Opinions
Progressive LGBTQ community should not throw conservative siblings under the bus
Queer people are not just Democrats
I have been an LGBTQ activist for almost 10 years, but I’ve never really felt like I’m a part of the LGBTQ community.
I remember how I was thinking about it when the idea of this article came to my mind: I was at a sex-positive queer event in a local library, at a book launch about neurodiversity and inclusion. It should be “my” topic: I’m a transgender autistic person after all. The event was amazing, wasn’t it? It was.
Only why did I feel so lonely, so out of place?
The folks around me felt like a community; most of them were so obviously gender non-conforming, obviously queer, and obviously leftists. They shared the same aesthetic, the same culture. But I was silently scrolling through my social media feeds, reading about the Chechen liberation movement’s history, weapons, and political news and my mind wandered. I was thinking about how I told my Chechen Salafi friend that I wanted to have a big family with eight kids and live in a village when I was a 4-year-old.
At four, I already knew that I’m not a girl, even if I didn’t have words for describing my condition. I have never heard about other trans* people. I was a trans* child without knowing it.
Then I became a trans* teenager in denial: A messy one, depressed, Christian fundamentalist teenager who compulsively read everything about the Cold War. An anti-leftist teenager who shared Henry Kissinger’s views on international politics and Ayn Rand’s view on the economy.
In my teenage years, I saw other trans* folks, but only on a TV screen. In mass culture, the trans* community is all about cross-dressing and drag queen parties in the worst case, and about being part of leftist social movement in the best. So, I couldn’t be trans*, couldn’t I? One of the reasons why it was so difficult for me to accept myself as a trans* was that I believed that if you are trans*, you should instinctively accept mainstream LGBTQ subculture.
I have changed a lot since then, and became an open LGBTQ activist, but when I read about Jessica Watkins, a transgender hardcore Donald Trump supporter who was arrested after the Washington riot on Jan. 6, I felt like she is the person I needed to hear about when I was younger.
I’m so not like her.
Watkins is an Afghanistan war veteran and a member of the far-right group Oath Keepers, and I’ve always, even in my childhood, hated the far-right, and have never supported the American invasion of Afghanistan. I do not think that I would like Trump populism and anti-intellectualism, even in my youth. But as a young transgender person, I desperately needed to see some proof that I could be trans* without falling into some social movement, that it is possible to be a transgender without having to fit into a long list of criteria from the mainstream LGBTQ community, and that transgender people could be different, just like everyone else.
This is why I felt outraged when some American LGBTQ people in social media supported a transphobic decision to put Jessica Watkins in a male prison.
On the eve of the 2024 presidential election, the situation worsened. The American LGBTQ community is taking a dangerous turn on excluding their politically “unreliable” siblings, and by doing it, helping anti-queer bigots to push their agenda of dehumanization of queer people in general.
Queer as a doctrine
Many homophobes believe the LGBTQ movement had some kind of ideology beside promoting equal rights. This myth existed for decades. In the Western conspiracy theories, homosexuality, and transgenderism are considered to be connected to leftist political schools of thought. During the McCarthyism era, LGBTQ people were discriminated against and sometimes even incarcerated partly because they were considered to be potential Soviet spies. It is a peculiar idea, because at the same time homosexual people in the Soviet Union were considered to be Western sympathizers. Or maybe it is less weird as it looks — people are often prone to be seen as a threat to someone who belongs to a minority they do not understand.
This is why many modern-day conservatives believe that if a child came out as queer, it means that this child was groomed by “cultural Marxism.”
But there is something else. The media — both progressive and conservatives — are to blame for this misconception.
The most common image of a queer person in the media is an image of a politically left, secular, eco-friendly, pro-choice person who likes to speak about their sexual kinks, has bright colored hair, and votes for Democrats. But if you would think twice, you would realize that all those things have nothing to do with being gay, bisexual, or trans*. It’s just some trends in LGBTQ community.
Some gay people are conservatives: Get over it
There are actually a lot of Republican LGBTQ. Some of them are quite prominent, like Richard Grenell, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany who was also the first acting director of National Intelligence during the Trump presidency, which made him the first openly gay Cabinet-level official. He is quite a controversial figure for an LGBTQ community because of his anti-trans* sentiments and for criticizing the Equality Act, but it doesn’t make him less “gayish.”
