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Seattle mayor’s Israel trip highlights dangers of ‘pinkwashing’

‘Playing the fool’ in campaign to distract from abuse of Palestinians

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Ed Murray, gay news, Washington Blade

Ed Murray (Photo by Ryan Georgi; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

On Monday, Seattle mayor Ed Murray touched down in Israel as part of a trip where he is expected to march in Tel Aviv’s gay Pride parade, meet Israeli political and military officials, and give a keynote at a conference celebrating Israel’s LGBTQ rights record.

The trip has generated a great deal of controversy, especially after reports revealed that despite the fact that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs was paying for part of his trip — reportedly the first time in at least a decade a Seattle mayor has accepted such a gift from a foreign government — taxpayers will still be forced to foot $36,000 for the rest.

If that isn’t enough to cause reason for suspicion about potential underlying motives, there’s the fact of who is behind the trip. A major sponsor is the pro-Israeli lobbying group called A Wider Bridge that aims to improve the country’s image among LGBTQ-identified Americans. That organization is closely linked with StandWithUs, a group that has come under fire repeatedly for rampant Islamophobia, verbal attacks on pro-Palestinian students, and promoting narratives that whitewash the realities of Israel’s occupation and mistreatment of the Palestinians.

The largest opposition to the mayor’s trip has come from queer groups across the United States accusing the mayor of playing the fool in the Israeli government’s global campaign to highlight its LGBT-friendly policies as a way to obscure or cover up its ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people.

As scholars and activists have repeatedly highlighted, Israel has in recent years actively pursued a global PR strategy under its Brand Israel label, often called “pinkwashing,” that seeks to divert attention from its massive abuses of Palestinian rights, including the killing of more than 2,200 people, around 70 percent civilians, in Gaza last summer, as well as the brutal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967.

The strategy, which is complemented by a broader outreach to young, Western liberals through arts and culture, is rooted in the idea that if hipsters think Israel is a fun place to be gay, they might forget or at least ignore the fact that it maintains different systems of law for Jews and for Palestinians in areas under its military control or that it has kept Gaza under a nearly total economic siege for the last nine years.

After all, who wants to talk about racial apartheid when we could be talking about clubbing in Tel Aviv?

In this way, Israel’s strategy resembles that used by many corporations and politicians in the United States to distract from their own records of workers’ rights abuses or support for racist and classist laws, and instead refocus the perception that “being gay” is all about being able to party.

This strategy not only delinks queer and trans rights from other kinds of human, political, and social rights, it also de-historicizes the queer and trans rights struggles in order to delegitimize other forms of rights violations. In the case of Israel, “pinkwashing” sets up an opposition between the rights of queer and trans Israelis and those of Palestinians by calling for queers around the world to support a state friendly to Jewish queers but violently opposed to the rights of Palestinians — queer or otherwise — to live free, dignified lives.

For a queer or trans Palestinian living under Israeli occupation, the idea that global leaders should heap praise on Israel because Tel Aviv has a few gay clubs is not only absurd, it is also insulting and a direct expression of support for the denial of the basic rights of themselves, their families, and their people as a whole.

Amid the cynical use of “gay rights” as a cover for racial discrimination, it is no surprise that Palestinian queers have been at the forefront of the global campaign for the boycott, divestment and sanctioning of Israel over the last decade.

In a 2010 statement, the Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions group wrote: “As Palestinian queers, our struggle is not only against social injustice and our rights as a queer minority in Palestinian society, but rather, our main struggle is one against Israel’s colonization, occupation and apartheid; a system that has oppressed us for the past 63 years.”

Mayor Murray has not remained silent on the accusations by activists, and a few days before the trip he even released a statement to a local radio station.

“To the extent that I can help advance the cause of equality in Seattle, in Israel, the rest of the Middle East, or in any other places, I welcome the opportunity to do so,” he said.

Murray’s statement highlights the shocking extent to which the mainstream gay rights movement in the United States has managed to so narrowly define “equality” that it embraces the freedom to fly a rainbow flag but not the freedom to live free of fear from military occupation.

Murray enthusiastically embraced calls for a boycott of the state of Indiana after it passed legislation deeply discriminatory to LGBTQ citizens, but apparently cannot extend that same empathy to both LGBTQ and straight Palestinians.

