Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced on Friday that she is resigning from Congress.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), the Georgia 14th Congressional District representative announced her sudden decision to resign from office.

The nearly 11-minute-long video shows Rep. Greene stating she will step down from her role representing one of Georgia’s most Republican districts on Jan. 5, 2026. She cited multiple reasons for this decision, most notably her very public separation from Trump.

In recent weeks, Greene — long one of the loudest and most supportive MAGA members of Congress — has butted heads with the president on a slew of topics. Most recently, she supported pushing the DOJ to release the Epstein Files, becoming one of only four Republicans to sign a discharge petition, against Trump’s wishes.

She also publicly criticized her own party during the government shutdown. Rep. Greene had oddly been supportive of Democratic initiatives to protect healthcare tax credits and subsidies that were largely cut out of national healthcare policy as a result of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” passed in July.

“What I am upset over is my party has no solution,” Greene said in October.

Trump recently said he would endorse a challenger against the congresswoman if she ran for reelection next year, and last week went as far as to declare, “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Green is a disgrace to our GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY!” on his Truth Social platform.

Trump told ABC News on Friday night that Greene’s resignation is “great news for the country,” and added that he has no plans to speak with Greene but wishes her well.

Despite her recent split with the head of the Republican Party, Rep. Greene has consistently taken a staunch stance against legislation supporting the LGBTQ community — notably a hardline “no” on any issue involving transgender people or their right to gender-affirming care.

Rep. Greene has long been at odds with the LGBTQ community. Within her first month in office, she criticized Democrats’ attempts to pass the Equality Act, legislation that would bar anti-LGBTQ employment discrimination. She went as far as to suggest an apocalypse-like scenario if Congress passed such a measure.

“God created us male and female,” she said on the House floor. “In his image, he created us. The Equality Act that we are to vote on this week destroys God’s creation. It also completely annihilates women’s rights and religious freedoms. It can be handled completely differently to stop discrimination without destroying women’s rights, little girls’ rights in sports, and religious freedom, violating everything we hold dear in God’s creation.”

Greene, who serves one of the nation’s most deeply red districts in northwest Georgia, attempted to pass legislation dubbed the “Protect Children’s Innocence Act,” which would have criminalized gender-affirming care for minors and restricted federal funding and education related to gender-affirming care in 2023. The bill was considered dead in January 2025 after being referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.

Her push came despite multiple professional medical organizations, including the nation’s largest and most influential — the American Medical Association — stating that withholding gender-affirming care would do more harm than any such care would.

She has called drag performers “child predators” and described the Democratic Party as “the party of killing babies, grooming and transitioning children, and pro-pedophile politics.”

Greene has also publicly attacked Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride, the nation’s first and only transgender member of Congress. She has repeatedly misgendered and attacked McBride, saying, “He’s a man. He’s a biological male,” adding, “he’s got plenty of places he can go” when asked about bathrooms and locker rooms McBride should use. Greene has also been vocal about her support for a bathroom-usage bill targeting McBride and transgender Americans as a whole.

She has repeatedly cited false claims that transgender people are more violent than their cisgender counterparts, including falsely stating that the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooter in Texas was transgender.

The former MAGA first lady also called for an end to Pride month celebrations. She criticized the fact that the LGBTQ community gets “an entire” month while veterans get “only one day each year” in an X post, despite November being designated as National Veterans and Military Families Month.

Under Georgia law, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) must hold a special election within 40 days of the seat becoming vacant.

The Washington Blade reached out to both the White House and Greene’s office for comment, but has not heard back.

It’s not strictly necessary to know anything about Henrik Ibsen when you watch “Hedda” – the festival-acclaimed period drama from filmmaker Nia DaCosta, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video after a brief theatrical release in October – but it might help.

One of three playwrights – alongside Anton Chekhov and August Strindberg – widely cited as “fathers of “modern theater,” the Norwegian Ibsen was sharply influenced by the then-revolutionary science of of psychology. His works were driven by human motivations rather than the workings of fate, and while some of the theories that inspired them may now be outdated, the complexity of his character-driven dramas can be newly interpreted through any lens – which is why he is second only to Shakespeare as the most-frequently performed dramatist in the world.

Arguably his most renowned play, “Hedda Gabler” provides the basis for DaCosta’s movie. The tale of a young newlywed – the daughter of a prominent general, accustomed to a life of luxury and pleasure – who feels trapped as the newly wedded wife of George Tesman, a respected-but-financially-insecure academic, and stirs chaos in an attempt to secure a future she doesn’t really want. Groundbreaking when it premiered in 1891, it became one of the classic “standards” of modern theater, with its title role coveted and famously interpreted by a long list of the 20th century’s greatest female actors – and yes, it’s been adapted for the screen multiple times.

