowed Alejandro to remain under house arrest amid the case, threatening Lane’s life and safety.

Demonstrators clashed with police and counterprotesters outside the buildings, throwing water, paint, and various objects. Demonstrators supporting Lane stormed the complex. Windows were broken, walls were spraypainted and solidarity was built. Consuelo, the mother of a trans woman murdered in 2024, spoke on how that murderer was let go and her family left without justice.

“My daughter has been dead for one year. No one knows the mental and moral damage done to us. My daughters, my grandchildren, are all left suffering. The case is incomplete,” she said to La Prensa.

In an update on TikTok in late July, Lane reported that the case is still ongoing, with Alejandro’s legal team postponing trials through continuous bureaucratic reshuffling, a process which she describes as “immensely painful, re-victimizing, and characterized by a great deal of institutional violence.”

But the action also worked. Alejandro was not released. In the weeks after the protest, the Mexico City prosecutor’s office declared that they’re still pursuing a case against Lane’s attacker.

“We reiterate our solidarity that our institution has shown since the beginning of this case. This is the first case of its type, where it has been brought before a judicial authority and recognized as attempted femicide,” the prosecutors declared in a statement issued to the independent media org Animal Politico. They added that the attacker will not go unpunished, and that they’ll continue providing support for Lane and other victims.

In response to criticisms of the militant demonstrations she’s organized Lane said, while smiling, "Look my dear, I don't debate with stupid people... I don't waste my energy on stupid people."

None of this is said to suggest that violence is the sole driver behind historical change. Indeed, many experienced in a multitude of struggles against oppression consider the way the question is often framed to miss the point: every movement has to deal with force, and none succeed by that alone.

Rather, it is to acknowledge the historical truth that just as long as there has been social unrest, so too have people brought about immense change through violence and the use of force. They may be scolded, condemned and erased by those on the sidelines, but that does not change the truth of what happened. So long as the oppressed will push against the oppressors, there will be people claiming that the real solution is for everyone to be nice, hold hands, and not step out of line.

Which is where the moderate argument against liberation stood for ages. However, over the past 15 years, think-pieces increasingly emerged online attempting to make this position seem less like ideology and more like science. Specifically, the assertion of this particular propaganda wave is that a highly-sanitized version of nonviolent protest is the only way to defeat fascism, with all major social change supposedly caused strictly by these tactics.

Interestingly, the bulk of these claims all tend to stem from a single source: Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth. Chenoweth, recently profiled in Harvard Magazine, is famous for running a quantitative analysis of 325 different social uprisings and coming to the conclusion that nonviolent protest works better than violent revolt at achieving change. This work, published in the 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict alongside their colleague Maria Stephan, has evolved into a part of the modern liberal canon, justifying the status quo not as mere gentry distaste for riot and militant confrontation, but as supposed cold empirical fact.

Most notable in recent months have been a surge in articles proselytizing about the so-called “3.5% rule,” an initially offhand statistic in the book that has become a favorite of pundits everywhere. This rule, later expanded on by Chenoweth, after a reanalysis of the dataset, in a 2013 TedX Talk, alleges that it only takes approximately 3.5% of a population to make sweeping societal change. An additional corollary that Chenoweth has been sure to push is that these protesters must be nonviolent.

This piece will not focus too heavily on the population number, as it is beyond dispute that it does not always take a majority to cause immense social upheaval. Though it's worth noting that even Chenoweth hedges on this point, admitting the statistic is “descriptive… not necessarily prescriptive,” as there have been movements with more participation that failed and movements with less that have succeeded. Rather, this piece focuses on the dataset and analysis that Chenoweth deploys to create this statistic and advocate for their sanitized version of nonviolent change.

Put simply: Chenoweth’s work doesn’t hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.

The flaws in their analysis are numerous. They include undisclosed biases, major conflicts of interest, empirical issues, selectively leaving out key data, utilizing measures that a wide array of history and research into nonviolent struggle rejects and dismissing years of historical work into complicated civil revolts.

Given how canonized this supposed proof of liberal “nonviolence” has become, it’s worth dismantling in detail.

The undisclosed U.S. government and Wall Street backing

Note that this essay will often name this book and its arguments by referring to the first author, Erica Chenoweth. Chenoweth by no means has the monopoly on these perspectives, and Maria Stephan undeniably also has significant influence. This focus on Chenoweth is due to their careerism, based on the publication of the book, and their role as the face of liberal nonviolence research.

Most notable and egregious, the book is funded by the International Center for
Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). Initially seeming innocuous, this itself is a major conflict of interest that is only mentioned briefly in an acknowledgements section. Chenoweth themself is a member to this day, and lists both ICNC connections and their experience as a motivation for writing this book to begin with.

The ICNC, contrary to how it presents itself, has an ideological bias intrinsic in its founders. Peter Ackerman, its founder and still president as of the book’s release, was an investment banker that built a fortune off the now-defunct Wall Street firm Drexel Burnham Lambert. In it, he worked as a senior executive in their international capital markets division. While not discussed often today, he notably invested over twice his salary into the company in its heyday – during a period where it was notoriously involved with illegal insider trading to build its capital, although the extent of Ackerman’s activities during this time is unclear. There is currently no proof that he was personally involved in insider trading, but he clearly played an integral role in this company’s fiscal development.

An image of Ackerman at a 2008 conference in Budapest. From Wikicommons.

Outside of private enterprise Ackerman had a direct interest in American foreign policy. He was co-chair of the United States Institute for Peace’s advisory board. The council is a government-backed nonprofit that requires Presidential and Congressional approval of its board, which includes the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. He held this position from at least 2006 up until his death in 2022, a period in which former USIP member Heather Ashby describes the organization as addressing “the nation building aspects of the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq,” while having “nothing to do with resolving the wars through nonviolent options.”

“USIP actively supported the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan after the invasions providing training to Iraqi government officials in truth and reconciliation, human rights, and dialogue,” Ashby wrote in a 2024 article for the blog Responsible Statecraft. “But USIP’s work did not move the needle nor did the increase in funding for USAID’s development work… USIP’s activities reflected the U.S. foreign policy emphasis on the war on terror and addressing the security and societal challenges in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Ackerman himself wrote in April 2002, for the National Catholic Reporter, about his views of how to best approach then-President George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror.’

“As President Bush moves to widen the war against terrorism, he has warned the governments of Iraq, Iran and North Korea not to make weapons of mass destruction available to terrorists -- or else, he implies, American military action against them is likely,” Ackerman wrote. “It is true that countries ruled by dictators have incubated or aided terrorists. But it is not true that the only way to ‘take out’ such regimes is through U.S. military action.”

This article, which draws from prior civilian nonviolent resistance movements in Serbia, describes how the Bush administration could stage a dictatorial coup by the “strategic use” of such movements.

He continued these thoughts in a June 2004 speech at the State Department’s ‘Secretary Open Forum,” one entitled “Between Hard and Soft Power: The Rise of Civilian-Based Struggle and Democratic Change.” In this speech, he described how the United States government could fund nonviolent resistance movements in countries whose governments they dislike.

“While external forces cannot bring civilian-based movements into existence, there is a great deal that the international community can do to nurture and sustain them,” Ackerman told his audience of politicians and warmongers. “This can be done either with sanctions targeted against elites and by continuous advocacy by human rights organizations against such abuses… What [civilians in opposing regimes] want is the tools to multiply their power, and the international community should be ready to help.”

He additionally detailed how this version of nonviolent resistance does not come from strict pacifism as a goal, but pragmatism — he simply believes this to be the most effective way for the United States to advance its interests.

“Nonviolent tactics are used for strategic purposes, whereas nonviolence described as an ethic is usually associated with pacifism. Successful, nonviolent resistance movements therefore don't depend on converting the oppressor. Instead they require a significant level of coercion, as authoritarians rarely give up power voluntarily,” Ackerman wrote without a hint of irony. “Virtually all leaders of nonviolent resistance movements would have considered a military option if it was viable… They demand nonviolent discipline so their provocations create dissension among groups their adversaries depend on. A movement can't co-opt the loyalties of people they threaten to kill or maim.”

He goes further in describing the applicability this could have to specific regimes. On North Korea, he refused to condemn violent intervention before describing how the U.S. could theoretically intervene. His ramble, ultimately, contributes to the modern fear of North Korea that plagues American political discourse.

“Nonviolent resistance is not a panacea. It's a set of tools, a set of weapons, that are used in conflict… With respect to North Korea, I would say two things. Number one, it's probably the toughest nut to crack for sure; but, at the same time, I don't think we fully understand the extent and potential for dissidence that might exist there,” he recounts, again without any irony. “I think we shouldn't assume that people rest easy with their lack of freedom, and if given alternatives and if exposed to possibilities, virtually anything is possible. You also have to work with the fact that a totalitarian regime that's been successful for long periods of time expects total cooperation, and when it doesn't receive it there's a great sense of disorientation that's exploitable.”

But according to Business Insider, Ackerman himself helped fund trainings in Egypt to stage not a nonviolent movement, but a military coup. His ideological views are also very clear: in 1995 he was appointed as a board member of the conservative Cato Institute, shaping its advocacy for years to come. This think tank is notorious for taking stances opposed to climate change and queer rights, among other far-right positions.

Particularly relevant to Chenoweth’s work, USIP described how Ackerman “built” much of the evidence for “nonviolent action, often from scratch.”

“Perhaps the most impactful among the many research projects Peter supported was Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s Why Civil Resistance Works,” wrote USIP member Jonathan Pinckney. “This book, the first of its kind, showed through a global statistical study what Peter had long been claiming: that nonviolent action was not just admirable but effective, not just sympathetic but strategic.”

In the book itself Chenoweth notably endorses these very sentiments from Ackerman, credits his influence and widely cites him throughout the work.

“This study strongly supports the view that sanctions and state support for nonviolent campaigns work best when they are coordinated with the support of local opposition groups; but they are never substitutes,” Chenoweth claimed. “The existence of organized solidarity groups…’ is sometimes necessary for opposition groups to enhance their leverage over the target. Lending diplomatic support to human rights activists, independent civil society groups, and democratic opposition leaders while penalizing regimes (or threatening penalties) that target unarmed activists with violent repression may be another way that governments can improve the probability of nonviolent campaign success.”

These biases, treated with the veneer of objectivity, run much deeper than one may initially suspect. This is primarily seen in how Chenoweth defines — or rather fails to define — nonviolence and violence as categories of revolt.

Chenoweth’s definitions make no sense

Erica Chenoweth delivering their 2013 TedX speech touting their whitewashed view of nonviolent action.

In Chapter 1 of their book, Chenoweth admits that most revolts use a mixture of violent and nonviolent tactics, and that rarely can one be seen fully without the other. They admit that “characterizing a campaign as violent or nonviolent simplifies a complex constellation of resistance methods.”

The work proceeds to completely ignore this, focusing on nonviolence as a “principled” set of actions including “boycotts (social, economic, and political), strikes, protests, sit-ins, stay-aways, and other acts of civil disobedience and noncooperation,” with no definition given for how each action is defined and considered.

Likewise, violence is defined as movements that aim for “revolutions, plots (or coups d’état), and insurgencies.” These movements, which Chenoweth clarifies are non-military ones in this project (wouldn’t want to upset that beacon of peace, the U.S. military) use tactics such as “bombings, shootings, kidnappings, physical sabotage such as the destruction of infrastructure, and other types of physical harm of people and property.”

Further, success is defined as achieving the movements’ stated goals within a year of its “peak” activities without any explicit external influence. Partial success is when they achieved their goals, but only with the “substantial aid” of external forces. No objective criteria is given.

While cited as an established fact by liberal pundits and activists, among a broad range of social scientists and historians who study these issues Chenoweth’s work has, to put it mildly, been ripped to shreds.

In his 2020 article, Debunking the Myths Behind Nonviolent Resistance, Alexei Anisin reveal a substantial problem with Chenoweth’s data set. Specifically, that many of what Chenoweth tagged as so-called “nonviolent” movements actually use what he characterizes as “unarmed violence,” consisting of violent acts that don’t use firearms but nevertheless can hardly be considered strictly pacifist.

For instance, the 1986 Philippine revolution against Ferdinand Marcos’ regime is commonly characterized in the book as nonviolent, with Chenoweth going as far as starting off the work with using it as a case study of a successful example. Anisin points out, however, that “there were incidents in which protesters threw stones, wooden staves, and homemade grenades as well as Molotov cocktails at authorities,” citing several historians who have dedicated their careers to studying Filipino history.

Other examples of this, he notes, include the 2000 Serbian revolution and the 2003 Georgian revolution, which too are used by Chenoweth as examples of “nonviolent” revolutions but have extensive amounts of “unarmed violence.”

In the online Appendix, Chenoweth outlines the sole objective criteria for what is considered a violent campaign. Relying predominantly on Kristian Gleditsch’s 2004 Correlates of War dataset, Chenoweth claims that if a conflict had over 1,000 deaths in battle, then it is considered violent. This means that a campaign with 999 deaths and one with 1,001 deaths will be classified entirely differently.

This criteria is, of course, entirely arbitrary, and given that each movement uses nonviolence in different ways and in different contexts alongside violence, it can hardly be said that there is a meaningful distinction between dubbed “violent” and “non-violent” revolutions in either the quantitative or qualitative sense. Additionally, this ignores the sheer variation in scale depending on the context this occurs in – 900 deaths in the Burmese military would be felt much more severely than 900 in the United States military.

Chenoweth, of course, dismisses these complaints by appealing to their own research, simply saying that they consulted other “nonviolent scholars.” These scholars are not explicitly named, but can be presumed to be their ICNC colleagues, given those outlined in the acknowledgements section. In essence, their defense boils down to “just trust me.”

A slew of cherry picking

The authors’ reliance on bizarre, subjective definitions is far from the only problem with their work. Why Civil Resistance aims to disregard the role that authoritarian regimes and structural factors play in determining the outcome of revolts, and instead expressly aims to center “nonviolence” versus “violence” as the dominant factor.

Political scientist Fabrice Lehoucq in his paper Does Nonviolence Work? provided an eloquent and careful deconstruction of how Chenoweth and Stephan disregard much of the scholarship in the field, and instead settle for a low quality quantitative analysis that relies heavily on cherry-picked examples.

“They rarely analyze the structure or nature of governments to understand whether certain types of regimes are more likely to change. They say little about distinctions among autocracies. Political systems in Why Civil Resistance Works are either democratic or autocratic,” Lehoucq writes. “Chenoweth and Stephan categorize opposition responses to dictatorship as violent or nonviolent, which is very much like characterizing relations between nation-states as diplomatic or warlike. Whether opponents began with one approach and gravitated to another or whether different groups use one or the other (or both) is a topic absent from their book. Whether movements are diffuse or centralized, whether there are moderates or hardliners, are also topics that Chenoweth and Stephan do not address.”

Lehoucq agrees with their claim that nonviolent revolt often produces liberal democracies. He disagrees, however, in the realm of dictatorships — his paper argues that, when dealing with authoritarianism (as many movements, including in modern America, do), incorporating strategic violence is often much more successful than a blanket advocacy for nonviolence.

Lehoucq points out how in attempts to defend their claims of a vague, dichotomous variable being the key determinant in the outcome of social movements, Chenoweth also heavily relies on incredibly vague criteria. This variable, constructed just for their study, aims to do what Lehoucq calls an “impossible” task of summarizing all political and socioeconomic determinants in a single scale, constructing a strawman for denouncing critics.

This variable has not been validated by others in the field, and has not been used in research broadly – but rather was created just for their book.

In stark contrast, Lehoucq cites several works from experts across historical disciplines, such as Guillermo Trejo’s Popular Movements in Autocracies, which focuses heavily on indigenous revolt in Mexico throughout the 20th century.

“Unlike Chenoweth and Stephan, however, Trejo takes regime dynamics seriously… He argues that the choices dictators make shape whether the opposition chooses peaceful protest or armed struggle. Opposition movements, in other words, become violent if incumbents become brutal,” Lehoucq wrote. “A far-reaching conclusion of Trejo’s book disputes the claim that the opposition autonomously chooses whether a conflict becomes violent. Unlike Chenoweth and Stephan’s book, Popular Movements in Autocracies contends that the opposition organizes an insurgency in response to the government’s choice to repress its opponents.”

Most notably, Lehoucq further argues that not only was violence a key part of Mexican revolts, but that it was crucial to their success and ensuing liberation of Indigenous peoples in the region. He uses this as a basis to level a major critique of the dataset underlying Chenoweth and Stephan’s work: it’s missing countless historically significant revolts from across Latin America.

In some analyses, Lehoucq writes that their dataset is forcibly halved owing to a mixture of missing information and a lack of adequate data on things like election quality and income. They are inevitably going to miss key information on street marches and occupations, which details a fundamental flaw with this style of analysis.

He goes further, however, in noting the sheer amount of campaigns that Chenoweth’s dataset lacks.

“The first conclusion to draw is that the database fails to include thirteen of the twenty-six campaigns on the isthmus, eleven of which were nonviolent. None of these campaigns, I should add, requires reading obscure Spanish-language sources,” Lehoucq detailed. “Several books exist on the 1948 civil war in Costa Rica. At least two books exist on nonviolent campaigns in El Salvador. And, while information on Guatemala is scarcer, a comprehensive dissertation and a handful of books exist on protest, violence, coups, and politics between 1920 and the mid-1980s.”

This mirrors the findings of Anisin, who argues that not only are numerous other 20th century revolts left out of Chenoweth’s dataset beyond the borders of Latin America, but that there is no empirical reason to exclude resistance efforts in the 19th century, the vast majority of which involved considerable violence.

This demonstrates the biased approach of the study, with Chenoweth and Stephan trying to find evidence for their pre-existing beliefs by constructing the data to reflect what they believe ought to be true. Anisin argues that the updated dataset paints a different empirical picture from what is outlined, something also supported by Lehoucq.

“The Central American data, if generalizable, modify Chenoweth and Stephan’s
claim about the effectiveness of nonviolent campaigns. Eight of the thirteen cases
they overlook are failures, and seven of these eight are nonviolent. When we include
these omitted cases, the success rate of nonviolence falls to 42 percent, well below the 60 percent claimed by Chenoweth and Stephan from their sample of cases,” he concludes in his paper. “The success rate for nonviolent action is not much higher than for violent campaigns. Two of the nine of my sample are successful campaigns; when we combine successful and partially successful campaigns, the rate is 41 percent, which is statistically no different from the success rate of nonviolent campaigns.”

Lehoucq goes further — he points out that they erroneously classify some violent campaigns as unsuccessful, such as the Nicaraguan resistance against the Somoza government, one widely regarded by scholars as successful. He identifies that it is impossible to separate structural factors from the success and failure of movements to resist dictatorships, and cites other scholars who demonstrate the importance of this internationally.

Lehoucq in a 2021 academic conference about violence in Mexico. Screenshot from the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Latin American Studies’ recording.

Other academics make similar suggestions. Researchers Mohammad Ali Kadivar and Neil Ketchley argue in their 2018 paper Sticks, Stones, and Molotov Cocktails: Unarmed Collective Violence and Democratization that the focus of nonviolence versus violence is a red herring, with the majority of often-cited nonviolent movements containing some ignored instances of unarmed violence, similar to Anisin’s conclusions.

By arguing that a ”strict adherence to nonviolence may be significantly less consequential to the outcome of a democratization campaign than whether participants take up arms,” Kadivar and Ketchley reveal that many oft-cited “nonviolent” campaigns often relied heavily on unarmed violence. Their overview of the data provides a very different angle in the violence versus nonviolence debate by focusing on unarmed violence.

Among their examples are the 2011 Egyptian protests, the Chilean resistance against Augusto Pinochet, the Madagascar protests against President Didier Ratsiraka, the South African anti-apartheid movement, the 1980s Polish Solidarity movement, and the 2000 Serbian resistance against Slobodan Milosevic.

Kadivar and Ketchley draw from each of these resistance efforts to formulate the category of unarmed violence, something that includes instances of rock-throwing, molotov cocktails, fighting police officers, burning police stations, riots, sabotage and hand-to-hand combat. Notably, this concept specifically excludes firearms and open armed warfare.

Chenoweth and Stephan don’t discuss any of these. To their credit, they do have four chapters discussing specific case studies of revolutions in Iran in 1979, Palestine in 1992, the Philippines in 1986, and Burma (now Myanmar) in 1990. As the specific peculiarities of these revolutions are beyond the scope of this article to discuss, they won’t be explored in detail. However, as has been and will continue to be illuminated, Chenoweth and Stephan aren’t particularly credible historians, and so interested readers are advised to read histories written by, or that give strong credit to, people from these regions, as these provide much more detailed recounts for a broader audience.

Nonsensical definitions of ‘successful’ resistance

One of the clearest problems with Why Civil Resistance Works is its definition of “success.” The book uses two binary variables for defining success: one of total success, and one of partial success.

“Whether the campaign achieved 100% of its stated goals within a year of the peak of activities. In most cases, the outcome was achieved within a year of the campaign’s peak. Some campaigns’ goals were achieved years after the ‘peak’ of the struggle in terms of membership, but the success was a direct result of campaign activities. When such a direct link can be demonstrated, these campaigns are coded as successful,” Chenoweth and Stephan claim. “Whether the campaign achieved some of its stated goals within a year of the peak of activities. When a regime makes concessions to the campaign or reforms short of complete campaign success, such reforms are counted as limited success.”

Such a definition makes numerous dubious assumptions, most notably that there is a single unified agreement on what constitutes success within an allotted timeframe — something highly dubious since there are often multiple distinct yet interconnected movements pushing for a similar goal over time, each making gains or building for further efforts. Chenoweth’s definition of success appears to draw more from the timeline of non-profit complex grant cycles than any actual history of social struggle.

The American civil rights movement, for example, did not occur within one year. Instead it took decades of continuous resistance across the country, each group and action hammering away at segregationist regimes and pervasive racism.

Or even take one of the examples favored by Chenoweth and Stephan: the Iranian anti-Shah revolution of 1979. This movement consisted of numerous distinct groups, including Marxist-Leninist groups, religious fundamentalists, milquetoast liberals, and even a few disparate anarchist formations. While there was a common goal to overthrow the monarchy, it was hardly a unified movement. The leftists were later purged en masse after the revolt.