But queer and trans rights are not isolated discourses unrelated to the right to life, dignity, and freedom. If queer and trans rights are to be seen as nothing more than the ability to party or marry — divorced from an analysis of the political and economic realities that define our daily lives — then they are close to meaningless to the billions around the world, queer and otherwise, who daily struggle for better lives and a more just world.

In Bethlehem, a Palestinian city in the West Bank where I live, the strategy seems so ridiculous that it can be difficult to know whether to laugh or cry when reports emerge of yet another Western leader or dignitary coming on an Israeli-funded trip.

Israel’s separation wall and policies of building Jewish-only settlements and roads for 500,000 settlers in the West Bank have chopped the region into little tiny bits of limited Palestinian sovereignty surrounded by Israeli military checkpoints.

The reality on the ground makes a mockery of Murray’s claims that he supports a “two-state solution” — a policy the sitting Israeli prime minister has said he refuses to consider — and a quick glance around Palestine and Israel would show that Israel has made this an impossibility.

Supporters of the trip have noted that Murray is meeting with exactly two Palestinians during a jaunt to the Palestinian city of Ramallah, as if to demonstrate that his participation in a multi-day trip coordinated by the Israeli government with the support of pro-Israeli advocacy groups and including meetings with Israeli military officials can be “balanced out” by a few hours in the West Bank.

These claims are disingenuous, to say the least, and rely on the notion that there are two sides in the conflict. But there are not. There is a military superpower that occupies the land and dispossesses a people who have been denied basic human, political, and civil rights for decades.

In this context, playing along with Israeli government efforts to raise publicity about how gay-friendly it is should be recognized as a form of complicity in the occupation and dispossession of Palestinians.

Unfortunately, Ed Murray isn’t the only who has been duped. Both Jenny Pizer of Lambda Legal and Brad Sears of the Williams Institute, two prominent LGBTQ advocates in the United States, are also speaking at a Tel Aviv conference Murray is attending intended to celebrate its record of gay rights.

U.S. queer organizations need to understand that participating in the pinkwashing of Israel and allowing “gay rights” to be used as a tool to suppress the rights of others wherever it happens is an ethical betrayal of the decades of queer struggle in the United States.

For the last decade, Palestinian activists have called on those who support justice and equality in the Holy Land to join the movement for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctioning of Israel in order to hold the state accountable.

They have urged people around the world to be conscious of how the long struggle for queer rights is now being cynically co-opted by the Israeli government for its own agenda that entails using gays as window-dressing for its brutal policies.

It is time for Ed Murray, and U.S. queers more broadly, to listen.

 

Alex Shams is a journalist based in Bethlehem and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago. Follow him @SeyyedReza.

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TRAITOR: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has blood on his hands

Nation’s highest-ranking gay public official is a MAGA sell out

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

It’s an odd dichotomy: President Trump appoints the highest-ranking openly gay government official in history in Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, yet he launches cruel attacks on transgender Americans. 

Make no mistake: Those attacks are claiming lives. Trans people are killing themselves. I know of one trans person who died by suicide on Election Night, overwhelmed by fear of the incoming administration. Trump’s attacks have driven trans Americans and their families to flee the country and move to Canada, as the Blade has reported. 

None of this is hypothetical or melodramatic. It’s real life and happening everywhere. 

And so when Bessent was confirmed as Treasury Secretary, I wrote an op-ed urging him to educate Trump about the plight of trans Americans and the destructiveness of the attacks on the community. I waited 90 days for some sign that Bessent has a heart or at least a modicum of decency but sadly, I must report that he does not. 

The attacks on the LGBTQ community under Trump keep coming. Last week’s news that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is planning to retire the national 988 crisis lifeline for LGBTQ youth on Oct. 1 is just the latest evidence that this administration doesn’t just dislike us — they want us dead.

“Ending the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline’s LGBTQ+ youth specialized services will not just strip away access from millions of LGBTQ+ kids and teens — it will put their lives at risk,” Trevor Project CEO Jaymes Black said in a statement.

