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Trans candidate concedes in Erie county exec race

Democrat was attacked over out-of-state campaign funds

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Tyler Titus appears to have lost their bid for county executive in Erie, Pa. (Screenshot from campaign video)

UPDATE: Tyler Titus conceded the race for Erie County Executive on Wednesday. They issued the following statement: “Since launching my campaign, I’ve talked with so many people who found a home in our campaign, who found light and inspiration in our shared vision for an inclusive future. I’ve talked with countless transgender youth in Erie County and across the country who told me our campaign inspired them to strive for greater heights, defy expectations, and feel hope for a safer, brighter future.”

Erie, Pa., school board president Tyler Titus was behind by more than 4,000 votes shortly before midnight on Tuesday in their bid to become the nation’s first openly transgender and nonbinary person to win election as a county executive.

Titus, a Democrat, had 28,253 votes, or 45.9 percent, compared to their Republican rival Brenton Davis, who had 32,786 votes, or 53.3 percent, with 147 of the county’s 149 precincts counted, according to the latest available returns on Tuesday night from the Erie County election board.

The Erie Times-News reported that Davis declared victory in the hotly contested county executive race shortly before midnight, claiming that the “math” from the vote count made it no longer possible for Titus to win.

It could not immediately be determined how many mail-in ballots were uncounted on Tuesday night, but the LGBTQ Victory Fund, which endorsed Titus and raised over $283,000 for their campaign, said it heard from sources that as many as 4,000 mail-in ballots had yet to be counted.

Josh Rosenbaum, Titus’s campaign manager, said election officials would resume counting ballots at 9 a.m. Wednesday. He said Titus would make a statement sometime on Wednesday. 

“The [Titus] campaign is going to review everything in the morning and make sure everything is in before they make a final decision one way or another,” Victory Fund spokesperson Elliot Imse told the Washington Blade.

Political observers said Titus ran an aggressive, well-funded campaign against Davis, who Titus supporters say appealed to anti-transgender and anti-LGBTQ sentiment among some voters by accusing Titus of planning to impose an “unknown agenda” on Erie County.

Davis also criticized Titus for raising most of Titus’s campaign funds from donors who live outside of the county and outside of Pennsylvania. The Titus campaign raised just over $541,000 as of Nov. 1, more than double the amount raised by the Davis campaign. A significant percentage of the funds raised by the Titus campaign came through the fundraising effort of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, the national group that raises funds for LGBTQ candidates running for public office throughout the country.

“Tyler Titus is continuing the sale of Erie County government to out-of-region donors who have pumped huge dollars into what is supposed to be a local political race,” the Davis campaign said in an Oct. 25 statement. “When somebody outside Erie County invests this kind of money in a county-level election, you can bet it’s not about improving the lives of people here,” the statement said. “It’s about imposing an unknown agenda with mystery dollars.”

The Titus campaign and its supporters called the Davis campaign’s claims about out-of-town donors with a hidden agenda an unfounded ruse aimed at diverting voters’ attention from the issues that Titus raised to improve the lives of Erie County residents.

During the campaign, Rosenbaum, Titus’s campaign manager, called Titus’s ability to raise money from supporters outside the county a sign that their ideas and positions on the issues enjoy widespread support.

“It’s exciting to us that there are people from all across Erie County, across Pennsylvania and some across the country who believe in Tyler’s message and Tyler’s ability to lead Erie County into a future that’s healthy, safe and prosperous for all of us,” Rosenbaum told the Erie Times-News. “It shows that Tyler is inspiring to so many people.”

Titus became the first out transgender person to win election to public office in Pennsylvania in 2017 when Titus won election to the Erie City school board. Fellow school board members later elected Titus to serve as president of the board.

In May of this year Titus won an upset victory in the Erie County Democratic primary in a four-candidate race to capture the nomination for the County Executive post. Most Democratic Party leaders in the county supported County Councilor Carl Anderson, whom Titus beat in the primary by a margin of just 218 votes. Following the primary, the Erie County Democratic Party and the Pennsylvania Democratic Party endorsed Titus and actively supported Titus’s campaign.

