Being an ally to the trans community is not a conditional position for me, nor should it be for any candidate. My allyship doesn’t hinge on polling, focus groups, or whether courage feels politically convenient. At a time when trans people, especially trans youth of color, are under coordinated attack, elected officials and candidates must do more than offer quiet support. We must take a public and solid stand.

History shows us how these moments begin. One of the oldest political tactics is to single out the most vulnerable and blame them for society’s anxieties — not because they are responsible, but because they are easier to blame than those with power and protection. In Nazi Germany, Jewish people were primarily targeted, but they were not the only demographic who suffered elimination. LGBTQ people, disabled people, Romani communities, political dissidents, and others were also rounded up, imprisoned, and killed. Among the earliest acts of fascistic repression was the destruction of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, a pioneering center for gender-affirming care and LGBTQ research. These books and medical records were among the first to be confiscated and burned. It is not a coincidence that these same communities are now the first to suffer under this regime, they are our canaries in the coal mine signaling what’s to come. 

Congress, emboldened by the rhetoric of the Donald Trump campaign, recently passed HR 3492 to criminalize healthcare workers who provide gender-affirming healthcare with fines and imprisonment. This bill, sponsored by celebrity politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, puts politics and headlines over people and health outcomes. Healthcare that a number of cis-gendered people also benefit from byway of hair regeneration and surgery, male and female breast augmentation, hormone replacement therapy etc. Even when these bills targeting this care do not pass, they do real damage. They create fear among patients, legal uncertainty for providers, and instability for clinics that serve the most marginalized people in our communities.

Here in D.C., organizations like Planned Parenthood and Whitman-Walker Health are lifelines for many communities. They provide gender-affirming care alongside primary care, mental health services, HIV treatment, and preventative medicine. When healthcare is politicized or criminalized, people don’t wait for court rulings — they delay care, ration medication, or disappear from the system entirely.

As a pharmacist, I know exactly what that means. These are life-saving medications. Continuity of care matters. Criminalizing and politicizing healthcare does not protect children or families — it puts lives at risk.

Instead of centering these realities, political discourse has been deliberately diverted toward a manufactured panic about trans women in sports. Let me be clear: trans women deserve to be protected and allowed to compete just like anyone else. Athletics have always included people with different bodies, strengths, and abilities. Girls and women will always encounter competitors who are stronger or faster — that is not a gender or sports crisis, it is the nature of competition.

Sports are meant to teach fairness, mutual respect, and the shared spirit of competition — not suspicion or exclusion. We should not police young people’s bodies, and we should reject attempts to single out trans youth as a political distraction. Families and doctors should be the authority on sex and gender identity.

This narrative has been cynically amplified by the right, but too often Democrats have allowed it to take hold rather than forcefully rejecting it. It is imperative to pay attention to what is happening — and to push back against every attempt to dehumanize anyone for political gain.

Trans people have always been part of our communities and our democracy. Protecting the most vulnerable is not radical — it is the foundation of a just society. My work is grounded in that commitment, and I will not waver from it. I’m proud to have hired trans political team Down Ballot to lead my campaign for DC Council At Large. We need more ally leaders of all stages to stand up for the LGBTQ+ community. We must let elected detractors know that when they come for them, then they come for all of us. We cannot allow Fox News and social media trolls to create a narrative that scares us away from protecting marginalized populations. We must stand up and do what’s right.

Anything less is not leadership.

Rep. Oye Owolewa is running for an at-large seat on the D.C. Council.

I live with the consequences of what America is willing to condone in the name of “protecting children.”

When I was young, doctors and adults made irreversible decisions about my body without my informed consent. They weren’t responding to an emergency. They were responding to discomfort with innate physical differences and the social and medical pressure to make a child’s body conform to a rigid female-male binary. That’s the part people like to skip over when they talk about “child welfare”: the harm didn’t begin with my identity. It started with adults deciding my healthy body needed fixing.

That’s why the hypocrisy unfolding right now from statehouses to Capitol Hill feels so familiar, and so dangerous. 

