Opinions
Second Trump administration will put trans youth at further risk
American politics, culture has global impact
When Andrew Joseph White, a 26-year-old transgender author, released his third novel, “Compound Fractures,” a young adult thriller, last fall, it became an instant New York Times, USA Today, and Indie bestseller.
This book is a story about an autistic trans* boy who was dragged into a generational feud. It also mentioned President-elect Donald Trump and his influence on the working class in the American South. The popularity of this novel among young readers shows that modern day teenagers are more political than some folks from older generations expect them to be.
The novel became a bestseller in the midst of the 2024 presidential campaign and White, in his letter to readers, confessed that he wanted to give it a different intro, but had to speak about how tough it is to be a young trans* person in modern-day America.
Donald Trump on Dec. 22 confirmed the fears of A.J. White and millions of other LGBTQ folks from Z and Alpha Generations. At the AmericaFest conference, Trump promised to “stop the transgender lunacy” on the first day of his presidency. He was particularly speaking up against trans* young people’s rights, and against trans* adults’ rights to work with young people.
Donald Trump’s election also increased worries about censorship around children’s and young adult literature, especially in public and school libraries.
A new report by PEN America showed that during the 2023-2024 school year, book bans increased by nearly 200 percent, targeting not just books about gender and sexuality, but also about racial discrimination, mental health, substance abuse, and other social problems that young people are facing in the everyday world. Such bans are not just making printed books unacceptable for youth who cannot afford buying their own copies. They may prevent authors from writing new books for younger generations, which will also affect American mass culture.
Republicans throughout the U.S. for a long time have behaved more and more authoritarian toward youth. Republicans are trying to attack LGBTQ youth everywhere, erasing them from academia and implementing social media restrictions.
It is tough to be a young person in modern-day America under any administration, even without new laws. All American citizens under 18 can easily be prevented from expressing their religious and political beliefs, forced to stay in abusive environments, can be medicated and institutionalized without their consent, can be separated from their supportive community if their parents say so. Young people under 18 can also be tried in adult court, but they cannot vote or run for office.
All the decisions about their rights are made by people from the older generation.
It is legal to pay young people less for their work, and deny the right to manage their property. Young people from non-supportive families are denied any chances to have normal lives until they turn 18, or even 21. This is basically the situation in most Western cultures, but American teenagers could start to change the system with more informational freedom and support.
But now Donald Trump and his supporters are trying to make everyone believe that young people cannot have their own gender identity, do not have any rights to their body autonomy, and should not be asked about their own feelings until they turn 18. Republicans have also tried to deny young people basic knowledge about the complicated world around them, as if this knowledge could be magically downloaded into a person’s mind when they turn 18.
These dangerous trends will create a generation who is used to obeying, but not very used to thinking for themselves and trusting their own feelings. It is basically a very anti-American, anti-individualistic, and authoritarian tendency.
This tendency could have a long-lasting impact on world politics.
It is not an exaggeration to say that no other culture has had such a global impact on the way people around the world think than the American culture, and it is especially true on LGBTQ issues.
When I was an LGBTQ activist in Russia and Ukraine, my fellow post-Soviet activists spoke more about Stonewall and the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco than about the persecution of LGBTQ people in the Soviet Union. By my own experience as a person who was into LGBTQ blogging and journalism in the post-USSR; the videos, posts, features, and essays on LGBTQ issues that you could find on Ukrainian and Russian social media were either a direct translation from English or based on language that American LGBTQ activists created.
Young LGBTQ people around the world are learning to speak for themselves by watching their peer influencers on English-language platforms.
As a young transgender person from Ukraine who had never heard the word trans* until I was a teenager, I understood that I was trans* since I could remember myself. I began accepting myself only after I read more about the American LGBTQ movement.
I saw a lot of young people from Eastern Europe and the Middle East for whom Lana Watchevski became a first name when they came out to their parents, or the first person who helped them to believe that yes, they could be trans* and have a fulfilling life. Folks accepted their transgender peers because there was a transgender person in a Kardashian show. And we badly need more LGBTQ films, cartoons and books for young people, and more freedom for LGBTQ youth to find their own communities. All of this will more likely come from the U.S.
I think Americans would wonder if they find out how often I saw a situation like that — a young queer Gen Z Tatar person from a small, almost isolated Russian village — or situations when a Gen Z refugee person from Iran felt comfortable to chat about American LGBTQ culture, and use it to explain their own cultural context. American culture, and America’s online spaces are quite universal.
