World
LGBTQ Venezuelan migrants in Colombia struggle to survive
People with HIV again suffering from Kaposi’s sarcoma
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Edgar García and his partner, Dannys Torres, on Oct. 3, 2018, used a canoe to cross the Arauca River that marks the Venezuela-Colombia border.
García was a member of the board of directors of Alianza Lambda de Venezuela, a Venezuelan LGBTQ rights group, before he fled Venezuela. Torres worked as a hairdresser in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital.
The couple now lives in Rafael Uribe Uribe, a working-class neighborhood in Bogotá, the Colombian capital.
Torres continues to work as a hairdresser. García most recently worked for a telecommunications company.
“We are settled here in Bogotá,” García told the Washington Blade on Sept. 21 during an interview with him and Torres that took place at a shopping mall near their home. “You have your life here.”
García and Torres are two of the more than 5.4 million Venezuelans who the Coordination Platform for Migrants and Refugees from Venezuela say have left their country as of November 2020 because of its ongoing economic and political crises.
Statistics from the Colombian government indicate there are currently more than 1.7 million Venezuelans in the country. More than 50 percent of them live in Bogotá and the departments of Norte de Santander, Atlántico and Antioquia.
Colombian President Iván Duque in February announced the country would legally recognize Venezuelan migrants who are registered with the government.
Sources in Colombia with whom the Blade has spoken say there are likely many more Venezuelan migrants in the country than official statistics indicate. Venezuelan migrants who are LGBTQ and/or living with HIV remain disproportionately vulnerable to discrimination and violence and often lack access to health care and formal employment.
A report the Red de Movilidad Humana LGBTI+—a network of advocacy groups in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala and Mexico—published with the support of the U.N. Refugee Agency notes sex trafficking and even death are among the myriad threats that LGBTQ migrants from Venezuela face once they enter Colombia. The report indicates they also face discrimination in shelters because of their sexual orientation and gender identity, sexual violence and a lack of access to the Colombian judicial system.
Trans woman left Venezuela ‘in search of a better quality of life’
Vanesa, a 25-year-old transgender woman from the Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, came to Colombia eight years ago “in search of a better quality of life.”
She told the Blade on Sept. 14 during an interview at Fundación de Atención Inclusiva, Social y Humana (FUVADIS)—an organization in Barranquilla, a city in Atlántico department that is near the mouth of the Magdalena River in northern Colombia, that serves Venezuelan migrants—she entered Colombia near Maicao, a city in La Guajira department via an informal border crossing known as a “trocha.” Vanesa said she was nearly kidnapped.
“The people who were standing on the sides (of the “trocha”) who ask you for money were supposedly security,” she said. “There was no security. They left me there because I was trans. They said a lot of ugly things. They assaulted me, including one (man) who was not going to let me go. They wanted me to kidnap me or have me there to do whatever they wanted to me.”
Vanesa said a woman helped her escape.
“The experience was horrible,” she said.
Vanesa traveled to Cartagena, a popular tourist destination that is less than two hours southwest of Barranquilla, and began to work at her friend’s hair salon. Vanesa told the Blade that her friend’s mother “never liked me because … she is a Christian.”
Vanesa now lives in Barranquilla and supports herself through video chats. Vanesa also competes in local beauty pageants and is able to send money to her mother in Venezuela.
“I work here,” she said. “I am relatively well off.”
Andy, a trans man from Venezuela’s Maracay state, left Venezuela four years ago with his partner and their daughter. Andy, like Vanesa, entered Colombia via a “trocha” near Maicao.
“I migrated because the situation was becoming worse and worse each day,” Andy told the Blade on Sept. 14 as he attended a workshop that Caribe Afirmativo, an LGBTQ group in northern Colombia, organized at a Barranquilla hotel.
Caribe Afirmativo has opened three “Casas Afirmativos” in Barranquilla, Maicao and Medellín that provide access to health care and other services to Venezuelan migrants who are LGBTQ and/or living with HIV/AIDS. Caribe Afirmativo also operates several “Casas de Paz” throughout northern Colombia that support the implementation of an LGBTQ-inclusive peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia that came into force in 2016.
