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Julius Shan remembers sitting at his desk last August and opening an email that caught him by surprise: “Please find attached the memo terminating your employment with Microsoft, effective immediately.”

“It was kind of a shock, but it was also kind of a relief to be fired,” he told Uncloseted Media.

Shan, a 28-year-old gay man, had been on the outs with his employer for over a year. When he joined Microsoft in 2020, it felt like a good environment for LGBTQ employees. But over time, he grew disillusioned as he watched the company ignore criticisms from him and his colleagues about the troubling relationships Microsoft has with anti-LGBTQ figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

“It’s convenient to say that you are protecting and trying to champion LGBTQ rights … while on the other hand taking money from one of the most corrupt administrations there is,” Shan says.

Microsoft’s handling of LGBTQ issues wasn’t the only concern he had with the company’s values. Shan says the final straw came when he discovered that Microsoft was supporting a mass surveillance project that helped the Israeli military intercept millions of civilian phone calls in Palestine. Outraged, he joined an occupation protest at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters. The next week, the company fired him, accusing him of “misconduct in violation of company policy.”

“I think it really helped me understand where Microsoft’s values really were in terms of its stated values versus how those values actually play out in day-to-day-life,” he says.

Microsoft isn’t alone. Because of pressures from the Trump administration, many corporations have stopped expressing outward support for the LGBTQ community. On the surface, Microsoft seems like an exception: It has continued its annual pride campaigns and remains a platinum partner of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

But the company has also kowtowed to pressure from the Trump administration to roll back Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) commitments and has removed some hate speech protections on LinkedIn, which Microsoft owns.

“It’s obvious to me that they are trying to play both sides,” Ray Acheson, a writer and researcher at Princeton University focused on military uses of technology, told Uncloseted Media. “It really shows the ways in which queer folks are expendable to these companies.”

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The Rise and Fall of Microsoft’s Pro-LGBTQ Stance

Throughout history, Microsoft has been ahead of the curve on LGBTQ issues. It added sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policies in 1991 and gender identity in 2004, well before these became industry standards in corporate America. Since then, it has received perfect scores on HRC’s Corporate Equality Index, a tool to track pro-LGBTQ employee policies at major companies. And since at least 2013, it’s participated in pride events every year.

But over the last few years, Microsoft has backtracked. In July 2024, the company eliminated one of its DEI teams. A team leader wrote in an email to employees that DEI is “no longer business critical.”

It was around this time when many corporations made similar moves to scale back DEI efforts following pressure campaigns from right-wing think tanks.

“The landscape has shifted in a landslide,” Mike Wilke, the founder of AdRespect, a nonprofit advocating for LGBTQ inclusion in advertising, told Uncloseted Media. “[Right-wing activists] seemed to get a lot of traction very quickly across multiple companies, and there was synergy with the different leaders in the Republican party who started to pile on.”

Microsoft’s rollbacks have intensified under Trump, who signed an executive order on his second day in office pushing companies to remove their DEI policies.

In 2025, Microsoft announced that it would no longer publish an annual report on diversity and inclusion, which it had been doing since 2019. The report contained statistics on the representation of women, LGBTQ people and racial and ethnic minorities in leadership and at the company overall, as well as info on Microsoft’s efforts to promote greater diversity and equity in its offices and products.

“They got rid of that … without really any direct pressure from the Trump administration,” Shan says. “It felt like it was happening in advance.”

Microsoft claims that it pulled the plug on the report because it had “evolved beyond” the report and would replace it with “stories, videos and insights that show inclusion in action.”

Around this time, it also removed requirements for employees to report their actions and future plans to support diversity and inclusion at the company. It also removed diversity from its list of “core priorities” on performance reviews. And in March, Microsoft’s chief diversity officer stepped down as part of a restructuring that diminished the company’s DEI work.

Policy changes have also been concerning at Microsoft’s subsidiary, LinkedIn. Last July, the social media platform updated its hate speech and harassment guidelines. It removed a prohibition against the “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as well as language specifying protections against harassment on the basis of “race or gender identity.”

As Microsoft implemented these changes, it deepened its ties with the Trump administration. It donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, twice the amount it gave to the last two inaugurations. And last year, it gave an unknown amount to Trump’s ballroom project.

In May 2025, Microsoft invited then-senior adviser to the president, Elon Musk, as a special guest at its annual Build Developer Conference. There, it announced that Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, would run on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, which provides cloud storage via data centers.

“It’s fantastic to have you at our developer conference,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Musk.

This reportedly left LGBTQ employees “incensed.” Musk has a long history of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and has called his trans daughter “dead … killed by the woke mind virus.” And Grok has a history of spreading anti-trans misinformation, such as claiming that transness is a “social contagion” spread via access to the internet.

“I felt shocked and disgusted that Satya gave Elon and Grok a warm welcome,” says Shan, who watched the conference via livestream. “Microsoft insults human rights and DEI by supporting both a man and an AI chatbot infamous for their antisemitism, white supremacy, transphobia and idiocy.”

Microsoft’s Pride Pinkwashing Push

Despite all this, Microsoft is still flaunting its rainbow flag this Pride month. It’s currently touting its “Pride is Alive” campaign, where it’s asking users to show their pride with Microsoft rainbow video backgrounds and wallpapers. It’s also selling pride T-shirts, hoodies and hair ties. It’s even offering custom pride designs in Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

On the site, it claims that “Pride endures. Because you do. This year, Pride isn’t just about showing up. It’s about choosing to live—openly, visibly, and fully. LGBTQIA+ communities at Microsoft invite everyone to gather, share, create, live, and love.”

This practice of marketing to the LGBTQ community without meaningfully backing it up has been called “pinkwashing.”

Wilke says Microsoft’s moves could be interpreted charitably or cynically. On one side, it could be read as an attempt to continue supporting the community in less risky ways while warding off attacks from the Trump administration. But on the other hand, it could be “just trying to take our money.”

“You have to show that you respect your employees and your consumers and that you’re not supporting anti-LGBTQ causes or politicians. We wanna see that your money is where your mouth is,” he says.

Despite Microsoft’s rollbacks, some of the largest LGBTQ advocacy groups have continued to support it. GLAAD hosted an LGBTQ youth event at Microsoft’s Atlanta offices and partnered with Blizzard, a video game company owned by Microsoft, on a pride campaign last year.

HRC, meanwhile, still makes bank from Microsoft donations, listing it as a “platinum partner,” the highest level of corporate sponsorship offered by the nonprofit. And this year, they awarded Microsoft and LinkedIn 100/100 scores on their Corporate Equality Index, despite the fact that it deducts points based on a company’s “responsible citizenship.”

Wilke says the index should account for issues like LinkedIn’s hate speech rollbacks.

“I don’t have insight into [HRC’s] committees … or any specific scores, but it should’ve been caught in that responsible citizenship section,” Wilke says. “People who are on these committees are themselves corporate-based typically, so you might say they bring somewhat of a conservative eye to all of it.”

Trump’s Pentagon Is a Big Customer

Acheson says Microsoft is likely ditching its LGBTQ-friendly policies because the U.S. government makes it lots of money.

“The Trump regime … have demonstrated themselves to be quite petty in terms of who gets money and what currying their favor will get you,” says Acheson, who also works with the Stop Killer Robots campaign, which seeks to ban lethal autonomous weapons.

The Pentagon is one of Microsoft’s biggest customers. The company has landed major defense contracts since Trump took office, including one for classified AI development and another last month worth $9.7 billion.

The Pentagon began deploying AI tools run on Microsoft’s data centers in the Iran War. Acheson says these technologies are often specifically used against queer people. In 2025, Israel—which pioneered the use of these AI tools in their assault on Gaza—struck the transgender wing of an Iranian prison, leaving about 100 people missing or presumed dead.

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“[Big tech companies] claim to support the queer community whilst actually developing, deploying and selling technologies that harm us,” Acheson says.

The Pentagon has also instituted anti-LGBTQ policies at home. A week into his second term, Trump signed an executive order banning transgender troops from serving in the military. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has pressured Scouting America to abandon pro-LGBTQ policies to maintain their contract with the Pentagon.

ICE Also Pays Microsoft

Microsoft Azure also powers ICE’s surveillance and mass deportations. Since 2023, ICE has spent more than $94 million on Microsoft products.

The agency’s technical operations team uses Azure to monitor Americans through “telephone, video, audio, tracking, radio frequency technologies and associated surveillance systems.” As of January, ICE has used facial and fingerprint recognition software in the field over 100,000 times and has access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults.

Last February, the Department of Homeland Security, to which ICE belongs, began allowing agencies to gather surveillance data from people solely based on their LGBTQ identity.

They have also deported or threatened to deport queer people to countries where it is illegal to be gay, including Cameroon and Iran. And a 2024 report found widespread abuse of LGBTQ people in ICE detention centers, with nearly a third of those interviewed having been sexually assaulted or physically abused.

“It can sound quite bureaucratic, but really [Microsoft’s technology] is facilitating the daily operations of these institutions that are acting unlawfully and committing grave human rights violations,” Acheson says.

Organizing Against Microsoft

Amid all of this pinkwashing, three groups are calling for a boycott of Microsoft.

“We all know that their [Pride month] logo change is nothing more than just symbolism,” Victor Rivera, cofounder and executive director of Beyond the Ballot, a Gen Z-led progressive political organization, told Uncloseted Media. “The key important thing is not supporting administrations who do harm to [the LGBTQ] community.”

While major LGBTQ advocacy groups have largely been silent on Microsoft’s activities, there’s precedent for successful pressure campaigns to change that. Last November, HRC cut ties with defense contractors Northrop Grumman and Raytheon after two years of pressure from activists.

“Boycotts and divestments are really important because money does matter to these companies, and so if they’re being shamed for their contracts and their collaboration with militaries or ICE, that’s very effective,” says Acheson.

In an email, a Microsoft spokesperson wrote: “Our commitment to our mission, values, and culture is core to who we are at Microsoft. We’re focused on creating an environment where every employee can contribute, grow, and do their best work, including LGBTQIA+ employees around the world. This shows up not just in what we say, but more importantly in how we support our people, and partner with customers every day.”

HRC did not respond to a request for comment.

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation in the U.S. through our 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

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Happy, happy Pride Month to everyone on here. Pride is absolutely a time to party—some of my fondest memories are of bopping around Toronto’s village as a teenager. Yes, the drag queens and go-go dancers were fascinating… but I was most inspired by the advocates marching down Yonge Street with signs that read “LGBTQ RIGHTS NOW.”

This year, especially, feels like a moment to protest and call out the injustices we are facing. The government, big tech, religious institutions and corporate America have turned their back on the LGBTQ community over the last two years.

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That’s translated into a dark reality for the next generation. There are hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills sweeping through state legislatures. The Trump administration recently classified trans Americans as a terrorist threat. And in March, the Supreme Court overturned Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy.

Per the photo above of me at four years old, I was a happy kid, thanks in large part to being raised by a family and social circle that accepted me.

But I’ve also always been outraged by injustice. Two years ago, when I launched Uncloseted, I never could have imagined how fast it’d grow. But the most important part is that my team and I get to wake up every day to hold the institutions outlined above accountable and document how they are creating a troubling and unequal reality for the LGBTQ kids of America.

We have the privilege and responsibility of offering a platform to the kids—some pictured below—who are ready to tell their stories and express their outrage and trauma, but also their hope for change.