There are other problems with this definition as well. Many campaigns do not have a single, unified goal. While members of the Bolsheviks in pre-Soviet Russia may have in brief periods temporarily worked with anarchists of the time to overturn the Czarist regime, they hardly can be said to have a true, cohesive goal beyond that overthrow (and, later, that of the provisional government that briefly succeeded it).

To label their actions as having one goal is naive. This, too, can be seen in regions such as Palestine, which feature multiple distinct groups vying to achieve different angles of liberation — some pushing for anarchy, some pushing for a single Marxist state, some pushing for a neoliberal two-state solution, others pushing for a more religious state, or centrist nationalism, mirroring some of Palestine’s neighbors.

The only way one can create a monolithic definition of “success” here is by crowning a single part of the movement the effective “leaders” of it, something intensely disconnected from the on-the-ground reality.

Further, this definition presumes the continued existence of what the authors consider a liberal democratic state, or at least the push for one. This is seen in how the push for nonviolence in many cases is represented as a success through getting the existing state to meet the demands of the given revolt.

This represents more of their unspoken ideological biases, with the influence of America and Western nations seen as the default, their governmental structure ideal, a final stopping point in societal growth rather than being one more way hierarchy and authority manifests across history. This is an important distinction: were Chenoweth in the 1600s, perhaps they would consider revolts to establish a new kind of monarchy as something to strive for.

Notably, this definition also results in a form of victim blaming, with the loss of civil rights or liberation in many cases being attributed to the oppressed not doing the right thing. This is riddled throughout the book book in a quite explicit way. In Chapter 1, they state with grave, offensive inaccuracy that a failure of the oppressed to consider nonviolent resistance failed to stop the Holocaust.

“The claim that nonviolent resistance could never work against genocidal foes like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin is the classic straw man put forward to demonstrate the inherent limitations of this form of struggle,” Chenoweth and Stephan scold. “Collective nonviolent struggle was not used with any strategic forethought during World War II, nor was it ever contemplated as an overall strategy for resisting the Nazis. Violent resistance, which some groups attempted for ending Nazi occupation, was also an abject failure.”

Chenoweth, of course, fails to consider the numerous examples of successful violent resistance that led to detainees escaping from concentration camps and sabotaging the Nazis from inside. Or the ultimate defeat of the Nazis came from a literal massive war; only a single sentence mentions World War Two as context. No serious historian of that war considers the many, many armed anti-Nazi resistance movements to have played no role in their defeat.

For a tangible example, one only needs to look at the Bielski Partisans, a group of several hundred Jewish radicals known for their violent revolt against the Nazis. According to the U.S. Holocaust Museum they saved over 1,200 people. This is through a variety of different tactics, including covert missions to liberate people from ghettos, creating permanent base camps deep in the swampy regions of Naliboki Forest, and relying on armed guards to protect the more vulnerable members of their survivor group.

The Bielski Partisans in 1944 while in the  Naliboki Forest. Photo from the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

The Partisans also demonstrated a core understanding of the need for mutual aid and a wider ecosystem of survival and resistance. Just as they had armed guards prepared to fight Nazis, so too did they include people who never raised a single weapon, instead working in bakeries, synagogues, tailors, carpenters, schools and medical clinics. They even had their own courts. They survived through hazardous weather, raids on Nazi-occupied cities, and even a typhoid epidemic, which due to this ecosystem of survival had only one casualty.

Readers interested in learning more about Holocaust resistance groups are advised to read works such as Serafinski’s Blessed is the Flame, a historical work examining how these means of resistance are effective even in concentration camps. Many prisoners were not only able to fight back against guards with mass resistance, but they were also able to escape death and live full lives. Of course, many others failed, but to blame this on the usage of violence when their lives were threatened by overwhelming odds is nothing short of grotesque.

Chapter 3 sees more of this. In it, Chenoweth and Stephan discuss the problem of endogeneity, or the idea that violent campaigns only emerge after nonviolent ones fail. To rebut this idea, they first begin by suggesting that no one should ever go violent, and that if they failed in nonviolence, people failed to “maintain their commitments,” and that this is why they did not succeed.

They do not outline where the cutoff is for having “tried everything,” because the argument here is that one can never stop trying the same tactics over and over, so therefore they need to keep being “nonviolent” if they want to be successful. Any deviation from this, they suggest, is a failure of the oppressed. This is an argument clearly formed while sitting in academic offices, far removed from the blood and grief of actual struggle.

The victim blaming here is self-evident, as when Chenoweth writes about Palestinian liberation they suggest that when nonviolent campaigns failed, violent ones came in and made things worse entirely because of internal turmoil. Nevermind, of course, that this division is patently false. The nonviolent 2018 Great March of Return, for example, drew broad support, including from groups that had previously mostly focused on violent tactics. It was brutally crushed by the Israeli regime. There are simultaneously multiple distinct Palestinian resistance groups at any given time, using a wide range of tactics, with some actors even funded or influenced by Israel’s interests.

The open biases in these sections increase drastically, practically to the point of anti-Arab racism. Chenoweth argues that Palestinians failed to take deals for independence previously, that they just rebelled out of “futility.”

“For example, although many Palestinians question the ingenuity of the offer, several Palestinian groups responded to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak’s offer of independence for the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank, which was accompanied by settlement expansion and other provocative Israeli actions, with an unprecedented wave of violence,” Chenoweth and Stephan write. “Thus, violence is not always a last resort, nor do insurgents readily discard it when it has proved fruitless.”

As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy describes in his 2024 book The Killing of Gaza, Barak — and other Israeli politicians who claimed to offer Palestinians peace — was doing this amid relentless bombings and murders of civilians. He himself directly sabotaged that effort through continued violence and subjugation. Indeed, as corroborated in 972 Magazine, Barak was disingenuous in any claims for peace with Palestine.

“All the premiers sided with continuing the occupation and the siege on Gaza,” Levy reports. “None of them thought for a moment to allow a real Palestinian state, with full powers, a state like any other. It didn’t occur to them to liberate the Gaza Strip from the strangling siege. Had it not been for all those, perhaps there would not be a Hamas.”

American sociologist Jeremy Pressman provided a detailed analysis of the problems with how scholars of nonviolence, and Chenoweth in particular, characterize Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation in his 2017 paper, Throwing stones in social science: Non-violence, unarmed violence, and the first intifada. Analyzing all the evidence available at the time, he concluded that much of the literature and discussion on this topic is obfuscated by a need to reduce a common resistance tactic of stone throwing into either a strictly violent or non-violent category.

While his conclusions on Palestinian liberation lean towards the prescriptive in saying what they ought to do to be seen as “legitimate,” he nevertheless makes a compelling point on how these nonviolence researchers offer a reductive perspective on Palestinian history.

“In Chenoweth and Stephan (2011), the first intifada is one of hundreds of cases. Coding this one case does not change their overall conclusion about the greater efficacy of non-violent protest,” Pressman wrote. “This also suggests to me a related question about work on non-violence: What do readers have in mind when scholars tell them about non-violent events or campaigns? I doubt that they assume such interactions involve unarmed violence, an analytically distinct category from non-violence.”

Indeed, this need to characterize the complexities of distinct, disparate international movements of revolt across a period of decades shows a naive approach to the research that neglects the intricate and meticulous approach needed to sufficiently analyze causation in each of these movements.

We can bear witness to real, tangible consequences of this push for a docile, sanitized nonviolence, both within the trans rights movement and beyond. Earlier this year, amid an increase in trans people buying guns and teaching each other self defense as attacks on us get worse, trans news outlet Assigned Media published an article that advocated against gun ownership, citing Chenoweth as justification for the “right” way to protest.

Using Chenoweth’s work to lecture activists against pursuing meaningful revolt has also been deployed by the New York Times opinion section and an a LGBTQ Nation article (which also misgenders them) published earlier this year. This approach is also favored by national nonprofits like the Center for American Progress, who cite the 3.5% rule as gospel, and is even pushed by Pod Save America, one of the biggest political podcasts in the country.

We’re already seeing this play out in tangible, damaging ways in protests against the Trump regime. This year saw the 50501 group gain national headlines and the support of numerous nonprofits and more centrist activists, including queer ones. In justification of their methods, they cite Chenoweth on multiple occasions, curiously without making any statements on revelations that organizers proudly work with cops and have even called the police on a Black activist in Los Angeles.

Similarly, some organizers of the No Kings protests — partnered with 50501, the ACLU, the Human Rights Campaign, Greenpeace, Indivisible, and ‘democrats.com’ — have repeatedly cited Chenoweth’s 3.5% rule as an inspiration.

Similarly not mentioned in most news coverage is how some No Kings organizers have repeatedly and proudly worked with cops, in spite of the fact that numerous protesters have been arrested, with protesters in LA shot at by police. One man was even killed, though it’s unknown by who.

To be clear, plenty who showed up to these protests did so in good faith, wanting to show their resistance to a fascist regime. The connections plenty of on-the-ground folks made during them are inarguably beneficial. But those leading the protests — and often seeking to co-opt them — do so from a set of false assumptions that will endanger and weaken the very resistance they claim to value.

Tellingly, a recent Electronic Frontier Foundation report revealed that nearly two dozen agencies mass surveilling the public during the 50501 and No Kings protests. Through these searches of public and private information they collected an incredible amount of information on protesters across the country, who often were not properly taught operational security, marching without masks and with tattoos visible.

Some No Kings marches even encouraged people to “RSVP.”

An image of a protest flyer of ‘the solidarity wave’ that circulated widely on social media made in direct response to a popular ‘sit-down wave’ that promoted a sanitized version of ‘nonviolence’ that included literally turning people over to the police.. 

Why Civil Resistance Works is simply a piece of propaganda masquerading as though it’s a legitimate scientific work. Its place in the canon of today’s liberals does little more than excuse hierarchical, capitalistic power structure as something innate to human existence, portraying any militant resistance as automatically hopeless.

Authoritarianism and capitalism are not the default status for humanity, and in fact haven’t even existed for much of our existence on this planet. We are a social species, and our default state is to care for one another. This caring impulse is the exact thing that literature deifying a passive nonviolence seeks to seize upon, hijacking our empathy for each other as a way to sabotage revolt.

None of this means that we need to pick up arms and start randomly looking for a fight either. Once again, those experienced in these struggles regard a simplistic binary between “violent” and “nonviolent” resistance as a false one.

There are solutions to oppression that are grounded in history, ones that have worked across time and space. In this article’s second part, we will grapple with some real world examples of revolt against oppression, and show just how much we have to learn from our siblings in solidarity.

-Edited, and contributed to, by David Forbes

Trans News Network (@transnews.network)

Trans News Network (TNN) is a worker-run nonprofit LGBTQ+ newsroom publishing articles that impact trans communities. Follow our work at https://transnews.network/ Donate to our launch fundraiser at https://transnewsnetwork.networkforgood.com/

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Robert Barron, bishop of Winona-Rochester, making a blatantly anti-trans statement at the recent conference of U.S. bishops. The conference overwhelmingly backed a sweeping ban on trans healthcare throughout the Catholic Church's many healthcare systems. Screenshot from public video of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' conference

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On Nov. 12, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted overwhelmingly to ban life-saving trans healthcare in its many church-run health systems across the country.

While this did draw some coverage from establishment news outlets, it generally relegated it to dry language (NPR: “the step formalizes a yearslong process for the U.S. church to address transgender health care”). They gave it a good deal less ink than the same Baltimore conference's earlier resolution condemning the Trump administration's treatment of immigrants, or to the news revealed later in the week that Pope Leo XIV would have lunch with four hand-picked trans people.

Most news outlets didn't even record the vote margin, which this reporter had to root around in various diocesan announcements to find: 206 in favor, eight abstained, seven against. The Catholic hierarchy's factions may have their disagreements, but denying healthcare to trans people isn't one of them.

This has a much larger impact than either of the symbolic steps that drew far more attention. The hospital networks run by the church are sprawling and immense. In some areas of the country they're the only major healthcare system.

Robert Barron, the bishop of Winona-Rochester, credited the ostensibly progressive Pope Francis for the move, remembering a three-hour meeting with the late pontiff.

“He specifically said to us: ‘I want you to fight gender ideology, which is repugnant to the Bible and our tradition,’” Barron told the assembled bishops.

A clearer, “we hate trans people” statement is hard to imagine.

The Catholic Health Association claims that one in seven patients in the U.S. go through their hospitals. A 2020 report from Community Catalyst found that in plenty of states, their systems make up a substantial percentage of all hospitals. This is not just something that impacts Catholics, nor only red states. Almost a third of all hospital beds in Oregon are run by the church. In Washington, it's over 40 percent, as it is throughout much of the Midwest.

A map from a 2020 Community Catalyst report, showing the percentage of hospitals owned by Catholic Church-run healthcare systems in each state. Trans healthcare is now banned in all of them

Nor does it just impact hospitals themselves. Healthcare systems run by the church are rapidly expanding, taking over urgent cares, specialists and doctor's offices around the country.

“From 2001 to 2025, Catholic provider growth rate was 28.5 percent,” a September report from the liberal Center for American Progress summarized. “During that same period the number of non-Catholic hospitals declined by nearly 14 percent. By 2020 four of the country's 10 largest hospital systems — by number of beds — were Catholic, and at least 1 in 6 of America's hospital beds were in Catholic hospitals.”

The recent attacks on public healthcare funding are not going to improve this situation.

A 2024 KFF Health News report highlighted the case of a Michigan woman, Kalaina Sullivan, who repeatedly found essential care denied her as one provider after another was taken over or bought out by the church's apparatus.

Sullivan’s main provider was owned by one of the Catholic church’s healthcare systems. So she had to travel to get a procedure done to ensure she couldn’t get pregnant in the future. Shortly afterwards, that practice was also bought out by the same system. As of 2024 she’d have to travel over 30 minutes to any hospital not controlled by the church’s dictates.

“I just don’t see why there’s any reason for me to have to follow the rules of their religion and have that be a part of what’s going on with my body,” Sullivan told KFF Health News.

This means that even where laws protecting trans and reproductive healthcare are on the books — Michigan voters enshrined abortion protections in 2022 — many areas are under de facto bans because the nearest providers are controlled by a religious hierarchy that forbids them anyway. The analysis from CAP — hardly a bastion of radicalism — found the situation so severe that they called for using antitrust laws to curb it.

All this makes the bishops' actions one of the biggest attacks on trans healthcare in the United States yet, not passed by politicians that at least fear some level of public outrage, but a sweeping ban enacted by a theocratic hierarchy.

It is worth remembering that trans healthcare is not optional. It literally saves lives. The increasing hostility to it is, rightly, considered a harbinger of genocide by the Lemkin Institute, which has repeatedly sounded the alarm about “a genocidal process against the transgender community that has been emerging in the United States for over a decade.”

Catholic hospitals have never exactly been friendly terrain for trans people — as we're about to detail, the church hierarchy's hatred of us runs deep — but the recent declaration by the conference of bishops replaces a more hodge-podge system with occasional breathing room with an outright and total ban at a time when our survival is under increasing attack everywhere.

“Catholic providers will continue to welcome those who seek medical care from us and identify as transgender,” a statement from the Catholic Health Association declared after the ban's passage. “We will continue to treat these individuals with dignity and respect.”

This is, to be clear, nonsense. It is the same language used to excuse “separate but equal” and other horrific bigotry as something they're not.

In reality the ban means that trans people are even less likely to get treated in the church's healthcare systems for anything. Bans on trans healthcare never end just at care specific to us. Broken bone? Surgery complications? Infection? Historically, bigoted medical institutions are happy to let us perish.

This is compounded by the fact that as an overwhelmingly working class demographic often facing overlapping oppressions (generational poverty, racism, xenophobia), trans people are in particular need of all forms of medical care. We face more stress and deprivation, including malnutrition. We're far more likely to be attacked or injured. Due to all this, including widespread poverty, illnesses often hit us harder too. A major correlating factor in trans people ending up in prison is lack of access to medical care.

A scenario I'm personally aware of illustrates this point: a trans woman shows up to an ER, bleeding from a recent surgery. Even at hospitals without outright trans healthcare bans she could easily face rejection or deadly hesitation from medical staff. What about at ones whose owners outright ban trans healthcare? If it's for complications from recent bottom surgery will they just let her die? Throughout history, too often the answer is “yes.”

We also have recent examples of Catholic hospitals in particular doing this to patients desperately in need of reproductive care.

“We had many instances where people would have to get in their car to drive to us while they were bleeding, or patients who had their water bags broken for up to five days, or even a week,” Jennifer Chin, an OB-GYN in Seattle who's treated many patients turned away from Catholic hospitals, told KFF Health News in 2024.

“Dignity and respect” indeed.

Given that, a lot more skepticism is in order. Especially when it comes to propaganda around the blood-soaked institution that is the Catholic Church.

Whitewashing atrocity

Individual Catholics across the globe have a wide range of beliefs, from leftist liberation theology to outright fascism. Indeed, American Catholics as a population tend to be more broadly supportive of queer and trans rights than the institution itself. A 2023-24 Pew Research study found Catholic respondents split, with 36 percent broadly supporting trans rights and 35 against. By comparison, among evangelicals the divide was 18-64.

The church hierarchy, however, is a very different story. It has been, and remains, a relentlessly reactionary force.

For the sake of brevity we'll just focus on the last century or so. As an institution the Catholic Church actively collaborated with multiple fascist regimes, including those of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. It set itself dead against rights for women and practically any marginalized group one cares to mention.

While much of the attention on the far-right push to overturn abortion rights focused on louder (and also thoroughly evil) evangelical Protestant organizations, the Catholic Church was the creator of the notorious “crisis pregnancy centers” that spew anti-abortion pseudoscience and intimidate pregnant people seeking basic care. The church hierarchy also helped bankroll efforts to roll back bodily autonomy around the globe, including overturning Roe.

The largest anti-abortion group in the United States, the National Right to Life Committee, was started and financially backed by the Catholic hierarchy, at another one of those bishops' conferences. After Roe became law in the '70s, the bishops pushed for a constitutional amendment banning abortion permanently. This continues to the present day, as the bishops' conference pushed a major 2023 lawsuit to ignore laws requiring employers to medically accommodate workers who'd recently had an abortion. All of this is without even discussing the church using its control to ensure pregnant people suffer or even die in brutal conditions

Then there were the widespread systems of “residential schools” and “Magdalene laundries,” which were concentration camps under other names. Often, for indigenous children and non-conforming (including queer) women, these were also death camps. They only shut down in the '90s. Bodies, especially of children, are still being found. They remain a bleak reminder of what happens when the Catholic hierarchy has free political reign.

That's before we get into the endemic levels of horrific child abuse perpetrated by priests and others in the church hierarchy, covered up for decades at all levels of the institution in places around the world. The current pope is not an exception.

Of course, this has long meant an absolute and brutal opposition to trans rights and healthcare. The church hierarchy's influence with the Reagan administration was a factor in the 1981 ban on Medicare covering trans care, which led to wider bans throughout U.S. healthcare systems and was only lifted in 2014. As the AIDS genocides escalated, the same bishops and cardinals staunchly opposed basic measures like condoms and informing the public about safe sexual practices.

As the saying goes, the point of a system is what it does.

Given that, it's not shocking that in 1989 ACT UP launched a major action called Stop the Church “to protest the AIDSphobic, homophobic, misogynistic and anti-abortion policies of the Catholic Church,” according to ACT UP’s Oral History Project. Teaming up with WHAM!, a women's health action group, thousands disrupted a mass by Cardinal John O'Connor, who'd spearheaded the hierarchy's opposition to stopping the AIDS genocides, storming into St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. Over 100 people were arrested.

Protesters hold signs outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral as part of ACT UP’s Stop the Church action. From the ACT UP Oral History Project

While the action drew widespread condemnation from the political and media establishment, veterans of the group recalled that it had a real impact.

“I think the shock of going inside and confronting the cardinal really worked,” ACT UP member Jim Hubbard recalled in a 2012 Radio Free Europe article. “It helped bring ACT UP to mainstream attention. It brought the crisis to a point where the government and the mainstream media really had to start dealing with it.”

But you may have heard this was all in the past, that since Pope Francis took the highest spot in the Catholic hierarchy in 2013, there were at least some real moves in another, less utterly horrific direction.

This isn't true. The shift during Francis' papacy was overwhelmingly one of public relations rather than actual changes to how the institution used its power.

This was especially true with everything involving bodily autonomy. Indeed, Francis was particularly harsh about his stances against trans people, comparing us to nuclear weaponry. While our endlessly inventive communities quickly repurposed these because they make us sound cool as hell, they're also a clear reminder that one of the most powerful institutions on the planet seeks our annihilation.

In a notable contrast with ACT UP's courageous history of confrontation, in 2013 The Advocate named Francis its person of the year, based mostly on vibes and vague statements. If this was meant to encourage more pro-trans and queer actions from the papacy, it was an utter failure.

In a pattern that will become familiar, such steps as his papacy took towards more tolerance were highly symbolic or only impacted Catholics in specific ritual circumstances, while the broader moves — and plenty of his remarks to others in the hierarchy — were all staunchly against trans rights.

In 2015, Francis' remarks equating us to radioactive destruction also embraced the far-right's “gender ideology” framing, something the U.S. bishops continued when announcing their recent ban. In 2016, he told a conference of clergy and nuns that teaching about the very existence of trans people was part of a “global war” against marriage. In 2021, the church hierarchy tried to stop an Italian law criminalizing anti-LGBTQ violence and hate speech under the rationale it could, heaven forefend, be used against them. The same year the U.S. bishops lobbied to stop the formation of a national suicide hotline because it involved basic LGBTQ support resources.

In 2023, the U.S. bishops' conference urged Catholic hospitals not to administer trans healthcare. A 2024 papal declaration on Catholic doctrine condemned our healthcare as a violation of “human dignity.”

No, I am not making that up.

While the formal ban didn't happen during Francis' reign, his papacy laid extensive groundwork for it, as the bishops themselves openly said when they passed it.

An incident towards the end of Francis' papacy also peeled back the facade and showed a truer, and uglier, example of his views than magnanimous public statements. In a May 2024 private discussion with bishops about whether to admit gay men into seminaries, he used the Italian slur to dismiss the idea.

As journalist Paul Vallely, who's written extensively about the church, summed up Francis' approach in a prescient 2015 NPR interview, he was “keeping the words and changing the tune.”

This p.r. shift — and that is, overwhelmingly, all it is — has not changed with the newest pope. While Leo hasn't made any major statements about queer or trans rights yet, his previous record and current actions since he ascended to the papacy don't show any break with Francis' history.