Andy said his work in Venezuela allowed him to learn how “to sell whatever product,” but he told the Blade he struggled to find a job once he arrived in Colombia.
Andy told the Blade that he, his partner and their daughter now have stable housing in Barranquilla. Andy said he also has received a job offer in Medellín, the country’s second-largest city that is the capital of Antioquia department.
Jesús Gómez is a 33-year-old gay man from Venezuela’s Trujillo state in the Venezuelan Andes that are close to the country’s border with Colombia.
He previously worked with Venezuela Diversa, a Venezuelan LGBTQ advocacy group, and accepted a position with the municipality of Chacao that is part of Caracas. Gómez, whose mother was born in Colombia, also joined a student protest movement against the government.
Gómez fled to Colombia and is pursuing his asylum case with the help of UNHCR.
“I feel bad emotionally, but I am well-off compared to other people,” he told the Blade on Sept. 16 during an interview at a hotel in Cúcuta, a city in Norte de Santander department that is a few miles from the country’s border with Venezuela. “I am working to help other people who are in the same situation.”
Gómez in December is scheduled to graduate from nursing school. He also works with Fundación Censurados, a Cúcuta-based HIV/AIDS service organization that works with Venezuelan migrants, and has supported other organizations in the area that serve them.
FUVADIS Executive Director Luis Meneses, like Gómez, was an LGBTQ activist in Venezuela.
Meneses, who is from Venezuela’s Zulia state, in 2010 unsuccessfully ran for Venezuela’s National Assembly. Meneses in February 2018 fled to Colombia because of the “political persecution” he said he suffered.
“Discrimination and prejudice against me began when I came out to defend LGBTI rights,” Meneses told the Blade on Sept. 14 during an interview at his office.
Meneses in August 2018 launched FUVADIS, which receives support from groups that includes UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration. FUVADIS provides health care, antiretroviral drugs and a host of other services to Venezuelan migrants with HIV/AIDS and other populations that include sex workers. Vanessa and nearly 900 other FUVADIS clients are LGBTQ.
“We cannot work for the migrant population by only giving them humanitarian assistance,” said Meneses. “It’s also about guaranteeing access to their rights.”
Venezuelans with HIV/AIDS die because of lack of medications
The New York-based Aid for AIDS International estimates more than 10,000 Venezuelans with HIV have left the country in recent years. Activists and health care service providers in Venezuela with whom the Blade has spoken in recent years have said people with HIV/AIDS in the country have died because of a lack of antiretroviral drugs.
The Venezuelan government has also targeted HIV/AIDS service organizations.
Members of Venezuela’s General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence in January raided the offices of Azul Positivo, an HIV/AIDS service organization and arrested President Johan León Reyes and five other staff members. Venezuelan police on Feb. 15, 2019, raided the offices of Fundación Mavid, another HIV/AIDS service organization in Valencia, a city in Carabobo state, and arrested three staffers after they confiscated donated infant formula and medications for people with HIV/AIDS
Deyvi Galvis Vásquez, a doctor who is the manager of prevention and testing for AIDS Healthcare Foundation Colombia on Sept. 17 during an interview at AHF’s Cúcuta clinic showed the Blade pictures of Venezuelans with HIV/AIDS in Colombia who had cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma.
“The conditions are of extreme vulnerability,” said Galvis.
Andrés Cardona, director of Fundación Ancla, a Medellín-based group that works with migrants and other vulnerable groups, during a Sept. 13 interview with the Blade in his office echoed Galvis. Cardona added stigma specifically against Venezuelans with HIV/AIDS is one of the myriad issues he and his colleagues confront.
“The issue of the elimination of HIV also implies not only an issue of communication and prevention, but also an issue of effective attention,” said Cardona. “We have our conservative culture, an idea that the Venezuelans who are coming are going to give us HIV.”
“This is totally discriminatory,” he added.
