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Teens stage ‘die-in’ protests against Florida’s anti-trans driver’s license policy

Demonstrations took place at DMVs across the state

Published

3 years ago

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Cameron Driggers (back row, far left) and other demonstrators protest outside the Gainesville, Fla. Department of Motor Vehicles (Photo credit: Youth Action Fund)

On Friday, just days after the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles issued a policy prohibiting transgender residents from updating the gender markers on their driver’s licenses, a group of teens coordinated “die-in” protests at DMVs across the state.

Speaking with the Washington Blade on Friday afternoon, Cameron Driggers and Jack Petocz relayed how they led demonstrations in Orlando, Miami, Tampa and Gainesville that featured more than 200 participants including representatives from more than eight LGBTQ groups.

The 18 and 19-year-old college students serve as, respectively, executive director and deputy director of Youth Action Fund, “a collective of Gen-Z activists fighting against the far-right culture war raging throughout Florida.”

This latest front on the war against trans people in the state, Driggers said, represents “one of the scariest, most authoritarian developments in Florida in a long time.”

The state agency’s policy preempts legislation in the Florida House of Representatives that would implement the same restrictions, permitting Floridians to list only their sex assigned at birth on state-issued IDs.

In response, Driggers recognized that “we need to have an Act Up-style direct action where we put our bodies on the line,” a reference to the AIDS activist organization’s practice of staging “die-ins” to demand that the federal government and Reagan White House stop ignoring an epidemic that was ravaging gay communities in the 1980s.

Driggers said Friday’s demonstrations were each 37 minutes long, a nod to data from the U.S. Transgender Survey that 37 percent of respondents have experienced discrimination because their IDs have inaccurate gender markers.

“We really wanted the protests to tell a story,” Petocz said. “We had the individuals actually lying down and committing the die-in where they had mock gravestones with messaging like ‘RIP: Killed by the DMV’ or ‘killed by the DeSantis administration'” along with “general messages about trans resistance.”

At each site these demonstrators were joined by a narrator to “tell the story of why we are out there today to passersby, what we are fighting for in this moment, [and] what the DMV just committed.”

Asked whether their decision to emulate the protest methods of Act Up was grounded in the relationship between Florida’s anti-trans crusade and increased incidence of death by suicide in communities already beset with high suicide rates and mental health challenges, Petocz said yes — but added that it’s “multifaceted.”

“I also think that you have to look at it from the perspective of enabling hate — of enabling the kind of sentiment that contributes to widespread transphobia,” he said. “And when the state goes ahead and they amplify that sentiment and they actually endorse it, it definitely leaves way for additional hate and hate crimes.”

“Our trans brothers and sisters are most susceptible to hate crimes in this country,” Petocz added.

Driggers said that next up for the coalition that participated in Friday’s demonstrations is bringing their protest to the Florida House. He noted that the copycat legislation, which was filed by state Reps. Douglas Michael Bankson (R-Apopka) and Dean Black (R-Jacksonville), is headed to committee for markup next week.

Meanwhile, they’re working with the Human Rights Campaign and Equality Florida on a letter writing campaign to urge the Justice Department to investigate the policy, which appears both unconstitutional and authoritarian, Driggers said. They have 1,167 letters so far.

Driggers also noted that Simone Chriss, director of the Southern Legal Counsel’s Transgender Rights Initiative, is “getting testimony from people who experienced problems” following the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles’ issuance of the new policy a couple of weeks ago.

A new wave of youth activism

Friday was hardly the first time Driggers and Petocz have led a protest against anti-LGBTQ and other harmful policies in Florida.

“Jack and I obviously been involved in activism for a very long time,” Driggers said. Their organization, which was just founded in November, awards $500 and $1,000 stipends for youth-led campaigns and individual advocates — while also lending their expertise in organizing to others through advisory services.

“We’ve worked through a variety of more institutional established organizations,” Driggers said. “And through that we’ve kind of identified a lot of shortcomings in the nonprofit industrial complex, if you will.”

“First among those, we think that there’s a structural lack of resources, and we’re often put on a pedestal and [told] ‘you’re gonna save us,’ but really, all that really means is they want us to be free labor, they want to knock on doors, they want to, you know, co-opt labor for the benefit of other organizations,” he said.

By contrast, with the Youth Action Fund, Driggers said, he and his friends have pioneered a new organizing model where “we tell people to come to us with their ideas, and then we work with them to make those ideas happen.”

For instance, Driggers said, when they were approached by students from Brevard County public high schools who objected to the district’s practice of banning books, Youth Action Fund was able to provide resources for them to acquire “speaking equipment, tables, literature” along with guidance on matters like how to “negotiate with their school board on how to get permits to protest.”

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Congress

HRC president campaigns for Chris Pappas in NH

Gay congressman running to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen

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11 hours ago

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August 31, 2026

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Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson speaks at the group's 2025 National Dinner in D.C. She campaigned for U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) in New Hampshire on Aug. 30, 2026. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson on Sunday campaigned for U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) in New Hampshire.

Robinson traveled to Manchester, the state’s largest city, nine days before the Sept. 8 primary that will determine who will vie for retiring U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.)’s seat.