While harmful medical practices on intersex children, the nearly 2 percent born with differences in one or more of their physical sex characteristics, have been ongoing in the U.S. for decades, until recently, there was no law specifically condoning it. 

This month, House Republicans passed one of the most extreme anti-trans bills in modern American history, advancing legislation that would criminalize gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth and threaten doctors with severe penalties for providing evidence-based treatment. The bill is framed as a measure to “protect children,” but in reality, it weaponizes the criminal legal system against families and providers who are trying to support young people in surviving adolescence.

At the same time, the administration has proposed hospital and insurance policies designed to choke off access to affirming care for trans youth nationwide by making providers fear loss of federal funding, regulatory retaliation, or prosecution. This is a familiar strategy: don’t just ban care outright; instead, make it so risky that hospitals stop providing it altogether. The result is the same everywhere. Young people lose access to care that major medical associations agree can be lifesaving.

All of this is happening under the banner of preventing “irreversible harm.”

But if America were genuinely concerned about irreversible harm to minors, the first thing lawmakers would address is the medically unnecessary, nonconsensual surgeries still performed on intersex infants and young children, procedures that permanently alter healthy tissue, often without urgent medical need, and long before a child can meaningfully participate in the decision. Human rights organizations have documented for years how these interventions are justified not by medical necessity, but by social pressure to make bodies appear more typically “female” or “male.” 

Here is the uncomfortable truth: all of the state laws now banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth explicitly include exceptions that allow nonconsensual and harmful intersex surgeries to continue.

A recent JAMA Health Forum analysis found that 28 states have enacted bans on gender-affirming care for minors that carve out intersex exceptions, preserving doctors’ ability to perform irreversible “normalizing” procedures on intersex children even while prohibiting affirming care for trans adolescents.

This contradiction is not accidental. It reveals the real priority behind these laws.

If the goal were truly to protect children from irreversible medical interventions, intersex kids would be protected first. Instead, these policies target one group of children, transgender youth, while continuing to permit permanent interventions on another group whose bodies challenge the same rigid sex and gender binary that lawmakers are trying to enforce.

Intersex people are routinely erased from American policy debates, except when our bodies are invoked to justify harmful laws, warning that intersex children are being used as legal loopholes rather than protected as human beings. This “protect the children” rhetoric is routinely deployed to justify state control over bodies, while preserving medical practices that stripped intersex children like me of autonomy, good health, and choice. Those harms are not theoretical. They are lifelong.

What makes this moment even more jarring is that the federal government had finally begun to recognize intersex people and attempt to address the harms suffered.

In 2024, at the very end of his term, the Biden administration released the first-ever intersex health equity report — a landmark admission that intersex people have been harmed by the U.S. health care system. Issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, the report documents medically unnecessary interventions, lack of informed consent, and systemic erasure and recommends delaying irreversible procedures until individuals can meaningfully participate in decisions about their own bodies.

This should have been a turning point. Instead, America is moving in the opposite direction.

On day one, President Trump issued an executive order defining “sex” in a way attempting to delegitimize the existence of transgender Americans that also erased the existence of many intersex people. 

When medicine is used to erase difference, it is called protection, while care that supports self-understanding is treated as a threat. This is not about medicine. It is about control.

You cannot claim to oppose irreversible harm to children while legally permitting surgeries that intersex adults and human rights experts have condemned for decades. You cannot claim to respect bodily autonomy while denying it selectively, based on whose bodies make lawmakers uncomfortable.

Protecting children means protecting all children, transgender, intersex, and cisgender alike. It means delaying irreversible interventions when they are not medically necessary. It means trusting and supporting young people and families over politicians chasing culture-war victories.

America can continue down the path of criminalizing care for some children while sanctioning harm to others, or it can finally listen to the people who have lived the consequences.

Intersex children deserve laws that protect their bodies, not politics that hurt and erase them.

Kimberly Zieselman is a human rights advocate and the author of “XOXY: A Memoir”. The author is a co-author of the JAMA Health Forum article cited, which examined state laws restricting gender-affirming care.