Cardona, like those inside Venezuela with whom the Blade has spoken, said there are no services in the country for people with HIV/AIDS.
“There are many Venezuelan migrants with HIV who enter Colombia, because they are going to die if they don’t,” he said.
AHF operates clinics throughout Colombia
AHF operates other facilities in Bogotá and in the cities of Bucaramanga, Yopal, Valledupar and Ríohacha. The organization, along with the Colombian Red Cross and the government of Santander department, in March began to distribute condoms, food and water and offer rapid HIV tests to Venezuelan migrants who travel through Páramo de Berlín, a high plateau in the Colombian Andes through which a highway between Cúcuta and Bucaramanga passes.
AHF, among other things, offers migrants rapid HIV and syphilis tests and counseling for people who test positive. AHF also provides lab tests, formula for children of mothers with HIV and health care with an “interdisciplinary health care team.”
AHF Colombia Country Program Manager Liliana Andrade Forero and AHF Colombia Data Manager Sandra Avila Mira on Sept. 20 noted to the Blade during an interview at AHF’s Bogotá clinic that upwards of 2,000 migrants currently receive care from the organization. They also pointed out that 1,952 of them are taking antiretroviral drugs the Brazilian government donates.
Galvis noted to the Blade that many of AHF’s patients also have access to mental health care and social workers.
“AHF’s policy is to reach out to everyone,” he said.
Pandemic has made migrants even more vulnerable
Galvis, Fundación Censurados Director Juan Carlos Archila and other Colombian HIV/AIDS service providers with whom the Blade spoke say the pandemic has made Venezuelan migrants with HIV/AIDS in the country even more vulnerable.
Lockdowns prevented sex workers and others who work in the informal economy from earning money. A “pico y género” rule implemented by Bogotá Mayor Claudia López that allowed women to leave their homes on even days and men to leave their homes on odd days sparked criticism among trans activists.
Archila, who is a nurse, on Sept. 16 told the Blade during an interview at a Cúcuta hotel the pandemic has also left Censurados in a precarious situation.
“We endured practically two years with the doors closed, with expenses increasing,” he said. “The need of people who come to us for the issue of HIV remains, and yet we are all trying to cope with the situation.”
Andrade noted AHF’s Bogotá was closed for several months at the beginning of the pandemic because of the city’s strict lockdown.
The pandemic also forced FUVADIS to close its offices in March 2020, but Meneses told the Blade the organization was able to see a handful of patients at a time. He said “basic humanitarian assistance” that included hygiene kits and food were among the things that FUVADIS was able to provide its patients during the pandemic.
“Understanding how the situation for the LGBTI community, people with HIV, the migrant population and the refugee population is, we could not allow (our services) to shut down,” Meneses told the Blade.
Honduras
Realidad LGBTQ en Honduras: fuga o muerte
Observatorio KAI+: 35 asesinatos anti-LGBTQ en 2026
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Las cifras encienden todas las alarmas: 35 muertes violentas de personas LGBTQ, 195 casos de violencia generalizada y 11 personas asistidas para refugiarse en el extranjero. Las mujeres trans encabezan las víctimas mortales con 11 casos, seguidas de los hombres gay con 10.
Esa es la realidad de las poblaciones sexualmente diversas que pinta el boletín número 14 del Observatorio de Violencia hacia las Personas LGBTI+ de Honduras KAI+, correspondiente al período de enero al 8 de agosto de 2026.
Según el informe, los departamentos con mayor concentración de asesinatos son Francisco Morazán (12), Cortés (5) y Comayagua (4). Sin embargo, el dato más revelador de la impunidad es que los 35 casos permanecen en etapa de investigación preliminar, con apenas dos capturas reportadas.
«No queremos vivir con miedo»: defensores
Lucía Barrientos, de la Asociación Ixchel, resume el sentimiento colectivo. «Hoy las personas LGBTI en Honduras vivimos en estado de alerta. Muertes que, al hacer un análisis, tienen una conmoción de que muchas personas de nuestra población han sido torturadas, que han sido crímenes de odio», señala.