The latest version – DaCosta’s radically reimagined reframing, which moves the drama’s setting from late-19th-century Scandinavia to England of the 1950s – keeps all of the pent-up frustration of its title character, a being of exceptional intelligence and unconventional morality, but adds a few extra layers of repressed “otherness” that give the Ibsen classic a fresh twist for audiences experiencing it more than a century later.

Casting Black, openly queer performer Tessa Thompson in the iconic title role, DaCosta’s film needs go no further to introduce new levels of relevance to a character that is regarded as one of the theater’s most searing portrayals of thwarted female empowerment – but by flipping the gender of another important character, a former lover who is now the chief competition for a job that George (Tom Bateman) is counting on obtaining, it does so anyway.

Instead of the play’s Eilert Lövborg, George’s former colleague and current competition for lucrative employment, “Hedda” gives us Eileen (Nina Hoss), instead, who carries a deep and still potent sexual history  – underscored to an almost comical level by the ostentationally buxom boldness of her costume design – which presents a lot of options for exploitation in Hedda’s quest for self-preservation; these are even further expanded by the presence of Thea (Imogen Poots), another of Hedda’s former flings who has now become enmeshed with Eileen, placing a volatile sapphic triangle in the middle of an already delicate situation.

Finally, compounding the urgency of the story’s precarious social politics, DaCosta compresses the play’s action into a single evening, the night of Hedda and George’s homecoming party – in the new and expensive country house they cannot afford – as they return from their honeymoon. There, surrounded by and immersed in an environment where bourgeois convention and amoral debauchery exist in a precarious but socially-sanctioned balance, Hedda plots a course which may ultimately be more about exacting revenge on the circumstances of a life that has made her a prisoner as it is about protecting her husband’s professional prospects.

Sumptuously realized into a glowing and nostalgic pageant of bad behavior in the upper-middle-class, “Hedda” scores big by abandoning Ibsen’s original 19th-century setting in favor of a more recognizably modern milieu in which “color-blind” casting and the queering of key relationships feel less implausible than they might in a more faithful rendering. Thompson’s searingly nihilistic performance – her Hedda is no dutiful social climber trying to preserve a comfortable life, but an actively rebellious presence sowing karmic retribution in a culture of hypocrisy, avarice, and misogyny – recasts this proto-feminist character in such a way that her willingness to burn down the world feels not only authentic, but inevitable. Tired of being told she must comply and cooperate, she instead sets out to settle scores and shift the balance of power in her favor, and if her tactics are ruthless and seemingly devoid of feminine compassion, it’s only because any such sentimentality has long been eliminated from her worldview. Valued for her proximity to power and status rather than her actual possession of those qualities, in DaCosta’s vision of her story she seems to willingly deploy her position as a means to rebel against a status quo that keeps her forever restricted from the self-realized autonomy she might otherwise deserve, and thanks to the tantalizingly cold fire Thompson brings to the role, we are hard-pressed not to root for her, even when her tactics feel unnecessarily cruel.

As for the imposition of queerness effected by making Eilert into Eileen, or the additional layers of implication inevitably created by this Hedda’s Blackness, these elements serve to underscore a theme that lies at the heart of Ibsen’s play, in which the only path to prosperity and social acceptance lies in strict conformity to social norms; while Hedda’s race and unapologetic bisexuality feel largely accepted in the private environment of a party among friends, we cannot help but recognize them as impediments to surviving and thriving in the society by which she is constrained, and it makes the slow-bubbling desperation of her destructive character arc into a tragedy with a personal ring for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider in their own inner circle, simply by virtue of who they are.

Does it add anything of value to Ibsen’s iconic work? Perhaps not, though the material is certainly rendered more expansive in scope and implication by the inclusion of race and sexuality to the already-stacked deck of class hierarchy that lies at the heart of the play; there are times when these elements feel like an imposition, a “what-if?” alternate narrative that doesn’t quite gel with the world it portrays and ultimately seems irrelevant in the way it all plays out – though DaCosta’s ending does offer a sliver of redemptive hope that Ibsen denies his Hedda. Still, her retooling of this seminal masterwork does not diminish its greatness, and it allows for a much-needed spirit of inclusion which deepens its message for a diverse modern audience.

Anchored by Thompson’s ferocious performance, and the electricity she shares with co-star Hoss, “Hedda” makes for a smart, solid, and provocative riff on a classic cornerstone of modern dramatic storytelling; enriched by a sumptuous scenic design and rich cinematography by Sean Bobbitt, it may occasionally feel more like a Shonda Rhimes-produced tale of sensationalized scandal and “mean-girl” melodrama than a timeless masterwork of World Theatre, but in the end, it delivers a powerful echo of Ibsen’s classic that expands to accommodate a whole century’s worth of additional yearning.

Besides, how often do we get to see a story of blatant lesbian attraction played out with such eager abandon in a relatively mainstream movie? Answer: not often enough, and that’s plenty reason for us to embrace this queered-up reinvention of a classic with open arms.

