National
U.S. in midst of ‘genocidal process against trans people’: study
Attacks rooted in Nazi ideology’s views on gender
Earlier this week, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security issued a haunting warning. Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, president of the Lemkin Institute, stated that the U.S. is in the “early-to-mid stages of a genocidal process against trans and nonbinary and intersex people.” Dr. Gregory Santon, former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, flags “a hardening of categories” surrounding gender in a “totalitarian” way.
Stanton argues that this is rooted in Nazi ideology’s surrounding gender — this same regime that killed many LGBTQIA individuals in the name of a natural “binary.” As Von Joeden-Forgey said, the queer community, alongside other “minority groups, tends to be a kind of canary in the coal mine.”
In his first year in office, Trump and his Cabinet’s anti-trans rhetoric has only intensified, with a report released late September by journalist Ken Klippenstein in which national security officers leaked that the FBI is planning to classify trans people as “extremists.” By classifying trans people as “Nihilistic Violent Extremists,” far-right groups would have more “political (and media) cover,” as Abby Monteil reports for them, for anti-trans violence and legislation.
While the news is terrifying, it’s not unprecedented – the fight against trans rights and classification of trans people as violent extremists was included in Project 2025, and in the past several weeks, far-right leaders’ transphobic campaign has expanded: boycotting Netflix to pressure the platform to remove trans characters, leveraging anti-trans attack ads in the Virginia governor’s race and banning professors from acknowledging that trans people exist. In fact last month, two Republican members of Congress called for the institutionalization of trans people.
It’s a dangerous escalation of transphobic violence that the Human Rights Campaign has classified as an epidemic. According to an Everytown for Gun Safety report published in 2020, the number of trans people murdered in the U.S. almost doubled between 2017 and 2021. According to data released by the Gun Safety report from February 2024, 34 percent of gun homicides of trans, nonbinary, and gender expansive people remain unsolved.
As Tori Cooper, director of Community Engagement for the Transgender Justice Initiative for the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, this violence serves a purpose. “The hate toward transgender and gender expansive community members is fueled by disinformation, rhetoric and ideology that treats our community as political pawns ignoring the fact that we reserve the opportunity to live our lives full without fear of harm or death,” Cooper said.
“The genocidal process,” Von Joeden-Forgey said, “is really about destroying identities, destroying groups through all sorts of means.” And just like the Nazi regime, former genocide researcher Haley Brown said, the Trump administration is fueling conspiracy theories surrounding “cultural Marixsm” — the claim that leftists, feminists, Marxists, and queer people are trying to destroy western civilization. This term, Brown states, was borrowed directly from the Nazi’s conspiracies surrounding “Cultural Bolshevism.”
As Brown explains, historians are just beginning to research the Nazis’ anti-trans violence, but what they are finding reveals a terrifying pattern wherein trans people are stripped of their identification documents, arrested and assaulted, and outright killed.
Before World War II, Germany – especially Berlin – was a hub for transgender communities and culture. In 1919, Dr. Magnus Hirschfield, a Jewish gay sexologist and doctor, founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the Institute for Sexual Science. The Institute was groundbreaking for offering some of the first modern gender-affirming healthcare, with a trans-affirming clinic and performing some of the first gender-affirming surgeries in the 1930s for trans women Dora Richter and Lili Elbe.
Researchers at the institute coined the term “trassexualism” in 1923, which while outdated now, was the first modern term that Dr. Hirschfield used when working with Berlin police to acquire “transvestite passes” for his patients to help them avoid arrest under public nuisance and decency laws. During the Weimar Republic, trans people could also change their names although their options were limited. In Berlin, queer press flourished after World War I along with a number of clubs welcoming gay, lesbian and trans clientele, including Eldorado, which featured trans performers on stage.
