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Log Cabin says Boehner helpful on ‘Don’t Ask’ vote

GOP election victories shine spotlight on gay Republican group

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Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), who is expected to become Speaker of the House in January, agreed to a request by the gay GOP group Log Cabin Republicans not to penalize House Republicans who voted in May for repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” according to the group’s leader.

Log Cabin Executive Director R. Clarke Cooper said Boehner agreed to his request that the House minority leader not order a Republican whip count for an amendment to a defense authorization bill calling for repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Whip counts are sometimes viewed as a means of pressuring members to vote the way party leaders want them to vote, and House GOP leaders, including Boehner, opposed the repeal amendment.

In what he called a conciliatory gesture, Cooper said Boehner agreed to his request to “no whip” the amendment during a conversation at a political event days before the House voted 234 to 194 on May 27 to approve it. Only five Republicans voted for the amendment, which was introduced by Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Pa.).

“He did not do a whip count,” Cooper said. “And in the grand scheme of things it’s not the biggest deal on the planet. But I saw it as a positive indicator that he didn’t blow me off.”

The repeal measure died in a Senate filibuster. Senate Democratic leaders have promised to bring it up again later this month in a congressional “lame duck” session, but its prospects for passing are uncertain.

Meanwhile, with Republicans winning control of the House in Tuesday’s midterm elections, LGBT activists and Capitol Hill pundits will likely weigh Cooper’s interaction with Boehner as part of their assessment of whether gay Republicans will have access to and influence with House GOP leaders over pending LGBT legislation.

Although Democrats retained their control of the Senate, most political observers — including LGBT advocates — agree that major LGBT-related bills would have no chance of passing in Congress next year without the consent of Republican leaders like Boehner. And most observers believe House Republicans won’t allow gay bills to come to the House floor for a vote.

Cooper, however, said he and his Log Cabin team have a plan for persuading congressional Republican leaders to consider and agree to a vote on at least two gay bills. According to Cooper, one is an as yet to be unveiled tax reform bill that would address “tax inequities that affect the gay community.” The other is the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, which Democratic leaders declined to bring up for a vote during the past two years. The measure calls for banning employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Cooper said the tax bill would appeal to “the broader conservative community” while addressing inequities in the gay community.

“We would be attracting new or additional allies that we’ve not had in the past,” he said. “There are several members of Congress right now who don’t have a record, good or bad, or who are unknown to our community. And this gives them an opportunity to put a toe in the water on doing pro-equality measures.”

Cooper said the tax bill, the details of which would be released at the start of the new Congress in January, would help pave the way for more Republican support for ENDA.

Other LGBT organizations issued statements Tuesday night saying the Republican takeover of the House and the increased number of Republicans elected to the Senate would essentially eliminate any chance of passing LGBT bills for at least two years.

National Stonewall Democrats, the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force each released statements describing the new crop of Republican leaders as “anti-equality.”

HRC noted that Boehner; Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the expected new House majority leader; and Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), the expected majority whip, each received an HRC scorecard rating of “0” on LGBT issues over the past two years.

D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At-Large), who won election to another term on Tuesday, said his opinion of the Republican Party as an impediment to LGBT equality hasn’t changed since he left the party in 2004 over its support for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

“If the question is what impact gay Republicans will have in a Republican-controlled Congress, the answer is none,” Catania said. “And if the last 10 years has demonstrated anything it’s that the Republican Party has no interest in a big tent, no interest in having gay Republicans at the table.”

“And the fact that gay Republicans continue to live in a fantasy land as if they mattered to the establishment in the GOP is mind blowing,” he said.

A spokesperson for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who will be replaced as speaker by Boehner in January, gave an equally harsh assessment of the influence of gay Republicans under the new Congress.

“They have got to be drinking some serious Kool-Aid over at Log Cabin Republicans’ headquarters,” said Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill. “To think that a Republican majority would do anything to advance equality for the LGBT community is simply delusional.”

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, which has been among the lead groups lobbying for ENDA, said she hopes Log Cabin does have access and influence over congressional GOP leaders.

But she noted that some of Log Cabin’s effort could be undercut by what appears to be a rival gay Republican group, GOProud.

Founded by conservative gay GOP activist Christopher Barron, who broke away from Log Cabin two years ago, GOProud received criticism from LGBT activists this fall for producing a campaign ad calling for the defeat of gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.). The ad accused Frank of being responsible for “the financial meltdown that devastated our economy” in his role as chair of the House committee that approved government bailouts for banks.