Gay conservatives often have a complicated relationship with their sexuality, struggle to accept themselves. Former Illinois Congressman Aaron Schock had a long history of fighting inner homophobia before he managed to come out as a gay man, but it is more likely going to change for Zoomer and Alpha generations.
The list of modern-day LGBTQ Republicans is quite big, and there are even groups like Log Cabin Republicans, or The Rainbow Pro-life Alliance.
LGBTQ Donald Trump supporters host their own MAGA events, “Trump UNITY,” and basically have their own “LGBTQ culture,” separated from a mainstream LGBTQ movement for quite clear reasons.
Of course, not all LGBTQ Republicans are pro-Trump, and even not all LGBTQ conservatives are Republicans.
The fact that LGBTQ conservatives exist nowerdays is nothing unusual or new. Even in the 70’s when being LGBTQ was something far away from the acceptable norm, there were some openly right-wing queers and queer rights supporters in America. Actually there is a big difference between being socially conservative authoritarian who sometimes even economically-left, and economically conservative libertarians, because those movements often hate each other.
American economic conservatives, libertarian-right politicians and thinkers, like Ralph Raico, speak up for LGBTQ rights, and this is the reason why some LGBTQ became libertarian-right.
As for a social conservative authoritarian right, there were gay people even among members of an openly Nazi organization, National Socialism League.
The times are changing, and there will be more conservative people, including Republicans, who would accept themselves like gay, trans* or bi.
As Neil J. Young, author of “Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Rights,” noted in one of his interviews, “the proliferation of more people who identify as LGBTQ will mean a growth of people who identify as gay Republicans.”
This is not just a Western trend.
Amir Ohana, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party, for example, is the first openly gay Knesset speaker in Israeli history
Hence, even such an openly anti-gay movement as the so-called Islamic State somehow had gay people among their members — of course, those people have never openly said that they are gay because the risk of being executed, but it is known even in the authoritarian apocalyptic Islamist cult there were LGBTQ people. And while “ordinary” ISIS members were sometimes slaughtered for the accusation of being homosexual, high-ranking ISIS fighters like Abu Zayd Al-Jazrawi, a prominent Saudi fighter and commanders, who was accused of same-sex activity, was flogged or received a less serious sentence.
So, LGBTQ conservatives, including conservatives in quite extreme ways, are literally everywhere. Then why didn’t we notice them?
A self-fulfilling prophecy
Let’s put aside cases such as the possibly gay ISIS member, and think closer to home.
The reason why most visible LGBTQ Americans are progressive is not just about actual politics of Democrats and Republicans on queer issues, but partly is a self-fulfilling prophecy: After a gay, bi, or a trans* a young person became estranged to their conservative family, this person allied themselves with the mainstream LGBTQ community, who could reject him if it didn’t share their ideas.
So, LGBTQ youth have to make a choice that cis hetero kids don’t have to even imagine being forced to make. You could be literally anyone and be cis-hetero, but for being accepted as a queer person you are often forced to be part of a subculture.
By denying conservative LGBTQ people the right to be themselves, progressive media and LGBTQ activists made conservative anti-queer conspiracy about “cultural Marxism grooming” look more reliable, despite the fact that Karl Marx wasn’t particularly interested in sexuality and gender identity issues, and have nothing to do with modern minority rights movements.
But for conspiracists, gender identity and sexual orientation are seen not as part of human diversity, but something ideological.
Why do we need to change it?
The LGBTQ community is about gays, bisexuals, and trans* people. It is not about being left or right, Republicans or Democrats. The LGBTQ movement is a human rights movement at its very core; it is about the idea that you should have the same civil rights as anyone else. If we continue to deny politically “inconvenient” LGBTQ people those rights, we basically rob ourselves of a core idea of the LGBTQ movement. I strongly believe that Q-Anons and MAGA supporters in general are guilty of the deaths of some LGBTQ youth, especially trans* kids who died by suicide, because of the influence that Q-Anon’s “grooming” rhetoric has on the Republican mainstream nowadays, bringing back ideas from 80th Satanic panic and anti-queer conspiracy theories.
But if we would deny LGBTQ people who support Donald Trump their rights to be part of the LGBTQ community, we would be no better than the most hardcore MAGA supporters.
Civil rights have to be universal or they don’t work at all.
Even if we are speaking about rapist and a serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who also happened to be a gay man, it’s more than fine to say that he should be locked in prison for the rest of their lives, but in any we have no rights to discriminate against him because of his sexual orientation, or try to erase their homosexual identity to made gay community to look more “decent.”