The service for LGBTQ youth has received 1.3 million calls, texts, or chats since its debut, with an average of 2,100 contacts per day in February.

Make no mistake: cutting this service will kill young LGBTQ people.

Just a couple of weeks earlier, Trump’s administration announced the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy would be gutted. 

“In a matter of just a couple days, we are losing our nation’s ability to prevent HIV,” said HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute Executive Director Carl Schmid.

And prior to that, Trump issued a series of executive orders targeting the trans community — restricting access to affirming healthcare, banning trans service members from the military, barring trans women and girls from playing sports, eliminating the “X” gender marker on passports, and barring students assigned male at birth from using women’s restrooms.  

Let’s be very clear: When you deny someone the ability to use the bathroom, you deny their humanity.

So back to Scott Bessent, the billionaire hedge fund manager now running our economy into the ground. As many Trump protesters have noted: silence is complicity. And Bessent has been silent on all of these horrific attacks on trans Americans and their basic humanity. He is spineless and a traitor to the LGBTQ community. 

Bessent runs the U.S. Treasury and reportedly has Trump’s ear on all matters related to the economy. He could easily push Trump in a better, more compassionate direction, yet there is no evidence he has done that. 

“The LGBTQ+ community is counting on openly LGBTQ+ nominees like Scott Bessent to step up for the community,” said Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson after the inauguration. Sadly, it’s become clear we cannot count on Bessent. As I wrote in January, Trump likes his queer people gay, white, cis, rich, and obedient. 

Bessent has ignored the Blade’s interview requests. (And after this is published, I have no illusions he will change his mind.) The mainstream media, increasingly cowed by Trump, have failed to ask Bessent even the most basic questions about his views on trans equality and Trump’s attacks. 

As a member of the LGBTQ community, Bessent has a responsibility to at least speak up on behalf of trans people who are suffering. But Republicans today have lost their spines. They genuflect before their Dear Leader, line their own pockets, and leave the rest of us to deal with the consequences. 

The crisis is real. People are dying. Trans people especially are suffering. The rest of us must do what we can to mitigate that suffering and to speak out in defense of our trans friends. 


Kevin Naff is editor of the Washington Blade. Reach him at [email protected].

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Congressional Equality Caucus should participate in WorldPride

Make bold statement about our commitment to LGBTQ rights

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(Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)

The Trump administration, by its actions, has already hurt WorldPride. By attacking trans people, they have gotten many nations to suggest to trans citizens they not come to the United States. Canada’s queer group has said it is advising its people not to come. It is sad in so many ways. But despite what the felon in the White House is doing, WorldPride will be a success. It can be a time to not only have fun, but to make a point to the administration and the world. What was the old saying, “We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going anywhere, so get used to it.”  The LGBTQ community in the United States has made great strides since Stonewall in 1969, and there is no way we are going back into the closet. 

One way we can make a strong statement is if every member of the Congressional Equality Caucus would come out and join hands with constituents from their state, who are coming to D.C. for WorldPride. Together, they can take a stand for equality. Together, they can make a statement about our country to the world; that the United States values and supports its LGBTQ community. 

This year from May 17-June, we are anticipating huge crowds in Washington, D.C. for WorldPride. Let us together make sure they are all safe and that they have an exciting and fun time while here. But at the same time we should use this gathering to speak out, for our community here, and the LGBTQ community around the world. 

We must show the felon in the White House, and his MAGA acolytes in Congress, and around the nation, all those who would keep us down, we can, and will, stand up for ourselves. We are only willing to move one way, and that is forward toward full equality. Many years ago, during the early fight for recognition of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, there was an event staged by the group ACT UP, called ‘hands around the White House.’ It is time to stage something like that again. 

With all the attacks on the trans community, and as threats to the entire LGBTQ community continue, we need to stand together, and stay strong. We need to join with everyone else who is fighting back against the felon, and his Nazi sympathizing co-president, in the White House. To join in the demonstrations, fight back, and not fall for the distractions meant to take us from our goals. Those goals must include defeating every Republican in elections in 2025, and taking back Congress in 2026. I say every Republican, only because today there is no longer a rational Republican Party. That party has become a MAGA Party, or ‘Cult of Trump.’ That is sad, but it’s true. It is not up to Democrats, or independents, to change the Republican Party; it is up to us to ensure their defeat until they change themselves. 

