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Could 2010 be ‘Year of the Gay?’

Large number of out candidates running for office

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David Cicilline, the gay mayor of Providence, R.I., is seeking a U.S. House seat in this year’s election. (Photo courtesy of Cicilline Committee)

The unprecedented number of LGBT candidates expected to seek political office this November could be setting up 2010 as the “Year of the Gay.”

A number of gay candidates are running for high-profile office this year. In addition to the three openly gay lawmakers in the U.S. House seeking re-election, several non-incumbent gay candidates are running for Congress.

Steve Pougnet, the gay mayor of Palm Springs, Calif., is seeking a House seat and David Cicilline, the gay mayor of Providence, R.I., is also running for Congress. Another gay candidate, Ed Potosnak, is running to represent New Jersey in the U.S. House. All three men are campaigning as Democrats.

Gay candidates are also seeking election to prominent statewide offices. In Massachusetts, Richard Tisei, a state senator, is in contention to become the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor. In Connecticut, Kevin Lembo, a health care advocate, is seeking the Democratic nomination to become lieutenant governor.

Additionally, several LGBT people are seeking election or re-election in races at the local level. Notable candidates include Kathy Webb, a lesbian who’s running for re-election to the Arkansas State House; Jolie Justus, a lesbian who’s running for re-election to the Missouri State Senate; and Heather Mizeur, a lesbian who’s running for re-election to the Maryland State House.

The Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, which backs qualified LGBT candidates for political office, has endorsed for the November election 68 candidates for federal and local races. That’s the highest number of candidates the organization has ever endorsed at this point prior to a November election.

Denis Dison, a spokesperson for the organization, projected the Victory Fund will endorse at least 112 candidates by the time the general election arrives. It would be more candidates than the organization has ever endorsed for a general election.

“When people see someone like [lesbian] Annise Parker win election as mayor of Houston, they question their assumptions about what’s possible, and I think that when people see other LGBT candidates succeed, they believe they can they can do it, too,” Dison said.

The potential for the election of so many gay candidates to office could make 2010 a milestone in terms of visibility for LGBT officials. Such a change would echo a political phenomenon from 1992, which became known as the “Year of the Woman.” At the time, Democratic nominee Bill Clinton’s victory was accompanied by the election of four female Democrats to the U.S. Senate.

Three of those women still serve in the Senate today: Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.). Carol Moseley Braun, a presidential candidate in 2004, was also elected to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate. Never before had four women been elected to the U.S. Senate in one election.

Dan Pinello, a gay government professor at the City University of New York, said the 1992 election’s outcome was the result of greater attention paid to feminist issues such as the Equal Rights Amendment and the Anita Hill hearings on Capitol Hill.

“Maybe the same thing is happening now in the LGBT community, given what’s occurred in the last decade or so around the issue, for example, of relationship recognition,” he said. “So there may be a correlation there in terms of there being events that spark attention to a particular community, and then, a decade or so later, it’s recognized enough to have members of that community be acknowledged publicly through election to public office in substantial numbers.”

Despite this potential for gay wins, Pinello said even if three LGBT non-incumbent candidates were elected to Congress, it wouldn’t yet proportionately reflect the LGBT population if, as some national exit polling data indicates, around 4 percent of American voters self-identify as lesbian or gay.

“Thus, in order to increase the openly lesbian and gay membership of Congress so that it would be comparable to the proportion of the population that is gay, you’d need about 18 more members, or an additional 600 percent,” he said.

Pinello was skeptical, though, whether wins for LGBT candidates seeking office in Congress this November should be considered substantial. He said a greater number of candidates would be necessary to make representation more closely reflect the American public.

“If there were like eight or 10 out there, and 435 total seats in the House, that would be notable,” he said. “That would be a dramatic shift, but I don’t know that anything short of that would be.”

Nonetheless, Pinello said every additional LGBT person elected to office would be a representational win, and called having known LGBT candidates running for office “a substantial statement.”

Noting the lack of LGBT representation in public offices throughout the country, Dison said LGBT people have a “long way to go” toward achieving representation in elected office, even if 2010 brings significant success.

“There are over half a million elected offices in the country and only 470 right now are filled with openly LGBT persons,” he said. “We’re still at the beginning of this effort to have our voices heard in government.”