You’ve helped us build this community, which now enables the stories of these kids to reach 20 million people a month.

Uncloseted fills a critical gap in a media ecosystem where the next generation is receiving their news from podcasters like Joe Rogan and Candace Owens, who have described LGBTQ people as pedophiles and perverts.

Donate to Counter These Narratives

The state of media and LGBTQ issues today is not normal and it creates a dangerous precedent for the future of American democracy.

Uncloseted is responding to this problem with journalism that elevates and deepens the conversation. We’re doing our best to hold the line by holding those in power to account.

But we can’t do this alone. Will you help us help the next generation by supporting journalism you don’t find anywhere else? If so, we would love you to upgrade and become a paid or founding subscriber or make a gift through our 501(c)(3) sponsor here:

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• We had our third annual Pride fundraiser at the Mercedes Club rooftop last night in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. We raised funds and had meaningful (and fun!) conversations all in the name of supporting LGBTQ-focused investigative journalism. Thanks to the Mercedes Club for donating the space, and to our fantastic host committee, advisory board and staff.

• “Fascism”—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist (Erin in the Morning)

  • The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

• Qween Jean Reacts to Tony Win - ‘It’s a Tremendous Blessing’ (Broadway World)

  • Qween Jean has made history, becoming the first openly trans person to win in her category.

• Ebola ban prevents Ugandan LGBTQ+ activists from speaking at Ottawa rights conference (The Canadian Press)

  • The federal government’s blanket ban preventing people from some Ebola-affected countries from entering Canada is keeping Ugandan activists from attending a major LGBTQ+ rights conference in Ottawa.

• Grand jury says judge ‘laid bare her bigotry’ by refusing to marry gay couple; find she should be removed (Syracuse.com)

  • A newly unsealed grand jury report reveals how a Syracuse City Court judge discriminated against a same-sex couple by refusing to marry them and attempted to conceal her actions.

• Killer found guilty of hate crime in stabbing of gay man who was dancing to Beyoncé (LGBTQ Nation)

  • The killer tried to argue that he was acting in self-defense when he went up to the gay man, told him to stop dancing, and pulled a knife on him.

Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:

• 🆕 SATURDAY: Microsoft is one of the few big tech companies that continues to include pro-LGBTQ themes in its marketing. But behind the scenes, they’ve been rolling back protections for LGBTQ people in order to stay in Trump’s good graces. Hope Pisoni investigates.

• 🆕 TUESDAY: Across Illinois, conservative groups and parents are turning school policies for transgender students into political flashpoints — filing federal complaints and lawsuits against districts even when those policies follow state law. The attacks are forcing schools to spend public money defending themselves. Sam Donndelinger and the Chicago Sun-Times’ Violet Miller team up to investigate just how much money these schools are having to shell out.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me with questions, complaints and story ideas!

Spencer Macnaughton, Editor-In-Chief — spencer@unclosetedmedia.com

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation in the U.S. through our 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

Donate now

“UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton” is a new podcast by Uncloseted Media, an investigative LGBTQ-focused nonprofit news publication. Follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. YouTube // Spotify // Apple

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Milo Miles, a Toronto-based adult film actor, was recently banned from entering the United States for the next 10 years after he says he was detained and questioned by Customs and Border Protection agents over the course of two days.

Miles, who was trying to fly to Las Vegas from Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, says he had never faced significant issues at the border ahead of this instance.

While U.S. Customs does have the right to deny entry to people they believe have engaged in sex work, Miles says he was questioned for upwards of eight hours, often about his sexual orientation. He says one agent asked him why he has so many “gay clothes” and if he was “sick” upon seeing his PrEP medication and his fiber pills.

In this episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Miles sits down for his first on-camera interview to explain his experience, what he thinks Prime Minister Mark Carney should do in response to this treatment and why he believes all LGBTQ travelers should avoid the U.S. right now.

Watch the video or read the full transcript below.

Spencer Macnaughton: Hi everyone, welcome back to UNCLOSETED with me, Spencer Macnaughton. Today I’m here with Milo Miles, a Toronto-based adult film actor who was recently banned from entering the United States for 10 years after being detained and questioned by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol for nearly eight hours when trying to fly from Toronto to Las Vegas. Milo, a Canadian citizen with no criminal record, describes the experience as the worst and most painful day of his life. Milo, thanks so much for speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

Milo Miles: Thanks for having me, Spencer.

SM: Yeah, and for folks hearing that intro, obviously it sounds like a horrific day. For people who haven’t read your story yet, do you wanna just walk us through that day when you were trying to fly to Las Vegas? What happened?

MM: Yeah, so it all happened in January of this year. I was banned from entering the United States for 10 years while I was trying to fly to Las Vegas to attend the GayVN Awards, which in the adult industry are like the porn Oscars. I was scheduled to present at the event. I had six nominations and I ultimately won one of those awards. But instead, on my way down from Toronto where we have preclearance with customs at Pearson Airport, I was detained and questioned by U.S. Customs for eight hours. My luggage and my phones were searched, my privacy was violated, and I was subject to derogatory comments with an unsettling focus on my sexual orientation and sex life. It was as if my own gayness was working against me at customs. I felt coerced, manipulated and powerless. It was a completely devastating experience because I feel like I was being punished for doing what I love, for showing up as myself and for existing openly in my work and identity.

SM: Wow, yeah, that sounds like a horrible experience and I’m sorry that you went through that. When you say being targeted for your gay identity, can you give us specifics, like exactly what were they saying to you? How were they treating you? How were they acting towards you?

MM: Yeah, so the whole thing actually happened over two days. My original flight to Vegas was on a Tuesday night. At the time I had NEXUS, which is like the Canadian equivalent to global entry. So typically when I cross the border, I don’t usually have an issue. And this trip was an important one because it wasn’t just the award show that I was going to. As soon as my trip in Vegas ended a few days later, I was gonna rendezvous with my boyfriend in Florida, where he lives. But anyways, when I went through customs the first night, it wasn’t very busy. I think my flight was the last flight that was leaving from Toronto to the U.S., and the border agent that saw me was—he wasn’t the nicest border agent, let’s put it that way. He was scanning my fingerprints and he says, “I need to take you to the back.” He didn’t tell me why. He just said that I was going into secondary questioning. So the border agent takes me to the back and he has me fill out this form. He tells me to take a seat while we wait for my checked luggage to come back. And as soon as my luggage got there, the officer immediately started searching through it. And he calls me over. And he’s completely fixated on why I have so much luggage. He asks me if I’m an erotic dancer, because he opens it up and he sees that I have “gay clothing” in my luggage.

SM: Did he refer to them as gay clothing?

MM: He did, actually, yeah. He said, “Why do you have so much gay clothes?” And I was like, what do you mean? I’m going on a cruise, I’m going to Vegas with friends. I’ve never been asked that question before and I really wasn’t prepared for that series of questions. It was as if being gay in and of itself was a crime and I was expected to somehow defend my gayness. So I was, the entire time I’m trying to figure out why is he asking these questions? What’s the angle? What’s he trying to get at? What’s the problem? But he would ask them in such a way that I think he was trying to get me to stumble on my answers or trying to find this “I got you” moment with why I had so much gay clothing. He even asked why I have a Sniffies sticker on my luggage. Sniffies, the popular meetup app.

SM: Gay hookup app, yeah.

MM: Yeah, yeah, and he’s like, “What’s Sniffies?” It was as if he was trying to figure out if I was part of some gang or something, or if it meant that I was involved in gang activity, but with the gays, you know? What does Sniffies mean, why is it on my luggage? And he goes through my backpack. He sees that I have medication that I’m bringing down with me. I mean, I had my PrEP, my fiber pills, my Doxy, and he asks me why I have so much medication. He says, am I sick? Like, he just looks at me and says that, and I’m like, no, no.

But I’m happy to go through each one and tell you what it’s for and why I have it and why there’s a prescription for it. And he doesn’t really acknowledge my answers. He’s just going on to the next thing and going through everything. And eventually he says, “I’m going to search your phone.” And I was like, okay, yeah. I mean, we Canadians have been hearing about the phone searches since Trump took office and how they’ve increased and how everyone’s privacy is being violated. So it’s something that I was kind of prepared for mentally or I’ve been preparing for mentally for a while. So I was like, okay, this is my time. They’re gonna search my phone. So I give him my phone and he disappears to the back room. And it’s important to keep in mind that it’s just him and me at secondary screening at this point. It’s so late in the night that there’s no other officer on duty. There’s no other passengers being questioned. It’s just me and this one agent. And I’m sitting there like, wow, this is super weird. Like I’m definitely gonna miss my flight, But what’s happening? Why am I even back here? Like, what is the reason that there was, I guess, a flag on my account? And while the officer has my phone, he comes back 20 minutes later and he says, “I looked at your phone, you’re a prostitute.” And I’m like, “What?” Like, first of all, furthest thing that I expected him to say. And he’s like, “Yeah, I took a look at your phone, I saw messages.” And I know for a fact that there was none of that on my phone that indicated that I, or would have suggested I was a prostitute. There might be nude photos of me and friends when we go to the nude beach in Mexico, but he’s like, “Yeah, I saw your messages.” And then he says, “Wait, I thought you had a boyfriend. Why do you have so many pictures with other men?” And then I suddenly had to explain that I’m in an open relationship with my boyfriend, that it’s very normal in the gay community to have sex with other men outside of your relationship. But again, it was just like the weirdness of it all that just felt very odd and uncomfortable. And you know, when I pushed back on the whole prostitution thing, he kind of like growled and then went back and continued looking and then eventually came out again and said, “I couldn’t find anything. You’re free to go but you missed your flight, so we’ll do it all again tomorrow.” And I was like, what does that mean? He escorted me out of there, brought me back through Canadian customs. And I was kind of just left speechless and kind of frozen because I’d never experienced something like that in my life. I had no idea what to do. And then to do it again tomorrow? It just sounded so ominous. So I didn’t get home until probably, I think 1 o’clock in the morning. I’m at home and I’m talking to my boyfriend, I’m talking to my friend who’s a lawyer, and I’m like, “That was the craziest thing ever. What do I do?” You know part of me was thinking of just flat out canceling the trip to Vegas because I think the reality of being a sex worker as a content creator is that I’m not the first person who’s been banned from entering the United States. Since my ban, I know of at least five people from Toronto who have been banned from entering the United States. So at the back of my mind, I always kind of knew that it was a risk. And the reality is that Customs and Border Patrol agents see content creators as the same category as prostitutes. So I also was trying to avoid them finding out that I do porn because I didn’t want to be treated like a prostitute, because porn star equals prostitute in their eyes.

SM: Well, and that’s what we were trying to figure out when we were researching this too is, do they legally have a right to deny you entry into the U.S. because you do porn, right? And we looked it up and it was a little muddy, but according to a Canadian sex worker support agency, Maggie’s, they say that customs has the right to deny entry to people they believe have engaged in sex work, even if they have never been convicted of prostitution and or are not traveling for work. In your eyes, what is the rule around porn? It feels like there’s been a gray area, because there’s all these international porn conferences. I assume tons of global porn actors, adult entertainers, are coming to the U.S. all the time. So was it a gray area for you, or how do you interpret all of that?

