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Progressive LGBTQ community should not throw conservative siblings under the bus

Queer people are not just Democrats

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Former U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) has come out as gay. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

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. 

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Trans people need to be terrified

And we need to stay strong and take action

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(Photo by Creatista/Bigstock)

Donald Trump has held the presidency for less than six months in 2025. But already, trans people have been defaced, demoralized, and fatigued. On June 18, the Supreme Court upheld a ban on gender affirming care for trans youth in nearly half of U.S. states. This ensures that trans youth do not have access to hormone blockers that prevent them from becoming their hated gender. 

The Trump administration has also ensured that Medicaid can no longer provide subsidized and insurance-covered care to trans adults. In addition to this, Trump’s White House has banned trans people from the military and has stripped all government agencies and universities of having Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) departments. Even progressive minded institutions like Yale (my alma mater) and Harvard have stripped themselves of DEI. Trump’s cruelty knows no bounds. 

This month, former president Obama stated over Instagram that Trump’s administration was becoming more and more like an autocracy. Recently, a tourist was stripped of his U.S. visa when federal agents discovered a JD Vance meme on his phone. 

ICE is raiding more and more immigrant families–immigrants who provide critical labor to our U.S. fields and other important industries. Immigrant children are forced to stand testimony and defend themselves–without a lawyer–in court. The United States, in other words, is becoming more and more like a fascist state. Look no further than Trump’s removal of the Kennedy Center board, and his ban of a Pride event at the Kennedy Center. During his campaign years, Trump held queer events for “LGB” folk — but made sure to drop the “T”, because it is becoming all too apparent that he is cruel to trans people. 

In a past article I wrote for the Blade, I stated that not enough trans people are scared in the U.S. right now. Other countries, including European countries, are quickly warning their trans citizens against traveling to the U.S., citing the fact that we are a hostile place for folks like them. Unfortunately, this is true. 

Trans people have to start looking to move to sanctuary states right now. In fact, we have already been doing this for many years: trans citizens have been fleeing red, conservative states–states where men shoot trans women (and trans men). But now is the time to do so more than ever. Check out outcoast.com for a useful list of some sanctuary cities for trans people in the U.S. right now. But other cities not on the list, including my college town of New Haven, Connecticut, are also welcoming places for trans people. 

Transgender Americans have to take into consideration the fact that Trump and his cronies have sought to overthrow us in just less than six months’ time. They are trying to make us weak, vulnerable, up for the taking. Yet we have to stand strong amid all the attacks from Republican lawmakers. One has to question the fact that ICE is starting to use social media to go after any naysayer — and deliberate whether ICE will be going after trans Americans in two or three years to come. If Trump is doing so much damage to the trans community already, what will be happening in 2028? A move to Canada can surely be on the horizon. 

Transgender Americans need to be scared right now. But more than just scared, we need to be taking action. 


Isaac Amend is a writer based in the D.C. area. He is a transgender man and was featured in National Geographic’s ‘Gender Revolution’ documentary. He serves on the board of the LGBT Democrats of Virginia. Contact him at [email protected] or on Instagram at @literatipapi.

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Felon-in-Chief either has dementia or is just plain dumb

Trail of gaffes raise questions about Trump’s fitness for office

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(Image by doddis/Bigstock)

Some ask why I often write about the felon in the White House. It’s because we should never stop highlighting his outrageousness, how he is destroying our country, and creating havoc in the world. His gaffes are often venal, and in most cases just his way of insulting someone. Recently it’s again obvious he either has dementia, or is just plain dumb. Clearly, he is being manipulated by some corrupt aides and personally motivated by vindictiveness. He asked the president of Liberia how his English is so good, apparently not knowing that English is the language of Liberia. 

He was asked who stopped the shipments of weapons to Ukraine, didn’t know, or remember. Then appears to forget, or doesn’t know, only two countries actually came to final tariff deals with the U.S. He went to Iowa to tout his disgusting bill and used the term “Shylock,” the name of the Jewish character in the “Merchant of Venice,” clearly used today as an anti-Semitic slur, and lied saying he never heard of it that way. Then he said Putin was a hero in World War II, when he wasn’t born until after the war ended. Now he thinks we should change the Department of Defense back to Department of War. He often forgets where he is in speeches. 