Other activists note that Log Cabin had its own financial meltdown in 2008, when money problems resulted in the layoff of its entire Washington staff. The group’s board and state and local chapters remained active and kept the group going until funds were raised to hire a new executive director and a small Washington staff.

Cooper and other Log Cabin supporters strongly dispute claims that congressional GOP leaders will ignore the group. They note that unlike the last GOP takeover of Congress, virtually none of the current crop of Republican candidates ran on an anti-gay or anti-same-sex marriage platform. Economic issues and the Tea Party-led revolt this year against “big government” overshadowed social issues like gay marriage, Cooper and other Log Cabin members said.

Richard Tafel, who served as Log Cabin’s executive director in the 1990s, told the Blade Tuesday that he believes the new GOP-controlled House will be far more receptive to LGBT equality issues than the GOP Congress he contended with nearly a decade ago.

“I think the Republicans have learned a very harsh lesson from the ‘90s, when I was there, which is gay bashing didn’t work. It was fundamentally a flaw … the Tea Party is all about fiscal responsibility,” he said, adding that the new GOP leadership will likely follow that path rather than expend resources opposing gay equality issues.

Gay Republican activist Jim Driscoll, who served on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS during the Bush administration, said Log Cabin’s influence “will be heavily dependent” on its willingness to support Republicans on non-LGBT issues like the economy and GOP positions on AIDS programs.

“Regardless of how Log Cabin fares, I believe that most Republican offices will be more receptive to openly gay Republicans than any time before,” Driscoll said. “Republicans will realize that this election was not won on social issues or gay baiting. In fact, nearly all Republican strategists and consultants advised their candidates to keep quiet or tone down on this one.”

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Federal Government

Treasury Department has a gay secretary but LGBTQ staff are under siege

Agency reverses course on LGBTQ inclusion under out Secretary Scott Bessent

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

A former Treasury Department employee who led the agency’s LGBTQ employee resource group says the removal of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) from its discrimination complaint forms was merely a formalization of existing policy shifts that had already taken hold following the second inauguration of President Donald Trump and his appointment of Scott Bessent — who is gay — to lead the agency. 

Christen Boas Hayes, who served on the policy team at Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) from 2020 until March of this year, told the Washington Blade during a phone interview last week that the agency had already stopped processing internal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaints on the basis of anti-LGBTQ discrimination. 

“So the way that the forms are changing is a procedural recognition of something that’s already happening,” said Hayes. “Internally, from speaking to two EEO staff members, the changes are already taking place from an EEO perspective on what kind of cases will be found to have the basis for a complaint.”

The move, they said, comes amid the deterioration of support structures for LGBTQ workers at the agency since the administration’s early rollout of anti-LGBTQ executive orders, which led to “a trickle down effect of how each agency implements those and on what timeline,” decisions “typically made by the assistant secretary of management’s office and then implemented by the appropriate offices.”

At the end of June, a group of U.S. House Democrats including several out LGBTQ members raised alarms after a Federal Register notice disclosed Treasury’s plans to revise its complaint procedures. Through the agency’s Office of Civil Rights and EEO, the agency would eliminate SOGI as protected categories on the forms used by employees to initiate claims of workplace discrimination.

But Hayes’s account reveals that the paperwork change followed months of internal practice, pursuant to a wave of layoffs targeting DEI personnel and a chilling effect on LGBTQ organizing, including through ERGs. 

Hayes joined Treasury’s FinCEN in 2020 as the agency transitioned into the Biden-Harris administration, working primarily on cryptocurrency regulation and emerging technologies until they accepted a “deferred resignation” offer, which was extended to civil servants this year amid drastic staffing cuts. 

“It was two things,” Hayes said. “One was the fact that the policy work that I was very excited about doing was going to change in nature significantly. The second part was that the environment for LGBTQ staff members was increasingly negative after the release of the executive orders,” especially for trans and nonbinary or gender diverse employees. 

“At the same time,” Hayes added, “having been on the job for four years, I also knew this year was the year that I would leave Treasury. I was a good candidate for [deferred resignation], because I was already planning on leaving, but the pressures that emerged following the change in administration really pushed me to accelerate that timeline.”