MM: You know, you’re right. It really is a gray area. And there’s a few schools of thought. One of the biggest challenges I’ve had doing content in the United States is finding a legal way to do it. A few years ago, I hired an immigration lawyer and I said, “Hey, you know, I wanna start doing porn. I want to start working for studios in the United States.” But the problem is, you know, I don’t wanna feel like I’m sneaking into the country every time I have a porn shoot. And you know we looked at all the options, at all of these options, I spent all this money. And at the end of the day, the lawyer said, “Look, there’s really no visa option for someone who wants to film adult content in the United States. In fact, it’s better if you don’t say anything, because if they do end up, if you do apply for a visa and they do a background check and then see that you do porn, they’re going to put a permanent red flag on your account” because, again, porn equals sex work and sex work equals prostitution in the eyes of the U.S. government. So that kind of scared me a little bit. In other words, my only option was to marry an American and start the application process for a green card to do what I love in the United States. I should mention that Canada is a lot more liberal here, to the point that even prostitution is decriminalized. It’s not something that you can be charged for, it’s not against the law to be a prostitute in Canada. So that’s one school of thought. When I would participate in content collab houses in the U.S. and over the years got to meet so many amazing content creators and knowing that at the end of the day, this could all end for me simply because I don’t have a green card or a U.S. passport. So it’s been something that’s kind of dawned on me for many, many years as a possibility and here we are, it’s actually happening.

SM: And just so I’m clear, because I know the GayVN Awards happen in Las Vegas and there’s other international porn awards. So there’s actually like explicit events that would try and bring in adult entertainers from around the world. Has there been an understanding in the industry for the last few years, many years that the Customs and Border kind of turn a blind eye to adult entertainers? And, do you think your situation represents that maybe now people have to be more careful?

MM: I don’t know if they’ve ever turned a blind eye. I think it’s that they now are putting more emphasis on targeting members of the LGBT community and people who are identified as sex workers. One theory is that the increase in funding to Homeland Security has now resulted in increased enforcement at border controls. Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, it’s all speculation on my part.

SM: No, yeah. This is all—it’s all interesting. I just think it’s important for people to understand the rules around it, you know? So you come back the next day, assuming off of very little sleep, what happens then when you come back?

MM: Yeah, that was the worst night of my life. I’ve never experienced such anxiety. Like I had maybe two hours of sleep before having to wake up early for my flight that morning. And my heart was just racing and beating. It felt like it was gonna explode the entire time because I’m trying to problem solve what happens. So I kind of thought we made it OK the first night. The worst-case scenario in my head was the same exact outcome, right? Where they give me a hard time, I miss my flight, but, you know, it’s an early flight, so maybe I’ll be able to go down in the afternoon. I get to the airport three and a half hours before my flight just as customs had opened, and it was a lot busier this time. But it felt like déjà vu. I did the exact same thing the night before. I scanned my picture, went to the agent. The agent looked at my passport. This was a younger agent. He kind of sighed. He’s like, “Ah, man, I got to take you to the back.” And I said, “Why?” And he said, “There’s a flag on your account.”

SM: So then you’re taken to secondary screening again.

MM: I’m taken to secondary screening, the same spot as the night before and the agent gives my passport to a different agent behind one of the counters and says, “Hey, he was here the night before, blah, blah blah. Can you take care of it?” “Sure.” So the agent calls the agent that was giving me a hard time the night before. And apparently that agent told him that he never even searched my phone. He just took it for an hour, behind closed doors and pretended to search it. But I guess because we were the last two the night before, he kind of just wanted to go home, didn’t do his job, whatever, whatever, let me go.

SM: And the other agent divulged that to you?

MM: Correct. So the agent the next morning said, “Hey, last night didn’t count. He didn’t even search your phone.” And I’m like, wait, so what was that whole thing about prostitution? He clearly did because he saw photos of me and other men. But anyways, he didn’t even search my phone so we’re gonna do it all again today, is what he said. I’m like, OK, so I waited for my luggage to pop back out again. And he does the whole search again. He’s going through everything. He asked me if I have cannabis, if I have drugs, you know? He’s looking for excuses to give me a hard time. He goes through my luggage and he’s being super thorough and… Look, as a sex worker, I have two different phones. There’s my personal phone, which is the one that was searched the night before. And then there’s my work phone that I use for editing videos and stuff like that. Or, you know, messaging other content creators. Anyways, he finds my work phone, my second phone, which is completely dead by the way. It was like at the bottom of my backpack. He finds it and he says, “All right, we’re going to search both phones. We’re going to search everything again,” and the whole process started over. And over the next two hours, he’s asking me the same type of questions. He’s being just as accusatory and aggressive.

SM: Were there examples where he targeted you because of your sexual orientation, like there were with the first officer?

MM: I think the first officer was definitely a lot more anti-gay, it was very obvious. The second one was just, I think, more convinced that he wanted to find something. So two hours into it, he still didn’t find anything, he searched through my personal phone and he found a message on WhatsApp that a friend had sent in a group chat like six months earlier. And this was like 120 messages down in the group chat that was saying, I guess, he went to a hookup and at the hookups place, my porn was playing in the background. And they just sent a picture saying, “Hey, your porn’s playing in the background.” So the agent was like, “Do you do porn?” And I was like “Yeah, I sometimes do porn.” And I think that was all he needed to hear to realize, yeah, we’re gonna find something on this guy. Eventually he charged my dead work phone, plugged it in. And then eventually saw that I had messages on there that I do porn, that I’m a sex worker, and then found messages with past clients that I’ve seen in the past. The reality of being a sex worker, of doing adult film, is that you need to pay the bills. And especially for newer content creators, sometimes escorting is required. Now, there is a big difference between escorting and prostitution. I only participate, or have participated, in escorting, which is an exchange of time for goods or services, and my specialty has always been the boyfriend experience. So sometimes I’ll go out for dinner with a client and we’ll spend time together. If sex were to happen, it would always be consensual. But the agent found those messages on my phone and that was all he needed to move ahead with the ban. So on day two, I was back there for a total of six hours. The first two hours were more questioning and searching, intimidation. The next two hours was evidence gathering. So that’s when the agent took his time to have me answer a statement where I’m basically… He wanted me to confess to things I hadn’t done. So he’s asked me these questions. He’s like, “Are you a prostitute?” I’m like, “No.” And he would get upset if I didn’t say yes, that I am a prostitute. And he was coercing me into answering questions appropriately. He even threatened me with charging me with fraud if I didn’t conform to the responses that he wanted on this topic. And yeah, I mean, the whole thing was just like the most dehumanizing thing. They took my fingerprints like six different times, agents, different agents would only speak Spanish to me. I think they assumed that I only spoke Spanish while they were taking my fingerprints, while giving me instructions. And knowing that the ban was happening halfway through, I think was one of the more painful moments because I couldn’t do anything about it.

SM: Yeah, how did they deliver the news to you? They just said you’re gonna be banned for 10 years?

MM: Yeah, pretty much. His supervisor was supposed to come out and speak to me at one point. That didn’t happen. I think he just needed his approval, got the go-ahead, and it was just like a bunch of administrative things that were happening behind the scenes. But the unfortunate thing is that my partner and I were planning to build a future together in California. And the hardest day of my life was that day because having to stay there for so long and then finally being released and then just immediately calling my partner and you know, both of us—like delivering the news and having to deal with the shock and just crying and crying for days on end. Yeah, it wasn’t a fun time, and as someone who came to Canada as a refugee from Colombia when I was 7 and I, you know, I lived through some very challenging things. You know I’ve had several family members be the victims of gun violence. I’ve witnessed a few shootings. And then on top of that, you know, the whole immigration experience, you know? There were some challenges and I thought that I was strong and then to have to relive some of—a lot of—trauma again hasn’t been the easiest thing.

SM: No, and to be clear, essentially, the ban is in effect for 10 years, meaning you are not allowed to go to the United States for the next decade.

MM: Correct.

SM: Wow. I’m so sorry that happened to you. And I mean, you know, we talked a little bit about the gray area of the law around, you know porn and crossing the border, which, you know, is obviously cause for concern for other people going to the U.S. right now. But I think back to what you said about the first customs agent, right? How he’s saying, “Why do you have so many gay clothes?” How he’s sifting through your HIV prevention medication and interrogating you about it. And how he is asking you why you have some swag about a gay dating hookup app, right? All of these things to me sound irrelevant to whether or not you should be able to cross the border and explicitly discriminatory based on your sexual orientation. Am I missing something? Is that how you perceive the interaction with him?

MM: Oh, for sure. As a person of color, I faced a lot of racism growing up, and it literally felt like all that all over again, except this time the focus was on my sexual orientation. I remember when I came out as gay, this was literally my mom’s fear and this was my fear, it was like, oh man, yet another category to be marginalized by. But I think the privilege of growing up in Canada has made me a little naive to the realities I think that our community is still facing out there, especially now more than ever. And you hear about it on the news, or you hear about it happening to other people, but you think it’s never going to happen to you. And then when it finally does, I don’t know, I guess I was just completely unprepared, which is really unfortunate.

SM: And you said in another interview that your advice to queer travelers is to, quote, “avoid the United States at all costs. It’s not worth it, it’s not worth it to put your life at risk.” That’s a bold statement to tell all queer travelers. Why do you feel so strongly there?

MM: You know, and it’s a very difficult thing to say too, because I would say at least half of my chosen family lives in the United States. I’ve had the privilege of doing a lot of traveling and making some really amazing friends and building some really strong friendships with people who live across the United States. And I thought that it was safe until I realized that it wasn’t. And after speaking with other people who have had similar experiences crossing the border into the United States, I’m realizing now that it’s not just people of color that they’re targeting. It’s literally the entire LGBT community. And they will want to find something on you. It took them a total of four hours of me being detained and questioned before they found anything that they could use against me. They were so determined to give me a hard time and to find something on me. One of the questions is why was I flagged in the first place? And I still don’t know to this day. There’s so many theories. You know, people say that they’re using facial recognition software. Others are alleging that maybe I was reported by another content creator.

Personally, for me, I think the increase in travel activity to the United States to see my partner may have had something to do with it as well, or maybe just flat out racism or anti-LGBT sentiment.

SM: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I guess there’s only so much you can do with the law itself that exists, as we know, where they can technically flag folks who engage in sex work and that just is what it is. But for the kind of things that the first agent did, you know, targeting you clearly because you’re gay, right, which should be irrelevant to the border crossing situation, what do you want to come out of this? Because Canada… Our values are completely antithetical to homophobia, right? And we kind of pride ourselves on being a bastion for LGBTQ equality. I mean, do you think Mark Carney should be making a statement saying, “I denounce what happened to Milo Miles?” Because, I mean I worry it sets a precedent for all LGBTQ Canadians going into the United States.

MM: I think the scary thing is, is that it’s not hard to find articles about other Canadians that have currently been detained by ICE, for example, who have no criminal record. As unfortunate as it sounds, I know that it could have been a lot worse. But you’re right, there are many, many more Canadians who are being targeted right now. And so in the same way that I think Trump is going after Canada for not, you know, preventing the flow of drugs into the United States and using that as an excuse to impose tariffs on our country. I think you’re right. I think our prime minister and our Canadian government can do a better job at protecting Canadians from the type of mistreatment that they’re facing when they cross the border.

SM: If you could ask our prime minister, Mark Carney, to say something publicly about this situation, about the targeting of queer people trying to come into the United States, what would you want him to say?

MM: I think, first, I would want to acknowledge the pain that our community is facing and suffering, and then to address the policy issues. I think there’s a more holistic approach that can be taken, and I think a statement from the prime minister that says that he would want to prioritize working with marginalized communities would be helpful.