This is the man who occupies the most powerful office in the world. He is an embarrassment to the nation. He uses the presidency to get back at his perceived enemies, doing it openly. He is a grifter, enriching himself using the power that comes with being president of the United States. Others are helping, or excusing him. House Speaker Johnson was asked about the president taking grift, and said contrary to his attacks on Biden, who he said did it secretly, what Trump is doing is OK, since he is doing it publicly. Yes, he is doing it publicly, taking a jet from Qatar and cutting deals to build hotels in the Middle East. He said he wants to build a resort in Gaza after removing all the Palestinians. While enriching himself and his friends, in the process he is screwing the American people. 

Trump is making policy based on personal interests. Like framing his threat to slap a bruising 50 percent tariff on Brazil as a quest for justice for his friend and ally, far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro. Then he upped the ante based on a recent BRICS meeting, one of Trump’s top foreign policy targets, a coalition of emerging economies that includes founding members Brazil, Russia, India, and China, as well as South Africa and six other countries that have joined the group in recent years. They are stronger based on the felon’s policies. 

I keep writing about this felon because he is always doing something outrageous. The MAGA Republicans in Congress keep supporting him, willingly screwing their constituents. The MAGA Log Cabin Republicans, supporting Trump, recently honored four MAGA members of Congress, all of whom are opposed to the Equality Act. One, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), when asked by her constituents why she supported taking away their Medicaid, said “It doesn’t matter you will die anyway.” That is the attitude of the felon in the White House and all his MAGA supporters. 

I am not blind to the fact that there has always been racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia, in our society. But for many years we worked hard to ensure those feelings couldn’t be voiced in the public square. If someone did voice them, they were called out for it. Then during Trump’s first term, from the day he came down that escalator to announce his candidacy and called out people in derogatory terms, he gave others tacit permission to do the same. If he could do it, then why couldn’t they? And things only got worse from there. 

Trump took hold of the Republican Party and rational Republicans simply dropped like flies afraid to criticize him. It became clear nearly 35% of the Republican Party became a Trump cult, and no Republican could win without their votes. So today, the Republican Party supports a sick, old, lying felon, a racist, homophobe, misogynist, found liable for sexual assault, whose closest allies produced Project 2025, the blueprint for destroying democracy. 

So that is why I will always write about him, and urge others to do the same. We must all speak out every day, until we rid ourselves of this despot in our midst.


Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist. He writes regularly for the Blade.

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Pride must be inclusive, intentionally intersectional

Organizers of local UK Pride led anti-Israel, pro-Houthi slogans

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Pro-Palestine protesters at the 2024 Capital Pride Parade (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

There are a lot of conversations in the LGBTI community about Prides becoming “too commercial,” but what about grassroots, leftist radical Prides? Well, the idea of community-organized, grassroots Prides is amazing, but unfortunately, it is very human to make mistakes.

While big LGBTI Prides that are organized with help from businesses are trying to be inclusive, grassroots Prides have sometimes gone too far in their attempts to create an “edgy,” rebellious atmosphere. Some slogans that have been used at “independent” Prides create more problems than they solve, making these events non inclusive and unacceptable for a large part of the LGBTI community.

I believe in intersectionality. I was one of the very few activists in Russia who began writing and speaking about the need for intersectional approaches in the LGBTI community — speaking up for neurodivergent, disabled, non-white, Muslim, and Jewish LGBTI people. In the U.K., I’m part of various groups supporting LGBTI refugees.

And this is why I see that some modern attempts by Western LGBTI activists to be mindful of different forms of oppression have actually excluded people from Pride and divided the LGBTI community. I’ve seen these tendencies across Europe, the U.S., and the U.K.

Personally, I’ve never felt less included at a Pride than I did last weekend at a local U.K. Pride, where the crowd was forced to yell: “Death to the IDF (Israel Defense Forces),” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and “Yemen, Yemen made us proud, turn another ship around.”