But as Hitler rose to power, trans people were targeted. In 1933, Nazi youth and members of the Sturmabteilung ransacked the institute, stealing and burning books – one of the first book burnings of the Nazi regime. German police stopped recognizing the “transvestite” passes and issuing new ones, and under Paragraph 175, which criminalized sexual relationships with men, trans women (who were misgendered by the police) were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
As the Lemkin Intsitute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security wrote in a statement:
“The Nazis, like other genocidal groups, believed that national strength and existential
power could only be achieved through an imposition of a strict gender binary within the racially pure ‘national community.’ A fundamentalist gender binary was a key feature of Nazi racial politics and genocide.”
History professor Laurie Marhoefer wrote for The Conversation that while trans people were targeted, there was not extensive discussion of them by the regime. But there was evidence of the transphobia behind the regime’s violence, specifically in Hermann Ferdinand Voss’s 1938 book “Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Transvestitismus.”Voss noted that during the Nazi regime, trans people could and were arrested and sent to concentration camps where they underwent forced medical experimentation (including conversion therapy and castration) and died in the gas chambers.
While there is growing recognition that gay, bisexual, and lesbian individuals were targeted during the Holocaust, few know about the trans genocide through which trans individuals were arrested, underwent forced castration and conversion therapy, and were outright killed alongside gay, lesbian, disabled and Jewish individuals in concentration camps. Historians are just beginning to undertake this research, writes Marhoefer, and to delve further into the complex racial hierarchies that affected how trans people were treated.
As Zavier Nunn writes for Past & Present, trans people of “Aryan” racial status and those not considered to be homosexuals were sometimes spared from the worst violence and outright murder. Depending on their skills, they could even be considered for rehabilitation into the Volksgemeinschaft, or Nazi utopian community. As Nunn highlights, trans violence was much more nuanced and individualized and should be explored separately from violence against gay and lesbian individuals during the Holocaust.
Marhoefer’s research of violence against trans women, as recorded in police files (as is the persecution of gay and lesbian individuals), is groundbreaking but rare. He gave a talk at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in 2023, shortly after a 2022 civil lawsuit about denial that trans people were victims of the Holocaust. The German court recognized that trans people were victimized and killed by the Nazi regime, but in the United States, there is still a hesitancy by the wider LGBTQ community and leftist groups to acknowledge that we are living during a time of anti-trans violence, that trans people are being used as political scapegoats in order to distract from real problems of accountability and transparency around government policy.
As anti-trans legislation escalates, it’s important to remember and call out how trans violence is not only a feminist issue, it’s a human rights one as well. While Shannon Fyfe argues that the current campaigns against trans people may not fit the traditional legal definition of a genocide, the destruction and denial of life saving care, access to public spaces, and escalating violence is still immensely devastating.
Kaamya Sharma also notes that the term “genocide” has deep geo-political implications. As she explained, “western organisations are, historically and today, apathetic to the actual lives of people in the Global South, and put moral posturing above Brown and Black lives,” so the choice to use “genocide” is a loaded one. But as the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security writes in the same statement: “The ideological constructs of transgender women promoted by gender critical ideologues are particularly genocidal. They share many features in common with other, better known, genocidal ideologies. Transgender women are represented as stealth border crosses who seek to defile the purity of cisgender women, much as Tutsi women were viewed in Hutu Power ideology and Jewish men in Nazi antisemitism.”
Trans people are not extremists, nor are they grooming children or threatening the fabric of American identity – they are human beings for whom (like all of us) gender affirming care is lifesaving. As we remember the trans lives lost decades ago and those lost this year to transphobic violence, knowing this history is the only way to stop its rewriting.
New York
N.Y. governor’s race presents stark contrast on LGBTQ rights
Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul expected to face Republican Bruce Blakeman
As states across the country grapple with a rapidly changing federal landscape under President Donald Trump, governors have increasingly become the first line of defense — or enforcement — on issues ranging from healthcare and education to LGBTQ rights.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in New York, Trump’s home state, where the 2026 gubernatorial race is shaping up as a high-profile battle over the future of LGBTQ protections.
Incumbent Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul is seeking a second full term as New York’s 57th governor and the state’s first female governor. She enters the race with strong support from LGBTQ advocates and organizations, including an endorsement from the Stonewall Democrats of New York City. Earlier this year, Hochul was also endorsed by progressive leaders like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She is running alongside New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams as her lieutenant governor candidate.
