Gay U.S. Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) will chair the LGBTQ Congressional Equality Caucus in the newly seated 119th Congress, he told Axios on Friday.

“Over the next several years, we will see a constant barrage of attacks on the rights and dignity of the queer community — especially against our transgender siblings,” Takano said. “I will lead our coalition of openly-LGBTQI+ members and our allies in the fight to both defend the queer community and push equality forward, including by reintroducing the Equality Act.”

The caucus was founded in 2008 by then-U.S. Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), the latter going on to represent the Badger State in the U.S. Senate since 2013, when she became the first LGBTQ member to serve in the upper chamber.

Led in the last Congress by U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), the caucus’s chair and eight co-chairs are out and LGBTQ. There are a couple dozen vice chairs and more than 160 other members, all Democrats.

In recent battles over must-pass appropriations bills, the caucus opposed House Republicans’ insistence on including anti-LGBTQ “poison pill” policy riders, meticulously chronicling their efforts to politicize government funding.

The caucus has also fought against and documented legislation proposed by House GOP members that takes aim at LGBTQ and especially transgender rights.

Takano’s tenure as chair will begin just as Republicans plan to push forward a bill that would prohibit trans women and girls from competing on women and girls’ sports teams, and just after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) enacted a new policy that would ban transgender people from bathrooms in the U.S. Capitol building.

“Our community will have a strong defender against Republicans’ incoming attacks with Representative Takano as our chair,” Pocan said.

First elected in 2013, the California congressman is the first gay Asian member to serve in either chamber. He is also the top Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

Particularly since Republicans took the U.S. House of Representatives in 2023, legislative attacks against the LGBTQ community, at least at the federal level, have been blunted by U.S. Senate Democrats exercising their narrow majority in the upper chamber, along with President Joe Biden’s promise to veto any discriminatory bill that should reach his desk.

Next month, however, Republicans will take control of both chambers of Congress as President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House, marking the first time since 2018 that the GOP has governed with a trifecta in Washington. 

“We expect the Trump administration and House and Senate Republicans to continue their anti-LGBTQ+ attacks on all aspects of life, especially against trans kids,” Josh Sorbe, a spokesperson for Senate Majority Whip and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), told the Washington Blade.

Durbin is among the Democratic senators who spoke out this week against a policy rider added to the National Defense Authorization Act by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), which would prohibit the military’s health provider Tricare from covering transgender medical treatments for the children of U.S. service members.

“In his first term, Donald Trump enabled LGBTQ+ workplace discrimination, banned trans service members, and vilified trans kids,” Sorbe said, while “The Biden-Harris administration and Democrats codified same-sex marriage, declared mpox a national emergency, and built up the LGBTQ+ movement.”

He added, “Democrats will continue to hold the line against misguided, anti-freedom legislation that we anticipate will be introduced.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee, one of the most powerful in Congress, exercises broad legislative jurisdiction and is responsible for oversight of the Executive Branch as well as the initial stages of confirming the president’s nominees for vacancies on the federal bench, including those picked to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the 117th Congress, control of the Senate was a 50-50 split, with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris casting tie-breaking votes. Democrats won another Senate seat in the 2022 midterms and for the past two years Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has led a 51-49 majority.

Despite the party’s narrow margin of control and starting with less than half the number of vacancies than were available for Trump to fill when he took office in 2017, Sorbe noted Senate Democrats are expected to confirm Biden’s 234th and 235th judicial nominees — surpassing, by one, the number of confirmations under the previous administration and also, by one, the record setting number of LGBTQ jurists appointed by President Obama over two terms. 

These “highly qualified, diverse candidates” will “help ensure the fair and impartial administration of the American justice system,” Sorbe said. Many will decide legal questions with broad implications for LGBTQ communities, including challenges brought against anti-LGBTQ legislation at the local, state, and federal level, or anti-LGBTQ policies enacted by the Trump-Vance administration. 

Sorbe highlighted some of the other work Durbin has done to “protect civil rights for all Americans” over the past four years in the majority, pointing to the Judiciary Committee’s 2021 hearing on the Equality Act, legislation that would codify LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination protections; a 2023 hearing that celebrated “the historic progress made in protecting the right of LGBTQ+ Americans”; the first hearing since 1984 about the Equal Rights Amendment that would “enshrine gender equality into the Constitution”; floor speeches in which the majority whip denounced “the harmful anti-LGBTQ+ legislation being introduced across the country”; and the senator’s co-sponsorship of the Respect for Marriage Act, which solidified the legal rights of interracial and same-sex married couples. 

Update: On Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. Senate voted 85-14 to pass the National Defense Authorization Act. Several Democrats voted against the military spending package, in many cases over their objection to a restriction on health coverage for gender affirming care. The Human Rights Campaign issued a statement urging President Joe Biden to veto the bill.

The U.S. Senate appears poised to pass the National Defense Authorization Act later this week, voting 63-7 on Monday to invoke cloture on the annual defense budget bill, which contains controversial provisions, including a prohibition on covering transgender medical care for the children of U.S. service members.

While all signs now point toward a smooth journey for passage of the NDAA, 21 Senate Democrats led by U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (Wis.) signed on to an amendment introduced Monday evening that would remove the anti-trans policy rider.

U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (Mass.), a cosponsor of Baldwin’s resolution, held a press conference on Tuesday with LGBTQ advocates to raise awareness about the issue, telling reporters “It is unacceptable for politicians to use the NDAA to force themselves between families and their health care providers, all in pursuit of their discriminatory aims.”

“We cannot stand by as these attacks on health care freedom continue, and we cannot pass the NDAA with this language included,” the senator said. “Trans rights are human rights.”

Also on Tuesday, U.S. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), another co-sponsor, delivered a speech on the Senate floor in which he shared, “there’s one provision in this conference agreement that troubles me—a provision that would ban certain medical treatments for transgender children of service members,” which “eliminates the ability of military families to work with medical professionals and make their own decisions about the health care needs of their own children.”

Baldwin’s office said the rule could restrict healthcare access for 6,000 to 7,000 children of U.S. service members who rely on the military’s Tricare provider for coverage of guideline-directed, medically necessary gender affirming treatments.

The rider was first added by House Republican Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) who passed the NDAA last week by a comfortable margin, 281-140 — with 81 Democrats including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) voting for the bill as others objected to the anti-trans provision.

U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, who said “Blanketly denying health care to people who clearly need it, just because of a biased notion against transgender people, is wrong.”

U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, the gay chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, said in a statement that “Speaker Johnson is playing political games with the health of our service members’ children by inserting himself into private medical decisions and overriding families’ choices—and our service members and their children will pay the price.”

Also voting against the bill last week was every out LGBTQ member of the House, with the exception of U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.), who told The Advocate that, “I strongly oppose the riders that Speaker Johnson included in the NDAA that would limit insurance coverage for military family members” and “will continue to fight for full equality for all members of the LGBTQ+ community, including transgender Americans, and my record in Congress demonstrates that.”

The Senate’s likely passage of the NDAA comes also despite last week’s letter by 45 Democratic members urging leadership to reject the “partisan, discriminatory, and harmful” policy riders added by House Republicans to must-pass spending bills, noting that most have tended to target reproductive and LGBTQ rights.

While the GOP caucus ultimately rejected more extreme anti-trans proposals, like a ban on funding gender transition surgeries for adults, the NDAA includes, along with the Tricare rule, a ban on contracting with advertising companies that “blacklist conservative news sources” and a freeze on hiring and recruiting for DEI-related roles pending the completion of an investigation into those programs.