For years, the far right has relied on a familiar infrastructure to wage its political battles: coordinated legal networks, back-channeled money, and an ever-growing pipeline of model legislation that moves quietly from one statehouse to another. What used to be a fringe ecosystem of activist lawyers has matured into something far more muscular. Today, the attacks on LGBTQ Americans—especially transgender people—are not random. They are designed, drafted, and deployed by a disciplined constellation of groups that understand how to move legislation with precision. And if Democrats, civil rights advocates, and national LGBTQ organizations continue treating each bill as an isolated outrage rather than a unified offensive, this machine will keep outpacing them.

Most Americans have never heard of outfits like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Principles Project, the Leadership Institute’s law arm, or the network of state-based policy shops that orbit the Heritage Foundation. But these entities now function as the shadow authors of state legislation. The anti-trans sports bans that appeared in more than 20 states did not arise organically; they were cloned from drafts circulated by ADF attorneys. The same is true for bills restricting gender-affirming care, limiting name and pronoun accommodations in schools, or expanding “religious liberty” carve-outs that allow discrimination against LGBTQ employees or customers. Legislators often change a few words, swap in a local sponsor, and reintroduce the same provisions session after session — giving the impression of momentum when, in reality, only a handful of ideologues are writing the nation’s culture-war script.

The operational model is simple: produce a bill, partner with a state-level think tank, recruit a legislator to introduce it, and provide legal testimony to defend it. But the strategic sophistication lies upstream. These groups have spent years cultivating relationships with attorneys general, state solicitors, and conservative judges who are sympathetic to their worldview. They draft legislation with litigation in mind, anticipating which language will survive scrutiny before the federal courts they have worked diligently to remake. They treat policy, politics, and jurisprudence as a seamless ecosystem; meanwhile, LGBTQ advocates are forced to fight on three fronts at once, often with smaller budgets and no comparable network of state-by-state affiliates.

What is most striking now is the acceleration. Bills that used to be test-driven in one or two states are being introduced in a dozen simultaneously. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the same legal strategists pushing abortion bans pivoted almost immediately toward restricting trans health care, framing puberty blockers and hormone therapy as “sterilization.” The rhetorical shift was not accidental. It was a deliberate legal construction designed to open the door to future Fourteenth Amendment challenges, should the movement secure a case capable of reaching the Supreme Court. This is not simply a legislative fight; it is the groundwork for long-term judicial warfare.

And yet, Democrats and even national LGBTQ groups often treat these measures as if they were spontaneous outbursts of local prejudice. That is politically naïve. The reason similar bills appear in Idaho, Florida, Tennessee, Kansas, and Ohio at the same time is because they originate from the same set of PDFs stored on the same servers belonging to the same legal networks. The far right has embraced an industrial model of anti-LGBTQ policymaking: mass production, rapid deployment, and coordinated amplification by media channels that echo the same talking points across state lines.

The consequence is that the burden falls on queer people themselves—especially trans people—to respond to an avalanche of bills, hearings, lawsuits, and administrative changes that no individual or small advocacy team can fully track. When you have a network of attorneys feeding language to legislators, drafting amicus briefs, and preparing future litigation strategies in advance, you create an asymmetry that is difficult to counter with reactive press releases or one-off legal challenges. This imbalance of power is not about public opinion, which still supports LGBTQ equality by wide margins. It is about institutional positioning. The far right has placed its lawyers where the pressure points are: in state AG offices, in coordinated legislative caucuses, in judicial clerkships, and in the nonprofit legal trenches where issue fights are shaped long before the public hears about them.

There is a path forward, but it requires abandoning the old model of treating each bill as a separate emergency. LGBTQ organizations need a unified, long-range strategy that mirrors the discipline of the groups attacking them. That means state-by-state legal surveillance, rapid drafting of counter-model legislation, formal partnerships with progressive state AGs, and a standing litigation coalition capable of anticipating—not just responding to—legal threats. It also means investing in local leaders who understand that these bills are symptoms of a national machine, not quirks of their hometown politics.

What’s at stake here is nothing less than the architecture of civil rights in the United States. The far right is attempting to rewrite the legal landscape through volume and repetition, hoping courts will eventually treat these contrived bills as reflections of a shifting national consensus. They are betting that if they introduce enough legislation, in enough states, for enough years, the judiciary will reinterpret LGBTQ equality not as a settled constitutional principle but as a contested social question that can be narrowed or rolled back. Their ultimate goal is not just to restrict trans rights today but to lay the doctrinal groundwork for limiting LGBTQ protections for a generation.

The community can still win this fight, but only if it sees the battlefield clearly. These bills are not local skirmishes—they are coordinated acts of legal engineering. And it is time the pro-equality movement built an equally coordinated system to match them.

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 on Instagram at @isaacamend