Throughout her tenure, Hochul has signed a series of measures aimed at strengthening protections for LGBTQ New Yorkers, particularly transgender residents.
Among the most notable is New York’s “Trans Safe Haven Act,” which protects out-of-state trans youth, their parents, and medical providers who travel to New York to access legally protected gender-affirming care. Hochul has also signed legislation requiring health insurance plans to cover HIV prevention medications, including PrEP and Post-Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP), without out-of-pocket costs.
Additionally, Hochul signed a Long-Term Care Bill of Rights that prohibits discrimination against LGBTQ seniors and people living with HIV in long-term care facilities.
“As the birthplace of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, New York has long been at the forefront of advancing equality,” Hochul said in a statement during Pride month. “During Pride month, we celebrate New York’s vibrant LGBTQ+ community and acknowledge the importance of protecting the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ+ New Yorkers. This month and every month, we proudly stand with the LGBTQ+ community and remain committed to building a more inclusive and equitable future for all where everyone can live freely with dignity, safety, and respect.”
On the Republican side, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman has emerged as the party’s leading candidate. Blakeman is running with Madison County Sheriff Todd Hood as his lieutenant governor pick.
Blakeman, Nassau County’s 10th county executive, was first elected in 2021 after defeating Democratic incumbent Laura Curran. He previously served as a commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a Nassau County legislator, and a Hempstead town councilman.
A longtime supporter of Trump, Blakeman appeared alongside the president during a 2024 event honoring slain NYPD Officer Jonathan Diller.
LGBTQ advocates have frequently criticized Blakeman for his positions on trans issues, particularly his opposition to trans women participating in women’s sports.
In February 2024, Blakeman signed an executive order barring women’s sports teams that include trans women from using Nassau County athletic facilities. The policy applies to youth, collegiate, and professional teams. Teams that include trans men were not affected. The order has since been halted by the New York State Appellate Division swiftly issued an injunction halting enforcement while the plaintiffs appeal the decision
Ahead of announcing the order, Blakeman repeatedly referred to trans women as “biological males” and argued they should compete on men’s or co-ed teams. LGBTQ rights groups condemned the policy, saying it discriminates against trans athletes and contributes to the marginalization of trans youth.
Trump endorsed Blakeman’s gubernatorial campaign in December 2025, shortly after U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) announced she would not seek the Republican nomination. The president made his endorsement via Truth Social that “Bruce is MAGA all the way, and has been with me from the very beginning.”
The Washington Blade contacted Blakeman’s campaign seeking comment on his LGBTQ policy priorities and views on issues including nondiscrimination protections, trans rights, and healthcare access. The campaign did not respond.
The race highlights two sharply different approaches to LGBTQ policy in a state widely regarded as the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ rights movement, home to the 1969 Stonewall uprising that helped launch the contemporary movement for LGBTQ equality.
Despite the ideological contrast, early polling suggests Hochul remains the clear favorite. Most public surveys show the incumbent holding a double-digit advantage over her potential Republican challengers, with some polls placing her lead at roughly 20 percentage points ahead of the November election.
Illinois
Obama Center opens with tributes to marriage equality, LGBTQ progress
19.3 acre campus honors 44th president’s legacy
The Barack Obama Presidential Center held media previews on Thursday ahead of its official Juneteenth opening, marking the debut of the first presidential center dedicated to the 44th and only Black U.S. president.
The 19.3-acre campus, located on Chicago’s South Side within historic Jackson Park, features a museum, garden, basketball court, and a new branch of the Chicago Public Library.
Multiple artifacts related to the LGBTQ rights movement appear in the presidential museum’s collection, though none appeared to be on display at the time of publication, according to the center’s website.
Among the objects in the collection are the pen Obama used to sign the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that prohibited gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals from serving openly in the military; a set of Harvey Milk commemorative stamps honoring the first openly gay elected official in San Francisco; and an Out2Enroll rainbow sweat wristband used to connect communities — specifically LGBTQ people and their families, friends, and allies — with health insurance coverage options available under the Affordable Care Act.