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SM: And would you want him to respond to the clear queer profiling you were subjected to at customs?

MM: Sure. Yeah, I think so.

SM: Obviously, you’ve explained everything that happened. A spokesperson for Customs and Border Patrol told The Independent outlet that you were, quote, “admitted to a Border Patrol officer and discovered that you received payment for engaging in prostitution in the United States, which is a crime, and that you did it while you were in the United States and that’s why you were denied entry into America.” The agency also denies that you were interrogated for eight hours. Do you want to respond?

MM: Yeah, there’s a few things. In terms of the six versus the eight hour delay, I think the media spokesperson was probably just looking at notes on the computer and didn’t realize that I was detained over the span of two days. Two hours on the first day and then six hours on the next day would total up eight hours. So her information was wrong on that front. But then it goes back to what I was talking about earlier where there never has been any evidence on my phone that I engaged in prostitution. I’ve never taken money for sex, or I’ve never exchanged sex for money. I have done escorting in the past, which is again a very different definition in exchange of money for time spent with an individual. Quality time spent, going to the movies, going to go see a show, giving them that boyfriend experience because people are lonely. Similar to how massage therapists, you know, will rub someone’s back to make them feel better. But to your point, sex work is a very broad umbrella term and the way the agent coerced me into saying “yes, I participate in prostitution,” even though I hadn’t, otherwise I was going to be charged with fraud because I wasn’t saying what the agent wanted me to say on the confession statement. It’s just really unfortunate, but it’s not surprising that they gave out that statement.

SM: What’s your message to other adult entertainers and sex workers? Do you think, especially as the U.S. is using more facial recognition, there’s a possible policy that could go into place where you have to submit social media links and handles to Customs before you travel for certain travelers in various countries. Do you think all adult entertainers for the time being should stay away from the United States to be safe?

MM: Oh, 100%. One hundred percent or even just people of the LGBT community. The studio that I work for, Carnal, has moved all of their intellectual property rights over to Amsterdam, over to the Netherlands. Because it’s no secret that one of the goals in Project 2025 is to ban porn, is to go after the LGBT community. Specifically gay porn, to go after the gays. We’re the first on the chopping block in terms of being targeted, and I’m just one of the first examples of it. This is just the beginning, and you know the studio that I work for saw that coming so they decided to pack up and move everything over to Europe where their rights are protected. Looking ahead, I think a lot of content creators are realizing that, you know, the center of the universe is not in the United States, that the world’s a big place and that there’s many more opportunities, especially in Europe and South America. But at the end of the day, I’m hoping that this is temporary, that there can be some changes to the laws. I’m still reaching out to lawyers and trying to figure out a way to navigate this, but for the time being... We’re trying.

SM: What’s the lawyers’ responses been like? Do they think you have a case? What do they have to say?

MM: It’s different from lawyer to lawyer. One lawyer I spoke to said, quote unquote, “I’m fucked,” that there’s nothing that can happen. Another lawyer is more optimistic and he says that no, we could still submit a few waivers and appeals and see how that goes.

SM: Well, and I don’t think in their policies it is explicitly allowed to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation, and that’s exactly what it sounds like happened to you. What do you think should be the recourse for that first border agent who clearly was, you know, stigmatizing you and coming after you because you’re gay?

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MM: I think they should all be fired, quite frankly, you know? We should have no tolerance for this kind of behavior. People will argue that more training is better, but the fact that we’ve been rolling back or the fact the U.S. government has been rolling back a lot of the equity, diversity and inclusion programming, it’s no surprise that we’re now going to be facing a lot more racism across the board, a lot more homophobia. It’s just the reality of the government that’s in power.

SM: Okay, well, a stark sentiment that may be an appropriate place to end. Milo, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

MM: Thanks for having me, Spencer. I appreciate it.

SM: And for listeners who want to watch all of our podcast episodes, subscribe to Uncloseted Media on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast.

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation in the U.S. through our 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

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In April, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis introduced the latest move in his fight against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs when he signed a bill into law that prohibits any local government in the state from spending money on DEI-related initiatives. The restrictions could threaten nondiscrimination ordinances, local pride events and other services, leading some LGBTQ advocates to label it a “pride ban.”

The law’s definition of DEI is adapted from a model bill by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a New York City-based conservative think tank that formed in 1978. Since its model bill was released in 2023, at least 10 states have introduced anti-DEI bills that include nearly identical language. Additionally, MI has informed the Trump administration’s policy on gender-affirming care through collaboration on the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) controversial pediatric gender dysphoria report.

Prior to the 2020s, efforts to undermine LGBTQ rights were not a focus for MI. But since then, it began parroting many of the talking points of the anti-LGBTQ movement. While the shift may seem random, an assessment of MI’s history and strategy reveals how these attacks fit into its broader political goals.

“Attacking LGBTQ rights is an effective strategy because bluntly, people don’t like gay people and don’t like trans people,” says Quinnehtukqut McLamore, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Missouri. “It’s effective because it makes it really easy to get … folks who usually don’t sign on with right-wing agendas to back anti-trans positions which set precedent for greater advancement of right-wing goals.”

The Manhattan Institute Didn’t Originally Care About LGBTQ Issues

Since its founding nearly 50 years ago, MI has influenced conservative policy by crafting model legislation and publishing reports for lawmakers and lobbyists. Some of its longtime goals have included promoting libertarian economic policies, discrediting teachers unions and deregulating healthcare. Funded primarily by conservatives on Wall Street, MI has over $30 million in net assets as of its most recent tax filings.

In 1990, MI began publishing City Journal, where writers would advocate for conservative issues such as lowering requirements to get a medical license and promoting charter schools over the public system.

Robert Asen, a professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that this journal, which reports over 350,000 monthly online visitors, helps MI maintain its influence.

“The City Journal gets, comparatively speaking for a public affairs journal, a lot of engagement … certainly more than any academic equivalent,” Asen told Uncloseted Media. “There’s the power of promotion that the Manhattan Institute provides: They are well-resourced in lots of ways, and that includes finances, connections, and other ways they can promote their ideas.”

Paul Singer and Trump Ties

MI expanded its influence under the leadership of Paul Singer, who was appointed chairman of the board of trustees in 2008. Singer, the founder of hedge fund Elliott Management and a major donor to conservative causes, helped push MI further right in the 2010s, with Bloomberg later reporting he wanted it to become a “Wall Street equivalent of the Federalist Society,” referencing the right-wing legal group best known for their campaign to spot and groom potential federal judges, including all three of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees.

Initially opposed to Donald Trump, Singer cozied up to him after the 2016 election earned Singer’s firm over $42 million through a spike in stock prices for private prisons.

“I want to thank Paul Singer for being here. … He was a very strong opponent and now he’s a very strong ally,” Trump said in a 2017 press conference.

Their relationship became so friendly, Bloomberg reports, that staffers were allegedly “directed to write favorably about Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy—or not write about them at all.”

Over the next decade, members of MI would go on to be employed by Trump. And officials from the president’s first administration, including former Attorney General William Barr and former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, were later appointed to MI’s board.

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The Anti-Woke Pivot

While MI didn’t originally prioritize social issues, Asen says that began to change in 2020. Public outcry and protests against the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers led many organizations to introduce changes to how they handled racism, often under the framework of DEI.

These moves drew intense backlash from social conservatives. Asen says MI played off this frustration and melded it with existing anti-LGBTQ sentiment to go all in on an ideology of “anti-wokeness.”

“These two things start to converge as what this right-wing advocacy group calls ‘woke,’” he says. “This is wokeness, and wokeness is this oppressive discourse, wokeness is a threat to what we believe to be basic American values, and so we wish to stand against it.”

As the anti-woke craze started taking over the Republican party, Christopher Rufo, a contributing editor at the time for City Journal, began writing articles with headlines like “Teaching Hate” and “Against Wokeness.” This advocacy led him to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show to urge President Trump to end racial sensitivity trainings for federal employees, calling them “critical race theory” trainings. Days later, Trump signed an executive order doing just that after retweeting the Fox News segment, and Rufo has since been widely credited with starting the national movements against critical race theory and DEI.

“That kind of direct influence is something that is pretty remarkable about this network,” Asen says.

Attacking Universities

Seeing the potential of this new rhetorical strategy, MI hired Rufo as a senior fellow and the director of the initiative on critical race theory in 2021. And by 2023, the institute released its model legislation, which Rufo penned, to ban DEI at public universities.

Language from that bill would be adopted, often verbatim, in bills introduced in Florida, Texas, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Arizona. For example, several states use the verbatim definition of DEI from MI’s model legislation, describing it as “any effort to promote differential treatment of or provide special benefits to individuals on the basis of race, color, or ethnicity.”

According to University of Michigan-Flint sociologist David J. Luke, this is a distortion of what the programs are actually about. “If I don’t know what DEI is and someone is telling me that it is some policies that give Black people an unfair advantage, then I’m not gonna like that,” Luke told Uncloseted Media. “They are really designed to try to make things more fair, but groups that are advantaged by the status quo don’t want things to be more fair.”

Rufo has remained the face of the anti-DEI campaign, which has been most successful in Florida. Documents obtained by American Oversight show that DeSantis’ office communicated directly with Rufo about his model legislation. In one email, a third party introduces DeSantis’ director of external affairs to MI as a “friend of the movement.” And in 2023, as part of his efforts to root out “woke” ideology at the New College of Florida, DeSantis appointed Rufo to its board of trustees.

Joanna Wuest, a political scientist and professor at Stony Brook University, says that going after so-called “woke” or “DEI” programs at universities allows MI to push its ideological opponents out from institutions where younger generations learn new ideas.

“[It’s] attacking anyone who is providing a counter-narrative to their idea that free market principles should undergird every part of American society,” she told Uncloseted Media.

In an article for City Journal, Rufo boasted that his efforts at the New College of Florida, including abolishing the school’s gender studies department and reworking the core curriculum, had led 36 left-wing faculty members to resign in just the first few months of his leadership.

“Through a combination of cultural incentives and good fortune, many of the most ideological, left-wing faculty members … have left the university … clearing the way for a large number of new hires interested in pursuing the great human questions rather than maintaining a stifling, left-wing echo chamber,” Rufo wrote.

Luke warns Rufo’s efforts are contributing to existing social disparities.

“The people that are losing their jobs are disproportionately people that hold marginalized identities … who are in these roles trying to help create these environments that support all students and their success,” Luke says.

Even in states that haven’t seen direct attacks, the hostile environment towards DEI and so-called woke policies has led many to fear speaking up about diverse topics. Asen says one of his graduate students, who was teaching a class that discussed demagoguery, approached him with concerns that they could be targeted if right-wing groups learned about the class.

“The issue about this discourse is that it creates a chilling effect regardless of whether there are formal laws or policies in place,” Asen says. “People feel more measured and more inclined to self-censor, and that’s the point.”

The Proxy War Against Public Schools

MI’s attacks on education also target K-12 schools. Starting in 2022, it began frequently demonizing schools for teaching “radical gender” ideology and “transitioning kids without parental consent.” Wuest says this is because disparaging public schools supports its longtime policy goals related to school choice. She cites a 2022 speech by Rufo at Hillsdale College.

“To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust,” Rufo said in the speech.

In another instance, Rufo has labeled teachers unions “the enemy,” calling them “inherently corrupt” and calling on Americans to “lay siege to the universities, abolish the teachers unions, and overturn the school boards.”