Barrientos subraya que en el país no hay una ley que tipifique el crimen de odio, lo que deja a la población en un limbo legal y expuesta a la violencia sin protección efectiva.
Entretanto, Jennifer Córdoba, de la Colectiva de Mujeres Trans Muñecas de Arcoíris, lamenta que las autoridades no estén haciendo nada para defender los derechos humanos.
«Ver ese tipo de violencias en el país que se incrementan, ver que las autoridades de nuestro país no están haciendo nada para la defensa de los derechos humanos, no crear una política pública que respete los derechos humanos de la población LGTBI», afirma Córdoba.
Violencia generalizada y discriminación sistemática
Los 195 casos de violencia generalizada incluyen amenazas (19), maltrato familiar (25), abuso de autoridad (14), discriminación por orientación sexual o identidad de género (14), lesiones (10) y agresiones sexuales. Las mujeres trans son nuevamente las más afectadas, con 32 casos registrados.
Dany Montesinos, de la Asociación LGBTI Kukulcán, advierte: «Esta es una violencia general, estructurada. No tenemos un patrón determinado. La alerta que estamos poniendo es que, en comparación con otros años, esto está siendo más creciente».
Un elemento crítico señalado por el boletín es que casi el 70 por ciento de los casos de violencia generalizada (137 de 195) carecen de categorización desagregada sobre la orientación sexual o identidad de género de la víctima, lo que evidencia la ausencia de protocolos adecuados por parte de las instituciones estatales y una invisibilización sistemática.
Migración forzada, huir para vivir
Entre los hallazgos más dolorosos está la asistencia a 11 personas LGBTQ que han buscado refugio en el extranjero. Ocho se han ido a Estados Unidos, dos a España y una al Reino Unido. Los motivos incluyen amenazas, discriminación, abuso de autoridad, agresiones sexuales y físicas.
Como señala un testimonio: «Tuvieron que irse, se vieron obligadas a huir por amenazas, por la discriminación, por el abuso de autoridad y agresiones sexuales. Estos datos nos muestran que la migración de las personas LGBTI no responde únicamente a razones económicas, sino a la necesidad urgente de proteger su vida y sus derechos».
Recomendaciones ante un Estado ausente
El boletín concluye con un llamado urgente al Estado hondureño. Exige fortalecer las investigaciones de muertes violentas e implementar políticas públicas de protección integral. Además, capacitar a funcionarios en diversidad sexual y derechos humanos y garantizar que los casos avancen más allá de la etapa preliminar.
Barrientos lo resume con claridad. «Exigimos al Estado respuestas inmediatas, justicia y protección real para nuestra población. No queremos retroceder, no queremos volver atrás, no queremos vivir con miedo, no queremos salir a la calle y saber que no puedo expresar mi amor hacia mi pareja o hacia otra persona porque puedo amar y ser muerta».
El Observatorio KAI+ recuerda que detrás de cada cifra hay seres humanos: madres, padres, hijos, hermanos y familias que dependen de ellos. La indiferencia institucional, advierten, no puede seguir siendo una puerta abierta a la impunidad.
Netherlands
Trans, nonbinary Americans find refuge in the Netherlands
DAFT visa offers fast-track to permanent residency, citizenship
Editor’s note: International News Editor Michael K. Lavers and Photo Editor Michael Key were on assignment in the Netherlands from July 28-Aug. 10.
AMSTERDAM — A transgender American couple who live in the Netherlands say President Donald Trump prompted them to leave the U.S.
Jack Reaves, who is a trans man, and his wife, Iskara McCoy, who is a trans woman of color, moved to the Netherlands from Reno, Nev., in 2024. The couple now lives outside Utrecht, a university city that is roughly 30 miles south-southeast of Amsterdam.
“We’d been keeping an eye on things during his (Trump’s) first term in 2016, which was pretty terrifying,” Reaves told the Washington Blade on Aug. 24 during a WhatsApp interview with him and McCoy. “We knew that there was a lot of anti-trans legislation and just anti-trans feelings from the Republican/MAGA party at the time.”