During his time as a bishop in the Peruvian city of Chiclayo, Leo opposed any recognition of trans rights and gender non-conformity within the education system, telling the conservative newspaper Diario Correo in 2016, “the promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don't exist.”

In a September interview with the Catholic magazine Crux, Leo stressed that “the doctrine on LGBT people is not going to change” though claiming that, somehow, gay and trans Catholics would still be “welcome.” To those of us who grew up with constant invocations of “love the sinner, hate the sin” plastered over a reality of brutal violence, it's a familiar refrain.

Even that much-touted p.r. lunch with trans women had a catch: the pope, unlike even his predecessor, refused to sit at the same table.

Stop the Church

At TNN, we like to direct our readers to concrete actions they can take, like when we helped bring public pressure against attempts to ban Medicaid from covering trans healthcare earlier this year.

But that's not really possible here, because in this case those with the power over our healthcare in a shocking amount of the country's hospital systems aren't even elected officials that might be intimidated by a public backlash, they're appointed religious authorities within what remains an absolute theocratic monarchy.

It is a problem that the literal life or death power over so many lies in the hands of an institution so utterly unaccountable, with such a long history of hatred and abuse.

Of course, no power is unshakeable. For a start, what people can do — both trans people and cis folks who care at all about our lives — is exercise a lot more skepticism about propaganda from an institution whose conduct so vastly belies its occasional words of tolerance.

There is a regrettable tendency, especially when circumstances are as dire as they are now, to look for any sign of hope in status quo institutions. That maybe this apology, or that gesture, may portend something less oppressive. The stark evidence is that it does not.

They should put hard pressure on media to adopt a similarly skeptical stance. We'd be having a very different discussion if the bishops' move to ban trans healthcare — and its human cost — got the same press as their far more symbolic resolution on immigration.

This all goes double for Catholics who support trans rights. If you find the current ban appalling, then far, far more is needed than the tepid statements of disappointment we usually see from ostensibly pro-trans Catholic groups. This isn't what you believe, what you stand for? Prove it.

A shift in tactics is also necessary. Over the past three decades, especially as assimilationist “Gay Inc” groups have gained more power, activism and organizing directly targeting the role of religious authorities in attacks on our rights has diminished, so as to make things more acceptable to the status quo.

This was a mistake, and not just with a refusal to confront the Catholic hierarchy. It is far past time to take a page from ACT UP, and realize that in the fight for our liberation a little anticlericalism goes a long way.

—Edited by Mira Lazine

Trans News Network (@transnews.network)

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Melody Short, who was among the protesters arrested in August

On June 12, 2016 a far-right mass shooter murdered 49 people and wounded 53 at the Pulse nightclub. This Orlando, Fla. spot was known as a gay club and haven for the community, widely seen as a supportive and safe place for everyone. This night in particular was Latino Night, a gathering focused on the intersection of Orlando’s large queer and Latine communities.

This shooting, explicitly racist and queerphobic, sent waves throughout Florida’s — and America’s — queer and Latine communities. Countless people have stories of where they were that night, who they knew, and how they grieved in the years since. This massacre is an unequivocal tragedy, and one that is still felt locally and beyond to this day.

In 2017 a rainbow crosswalk was constructed outside Pulse to honor the victims. This was put in by and recognized by Florida’s Department of Transportation (FDOT). Yet, in late August 2025, FDOT erased the crosswalk under cover of darkness, painting it completely black. In comments given to Fox 35 an FDOT spokesperson justified this as removing “social, political, and ideological interests,” calling the rainbow “street art,” saying that the street was restored to “proper form.”

In its place Orlando officials greenlit a permanent Pulse memorial, which is supposed to be completed by mid-2027. But as of last month this memorial is still going through a bureaucratic slog for funding, according to Fox 35. No memorial is in place as of the writing of this article.

In response to the removal, protesters immediately started gathering outside of Pulse, holding signs and using chalk to draw a rainbow on the crosswalk once again. They stood out there for days, only stopping after police arrested several of them, something that especially escalated after the arrest of Sebastian Suarez, the first person to be detained.

This is not the only rainbow crosswalk removed in the U.S. due to fascism’s growing influence at the governmental level. The Texas Department of Transportation removed a memorial rainbow crosswalk in Houston, with protesters responding almost immediately, prompting huge backlash from conservative officials. Chron’s Gwen Howerton reported in detail on the scene, photographing protesters sitting on the crosswalk and blocking officials from further modifications.

Trans News Network conducted an exclusive interview with one of the protesters from Orlando, Melody Short, an Army veteran and current Twitch streamer. Short was arrested shortly after Suarez, and was subject to numerous human rights abuses and transphobic insults, including one cop who tried to convince her to convert to Christianity and to detransition.

She was nervous throughout the interview, owing to the difficulty of recollecting recent trauma. Nevertheless, she emphasized that she wanted to do this, and to go into as much detail as possible. “I need to tell the story,” Short told TNN. “I’m afraid that whatever I’m saying could… lead to people coming after me. But I’m not afraid of these people. I think more people like me need to step up against them.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Mira Lazine: Could you tell me a bit about the day you got arrested and the prior protests outside the Pulse Nightclub?

Melody Short: Well, I was there for two and a half days. I didn't leave Pulse. Not even to take a shower. I was there for the long haul, like a lot of these folks were. What started it was the arrest of Sebastian. I think that was the tipping point of the movement, whenever Sebastian was arrested. I witnessed that arrest. I was there when he was arrested. He didn't even cross the crosswalk, he was just arrested for putting chalk on his shoe.

After seeing his arrest, it kind of moved me. I knew I had to act, I just didn't know how. What drove us to do the things we did was for freedom of speech. Protesters wrote that the First Amendment shall not be infringed in rainbow colors. I was arrested for allegedly participating in that.

Can you tell me a bit about Sebastian? Who was he? 

Sebastian was this very white guy from Georgia. He was just visiting Orlando and he wanted to come and protest with us, with his wife. He was arrested on his birthday. I got to really know him before he got arrested. I kind of hope he's doing well [Suarez was released the next day, on August 30]. Seeing the fear in people's eyes when Sebastian got arrested, that's what made me do what I did.

I feel like people today take freedoms for granted. I think we are in a time and age where we, the queer community, have to stand strong and protest. Our whole existence peters on people giving us our rights. And I won't stop fighting for our rights.

And this is interesting! I spent seven years in the army defending our rights for other people to live their lives the way they want to. Why the hell should I be submissive and just let them rule over what they want me to do? I'm going to do what I'm going to do in order to make sure everyone has the same rights as me.

Can you tell me a little bit about what prompted the protest? 

To my understanding, the police in Orlando — and by extension the state police in Florida — had erased and mandated the erasure of the memorial Rainbow Crosswalk outside the Pulse Nightclub, prompting people to push back. Is this a correct understanding?

Yes, the protest was because of the removal of the crosswalk. You got the premise down. Why we actually showed up is because they weren't supposed to remove that crosswalk. It was on the Florida Department of Transportation's list of non-removable memorials, and they still did it in the middle of the night. We felt like it was disrespectful to the 49 dead who suffered in the terrorist attack.

That's what inspired me to pick up a sign and protest. It was mainly because of the dead, and it transformed into something much more crazier.

From what I understand from both friends in the area and people I’ve talked to for old stories, the Pulse shooting is still remembered today in the broader Orlando community.

I was in the area during the Pulse shooting. I still remember the gunfire, or the gunshots. I was looking at the Pulse building, and I swore I heard the gunfire.

That's awful. I'm so sorry. 

It's just a shame. It wasn't for just us, the queer community, it was for the people who died. I think a lot of people don't understand that message anymore. I still remember going into school, coming into class, listening to people talk about the shooting.

You mentioned that some folk like Sebastian came from out of state. How many people were there? How quickly was this organized? 

It wasn't an organized protest. It just upset community members. And it wasn't even just queer community members. There were a lot of straight people. Just all upset the memorial was taken down. God, right before my arrest, there must have been probably 50 people there. There were a lot of people.

How many got arrested? 

Three, not including Sebastian. I don't know them that well though.

Can you tell me about your experiences getting arrested and while in jail? How did the cops treat you?

I got arrested, put in a cop car, the whole shebang. They were talking to me until I got out of the cop car and actually got into booking. I guess it's the reception area where they're doing the paperwork with the lawyers. It was just weird. It was just fucking weird. Then I got into booking or it's like an in process place where they ask you your medical history.

As I was entering, they were misgendering me. I asked them to please stop misgendering me. I don't like it. And they said, ‘well, you're a man, right?’ And I said, ‘I'm not a man.’ A higher-ranking officer was handling most of these things. As she was leaving, she told me I needed to put my hands on the glass behind me. So I tried to lift my arms, and me being a disabled combat vet I had difficulties raising my arms. She got very mad at the fact that I couldn't raise my arms and left. Like she was so disappointed in me.

They then gave me shoes that were way too small. And the moment they did, they put me into this like, I want to say six foot, tiny ass cell. I was isolated. Guards would look at me like I'm a zoo animal. They'd come just to look at me and to laugh. Like, you know, I call, I get in process, eventually through booking. And they take me to like the psych cell where they place me into an even smaller confinement, because they think I'm crazy because I'm declaring that I'm a woman, so they think I'm crazy. At no point was there anyone else in my cell. I had no idea why I was in that room. I was completely shut off from the guards.

Throughout the entire day, they were asking me, ‘would you rather be with a man since you have a penis, right? You’d be more comfortable with a man?’ I said, ’no, I don't consent to that.’ And they still had a male guard search me. And he made comments about my fucking body. I was alone with this man. I've been transitioning for years. As a trans woman I look the part!

Also, because my shoes were too small, my feet started to bleed. I didn’t receive medical treatment. How could I? The guards weren’t really checking on me. They were only watching me. So eventually I just ditched the shoes.

This is horrifying, I'm so sorry.

When you go through something horrific like that, it's easy to lose your way. It's easy to just submit and just to be… I don't know, going through the motions. But when I got arrested, I realized in the society that they're hoping for, we are like that. They're hoping that we are scared and we are terrified of these people… it’s terrifying.

But it wasn't until I got to my final cell that the guards really started getting very comfortable with this. They were really coming after me. They eventually moved me to a main population, protective unit. So they placed me into a special unit for celebrity captures because I am a high note, high valued prisoner – something like that. So they placed me in another isolated cell.

I went from three different isolated cells to my final one. I was very hopeful before the trial happened. I was told I was free originally. The guards were laughing at me through the glass, so I just, you know, didn't really pay them too much attention. I knew the judge said I was able to walk, get out of here without paying bonds, so I was excited. I didn't really give a shit what they saw of me at that point.

I was just ready to get GTFO. And I was literally ten steps away from my freedom. I was already in my dirty civilian clothes. But as I was walking out the door and that's when I was told, ‘hey, [deadname], you're under arrest.’

I was the only one they re-arrested.

Did they say why they did? 

No, they never told me. They didn't tell me until I got to the pre-trial phase of booking, because that's the only people who would know why you're arrested. I finally got an answer after an hour of waiting. It was when a clerk told me that I was arrested for writing ‘trans rights are human rights’ in chalk on the side of a building.

That’s it?

That's it. I was re-arrested and had to go back to the same cell I was released from.

How long were you detained in total? 

I don't know. It's a blur, I'm going to be honest with you. I didn't have access to sunlight. I didn't know what time it was in general in the jailhouse. Time deprivation is something they definitely use as a torture tactic in the jail system.

I want to say a day and a half or maybe two days if you count being released at like nine or ten [p.m.] being a full day.

So you were arrested the same day as the protest, held for about two days, and during that time you were re-arrested?

Yeah.

What happened after you were re-arrested and you found out why they re-arrested you? 

I was upset. I was understandably angry. Yeah.

I think any rational person would be angry when you're told that you're free but then you're not. Yeah. And what's worse about it is that it's crazy. It's fucking crazy.

Like the things that they can just do and the things that the law enforcement, the power that they have just to do is crazy.

That's where I started to really get into trouble with the commanding officer. Because I think she was the officer because I saw the two stripes and in the army that means you're a corporal. That means you're armed. You're a non-commissioned officer. That means you have rank. So I told the officer, ‘hey, I've been told that protesters paid for my bail. When am I getting out?’

She laughed at me and said that ‘it doesn't matter if they pay your bail or not. I'm not releasing you. There's nothing that you can do that will ever let me release you.’ It's just horrifying.

Could you tell me a bit about when they eventually did release you, the experience of that and the timeline of it all? 

So I had this guy. Let's just call him Officer Jones. I don't know his name. Officer Jones was so adamant that he could convert me to Christianity while I was being arrested for the second time. So I had this guy the entire time tell me how much I'm a sinner and how I need to repent and turn my life to Jesus and how I need to be detransitioned because that's what Jesus would tell me to do. And that guy is allowed to enforce the fucking law.

He was telling you this while you were detained? 

Yeah, while I was detained.

That's awful! 

God. And I can't talk back to him. You know I can't. He has the power in the situation. If I say something that he finds offensive, like how I wanted to say to him that there's a separation of church and state, right? But I couldn't because I was afraid that he would just re-arrest me again or find something stupid to arrest me for. At that point, I just wanted to get it over with.

When you did get released, what happened? What charges were still put on you by then? 

The misdemeanor, for writing trans rights, and the felony, for the alleged crosswalk involvement.

After you were let out, I understand you were going through a bit of a hefty court battle. Could you tell me a bit about that?

It looks like [the misdemeanor] is being dropped. I showed up to the court date for the misdemeanor one. The prosecutors never actually shut the fuck up. But yeah, it seems like they don't really want to bring charges against me. It's more looking like the city doesn't want to actually charge me. They just want me arrested.

Was it just a scare tactic then? 

I think so. I angered some very rich people because a lot of rich people live in Winter Park [an Orlando suburb]. I allegedly went through a rich part of downtown Winter Park and wrote ‘trans rights are human rights’ in chalk. It's crazy, right? In Winter Park, they prohibit LGBT protesters from protesting at the library.

How are you faring after everything that happened?

I don't trust people. I really have a hard time trusting anyone that says that they're from the government, I immediately just don't trust them. It's gone to the point where I just can't trust the government anymore. And I don't really have a lot of money, so I want to go to therapy.

And I just haven't yet because I've been so scared to tell people what happened to me because I'm so scared that people are going to come after me. I’ve had a lot of white supremacists message me like, hate shit and death threats saying how, you know, a T-slur like me has no place in this world. And I just think the reason why they're coming after me very harshly is because they know I have the means to protect myself. So all they have is their word.

What are your next steps forward after all this? 

I'm an optimist. I don't think things are going to get worse. I think this proved to me that the LGBTQ community is strong. I just think that our community needs to step up and actually go to these protests. That's just my personal opinion. We need to stop being scared.

We need to protest until they do something. We don't need protests that are a day long that do nothing because they know that it's only going to go away. They're counting for the protest day before it even starts. That's what they're telling us. That's what our haters were telling us when we were protesting. We shouldn’t leave until something happens. We need peaceful action for a peaceful society.

What would you say that readers of this interview should do? What steps should they take?

Get out with your friends. Find a protest organization. A protest organization that says go in your local area and protest. And be relentless. Be fearless. Only through adversity does someone grow as a person. And unfortunately, protesting is an adversity. I just ask for people to be strong. You'll be very surprised at how many people actually supported us. We have way more people support us than we do the haters.

People want to support us. They want us to succeed. Society wants us to succeed. We just need to grab it.

—Edited by David Forbes

Update 10/24 - A transcription error resulted in the number arrested being incorrect. The correct number of people who got arrested at the protest is 4 total. This article has been updated to reflect this.

Trans News Network (@transnews.network)

Trans News Network (TNN) is a worker-run nonprofit LGBTQ+ newsroom publishing articles that impact trans communities. Follow our work at https://transnews.network/ Donate to our launch fundraiser at https://transnewsnetwork.networkforgood.com/

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A picture of protesters at a protest for trans rights. Every victory comes after tons of fighting.
Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

In the world’s current anti-trans status quo, facing bigotry is not something that’s a rare phenomenon. It’s the default. Trans people across the world each have personal stories of discrimination against them, or a loved one, for just trying to exist.

For our community, this is a fact of everyday life. Any trans person who has ever been to a suburban or rural community (and many “safe” urban ones) can recount the amount of dirty glares they get, the furious honking of truck horns while walking beside an otherwise empty road, the endless violent threats from either former loved ones or members of our own communities, the endless mis- and degendering from company staff that will maliciously refuse to acknowledge us as people worthy of respect. The reality that cisgender people often fear a decaying country will fall into is one that already exists for every trans person that dares to exist as we want.

These experiences are backed up by hard data. The nonprofit Advocates for Trans Equality released a nationally representative survey of the American trans community which revealed that 63% of trans people have experienced discrimination severe enough to permanently alter their lives. This includes but is not limited to: eviction, job loss, homelessness, medical discrimination, physical and sexual assault, incarceration, and educational discrimination. Additionally, just under a quarter of respondents report having at least three of these things happen to them.

This is without factoring in the more mundane aspects of discrimination we all experience, too.

In the past year, transphobia has been much more widely normalized, with tons of people feeling they have an excuse to let out attacks against trans people. The scores of individuals behind those numbers will often casually misgender, degender, and flat out insult trans people any chance they get. Coupled with that, violations of these laws can and do lead to discrimination that can permanently impact someone’s life, as data from GLAAD shows that the number of anti-trans hate crimes has increased drastically in the past year, including homicides. Such instances are often directly related to trans people just trying to use the bathroom.

This is all to say nothing of how transphobia overlaps with other aspects of marginalization. Black and Indigenous trans people, for instance, often experience even more severe and more frequent instances of hate crimes, including being disproportionately likely to be victim to physical assault, sexual assault, and homicide. Disabled trans people face increased medical discrimination. Impoverished trans people — rates of poverty are far higher among our communities — face disproportionate rates of many of the above hateful attacks.

The following are four stories, first reported by Trans News Network, documenting instances of anti-trans discrimination from major corporations in the United States. These stories do not encapsulate all transphobia that people experience, even by just these companies – rather, they are individual examples that highlight systemic injustices fueled by individual biases and far-right propaganda that isolates the trans community.

Legal & General America

Rebecca is a trans woman based on the East Coast. She completed her legal gender and name change in 2023, and since has just been living her life. In early 2025, she decided to set up a life insurance policy, and reached out to the provider Legal & General America. She submitted her application electronically, and after a brief waiting period, was given an answer in no uncertain terms. “I got a letter from them that said, ‘you've been denied for eligibility for life insurance because of gender dysphoria being on your medical record.’”

Rightfully furious, she didn’t sit idle.

“I was just very angry at the time… I called them and I said, ‘why is gender dysphoria a reason to deny me for life insurance?’ And they just said, ‘I can't really answer that, but we can check with the underwriters and get back to you.’” she tells TNN. “So I followed up with an email and asked them to please check with the underwriters because I want to better understand why gender dysphoria is a reason for life insurance denial.”

Rebecca shared the contents of the email with Trans News Network. It said verbatim, “Applicant has been declined due to gender dysphoria. Possible reconsideration after all surgery is complete and applicant demonstrates one year of favorable psychological adjustment to new gender role with updated records for review.”

“That just blew my mind because they don't know if I'm planning any surgery or not — nor about my psychological adjustment to a ‘new gender role.’ I've been living as a woman for years. I don't know where that comes from or how that makes any sense whatsoever,” she recounted to TNN.

She tried to escalate things by getting in touch with civil rights organizations, but none were able to take on her case. With no communications from L\&GA since, she ultimately sought out, and achieved, insurance with another broker.

Except her troubles didn’t end there.

“The company that did insure me… insured me as a male. Which kind of sucks because men have higher rates,” she said. Exhausted, she stopped pushing after this, because she described how her rates are still low, and she didn’t want to deal with any continued headache.

In response to a request for comment, a representative of Legal & General America said only, “We are unable to comment on policyholder matters due to privacy reasons.”

Patreon

In the time following our coverage of payment processors pushing the gaming website Itch.io to remove queer and NSFW content from their site, Trans News Network has kept an eye on other platforms that fund independent creators’ livelihoods and the likelihood of their following suit.

One such platform, Patreon, has already been covered by independent journalists like Ana Valens as showing signs that they plan to follow suit, including by restricting any content deemed not safe for work, often including fantasy, queer, and furry content that isn’t sexual in nature.

In response, TNN sought additional sources for more information on whether things were continuing to escalate. We got in touch with a queer former employee of Patreon, who worked there from 2020 to 2021, who described how Patreon’s attitudes towards NSFW content and the LGBTQ+ community isn’t anything new. This employee, who we granted anonymity for safety, described an apathetic attitude by leadership towards anti-trans actors.

This employee claims that they brought to the attention of Patreon executives – including CEO Jack Conte – that several anti-queer actors were using the site. These included Andy Ngo, Jesse Singal, Katie Herzog, and Sam Harris. While many of these figures have since left voluntarily, Patreon staff were nevertheless apathetic.

“They were just feeling cautious about changing anything in their content guidelines that would cause people to shift to a different platform. The end result was them saying, ‘no, we're not really going to do anything. Thanks for bringing it up. We hear you, we see you,’” this employee recounted an executive saying.

This was bounced around to numerous different staff members. Executives told the employee to bring it up to their manager to no avail. They brought it up during company-wide meetings, also to no avail. Ultimately, it took them getting in touch with an executive on the C-Suite for the company to hold a meeting on this issue.

“I was very frustrated by that. It seemed very clear cut to me that if you're doing transphobia, you shouldn't be on the platform because they had similar guidelines for all kinds of other bigotries, but they just didn't want to do anything about this,” they said.

The employee emphasized that many queer creators do still use Patreon to fund their livelihoods, and up until now that’s been working well. This individual also doesn’t want to dismiss every employee there, mentioning that many employees’ support of queer people enables creators to continue doing their work.

“At the time, Katelyn Burns made a blog post about how she couldn't do her journalism work without Patreon. I know there were lots of queer creators on there who could not do the work they did without Patreon,” they said. “I don't want to suggest that I think they're all bad. I feel like it's a net good for a lot of creators.”

But they add that this doesn’t excuse the blatant enabling of transphobia, which helped lead to the current political crises and scares seen today.