But Dison said with so many LGBT candidates seeking office, 2010 could bring a surge in LGBT representation and predicted that a majority of Victory Fund-endorsed candidates would be successful in their races.

“Our win rate has fluctuated sort of between 65 and 75 percent over the last five years,” he said. “If that tradition holds, we’ll see roughly 70 percent.”

Michael Mitchell, executive director of the National Stonewall Democrats, said his organization intends to help LGBT candidates win election at the federal level as part of their overall plan to help Democrats win races this year.

“There are some great gay candidates out there — some who are already in, obviously, some who are running,” he said. “We are in the process of fine tuning our election plan and we’re going to be launching that very, very soon in the next couple weeks.”

Mitchell said he’s planning a coordinated campaign with an online presence intended to engage people across the country, using a model similar to what was used for the election of Parker as Houston mayor.

“We had folks from all across the country calling with Stonewall folks from Texas, and we were responsible for about 10,000 calls in one day,” Mitchell said. “We want to do similar things for the candidates that we are focused on, and I’m sure that some of those LGBT candidates will be included in our races.”

Dison said so many wins for LGBT candidates would benefit LGBT Americans because it would help ensure the community’s voice is heard.

“When people are able to speak from an authentic place as an LGBT person, it really changes the debate in the rooms where the decisions are made on things that affect our lives,” Dison said.

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Federal Government

Treasury Department has a gay secretary but LGBTQ staff are under siege

Agency reverses course on LGBTQ inclusion under out Secretary Scott Bessent

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

A former Treasury Department employee who led the agency’s LGBTQ employee resource group says the removal of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) from its discrimination complaint forms was merely a formalization of existing policy shifts that had already taken hold following the second inauguration of President Donald Trump and his appointment of Scott Bessent — who is gay — to lead the agency. 

Christen Boas Hayes, who served on the policy team at Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) from 2020 until March of this year, told the Washington Blade during a phone interview last week that the agency had already stopped processing internal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaints on the basis of anti-LGBTQ discrimination. 

“So the way that the forms are changing is a procedural recognition of something that’s already happening,” said Hayes. “Internally, from speaking to two EEO staff members, the changes are already taking place from an EEO perspective on what kind of cases will be found to have the basis for a complaint.”

The move, they said, comes amid the deterioration of support structures for LGBTQ workers at the agency since the administration’s early rollout of anti-LGBTQ executive orders, which led to “a trickle down effect of how each agency implements those and on what timeline,” decisions “typically made by the assistant secretary of management’s office and then implemented by the appropriate offices.”

At the end of June, a group of U.S. House Democrats including several out LGBTQ members raised alarms after a Federal Register notice disclosed Treasury’s plans to revise its complaint procedures. Through the agency’s Office of Civil Rights and EEO, the agency would eliminate SOGI as protected categories on the forms used by employees to initiate claims of workplace discrimination.

But Hayes’s account reveals that the paperwork change followed months of internal practice, pursuant to a wave of layoffs targeting DEI personnel and a chilling effect on LGBTQ organizing, including through ERGs. 

Hayes joined Treasury’s FinCEN in 2020 as the agency transitioned into the Biden-Harris administration, working primarily on cryptocurrency regulation and emerging technologies until they accepted a “deferred resignation” offer, which was extended to civil servants this year amid drastic staffing cuts. 

“It was two things,” Hayes said. “One was the fact that the policy work that I was very excited about doing was going to change in nature significantly. The second part was that the environment for LGBTQ staff members was increasingly negative after the release of the executive orders,” especially for trans and nonbinary or gender diverse employees. 

“At the same time,” Hayes added, “having been on the job for four years, I also knew this year was the year that I would leave Treasury. I was a good candidate for [deferred resignation], because I was already planning on leaving, but the pressures that emerged following the change in administration really pushed me to accelerate that timeline.”

Some ERGs die by formal edict, others by a thousand cuts 

Hayes became involved with the Treasury LGBTQ ERG shortly after joining the agency in 2020, when they reached out to the group’s then-president — “who also recently took the deferred resignation.”

“She said that because of the pressure that ERGs had faced under the first Trump administration, the group was rebuilding, and I became the president of the group pretty quickly,” Hayes said. “Those pressures have increased in the second Trump administration.”