The Biden-Harris administration took office on Jan. 20, 2021, two weeks after thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol — the insurrection took place shortly after Congress began to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election that Joe Biden won.
“Joe Biden was elected, and we were like, okay, well maybe things will turn around,” said Reaves. “But it was very clear very early on in the Biden presidency that that wasn’t going to happen.”
“There weren’t any meaningful changes, and then with Trump getting ready to win the next election and MAGA really looking like they were going to continue to gain more power, we were like, well time to get out.”
Reaves and McCoy are two of the four trans and nonbinary Americans who have moved to the Netherlands with whom the Blade recently spoke. The interviews took place during World Pride, which took place in Amsterdam from July 25-Aug. 8, or in the days after the biennial event ended.
The Dutch American Friendship Treaty, or DAFT, allows American citizens to live and work in the Netherlands as self-employed entrepreneurs.
DAFT visa recipients must keep at least €4,500 ($5,244.19) in a Dutch business bank account and need to register their business with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce. DAFT visa recipients can apply for permanent residency in the Netherlands or the European Union seven years after they receive it.
Reaves and McCoy and the two other trans and nonbinary Americans with whom the Blade spoke for this story either received a DAFT visa or plan to apply for one.
Kai, who is nonbinary, and their husband, who is a trans man, moved from New England to the Netherlands in August 2021. They now live in Haarlem, a small city that is roughly 12 miles west of Amsterdam.
Kai told the Blade on Aug. 20 during an interview from their home that friends moved to the Netherlands in 2017 after they received a DAFT visa.
“The prompt was the 2016 election for them,” said Kai.
Kai and their husband were living in a collective household in August 2020 when they “decided we wanted to have some kind of change.”
“We suspected that politics was going to get worse, even if it got better soon, that it would probably get worse again later, and that the country politically was going downhill,” they said.
Kai told the Blade a lack of promised disability payments and poor health in the U.S. were also factors.
“When I had been to visit the Netherlands to visit the friends that were living here, I found that my body was healthier, even though I was only here for one or two weeks at a time,” they said. “I was able to do more things, eat more things that I couldn’t go or eat while living in the U.S.”
The fourth American with whom the Blade spoke identifies as a “disabled transgender queer” person. He asked to remain anonymous.
He and his daughter, who is also trans, arrived in the Netherlands in July. He referred to the Holocaust and its impact in the Netherlands when the Blade interviewed him in Amsterdam on Aug. 6.
“I’m the trans parent of a trans adolescent who knows our family history, which includes genocide from the Holocaust,” he said, pointing out 85 percent of Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust. “(My daughter) said my grandparents came to New York right before the occupation, and so my daughter said from our history that targeted communities have to get out early, so this was last summer, so how will we know we need to leave and where will we go?”
“I started looking into that, and we started planning our move,” he added.
He pointed out the “murder of opposition politicians” — specifically former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, who were shot to death inside their home in June 2025 — and “harassment and prosecution” of journalists in the U.S. — federal authorities in January arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon less than two weeks after he entered a Minnesota church with a group of protesters who confronted its pastor who works with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — since the Trump-Vance administration took office as signs he and his daughter may need to leave the U.S.
Federal authorities charged Lemon, independent journalist Georgia Fort and two protesters with conspiracy and interfering with worshippers’ First Amendment rights during the protest.
An ICE agent on Jan. 7 shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman who left behind her wife and three children. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents on Jan. 24 shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who worked for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Minneapolis.
Pretti and Good were American citizens.
The shootings took place after the Trump-Vance administration deployed thousands of federal immigration agents to Minnesota during “Operation Metro Surge.”
“We were thinking, depending on what happens with the midterms,” said the trans person in Amsterdam with whom the Blade spoke. “But then you’re like, you know what, every day more people are coming and we should just do this thing.”
The Trump-Vance administration since it took office on Jan. 20, 2025, has implemented several anti-trans executive orders and policies.