MI’s opposition to public schools in favor of the charter model is part of a longtime battle against teachers unions, which it claims have a “death lock on education policy in the Democratic Party.” Charter schools are rarely unionized, which MI has cited as a benefit.

By fearmongering about teachers putting kids in danger through LGBTQ-friendly policies, Wuest says MI is able to use anti-LGBTQ sentiment to help with its broader goal of discrediting the public school system.

“The Manhattan Institute and other libertarians are extremely opposed to labor unions, and so going after the public education system for being a bastion of woke indoctrination is a way of going after public sector teachers unions, which provide higher wages, benefits, protections for those workers,” Wuest says. “But also the teachers unions are an important political mobilizing arm of the Democratic party, and so it’s also a way of going after liberal/progressive politics more generally.”

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Anti-Trans Attacks Fuel Healthcare Goals

In addition to opposing DEI, MI began establishing itself as a key player in the fight against gender-affirming care in 2022. Over the next two years, billionaire Joseph Edelman, the founder and CEO of healthcare-focused investment firm Perceptive Advisors, donated $500,000 to the group to provide support for a “gender identity initiative.” MI has not publicly identified the mission of the initiative.

The same year, MI hired Leor Sapir, a political scientist who wrote his dissertation in 2020 about how trans activism had gone too far. Sapir began writing for both MI and City Journal about the alleged excesses of trans activism. He penned articles including “Transgender Confusions” and “Don’t Say ‘They.’”

The institute also hired Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist who joined Sapir in leading what MI calls its “global effort to end pediatric sex-trait modifications,” referring to gender-affirming care for kids. Wright was previously an academic advisor for the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group.

Since then, they’ve helped steer the Trump administration’s trans policy. Sapir led the HHS report on pediatric gender medicine, which health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cited in a thwarted attempt to cut federal funding to hospitals providing gender-affirming care to minors. Sapir later said that the Trump administration approached him directly for this role.

And MI claims that two of Trump’s executive orders that prohibit federal funding for transition surgeries for minors and that reject trans identities by defining “biological sex” were inspired by Sapir’s and Wright’s work.

“The original strategies that [MI] articulated were basically what is happening in blue states right now—basically, intimidate the clinics out of offering the care in the first place,” Quinnehtukqut McLamore says.

Wuest says anti-LGBTQ healthcare policy gives MI and its funders an avenue to attack medical professional organizations, which has been a goal of the organization since its inception.

For example, the American Medical Association (AMA) aims to improve the quality of U.S. healthcare by holding medical schools to certain standards of rigor to obtain accreditation and by lobbying the government for more regulations. MI, strong proponents of an unfettered free market, have come to blows with the AMA numerous times, arguing that these regulatory measures hold back progress.

“[MI] has been especially concerned with these associations’ role in crafting healthcare regulations that protect patient health and safety while boosting licensed healthcare workers’ wages,” Wuest says. “Licensure and other healthcare regulations, Manhattan writers have often argued, are an undue and inefficient imposition on the free market.”

She adds that MI’s entry into anti-trans policy allows them to capitalize off of souring public sentiments on gender-affirming healthcare. This helps them leverage new attacks on the credibility of the AMA and other organizations like it. Susan Lebovitz-Edelman, an MI trustee and wife of Joseph Edelman, has said that to fight wokeness in healthcare, the industry must “hold accreditors [like the AMA] accountable and end their stranglehold on medical education.”

“Attacking the AMA’s role in buttressing gender-affirming care … is part of their larger effort to show that these groups are ideologically captured and that they’re otherwise abandoning their duty to guide Americans in finding evidence-based care,” Wuest says. “The gender-affirming care stuff is a way of de-legitimating the AMA’s role in guiding best healthcare practices.”

The Impact

MI’s advocacy has helped undermine institutional support for trans healthcare, which most major medical organizations support and has been described as life-saving.

A 2023 article by Rufo covered details from the leaked personal healthcare records of trans kids at the Texas Children’s Hospital and sparked an investigation that forced the hospital to stop providing gender-affirming care to minors and open the nation’s first “detransition clinic.” And Sapir’s lobbying through the HHS report helped influence the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ decision to recommend against gender-affirming surgeries for people under 19.

In higher education, Luke says that while some of Trump’s anti-DEI attacks on universities have been legally dubious, universities have been quick to comply anyway. More than 300 colleges and universities have rolled back their DEI policies under Trump’s second term, and schools like Texas A&M have fired professors for allegedly teaching gender identity concepts in class.

“[MI’s] attacks have aligned successfully with policy goals, as various states have passed anti-trans laws and the federal government has adopted an anti-trans posture,” Asen says.

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for an interview or comment for this story.

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation in the U.S. through our 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

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Over the last week, it’s been nearly impossible to miss the headlines about the history-making drama that has unfolded at CBS News’ 60 Minutes.

It all started last Thursday, when CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss fired correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, as well as executive producer Tanya Simon. Weiss replaced Simon by hiring Nick Bilton, a technology journalist and filmmaker with no TV news experience. The event was followed by an explosive Monday morning meeting where Scott Pelley, who had been a correspondent at the show for over 20 years, accused Weiss of “murdering” the program. The following day, Pelley was fired.

60 Minutes has ranked as the most-watched TV news program for 52 consecutive years, and they just finished a season where they averaged 9.1 million viewers per episode, a 9% increase from the year prior—remarkable numbers in an era where everyone is pivoting to streaming.

So what’s behind the seismic shift in leadership and talent? And how did a few ideologues manage to dismantle one of the most trusted, award-winning and iconic news shows in American history? Here’s a timeline of key events to explain how we got here:

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Jan. 24, 2024

Billionaire David Ellison makes his first offer to merge Skydance with Paramount, which owns CBS. Ellison, who today is seen as a Trump ally, offers to buy Paramount’s parent company, National Amusements, which is owned by Shari Redstone.

Jul. 7, 2024

Skydance and Paramount agree on the terms of the merger, with Ellison to become chairman and CEO of the company.

Oct. 31, 2024

Trump sues CBS and demands $10 billion in damages for a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that he claims was edited deceptively to make her look better. While legal experts call the lawsuit “frivolous and dangerous,” Trump’s lawyers call the segment a “partisan and unlawful act of election and voter interference.” Trump had previously called for the network to lose its license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over this.

Apr. 7, 2025

Trump and Paramount begin a process of mediation with plans to settle the lawsuit out of court.

Apr. 22, 2025

60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens resigns, citing a lack of editorial independence in the wake of the lawsuit. Owens would later report that he was discouraged from covering Trump and Gaza and pressured to apologize for the editing of the Harris interview, which he has repeatedly said was a standard edit.

July 2, 2025

Paramount agrees to pay Trump $16 million in a settlement. They also agree to promptly release full transcripts of interviews with presidential candidates in the future. The Associated Press obtains a letter to Paramount leadership from 60 Minutes correspondents, including Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Anderson Cooper, Sharyn Alfonsi, Jon Wertheim and Cecilia Vega, opposing the settlement. In it, they say that “if our parent company caves in to [Trump’s] pressure and lies, it will leave a shameful stain and undermine the First Amendment.”

July 18, 2025

Paramount announces that they are cancelling Stephen Colbert’s Late Show just three days after he publicly called the settlement a “big fat bribe.”

July 22, 2025

Skydance files letters to the FCC promising more capitulations to Trump should the merger be completed. Namely, they promise to install an ombudsman to review complaints of bias at CBS News and to not have any Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives at the company.

July 24, 2025

Trump’s FCC approves the merger. Two weeks letter, the Paramount Skydance merger officially closes, creating the new combined company

Sept. 8, 2025

CBS News appoints Kenneth Weinstein as its new ombudsman. Weinstein is the former head of a Republican think tank with little journalism background.

Oct. 6, 2025

CBS News announces that Bari Weiss will be appointed editor in chief, reporting directly to Ellison. They also acquire Weiss’ The Free Press, a Substack newsletter known for its right-leaning bias, for roughly $150 million.

Oct. 16, 2025

CBS News Standards and Practice chief Claudia Milne announces her resignation following Weiss’ appointment.

Oct. 27, 2025

CBS Evening News anchor and former 60 Minutes correspondent John Dickerson announces he will resign at the end of the year. His co-anchor, Maurice DuBois, would announce in December that he will also resign at the same time

Dec. 20, 2025

Weiss spikes a planned 60 Minutes segment on El Salvadaor’s largest prison, CECOT, a day and a half before it was set to air. Weiss cites concerns about a lack of comment from the Trump administration. Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent for the segment, says she had reached out for comment but that the administration did not promptly reply. In an email to 60 Minutes colleagues, Alfonsi wrote that “if the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient. … We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.” The segment would eventually air in January.

Jan. 2, 2026

CBS Evening News releases new “Five Simple Principles” guiding the platform, including that they “love America.”

Feb. 16, 2026

Anderson Cooper announces that he will retire from 60 Minutes in May. Notably, he stays with CNN.

May 11, 2026

According to a report by the newsletter Status, Bari Weiss swiped an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu from 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl to give it to CBS News reporter Major Garrett. The New York Post would later report claims from an insider that Weiss had offered Netanyahu choices for who would interview him.

May 27, 2026

Sharyn Alfonsi tells the New York Times that CBS News declined to renew her contract.

May 28, 2026

In a major shake-up, Weiss fires 60 Minutes executive producer Tanya Simon and replaces her with Nick Bilton, a technology journalist with no experience in TV news. They also fire correspondent Cecilia Vega, who called the move “censorship” in a statement:

Vega added: “In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories. Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions. Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”

June 1, 2026

In an explosive staff meeting, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley criticizes CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss and new executive producer Nick Bilton after the spate of firings. “She is murdering 60 Minutes ... She was brought in to kill it ... She has no qualifications for her job,” Pelley told Bilton in front of the 60 Minutes staff.

June 1, 2026

At a New York Press Club event, former 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens accuses corporate leadership of setting up an “internal spy ring … within the news division” during Trump’s first weeks in office. He added that “it’s a pity because CBS News and 60 Minutes are institutions, not places where partisans and ideologues should be employed,” referencing Weiss’ background as an opinion writer.

June 2, 2026

Bilton fires Pelley. In a letter to Pelley, Bilton writes he was “terminated for cause effective immediately.”

Later that evening, Pelley releases a statement on social media. Notable excerpts include:

• For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.

• The waste is heartbreaking.

• The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.

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Editor’s note: Trump’s 500th day in office is June 3. This article will be amended if he makes any additional LGBTQ-focused news before then.

Since President Donald Trump’s reelection, the full force of the federal government has been working to dismantle anything and everything it calls “gender ideology.” The past four and a half months have seen the Trump administration’s key agencies using executive orders from the president’s first days in office to further upend queer and trans rights. While federal judges continue to block some of his agencies’ anti-LGBTQ policies, his administration has ignored court orders at least 31 times. Here is every move Trump and his administration have made on LGBTQ issues since Jan. 21 of this year.

Jan. 27, 2026

Building on a 2025 presidential memorandum, the Department of State implements a new policy called Promoting Human Flourishing in Foreign Assistance (PHFFA). The policy threatens up to $39.8 billion in foreign aid by prohibiting recipients from funding gender-affirming care and anything that promotes so-called gender ideology, abortion as a method of family planning, and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Critics have called the policy a “global gag rule.”