However, Democratic candidate Rita Bishop, who finished in fourth place in the primary and who identifies as a lesbian, announced she was breaking ranks with her party to endorse and actively support Republican Davis in the November election. 

In a controversial Facebook message on Oct. 25, Bishop posted five photos of Titus, in one of which Titus was wearing female clothes that was taken before Titus fully transitioned to their status as a transgender and nonbinary person.

“Who is the real Tyler Titus?” Bishop stated in her posting. “He doesn’t know.”   

The posting drew an immediate flurry of more than two-dozen postings by Facebook users denouncing Bishop for what they called a hurtful and hateful attempt to attack a transgender candidate.

Titus’s supporters said they were hopeful that what they considered an attempt by Bishop and GOP candidate Davis to use the trans issue to distract voters’ attention from Titus’s positions on how the Erie County government can be improved would be unsuccessful.

But some of Titus’s supporters said the anti-trans attacks by Davis supporters could be successful in alienating voters who otherwise might have supported the Democratic candidate for county executive. 

Titus has a master’s degree in community counseling and a doctorate degree in social work. Titus has worked in recent years as a licensed professional counselor operating a private counseling practice

Titus’s campaign website says Titus is married to Shraddha Prabhu, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania’s Edinboro University, “and the proud parent of two phenomenal children.”

Political observers have pointed out that Erie County is considered an election bellwether for the nation as well as for Pennsylvania, which they say could be predictive of whether Democrats or Republicans come out ahead in the 2022 congressional midterm elections. Donald Trump narrowly won Erie County in the 2016 presidential election and President Joe Biden won in the county by a close margin in 2020.

But in addition to Titus’s status as a transgender and nonbinary candidate, the Titus campaign stressed that Titus was a progressive who ran to the left of their Democratic primary rivals.

“The campaign is anchored by the belief that progressive policies are popular, and that when you speak directly to the values of the voter, you can win anywhere,” an Oct. 18 statement from the Titus campaign said.

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State Department

Transgender, nonbinary people file lawsuit against passport executive order

State Department banned from issuing passports with ‘X’ gender markers

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(Bigstock photo)

Seven transgender and nonbinary people on Feb. 7 filed a federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s executive order that bans the State Department from issuing passports with “X” gender markers.

Ashton Orr, Zaya Perysian, Sawyer Soe, Chastain Anderson, Drew Hall, Bella Boe, and Reid Solomon-Lane are the plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and the private law firm Covington & Burling LPP filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. The lawsuit names Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as defendants.

Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken in June 2021 announced the State Department would begin to issue gender-neutral passports and documents for American citizens who were born overseas.

Dana Zzyym, an intersex U.S. Navy veteran who identifies as nonbinary, in 2015 filed a federal lawsuit against the State Department after it denied their application for a passport with an “X” gender marker. Zzyym in October 2021 received the first gender-neutral American passport.

The State Department policy took effect on April 11, 2022.

Trump signed the executive order that overturned it shortly after he took office on Jan. 20. Rubio later directed State Department personnel to “suspend any application requesting an ‘X’ sex marker and do not take any further action pending additional guidance from the department.”  

“This guidance applies to all applications currently in progress and any future applications,” reads Rubio’s memo. “Guidance on existing passports containing an ‘X’ sex marker will come via other channels.”

The lawsuit says Trump’s executive order is an “abrupt, discriminatory, and dangerous reversal of settled United States passport policy.” It also concludes the new policy is “unlawful and unconstitutional.”

“It discriminates against individuals based on their sex and, as to some, their transgender status,” reads the lawsuit. “It is motivated by impermissible animus. It cannot be justified under any level of judicial scrutiny, and it wrongly seeks to erase the reality that transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people exist today as they always have.”