One of the previous ERG board members had left the agency after encountering what Hayes described as “explicitly transphobic” treatment from supervisors during his gender transition. “His supervisors denied him a promotion,” and, “importantly, he did not have faith in the EEO complaint process” to see the issues with discrimination resolved, Hayes said. “And so he decided to just leave, which was, of course, such a loss for Treasury and our Employee Resource Group and all of our employees at Treasury.”

The umbrella LGBTQ ERG that Hayes led included hundreds of members across the agency, they said, and was complemented by smaller ERGs at sub-agencies like the IRS and FinCEN — several of which, Hayes said, were explicitly told to cease operations under the new administration.

Hayes did not receive any formal directive to shutter Treasury’s ERG, but described an “implicit” messaging campaign meant to shut down the group’s activities without issuing anything in writing.

“The suggestion was to stop emailing about anything related to the employee resource group, to have meetings outside of work hours, to meet off of Treasury’s campus, and things like that,” they said. “So obviously that contributes to essentially not existing functionally. Because whereas we could have previously emailed our members comfortably to announce a happy hour or a training or something like that, now they have to text each other personally to gather, which essentially makes it a defunct group.”

Internal directories scrubbed, gender-neutral restrooms removed

Hayes said the dismantling of DEI staff began almost immediately after the executive orders. Employees whose position descriptions included the terms “diversity, equity, and inclusion” were “on the chopping block,” they said. “That may differ from more statutorily mandated positions in the OMWI office or the EEO office.”

With those staff gone, so went the infrastructure that enabled ERG programming and community-building. “The people that made our employee resource group events possible were DEI staff that were fired. And so, it created an immediate chilling effect on our employee resource group, and it also, of course, put fear into a lot of our members’ hearts over whether or not we would be able to continue gathering as a community or supporting employees in a more practical way going forward. And it was just, really — it was really sad.”

Hayes described efforts to erase the ERGs from internal communication channels and databases. “They also took our information off internal websites so nobody could find us as lawyers went through the agency’s internal systems to scrub DEI language and programs,” they said.

Within a week, Hayes said, the administration had removed gender-neutral restrooms from Main Treasury, removed third-gender markers from internal databases and forms, and made it more difficult for employees with nonbinary IDs to access government buildings.

“[They] made it challenging for people with X gender markers on identification documents to access Treasury or the White House by not recognizing their gender marker on the TWAVES and WAVES forms.”

LGBTQ staff lack support and work amid a climate of isolation 

The changes have left many LGBTQ staff feeling vulnerable — not only because of diminished workplace inclusion, but due to concerns about job security amid the administration’s reductions in force (RIFs).

“Plenty of people are feeling very stressed, not only about retaining their jobs because of the layoffs and pending questions around RIFs, but then also wondering if they will be included in RIF lists because they’re being penalized somehow for being out at work,” Hayes said. “People wonder if their name will be given, not because they’re in a tranche of billets being laid off, but because of their gender identity or sexual orientation.”

In the absence of functional ERGs, Hayes said, LGBTQ employees have been cut off from even informal networks of support.

“Employees [are] feeling like it’s harder to find members of their own community because there’s no email anymore to ask when the next event is or to ask about navigating healthcare or other questions,” they said. “If there is no ERG to go to to ask for support for their specific issue, that contributes to isolation, which contributes to a worse work environment.”

Hayes said they had not interacted directly with Secretary Bessent, but they and others observed a shift from the previous administration. “It is stark to see that our first ‘out’ secretary did not host a Pride event this year,” they said. “For the last three years we’ve flown the rainbow Pride flag above Treasury during Pride. And it was such a celebration among staff and Secretary Yellen and the executive secretary’s office were super supportive.”

“Employees notice changes like that,” they added. “Things like the fact that the Secretary’s official bio says ‘spouse’ instead of ‘husband.’ It makes employees wonder if they too should be fearful of being their full selves at work.”

The Blade contacted the Treasury Department with a request for comment outlining Hayes’s allegations, including the removal of inclusive infrastructure, the discouragement of ERG activity, the pre-formalization of EEO policy changes, and the targeting of DEI personnel. As of publication, the agency has not responded.