PHFFA is paired with two additional State Department rules: Combating Gender Ideology in Foreign Assistance and Combating Discriminatory Equity Ideology in Foreign Assistance. The first bars any nongovernmental organization that “promotes transgenderism” from receiving federal funding. The second directs the Secretary of State to remove “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility” as a factor for who it considers for promotions and tenure with the Foreign Service.

Jan. 29, 2026

Attorneys tell The Advocate that the Trump administration has been quietly advancing immigration policies that could endanger LGBTQ asylum seekers, including by putting them at risk of being transferred or deported to countries where LGBTQ people are criminalized. One agreement allows for U.S. immigration officials to send third-country asylum seekers to Uganda, where—in certain circumstances—gay sex is punishable by death.

Jan. 30, 2026

Roughly a dozen federal agents arrest Don Lemon, a gay, Black journalist, at a hotel in Los Angeles for his coverage of an anti-ICE protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Feb. 9, 2026

The National Park Service (NPS) removes the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument. The move comes in response to a Jan. 21 memo that restricts certain flags from being flown by NPS. The following week, three civil rights organizations sue the administration, arguing that the removal of the flag violated federal law.

The week of Feb. 9

The Trump administration begins implementing $600 million of cuts to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grants for STD prevention and HIV surveillance programs “because they do not reflect agency priorities.” Public health funding in California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota is impacted.

Feb. 19, 2026

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) issues a new federal policy that bans gender-affirming care for trans prisoners. Under the policy, incarcerated trans people must stop taking hormone therapies and new treatments are banned.

Last year, a federal judge had issued a preliminary injunction requiring the BOP to continue providing gender-affirming accommodations to trans prisoners despite a Trump executive order banning said accommodations. While that injunction is still in effect today, an Uncloseted Media investigation found that the BOP has already been violating the order for months.

Feb. 22, 2026

The Associated Press reports that the Trump administration had deported a Moroccan lesbian asylum seeker to Cameroon, a country that prosecutes same-sex conduct with up to five years in prison. She is then flown back to her home country of Morocco, where she “lives in fear.”

March 7, 2026

In legal depositions uploaded by the American Historical Association, two former Department of Government Efficiency employees say they used ChatGPT to identify and cut grants related to LGBTQ issues, as well as issues related to race and gender.

March 11, 2026

In an interview with influencer and boxer Jake Paul, Trump says, “We support gays, but [Iran] throw[s] gays off the buildings,” referring to an Iranian law that punishes same-sex activities with a maximum punishment of execution. Critics of Trump’s remarks note that the administration is attempting to deport a gay Iranian couple who fled their home country after being arrested for “homosexual conduct.” The couple was facing possible execution.

On the same day, the Department of State releases a new rule requiring visa applicants to disclose their assigned sex at birth. Advocates warn that the change, which would later go into effect on April 10, will impact trans and nonbinary people’s ability to travel to the U.S.

March 13, 2026

The Department of Education’s (DOE) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) concludes an investigation and claims that Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado (Jeffco) violated Title IX by allowing transgender students to play on sports teams and to use bathrooms, locker rooms and overnight accommodations aligned with their gender identity. OCR gives Jeffco 10 days to reverse trans-inclusive policies, but Jeffco rejects these threats and responds by saying that:

“Providing equal access to programs and services for all Jeffco students, including those who are transgender, does not violate Title IX. … The Department’s interpretation has no basis in the Title IX regulations and is not supported by any binding court decision.”

The next month, Jeffco formally disputes the findings and claims OCR’s conclusion contradicts its original evidence.

March 19, 2026

A federal judge in Oregon rules that Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary RFK Jr. overstepped his authority with a recent declaration. The declaration stated that HHS would bar federal funding for certain state-run hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to minors. The judge said that the case spoke to broader tactics that threatened to undermine democracy:

“The notion that ‘I will go forward and issue a declaration and see if we can get away with it’ is not a principle of governance that adheres to the overarching commitment to a democratic republic that requires the rule of law to be regarded and respected and honored as sacred.”

March 25, 2026

The Department of Justice (DOJ) opens an investigation into the Los Angeles Unified School District. The inquiry is driven by a lawsuit filed by parents who claim the district’s gender-inclusive policies contributed to their child Aria’s isolation and suicide. The policy intends to protect children from potentially abusive or non-affirming parents by allowing schools to withhold information about a student’s gender identity.

In this case, Aria’s parents argue the policy harmed rather than helped their child. Their refusal to recognize Aria’s gender identity is reflected throughout the lawsuit, where they repeatedly use her deadname.

March 31, 2026

On Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV), the White House releases a statement called “President Trump Ended Democrats’ ‘Transgender for Everybody’ Insanity,” which attacks Biden for releasing a TDOV message two years prior. The statement claims the Biden administration “desecrated Easter Sunday” with Biden’s message and goes on to praise Trump for the variety of ways he’s targeted “gender ideology.”

“Under President Trump, the era of government-sanctioned delusion is over,” the statement reads. “[The Trump administration’s] bold actions have shattered years of Democrat extremism.”

April 4, 2026

A budget request sent to Congress from the White House reveals that the FBI runs a new “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center” with the goal of “proactively” investigating and prosecuting “domestic terrorists.” “Extremism on migration, race, and gender” is mentioned as a targeted belief.

April 6, 2026

In an unprecedented move, the Trump administration terminates multiple federal civil rights settlement agreements that protect transgender students from discrimination in schools and colleges. Agreements included requiring school districts to use trans students’ preferred pronouns and allow them to use facilities that match their gender identity. The DOE calls the settlements “illegal” and says prior administrations distorted Title IX to advance a “radical transgender agenda.”

April 13, 2026

Seeking to settle the lawsuit against NPS, the Trump administration agrees to continue flying the Pride flag at Stonewall. The settlement represents a major win for the LGBTQ community.

April 16, 2026

A court filing from the DOJ confirms that the Pentagon has begun removing trans service members from the military. The filing states that separation proceedings have begun for at least two individuals.

April 22, 2026

The Federal Communications Commission requests comments from the public, seeking opinion about whether they should make it clear when “gender identity themes are discussed or displayed” in a show or film. This would mean placing a “warning label” before television shows that include LGBTQ characters, stories or themes—even in programs currently rated as appropriate for all ages.

“Are parents aware that children watching programs rated TV-Y, TV-Y7, and TV-G may contain the discussion or promotion of gender identity themes? Should such programming be rated differently or contain relevant descriptions so that parents can make informed decisions?” the public notice reads.

April 30, 2026

The DOJ’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias releases a 197-page report stating that a Biden-era rule surrounding foster care and LGBTQ children is discriminatory “because [they] viewed traditional Christian values as harmful to children with gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction.” The rule created a system of designated placements for LGBTQ children and took steps to address harassment and abuse against LGBTQ foster kids. To become a designated placement, care providers would receive training on the needs of LGBTQ youth. The DOJ said this amounted to religious discrimination, despite the rule having religious exemptions and not being mandatory.

May 4, 2026

The OCR opens a Title IX investigation into Smith College, a private women’s college, for admitting trans women. OCR claims that “an all-girls college that enrolls male students professing a female identity would cease to qualify as single sex under Title IX.” The school, which has accepted trans and nonbinary students since 2015, said it received notice of the probe and is “fully committed to its institutional values, including compliance with civil rights laws,” and that it “does not comment on pending government investigations.”

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May 6, 2026

The White House releases a new National Counterterrorism Strategy, which falsely links transgender people to extremism and ignores the threat of white supremacists and far-right terrorists. It delineates three “major types of terror groups,” including “narcoterrorists and transnational gangs,” “legacy Islamist terrorists” and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.” In a glaring departure from the Biden administration’s strategy focused on far-right extremists and white supremacists, the Trump administration is cracking down on ideology that they call “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

“We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map [these threats] at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent,” the document reads.

Trump closes the strategy with a threat to terror groups: “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You.”

May 7, 2026

A federal judge grants preliminary injunctions halting the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) attempt to investigate the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The judge denied the FTC’s attempts to obtain internal records on transgender medical guidelines, ruling that there was “extensive evidence of animus” and that the investigations were likely viewpoint-based harassment.

The same day, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas issues a subpoena to NYU Langone, a New York City-based hospital, demanding information on any and all recipients under the age of 18 who received gender-affirming care since 2020.

May 15, 2026

In order to appease federal investigators who accused them of surreptitiously providing gender-affirming care to minors, the Texas Children’s Hospital agrees to cease all such care and pay over $10 million in damages and civil penalties. They also agree to spend millions to establish a “clinic dedicated to restorative care for detransitioners.”

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This story was originally written for Gay Times Magazine.

On a Friday afternoon in February, Teresa McCleary and Rose Milner sat near the entrance to Calgary’s Boddums Up Pub, collecting signatures for a petition pushing for Alberta—which is widely recognized as Canada’s most conservative province—to separate from the rest of the country.

“I want the old Alberta back. I want our free Alberta back. … We are a cash cow for the East. They don’t care about us,” says McCleary, who sported a baseball cap with the words “I am Albertan!”

As for Milner, she feels Canada is becoming “communist.”

“Bring back the ‘60s,” she told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “I don’t give a shit who you love, but don’t shove your ideology down my throat and tell me that I need to use pronouns.”

Milner and McCleary represent a subset of people in Alberta who are hoping their province will become a nation unto itself. And on Oct. 19, Premier Danielle Smith’s government will ask Alberta voters to answer nine questions, one of which will ask them to pick between two options:

1. “Alberta should remain a province of Canada.”

2. “The Government of Alberta should commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada.”

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If a majority of Albertans vote in favor of more autonomy, the province would not immediately secede from Canada. Rather, Alberta would proceed to engage in negotiations with each province’s legislature, as well as the government of Canada, before any formal changes could be made.

Though Alberta’s path to sovereignty may be vague, the prevalence of far-right views within the independence movement are clear. And with a provincial government that has passed anti-trans laws, what could separatism mean for the rights and safety of LGBTQ Albertans?

Janis Irwin, a queer member of the legislative assembly (MLA) in Edmonton, urges Albertans to take the issue of separatism seriously. “I worry deeply for what would come if separatism were to move forward,” Irwin told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “We dismiss this conversation at our own peril.”

Separatists and LGBTQ Rights

While separatist sentiment in Alberta can be traced back to Alberta’s entrance into the Confederation in 1905, it has grown significantly in recent years. Alberta is the province with the highest GDP per person and possesses 97% of the country’s oil reserves. Because of this, many separatists believe the province would be better off as an independent country.

But beyond economics lies an ideology rife with anti-LGBTQ sentiment. In the Alberta Prosperity Project’s (APP) “Proposed policies and governance for a sovereign Alberta within or without Canada,” they write that in grades K-12, the government will “ban any and all forms of critical race theory,” as well as “ban gender grooming.”

The APP, an organization spearheading the push for independence, also writes that family is “the moral, social, and cultural pillar of society,” and that parents should be able to choose “the kind of education that shall be given to their children, including the content … as well as the nature, culture, and character of their children’s learning environment.”

While this language may sound innocuous, Jamie Anderson, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Calgary whose work focuses on LGBTQ issues in education, says that isn’t the case.

“Parental rights is something that we should understand as a dog whistle,” Anderson told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “It reflects some of the recent policy changes that we’ve seen, [including] parental control over books and libraries [and] parental control over access to gender-affirming care and access to social transition.”