Until then we must work hard to elect Democrats across the nation. From school board, to county council, from statehouse to Congress. For the LGBTQ community that is the only way we will move forward on equality. It is the only way we can defeat those who want to ban books about our lives, and try to force us back in the closet. We must say a resounding NO to that. 

We must vote for Democrats because history shows us, any other vote, a vote for a third party, helps Republicans win. The reality, like it or not, is today there are only two parties that can win a general election. Yes, in a few rare districts, a third party has won. But this is rare and let’s not take the chance of that happening if there isn’t a history in your state, or district, or community, where it happened in the past. Be smart! While you may not like everything the Democratic Party stands for, it has proven, its members stand for the rights of the LGBTQ community. The incredible progress since Stonewall has been because the Democratic Party has worked with the activists in our midst, to make that progress. Let’s not give up now and move backwards with the MAGA Party. Together, let’s retake our government, and continue to move forward until we have full equality. That must be the goal we join hands for, and pledge to work toward. 


Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.

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How I changed my documents

Process in Md. cost around $300

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identification, gay news, Washington Blade
(Bigstock photo)

With legislation making it more difficult for transgender and gender non-conforming people to change their passports and other documents, it is now a race against the clock to change as many of them as possible. 

Trans Maryland and Advocates for Trans Equality are among the groups that offer workshops and online resources.

Here’s how I did it in Maryland:

A letter from your primary care provider

The first thing you’ll need to get any of this rolling is a document from your primary care provider that shows proof of hormone therapy, gender incongruence, or both. In my experience, this is important to have prior to getting anything started because some states require some sort of proof in order to certify the change.

Some courts may need a therapist’s letter as well, but it depends on what state you live in. With this document, you’ll be able to bring it to the respective offices and it will give a valid reason for you to get your desired gender marker.

A court order

The next thing you will need is a court order that recognizes your gender identity. It is a precaution just to avoid any wasted time or confusion at any offices going forward. You will go to the circuit court website for what state/county you reside in and find a document that is a petition to change your gender. Here is an example from Maryland. 

You will print that document and fill out the petition for your respective titles with or without a name change and take it to the Circuit Court. Some courts may require the appointment. There, you will present the petition and letter and pay a fee — Maryland’s fee is $165, however there are fee waivers for those that apply. After, you will wait some weeks for the court order to show up.

Social Security card

Unfortunately, as of January 2025, the Social Security Administration has ceased any gender changes in their system. As with the fight for passports reflecting the holder’s proper gender identity, the Human Rights Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union may bring a case to regain access in the future.

Identity card/driver’s license

After getting your primary care letter and court order, make a standard appointment for Identification Services at the local DMV and bring the paperwork. Though the Maryland Court’s website says there is no need to get a court order to change any documents, the clerk at the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration (Maryland’s DMV) stressed that I needed the updated Social Security card changed in order to get an updated ID.

I was able to get it changed prior to the Trump-Vance administration, however given the current circumstances, if there is any pushback from any clerk or official who say they require a Social Security card, very adamantly cite the official gov website if applicable, and use the court order, despite the fact you should not need one to get your ID updated.

Birth certificate

Should all have gone well with the ID, the last document to amend is the birth certificate. 

Unfortunately, this may be the most difficult document that you are able to amend because it must be done within your home state and some states, such as Oklahoma, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, have already banned altering birth certificates. 

In D.C., where I changed my own, there have been no known issues or legislation passed for changing the name and gender marker on the document. You will search your state government websites for the vital records department, find a Gender Designation Application and fill out the necessary information. The D.C. application is here:

On D.C.’s application, you must sign the document in front of a notary in order for it to be valid. Several mail offices, such as UPS, offer notary services for relatively cheap. Upon getting the application notarized, you can bring all documents you have already updated along with the court order and primary care letter to an appointment at the vital records office. All the previous work done should make this fairly easy if you are in a state that hasn’t made heavy strides to halt the process. 

All in all, with about a month of your time, about $300, and a state that supports your right to self-actualization, you should still be able to change most of your documents.

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