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U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court to consider bans on trans athletes in school sports

27 states have passed laws limiting participation in athletics programs

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U.S. Supreme Court (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear two cases involving transgender youth challenging bans prohibiting them from participating in school sports.

In Little v. Hecox, plaintiffs represented by the ACLU, Legal Voice, and the law firm Cooley are challenging Idaho’s 2020 ban, which requires sex testing to adjudicate questions of an athlete’s eligibility.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described the process in a 2023 decision halting the policy’s enforcement pending an outcome in the litigation. The “sex dispute verification process, whereby any individual can ‘dispute’ the sex of any female student athlete in the state of Idaho,” the court wrote, would “require her to undergo intrusive medical procedures to verify her sex, including gynecological exams.”

In West Virginia v. B.P.J., Lambda Legal, the ACLU, the ACLU of West Virginia, and Cooley are representing a trans middle school student challenging the Mountain State’s 2021 ban on trans athletes.

The plaintiff was participating in cross country when the law was passed, taking puberty blockers that would have significantly reduced the chances that she could have a physiological advantage over cisgender peers.

“Like any other educational program, school athletic programs should be accessible for everyone regardless of their sex or transgender status,” said Joshua Block, senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project. “Trans kids play sports for the same reasons their peers do — to learn perseverance, dedication, teamwork, and to simply have fun with their friends,” Block said.

He added, “Categorically excluding kids from school sports just because they are transgender will only make our schools less safe and more hurtful places for all youth. We believe the lower courts were right to block these discriminatory laws, and we will continue to defend the freedom of all kids to play.”

“Our client just wants to play sports with her friends and peers,” said Lambda Legal Senior Counsel Tara Borelli. “Everyone understands the value of participating in team athletics, for fitness, leadership, socialization, and myriad other benefits.”

Borelli continued, “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit last April issued a thoughtful and thorough ruling allowing B.P.J. to continue participating in track events. That well-reasoned decision should stand the test of time, and we stand ready to defend it.”

Shortly after taking control of both legislative chambers, Republican members of Congress tried — unsuccessfully — to pass a national ban like those now enforced in 27 states since 2020.

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Federal Government

UPenn erases Lia Thomas’s records as part of settlement with White House

University agreed to ban trans women from women’s sports teams

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U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon (Screen capture: C-SPAN)

In a settlement with the Trump-Vance administration announced on Tuesday, the University of Pennsylvania will ban transgender athletes from competing and erase swimming records set by transgender former student Lia Thomas.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found the university in violation of Title IX, the federal rights law barring sex based discrimination in educational institutions, by “permitting males to compete in women’s intercollegiate athletics and to occupy women-only intimate facilities.”

The statement issued by University of Pennsylvania President J. Larry Jameson highlighted how the law’s interpretation was changed substantially under President Donald Trump’s second term.

“The Department of Education OCR investigated the participation of one transgender athlete on the women’s swimming team three years ago, during the 2021-2022 swim season,” he wrote. “At that time, Penn was in compliance with NCAA eligibility rules and Title IX as then interpreted.”

Jameson continued, “Penn has always followed — and continues to follow — Title IX and the applicable policy of the NCAA regarding transgender athletes. NCAA eligibility rules changed in February 2025 with Executive Orders 14168 and 14201 and Penn will continue to adhere to these new rules.”

Writing that “we acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules” in place while Thomas was allowed to compete, the university president added, “We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.”

“Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, UPenn has agreed both to apologize for its past Title IX violations and to ensure that women’s sports are protected at the university for future generations of female athletes.”

Under former President Joe Biden, the department’s Office of Civil Rights sought to protect against anti-LGBTQ discrimination in education, bringing investigations and enforcement actions in cases where school officials might, for example, require trans students to use restrooms and facilities consistent with their birth sex or fail to respond to peer harassment over their gender identity.

Much of the legal reasoning behind the Biden-Harris administration’s positions extended from the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, which found that sex-based discrimination includes that which is based on sexual orientation or gender identity under Title VII rules covering employment practices.

The Trump-Vance administration last week put the state of California on notice that its trans athlete policies were, or once were, in violation of Title IX, which comes amid the ongoing battle with Maine over the same issue.

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