Coming out is often celebrated as a joyful milestone – a moment of truth, pride, and liberation. For many LGBTQ+ people, that’s exactly what it becomes. But new research I co-authored, published in the journal Pediatrics this month, shows that the period surrounding a young person’s first disclosure of their sexual identity is also a time of profound psychological vulnerability. It’s a fragile window we are not adequately protecting.

Using data from a national sample of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, our study examined what happens in the years before and after someone comes out to a family member or a straight friend. We weren’t looking at broad lifetime trends or comparing LGBTQ+ youth to heterosexual peers. Instead, we looked within each person’s life. We wanted to understand how their own suicide risk changed around the moment they first disclosed who they are.

The results were unmistakable. In the year a person came out, their likelihood of having suicidal thoughts, developing a suicide plan, or attempting suicide increased sharply. Those increases were not small. Suicide planning rose by 10 to 12 percentage points. Suicide attempts increased by 6 percentage points. And the elevated risk didn’t fade quickly. It continued in the years that followed.

I want to be very clear about what these results mean: coming out itself is not the cause of suicidality. The act of disclosure does not harm young people. What harms them is the fear of rejection, the stress of navigating relationships that suddenly feel uncertain, and the emotional fallout when people they love respond with confusion, disapproval, or hostility.

In other words, young LGBTQ+ people are not inherently vulnerable. We make them vulnerable.

And this is happening even as our culture has grown more affirming, at least on the surface. One of the most surprising findings in our study was that younger generations showed larger increases in suicide risk around coming out compared to older generations. These are young people who grew up with marriage equality, LGBTQ+ celebrities, Pride flags in classrooms, and messaging that “it gets better.”

So why are they struggling more?

I think it’s, in part, because expectations have changed. When a young person grows up hearing that their community is increasingly accepted, they may expect support from family and friends. When that support does not come, or comes with hesitation, discomfort, or mixed messages, the disappointment is often devastating. Visibility without security can intensify vulnerability.

Compounding this vulnerability is the broader political environment. Over the last several years, LGBTQ+ youth have watched adults in positions of power debate their legitimacy, restrict their rights, and question their place in schools, sports, and even their own families. While our study did not analyze political factors directly, it is impossible to separate individual experiences from a climate that routinely targets LGBTQ+ young people in legislative hearings, news cycles, and social media.

When you’re 14 or 15 years old and deciding who to tell about your identity, the world around you matters.

But the most important takeaway from our study is this: support is important. The presence, or absence of family acceptance is typically one of the strongest predictors of whether young people thrive after coming out. Research consistently shows that when parents respond with love, curiosity, and affirmation, young people experience better mental health, stronger resilience, and lower suicide risk. When families reject their children, the consequences can be life-threatening.

Support doesn’t require perfect language or expertise. It requires listening. It requires pausing before reacting out of fear or unfamiliarity. It requires recognizing that a young person coming out is not asking you to change everything about your beliefs. They’re asking you to hold them through one of the most vulnerable moments of their life.

Schools, too, have an enormous role to play. LGBTQ+-inclusive curricula, student groups, and clear protections against harassment create safer environments for disclosure. 

Health care settings must also do better. Providers should routinely screen for mental health needs among LGBTQ+ youth, especially around the time of identity disclosure, and offer culturally competent care.

And as a community, we need to tell a more honest story about coming out. Yes, it can be liberating. Yes, it can be beautiful. But it can also be terrifying. Instead of pretending it’s always a rainbow-filled rite of passage, we must acknowledge its risks and surround young people with the support they deserve.

Coming out should not be a crisis moment. It should not be a turning point toward despair. If anything, it should be the beginning of a young person’s journey toward authenticity and joy.

That future is possible. But it depends on all of us – parents, educators, clinicians, policymakers, and LGBTQ+ adults ourselves – committing to make acceptance a daily practice.

Young LGBTQ+ people are watching. And in the moment they need us most, they must not fall into silence or struggle alone.

Harry Barbee, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Their research and teaching focus on LGBTQ+ health, aging, and public policy.