The artifacts reflect a broader LGBTQ legacy associated with the Obama presidency.
During the televised opening ceremony, former first lady Michelle Obama thanked her husband for “standing up for marriage equality.”
During his presidency, Obama took a number of actions affecting LGBTQ Americans, including repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” signing the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act, directing the Justice Department to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in court, expanding federal benefits and leave to same-sex domestic partners of federal and Foreign Service employees, broadening Affordable Care Act coverage for LGBTQ health issues, including HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, and signing a 2014 executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
The opening event drew numerous celebrities, including Stevie Wonder, Christina Aguilera, Oprah Winfrey, and Tom Hanks.
It also attracted political figures from both sides of the aisle. One notable exception was President Donald Trump, who was not invited to the ceremony. All other living former presidents were invited and attended.
The Obama Presidential Center will open to the public on June 19, with tickets available on its website.
Florida
Intersex teacher alleges Fla. school fired him over perceived trans identity
Shepard Scalf filed a complaint with Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
An intersex teacher in Florida who was fired is alleging in a new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filing that he was terminated based on assumptions that he was transgender.
Shepard Scalf in the filing says he was assigned female at birth but identifies as male.
According to Monday’s filing with the EEOC, submitted on Scalf’s behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, and the law firm of Chanfrau & Chanfrau P.L., the school district fired Scalf on the basis of his sex and the presumption that he is trans.
Scalf was hired for the 2025-2026 school year at Patriot Oaks Academy in the St. Johns County School District to teach language arts to 6th- and 7th-graders, after previously working in another Florida school district.
During the hiring process, Scalf submitted paperwork that disclosed he had been assigned female at birth. He was born with an intersex variation with XY chromosomes, and he lives as and presents as a man.
On Aug. 28, 2025, Patriot Oaks Academy Principal Drew Chiodo scheduled an emergency meeting with Scalf. The principal was directed to read a letter from the school district superintendent informing Scalf that he must either submit his resignation or be fired.
According to the ACLU, Scalf was provided with no legitimate reason for his termination and had not received any prior warnings or disciplinary actions. At the time of his termination, Chiodo told Scalf his work was “exemplary” and that Scalf had “met every expectation.”
“Receiving this ultimatum was confusing and overwhelming. Everything had been going so well — I couldn’t understand why this was happening,” Scalf said. “The start of a school year is always brimming with promise and excitement, and I was looking forward to continuing my teaching career at Patriot Oaks until I was cornered into resigning. It became clear to me that being fired had nothing to do with my qualifications or teaching — it was about who I am.”
According to the filing, Scalf received communications that the termination followed complaints from a parent about his gender identity. However, the filing also claims that his gender identity, sex assigned at birth, and intersex status were never mentioned in his classroom.
In a 2020 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County found employment discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The ACLU is claiming that under that ruling, Scalf’s rights under Title VII were violated.
“Six years ago, the Supreme Court held in Bostock v. Clayton County that employers cannot fire someone for being gay or transgender because doing so is discrimination because of sex,” said Shana Knizhnik, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, in a press release from the ACLU. “The same reasoning protects intersex people, who have long faced discrimination because their bodies and lives do not conform to narrow expectations about what a man or a woman is supposed to be. Mr. Scalf was an exemplary teacher, but despite his performance and qualifications, he was forced out of his job because he did not fit those expectations. As politicians and institutions increasingly seek to police sex and gender, intersex people are too often caught in the crossfire alongside transgender people — but federal civil rights law protects everyone from this kind of discrimination.”
Samantha Past, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Florida, stated in a press release that Florida’s public school system is increasingly hostile towards LGBTQ people.
“At a time when Florida’s public schools are increasingly targeted by disruptive state policies and in the midst of a teacher shortage crisis, St. Johns County School District chose to unlawfully oust a qualified and respected educator. Everyone deserves the opportunity to work and contribute to their community without fear of being targeted because of who they are. Mr. Scalf is no exception,” Past stated.
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