When it comes to trans rights, separatists are more aggressive in their goals. In another APP document titled “The rationale for restructuring Alberta’s relationship with Canada,” the organization states that “promoting the teaching of transgenderism to children who are not yet at the age of consent” is contributing to the “fracturing of society.”

Anderson says this language mimics far-right strategies rooted in transphobia: “This draws on a longstanding tactic that’s been used against queer and trans inclusion for decades: the idea of social contagion of identity, that if we expose kids to ideas about queer and trans identity, that they will become that, as opposed to queer and trans identities just existing as a normal part of existence.”

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Still, separatists like Milner agree with the parents’ rights movement, which has attempted to ban LGBTQ education.

“I don’t believe it should be taught in schools,” says Milner. “Some of these people they had come to the schools, our children don’t need to see them, talking about gender and sexuality and stuff like that.”

Feodor Snagovsky, professor of political science at the University of Alberta, says that Milner’s attitude is common among separatists. “Within the movement, many think that LGBTQ issues are too prominent within the education system and that teachers are more or less indoctrinating kids with a sort of pro-LGBT mindset,” he says.

Separatists and Anti-LGBTQ Rhetoric

Not only could APP’s proposed policies be harmful to queer Albertans, but the rhetoric of some of the movement’s other leaders is also dangerous. Alberta 51 Project, an organization with over 40,000 followers on X that advocates for Alberta to become the 51st U.S. state, has posted false information stating that transgender people “are responsible for 95% of mass killings and violence against actual women.” And Take Back Alberta, another separatist group, has been referred to as a “populist far-right social movement” and has made efforts to remove books with queer themes from Alberta libraries.

David Parker, a separatist and founder of Take Back Alberta, has posted that he “[doesn’t] want LGBT flags … over any government building in Alberta” because they “divide.” Parker also leads The Centurion Project, a group mobilizing Albertans to push for independence. The project recently came under fire for illegally obtaining and publishing the personal information of nearly 3 million Albertan voters. Parker did not respond to GAY TIMES and Uncloseted Media’s interview request.

Other rhetoric is implicit. For example, one APP post advocates for “Protecting the Right to Share Scripture Freely.” While this may seem benign, Anderson has concerns.

“A lot of people in the independence movement speak of having their own constitution where freedom of speech and expression without suppression is protected,” he told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “I think that speaks to favoring a rights-based form of freedom of speech that does not account for discrimination [or hate speech] as a limiting factor.”

Connection to the UCP and Anti-LGBTQ Policies

While Alberta’s separatist groups are not formally associated with any political party, the United Conservative Party (UCP), which leads the provincial government, has ties to the movement. Conservative MLA Jason Stephan encouraged Albertans to sign a petition which allowed the question of separation to be added to October’s referendum ballot. And though Danielle Smith, the leader of the UCP and Alberta’s premier, says she has not signed the petition, she has refused calls to denounce the push for a sovereign Alberta.

And after Smith made remarks in support of restricting gender-affirming care for minors and mandating that schools inform parents if their children change their name or pronouns, APP called the speech “energizing.”

Smith has also passed legislation that prohibits gender-affirming surgeries and limits puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy for minors. To do this, she followed in the footsteps of Alabama’s chief deputy attorney general and relied on the testimony of an expert witness who was hired by Alliance Defending Freedom, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group.

Jennifer Johnson, another MLA and UCP member, has referred to transgender students as feces in food and has voted in favor of a bill which saved the referendum for Alberta’s independence from being shot down.

The Implications for LGBTQ People

With many in Alberta’s independence movement being those on the right and the far right, LGBTQ people have legitimate cause for concern. “Many folks within the movement see LGBTQ issues as ranging from irrelevant to actively pernicious,” says Snagovsky. “Many of the issues that motivate Alberta separatists are the same issues that motivate people in the far right.”

The independence movement also has ideological similarities to the likes of the late Charlie Kirk, who was known for his anti-LGBTQ perspectives. Following his death, APP made a post mourning Kirk, who once suggested that the issue of trans rights should have been “[taken] care of … the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or ‘60s.”

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If Alberta were to become an independent country, federal protections for LGBTQ people would no longer apply. Most notably, the country’s charter—a foundational document protecting the rights and freedoms of Canadians to live free from discrimination based on many things, including sexual orientation and gender identity—would cease to safeguard queer Albertans.

As far as McCleary is concerned, LGBTQ rights, including gay marriage, would need to be revoted on. “When Alberta becomes independent, all of Alberta will decide,” she says. “It’s not cut in stone.”

Janis Irwin says she has concerns: “If we have a UCP government that’s already willing to attack queer and trans rights within the confines of a country that has a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, why would there be any impetus for them to try to protect our rights in an independent country?”

Back at the Boddums Up Pub, McCleary is excited about the prospect of independence. “I want to see our old, free and strong Alberta,” she says.

As far as Anderson is concerned, the freedom McCleary dreams of does not safeguard the liberties of all Albertans. “There’s a significant cognitive dissonance, because this idea of freedom is less about individual liberty, and more about freedom of majority dominance,” he says. “They’re not concerned about individual liberties of queer and trans people.”

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“This school is built on racism, sexism, and homophobia. I encourage everyone here today to stand up for yourself, even if it makes [a] scene. This school is fucking ridiculous,” eighth-grader Daniel Mattingly said in his graduation speech on May 21 at Stuart Academy in Louisville, Kentucky.

Hundreds of Mattingly’s classmates roared with applause, and a video of his remarks has gone viral.

Mattingly said school administrators tried to suppress his original speech for being “too negative.” But he didn’t listen and instead went off script:

“My name is Daniel Mattingly, and apparently, this school doesn’t know better than to give an angry gay kid a microphone.”

Mattingly’s concerns about his school may be related to some of Kentucky’s state policies toward LGBTQ people. Kentucky is the 37th-ranked state when it comes to government policies and local attitudes toward LGBTQ people, according to a 2026 report by Out Leadership.

Here are just some stats that explain the plight of queer kids in Kentucky today:

• 27% of LGBTQ kids were physically threatened or harmed based on their sexual orientation or gender identity in 2024.

• 62% of LGBTQ kids experienced discrimination based on their gender identity or sexual orientation in 2024.

• 56% of LGBTQ kids say they or their family have considered leaving Kentucky for another state because of LGBTQ-related politics and laws.

• Classroom instruction for “any child, regardless of grade level,” that has “a goal or purpose of students studying or exploring gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation,” is prohibited.

• Kentucky does not have a statewide ban on conversion therapy for minors, and lawmakers overturned Governor Andy Beshear’s 2024 executive order restricting the practice.

• School districts are not allowed to compel teachers to address trans students by their pronouns and don’t allow transgender students to use school bathrooms or changing rooms that match their gender identity.

• To change your gender on your birth certificate, proof of gender reassignment surgery is required.

All of these policies contribute to a reality where only 52% of LGBTQ Kentuckians feel safe being openly queer, and only 44% of them feel they are represented in education.

This translates to poor mental health outcomes: 66% of LGBTQ youth in the state experience anxiety; 56% experience depression; 43% seriously considered suicide; and 14% have attempted it.

Young people today are the loudest voices pushing back against LGBTQ oppression and are the most openly queer generation of all time. More than 1 in 5 Gen Z adults identify as LGBTQ.

As an eighth grader, Mattingly—who said his speech was meant to “cheer on and encourage oppressed youth”—sits on the cusp of Gen Alpha. And if anything can give all Americans hope right now, it’s that voices like his represent the next generation of American adults.

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• Our very own Hope Pisoni was on the Freedom from Religion Podcast to discuss her investigation into how license plates are funding anti-LGBTQ hate groups:

• Bentley Hudgins is poised to become Georgia’s first trans state lawmaker (Them)

  • After winning the Democratic primary for Georgia House District 90, Hudgins is favored in the general election and could become Georgia’s first openly transgender and nonbinary state lawmaker.

• Maine’s anti-trans sports and bathroom ballot initiative halted over invalid signatures (AP)

  • A proposed November ballot measure targeting transgender students’ access to school sports and bathrooms failed to qualify after more than 12,000 petition signatures were disqualified.

• UK guidance says single-sex toilets and changing rooms must exclude transgender people (The Guardian)

  • The UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission issued draft guidance saying single-sex spaces should be based on “biological sex,” prompting backlash from trans advocates and service providers.

• South Carolina governor signs bathroom law restricting trans students in schools (Them)

  • The new law requires public K-12 schools and colleges to assign multi-stall bathrooms, locker rooms and changing facilities based on sex assigned at birth.

• Families weigh moving as gender-affirming care access comes under assault in the U.S. (Reuters)

  • Families of transgender youth are considering relocating to states or countries with stronger protections as legal threats and restrictions continue to disrupt access to care.

Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:

• 🆕 SATURDAY: Alberta is arguably Canada’s most conservative province, and a right-wing movement has been pushing for it to become its own independent country. Emma Paidra looks at the implications sovereignty could have on LGBTQ Albertans.

• 🆕 TUESDAY: Trump's 500th day in office is next week. On June 2nd, look out for an in-depth timeline outlining every move the administration has made on LGBTQ issues from day 366 to 500.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me with questions, complaints and story ideas!

Spencer Macnaughton, Editor-In-Chief — spencer@unclosetedmedia.com

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“UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton” is a new podcast by Uncloseted Media, an investigative LGBTQ-focused nonprofit news publication. Follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. YouTube // Spotify // Apple

You may know Peppermint as a runner-up on season 9 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Or for her stint as the first trans competitor on the runaway hit “The Traitors.” Or for her relentless activism at a time when the Trump administration is waging an unprecedented attack on the LGBTQ community.

Now, Peppermint is getting set to be one of New York City Pride’s official grand marshals. And she’s doing that while upholding the legacy of the trans women of color who were at the Stonewall Uprising in 1969.

In this episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Spencer sits down with Peppermint to hear about what it means to be a Black trans woman at the forefront of the LGBTQ movement during the second Trump administration.

Watch the video or read the full transcript below.

Spencer Macnaughton: Hi everyone, welcome back to UNCLOSETED with me, Spencer Macnaughton. Today, I have the great pleasure of speaking with Miss Peppermint. She was a runner-up on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” she was the first trans contestant on the runaway hit, “The Traitors,” and now she is the grand marshal for this year’s New York City Pride. Peppermint, thanks so much for speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

Peppermint: Hello, I’m so happy to finally be with you. This is great! Hello, Uncloseted!

SM: Yes, we’ve done many collabs and you’ve definitely amplified our work, and you’re just such a huge advocate in the community so we’re thrilled to connect with you formally in this way. So, you were recently named the grand marshal for New York City Pride. How did that come about and what does that exactly mean? What is your duty if you’re grand marshal?

P: You know, I’m still trying to figure it out, but don’t tell them. Obviously, most parades and marches, and probably all of them traditionally, have a grand marshal who’s somebody that they honor who’s like one of the people at the very front of the parade as it goes through. And so I’ll be joined by some other fabulous grand marshals as well. I’m sharing the spotlight with Dominique Jackson, with Bernie Wagenblast, who New Yorkers will know as one of the voices of the subway system, and also Bowen Yang. And Gays Against Guns was just announced, and I’m so excited to share the spotlight with them.

SM: Yes, and you wrote, or you mentioned in a recent interview that you said, “Being named a grand marshal for New York City Pride is deeply meaningful, not just as an artist, but as a Black trans woman standing in the legacy of those who fought for us to be here.” That’s Marsha P. Johnson, that’s Sylvia Rivera. And through history, those voices, the voices of trans women of color have, for many parts since 1969, been erased from that conversation, right? So how meaningful is that to you as a Black trans woman to be in this space now in 2026, especially given the political climate we’re experiencing?