LGBTQ people are human, and if we deny them a quality to make wrong choices or even different choices, we are denying them part of essential human traits. If we would go into gatekeeping, the core idea of LGBTQ activism lost its meaning.
Some people excuse the sick felon in the White House for confusing Iceland and Greenland, after all, they are both cold. Actually, he is a senile old fool, and people must consider whether he should be locked up and kept out of trouble. The only problem with that is J.D. Vance. He could be worse, because however disgusting, he is smarter. After all, he once compared Trump to Hitler.
The felon creates problems and then thinks when he backtracks on what he said or did, he should get credit for solving the problem he created. Recently the stock market plummeted 800 points in one day, based on the stupid things he said about attacking Greenland and imposing tariffs on our allies. When he changed his mind and backtracked, he took credit for the market going up. In some ways it simply looks like insider trading, when his friends and family knew what he was going to do. To others, it is simply a ploy to get Epstein off the front pages, and based on our media not doing their job, it’s working.
His speech in Davos was totally embarrassing. Joe Biden clearly lives in his head since he defeated him in 2020. He apparently blames Biden for the fact that during Biden’s presidency, Trump was charged and convicted of various crimes including 34 felonies.
He recently told the New York Times he can do anything he wants as president, as long as it doesn’t conflict with his own morality. Since he has none, he believes he can do anything. Now we see being King of the United States is not enough; he wants to be an emperor. Hence his formation of the ‘Board of Peace.’ Simply another way of grifting, as he is asking for a billion dollars from each member, and there are no obvious controls on the money. It will not be a success, again except for his looting it, when you look at who signed up to join this organization. Members include: three ex-Soviet apparatchiks, two military-backed regimes, and a leader sought by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes, with only two EU countries, Bulgaria and Viktor Orban’s Hungary, according to the Financial Times.
Then on his way out the door from Davos, he made the United States, and himself, look even worse, when as reported by CBS news, “President Trump claimed the U.S. had ‘never needed’ its NATO allies, and that allied troops had stayed ‘a little off the front lines’ during the 20-year war in Afghanistan.” This was entirely untrue and actually, “The only time NATO has ever enacted Article 5 was after the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the United States, and the world rallied to the support of the U.S.,” Alistair Carns, the U.K. government’s Minister of the Armed Forces and a veteran who served five tours in Afghanistan alongside American troops, said in a video posted Friday on social media. “We shed blood, sweat and tears together, and not everybody came home. These are bonds, I think, forged in fire, protecting U.S. or shared interests, but actually protecting democracy overall.”
More than 2,200 American troops were killed in Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon. The Reuters news agency says 457 British military personnel, 150 Canadians and 90 French troops died alongside them. Denmark lost 44 troops in Afghanistan — in per capita terms, about the same death rate as that of the United States.”
“Lucy Aldridge, the mother of the youngest British soldier killed in Afghanistan, told the BBC she was “deeply disgusted” by Mr. Trump’s comments. Her son William Aldridge was only 18 years old when he was killed in a 2009 bomb blast, while trying to save fellow troops.”
We are being represented on the world stage by a sick, evil, blathering idiot, who has no idea of history, no morality, and no decency. He was called out on this by the prime minister of the U.K., Keir Starmer, who normally appears to play up to the felon, when he called the remarks “insulting and frankly appalling.” He went on to say, “We expect an apology for this statement. Trump has “crossed a red line’, we paid with blood for this alliance. We truly sacrificed our own lives.”
Every day Trump slides more into the sewer, spreading hate, and violence, both here at home, and around the world. If there are any decent people left around him, unfortunately there may be none, for the good of humanity, they must stop him.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
Commentary
Defunding LGBTQ groups is a warning sign for democracy
Global movement since January 2025 has lost more than $125 million in funding
In over 60 countries, same-sex relations are criminal. In many more, LGBTIQ people are discriminated against, harassed, or even persecuted. Yet, in most parts of the world, if you are an LGBTIQ person, there is an organization quietly working to keep people like you safe: a lawyer fighting an arrest, a shelter offering refuge from violence, a hotline answering a midnight call. Many of those organizations have now lost so much funding that they may be forced to close.
One year ago this week, the U.S. government froze foreign assistance to organizations working on human rights, democracy, and development worldwide. The effects were immediate. For LGBTIQ communities, the impact has been severe and far-reaching.
For 35 years, Outright International has helped build and sustain the global movement for the rights of LGBTIQ people, working with local partners in more than 75 countries. Many of those partners are now facing sudden closure.