Some ERGs die by formal edict, others by a thousand cuts 

Hayes became involved with the Treasury LGBTQ ERG shortly after joining the agency in 2020, when they reached out to the group’s then-president — “who also recently took the deferred resignation.”

“She said that because of the pressure that ERGs had faced under the first Trump administration, the group was rebuilding, and I became the president of the group pretty quickly,” Hayes said. “Those pressures have increased in the second Trump administration.”

One of the previous ERG board members had left the agency after encountering what Hayes described as “explicitly transphobic” treatment from supervisors during his gender transition. “His supervisors denied him a promotion,” and, “importantly, he did not have faith in the EEO complaint process” to see the issues with discrimination resolved, Hayes said. “And so he decided to just leave, which was, of course, such a loss for Treasury and our Employee Resource Group and all of our employees at Treasury.”

The umbrella LGBTQ ERG that Hayes led included hundreds of members across the agency, they said, and was complemented by smaller ERGs at sub-agencies like the IRS and FinCEN — several of which, Hayes said, were explicitly told to cease operations under the new administration.

Hayes did not receive any formal directive to shutter Treasury’s ERG, but described an “implicit” messaging campaign meant to shut down the group’s activities without issuing anything in writing.

“The suggestion was to stop emailing about anything related to the employee resource group, to have meetings outside of work hours, to meet off of Treasury’s campus, and things like that,” they said. “So obviously that contributes to essentially not existing functionally. Because whereas we could have previously emailed our members comfortably to announce a happy hour or a training or something like that, now they have to text each other personally to gather, which essentially makes it a defunct group.”

Internal directories scrubbed, gender-neutral restrooms removed

Hayes said the dismantling of DEI staff began almost immediately after the executive orders. Employees whose position descriptions included the terms “diversity, equity, and inclusion” were “on the chopping block,” they said. “That may differ from more statutorily mandated positions in the OMWI office or the EEO office.”

With those staff gone, so went the infrastructure that enabled ERG programming and community-building. “The people that made our employee resource group events possible were DEI staff that were fired. And so, it created an immediate chilling effect on our employee resource group, and it also, of course, put fear into a lot of our members’ hearts over whether or not we would be able to continue gathering as a community or supporting employees in a more practical way going forward. And it was just, really — it was really sad.”

Hayes described efforts to erase the ERGs from internal communication channels and databases. “They also took our information off internal websites so nobody could find us as lawyers went through the agency’s internal systems to scrub DEI language and programs,” they said.

Within a week, Hayes said, the administration had removed gender-neutral restrooms from Main Treasury, removed third-gender markers from internal databases and forms, and made it more difficult for employees with nonbinary IDs to access government buildings.

“[They] made it challenging for people with X gender markers on identification documents to access Treasury or the White House by not recognizing their gender marker on the TWAVES and WAVES forms.”

LGBTQ staff lack support and work amid a climate of isolation 

The changes have left many LGBTQ staff feeling vulnerable — not only because of diminished workplace inclusion, but due to concerns about job security amid the administration’s reductions in force (RIFs).

“Plenty of people are feeling very stressed, not only about retaining their jobs because of the layoffs and pending questions around RIFs, but then also wondering if they will be included in RIF lists because they’re being penalized somehow for being out at work,” Hayes said. “People wonder if their name will be given, not because they’re in a tranche of billets being laid off, but because of their gender identity or sexual orientation.”

In the absence of functional ERGs, Hayes said, LGBTQ employees have been cut off from even informal networks of support.

“Employees [are] feeling like it’s harder to find members of their own community because there’s no email anymore to ask when the next event is or to ask about navigating healthcare or other questions,” they said. “If there is no ERG to go to to ask for support for their specific issue, that contributes to isolation, which contributes to a worse work environment.”

Hayes said they had not interacted directly with Secretary Bessent, but they and others observed a shift from the previous administration. “It is stark to see that our first ‘out’ secretary did not host a Pride event this year,” they said. “For the last three years we’ve flown the rainbow Pride flag above Treasury during Pride. And it was such a celebration among staff and Secretary Yellen and the executive secretary’s office were super supportive.”

“Employees notice changes like that,” they added. “Things like the fact that the Secretary’s official bio says ‘spouse’ instead of ‘husband.’ It makes employees wonder if they too should be fearful of being their full selves at work.”