“There were lots of really bad actors and lots of people, such as Ngo and Herzog, who managed to make a lot of money on the platform and managed to mainstream a lot of their viewpoints while making a living off of it. Perhaps they wouldn't have been able to, if Patreon had been a little stricter about its content guidelines for transphobia.”

Lyft

Rinna is a trans woman from Arizona who runs a foster home for cats, and she is currently training to become a firefighter. She doesn’t have a car, and so when she takes her cats to the vet, she often orders an Uber or a Lyft. What she thought was going to be an uneventful drive took a sharp turn when she got into the Lyft, and was immediately met with a bizarre experience, according to what she told Trans News Network.

Undisclosed to her on the app, the driver had brought a large dog in the front seat, claiming it to be a service dog – in spite of there being no vest or clear indicators that this was the case. Further, the driver had started chatting with her about her work running a cat foster home, prompting him to say, “I'm trying to do good myself too. I'm trying to start a brand of inspirational T-shirts!”

To try and show her the type of T-shirts he was making, he showed her a picture on his phone. “You see this? It's an Indian doing a tattoo, and it's an Arab tattoo. I'm white and my wife is Mexican,” she recounts him saying.

Rinna was taken aback. “This is weird,” she said to him, before he raised his voice and said “What the hell are you talking about?”

“He then goes on talking abruptly about how ‘he likes LGBT and stuff like that,’” Rinna remembered. At this time, she was worried about losing her medical care due to federal cuts to gender affirming care off of insurance programs funded by the federal government. She had talked about this to someone shortly before entering the car, but not to this man directly, though she reports he was in earshot.

She recollected how he abruptly told her “that I don't have to care about losing care because firefighter work isn't federal. Its state. But I'm saying that there's still a chance that I could get caught because state stuff is funded by the federal government. In Arizona, everything we do is funded by the federal government. He kept saying no to that, he kept disagreeing.”

“He then asked me ‘why do you think your work insurance should cover your transgender thing?’ He keeps poking me for an answer. ‘What do you think’? I respond that ‘I don’t think I’m going to answer that.’ He asks ‘why not?’”

She was baffled by this entire situation. “I’m just trying to get a ride. It’s not a choice. I should just be able to get medical care. This is a really weird conversation to have.”

“He just keeps going on and on with basic boilerplate transphobic stuff,” she continued recollecting. “He said that because it’s a choice that we ‘decided to become mentally ill,’ we shouldn’t have our care covered.’”

All the while he was doing this, Rinna described how he would go off on random tangents, saying things like “Autistic people are helpless. They can't do anything. They can't work.” His main point, however, remains about arguing that trans people do not deserve medical care coverage.

Meanwhile, he continues driving the Lyft. At this time, she’s nearing her dropoff point. After recovering from the shock, she replies to him: “You understand how dumb that is? That's like saying we shouldn't cover people with type two diabetes because they didn't take care of their body and got diabetes.”

She remembers that he tried justifying himself, arguing that trans people “don’t deserve” to get their work to cover their transition. “What you’re doing is a specific choice,” he continued.

At this point, Rinna was entirely fed up. “I just decided to let him have the final word. I don't want to have my Lyft drivers ask me about my rights and give me a condescending tone. But he was testing me the entire fucking ride — and the rest of the ride was awkward. I think he knew he said something wrong.”

After getting dropped off, she contacted Lyft customer support via phone. “The first time, they hung up on me,” she said. On her second call, she asks for a supervisor, as support was just giving generic answers that didn’t address her situation. Once again, she was hung up on.

“So then I called a third time. I say ‘please don't hang up on me.’ And so they don't hang up on me. But I think after 15 minutes of waiting, I'm realizing that person just put me on hold and didn't actually transfer me. So then I give up for now.”

Eventually, she gets an email from Lyft. This email, which was posted on Bluesky, has been transcribed in full below.

“I'm following up on feedback about your behavior during a recent ride. Specifically, the feedback alleged you made inappropriate or derogatory comments during a ride. As a reminder, Lyft is an inclusive community. We strive for all rides to be both safe and comfortable for everyone, so we take matters like these very seriously. Please remember to always remain respectful of others during each ride.” 

Keep in mind that additional reports of this nature may lead to further actions being taken on your account. If you'd like to provide any details or have any questions, please respond directly to this email."

This happened mere hours later. Rinna was furious. “I kind of get fired up again. I'm a bit more angry on the phone. The lady actually stops reading off the sheet because she says, ‘We'll give you $5 Lyft credit.’”

Rinna was insulted. “No refund. Just a $5 Lyft credit,” she said. She continued to talk with the representative, saying that she “just wants to speak to someone who can really help.” The representative puts a note on her account, and says that someone will call her within the next day. To her surprise, the next day they left a voicemail – with no call-back number.

“They said that they fully refunded my ride. And now I'm kind of upset because it took so long to refund my ride. And I don't think I even wanted to refund my ride because this fucker drove me home. He knows where I live,” Rinna said, her voice shaken with fear. This interview was conducted the same day this voicemail was received. “If the ride gets refunded out of nowhere and with a complaint, he knows where I am.”

Not long after, she received an entirely independent text from a separate person, which was also posted on Bluesky. This text is transcribed in full below:

“I'm following up on feedback about your behavior during a recent ride. Specifically, the feedback alleged you made inappropriate or derogatory comments during a ride. As a reminder, Lyft is an inclusive community. We strive for all rides to be both safe and comfortable for everyone, so we take matters like these very seriously. Please remember to always remain respectful of others during each ride. Please know that future reports of this nature may lead to your account being reviewed for a permanent deactivation. If you'd like to provide any details or have any questions, please respond directly to this message."

After hearing about this, Trans News Network reached out to Lyft’s press team for comment. In response, a spokesperson said, “Lyft unequivocally condemns this behavior. Upon investigating this incident, we deactivated the driver, and we've been in touch with the rider. We encourage riders and drivers to report any instance of harassment or discrimination through the Lyft app."

In addition, Lyft said the following with a request that it be on background, a request that TNN denies.

“Our community guidelines and terms of service prohibit harassment or discrimination on the basis of religion, national origin, race, gender, gender identity or expression, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, age or sexual orientation.”

Trans News Network informed Rinna of this response via text. She said that she received an automated phone call from Lyft, and that she “wasn't even made aware the driver's account was deactivated or anything like they genuinely have not reached out at all.”

A Lyft representative followed up with another statement that was requested to be on background, one which Trans News Network also denies. “We can confirm that we have followed up with the rider via phone and email, most recently on Sep 1, acknowledging their concerns, confirming action was taken against the driver, and offering further assistance.”

Rinna received one email from a customer service representative on the date Lyft said. This email is as follows:.

“I'm truly sorry you had to endure such an upsetting and inappropriate experience during your ride. It's completely unacceptable for anyone to question your rights or make discriminatory remarks, and I understand how hurtful and frustrating this must have been for you. Please know that your case was thoroughly reviewed by a highly qualified team member, and decisive actions have been taken against the driver involved to ensure this behavior is not repeated. We take discrimination very seriously and are committed to supporting you. If you need further assistance or would like to discuss this in more detail, I'm here to help. For now, i\[sic\] glad to have helped you with your report and always remember: Your feedback is one of the best tools we have to continue to improve the Lyft platform. Thank you for your proactive outreach. Feedback like this truly allows us to keep our Lyft platform safe.”

She said that she “specifically requested a call,” and that this email, which was sent on September 1, is two weeks late, as the original request was from August 20\. “I still don’t feel good about how little I got to say everything that happened,” she said. “You're basically my only form of communication and I will respond to this email saying everything I just told you,” she said to the author of this article.

One week later, having gotten no response she said, “it seems they only respond when you say something.”

Amazon

Tilly Bridges is a transfeminine first-time author, having written the book Begin Transmission: The trans allegories of The Matrix. This book is a nonfiction book analyzing The Matrix film trilogy for trans allegories. It contains no sexual content, and is entirely safe-for-work. It was published in 2023 through the independent publisher BearManor Media, a publisher that primarily does not put out queer books, but rather ones focusing on media analysis.

Earlier this year, her book saw an abrupt and bizarre instance of censorship. Hundreds of reviews were suddenly removed from the book, the digital and paperback editions were taken down from the site and removed from people’s devices and both her book and her author page failed to consistently turn up in searches on the site.

“Prior to any of this happening, my book had 103 5-star ratings (and no ratings anywhere below 5!) and dozens and dozens of review testimonials from people who were touched and moved by it, several whose lives were changed by it,” Bridges told TNN. “On August 12 I opened the page to find I suddenly had only 25 reviews… I posted about this to social media, when many of my followers checked and said their kindle versions had been deleted and removed from their devices without their knowledge.”

“Further, it seems searching for both my name and the book title would only sometimes turn up in amazon search results, but often return nothing at all, as if I had never written a book Amazon sold. Internet searches were still turning up links to the missing book formats, but following that link took you to a page on Amazon with a photo of a dog and a message that something went wrong.”

Following this, her manager ordered a hardcover copy of the book to see if that was still available. In a screenshot provided to Trans News Network of the shipping notice, it hid the front cover of the book and said “Item hidden for privacy” instead of its name. According to Amazon’s official policy on this term’s usage, this is only done for things like “erotic media,” “intimate clothing,” “self-help,” and “products used for personal protection.”

“Other followers then confirmed that when placing an order, the title and cover were also censored in the emails they received about the purchase,” Bridges added. She contacted Amazon through their portal, and was told that there was nothing they could do, and that this could only be done “if the publisher asked.” At the time, the publisher wasn’t able to get in touch with Amazon staff.

“I contacted my publisher, who claimed to have no knowledge of the censorship but did tell me that some formats and reviews disappearing has happened to him before, and it had happened again to many of his titles this time.. It’s something he said that happens to publishers with over 500 books from time to time, but usually resolved in a couple days. I really don’t know,” she said, adding that she has been unable to verify if this has happened to any other books besides hers, or if BearManor publishes other queer or trans books.

Trans News Network was not able to verify the claim that this has happened other times with large publishers. TNN reached out to Ben Ohmart, Bridges’ contact with BearManor, who said via email, “Amazon removed 100s of our titles, not just hers, due to a problem on their end which took them weeks to resolve.”

When pressed further for more information, Ohmart said, “It wasn't about that issue, it was completely random and Many[sic] books like ones by Charles Tranberg and Richard Greene, biographies on stars. It was a mistake not intentionally and it took amazon[sic] 2 weeks to figure out what the problem was.”

Tranberg’s last book on Amazon was a 2021 audiobook re-release of a 2018 biography on William Conrad. Greene has published two books on Amazon, being showcases of early 20th century film advertisements. No other statements from BearManor were provided.

Amazon declined to comment on the record, stating that they could only provide comment before publication on-background. If any comment is provided, this article will be updated accordingly.

Bridges added in an email from September 2 that her book has since been put back up fully, with some hiccups along the way. “Two days ago most of my reviews and all of my missing formats returned, but all of the ‘products related to this item’ beneath the book listing were almost exclusively pornographic material,” she said.

She continued, “Then just yesterday all of my reviews reappeared, and now the ‘products related to this item’ are back to being books about film criticism, gender studies, and trans authors. I've also had one report from a reader that the Kindle version of my book that was deleted from their device without authorization mysteriously reappeared (this only happened last night, so I don't know if this is true for all who lost their Kindle versions). I have no idea if the title and cover are still being censored in shipping notifications to people who purchase it.”

“It almost feels as if they're backtracking on what they did, but who knows. It's a completely baffling situation.”

Trans News Network was able to confirm Bridges’ initial reports, having had issue pulling up her book’s page and, when successfully done, revealed a low number of reviews. Currently, her book’s page is up, and there is no issue accessing it nor are there issues in seeing reviews.

Bridges reports that nevertheless, this has hurt her livelihood.

“I can only surmise that it’s hurt my income, because not only do I not get detailed sales breakdowns, I get my royalties incredibly late for reasons my publisher said have to do with when and how sales are reported to him? Again he keeps everything very opaque, so I only know very little,” she said.

“My next royalty statement should arrive in November, I think, but will be for the six month period that ended in March of this year. So I won’t even know generally how sales from now have been affected until March of 2026.”

Solving What We All Face

These four stories are just a handful that reveal the breadth and intense transphobia that trans people have to go with on a day-to-day basis. The vast majority of the time, we are not able to get what happens to us publicized, and our voices often go unheard. Most trans people have a story of either themselves or a loved one experiencing discrimination This impacts countless livelihoods. Sometimes it costs trans people their lives.

Ultimately, there is only one way to truly solve this issue – solidarity and support networks that prioritize helping trans people. Trans people often go through hell and back trying to fight to stay alive, and oftentimes we find ourselves dismissed and belittled for even talking about what we face. The benefit of the doubt is constantly given to the cisgender individuals that take our rights away, while we’re seen as loud, curmudgeonly radicals who just want attention.

Yet, we face constant pressure to hide our experiences and pretend they never happened. Bringing it up in any environment beyond our own communities is often seen as domineering or being ‘ungrateful’ to any allies that claim to support us. In worst-case scenarios, it triggers more discrimination. Many trans people are silent about this, and the few that do speak up do so at great risk to their own reputation and careers.

Cisgender allies need to recognize the privilege they hold, the ignorance that comes with it and the need to work to protect the trans people in our communities, provide material support and give us a platform. Likewise, trans people need to band together and continue to fight against this oppression on every front we can. We must fight mercilessly against bigotry, put pressure on companies that deplatform us and rally support for those in our communities.

Likewise, we must organize support across marginalized identities. Black and Indigenous trans people of color are much more likely to experience discrimination, as are disabled trans people, as are impoverished trans people, as are trans immigrants. We must recognize who is being explicitly targeted, and protect them as much as possible.

The best way to build these networks is to connect with those around you, and identify areas that your community needs help with – be it assisting homeless encampments with supply runs, organizing unions for exploited workers, providing rental assistance for, fighting for environmental rights, or resisting attempts from fascists to occupy your neighborhoods.

There are countless ways to help your community and build support, and the sooner that we plug in and build bridges with each other, the sooner that there can be support networks for each of us. This is especially true if you are cisgender, white, higher-income, able-bodied, or benefit from any other kind of privilege. Build these bridges, and help those in your community that need it. This is the only way we can truly fight back against the discrimination that we all live with.

—Edited by David Forbes

Trans News Network (@transnews.network)

Trans News Network (TNN) is a worker-run nonprofit LGBTQ+ newsroom publishing articles that impact trans communities. Follow our work at https://transnews.network/ Donate to our launch fundraiser at https://transnewsnetwork.networkforgood.com/

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Activists have pushed to protect trans healthcare in California all year, such as at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. Photo by Mady Castigan

Update 10/13/25: Gov. Newsom has signed eight and vetoed two of the bills reported on by this article. Click here to see the full list.

Despite Gov. Gavin Newsom’s newfound ‘alignment’ with Charlie Kirk and other conservatives on trans issues, the California legislature has responded to the nationwide assault on queer people with ten bills bolstering queer and trans rights passed this legislative session.

The bills include measures that direct housing agencies to combat LGBTQ+ discrimination, ban anti-trans health insurance discrimination, and require insurance to cover a year’s supply of hormones for anyone who needs them. The measures also offer important reforms to improve the process of legal name changes, patient confidentiality, HIV drug access, and more.

California has a long and storied history of queer legislative advocacy, often pushed by grassroots activism. The state has one of the largest LGBTQ+ caucuses of any legislature—including some former AIDS activists. The success of these bills demonstrates the policy muscle of an organized and engaged community, even in the face of extreme bigotry and hate.

Trans News Network reached out to Newsom and three of the California legislators who filed these bills. While the governor’s office declined to comment on pending legislation, all three legislators did, including a lengthy phone interview from state Sen. Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco.

TNN also talked to Jorge Reyes Salinas of Equality California, a statewide LGBTQ advocacy organization with a strong presence supporting bills like these at the capitol in Sacramento.

The bills are listed below.

Note: This section was updated on 10/13/25 to reflect signed legislation.

Trans Rights Bills

•  AB 82 / SB 497 – Both signed into law on 10/13/25 –These privacy-focused bills provide needed confidentiality for patients, providers, and volunteers involved with trans healthcare. AB 82 offers important protections for reproductive healthcare, and prevents prescription data about drugs like testosterone and mifepristone from being stored in databases that could be accessible by other states.

  • As the author of the bill, Wiener told TNN that SB 497 would expand on the California “State of Refuge” law he wrote and passed in 2022 by preventing other states and private entities from subpoenaing private medical records. Wiener claimed that the US Constitution preempts California from blocking federal authorities from issuing subpoenas for private medical data.

• AB 1084 / SB 59 – Both signed into law on 10/13/25 –This pair of legal name change bills includes one that streamlines the process of updating legal name and gender, and another to ensure that older court records of name changes can’t be used to out or dox trans people.

  • Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, representing parts of Los Angeles, authored AB 1084 and wrote to TNN about his bill, “at a time when MAGA-led legislatures across the country are pushing hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ bills designed to erase transgender people from public life, California must continue to lead with compassion and equality. AB 1084 is especially critical for transgender and nonbinary Californians, because having accurate identification documents is not just paperwork — it is a matter of safety, dignity, and survival.

    I respectfully urge Governor Newsom, who has been a champion for the LGBTQ+ community, to sign these measures into law and reaffirm California’s role as a beacon of hope and safety for LGBTQ+ people in the face of growing national attacks.”

  • Wiener authored SB 59, which he said intends to provide more tools to protect themselves at a time when trans people are being targeted by “a president who has explicitly stated that he wants trans people just to disappear.”

• SB 418 – Vetoed on 10/13/25 (Veto Message) – Bolsters nondiscrimination protections for health insurance plans and requires the plans to cover up to a 12-month supply of prescription hormones.

LGBTQ+ Rights Bills

• AB 554 – Vetoed on 10/13/25 (Veto Message) – Requires insurance coverage of all FDA-approved medications that prevent HIV such as PreP, without prior authorization.

  • Salinas told TNN AB 554 intends to ensure queer people would retain access to HIV medicines even if federal protections are whittled down. “As we are seeing RFK and the Department of Health trying to take away these essential medications from the Affordable Care Act, we want to make sure that California has a protection in place that will allow people to receive this preventative healthcare without putting them in a situation where they can't afford this medication.”

• AB 727 – Signed into law on 10/10/25 – Mandates that schools and universities must provide all youth suicide hotline information, including numbers for LGBTQ+ hotlines in the wake of Trump’s defunding of the Trevor Project hotline.

• AB 678 – Signed into law on 10/10/25 – Requires state housing programs to coordinate with LGBTQ+ communities to ensure homelessness programs remain inclusive and nondiscriminatory for queer people experiencing homelessness, directly combatting federal efforts to force homeless shelters to ban trans people.

  • Assemblymember Alex Lee, author of AB 678 and representing western San Jose, provided the following comment regarding his bill: “As the federal regime seeks to criminalize homelessness and erase LGBTQ+ identities, AB 678 safeguards our LGBTQ+ communities by ensuring homelessness programs are inclusive and affirming. LGBTQ+ Californians face disproportionately high rates of housing insecurity, and I will keep fighting for everyone’s right to safe, stable, and affordable homes.”

• SB 590 – Signed into law on 10/13/25 – Expands paid family leave protections to include the diverse caregiving needs of queer families.

• SB 450 – Signed into law on 10/13/25 – Clarifies California adoption law to allow for LGBTQ+ couples who live outside of California to adopt children born in the state through California proceedings, which are more inclusive than many other states.

Unlike Democrats in Congress or other states like North Carolina, the entire caucus stayed united on every vote to support trans and queer people, except for some absent legislators, according to a review of the official tallies. Grassroots community groups across the state such as Trans Latin@ Coalition mobilized crucial support for pro-trans bills (and opposing Republican anti-trans bills) throughout the year.

“I know that it is so painful for any trans person that is sitting there and reading social media and watching the news and there are people debating pros and cons about your existence—it's incredibly toxic and painful,” Wiener told TNN. “Even with all that, on these bills, all or just about all of my Democratic colleagues voted for it, even including the ones that are in very purple districts. And so that gives me hope.”

Republicans opposed most of the bills as a bloc, except for AB 554 (PrEP access), AB 678 (inclusive shelter services), and SB 590 (family leave protections), which passed with near or fully unanimous support across both chambers. Notably, every Republican voted against AB 727, a bill that simply provides students information about suicide hotlines.

In addition, the California Budget Act of 2025 was signed into law this June after legislators restored millions of dollars of state funding for trans healthcare that was previously cut by Gov. Newsom, as reported on by Trans News Network. However, there have been no efforts to compensate for federal funds that were slashed this year.

Legislators also overwhelmingly passed (14 abstained, including Lee) a pro-Israel education bill coauthored by Zbur, Wiener, and other Democrats—even as some lawmakers who voted yes echoed educator warnings that the law claiming to combat antisemitism would instead be weaponized to censor educators who teach about the history of genocide against Palestinians. The bill also left out measures to combat any other form of discrimination in education against other religions, race, ability, sexual orientation, or gender.

Liberal housing advocates moved forward deregulatory measures that they claim could lower housing costs by helping corporate developers build more housing. But these measures could take years to lower housing costs, if ever, and fail to address the immediate material needs specific to the trans community.

California’s budget shortfall this year resulted in little money left to address those needs, as politicians declined to raise taxes on the wealthy or meaningfully cut funding for state police forces that Newsom commands to brutalize ICE protestors and sweep homeless encampments.

In future sessions, legislators could draw ideas from Trans Latin@ Coalition’s proposal for LA to create a fund to support trans housing or NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s proposals to directly fund trans healthcare for youth and freeze rent for everyone, if he becomes mayor of New York City.

Wide-sweeping and timely bills would benefit nearly every trans and queer Californian

While these bills won’t stop every threat, they do offer a genuine ray of hope and breath of fresh air—if they become law. As someone who lives in California, I spent hundreds of dollars paying a lawyer to seal court records of my name change this year, after waiting for nearly four months for the court date—a barrier far higher for trans people without resources.

But if I had filed my name change with AB 1084 and SB 59 enacted as law, I would have received the name change within 6 weeks and my court records would have been sealed automatically, with no lawyer required. This would have also meant I could have updated my passport before Trump took office and made such updates nearly impossible.

TNN talked to Los Angeles resident Juniper, a Black trans woman studying for a master’s degree at UCLA, about what these bills could mean for the community.