Solomon-Lane, who lives in North Adams, Mass., with his spouse and their three children, in an ACLU press release says he has “lived virtually my entire adult life as a man” and “everyone in my personal and professional life knows me as a man, and any stranger on the street who encountered me would view me as a man.”

“I thought that 18 years after transitioning, I would be able to live my life in safety and ease,” he said. “Now, as a married father of three, Trump’s executive order and the ensuing passport policy have threatened that life of safety and ease.”

“If my passport were to reflect a sex designation that is inconsistent with who I am, I would be forcibly outed every time I used my passport for travel or identification, causing potential risk to my safety and my family’s safety,” added Solomon-Lane.

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Federal Government

Education Department moves to end support for trans students

Mental health services among programs that are in jeopardy

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The U.S. Department of Education headquarters in D.C. (Photo courtesy of the GSA/Education Department)

An email sent to employees at the U.S. Department of Education on Friday explains that “programs, contracts, policies, outward-facing media, regulations, and internal practices” will be reviewed and cut in cases where they “fail to affirm the reality of biological sex.”

The move, which is of a piece with President Donald Trump’s executive orders restricting transgender rights, jeopardizes the future of initiatives at the agency like mental health services and support for students experiencing homelessness.

Along with external-facing work at the agency, the directive targets employee programs such as those administered by LGBTQ resource groups, in keeping with the Trump-Vance administration’s rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion within the federal government.

In recent weeks, federal agencies had begun changing their documents, policies, and websites for purposes of compliance with the new administration’s first executive action targeting the trans community, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

For instance, the Education Department had removed a webpage offering tips for schools to better support homeless LGBTQ youth, noted ProPublica, which broke the news of the “sweeping” changes announced in the email to DOE staff.

According to the news service, the directive further explains the administration’s position that “The deliberate subjugation of women and girls by means of gender ideology — whether in intimate spaces, weaponized language, or American classrooms — negated the civil rights of biological females and fostered distrust of our federal institutions.”

A U.S. Senate committee hearing will be held Thursday for Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee for education secretary, who has been criticized by LGBTQ advocacy groups. GLAAD, for instance, notes that she helped to launch and currently chairs the board of a conservative think tank that “has campaigned against policies that support transgender rights in education.”

NBC News reported on Tuesday that Trump planned to issue an executive order this week to abolish the Education Department altogether.

While the president and his conservative allies in and outside the administration have repeatedly expressed plans to disband the agency, doing so would require approval from Congress.

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State Department

Protesters demand US fully restore PEPFAR funding

Activists blocked intersection outside State Department on Thursday

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HIV/AIDS activists block an intersection outside the State Department on Feb. 6, 2025. They were demanding the Trump-Vance administration to fully restore PEPFAR funding. (Photo courtesy of Housing Works)

Dozens of HIV/AIDS activists on Thursday protested outside the State Department and demanded U.S. officials fully restore President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief funding.

The activists — members of Housing Works, Health GAP, and the Treatment Action Group — blocked an intersection for an hour. Health GAP Executive Director Asia Russell told the Washington Blade that police did not make any arrests.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Jan. 24 directed State Department personnel to stop nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending for 90 days in response to an executive order that President Donald Trump signed after his inauguration. Rubio later issued a waiver that allows PEPFAR and other “life-saving humanitarian assistance” programs to continue to operate during the freeze.

The Blade on Wednesday reported PEPFAR-funded programs in Kenya and other African countries have been forced to suspend services and even shut down because of a lack of U.S. funding.

“PEPFAR is a program that has saved 26 million lives and changed the trajectory of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic,” said Housing Works CEO Charles King in a press release. “The recent freeze on its funding is not just a bureaucratic decision; it is a death sentence for millions who rely on these life-saving treatments. We cannot allow decades of progress to be undone. The U.S. must immediately reaffirm its commitment to global health and human dignity by restoring PEPFAR funding.” 

“We demand Secretary Rubio immediately reverse his deadly, illegal stop-work order, which has already disrupted life-saving HIV services worldwide,” added Russell. “Any waiver process is too little, too late.”

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