Trump hours after his second inauguration signed the “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” that, among other things, declared the federal government will only recognize two genders: male and female. The directive also banned the State Department from issuing passports with “X” gender markers.
The Pentagon reinstated a ban on openly trans servicemembers. The Department of Education has rescinded agreements with school districts that were designed to protect trans students. The Trump-Vance administration’s anti-terrorism strategy specifically targets “radically pro-transgender” groups.
The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this summer upheld state laws banning athletes from school sports teams that correspond with their gender identity and block gender-affirming care for minors. The Trump-Vance administration since it took office has moved aggressively to curtail these treatments.
“On the one hand, it’s like as if people don’t recognize that that these things make it impossible to have a trans life,” said the trans person with whom the Blade spoke in Amsterdam. “But of course, that’s what Project 2025 is trying to do … make it be impossible to exist.”
McCoy said her and Reaves’s oldest child, who is also trans, has an “X” gender marker on their U.S. passport. McCoy’s grandmother with whom she was very close recently died, but her family attended her funeral virtually from the Netherlands “because we didn’t want to risk returning to the States at that point.”
Kai also noted trans and nonbinary Americans who are trying to leave the U.S., but don’t have passports and other documents with gender markers that match their gender identity.
“That’s terrifying, and it prevents you from doing things like leaving the country,” they said. “Even if it’s not a ban on leaving the country, it still prevents you from leaving the country if those things don’t match in the right way, depending on which immigrations person you get at the border.”
“On this end it wouldn’t matter as much,” added Kai. “But on the other end, it does matter and that is super frustrating and exhausting.”
Dutch ‘very into their bureaucracy’
Kai and the three other trans and nonbinary Americans with whom the Blade spoke said navigating the Dutch health care system upon their arrival in the Netherlands was one of their biggest challenges.
“They’re very into their bureaucracy and they’re very into following guidelines as if they’re laws, and they’re the only ways you do things,” said McCoy. “Once they start working for you. They work. Once you’re in the system, once you’re onboarded, once they’re caught up, then everything goes pretty smoothly.”
Reaves noted McCoy “had a little bit easier time as a trans woman who’s already passing.”
“They were just like, oh, well, it’s clear you’re a woman, so here’s your hormones, and here’s the fast path to diagnostics,” Reaves told the Blade.
Reaves, on the other hand, had been on testosterone for six years before he and McCoy moved to the Netherlands. Reaves said it took nearly a “full year of re-diagnostics before I could get back on testosterone and continue to determine care.”
“They were just like, ‘Well, you kind of look like a woman, so we’re gonna make you do the full diagnostic phase again,’” recalled Reaves.
Reaves told the Blade his doctor prescribed him the wrong type of testosterone. Health clinics that specifically treat trans and nonbinary people use what he described as “extremely outdated language,” but Reaves noted the facility’s doctor helped him get an appointment for his top surgery.
“Now that I’m fully onboarded, I think it’s actually been a little bit better than the U.S.,” he said, noting he receives testosterone blood tests at home. “The follow-ups are really easy.”
Kai also discussed the challenges navigating the Dutch health care system.
They said it would “have been a lot harder to receive care” if they had already undergone hormone replacement therapy, seen a psychiatrist, or had had surgeries. Kai told the Blade they “made the choice” to tell the clinic where they were receiving care that they were a man, as opposed to saying they are nonbinary.
“That’s not true, but I look enough like a man, and then I’m going to get the care that I need,” they said. “I’m sure it’s very different and difficult for folks, especially who are nonbinary, to say I am actually a woman, or I am actually a man, and to pretend that … and that’s still what the system says.”
“Just like with any system, if you want to get your needs met from the system, sometimes you have to meet the system where it’s at, and then once you get your needs met, then outside of the system you can be whoever you want,” Kai added.
Kai noted Dutch activists are “working to get some of those laws and some of those policies changed.” Their husband is working with one group “that is working to change things from if you don’t have a psychological diagnosis of being trans, then getting that care is going to be really hard.”