“Dope as fuck,” she said after reviewing the bills. “The insurance stockpile one would be insane. I've had a lot of anxiety recently about losing access to my parents' insurance when I turned 26 and then maybe having to go off hormones, just because the nature of my field does not provide a lot of positions where you get great insurance.”

“All of the confidentiality stuff, also dope as fuck,” Juniper continued. “I feel like me and you, along with probably all trans people in America right now, are very scared about our like records being released. So that would be really neat.”

“The [inclusivity protections for] housing programs are also massive,” she added. “I know a lot of homeless trans women, and a lot of them are not really jazzed about going to any shelters, because they're all famously, really, really bad at dealing with gender diverse individuals.”

Juniper also said the bills are “100% anxiety reducing. Recently, I've had like, I'm gonna estimate probably a 200% to 300% increase in my anxiety with just like everything that conservatives are saying about trans people. And at least knowing that, ‘hey, the state that I live in is doing the bare minimum,’ that would be cool!”

California’s continued refusal to support trans kids in need

As refreshing as these bills may be, they don’t address the devastation caused by multiple California hospitals and healthcare systems illegally denying trans healthcare in their rush to comply with Trump’s demands.

Trans News Network reported in June that Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles ended their entire gender care program for over 3000 patients, including many adults. Not long after, both Stanford Medicine and Kaiser — one of the biggest hospital networks in the region — announced they would end gender affirming surgeries for trans youth for similar reasons.

Many patients who lost care from CHLA this year switched to other local hospitals, such as UCLA Health. But the number of providers who provide trans care for minors, especially ones that accept Medicaid, is rapidly dwindling in Los Angeles, as UCLA shamefully negotiates a deal with Trump that could put trans lives in danger in order to restore lost funding.

“We are going to have to follow whatever rules the federal government proposes,” UCLA Chancellor Frenk recently said, in regards to Trump’s demand to end trans healthcare for minors. A deal with Trump ending that care may come even though the university recently won back illegally withheld funds in federal court rulings. (Note: the author of this article uses UCLA Health for her healthcare needs).

“My understanding is [ending gender health programs] is pretty clearly a violation of state law. I don't think we need to pass any new laws,” Wiener, the senator from San Francisco, said.

But these laws have yet to be enforced by the state, despite numerous patient complaints and near-weekly protests at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles lasting much of this year.

Salinas from Equality California said that while the hospitals should not have ended care for youth and acknowledged their actions violate California law, California could best address the issue by directly confronting the Trump administration with lawsuits.

Wiener, however, has taken a much more confrontational tone against the hospitals.

“I've met with senior management of CHLA and Kaiser about this issue about the federal government trying to bully hospitals into ending gender affirming care. I made it very clear that I think it's completely unacceptable to do that.”

“And my view is that these institutions need to fight and file lawsuits if Trump is doing something illegal, which it seems quite illegal. But a lot of times they seem to not want to take the risk,” Wiener continued. “I think that's really dangerous, because when institutions just start folding, it becomes a domino effect and you see more and more institutions [comply], whether it's hospitals or law firms or whatever the case may be.”

Wiener agreed with the idea of California using its power to enforce a carrot-and-stick approach against hospitals. “I think the state should be supporting these hospitals in their litigation. And I think it's important for hospitals to follow the law.”

But why have state authorities failed to enforce the law so far?

“The California Department of Justice is very aware of the situation, and I just don't wanna speculate about what they're investigating or preparing,” Wiener replied. “But do I think the law should be enforced? Yes, it should be.”

Newsom’s turn against trans rights breaks with community needs and political allies

While the California legislature has remained united in passing measures supporting LGBTQ+ people this year, the same cannot be said for the governor. Although Newsom built much of his career off the backs of supporting LGBTQ+ rights (especially for well-off cis gays) and has signed some bills supporting trans people during his two terms as governor, his rhetoric has taken a sharp turn to the right after Trump took office for his second term this year.

Newsom infamously sided with Charlie Kirk on many trans issues on the first episode of his new podcast, including on trans women in sports, prisons, and more. Since then he has routinely brought up trans rights in a negative light on his podcast when talking with right-wing guests and falsely claimed that support for trans rights negatively impacted Democrats in the 2024 election.

After Kirk’s death, queer activists excoriated Newsom’s statement for whitewashing Kirk’s legacy and stating that all people should “continue his work,” in reference to the far-right YouTuber’s “passion and commitment to debate.”

And just this week, Newsom said in an interview with former President Bill Clinton that Democrats should learn from Kirk when attempting to court the vote of young men. Kirk took many extreme stances against trans people (as well as Black people and women), such as calling for Nuremberg-style trials for doctors who provide lifesaving healthcare to trans people or asking Trump to ban trans healthcare for everyone, across the country.

Newsom showed off his learnings from Kirk as a guest for the right-wing Shawn Ryan Show, where he suggested that trans people should not be able to medically transition until they are 26 years old—a higher age threshold than any trans healthcare ban enacted anywhere in the country so far.

Wiener, a long-time political ally to Newsom, has spoken out against his comments about trans athletes, but was unaware of the comments against trans healthcare until TNN mentioned them.

“Trans people have become a political football, and it's important for Democrats and progressives not to participate in that,” Wiener replied. “This is about people's lives and health care decisions that people make in consultation with their medical providers, in consultation with their families.”

While Newsom may not be planning to veto every pro-trans bill, the worry is that he might make decisions based on his own perceived political needs or needs of his wealthy donors, rather than the needs of Californians. After all, he’s done so before. Last year, Newsom vetoed almost 16% of the 1206 bills that reached his desk including a bill to expand trans healthcare, with many vetoes often aligning with the interests of corporations.

“We're really hoping that the governor signs our sponsor legislation this year,” Salinas said. “Whether it's a good political move or not, we don't really care. What we're asking for is for the governor to continue to do the right thing and support the communities in California that are the ones that are the most vulnerable because of the vile attacks from the Trump administration and the federal government trying to strip away their identities, their rights, and their health care.”

Wiener similarly stated, “when it comes to people's basic rights and humanity and dignity, it can't just be about what the polls say.”

Citing his Jewish heritage, Wiener drew parallels between conspiracy theories against Jews that led to pogroms and genocide in Europe, and false claims pushed by many conservatives that trans people are terrorists and mass shooters.

In regards to the Lemkin Institute’s warnings of potential genocide against trans people, Wiener responded, “yeah, I think that when you take the rhetoric to its logical end, including the President's executive order proclaiming trans people don't exist, I think that you can see it going in that direction. And that is deeply, deeply concerning to me.”

Wiener’s comments to TNN place him in a small group of politicians who have warned that Republican policies intend to commit genocide against trans people, such as state Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh of Nebraska and state Rep. Alicia Kowlowski of Minnesota. No members of Congress have acknowledged the term.

However, it remains to be seen if state Democrats like Wiener will match the urgency the moment demands by exercising their supermajorities in the legislature to override vetoes on bills that could protect trans people from deadly threats. Legislators haven't defied a governor that way since 1979, which means that trans activists must pile the pressure on before the Oct. 12 deadline to ensure these bills become law.

“It's important for people to continue putting pressure and really not diminish the value of a phone call to their representative makes,” Salinas said.

Never let politicians become complacent, and never lose the will to fight

Through centuries of brutal fascist violence enacted by western imperialist nations against Black and Indigenous peoples across the globe, marginalized groups have learned that oppression is the norm, and our innate freedoms are often stolen from us. But we have also learned that it can be won back through rugged perseverance and collective solidarity, channeling community grief into determined resistance.

You can channel your own community’s rage into action today by rallying your friends and chosen family behind protests or phone zaps against politicians, hospitals, or other institutions. Flex your collective power, and build the connections needed to tend to the material, safety, and emotional needs of your community.

California residents can motivate allies to contact Newsom’s office directly and demand he sign these bills. Equality California provided an action letter, for those not sure what to say.

But the most effective advocacy comes from the heart. Consider asking your allies to write up a personal message that you email or use as a script for a call that uses strong and passionate language to explain about how these bills could impact you personally (feel free to link this article!), and list actions you may take to protest his future political aspirations if he does veto the bills. Never allow politicians to feel complacent.

Residents can also contact their CA Assembly members and State Senators to ask them to pressure Newsom themselves and work internally to build party consensus for overrides if necessary. Trans advocates living anywhere in the US can contact their representatives to hold them accountable, as Democrats negotiate deals to end the ongoing shutdown with Republicans who threaten to jam anti-trans provisions into spending bills, including a ban on federal funding for trans healthcare.

But as threats escalate, so must our tactics to confront politicians with the true urgency of the moment, beyond phone calls and emails. One example is organizing protests at town halls or public events held by politicians and other figures, exemplified by recent protests for trans rights, Palestine, and healthcare.

The possibilities are endless, and tactics innumerable. We can draw from the storied histories of queer activism, Palestinian resistance, anti-colonial fights for independence, and Black civil rights movements.

In order to survive difficult times like these, we must remember that focusing on individual survival and incremental reforms to the systems that oppress us cannot protect our communities, our healthcare, and our basic rights. The best way to save yourself is to work with your community and fight to save us all, and bring your friends to the future we all deserve.

— Edited by Corinne Green and David Forbes

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“I’m just me, I’m just free,” by Asia-Vinae Jazzreal Palmer in collaboration with BreakOUT!, courtesy of Forward Together

I know you have already read the news.

They are blaming us for killing Charlie Kirk. It doesn't matter that the suspected shooter is cis. It doesn't matter that even his indictment describes the allegedly trans roommate as a person who was completely unaware of the plan and helped the government indict his killer.

And liberal gentry and conservatives alike mourn Kirk, a man whose last words were tinged with the kind of racist and transphobic propaganda he built his career on. They even team up to censor queer and Black people who dare not to whitewash his hateful legacy.

And the same bipartisan group of politicians lying to us about Kirk’s life quickly narrow their eyes towards threatening our lives by revoking our rights to healthcare and bathrooms in Congress, as Democrats stonewall our increasingly desperate cries for help.

And the most extreme fascists have even escalated their rhetoric to threatening to label us as terrorists and open calls for genocide of trans people through mass institutionalization or other means, including some in Congress.

And we know they won't stop until we are dead—or they lose all semblance of political power. The genocidal drive behind the Christofascist MAGA movement has absorbed the tactics of Nazi Germany with the full intention of repeating the Holocaust’s victimization of trans people.

And yet, we will survive. That much is an inconsolable fact of the universe, a truth that proves itself further every day.

Consider that, despite dozens of states banning trans care for minors in the last several years, as well as bans on literature or teachers talking about trans people in schools, the number of trans youth keeps increasing every year, across the United States. 

The increasing escalation from the far-right in their attacks on us reflects the primal desperation the fascists feel knowing they are continuously losing their fight to commit genocide. As Karis Nemik writes in his manifesto in Andor, oppression is the mask of fear.

Despite wielding nearly every measure of political power, they continue to lose the war against us every single day that each of us continues to breathe. Even if they kill some of us, they will never convince us we aren't who we are. They can never kill our truth.

Ultimately, fascism is a hateful, suicidal ideology,³ an idea which, for all the damage it can do in the short-term, can never truly win.

And trans existence is a fact of human existence powered by love, impermeable to hate, a fact that can never truly lose.

Every single day, a newly reborn trans child wakes up remembering a future she never could have imagined, seeing her true self in the mirror. We must protect her, and all other children and future children of all genders, by surviving.

Whatever happens, you must survive, thrive, and zealously fight for the day after they lose their unjust war, so that people like her and you can live the lives you deserve, with those you deserve to love.

Like many of you, I have spent much of the last few weeks oscillating between stages of despair, loneliness, grief, fear, gloom, and despondency.

I can't promise you an end date for the never-ending storm of trauma we find ourselves in. And I can't pretend like they aren't trying to kill me, you, or the people we love. Because they are.

But I can promise to you that they will lose. Because to eliminate transness is to eliminate humanity. The ongoing attempted trans genocide is an autogenocide in the truest of sense—our enemies can only destroy us if they are willing to destroy themselves as well.

For as long as humans exist, trans people exist.

We survived the Holocaust. We survived the AIDS genocides. We survived hundreds of years of settler-colonialist legal repression that erased thousands of years of indigenous trans and Two-Spirit history.¹ We will survive this genocide too.

The legacy of trans resilience goes well past surviving panic attacks caused by fearmongering tweets or stockpiling medication. During AIDS, it was not common for queer people to attend hundreds of funerals a year during the peak of its ravage, forcing psychologists to develop a new diagnosis to describe and treat the severe mental impacts that genocide had on queer communities. And through all of it, queer people preserved in their hearts the memories of lives lived to their fullest, however short they may have been.

And despite enduring the cruelest conditions imaginable, AIDS activists successfully channeled their collective grief and anger towards efforts to save tens of millions of lives through mutual aid and direct action. It’s not an exaggeration to say your very existence is due to the suffering and direct action of queer activists from the 1980’s and 1990’s. And the next generation of trans people similarly owe us their lives, as we return from shallow corporate pride to indomitable community solidarity.

I can't tell you that awful events and laws won't continue to materialize, that no one you love will unjustly suffer, that you won't continue to feel that escalating guttural fear watching the situation escalate.

But I can offer you a map to keep with you, so you always know how to find your hope again. That no matter how far you fall down that pit of despair, you know where to find the rope you left for yourself to climb out of that barren well back into our reality of our truth.

Take out a notebook and a pen with your favorite color. If you don't have that with you, bookmark this link and come back when you are ready.

Open the notebook to the last page, and title it “I Survived."

Now think back on your past, through your favorite and most cherished memories and search for the one that resonates with you the most.

Was it that impossible high from that one too-short-yet-incredibly-toxic t4t situationship that you can’t stop thinking about? What about that singular glimpse you had of your parent’s loving heart through a childhood of abuse? Or maybe the soothing cacophony of that one underground rave you only found out about four hours ago? Perhaps it was the rare peace you found in yourself while exploring nature?

Whatever it is for you, cling onto that authentic human feeling you had in that one moment, in that one memory.

And, grasping that feeling firmly in your mind’s grip, write yourself a short story on the last page of that notebook, of the past you yearn to relive, as it will happen in the future. The messy yet satisfying future where you will find the lasting, secure, permanence you never believed you could have.

It might be tomorrow, or it might be next year, it might be 10 years from now, but it will happen some day. And you must fight to survive with all your heart so that you reach that future, no matter how bleak things seem, or how much they lie about us.

And once you have this notebook, keep it close. That way, the next time you feel sad, despondent, and hopeless, take your notebook out and remind yourself of that joyful past you still hope to find in your future. Remind yourself that it's okay to feel sad and scared during a genocide, but that you must not forget what you are fighting for.

We are fighting for the day, after the worst of the storm has passed, when we will come together and show each other the stories we wrote in our notebooks today, so that we can relish and laugh and cry and marvel together at how our yearning to relive a happier past brought us to the imperfect, human future we truly deserve.²

Here’s my future. What’s yours?

—Edited by David Forbes

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And during these times of widespread government censorship and increasing authoritarianism, independent grassroots trans journalism is more important than ever. Please consider supporting us by subscribing, donating to our tax-deductible fundraiser, or referring a friend to TNN if you can’t afford to donate. Referrals also provide free Supporting Subscriber status! We pay all journalists a living wage of $28/hour.

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North Carolina state flag.

Among the bleak election results for Democrats in 2024, North Carolina stood out as an exception: gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein, the Democratic attorney general, won in a landslide against scandal-ridden Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson. Democrats also kept Stein's old office and a number of other statewide positions.

Despite extensive gerrymandering, Republicans even lost their supermajority in the state House. Crucially, this meant that if future far-right legislation were to make it to the governor’s desk, a united Democratic bloc would be able to sustain Stein’s vetoes. Here, as elsewhere, LGTBQ+ voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots for the party’s candidates — and helped Democrats secure key wins — for just this reason.

While plenty of trans people in N.C. are understandably skeptical of the Democrats, for reasons we'll delve into later in this piece, there was some cautious hope that the party’s gains would stave off the anti-trans laws that have proliferated around the country, especially in the South.

Over the past few months those hopes were demolished.

Two anti-trans bills, HB805 and SB442, passed the far-right General Assembly earlier this summer. The first, a sweeping anti-trans law targeting everything from the use of state funds for trans healthcare to changing gender markers on birth certificates, passed with all but a single Democrat — Rep. Dante Pittman — against it, though there were a number of notable “excused” absences from other Democrats in the state House.

SB442 was a different story, one that should have served as a warning sign for the eventual fate of HB805. The bill was supposedly written against the non-existent spectre of children being seized from parents if they didn't get their pronouns right. In reality, the bill sanctions and protects the intentional abuse of trans youth, according to Corinne Green, TNN’s policy advisor.

North Carolina prohibits child placement agencies from denying or delaying the opportunity to become an adoptive parent on the basis of race, color, national origin… and now, transphobia.

Under SB442, agencies aren’t allowed to refrain from placing trans youth with transphobic adoptive parents, a situation rife for abuse or even murder. Given that far-right officials in other states have threatened to seize trans children from supportive parents, it also starts to lay the groundwork for further atrocities, as well as giving N.C.'s notoriously arbitrary courts an opening to further chip away at trans rights.

“If you do not already have a trans youth to do felony abuse to, a trans youth will be provided for you,” Green bleakly summed up on Bluesky following SB442’s passage.

While N.C. Senate Democrats unanimously voted against SB442, this time eight Democratic representatives joined Rep. Pittman in support of the anti-trans measure — including Rep. Cecil Brockman, who is openly bi.

Like many other places across the country, North Carolina has its share of “Gay Inc.” non-profits, who are, in theory, supposed to act as the voice of queer and trans communities when it comes to pressuring the establishment. In practice, as former Gay Inc. vet and academic Myrl Beam, who popularized the term, noted, “dominant voices within the LGBT movement are focused on a narrow ‘equality’ agenda, organizing for inclusion into existing systems of power” and furthering their own careers. This happens even at a cost of damaging the vast majority of queer and trans people oppressed by those same systems.

In N.C. these groups are loath to ever criticize Democrats even when they directly take bigoted stances against trans and queer people. Accordingly, they made statements against SB442, as well as the more clearly party line HB805, but stopped short of targeting any Democrats who supported those bills. So did LGBTQ Democratic organizations.

“These are vulnerable kids who have already faced trauma, rejection and instability — and now extremist politicians want to legally sanction more harm in the very homes meant to protect them,” LGTBQ Democrats of North Carolina declared in a May 7 Instagram post about SB442. “Denying a young person's identity is not 'parenting' it is abuse...We believe every child deserves safety, affirmation and love — not conditions, not conversion and not cruelty.”

“This dangerous bill targets trans youth in foster care,” Equality NC stated in a June 17 Facebook post, adding that the bill encourages “discrimination in adoption and foster care,” “undermining support for trans youth” and “weakening child welfare protections.”

Despite the Democratic votes in favor of the two anti-trans bills, as SB442 and HB805 reached Gov. Stein's desk in late June, Rep. Allison Dahle told the Washington Blade that she was “as confident as I can be” that he would veto both bills, and that even the Democrats who'd voted for the measures in the legislature wouldn’t help Republicans override Stein’s vetoes.

On July 2, Campaign for Southern Equality called for the governor to veto both bills, noting that if passed “they will be some of the cruelest and most restrictive anti-LGBTQ laws in the country — as well as incredibly harmful to trans folks.” Not for the first time, trans rights proved an afterthought for CSE.

Democratic N.C. House Rep. Allison Dahle, official photo.

The next day Stein signed SB442 into law. He issued no signing statement. There was no press conference. No well-practiced, pained expression. No overwrought words about what a difficult decision it had been. No empty reassurance about somehow still having the backs of trans youth in the state’s foster system. Instead, one of the most egregiously anti-trans child placement laws in the country was sandwiched right between the Neighbor State License Recognition Act and a bill sprucing up regulations for retirement communities in a list of legislation he’d signed.

The far-right NC Values Coalition quickly issued a giddy press release praising Stein for approving the anti-trans law. N.C.'s Gay Inc. organizations, by contrast, promptly went silent on the issue.

On Facebook, Equality NC posted a video collage of pride imagery set to Montell Jordan’s 1995 single “This is How We Do It,” while LGBTQ Democrats of North Carolina put up seemingly AI-generated praise for Congressional House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and seemingly AI-generated condemnation of the President’s budget bill.

The same day that Stein signed SB442 he also vetoed HB805, alongside a number of bills banning “DEI.” He dubbed them “mean-spirited” and an effort to “distract us by stoking culture wars that further divide us,” a line commonly used by Democrats who want to seem like they're supporting trans people without directly acknowledging our existence. It was a notable retreat from even the previous governor’s rhetoric.

Dahle, who’d earlier predicted both bills facing veto and defeat, did not return calls from TNN for comment.

For once I will agree with the Gay Inc. orgs, to a point. SB442 is despicable. It is dangerous. It is cruel. It is a threat.

It did not magically stop being so when a Democrat signed it.

The absence of even the most basic rebuke of Stein’s approval of SB442 from the mainstream organizations supposedly there to advocate for queer and trans communities also sent a giant signal to other Democrats that they, too, could turn against our rights. After all, they wouldn’t face any real, public political consequences for doing so. A few weeks after SB442’s sanctioned abuse became law, the General Assembly reconvened to try to override Stein's vetoes, including of HB805, the broader anti-trans bill. If Democratic legislators held the line, the bill would go down in defeat.

They did not. While Pittman (who had helped to pass the bill through the state House in the first place) voted against overriding the veto, Democratic Rep. Naseef Majeed (who'd had an “excused absence” during the initial vote) sided with Republicans this time to ensure HB805's final passage. He was also one of the nine Democratic House legislators who'd backed SB442.

While the snowballing betrayal of the trans community is appalling, it is also far from surprising. The backlash against, and eventual “repeal” of, HB2, N.C.'s infamous bathroom bill of the mid-2010s, is often held up as an example of how anti-trans laws used to draw far more widespread condemnation. But the reality was never that simple. Nor has the state Democratic Party been the friends to trans and queer communities they like to pretend during campaign season.

To get a clearer idea of what we're up against, why what's happening in North Carolina matters for trans people around the country and what we can do about it, we need to delve into some history.

