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Trans faith leaders, activists call for faith-based fight for trans rights

‘We cannot cede morality to those who would use it as a weapon’

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(Photo by nito/Bigstock)

The Transforming Hearts Collective led a webinar on Tuesday for pro-LGBTQ Christians. Featuring trans religious leaders and activists including Transforming Hearts Collective founders Zr. Alex Kapitan, Teo Drake, and Rev. Mykal Slack alongside trans and HIV human rights advocate Katie Willingham, Soulforce Executive Director Rev. Alba Onofrio, and legal and policy strategist and human rights advocate Sam Ames, the webinar foregrounded the moral and spiritual need to defend trans lives. 

Rev. Slack, community minister for Worship & Spiritual Care for Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism, began the webinar by grounding attendees spiritually. “My God is a God who I know loves me.” It is critical to be “doing trans justice work from a faith perspective because it is the ongoing, everyday outward expression of God as love that reminds us,” Slack continued at the start of the webinar, “especially when we’re constantly getting messages to the contrary, how valuable our lives are.” This is the work of disrupting hateful messages and harmful theology, Rev. Slack continued. 

The Transforming Hearts Collective, co-leader and Unitarian Universalist community minister Zr. Alex Kapitan shared, is a national trans-led, faith-based organization based in North Carolina that helps trans and queer people to access healing and resilience and helps faith communities be welcoming refuges for queer and trans people. 

“We do a lot of work with faith groups,” Kapitan said in an interview, “that are pro-LGBTQ but sometimes need a little bit of help to figure out how to live into that value in this moment, how to show up for queer and trans people right now.” 

This webinar, funded by the Arcus Foundation, is the result of year-long work to help pro-LGBTQ+ Christians understand trans identity and the ways in which trans people have been used as a mobilizing target among far-right politicians and faith leaders. This is why the webinar was specifically targeted at pro-LGBTQ+ Christians but welcomed all people because, as Kapitan explained, Christianity has been weaponized by white Christian nationalists against trans people.

“This particular webinar grew out of wanting to speak directly to progressive Christians,” Kapitan said, “and equip them to show up in this moment and not cede religion to the religious right.” As Sam Ames shared after an overview of current anti-trans legislation in the webinar, far-right politicians “have expected religion to be on the side of fear. We cannot cede morality to those who would use it as a weapon. It is our responsibility as people of faith to use it as a shield.” 

But even if people agree with this, Kapitan explained, the faith communities they work with often do not feel comfortable standing up for or discussing trans peoples’ lives because they do not know enough about trans lives and as a result become susceptible to anti-trans disinformation. 

The goal of the webinar and the companion resource collection–one of three courses by the Transforming Hearts Collective–offered to attendees is to mobilize pro-LGBTQ+ Christians around trans rights as a moral and human rights issue, that trans people are sacred and worthy like all other people, that trans people are being used as scapegoats by far-right Christian nationalists, and that gender affirming care is not only a form of spiritual care but also suicide prevention. This is more critical than ever with the growing anti-trans conversion therapy movement; most of the programs and practitioners involved are faith based. 

“I fully believe, as a person of faith,” Kapitan said, “that we are each called to be a full authentic self and that only we can know, in conversation with the divine, what that fullness looks like, so I do believe that gender identity and gender expression are a key component of our authenticity. If you are able to have the care that’s needed to help you fully embody that sense of self, that is 100% a spiritual thing for a lot of people.”

“Whether that is directly because there are trans people joining on the call who are at the end of their rope and they need to hear faith leaders say ‘who you are is valid, who you are is real, who you are is worthy and divine,’” Kapitan said, or helping people of faith make more space, show up more fully, be a stronger voice in their contexts, whether that’s inside their own church, whether that’s in their local legislature in a way that trans people see, this work is live saving. 

Teo Drake, a fellow Transforming Hearts Collective co-leader and community organizer, speaks to the importance of being embraced by his own communities, during the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and today. Drake was raised Catholic and educated in the Catholic school system in the 1980s as a visible queer and gender nonconforming person. Choosing to transition and live as his authentic self as a queer trans man gave him a reason to fight to survive living with HIV/AIDS. Drake is now a practicing Buddhist and says that the practice helps him to be resilient in hard times.

“For a lot of folks in faith,” Drake said in an interview, “it’s important to say that you can as one single human being be connected to many others. It makes a huge difference just simply holding someone personally, holding them in community, wrapping yourselves around them,” as the webinar invites pro-LGBTQ Christians to do. “As someone who has survived the AIDS epidemic and lived with HIV for a long time, the effects of people showing up, even though there was a fear of HIV, I’m here because of their courage to buck the system.”

Drake continues that this visibility of trans and queer faith leaders alongside cis faith leaders affirming the existence and belonging of trans and queer people is especially important for young people. “It’s really huge for youth in particular to see their congregation, the ministers they know down the street suddenly stand up and say ‘not on my watch.’ Kids and youth are hearing all the media, but they’re not hearing the good media. They need to hear it out in the public square that someone is going to put their body on the line for them.”

This webinar and the accompanying resources–or rather five-part-course–makes clear that it is the responsibility of all Christians to affirm trans lives. “People have a responsibility to learn about that disinformation,” Kapitan said, “that propaganda, and at the very least, be able to recognize it, if not be able to counter it,” and to educate their neighbors, friends, and families about rampant anti-trans disinformation, to invite and empower more people of faith to join the resistance against the far-right anti-trans Christian nationalist movement. 

Because as Kapitan explained, “these systems that trans people are suffering the most under right now, they affect everyone. They hurt everyone. They limit everyone. So much of my own call to ministry is to help everyone get free because if trans people are free then all of us can be free from gender-based violence, restrictions and norms.” Trans people are just one of many groups targeted by Christian nationalist groups, and it’s not just about trans and queer people today but about future generations of trans and queer children that will continue to be born into religious families. 

For them and for other LGBTQ+ individuals, religion may be a key part of how they approach the world, and it’s only by mobilizing queer and trans-affirming Christians–people whose communities have caused the greatest harm as a result of widespread anti-trans legislation and theologizing–that hearts and futures will be transformed for the better. 

The Defend Trans Lives resource collection was created by the Transforming Hearts Collective in partnership with enfleshed, Soulforce, and Queer Theology. It is a free course offered alongside the 6-session online course, “Trans Inclusion in Congregations,” and shorter course, “Responding to the Anti-Trans Movement,” also offered by the Transforming Hearts Collective. 

The Defend Trans Lives collection includes five videos featuring trans faith leaders and trans activists from the Transgender Law Center, the National LGBTQ Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and more–including several faith leaders and activists who presented at the webinar. 

These videos, like the webinar, seek to empower people of faith to become active, educated advocates and organizers for trans rights. Out of respect for the risks involved for interviewees, people accessing the course are required to sign into the site in order to access but once people sign into the website, all of the coursework is completely free.

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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

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(Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

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. 

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Frank Kameny’s legacy lives on

May 21 marks pioneering activist’s 100th birthday

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May 21 would have been Frank Kameny's 100th birthday. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

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

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Returning to Alcatraz: Memory through a queer lens

Trump would like to ‘rebuilt and reopen’ notorious island prison

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Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay (Photo courtesy of Estuardo Cifuentes)

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.

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