Since January 2025, more than $125 million has been stripped from efforts advancing the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer people globally. That figure represents at least 30 percent of yearly international funding for this work. Organizations that ran emergency shelters, legal defense programs, and HIV prevention services have been forced to close or drastically scale back operations. At Outright alone, we lost funding for 120 grants across nearly 50 countries. We estimate that, without intervention, 20 to 25 percent of our grantee partners risk shutting down entirely.
But this is not only a story about one community. It is a story about how authoritarianism works, and what it costs when we fail to recognize the pattern.
The playbook is not subtle
Researchers at Outright and partners across human rights and democracy movements have documented the same sequence playing out across sectors worldwide: governments defund organizations before passing restrictive legislation, eliminating the groups most likely to document abuses before abuses occur.
In December, CIVICUS downgraded its assessment of U.S. civic freedoms from “narrowed” to “obstructed,” citing what it called a “rapid authoritarian shift.” The message was unmistakable: independent organizations that hold power to account are under growing pressure, in the United States and around the world.
And the effects have cascaded globally. When one of the world’s largest funders of democracy support and human rights work withdraws, it doesn’t just leave a funding gap. It sends a signal to authoritarians everywhere: the coast is clear.
The timing is not coincidental. In the super election year of 2024, 85 percent of countries with national elections featured anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric in campaigns. Across the 15 countries we tracked, governments proposed or enacted laws restricting gender-affirming care, rolling back legal gender recognition, and censoring LGBTIQ expression. The defunding often came first. Governments know that if they can starve the movement, there will be no one left to document what comes next.
Why US readers should care
It may be tempting to see this as a distant crisis, especially at a moment when LGBTIQ rights in the United States are under real pressure. But this story is closer to home than it appears. American funding decisions often help determine whether organizations protecting LGBTIQ people abroad can keep their doors open. And when independent organizations are weakened, no matter where they are, the consequences do not stay contained. The same political networks driving anti-LGBTIQ legislation in the United States share strategies and resources with movements abroad. Global repression and domestic rollback are not separate stories. They are the same story, unfolding in different places.
LGBTIQ organizations are often the first target, but never the last
Why target LGBTIQ communities first? Because we are politically easier to isolate. The same playbook — foreign funding restrictions, bureaucratic harassment, banking access denial — is now being deployed against environmental groups, independent media, women’s rights organizations, and election monitors. When one part of our community is silenced, all of us become more vulnerable. What happens to us is a preview of what happens to everyone.
This is not speculation. It is documented history. In Hungary, the government restricted foreign funding for civil society before passing its “anti-LGBTQ propaganda” law. In Russia, “foreign agent” designations preceded the criminalization of LGBTIQ identity. In Uganda, funding restrictions on human rights organizations came before the Anti-Homosexuality Act. The pattern repeats because it works.
And yet, even as these attacks intensify, victories continue. In 2025, Saint Lucia struck down a colonial-era law criminalizing consensual same-sex intimacy after a decade of regional planning and coalition-building. Courts in India, Japan, and Hong Kong upheld trans people’s rights. Budapest Pride became the largest in Hungarian history — and one of the country’s biggest public demonstrations — despite a government ban. In Thailand, years of patient advocacy culminated in marriage equality becoming law in 2025, the first such victory in Southeast Asia.
These wins happened because our movement built the capacity to survive hostility. Legal defense funds. Documented evidence. Regional coalitions. Emergency response networks. The organizations behind these victories are precisely the ones now facing drastic funding cuts and even closure.
What we are doing and what we need
On Jan. 20, 2026, Outright International publicly launched Funding Our Freedom, a $10 million emergency campaign running through June 30, 2026. We have already secured over $5 million in pledges from more than 150 donors. But the gap remains enormous.
The campaign supports two priorities that must move together. Half of the funds go directly to frontline LGBTIQ organizations facing sudden shortfalls: keeping staff paid, maintaining safe spaces, securing legal support, and continuing essential services. The other half supports Outright’s global work: documenting abuses, training activists, and advocating for LGBTIQ inclusion at the United Nations and other international forums. This is how LGBTIQ people remain seen, heard, and defended, even when governments attempt to erase them.
We structured Funding Our Freedom this way because frontline support without protection is fragile, and global advocacy without frontline truth is hollow. Both must survive.