The same rules work for conservatives.
It is not enough that such dictators as Vladimir Putin, who mirror old American anti-LGBTQ conspiracies in his statements, say that LGBTQ ideas are dangerous for children, or conservative people all around the world began to use “groomer” rhetoric to describe people who support LGBTQ rights for young people when the pro-Trump Q-Anon movement went global. It is not just endangering LGBTQ youth worldwide, but increasing a gap in mentality between different generations.
But LGBTQ young people already know that there is something unusual about them, and they need information to figure out who they are. Americans could provide it via mass culture. It is worthy to note that Gen Z is much better at understanding the power of the internet, and American Gen Zers could literally make America greater by helping marginalized people in other countries.
Moreover, LGBTQ young people in America are speaking about their experience.
They are able to say what they need. All we need to do is listen, or we will have an international atmosphere where the new generation was raised in denial of basic rights to be themselves, and prevented from learning and thinking independently.
Editor’s note: The author uses trans* in order to be inclusive of nonbinary and gender queer people.
Opinions
Let love and compassion guide our response to Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis
Former president is diminished, but he and family deserve love and prayers
When I heard Joe Biden had serious prostate cancer, I felt immediate compassion for him and his family. I am a prostate cancer survivor myself. Then I heard how Trump, and some of his MAGA Republicans, responded and was amazed at how they are able to constantly sink to new lows. Trump’s son posted on X “What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another cover-up???” Clearly, they will never give up on being vile human beings.
The equally disgusting Joe Scarborough had on a doctor who declared he positively knows Biden must have known about his cancer years ago, although he knows nothing about the case. The reality, coming from many specialists, is at this time only Biden’s doctors know when he was diagnosed, and whether he even had regular PSA tests done, and when. Based on the latest research, the American Urological Association (AUA) age guidelines are that they do not recommend routine PSA screening for men 70 or older. This is because prostate cancer is normally very slow growing, and if you were to be diagnosed after 70, you will likely die of something else. Then you had the felon in the White House talking about “stage nine” cancer. Is he really so dumb? Guess he is as he tries to prove it nearly every time he opens his mouth. Talk about diminished.
Now is Biden diminished from what he was years ago? It is clear he is. Should the people around him have tried to hide that in order to have him run again, no! But the-then president’s hiding health issues is nothing new. Wilson was severely impaired and it is said his wife Edith ran the country for his last year in office. The same was said about Nancy Reagan when they hid Reagan’s Alzheimer’s. Kennedy hid his Addison’s disease and other infirmities, and Trump hid how sick he was from COVID, when being helicoptered to the hospital. Is it wrong to hide these things from the American public, yes, but clearly not unusual. Actually, the media is often complicit in this, which many said they were in Biden’s case. Then you have a guy like Jake Tapper who is happy to be complicit, so he can now write a book about it and make loads of money. Very sad.
I think the time has come in the case of Joe Biden, for us to just offer him and his family some love and prayers, and the hope he will be able to manage his cancer and live a long life. Then turn the page and deal with the things that will matter more to the lives of the American people today.
Those are the things the felon in the White House, and his Nazi sympathizing co-president, along with the MAGA Congress, are trying to do to them. Things like taking away their healthcare, and thereby also causing the closure of some rural hospitals. Things like the mass firings of federal workers, including thousands of veterans. Things like making it harder for our veterans to access their healthcare by cutting services at the Veterans hospitals. Things like increasing costs for groceries, and other items, due to the felon’s ineffective use of tariffs. Things like seeing college costs go up, as foreign students who pay the full fare at most schools, are sent home or denied visas. Things like making it harder to file for social security by closing so many offices, and pretending to lower drug prices, but not really doing it. Things like cutting research looking for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, MS, HIV/AIDS, and a host of other diseases, which will hurt people for decades to come. Things like creating havoc in the world, and bowing down to dictators. Things like walking away from our allies and making the world a less safe place for all of us, including abandoning Ukraine, and cozying up to his friend Putin. I always believed Putin has some dirt on him. Trump said Zelenskyy would be responsible for WW III. But it’s Trump who will be, if it happens. Then we must put a focus on the idiot who is secretary of HHS, RFK Jr., and whether he will allow the flu and covid vaccines, being readied for the fall, to be available in a timely manner. Will he continue to disparage all vaccines, and by doing so, cause deaths here, and around the world. Things like abandoning the fight against climate change and thereby screwing the planet and future generations.