With friends like these…

Throughout much of the 20th century the North Carolina Democratic Party tried to present itself as the quieter, more reasonable alternative to its peers throughout the South. While other governors were giving rabidly racist speeches, Democrats like Gov. Terry Sanford blandly talked about the need for progress and civil rights (but not too fast).

This was, as so much else in our story, a facade over a far harsher and more complicated reality. Even as they built more infrastructure, roads, universities and schools than many other regimes in the region, North Carolina Democrats also enshrined some of the harshest anti-union laws in the country.

While crackdowns on civil rights demonstrators and the Black liberation movement in N.C. may not have drawn the same headlines as places like Selma — authorities were often more careful than governments elsewhere in the South — they were still plenty brutal. From the '40s through the '70s, riots against the segregated status quo rocked North Carolina cities from the mountains to the sea, sparked by everything from the abuse of Black soldiers to crackdowns on colleges to, of course, racist police violence.

Heading towards the ‘80s, the state government and the well-heeled boosters of N.C. business and tourism portrayed open riots and Klan violence as a thing of the past. But in 1979 local and state law enforcement knowingly turned a blind eye (or actively collaborated) with the KKK and neo-Nazis when they conspired to attack anti-racist organizers in Greensboro. This culminated in white supremacists opening fire on a multiracial anti-Klan march in an infamous massacre. The fact that the anti-racist demonstrators murdered by the Klan that day also were also involved with a serious union organizing push in the textile mills was not a coincidence.

This, more than marketing brochures and ribbon cuttings, revealed the reality of the “Old North State.” Historian William Chafe, tracing a history of oppression that extended from the 1898 Wilmington coup d'etat and massacre all the way to the modern day, summarized it perfectly.

“This same progressive mystique has served as an exquisite instrument of social control, defining the terrain of political discussion in such a way that African Americans, factory workers and field hands have found it virtually impossible to break through the veil of civility and insist on change,” Chafe wrote in 1998. “Black citizens continue to be politically isolated, wages in North Carolina continue to stagnate as some of the lowest in the nation, and most of the state's economic growth continues to cluster in metropolitan counties increasingly populated by newcomers.”

White supremacist paramilitaries pose outside a burned-down Black newspaper building during the 1898 Wilmington massacre and coup d'etat. Violence like this underlay North Carolina's 'progressive mystique.'

And when the social order was truly threatened, he continued, “the ultimate weapons of violence and demonization could always be employed. For the progressive mystique existed hand in hand with a less attractive but ultimately decisive willingness to use caricature, mass hysteria, fear and violence to maintain the racial status quo.”

Sound familiar?

Fortunately, the people of a place are not the same as its governments. Beyond the walls of that blood-soaked fortress plenty of communities under fire have survived, connected and fought against oppression with incredible bravery.

While the South is often written off — like many Southern queer and trans people I've been told to move more times than I can count — we've always been here. A 2023 analysis by the Williams Institute and the National LGBTQ Task Force found that 36 percent of LGTBQ people in the U.S. live in the South, a far higher percentage than any other region of the country. Despite all we face, that number is growing, not declining —and not for nothing.

Politically the state is far more fractured than it appears, and often more radical. Queer land projects lie across a mountain from fundamentalist compounds, lily white suburbs with enthusiastic Trump-backing gentry spill into mostly Black rural areas with a long history of working class organizing.

While resilient, queer and trans people in N.C. have historically been on the wrong side of the status quo, facing “the ultimate weapons” Chafe wrote about, especially as an overwhelmingly working class demographic under a notoriously anti-labor state regime.

In 1996, when Democrats still held a firm lock on most of North Carolina's political power, including the state Senate and the governor's mansion, they passed a draconian ban on equal marriage by overwhelming majorities. Gov. Jim Hunt, touted as one of the region's leading Democratic progressives, signed it.

In 2010 Republicans gained majorities in both branches of the General Assembly. This was in no small part due to Democratic complacency and a consistent refusal to make any real changes to the status quo to draw in broader support.

In their very first session, the newly Republican-dominated legislature sought to enshrine discrimination even further into the state constitution by adding a marriage equality ban to it. But they had an obstacle. Their majority in the N.C. House was too thin to reach the three-fifths support required to place such a measure on the ballot.

But, in a pattern that remains depressingly familiar, Democrats bailed them out, with 10 representatives joining the Republicans to make sure hatred got its day.

By the mid-2010s a combination of extensive gerrymandering and continued Democratic fecklessness resulted in a far-right lock on the legislature despite its increasingly unpopular decisions.

In 2014, a federal court struck down the state's prohibitions on equal marriage, and the following year the Obergefell ruling did the same nationwide. As railing against equal marriage lost political utility in the face of legal failure and growing public rejection of de jure homophobia, the far-right turned to targeting trans people as a wedge issue — and because they hate us and seek our annihilation. North Carolina would end up being one of their first testing grounds.

The North Carolina State Legislative Building, home of the General Assembly. Photo used under Creative Commons License.

HB2 (and HB 2.0)

In 2016 the North Carolina legislature decided to put this horrific strategy into practice. The result was HB2, the notorious “bathroom bill,” which banned trans and non-binary people from using any bathroom that differed from the gender marker on their birth certificates in schools, local and state facilities. The law was clearly a slap-dash affair, as it didn't even specify how this would be enforced.

This was supposedly in response to Charlotte city council adding protections for trans people to its local non-discrimination ordinance. But the political calculus went well beyond that.

In 2012 Republican Pat McCrory had trounced conservative Democratic Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton and taken the governor's seat, so N.C. Republicans had a trifecta for the first time in living memory. Unlike many outside the state, they were quite aware that much of the population hated them. They quickly moved to redraw voting districts and overhaul multiple other parts of state government to ensure they never lost power again.

While gerrymandered districts entrenched them in the legislature, Gov. McCrory's statewide re-election was on much shakier ground. Republican legislators were closely connected to the far-right think tanks and policy circles that were pushing a shift to targeting trans people. Rabid transphobia seemed just the thing to mobilize conservative voters and target a population they hated.

While coverage of HB2, and the ensuing international outrage in response to the law, dubbed it the “bathroom bill” and a thoroughly Republican project, there was a bit more going on under the surface.

HB2 wasn't just shoved through over solid Democratic opposition. In that old, familiar pattern with anti-queer and trans legislation in N.C., two Democratic representatives joined Republicans to support it.

The bill also went further than just bathrooms. It banned local non-discrimination ordinances and, importantly, forbade any attempts to pass local minimum wage protections. As always, attacks on trans people are closely linked to those on other communities on the front lines and, of course, on labor.

The sheer, nonsensical vindictiveness of HB2's bathroom provisions drew a wide backlash. Companies pulled events and planned expansions in N.C. The Obama administration, while not great on trans issues, showed far more spine than their later Democratic successors and actually threatened to yank key federal funding. HB2 faced multiple lawsuits and McCrory became a national laughingstock.

Intended to rally far-right support, the bill actually had the opposite effect. Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper, while no leftist, took more of a public stance in favor of trans rights, at least in rhetoric, than any statewide Democratic politician before (or, honestly, since). Despite Trump sweeping the state that year, McCrory narrowly lost to Cooper.

The economic losses from HB2 continued to mount (tallying in the end to an estimated $400 million). While North Carolina gentry are plenty bigoted, the far-right had broken one of their cardinal rules: they'd fucked with the money. By the Fall of 2016 elite lobbying groups like the North Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association were already shouting at legislators to repeal HB2.

A flurry of negotiations followed, with governor-elect Cooper pressuring the Charlotte city council to adopt a “compromise” originated by tourism industry groups: repeal their local trans protections (then the subject of an ongoing legal battle against HB2) in return for scrapping the law. The council complied in advance, and nevertheless, HB2 persisted, as legislators refused any move to repeal.

In return for ditching trans rights rather than fighting on, they got nothing. Sadly, the lesson would not be learned.

By the end of the year the Electoral Integrity Project, which monitors elections in 153 countries, rated North Carolina “no longer functionally a democracy” due to gerrymandering, the targeting of marginalized voters and the legislature arbitrarily changing laws on a whim with zero transparency. Their analysis placed it “alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies.”

“North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair redistricting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project,” political scientist Andrew Robinson, who worked on the report, wrote in a column in the News and Observer.

In March 2017 the NCAA tournament announced they'd pull out of the state if HB2 stayed on the books — basketball is basically its own religion here — and even plenty of rich conservatives told legislators in no uncertain terms to knock it off.

But the Republicans had a problem. Plenty of them who'd been happy to use bigotry as an election year issue were ready to cut bait, but the more rabid among their ranks really hated trans people. They didn't have the votes in their own caucus to do what the NCAA and their wealthiest donors were demanding.

For the first time in most of a decade, the votes of Democratic legislators were a hot commodity. With economic pressure bearing down and the Republican leadership desperately needing their support, they had immense leverage to kill HB2 once and for all.

They proceeded to completely waste it.

Instead of holding out for repeal, most of the Democratic caucus joined the GOP to pass HB142, which made just enough cosmetic changes to HB2 to get the NCAA and other corporations off their backs. In fact, it preserved the worst of the bill, including keeping the prohibitions on local non-discrimination rules in effect for years to come. Even on the bathroom front it inserted byzantine regulations that still meant trans people would need a court case to use a public restroom. Gov. Cooper promptly signed it.

Queer and trans people around the state tagged it “HB2.0” and rightly pointed out this was a gross betrayal. Legal organizations dubbed it a “fake repeal.”

Pressured by this (and wanting to exercise some leverage), even prominent figures in Gay Inc circles condemned the measure. Then-state Rep. Chris Sgro (later the communications director for HRC and now a lobbyist for Meta) pointed out that it “doubled down on discrimination.” Even when the NCAA lifted the boycott, they noted they were doing so “reluctantly.”

In the weeks and months after, Democratic legislators went about their usual annual circuit of town halls. But members of the public showed up in force, angry about their backing of HB2.0. The Democratic politicians repeatedly, pointedly refused to call on trans speakers, especially trans women.

While they'd initially joined wider trans communities in condemning the bill, over the years HB2.0 was in effect the state's Gay Inc. groups increasingly turned to gatekeeping and shutting down more radical activism. With their upper ranks overwhelmingly staffed by cis gay gentry, they’d become more focused on preserving their careers and funding now that the equal marriage fights were over. Like the “white moderates” rightly condemned by the civil rights movement, they became part of that “exquisite instrument of social control” that propped up the status quo.

One stark example played out later that same year, when trans activists in Asheville asked local candidates at a forum hosted by Campaign for Southern Equality point blank if they'd pass a non-discrimination ordinance with teeth, in defiance of HB142, and then go to court to defend it.

Allison Scott, one of the non-profit's directors, seized the mic and changed the question to something more “pragmatic,” in her words. She asked officials only to commit to some vague non-discrimination measure at some future point, after HB142 had expired. Trans people even pressuring Democrats with an inconvenient question was beyond the pale for CSE.

After all, the organization's higher-ups had their political prospects to think about.

In 2021, once the ban on local non-discrimination protections finally expired, CSE headed up an effort to pass such laws in cities around the state. But many of the ordinances were quietly, intentionally written to have little to no effect, with minimal penalties and byzantine legal processes aimed at protecting bigoted business owners and landlords rather than those they hurt.

From her perch as a Buncombe County commissioner, CSE executive director Jasmine Beach-Ferrara even admitted as much, emphasizing the law’s purpose was to “communicate values” rather than penalize bigotry. She also waxed rhapsodic about what good people far-right religious bigots actually are.

In an event later that year Scott let slip that they watered down the ordinances not just for business owners and landlords (bad enough already!), but rather to ensure unanimous support from (mostly Democratic) local elected officials. And sure enough, in the first year after Asheville's toothless ordinance went into effect, for example, precisely zero discrimination complaints were resolved in the victim’s favor. Eventually, locals stopped filing them entirely.

Not coincidentally, Beach-Ferrara and Scott were both running for office in 2022, for Congress and Asheville city council, respectively. They wanted headlines without offending Democratic donors. It didn't work. Beach-Ferrara had directed millions in public tax incentives to notorious arms dealer Raytheon and threatened protesters with arrest. Scott backed brutal police crackdowns on the homeless. Combined with their open contempt for any queer (let alone trans) person justifiably unsatisfied with the status quo, their bids for office imploded.

Both lost, in no small part because of a lack of support from the left. Democratic statewide judicial candidates, generally a good barometer for how many votes someone can get just by having a “D” beside their name in a general election, drew slightly more votes in solidly blue Buncombe County than Beach-Ferrara did.

In 2022, North Carolinians again denied Republicans a supermajority — until Rep. Tricia Cotham, who ran as a fairly progressive Democrat, switched parties to rectify the misguided will of the voters.

So we reach 2025, when Democrats that voters sent to the capitol to stop the far right — despite some of the most extreme gerrymandering in the world — have again teamed up with them. The rest of us pay the price.

Tearing down the wall

“As the South goes, so goes the nation,” W.E.B. DuBois said, drawing the links between Jim Crow and America's wider capitalist hellscape.

It was bleakly, eternally prescient. Sadly, the left — including the queer left — has far too often written off the region, while our enemies have always seen it as a place to consolidate power and hone their tactics. It is telling that there is far more attention paid to raising money for trans people leaving the South than there has ever been to strengthening the far larger numbers of us who are here to fight for our homes and for each other.

DuBois' words are, in many ways, doubly true for N.C. Like HB2 debuted a strategy that the far-right has since deployed around the country, it was also a harbinger of the pattern that continues to threaten our existence — how willing Democrats were to throw trans people under the bus to maintain an oppressive status quo. Today’s surrenders by N.C. Democrats to increasingly severe anti-trans laws are a similarly ominous sign. What starts here never stays here, and what starts here won’t stop until we stop it.

Former Gov. Cooper, who announced a U.S. Senate run in late July, is already facing a propaganda barrage tarring his lukewarm rhetorical support for trans rights as “radical gender ideology.” Given the track record of N.C. Democrats, odds aren’t great on him mounting much of a defense.

Anti-racist and anti-cop graffiti on the segregationist Vance monument in downtown Asheville, summer 2020. City hall finally removed the monument after locals declared that they'd tear it down themselves. People in N.C. have always defied an oppressive status quo. Photo from the Asheville Blade archives. Used with permission.

Importantly, we are not the only community facing these kinds of betrayals, often from the same officials. Rep. Carla Cunningham, who also supported SB442, provided the key vote to override Gov. Stein's veto of legislation requiring local law enforcement to cooperate more closely with ICE, even throwing in a xenophobic tirade so bigoted the state NAACP publicly condemned it. Cunningham then joined with Rep. Shelly Willingham, another supporter of that anti-trans bill, to override the veto of a law allowing Duke Energy even more latitude to pollute.

I make it no secret that I haven't had any faith in the Democratic Party for a long, long time. I'm an anarchist for many reasons, and their actions are at least a few of them.

But it's worth asking a sincere question to those still invested: What's the use of a party that repeatedly fails to do the one thing it's elected to do? What’s the point of supporting those who will just side with our enemies?

We could ask the same about those still supporting Gay Inc. Whatever the arguments for their tactics in the past, the plain truth is they've utterly failed now. While they may still hold a (weakening) grip on a lot of formal organizing within the state, there are other alternatives.

The more radical advocacy of Southerners on New Ground, the community coalitions against anti-homeless crackdowns and the massive post-Helene mutual aid effort spearheaded by networks of locals show the way forward. There are many different ways to organize against the threats we face, outside of the ones we’re told are our only options.

The fact that so many communities are under attack alongside us must also be the start of something better, of widespread organizing in solidarity against our common enemies. We can start with the fact that the same rich assholes keep betraying us, and the same rich assholes want us all gone. Together, we can give them the only answer they deserve: we’re not going anywhere.

Rather than a sanitized tale of how much better things used to be, the actual story of HB2 — its “repeal” and all — is much more instructive for understanding everything that’s happened since. The far-right accurately read that Democratic officials were willing to ditch trans people, and that their lack of any real commitment to human rights for all can quickly be exploited, all the way from initial “legitimate points” compromise to outright abandonment.

For the rest of us it teaches a different set of lessons: that if you want to hit even the most die-hard bigot where it hurts, you target their money and power. Then, when centrists tell you to compromise and let up the attack you laugh in their faces.

North Carolina Democrats, like their colleagues around the country and their predecessors all the way back to segregation, will not yield an inch until the costs become too high for them to do anything else.

The ivy of civility still covers the old wall of coercion.

It is far past time to tear it down.

— Edited by Corinne Green

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On July 23 media hosting platform Itch.io began systematically delisting, and in some cases removing, hundreds of LGBTQ+ and/or adult video games, table top RPGs, written stories and works of art from their storefront. This occurred overnight, after Australian anti-porn and anti-LGBTQ+ group Collective Shout pressured payment processors Visa and Mastercard to push Itch to purge such content from their website.

This caused immediate, mass damage. The Transfeminine Review, who broke this story, reported that many users were initially unable to access payments they had already received and the immediacy of this push wreaked confusion over what games and developers were being impacted. The situation was so chaotic PC Gamer had to issue a correction earlier this week on a story interviewing several developers, as even they found themselves unable to fully confirm what games were impacted.

In Transfeminine Review’s initial story, Itch gave no comment on why this was done or the scale of the impact.

These bans were not entirely unanticipated. In 2021 journalist Ana Valens reported on this very type of problem, warning it could eventually affect Itch given similar prior attacks on gaming hosting sites like Steam. On July 20, PC Gamer reported that Collective Shout was already planning to target numerous websites, with Itch just one of many.

At the time of the PC Gamer article’s publication the only statement given by Itch’s team was through a single saluting emoji posted by the founder on the community Discord. On July 24, Itch finally released a public statement. They justified the lack of notice as having to “act urgently to protect the platform’s core payment infrastructure. Unfortunately, this meant it was not realistic to provide creators with advance notice before making this change.”

Itch apologized for this “abruptness,” adding that they are auditing the website and would not reindex pages that they deemed as violating their policies while they implemented new “compliance measures.” They additionally said that “for NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account,” with an additional notice that some pages will be “permanently removed.”

This statement revealed that every single adult game would be deindexed from the storefront. While Collective Shout denies involvement in pushing the removal of all adult content, alleging they only advocated removing games with tags they disliked, Itch nevertheless maintains that they were pressured to deindex all adult content.

Immediately both Itch creators and fans began to mobilize in response. Users launched viral campaigns to bombard Visa and MasterCard’s customer support lines with calls in protest. Users shared any updates they had about new means of contacting payment processors, with many giving detailed strategy guides on how to best call in protest to get an effective response.

These users reported that, for multiple days, those customer service lines were overwhelmed and that workers said they were told by management not to talk to the public about these bans. Polygon reported that this amounted to the boycott stalling entire customer service lines on nonstop lengthy holds in an effort to get payment processors to reverse course.

This push has already had some positive effects. The founder of Itch, known as Leaf, revealed that the most effective target for protest is the payment processor Stripe. Leaf, in an addendum to the statement, suggested that there are ongoing negotiations with both Stripe and PayPal, especially to try and maintain what content remains on the site.

According to Valens, the continued pressure on Visa has had demonstrable effects through their customer service employees. Activists report being screamed at by customer service reps, having insults like “rapist” hurled at them and employees even alleging that callers may be engaging with illegal content. As many in the replies to Valens’ post said, this is a sign to both keep going while also maintaining some compassion for overworked call center employees, who are likely facing harassment from management.

Currently, it isn’t clear what direction things will go. Trans News Network reached out to Itch, Visa, and MasterCard for comment. None replied before publication.

In a statement to Trans News Network, Stripe declared: "Stripe has a policy against commenting on users. Generally speaking, we take action when we conclude that users violate our terms of service. We do not support adult content."

Trans News Network replied, urging a better response that addresses users’ needs, and has not received any additional reply. Following this statement, users revealed how to put pressure on Stripe through public information.

Payment processors are continuing to raise more escalations. Valens reported that, according to an insider with game studio Riot Games, MasterCard is pushing them to censor any instances of negative talk about the company in any contexts affiliated with the site.

But signs are emerging that the protests are working, though payment processors still denythat public pressure is having an effect. One Reddit user claimed to receive an emailed response from Visa that said:

"As a global company, we follow the laws and regulations everywhere we do business. While we explicitly prohibit illegal activity on our network, we are equally committed to protecting legal commerce. If a transaction is legal, our policy is to process the transaction. We do not make moral judgments on legal purchases made by consumers."

“Visa does not moderate content sold by merchants, nor do we have visibility into the specific goods or services sold when we process a transaction. When a legally operating merchant faces an elevated risk of illegal activity, we require enhanced safeguards for the banks supporting those merchants."

MasterCard released a similar statement publicly on their website:

“Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.

Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.”

Regardless of the position payment processors and Itch take, it is undeniable that an immense amount of damage has been done to independent creators. Trans News Network talked to over two dozen game developers, artists, and writers about their experiences with the Itch ban, and how it affected them. The result was an overwhelming consensus of the fear that these bans will have as they grow in severity and affect more walks of life.

’We’re not safe here’

In the immediate days after, creators have found themselves at a loss of what to do. Game developer krispycat, also known as ButterflyLatte, reports that her NSFW game demo, known as “The Seventh Bride,” was deindexed, and is only shown when specifically searched for. It wasn’t just this game, either.

“On a whim, I tried to search up my SFW games as well - Wendy, warm, Like Seafoam. These games are fairly innocent and wholesome; 'warm' and 'Wendy' star children. However, they don't appear in the suggestions either - I suspect it's because they're yuri games,” she recounted, describing a genre of fiction which depicts romance between two female characters and has no inherent sexual elements.

“I am concerned that my audience will be severely cut. I'm already having to search for other places to release this particular game, and am worrying where I will be able to release future projects as well.”

She was not the only developer who reported the company singling out yuri content.

Developer Blood Machine, who primarily does both NSFW and SFW yuri content, reports that one of her games, called Girl Purgatoriem, was taken off the site completely. While reuploaded on her personal website, she still finds herself severely affected.

“It’s uncertain if I can take out collected funds out of Itch at all, uncertain how safe my next game will be to release. Another TTRPG I did art for is quite hard to publish on Itch now as well. Also most of my friends make games and had at least one in progress or published project affected.”

Blood Machine also does commissions for both 2D and 3D art, which she notes is also at risk if this censorship escalates further. “Since the commissions are very much tied to gamedev, often released on itch, it affects me quite directly there as well, as well as putting me at risk with accepting payments at all potentially, since I accept a lot of commissions that are NSFW in nature.”