The last slogan, about Yemen, didn’t even catch on with the crowd — probably because most people at the Pride had no idea why they should be proud of Yemen. And the truth is, they shouldn’t. The slogan refers to Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have hijacked and fired missiles at dozens of commercial and military ships in the Red Sea, supposedly to “protect” Palestinian rights.

Let me make it clear: I have no problem with the “protecting Palestinian people” part of the story. I believe that there are many war criminals in the current Israeli administration, and the bombing of Gaza refugee camps is unacceptable, no matter what.

But at the same time, I couldn’t understand why we were being asked to support attacks on commercial ships or show solidarity with the Houthi rebels, who, according to Amnesty International, are not only responsible for the deaths of dozens of LGBTI people, but are also extremely authoritarian and prone to sectarian violence.

If we’re speaking from an intersectional perspective, I know how triggering those slogans must have been for many Sunni Muslims (and yes, most Muslims from Gaza are Sunni), as well as for LGBTI refugees from Yemen and Iran who may have lost loved ones to the Houthis or the Iranian regime that support them. And I am sure there were likely some queer Iranians at that Pride.

The chanting about the Israel Defence Forces was also extremely disturbing — not only because there were likely Jewish queers at the Pride, some of whose relatives may even oppose Israeli actions in Gaza and support a two-state solution, but who served in the Israeli army due to conscription laws. But the problem is, I’ve never heard people at a Pride chant in support of Ukrainian people, or Chechens, or Uyghurs, or Yazidis — despite the fact that all of them have survived genocide. I’ve never heard queer people at Pride yelling “death to Russian occupiers,” even when Russian missiles destroyed Ukrainian schools and shelters in Mariupol, bombed Aleppo, persecuted Crimean Tatars, or wiped out entire Chechen villages.

China built concentration camps for Uyghurs, but no one is promoting the death of the Chinese government. Moreover, China, Russia, and Assad’s Syria are more homophobic than Israel. So, what is the reason for yelling “Death to the IDF” but not, for example, calling for the Russian government’s collapse or the end of the Chinese Communist Party? There are only two logical explanations:

• It is either antisemitism or ignorance about other wars except for the one that is going on in Gaza. Both reasons are quite bad.

• It is not intersectionality. It is anti-intersectionality, because it erases every other war survivor who isn’t Palestinian from LGBTI community. It also alienated LGBTI Jewish people because only Jewish State had a “special” hatred for war crimes that atheists and Christian don’t have. 

It’s also an attempt to turn the LGBTI movement into an ideological club instead of a group fighting for the rights of a specific marginalized community.

Another triggering thing I saw at this Pride was the glorification of socialism. But not all LGBTI people are socialists, and not all countries that called themselves “socialist” have been LGBTI-friendly.

I couldn’t even imagine what a queer person from North Korea, or a gay man who was imprisoned in the Soviet Union for being gay must have felt when hearing calls for a socialist revolution at Pride. It must have been devastating. Pride should feel like a free, anti-authoritarian space.

Pride also needs to focus on the real problems LGBTI people face. In the U.K., the Supreme Court ruled that only cis women can be considered real women. Thousands of trans kids have lost access to hormone therapy. LGBTI books are being censored in libraries. The government is cutting benefits for disabled people: LGBTI disabled people will be among the first to be harmed, because they face double stigma and more challenges finding employment, even when they are able to work.

But none of this was the main point at Pride. For some reason, we were asked to repeat pro-Palestinian slogans more often than slogans defending trans people or LGBTI people with disabilities.

The organisers were so obsessed with Palestine and socialism that, if I weren’t already involved in LGBTI activism, I might have assumed the LGBTI community has no real problems left — and that now we just campaign about unrelated political issues.

But that would be a false impression.

LGBTI people are under attack in countries around the world — from U.S. to Russia to the U.K. Moreover, far-right ideologies are rising across the West. Yes, it’s important to understand the international context, but now, more than ever, it is equally important to unite against the global rise of fascism and not divide the movement based on economic ideology or international political views.

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