These are the things the American public really needs to know about, and care about. It may have been wrong to hide Biden’s being diminished, but he is no longer in office, and he no longer impacts people’s lives on a daily basis. The felon in the WH does, and that is where the focus must be.
A first generation American from Queens, N.Y., Kameny was a decorated WWII veteran. With a prodigious 148 I.Q., he earned a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University. In 1957 he was recruited by the Army Map Service, a pioneering agency in space exploration.
In 1953 in the wake of McCarthyism, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450 that prohibited homosexuals from military or civilian employment. Having nothing to do with workplace conduct, the Army learned that Kameny might be a homosexual. When confronted, he equivocated and was terminated. Unlike then thousands of other homosexuals terminated from government employment, Kameny fought back.
He took on the military and Civil Service Commission including being the first openly gay man to file an appeal about gay rights to the U.S. Supreme Court. He helped co-found and chair the Mattachine Society of Washington, the first gay rights organization in the nation’s capital.
He wrote letters to, among others, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He founded and chaired the Eastern Conference of Homophile Organization, the nation’s first regional gay organization.
In the 1960s homosexuality, even with a consenting adult in the privacy of one’s bedroom was criminal. The police entrapped and extorted gay men. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness. A bar could lose its license if there was more than one homosexual in their establishment. Homosexuals were considered dangerous, deviant and demented.
Kameny coined the phrase “Gay Is Good.” He organized picketing called Annual Reminders each July 4 from 1965 to 1969 at Independence Hall. The picketers were the first to call for gay equality. The 1965 Annual Reminder had 39 activists making it then the largest demonstration for gay rights. In the mid-1960s the country had an estimated 300 gay and lesbian activists.
He published a newsletter that became the Washington Blade, now the nation’s oldest LGBTQ weekly newspaper. Kameny and Barbara Gittings, the mother of the movement that demonstrated for the right to be heard at the 1971 American Psychiatric Association meeting. Their panel at the 1972 meeting with a masked psychiatrist using a pseudonym and voice modulator was so impactful that the APA created a panel to determine if homosexuality as a mental illness was based on science or discrimination. In 1973, that classification was removed.
He advised gays and lesbians who were the subject of discharge from federal government service. He identified test cases and referred them to the ACLU, Lambda Legal and other counsel. Slowly, but surely those cases began a process for LGBTQ equality.
His efforts led D.C. to be the first city to overturn its sodomy criminal laws. He helped found the first national LGBTQ organization, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations. His efforts laid the groundwork for HRC and National LGBTQ Task Force.
After Stonewall in June 1969, he chaired a meeting of NY, Philadelphia and D.C. activists that authorized and helped organize to help remember Stonewall the first New York Pride Parade. He believed that Stonewall could be the movement’s Boston Tea Party. He marched in that 1970 parade holding a picket emblazoned with “Gay Is Good.”
He was the first out person to run for Congress as the D.C. delegate. Money left over from his campaign was used to fund the first gay rights television commercial. In July 1975, he was the first to be advised by the Civil Service Commission that it would eliminate homosexuality as a basis for not hiring or for firing a federal civilian employee. In 1977, he attended the White House’s first meeting with gays and lesbians.
Kameny died on Oct. 11, 2011, National Coming Out Day. He lived to see marriage equality approved in several states. He attended the signing by President Obama of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which enabled gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Kameny is buried in the Congressional Cemetery. On his tombstone is inscribed “Gay Is Good.” Over 70,000 of his documents are in the Library of Congress and picket signs from the pioneering demonstrations are housed in the Smithsonian Institution.
On May 21 LGBTQ national organizations gather in front of the Supreme Court. One hundred activists will each hold a candle for his 100th birthday. Fifteen national leaders will engage in picketing similar to the 1965 picketing at the White House and Independence Hall. They will honor Frank Kameny; celebrate the 10th anniversary of marriage equality (Obergefell v Hodges, 2015); and push back on those who would attempt to render us invisible, deny our history and undermine our equality. We will remember the nation’s loss when it fired a Harvard Ph.D. in astronomy because of his status as a homosexual. History repeats itself. This month the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the federal government to terminate transgender servicemembers solely because of their sexual orientation. How far we have come. How much farther we have to travel.