Funding Our Freedom is not charity. It is how we keep the global LGBTIQ movement alive when governments try to erase it.
A call to those who believe in equality and democracy
If you are part of the LGBTIQ community, this moment is personal. Whether you give, share this work, host a small fundraiser, or bring others into the effort, you become part of what keeps our global community connected and protected.
If you are an ally or simply someone who believes in fairness, free expression, and accountable government, this fight is yours too. The defunding of LGBTIQ organizations is not an isolated decision. It is a test case. If it succeeds, the same tactics will be used against every group that challenges power and defends vulnerable people.
We are not asking for sympathy. We are asking for commitment. The organizations now being forced to close are the ones that document abuses, provide legal defense, support people in crisis, and show up when no one else will. If they disappear, we lose more than services. We lose the ability to know what is happening and to respond.
Authoritarians understand this. That is why they target us first.
The question is whether the rest of us understand it in time.
Maria Sjödin is the executive director of Outright International, where they has worked for over two decades advocating for LGBTIQ human rights worldwide. Learn more at outrightinternational.org/funding-our-freedom.
Opinions
ICE agents murder another American citizen in Minneapolis
Trump and his Cabinet are the real ‘domestic terrorists’
ICE agents murdered another American citizen on the streets of Minneapolis. His murder is both caused, and condoned, by the evil felon in the White House, and his incompetent, and equally evil, Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristie Noem. She, the woman who thought nothing of killing her dog, now apparently thinks nothing of killing American citizens. The most recent murder, condoned by both of them, occurred on Jan. 24 and was that of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen.
His grieving parents released a statement, “We are heartbroken but also very angry. Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact. I do not throw around the hero term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has his phone in his right hand, and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down all while being pepper sprayed. Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.”
All this occurred amid heightened tensions in the city following recent clashes over federal immigration actions. The chaos in Minneapolis is clearly caused by the federal agents. We have also been told by the Minneapolis police that Pretti had no criminal record beyond minor traffic violations and held a valid Minnesota permit to carry a concealed weapon. His family said they had never seen him carry it.
The chaos in Minneapolis was heightened after an ICE agent murdered Renee Good, while she was in her car. The agent who shot her was clearly seen in videos to be in no danger. “An autopsy commissioned by the family this month, found that she suffered three clear gunshot wounds, including one to her head, lawyers for her family said Wednesday. One of the injuries was to Good’s left forearm, the lawyers said in a statement, while another gunshot struck her right breast without piercing major organs. Neither of those wounds was immediately life-threatening, the attorneys said. A third shot entered the left side of Good’s head near the temple and exited on the right side, according to the statement, and she also appeared to have sustained a graze wound.”
After both these murders, the felon and his lapdog, Noem, claimed the murders were appropriate as both victims were ‘domestic terrorists.’ In both cases they told Minnesota law enforcement they could not participate in the investigation. Clearly, they don’t want real investigations. It has become crystal clear, the felon in the White House considers anyone who disagrees with him, or his policies, a ‘domestic terrorist’. I, and so many others, consider the felon, and his personal Goebbels, Stephen Miller, along with Noem, and others in his Cabinet, to be the real ‘domestic terrorists.’
In my lifetime, I have never seen a president declare war on American citizens, but that is what this president is doing. He is sending federal agents, including the National Guard, into cities across the nation, to fight with, and threaten to curb, the legal actions of American citizens. He is a clear danger to our democracy, and is being assisted by the Republicans in Congress, and the Supreme Court. They are all guilty of enabling his vicious attacks on all of us.
When Renee Good and Alex Pretti were gunned down, we all suffered. We were all attacked, when they were attacked. None of us can feel safe if during a legal demonstration, we can be murdered, and no one will step forward to stop it from happening. We live in a country where our Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., is literally killing children by saying they shouldn’t be vaccinated against diseases that can be prevented with a vaccine and by ending research into Alzheimer’s, cancer, and HIV/AIDS. This is the government of the felon, and his campaign against our own people.
Every person in a minority, or group who has ever been discriminated against, is at risk while the felon is in the White House. Whether you are a woman, Black, Asian, Latino, Jewish, Muslim, or LGBTQ, you are being threatened by this administration, your rights, and even your life, are being threatened. We must all stand together, and work to stop him, or as the poem, “First They Came,” attributed to Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller, will prove to be true. There are many versions of the poem and just put your group in any of the paragraphs, and you will clearly understand its meaning. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum quotes the following text as one of the many poetic versions:
First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
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