“What this group is working on is trying to get trans care to be — it’s what they use in the U.S., which is like informed consent, which is not what they use here,” said Kai. “But they’re working on putting together something to like push to governmental level to policy level to say that trans care should be informed consent, not the diagnosis.”
Gay PM: Netherlands needs to do more to defend trans people, rights
The Netherlands in 2001 became the first country in the world to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples.
The country’s nondiscrimination and hate crimes law include gender identity and expression. The Dutch government in 2021 formally apologized to trans and intersex people who were forced to become sterile in order to legally change their gender — The Gender Change Act, which was also known as the Transgender Act — was in place from 1985 until 2014.
Prime Minister Rob Jetten, who is the country’s first openly gay head of government, during a World Pride Human Rights Conference panel conceded the Netherlands needs to do more to defend trans people and their rights. Boris Dittrich, the Dutch Senate’s First Vice President and a member of Jetten’s D66 party who was previously global advocacy director for Human Rights Watch’s LGBTQ Rights Program, at the end of the panel asked about protecting intersex babies from what advocates maintain are unnecessary surgeries.
Reaves admitted he and his children are struggling to learn Dutch, but he added he and his family “appreciate” the Netherlands and “really enjoy living here.”
“I struggle in the Netherlands,” Reaves told the Blade. “I don’t speak the language
“It’s hard being away from home and your own culture and the things you grew up with,” he said. “But I’m safe here, and so that like gives it extra points.”
McCoy said their daughter has “experienced zero transphobia here so far.”
Kai told the Blade that their friends warned them that Dutch people would “call you out or they’ll stare at you or will be mean to you” if they “look nonbinary.”
“I had never had that experience,” they said.
All four of the people with whom the Blade spoke said they plan to apply for their Dutch or EU citizenship once they are legally able to do so. They all expressed reservations about returning to the U.S., even once the Trump-Vance administration is no longer in office.
“I’m actually very nervous that even if things turn around in the U.S. as far as getting rid of Trump, that people are still going to be anti-trans,” said the trans person with whom the Blade spoke in Amsterdam. “The poison’s in the water.”
Reaves said the U.S. “doesn’t really feel like it’s a safe place for trans people to come to.” McCoy added she would consider visiting the U.S., but “I would not move back.”
“That’s too risky,” she said. “It can change anytime.”
“It would probably take like a decade of democratic legislative changes before I would feel safe coming back,” added Reaves.
Canada
Monument to LGBTQ Canadians officially unveiled
Thunderhead honors those who suffered government-sanctioned discrimination
A monument that pays tribute to LGBTQ Canadians who suffered government-sanctioned persecution and discrimination officially opened in Ottawa on Aug. 21.
Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Governor General Louise Arbour, and Women and Gender Equality Minister Rechie Valdez are among those who attended the ceremony.
A Canadian government press release notes Thunderhead, which is located on Parliament Hill, “recognizes the historic discrimination faced by 2SLGBTQI+ (two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, plus) people in Canada, including during the LGBT (lesbiennes, gaies, bisexuelles, trans) Purge.”
(French and English are Canada’s official languages.)
Trudeau in 2017 formally apologized to Canadians who suffered persecution and discrimination under the country’s anti-LGBTQ laws — including those convicted of “gross indecency” before Canada decriminalized consensual same-sex sexual relations — and policies. Trudeau also formally apologized to those who were fired from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the country’s military and civil service from the 1950s to the mid-1990s because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
The Canadian government later settled a class action lawsuit that LGBT Purge victims filed.
The settlement funded the monument.
The Canadian government’s press release notes an “all Canadian team” from Winnipeg, Manitoba, designed it. The monument is also located on the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation’s traditional territory.
“It celebrates the resilience and achievements of those who fought for equality, educates visitors, and inspires the change still needed so that everyone can openly love who they love and express and identify themselves as they choose,” reads the press release.
“Thunderhead stands as a tribute to the lives, stories, and contributions of 2SLGBTQI+ people across Canada,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney on Facebook. “It’s reminder of the discrimination too many endured — and honors those who fought to build a country where everyone can live freely, safely, and with dignity.”
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