Malcolm Lazin is the national chair, Kameny 100. He is the executive director, LGBT History Month and executive producer of three LGBTQ documentaries including Gay Pioneers. He was an adjunct professor of LGBT History and Rights at New College of Florida. www.kameny100.org.
Opinions
Returning to Alcatraz: Memory through a queer lens
Trump would like to ‘rebuilt and reopen’ notorious island prison
When I arrived at Alcatraz Island, what I felt wasn’t curiosity — it was discomfort. Standing before such a photogenic landscape, something felt off. As if the place was trying to erase what it truly was: a mechanism of punishment, a machine built to control and define who should be excluded. I couldn’t walk those corridors without thinking about what this place represents for so many of us: a symbol of how the state has decided, time and again, that some lives matter less.
As a queer person, what struck me wasn’t just the past Alcatraz holds — but how that past is still alive in today’s policies. As I looked into the empty cells, I thought about the many LGBTQIA+ people who have been punished simply for existing. People like Frank Lucas Bolt, the first prisoner of Alcatraz — not convicted for violence, but for “sodomy,” a label the legal system used to persecute gay men.
He was not the only one. For decades, being gay or trans was enough to end up in a federal prison or a psychiatric hospital. Not for a crime, but for defying the norm. The legal and medical systems worked hand in hand to suppress any deviation from prescribed gender and sexuality. In prisons, queer people were subjected to physical punishment, solitary confinement, and even conversion therapy. Alcatraz was not an exception — it was one of the system’s most brutal epicenters.
But the queer memory of this place isn’t found in tourist brochures. To uncover it, you have to read between the lines, search through archives that are never taught in schools, and listen to those who still carry the scars. Walking among those walls, I realized that remembering isn’t enough — we have to contest the meaning of memory itself. What isn’t told, is repeated.
That’s why, when a few weeks ago President Trump said he’d like to “rebuild and reopen Alcatraz,” I didn’t take it as just another symbolic gesture. I took it as a warning. In times of crisis, punishment becomes an easy offer: lock them up, expel them, make them disappear. And in that narrative, queer, migrant, and racialized bodies are always the first to be targeted.
The danger isn’t just in the idea of a reopened prison, but in what it represents: The longing to return to a social order that was already deeply unjust. The nostalgia for “tough-on-crime” prisons is the same one that criminalizes unhoused people, persecutes migrants, and stigmatizes queer and trans youth in public spaces. Anyone who dreams of locking up more people isn’t thinking about justice — they’re thinking about control.
In 1969, a group of Native American activists occupied Alcatraz for over a year. They did it to denounce land theft and the government’s betrayal of treaties. During their occupation, they painted a message on the island’s water tower: “Peace and Freedom. Home of the Free Indian Land.” That gesture was a radical reclamation of space, a way of saying: this island can also be a place of resistance.
Alcatraz holds many layers. It was a high-security prison, yes, but it also became the stage for one of the most powerful acts of civil disobedience in the 20th century. That tension still lingers. The question is not just what happened at Alcatraz, but what we want it to represent today. A renewed model of punishment — or a site of memory that helps us prevent more harm?
As I walked its halls, I couldn’t stop thinking about the migrant detention centers that are still full today. About trans people held in inhumane conditions. About arbitrary detentions. About those of us who, like me, crossed borders just to survive. The distance between that Alcatraz and our present is not as wide as we’d like to believe. The walls may change, but punishment still operates on the same bodies.
Standing before the empty cells, I felt what many must have felt there: the weight of abandonment, the state’s mark upon their body, the feeling that their existence was a problem. But I also felt something else: conviction. The certainty that we will no longer walk into those spaces in silence. That we will not let ourselves be labeled as “mistakes” or “deviants.” That if they try to lock us up again, they will find us organized, with memory, with dignity.
Alcatraz does not need to be rebuilt. It needs to be understood. And we — queer, racialized, migrant communities — need to transform that understanding into action: to push back against hateful rhetoric, to protect those still living under threat, and to tell our full stories. Let no one be punished again for being who they are. Let history not become a locked cell once more.
The views expressed in this article are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, colleagues, or any affiliated organization. They are shared from a personal perspective shaped by lived experience and advocacy work.
Let love and compassion guide our response to Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis
D.C. Black Pride 2025: Events, parties, and empowerment
Cuban lawmakers to consider simplifying process for trans people to change IDs
Frank Kameny’s legacy lives on