Developer Toni (AKA A Story In Pieces), who the writer of this article previously interviewed and playtested a game for, develops primarily lesbian erotic/horror homebrew GameBoy games. She similarly reports seeing a substantial drop in attention and income from this ban.

“My most popular games, and the only ones that I consistently earn any money or opportunities from, have been delisted from Itch’s store. They can't be searched directly on the site or found through browsing anymore, so even after the initial push of support and downloading from people over the ban, my overall traffic has sunk,” Toni said. “Itch's new terms about what content is permitted has put community funding bundles into chaos, too, and could mean I won't even see the previous payout I'm still waiting on.”

She said that this is her only consistent source of funding, and so her future revenue is impacted severely. In addition, her ability to sell physical goods is at risk. “I was hoping to sell physical cartridges of my games in-future, as well as little things like stickers, but there's even less places to sell physical goods from NSFW materials than the digital ones I already struggle to find a host for and sell.”

She added an important concern: that other sites like Patreon will also begin cracking down on queer content. “Between this and the new worry that places like Patreon will follow suit and shut NSFW creators out entirely soon, the impact seems to be coming from what feels like all sides.”

The impact this has had on some developers is particularly severe. A game developer known as Maddie May, also known as Milkboy, reports that two of her projects have been deindexed, including one that’s strictly safe for work. This impacted her views, with the days following seeing a significant dip, and discouraged her from working on future projects. More significantly, this may also make her homeless.

“I have no other means to support myself currently. Itch made me a little bit of money, but it already wasn't a lot,” May said. “Me and my girlfriend have been on the verge of homelessness for a while, and we survive completely on her income. I'm fortunate enough to have a place to live and a partner who makes enough to support what I do, but we just barely scrape by. Itch helped ease that struggle, if only a bit.”

Another game developer, Taylor McCue, focuses on video games about her experience as a trans woman. While she’s been out of game development for a couple of years, she was notified out of the blue as a journalist reached out to her about her games being deindexed.

“I am an older millennial queer and I remember the feelings of loneliness and the void of just not having anything like me in what I played. I got to see itch become a renaissance of queer works and community. I viewed it as an art movement and a potential future that I was a part of,” she recounted. “Since my game has been de-indexed I don’t know what to think. The pessimistic part of me knew this day would come but I didn’t think it would come so soon. When it did come I thought itch would at least email me or something.

“On the first day my viewcount and downloads spiked with people downloading the game and playing it one last time before it potentially vanished. Some people commented on the game as if it were doomed and I just didn’t know how to respond.”

Developers outside of the United States are just as affected. TangledVirus, a game developer from Brazil who was previously interviewed by this article’s author, creates a variety of visual novels on Itch, only some of which are NSFW. They report being severely affected by this.

“All of my adult visual novels were deindexed. I did change the tags on them and they are now back to being listed but some still aren't,” they said. “I have a patreon but like, most of my income was from the games on Itch and the adult ones were the ones that made the most cash.”

One Brazilian developer, who works the Wet Floor Games team, and who requested anonymity for safety, reports that the deindexing of their games resulted in a loss of thousands of views and dozens of downloads. According to statistics they shared, as of July 23, their games received around 5,000 views a day. After they were deindexed, they rarely got over 1,000 views a day.

Video game developers aren’t the only ones affected by this, either. Dorian, a member of the House of Black Roses plural collective, writes poetry and erotic novella hosted on Itch. One of their most popular works, an erotic short story collection, was deindexed from search pages, prompting them to take down the rest of their works in fear of further retaliation.

“This ban essentially removes Itch as a viable place for us to share work and build community. It's also been a hit to our feelings of relative safety in terms of finances and overall ability to build up something that allowed us a bit of freedom,” they said, adding that this was one of their sole sources of income as a disabled collective.

“Given that so many places use them as payment processors, their policies do run the risk of impacting us virtually anywhere we might try to establish ourselves,” they continued. “Policies like this really make it difficult to do one of the few things we can consistently handle doing as any form of job.”

A writer known as Worm Wood and Whatsanapocalae a trans man who does erotic short horror stories, reports that all of his work, aside from a rough draft of a novel, “have been shadowbanned.” Three of his pieces, including a free one, “have been removed.”

Astrid, a queer author, reports that they host entirely safe for work stories on Itch - nothing explicit, nothing sexual.

“I don’t even know how it happened. It’s just my book, which is actually a pre-order, but was searchable before. It’s no longer searchable. You have to go in and find it with a direct link,” they said. “So far, it hasn’t entirely hurt me, but I feel like if it doesn’t get resolved by the time it gets released in a few months, then it could. But not being able to find it’s kind of scary.”

Another writer, who goes by both Dee and Tormented Artifacts, primarily works on safe-for-work queer cosmic horror. She describes how none of her works have anything in them that violates the Itch adult content rules – and yet were still deindexed.

“I’m getting zero sales now from the platform that was my biggest sale leader for the last three months. This is about a third of my income gone.”

While she has additional income through her work in leatherwork and as a tattoo artist, the bans are still a severe hit.

“It’s becoming clear [far-right actors] are going to be driving us off of social media for existing as trans, and the social; media and internet is where I make my living. Can’t do it in person anymore. It’s not just about the ability to have a life via having an income, it’s also a long-term impact on your quality of life,” she said. “The people I network and talk to to keep myself sane are all online, they’re all over the world.”

Talia, another writer and also a tabletop game developer, saw one of her works entirely deindexed because of a single sex scene, and for being tagged adult. “They just quietly removed our visibility of our works overnight without any warning. That’s compliance in advance. We’re not safe here.”

She has no other storefronts where she can sell her products, save for Patreon, as the continued worries of pressure from Stripe and PayPal eats at her. She currently has no other means of supporting herself.

Artists are just as impacted. Dusky, an artist and writer, was working on launching a large queer NSFW webcomic. They were going to put it up on Itch for a small fee, with additional means of support through Patreon.

“I had started arranging my stuff to be formatted to post [on Itch], and I’ve been working on it for the past couple of months, then this happened.” While their content was going to contain adult themes and sexual content, they emphasized it wasn’t porn, but a larger narrative.

“I’m angry, I feel violated, I feel a sense of despair. What do I do? I’ve been preparing to do it this way, and now I’ve got to finally change gears, figure out how to reorganize my stuff, figure out how I’m going to monetize it.”

Dusky brought up a similar sense of anxiety as others – that other services like Patreon would fall. “So if I’m somebody who is targeting people for specific reasons, then my next target would of course be Patreon. So even with the lifeline of Patreon being there, I’m not confident anymore.”

’A lifeline for queer creatives’

One user, who organized a bundle (a group of discounted games purchasable in a collection) for queer adult media and requested anonymity to avoid targeting, reports that games in their bundle – alongside many others – are being completely taken down by users out of fear of having their livelihoods stripped.

“These bundles are a lifeline for queer creatives, and now they're basically off the table. A lot of adult material is usually in these bundles,” they said, while adding that the community was nevertheless banding together in the face of this growing adversity, still holding hope for the future.

Taylor McCue mentioned still having some hope for Itch specifically.

“I got more donations in one day than I usually get in two weeks like 90 dollars vs maybe 5 dollars. It felt weird seeing that much money come in since I didn’t know and still don’t know if itch will actually let me withdraw that money. It was a weird feeling. Since then my view count has plummeted back down to lower than it was before.

“I haven’t done a lot with my life but the games I made are one of the few things I was proud of that made me feel like I mattered beyond just being an insignificant speck in the universe. It made me feel like people cared,” she added. “With the way itch is now I have been rushing to create archives through archive.org and self hosting. I’ve asked people to help keep my games alive by sharing them but ultimately I’m not a company.

“I don’t know how the people who liked my last games will be able to find anything new I make. It’s just really sad,” she concluded. “I guess the fucked up thing is – and I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this or not – is that I never thought I’d have my own experiences with sexual trauma and sex work de-indexed in the name of ‘protecting women.’ I am afraid that if this keeps up there won’t be any place to talk about being fucked up, abused, or just anything negative.”

Worm Wood was planning on launching a storefront to help support himself, and is anxious about the impacts these bans will have on his work. While his main job isn’t affected, he nevertheless has been focusing on expanding his reach and making connections in the community through this.

“I am worried about how it’s going to impact my shop once it opens and how I’m going to market myself, because having everything on Itch and in bundles with other creatives got my work into the public eye in a way that I didn’t ever expect.”

Some creators report that an entire game jam – or collection of games developed in a short period to build community – was affected. The Toxic Yuri Game Jam, consisting of over 200 different games, saw significant hits, with over half of the games delisted and several being completely removed from the site. One user, known as Kastel, describes how a joke game they made was delisted squarely for having the tag “erotic.”

They mention how this jam was filled with first time developers, and how the occurrence of these bans led to mass panic, watching a happy community turn into people feeling completely doomed.

“I’ve done a bunch of these game jams, so I’m giving them advice. And then I’m looking at all this and it’s just… what do I even say? This is a pretty bad situation. I can’t pretend that this is good. This isn’t a wonderful thing we can all survive. It’s pretty rough. I feel bad for everyone, especially because it’s their first wave of censorship.”

A separate developer, known as Saoirse, describes how her team’s game ‘Contamination Protocol’ was made for lesbians as a “weird alien bug sex game,” something created by her community for fun. Her game, like many others, were de-indexed for having adult content. But notably, she points out that games tagged with “incest” – often games made by developers exploring their own trauma – were immediately removed from the site entirely.

“I think it was everything that was specifically tagged with incest was like fully de-listed from the platform. So that has obviously kind of thrown a lot of the jam into a little bit of chaos,” she said. “All of the judges have said, you know, everything's still going to keep going. We have all of the games, but there are a couple games that were only hosted on the web. There were no like direct downloads to them. So that's especially tough.”

She detailed that, while there are games being shared in a small torrent so community members can play them, this is hardly a permanent solution, and it certainly can’t help developers get off the ground.

She also gave statistics for her game’s performance. Prior to the ban, it received around 71 views. Afterwards, it received only seven.

While she isn’t relying on this game to survive owing to its free nature, many developers in the jam do rely on game development income full-time. She also mentions that she “wouldn't be surprised if this reach just continues to expand,” but adds she just wants to help people push back on this.

Another user, known as Fisher, describes how it was one of the people who helped discover the bans to begin with. It noticed that one of the games in the jam wasn’t indexed, knowing that it was previously. “Someone in the [Toxic Yuri Game Jam] server started talking to me about game indexing, and noticed how it seemed like a lot of games weren’t searchable. I checked, and found that my own game, which had been previously indexed, no longer was.”

“Everyone is disrupted now. People are in a rush to make their own websites, host their games - and some people have even had payouts frozen if their games were suspended.”

Palette, another game developer in the jam, saw her works delisted as well. “Itch's ban… got my visual novel delisted just weeks after finishing it, which was really really sucky… The real tragedy to me is my sisters and inspiration, the authors that got me into this scene. I'm not dependent on my art like a lot of them are, but also more selfishly... I'm upset they're harder to find or completely gone. I've never really been into the more sexual aspects of their works specifically (‘I read it for the plot’ but unironically, hahaha), but the stories, the characters, the art matters to me.

“She Was Swallowed by the Sun by Snek RK is a work that's really important to me because of its story, its world, its characters, its themes of resisting fascism and anger at a world that hates you, and it's delisted now,” she said.

Emmeline, also known as pltn, is a developer focusing on visual novels, and who also participated in the jam. She details how a big point of this game is to write about “women in unhealthy relationships, with space for those who want to explore risque content that often leads to 18+ markings. I find having that element of freedom in creative expression can be liberating.”

She gave concise but harrowing words about the impact the ban had on her. “As a result of the ban, I and thousands of other developers have had our work turned invisible, and in some cases, taken off the site outright. The effects of the bans came without warning, and many creators who rely on Itch as a source of income are left scrambling to figure out what their options are. I have to consider if I want to self-censor, find other more niche platforms to host sensitive art on, or be erased.”

Another developer, known as Pengo, is a disabled game developer who creates both SFW and NSFW visual novels, often around subverting the gender binary. He emphasized how, both before and after the ban was initiated, there was a strong and kind community among all the folk within, even while making games with topics that payment processors deem unsavory.

“The only game I currently have on Itch (though I am making another game currently that I hope to have done by September) is the demo of Seams and Senses, the game I made for the TYVJ,” he said of his game. “It's a character-driven game that shows neurodivergent queer characters as they try to survive both a capitalist world that doesn't care about their needs and maladaptive behaviors they themselves have formed over time.

“I made (and am continuing to make!) this game out of love for myself and for others who may struggle with similar issues. It has a lot of intimate and raw feelings inside. The characters are toxic in generally grounded ways despite the weird designs and setting, and I'd like it if people could feel seen through them,” he continued. “If people felt less alone and more accepting of their thoughts and feelings. It is the first piece of media I've made to actively involve sex without any hiding or skirting around it.”

He had hoped that developing on Itch would allow him to grow an audience, yet his game was deindexed, only accessible through direct links. “It felt worthwhile and like I might be able to make an income for myself, but now... I dunno. I guess I'm just going to see what happens. I know a lot of people disagree with these policy changes and with payment processors being so controlling, so hopefully things change. I would love to be able to connect with people who enjoy my work, without it being a secret passed around in whispered queer circles.”

Slitherbop, another developer, described how the game he developed, RAINJOKE, was completely removed from the storefront entirely. “It feels like... this is really sad and scary and frustrating that people are no longer allowed to even be near these topics. I Already felt extremely limited in expression due to social pressure, it’s fucked up that even now that I felt comfortable enough to not care, there’s suddenly increasingly less and less places to share it anyways.”

“It makes me worry about the future of art, and information in general. I worry that there is going to be so many games that were on itch that are just going to be lost to time and forgotten about because of this. They should get to exist too. I want art to persist so bad, ESPECIALLY the queer and horny and visceral ones.”

He has since listed the game on his personal website, after seeing the perseverance within the community. While he still has anxiety over other sites like Ko-Fi removing NSFW content, he continues nevertheless.

He added that this community gave him hope to start developing this type of work to begin with. “Seeing what the jam runners had previously made and what other people were making for the jam was really motivating. It made me feel like whoa, people WON’T kill me for what I want to express in my story “

A first time developer, who requested anonymity for safety, saw that the game they submitted to the jam was delisted. “I’m honestly crushed. I thought I’d found a safe place to post art about topics of queerness and kink that are important to me, but it seems that was a futile hope,” they said, adding that their game is nearly impossible to discover outside of a single listing.

Yet, they describe immense support from the community in response.

“Overwhelmingly, the jam's community has been full of kind, mature, and passionate people who are eager to make all sorts of art. Folks in the server were incredibly happy to help one another through code debugging, writer's block, illustration, or just to offer each other encouragement, and many have stuck.”

A ‘more resistant’ future

The Wet Floor Games developer reported pausing all game development. The reason: to build a new website as an alternative to Itch. That project is still in its early stages, but they were already considering it prior to these bans.

“For starters, Itch doesn't support Pix (Brazilian public payment system), which other game devs here in Brazil were vocal about as it's a big deal for us,” they said. “On top of that, I felt Itch's periods of instability and being offline were way too frequent, which made me afraid of solely relying on it to host our games (and more broadly, afraid for the wider indie game community for also being very reliant on it).”

“So, even though I'd never made a website before, I started researching and asking around to put stuff into motion. but nothing concrete. Then the NSFW deindexing happened, and it really sealed the deal for me to focus on this project,” they continued. “I understand ‘make a better storefront’ doesn't address the root causes of the issues we're facing, but I feel it can do some good for the indie game community in the meantime… I feel like the model I've come up with will make it more resistant to future content bans than Itch was.”

Still, this project is in its very early stages, and they emphasized that this is all still very tentative. Nevertheless, they “find the investment necessary. not just for my own games, but for the good of the community.”

This developer isn’t the only one considering going independent. Fisher mentioned having concerns about hosting future game jams, and having to develop a separate site. “I had planned to host the EroHorror Jam from September to mid October, and the Ryona Jam from January to mid February,” it said. “The games that would be made for these jams now fall outside the rules of what itch would allow, so I now need to go through the process of making my own website to host the jam on, outside of itch.”

Pengo described how his lack of options forced him into a sort of activism against payment processors for this.

“I feel like I will never be able to support myself through my work if what I want to create is barred from monetization unless it is scrubbed clean of any sort of queerness or adult content. I'm under disability in part because it is believed I cannot hold a regular job either, so... What's next for me? I don't really know. Like I said, I'm just kind of seeing what happens. Calling, sending emails, doing what little I can to support, but ultimately just seeing what happens.”

The Toxic Yuri first time developer described how the community created a sort of underground network in response to these bans.

“Since Itch's announcements and changes in policy, many folks in the jam community have been working to pull together all of the jam games into a large zip file, or make their own personal websites to host their work,” they continued. “Folks are working hard to preserve what they've made, but sadly direct downloads and private websites just don't have the reach that a seat in Itch's incredibly trafficked public listings do.”

They added an important note – that the community should not abandon what the public deems ‘evil’ games.

“I’ve seen lots of reporters and news sources softball this topic, saying things like ‘well they did get rid of a bunch of really evil porn games, but some innocent queer ones got hit too, which means it is bad,’ and frankly, as a queer creator, I find that attitude incredibly demeaning.

“There’s no room to cede ground and pick and choose what ‘evil games’ are. Even art I personally hate deserves to exist. Cis/straight NSFW game makers are getting hit hard by payment processors too, and now is a time for solidarity rather than division and infighting. Freedom of expression means freedom of expression, and that includes things that might be gross, uncomfortable, or even criminal in reality, because fiction doesn’t have significant bearing on reality.”

They added, “If I can play Call of Duty and gun down an airport full of civilians, why can’t I buy a game that even dares to talk about incest?”

Slitherbop feels the community response to this is, nevertheless, reason for optimism.

“A thought I would see in the [Toxic Yuri VN] server, that I feel too, is that this is motivating to want to keep making transgressive art and go hard with it. It’s been awesome to see people still working on their things. I hope we all keep making the art we want to make no matter what!”

Censorship as another weapon against the marginalized is absolutely unacceptable. Adult fiction, especially including taboo topics banned by Itch like rape or incest is important to defend no matter how “gross” it may seem. For many, it is a way to process trauma that they’ve previously survived. For others, it’s a way to explore complicated themes that are designed to help others who have borne witness to these events in real life. This content is not made to harm survivors; it is made to help and inform them.

Additionally the “think of the children” excuse blindly ignores how this content is already inaccessible to children, and neglects a single unifying fact to all of these works: they are entirely fictional.

No hierarchical body, especially not those controlling the sole means many have to pay their bills and stay alive, should have control over what media people produce and why. Unequivocally, no one is harmed by the production of fictional content involving taboo topics, and no one should have the right to regulate it. Of course, this content is not for everyone, and that is why tags exist in the first place; to help users ignore content they don’t wish to see. This does not mean corporations or the state should have the right to ban it.

At the same time, fascist figureheads are pushing far-right content repeatedly without any such pushback or prohibition from the same companies censoring queer works. Attempts are repeatedly made by bigots to normalize fascism, to treat bigotry as if it's acceptable or funny, all the while pushing marginalized groups out of the very spaces they founded. This is deliberate, as the erasure of queer people involves the resurgence of a hyper-conservative social morality that leads to broad social exclusion.

The solution is simple – we must universally stand with those who are oppressed by those in power, and we must remove fascists from our spaces with every bit of effort we have. We have to stand with the freaks, those most glossed over in our communities, or they will come for us next.

If we do not stand with those of us who are producing works considered fringe by society, then we will all be next in line, and eventually there will be no one left to speak for us. The only way forward is liberation from censorship, poverty, and bigotry for all of us – not just a few.

—Edited by David Forbes

Correction, 8/10, 8pm CST - The user ‘Dusky’ was erroneously referred to as ‘Dusty,’ and was not linked to properly. This has been corrected — we regret the error.

Update, 8/14, 3pm CST - Itch, which did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication, alleged on Bluesky that this article is “full of misinformation.” The author of this article responded to these claims in detail in a separate Bluesky thread here. The site has since stated in a separate reply that they “regret” their “choice of words.”

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Trans News Network (TNN) is a worker-run nonprofit LGBTQ+ newsroom publishing articles that impact trans communities. Follow our work at https://transnews.network/ Donate to our launch fundraiser at https://transnewsnetwork.networkforgood.com/

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Throughout the past month Congress began discussions on several military and governmental funding bills with sweeping bans on gender affirming care for federal employees, their families, ICE detainees, veterans, military troops, and more. Mirroring a failed attempt to ban trans Medicaid coverage earlier this year, this move represents the latest push to ban life-saving trans healthcare by fascist politicians and liberal sympathizers. This comes as Republicans also hope to deflect the public’s attention from Trump's growing Epstein pedophilia scandals with genocidal attacks on trans healthcare.

These attacks include bans on funding for trans healthcare in funding bills for Veterans Affairs, the Department of Defense, general financial services for the government and the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE.

Parts of Congress went into recess early to avoid votes on releasing the Epstein files, and will stay out for most of August. They must pass legislation funding the government through bills like these by Sept. 30 in order to avoid a shutdown. The government was last funded by a continuing resolution that passed this March, with the help of some Democrats in the Senate despite furious calls from grassroots activists against caving to Republicans.

The bills are HR 3944, funding Veterans Affairs; HR 4213, funding the Department of Homeland Security; HR 4016, regulating funding the Department of Defense; and the yet-unnumbered FY26 Financial Services and General Government bill, restricting funding for various sectors of the federal government.

The latter bill is the most sweeping in its restrictions, with a press release from the House Appropriations Committee boasting that it will prohibit “the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program from covering puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or surgical procedures for gender affirming care.”

Additionally, this bill also contains a ban on the display of flags other than the United States flag, bans funding for abortions, attacks harm reduction programs for drug users, restricts a vague category of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ trainings, tightens restrictions on immigration, and implements racist attacks on anything associated with China while promoting the ‘lab leak’ COVID-19 conspiracy theory. This bill by and large contains provisions struck out of Trump’s massive reconciliation bill albeit watered down in severity with less sweeping restrictions and cuts.