Former U.S. Sen. John E. Sununu, who represented New Hampshire in the U.S. Senate from 2003-2009, will face off against former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, who represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate from 2010-2013, in the Republican primary.

Karishma Manzur is among the Democrats challenging Pappas.

A poll the University of New Hampshire Survey Center released on Aug. 26 shows Sununu is ahead of Brown. The same survey shows Pappas ahead of Manzur and his other Democratic challengers.

The UNH Survey Center poll shows Sununu ahead of Pappas by a 45-43 percent margin if they were to face off in the general election. The margin of error is +/-2.1 percent.

Pappas would become the first openly gay man elected to the U.S. Senate if he were to win in November.

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Congress

Chris Van Hollen says the Democratic Party needs change. Is he the one to lead it?

Senator is backing anti-establishment Democrats across the country

Published

6 days ago

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August 26, 2026

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By LEE O. SANDERLIN | The Democratic Party is having something of an identity crisis — losing to President Donald Trump twice in three elections will do that.

Should the party embrace anti-establishment figures who espouse progressive policy ideas like Medicare for all and rhetoric about unrigging the economy for the 1 percent? Or should Democrats try to appeal to moderates who want to return to semi-normalcy in a time of political upheaval?

Although he’s been in Congress since 2002, with key leadership roles throughout his tenure, Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, 67, counts himself firmly in the anti-establishment camp.

The rest of this article can be found on the Baltimore Banner’s website.

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Politics

Log Cabin Republicans remove transgender rights from mission

Decision made after ‘significant discussion’ with members, board

Published

2 weeks ago

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August 21, 2026

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From left, former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell and then-Log Cabin Republicans President Charles Moran attend the Log Cabin Republicans Big Tent Event at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

Log Cabin Republicans, an organization that formerly represented LGBTQ conservatives, has removed advocating for transgender and queer rights from its “renewed” national advocacy focus.

In an opinion piece written by Log Cabin Republicans President Ross Hemminger for the conservative media outlet Town Hall, he announced that trans rights would no longer be part of what the organization advocates for through conservative leadership and candidates.

In his piece, Hemminger wrote that after “significant discussion” with members and Log Cabin Republicans’ board of directors, the organization’s leadership voted to “refine Log Cabin Republicans’ national advocacy focus to concentrate specifically on issues of sexual orientation and conservative values,” a focus that does not include trans people.

“We have fought for the right to legally marry who we love, serve our country and our communities openly and proudly, and to enjoy the same inalienable rights afforded to all law-abiding Americans — and we succeeded,” Hemminger wrote. “However, the new era of gender identity politics is not the movement we supported and fought for. Gay men and women are losing public support across the country, and support for gay marriage and other once-widely accepted rights is eroding. Why? Because many voters today weren’t alive or cognizant of the politics of gay marriage winding its way through the courts and gaining ground in public opinion. Their view of the gay community is based on today’s radical transgender activists with their unnecessary and discomfiting focus on America’s youth.”

Hemminger then went on to argue that trans advocacy has shifted to focusing primarily on minors — a characterization that does not reflect the breadth of issues trans advocates address.

“They push schools to teach radical gender ideology; they want biological men in women’s sports regardless of the consequences; perhaps most offensively, they support gender reassignment treatments for minors, often without the knowledge or consent of the parents, knowing full well these treatments are mostly irreversible,” he wrote.

Hemminger and many right-wing political leaders have continued to assert this false reality as fact.

A Harvard-affiliated study found approximately 2.1 gender-affirming surgeries occur per 100,000 trans and gender-diverse minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria, underscoring how uncommon these procedures are among minors. In addition to the option of surgery for those who think it’s right for them, there is an array of other medically sound options to treat gender dysphoria, which according to KFF, an independent source for health policy research and polling, includes “medical, surgical, mental health, and non-medical services for transgender and nonbinary people.”

Additionally trans advocacy is not as narrow as Hemminger makes it seem in his opinion piece.

There are a slew of issues the trans community faces — and fights for — on a daily basis that have nothing to do with healthcare. Those include obtaining government documents that accurately reflect one’s gender identity, multiple elements of family law that include the right to marry and adopt children as straight couples can, protections from violence, hate crime protections, the right to serve in the military, access to bathrooms corresponding with their gender, and the right to education.

Despite the overwhelming number of issues trans people — regardless of political affiliation — have to struggle with as a result of systemic gaps in protections that are supposed to be afforded to everyone under the law, they remain vulnerable to unequal treatment.

Despite this shift, Log Cabin Republicans has committed to standing with the Republican Party rather than LGBTQ people as a whole. The organization was initially founded as a loosely connected network of local California social clubs made up of LGBTQ conservatives in the late 1970s before eventually emerging as a national political organization in the early 1990s under its founding executive director, Rich Tafel.

As the organization continued to gain momentum, it endorsed a handful of Republicans who voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, the 2022 law that federally recognized marriage equality for same-sex couples.

The Washington Blade reached out to Log Cabin Republicans for comment but did not hear back by the time of publication.

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