The Blade contacted the Treasury Department with a request for comment outlining Hayes’s allegations, including the removal of inclusive infrastructure, the discouragement of ERG activity, the pre-formalization of EEO policy changes, and the targeting of DEI personnel. As of publication, the agency has not responded.

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U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court to consider bans on trans athletes in school sports

27 states have passed laws limiting participation in athletics programs

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U.S. Supreme Court (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear two cases involving transgender youth challenging bans prohibiting them from participating in school sports.

In Little v. Hecox, plaintiffs represented by the ACLU, Legal Voice, and the law firm Cooley are challenging Idaho’s 2020 ban, which requires sex testing to adjudicate questions of an athlete’s eligibility.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described the process in a 2023 decision halting the policy’s enforcement pending an outcome in the litigation. The “sex dispute verification process, whereby any individual can ‘dispute’ the sex of any female student athlete in the state of Idaho,” the court wrote, would “require her to undergo intrusive medical procedures to verify her sex, including gynecological exams.”

In West Virginia v. B.P.J., Lambda Legal, the ACLU, the ACLU of West Virginia, and Cooley are representing a trans middle school student challenging the Mountain State’s 2021 ban on trans athletes.

The plaintiff was participating in cross country when the law was passed, taking puberty blockers that would have significantly reduced the chances that she could have a physiological advantage over cisgender peers.

“Like any other educational program, school athletic programs should be accessible for everyone regardless of their sex or transgender status,” said Joshua Block, senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project. “Trans kids play sports for the same reasons their peers do — to learn perseverance, dedication, teamwork, and to simply have fun with their friends,” Block said.

He added, “Categorically excluding kids from school sports just because they are transgender will only make our schools less safe and more hurtful places for all youth. We believe the lower courts were right to block these discriminatory laws, and we will continue to defend the freedom of all kids to play.”

“Our client just wants to play sports with her friends and peers,” said Lambda Legal Senior Counsel Tara Borelli. “Everyone understands the value of participating in team athletics, for fitness, leadership, socialization, and myriad other benefits.”

Borelli continued, “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit last April issued a thoughtful and thorough ruling allowing B.P.J. to continue participating in track events. That well-reasoned decision should stand the test of time, and we stand ready to defend it.”

Shortly after taking control of both legislative chambers, Republican members of Congress tried — unsuccessfully — to pass a national ban like those now enforced in 27 states since 2020.

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Federal Government

UPenn erases Lia Thomas’s records as part of settlement with White House

University agreed to ban trans women from women’s sports teams

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U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon (Screen capture: C-SPAN)

In a settlement with the Trump-Vance administration announced on Tuesday, the University of Pennsylvania will ban transgender athletes from competing and erase swimming records set by transgender former student Lia Thomas.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found the university in violation of Title IX, the federal rights law barring sex based discrimination in educational institutions, by “permitting males to compete in women’s intercollegiate athletics and to occupy women-only intimate facilities.”

The statement issued by University of Pennsylvania President J. Larry Jameson highlighted how the law’s interpretation was changed substantially under President Donald Trump’s second term.

“The Department of Education OCR investigated the participation of one transgender athlete on the women’s swimming team three years ago, during the 2021-2022 swim season,” he wrote. “At that time, Penn was in compliance with NCAA eligibility rules and Title IX as then interpreted.”

Jameson continued, “Penn has always followed — and continues to follow — Title IX and the applicable policy of the NCAA regarding transgender athletes. NCAA eligibility rules changed in February 2025 with Executive Orders 14168 and 14201 and Penn will continue to adhere to these new rules.”

Writing that “we acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules” in place while Thomas was allowed to compete, the university president added, “We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.”

“Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, UPenn has agreed both to apologize for its past Title IX violations and to ensure that women’s sports are protected at the university for future generations of female athletes.”

Under former President Joe Biden, the department’s Office of Civil Rights sought to protect against anti-LGBTQ discrimination in education, bringing investigations and enforcement actions in cases where school officials might, for example, require trans students to use restrooms and facilities consistent with their birth sex or fail to respond to peer harassment over their gender identity.

Much of the legal reasoning behind the Biden-Harris administration’s positions extended from the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, which found that sex-based discrimination includes that which is based on sexual orientation or gender identity under Title VII rules covering employment practices.

The Trump-Vance administration last week put the state of California on notice that its trans athlete policies were, or once were, in violation of Title IX, which comes amid the ongoing battle with Maine over the same issue.

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