The other three bills are no less severe in their impact on gender affirming care. HR 4213 includes a blanket ban on gender affirming care for immigrants locked in ICE custody, something especially troubling in light of masked ICE agents kidnapping both documented and undocumented immigrants – as well as American citizens – and subjecting them to horrific conditions before deporting them, including to countries they’ve never set foot in. This mirrors actions already taken with this administration against trans prisoners in Florida. It is no coincidence that this bill also includes an additional millions of dollars of funding for ICE in the next fiscal year.

HR 4016 is similarly awful, banning funding for gender affirming care for all active duty troops and their families. It also mandates that none of the funds be used to abolish or reconfigure Guantanamo Bay, the United States military prison in Cuba infamous for torturing inmates. Notably, Guantanamo Bay is also used to detain immigrants for years, including transgender immigrants as of earlier this year. The bill also bans COVID-19 vaccination mandates for soldiers and their families, while nevertheless granting tens of billions of dollars for all branches of the military and federal agencies.

HR 3944 has a unique set of worries and considerations. While up until July 16 it contained provisions funding for banning gender affirming care for veterans, restricting abortions, and restricting healthcare for undocumented immigrants, the most recent provision changed this. Reported to the Senate with an amendment presented by Sen. John Boozman (R-AR), there is no longer any restriction on any forms of gender affirming care, abortions, or immigrant healthcare.

However, this bill is far from safe. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) submitted an amendment to reinstate the abortion restrictions, and while none restricting gender affirming care have been submitted yet, it is entirely possible – and even likely – that one will be added, especially as it gets closer to the currently unknown voting date. Adding anti-trans and anti-abortion measures into laws at the last minute is a frequently used tactic in state legislatures such as Georgia and North Carolina.

Currently only two of these bills have received floor votes in the House, both passing along party lines. However, both times several Democrats defected to vote alongside Republicans. For HR 4016, Representatives Don Davis (NC), Jared Golden (ME), Vicente Gonzalez (TX), Adam Gray (CA), and Marie Perez (WA) all voted to pass it. For HR 3944, only Golden and Perez voted to pass it.

In the Senate this week, the Veterans Affairs bill, without the anti-trans provisions included, passed its first hurdle towards passage with a 90-8 procedural vote with the support of the vast majority of Democrats. Senators can use their leverage to ensure anti-trans language remains out of the bill before it passes without anti-trans language being reintroduced.

Late last year, 45 Democratic Senators and 146 House Democrats demanded that appropriations bills for this year’s budget not include anti-LGBTQ “poison pill” riders, forming a block strong enough to filibuster any harmful bill. Today, in an environment where many Democrats have been led to falsely believe that supporting trans rights costs them elections, this near unanimous opposition has quieted to a whimper.

Throughout all this, leading Gay Inc organizations have remained completely silent on these bills. Few politicians outside of the Congressional Equality Caucus – and only on social media – have spoken out about the impacts these have, and some Democrats have voted for them.

Trans News Network reached out to the five Democratic Representatives who voted to pass the House version of the VA bill,¹ and ten other Congressmembers across both chambers,² including Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). No Congressmember responded to the requests for comment. This article will be updated accordingly if any responses are received.

These bills make it clear that Republicans’ draconian assaults on transgender rights will not deescalate anytime soon. As seen with their furious attempts earlier this year to ban trans people from Medicaid, far-right legislators and the oligarchs who back them will stop at nothing to prevent trans people from receiving life-saving healthcare. Politicians do not have our backs, and will only take action when they are given no other choice.

How readers can fight back

Readers are advised to put pressure on their legislators — not only through consistent and nonstop outreach, but by staging protests in front of their offices and making it as clear as possible that this cannot pass

Readers can take inspiration from the recent successful grassroots campaign to pressure Democrats to kill an anti-trans provision with the Byrd rule, which stripped the trans Medicaid ban from Trump’s megabill passed earlier this month. Funding bills cannot become law without the help of Senate Democrats. Unlike the reconciliation process used to pass the GOP megabill, as these require 60 votes to get past the filibuster.

The most effective strategies could involve readers organizing grassroots campaigns that encourage trans people and their allies to push Democrats through emails, phone calls, and pressure through town halls or protests. It has to be clear that no bill including deadly bans on trans healthcare nor bills attacking trans rights are acceptable under any circumstances.

During the month of August, Congress will be on a long recess as members visit their districts with town halls and other events. Earlier this year, some trans activists disrupted in-person town halls to push Democrats to speak out more for trans rights, such as against Rep. Brad Sherman and Rep. Laura Friedman, both representing Los Angeles. As the attacks against our lives escalate, grassroots confrontation of politicians who throw trans people under the bus must similarly escalate.

But the first step to organizing any such push is the same as the first step of any successful activist campaign: organizing your local community as part of a broader international grassroots movement to save trans lives through community solidarity and direct action. Organizing is essential, as these attacks on marginalized livelihoods will not cease even if temporary relief is found through positive legislative policies.

So long as a hierarchical structure of capital exists, and so long as the iron fist of totalitarian states are in control of the worlds’ resources, marginalized people will never be free. The gentry’s pursuit of infinite growth will deplete everyone but those within their class of means to live. The only way out is to recognize that the gentry have no strength if the rest of us do not give them it.

There are plenty of resources out there for getting into organizing, particularly from radical perspectives. The podcast It Could Happen Here has an episode introducing listeners to organizing by informing them that they already know how to organize, and have the tools to do so.

Trans News Network’s sister publication The Free Radical conducted an interview with a leading organizer in the Twin Cities revealing some strategies for newcomers to get involved, as well as what types of local groups they should seek out. Other guides are present on each article within The Free Radical.

There is only one way to prevent the endless fascist terror threatening the lives of millions — to remove the very means of their oppression. This can be achieved, and it can even be achieved within our lifetimes. Solidarity among marginalized people internationally is the way to pursue this, not by placing trust in the hands of a small number of powerful people. There are no heroes in this struggle, there are only people fighting to live their lives. This must include you.

—Edited by Mady Castigan and David Forbes

Please subscribe to TNN with your email and share our articles with your friends to support our work! As a small worker-run publication, we rely on readers like you to expand our reach and maximize our ability to benefit trans lives everywhere.

If you’re able to afford it, donating to our launch fundraiser or committing to a monthly donation through our website helps us continue to publish important articles like this one, which would otherwise go unreported.

Feel free to tell us your thoughts and opinions with these reader polls! Responses may be used to shape future news coverage. All written comments will be read by at least one trans journalist!

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In case you missed our big announcement and name change, read about our relaunch as Trans News Network from MadyCast News here! We have been blown away by your support, surpassing our initial $10,000 fundraiser within just a few days of our month-long fundraiser. 

This crucial funding will secure our ability to continue paying our existing reporters to publish articles like this one, and further donations through the fundraiser or our newsletter towards will enable us to expand even further to publish multiple articles a week across different areas.

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Photo courtesy of Bethany Andres-Beck’s campaign

In the wake of last year’s election, Rep. Seth Moulton drew widespread outrage and protests at his office for falsely claiming, amid a heap of open transphobia, that support for trans rights cost Democrats the 2024 elections.

“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton told the New York Times. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Less than a year later, Moulton—who ran unopposed last year—is facing a primary challenge from trans agender software engineer Bethany Andres-Beck. Andres-Beck sat down with Trans News Network contributor Tom Sayers this week to discuss their campaign and how they see their role as a trans candidate at a time when our rights and very existence are under constant attack and scrutiny.

And, no, they don’t think trans rights cost the Dems the election. “Absolutely not. Inflation cost us the general election last year,” they said while laughing in an exclusive interview with Trans News Network contributor Tom Sayers.

The data agrees with that analysis: A GQR poll found that, among non-Harris voters, opposition to trans rights ranked far behind concerns about the economy. The same poll also found voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris over Trump on trans rights by a margin of 12 points (52–40).

At a broader level, Andres-Beck represents a new wave of progressive candidates across the country channeling grassroots anger against Democratic party leadership through primary campaigns against powerful incumbents. Zohran Mamdani’s overwhelming defeat of former NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo to become the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City exemplifies the demand for something new from the party base. Mamdani won on a working class message without compromising his strong positions in support of Palestinians and trans people against ongoing attacks on both groups by both Democrats and Republicans.

“I think there is a new approach to politics that is unlocking,” they said. “We have these direct communication pathways with voters where you can build connections…I’m putting myself out there and saying ‘Hey, is this something you’d want? Feel free to come join me.’”

Andres-Beck bucks the Democratic party establishment on issues that have sharply divided the party since the start of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, such as their commitment to not take money from corporate PACs or the Israel lobby. They said they see a connection between Palestinian liberation and trans liberation because both involve “the belief that something is so important that we are willing to do what we know we need to do, and then we’ll face the consequences whatever those end up being.”

As for why Andres-Beck is running, “I’m doing this because I want to make things possible in America that people have assumed to be out of the question…so that we can have nice things,” Andres-Beck told Trans News Network. What they’re offering is, to them, profoundly different to congressman Moulton. “To him, this is a career,” said Andres-Beck. “I’m doing this because of what I can accomplish…I like living in Middleton…I want to be here to serve my neighbors and my community and work with other people who also want to find hope.”

–Edited by David Forbes and Mady Castigan 

Read the full interview with Andres-Beck at the link below!

Full Interview with Seth Moulton Primary Challenger, Bethany Andres-Beck

transnews.network/p/full-interview-with-seth-moulton-primary-challenger-bethany-andres-beck-36ff

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The full interview between Andres-Beck and Trans News Network contributor Tom Sayers is available below, with edits made for length and clarity.

TNN: How is the first week of the campaign going?

BAB: It’s been really great and to see what things are landing with people. I had guessed that a trans person running against someone who got national prominence for making transphobic remarks would be a story.

TNN: Was that your intention when you announced your campaign?

BAB: There’s just not that many non-binary public figures, especially not folks who have been out for 20 years—I’m sure that 50 years from now there will be a lot more publicly non-binary figures. One of the things I’ve appreciated, especially living in a sort-of small town, is being able to be out and be public about [being non-binary] which stops it being just something people talk about on the internet or that Fox News can make a monster-under-the-bed story about; because people actually know me.

TNN: Was there a particular moment that you decided to run?

BAB: It was a process of exploration. I wanted to take a leave of absence before next year’s election and work to help defeat Seth Moulton and I started looking around for what that looks like. I was just so frustrated with the way he’s undermining the Democratic party, in addition to the trans comments, voting to praise ICE and against impeaching Trump. So I wanted to do something about that; I talked to friends, family, people who I would ask to support me. I got really positive responses.

The next question: Well who can I get to work for me? The first person I asked said Absolutely, sign me up. I will be your campaign manager…’

Ultimately, what it came down to is: I’m not a conventional candidate. If this was a normal election in a normal time—say he was moving on to some other office or it was gonna be an open primary—I don’t think I would be the candidate but because this isn’t that election, there is a really strong story about how we have possibilities and capabilities we haven’t even imagined yet.

TNN: What kind of politician do you want to be?

BAB: I’m drawing somewhat from my professional experience in software…I want to be the kind of politician who can collaborate with the people who are actually around us. I think sometimes people have treated bipartisanship as either getting half of what you want or just supporting the Republicans. I don’t think bipartisanship is giving a mugger half of the stuff in your wallet. I think it’s about finding people who actually agree with us that this would be better.

TNN: What are you offering that will be different to your will-be opponent, congressman Moulton?

BAB: I think one of the differences is our goals: He has already run for Congress; he challenged Nancy Pelosi for leadership. To him, this is a career. Since business school at Yale, he spent one year as a president of a company in Texas, and then he moved back to Massachusetts to run for office.

I’m doing this because of what I can accomplish; because I want to make things possible in America that people have assumed to be out [of the question]—we can’t possibly have nice things—okay, let’s fix that so that we can have nice things. That’s my goal and I think that is profoundly hopeful; it gives us something we can work towards, that we can believe in that is worth going after and is worth all of this hard work. It’s not about my career—I like living in Middleton, I don’t want to move to Washington, D.C. full time; that’s not my goal in life. I want to be here to serve my neighbors and my community, and work with other people who also want to find hope.

TNN: You have a track record of serving people there.

BAB: Yeah, I got very involved in our Affordable Housing Trust, which we actually set up…It’s still relatively new but we’re buying tools for the library so people can [borrow them to] fix up their homes.

And it’s certainly not all Democrats in that group—the nice thing about local politics is that it’s not about scoring points or getting on Fox News tomorrow morning. [It’s about] what we can accomplish.

TNN: I was looking at your TikTok, and you follow just six people: Melat Kiros for Colorado, Kat Abughazaleh for Illinois, Zohran Mamdani for NYC Mayor, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. Are these people who you see as your political contemporaries?

BAB: I think there is a new approach to politics that is unlocking. We have these direct communication pathways with voters where you can build connections that don’t have to go through—clearly still cable news has much bigger viewership rates than anything on TikTok—but if you’re talking to 20 people on TikTok, you’re talking to 20 people in a way that you don’t get to do through the lens of someone else.

All of these people are experimenting with this, because we don’t know what it does yet. They’re all people who I see as being earnest and authentic…It’s not that I’m trying to shape myself into some political mould; it’s that I’m putting myself out there and saying ‘Hey, is this something you’d want? Feel free to come join me.’

TNN: I read in another interview the reason you think there’s so much pressure on trans people in sports, especially at the college level, is because there’s so much pressure on everyone else in sports because of competition for scholarships.

BAB: When you’re trans, people will bring up these issues…and I was realizing how intensely anxious people were about sports in general before you talk about anything with kids. When I was growing up, I was a trans kid playing sports, but it was very informal—we were playing tackle football with no pads and no helmets on the playground and kids didn’t care. It was weird that grown-ups cared. But, just for regular sports, the point was teamwork and sportsmanship. It mattered less if you won than how you played, and those were valuable lessons that I think every kid should have access to.

TNN: Do you think that politicians—yourself included—should be ‘meeting voters where they’re at’ when it comes to views on trans rights or our access to sports and bathrooms?

BAB: So, I think one question is: Which voters? Because when politicians talk about meeting voters where they’re at, there’s an implication that trans voters don’t matter; that the families of trans people don’t matter. Some of the fiercest support I have encountered is from the parents of trans children. We’re not just political props; we’re actual human beings…

It’s not about this one specific issue. It’s about whether the government should be deciding which children get to play sports, or tell you which healthcare you’re allowed to access; it’s about freedom. The thing I love about America is that it’s an experiment in pluralism in lots of different kinds of people living together, and we know that creates fiction and conflict. But, if we stay committed to that idea of America, we have a path through that isn’t trying to argue with these [transphobic] people; it’s saying these aren’t matters for the government, that’s not one of the arguments we resolve by passing a law.

We can also use [this framework] to pivot to the things we should be passing laws about, like how we provide public education for everybody, or how we make sure that kids have spaces where it’s safe to play outside and how do we keep children from being hit by cars. Those are the things where [the] government can be effective and supportive. There’s no right or wrong answer for what gender is.

This is one of the places I find my faith very useful. I'm a Unitarian Universalist—very Massachusetts, right?—and one of the things it does is help people sit with things that are slightly uncomfortable and realize that it’s okay not everything about the world makes perfect sense because we can have faith in people and our communities.

TNN: Do you think trans and gender non-conforming people need a more confrontational or educational approach in politics? 

BAB: I don’t think people like school or being lectured. The way I think about it is that we need an audacious approach where we’re not afraid of being too much. Like, no, we should be celebrating that some people are weird and that’s good, because everybody is weird in some way and we should celebrate these things that make us different. And that is a very controversial opinion; that is an audacious thing to say.

I don’t feel the need to argue whether or not I exist because I’m here. I have already proven that I exist, I’m standing in front of you. So now I’m interested in what that does for people. When I end up in those conversations, I ask a lot more questions than I make statements because I already know myself—I spent 20 years trying to figure out if I was a boy or a girl! I have definitely thought about it a lot, and that’s not usually relevant to the conversation. Usually, I end up [realizing] people have all kinds of relationships to their own genders, their marriages or their relationships with their parents. They’re not thinking about kids in sports; they’re thinking ‘What does this mean for me if I didn’t have to do all these things [performing gender] that I thought I had to do.’

TNN: Do you think there’s people out there who want that type of approach across the board?

BAB: Oh I think people want that approach because it brings peace. It means that if I just exist, we don’t have to fight about that anymore.

TNN: How do you plan to engage with people in the House, probably mostly on the right, who genuinely believe, or purport to believe, that it’s sinful to be queer or trans and don’t want LGBTQIA+ rights enshrined in law?

BAB: I will certainly not start with arguing with them on that. I will start by working on all of the other things. If I can get them into a conversation, all of a sudden, they’ve already admitted that I’m someone to have a conversation with. And I think that’s part of why it matters so much that we’re in the room when laws about us are being made. So that they have to look me in the eye when they say something and I can be like, ‘Oh, really?’ And sometimes that’s all it takes for people to realize how ridiculous the words coming out of their mouth are.

TNN: How do you think Rep. Sarah McBride, the first openly trans congresswoman to be elected, is doing?

BAB: I don’t think there’s any right or wrong way to be the first person in a space because that is such a hard—you have to be exceptional to have gotten there at all. I have often been the most feminine person on a software development team, especially at the beginning of my career and [there’s a lot of] extra baggage that comes along with anything you do. So, whether or not I agree with McBride’s political goal, I think just by being there she unlocks possibilities.

I deeply admire people with the courage to stand up and just be. It’s something that I learned from my gay, trans, lesbian elders.

TNN: Do you see yourself as having a different political goal [to McBride]?

BAB: Well, because I’m not a conventional politician, and especially with my background as a software engineer, I know how to write software well, and government software mostly is not very kind to the users. We had [IRS] Direct File, which people love; the reports on it are fantastic and Congress just killed it because it made contractors slightly less money. And so we need people with the audacity to stand up to money; we need the people who are willing to not enrich themselves.

TNN: Now is maybe a great time to ask you about your funding. You’ve said you won’t take corporate donations. What are your fundraising policies? Would you take [money] from PACs?

BAB: The individual donations are going to be my primary path here, for sure. I’ m also not a person who has a super PAC sitting around with a million dollars in it…I’m relying a lot on the other people like me. At least the first round is people who want to see a different style of politics. People who want to see technical expertise and are frustrated with the questions that get asked of these CEOs.

I think especially in tech, a lot of us have made good middle class salaries for a long time—well the industry right now is going through a lot of layoffs, which is challenging for a lot of people–and we haven’t really had a place to invest in getting tech expertise into Congress, just because there aren’t options. If you spend 15 years doing politics, you are out of touch that was going on in tech anyway.

We don’t have privacy legislation in this country. My congressman [Moulton] was the co-sponsor of the TikTok ban. Instead of actually protecting users’ privacy with all of the software they use, they just went after the one company he didn’t like.

I don’t think people have to agree with everything I say to support this project because, if we can make this work right; if this approach of being earnest and authentic, and [campaigning] for what we can accomplish not what I can gain from it, we can get a very different kind of politic in America. And so anyone who wants to support some part of that with their $3,500 max [donation], it’s not going to be any one voice dominating the conversation.

TNN: If AIPAC came knocking, would you take [their money]?

BAB: Absolutely not. No. Right wing lobbying organizations—those people come in with money because they are trying to achieve a specific goal. I don’t think they would come knocking anyway.

I want to be able to represent the people in my district and I think it is particularly scummy when politicians take money from the companies they’re supposed to be regulating.

TNN: How do you see the connection between Palestinian liberation and trans liberation? Do you see any connection there?

BAB: The thing that stands out to me most about the recent movement for Palestinian liberation is the way that…it was young people coming together, organizing, that changed the national conversation; that disrupted the status quo. I think it’s really important for the Democratic Party to have a place for people who are willing to put themselves out there to do the organizing and to challenge the status quo. Certainly not everybody involved in the party has been welcoming of these changes. Not everybody in the party agrees with me that that’s what we should be doing.

I started in politics protesting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars at a time when that passed the Senate almost unanimously—shout out to Barbara Lee. The reason that I’m a Democrat is because at the time, even though people in the party disagreed with my position and thought I was hurting the cause by being patriotic or whatever, there were enough people who were also inviting me into the party…

I have friends in IfNotNow and I know people whose families have stopped associating with them and the grief is the same there as it is if your family stops associating with you because you’re gay or you’re trans. It’s something that matters so much that you’re willing to risk your relationships, because it’s that important. I think that’s probably the connection I see; the belief that something is so important that we are willing to do what we know we need to do, and then we’ll face the consequences whatever those end up being.

TNN: Do you think that Democratic support for trans rights cost the party the general election last year?

BAB: Absolutely not. Inflation cost us the general election last year; the fundamentals were not on our side. And it wasn’t just America; America’s election actually swung less dramatically against the incumbent than many other countries did…

We have to stop pretending ridiculous things are legitimate just because some people believe them.

TNN: Do you see inflation as the number one issue facing the country right now?

BAB: Well, now we’re back to target inflation. I think the affordability problems that are left are being caused by the chaotic tariffs, which are killing small businesses. People who play board games are very aware of the tariffs, because it’s gonna kill board gaming in America…

The power of tariffs is supposed to live with Congress to keep this kind of chaos from happening. I think we’re seeing the bad effects of tariffs, of the ethnic cleansing currently going on in America, on the economy and not on employers and on families and neighborhoods. None of these things are good for America; none of them are solutions to what people were worried about. But they’re what this administration has chosen to focus on.

We can’t just say we’re going to stop these bad things; we have to talk about building an immigration pathway that builds a working class rather than undermine it, economic policies that protect workers around the world, about making higher education affordable and supporting public education and here’s a lot of things that keep the federal government from being part of the solution to housing prices—that’s why I’ve spent the majority of my adult life with roommates. Like, that’s a very millennial experience because that’s how you had to do it.

TNN: Do you feel hopeful?

BAB: I do. I think it’s partially a practice for me. Finding hope is less about simply thinking everything is going to turn out okay; it’s knowing that you can help things turn out better. Fear of failure does not make us succeed more often; it keeps us from trying things that might fail. To succeed the most, often we have to be willing to try some things that might fail, and so the more we can make failure [happen]—as miserable as it feels—we can confront that fear of failure and do things anyway. I think that’s where I find hope; I do things that are worth doing regardless.

Then, sometimes you have opportunities like this where you have a chance to actually succeed and make a difference, and those [opportunities] are never accidents. It’s always because people have been doing work that they had no idea whether it would succeed or not before they started.