P: I am continuously dedicated to using whatever platform I have, whether it’s before I was on TV, since I’ve been on TV, still using my platform to advocate for the LGBT community, including, obviously, trans folks. As someone who is trans, it does feel good to know that they are, “they” meaning the New York City Pride, they hold some reverence for the legacy of trans women of color, of trans people in general and their contribution and to the legacy of Pride. The march is a sort of recreation of the very first time that the community marched to commemorate what happened in 1969 at the Stonewall Uprising, where, you know, the police came to raid the bar, Stonewall, the legendary gay bar Stonewall in the Village, and the community fighting back.

But, I think what a lot of people didn’t realize is that, yes, trans people, trans women were there on the forefront, but it wasn’t just an attack on the bar. This was an attack on sex workers, people who were homeless and on the street, many of which were femme presenting people, drag queens, trans women. These were the street kids who were working, who were sometimes cast out of their apartment, or kicked out of their homes from their families, and the only places that they could gather were, besides the bar, were also down at the pier and on the street, wherever, and they were, some of them were engaging in survival sex work. And the police, the NYPD, were attacking, constantly harassing, and throwing in jail, and just like targeting trans sex workers, essentially. These were the people who were, and are often, the most vulnerable when it comes to interactions with the police, and those were the people who said, “We are done, we are tired of it.” That story has been whitewashed over time in many ways. One of the very first movies, one of the mainstream movies about Stonewall that we’ve seen, is a bunch of blonde kids from Iowa as the ones fighting back when we know that it wasn’t. Again, it was the street kids, it was the people who were vulnerable. And so their legacy had been erased. And so while we’re hearing voices like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera being mentioned so much, especially in recent years, is because it hadn’t been included so much in the past. And it had been essentially erased. And It’s been restored, and then since then, this administration has tried to erase trans folks from that legacy, taking down the mention of trans from the official website for the Stonewall National Monument, removing trans women, you know, biology, gender, whatever, all these words from all federal government documents and websites. So, I know that was a long answer, but I think it was important for people to know that that’s why it’s important for me and that’s so important to be included in Pride, because it feels like this year in 2026, the same year that the flag came down and went back up, thank goodness, it feels it’s a good time to remind people that trans folks are a very important part of the community.

SM: A hundred percent. And when I hear you speak all that, you are at the end of the day a very brave person, a very courageous person. You have Trump erasing all references to gender identity from all government documents, taking down the pride flag for what reason? And then his administration unveiled a new counterterrorism strategy that maybe you’ve seen that talks about the biggest concern, which is not at all reflected in the evidence, is left-wing extremists and pro-radical transgender people, whatever that means. I just interviewed two extremism experts for a different episode, who talked about there’s not even one mention of white supremacy, even though all of the evidence points to that being the biggest threat. So I wanna know, you’re an advocate, but you’re also a Black trans woman, triple, quadruple jeopardy as it relates to who this administration’s attacking. How does that make you feel going into this Pride month as grand marshal?

P: It really just kind of solidified what I already knew, the absence of white supremacist groups and organizations, and white supremacy as a notion in terms of being a threat, domestic terrorism threat. It’s like the weakest part of that evidence because the biggest part of it was when they removed the proof that the federal government stated in multiple reports that white supremacy was the largest domestic terrorism threat in the United States since the ‘80s.

SM: And just so the listeners know, the Department of Homeland Security quietly removed that threat from documents so the public would not be privy to it.

P: So the absence is just an echo of that, right? Their action of removing that is what really was like, what? I clutched my pearls. So, this latest sort of act is just sort of confirmation of that, and it is terrifying. I want to leave the country.

SM: You want to leave the country? You do?

P: Yeah, part of me wants—of course. I want to continue to use my platform to advocate for what I feel is right. And part me wants to leave, part of me wants to stay and fight. You know, and I, I think like, what am I, what is this country that I want to fight for? I envision like, am I going to stay and fight and want to risk my life for like a bunch of other people that are just like, “Oh well, that’s what happened to the trans people.” Or are we all going to fight? Like, I can’t just fight by myself. We have to fight for each other. Sometimes when we see not only the government putting out documents, official documents on government letterhead that say, “We’re going to name trans people as terrorists.” But then at the end it’s saying, “We will find you and we will kill you.” That’s the part that’s like, well, do I need to wait for them to kill me?

SM: And just to be clear to the people who haven’t read this document, that is a verbatim quote. They essentially list the terror threats, which include, quote, “pro-transgender radicals,” and then they say, make no mistake, quote, “We will find you and we will kill you.” I mean, that’s insane.

P: That’s in the document.

SM: That’s in the document. You mentioned you can’t do this alone. If people are listening to this and they aren’t trans but are concerned and are seeing the stats, what can they do? What can we do to really be there for our trans siblings?

P: When I say, “I don’t want to do it alone,” it’s not so much, I need you to defend me, which would be nice; it’s more that I need you to defend yourself by defending me, is what I want people to know. Like the cis community, people who are cisgender, people who’re not trans, and also people who are outside of the queer community, need to know that if rights are what we have, if equal rights are what a democracy gives you and what you have, an attack on those and removal of those rights for who someone is, who they love or their political beliefs, then it is an attack on that very democracy and an attack on the people of that democracy and the people who value those rights. And so, going after people for who they are and removing their passports, naming them as terrorists, threatening to kill them, banning them from all types of government buildings and bathrooms and holding a job and da-da-da, and healthcare, all these things. The only way they can do that to me is if they change the rules to make it possible to do. Now we have a government that can remove people from all these things. So now that means all they have to do is include, you know, let’s include Mormons as terrorists. You know what? I mean, it took them how long to put out this document. Vegans, whatever, I don’t know. Like they can target anyone. It sounds absurd and preposterous because it is, but it won’t take long for them to widen that group to who they want to focus on next.

SM: And I know you’ve been outspoken in all different places, including mainstream media. You’ve gone on CNN a few times. I’ve seen you on there. And I worked in mainstream media, 60 Minutes, the Wall Street Journal. And a big reason I left was because I didn’t feel like the coverage was rigorous enough, was fair enough, was frequent enough. How do you think the mainstream media is doing characterizing the issues plaguing the trans and LGBTQ community right now?

P: What is this question? They get an F, for fuck off. They get a terrible F because—

SM: Tell me why.

P: It’s so wild. Yeah, hello. We know that they’re interested because they talk about it on the daily. Every other day, there is mentions of trans people in some way, shape or form, and queer people in general. And so they’re constantly evoking us, talking about us, blaming us, bringing us up, attaching us, associating us, constantly. It is wild that they have so much to say about us and they don’t want to talk to us in general, the mainstream media. They don’t wanna include us. They don’t wanna hear. And I wonder why that is because with many other situations, they would want to go to, sort of like, the subject and speak with them about what it is, or the people who are involved in the story. You want to get their side of the story, except when it’s a situation like this, when it’s the political scapegoat. When it’s the political scapegoat, it actually is imperative that you don’t hear from them, that you just hear about them, because then you can create who they are for other people to sign off on.

SM: I have a friend, Alaina Kupec, and she’s a trans military veteran and she went on Abby Phillip’s CNN NewsNight, the 10 p.m. slot, after Trump passed the trans military ban. She was the only trans person on the panel. Other panelists include Scott Jennings, who is a Trump loyalist who has zero expertise in trans issues, but it created this false equivalency debate between Alaina, who was a military person and is trans, and Scott Jennings, as though both of those opinions should be considered equal from a journalistic perspective. How damaging are those kinds of conversations that are airing on shows like Abby Phillip’s that are, you know, sure we say “Americans don’t talk but they talk here,” but the majority of Americans perceive that as news still.

P: Yeah, it’s not news. It’s obviously just entertainment. And, you know, I really was upset with, I mean, I was really grateful to be on the show and have appeared there with another trans person, particularly, I got a chance to go on there.

SM: On Abby’s show?

P: On Abby’s show, pardon me, yes. But I do think that CNN has always served to launder the reputation, to launder the impact, and soften the perception of the very, very, real impact that sort of centrist politics that CNN holds. It really just exists to protect, sort of like capital and protect big business and sort of corporate, the corporate flow of politics that controls policy. And so I’m not surprised, but I think you’re 100% right. There is an epidemic, a habit, a vibe that this country has to just, like, take somebody off the street who has no knowledge about anything at all, other than their own opinion when they hear something, and that opinion when they hear, like, “What do you think of this concept that you’ve never heard of but we’re going to give it you and tell us what you think. And then here’s an expert in that, go!” And suddenly, you know, Scott Jennings gets to have an opinion on what I’m doing with my body or what rights I have and you know that thinks it’s harmful, it’s damaging and harmful.

SM: And I don’t want to single out, you know, Abby’s show too much because this happens on many different shows across network news, but to hosts like Abby or to producers on these shows—and I’ve worked in these newsrooms—who really care and really want to do it right, but might hit blocks. What’s your advice as a trans woman who’s experiencing this? What’s your advice to them? The people who are actually shaping the news packages we’re watching and actually do have some agency in deciding what gets to air.

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P: My ask is, bring trans people on, at least to talk about the trans issues that you mentioned every day. But besides that, bring trans people on to talk about what’s going on with Medicare. Bring trans people on to talk about what’s going on with the war. Whatever. Bring trans people on to talk about more because those things impact us as well. The simplest thing is gender-affirming care. Gender-affirming care and issues of gender-affirming care, the government telling people what decisions they can make medically with their own body, ties directly with reproductive justice and access to abortion, and making your own medical decisions for your own body. That’s something that we can all talk about. That is an intersection that you could bring a trans person on to talk about.

So I would ask of those other creators, bring trans people on to talk about everything that you wanna talk about, Honey. We got lots to say, and we can add something to the conversation because we have a very unique perspective.

And then beyond that, my advice to CNN is you would want to follow what the other podcasters will be doing and having them on because you will be sealing your own demise and become a lot less relevant than you already are if you don’t.

SM: The least surprising thing from this interview is that you’re very interesting. I want to stick on media though for a second because right now you must know that the Ellisons, billionaires, own Paramount, right? And they, who are MAGA loyalists and they have really reshaped the narrative at CBS News, bringing in Bari Weiss, who is an opinion columnist, but Paramount also owns MTV, which airs “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” which you were a finalist on. Ru and the show have been a groundbreaking TV series as the most successful Emmy award-winning reality TV series of all time. They have been progressive trailblazers for many different reasons for LGBTQ rights. There’s been no messaging on the fact that Paramount’s owned by the Ellisons. Should there be? Should they stay with Paramount? What are your thoughts on that?

P: It would be wonderful to see anyone on that show speak out against sort of what is happening in our country with regards to the control over politics and policy and the intersection again of money with politics, especially as related to the Ellisons and the purchase of Paramount. We’ll know when the takeover is complete, when RuPaul is like, “I love Larry Ellison,” cause that’s probably happening. They’re gonna get a script. So let’s just wait for them to get a script and start talking about how great President Trump is, whatever, I don’t know. That’s what I envision happening is they will try to either cut Drag Race or use it as a tool to parrot what they want to say. I hope that doesn’t happen, but it’s either one or the other. They’re either gonna get rid of the show, but it’s such a ratings juggernaut that I imagine they’ll probably try to reshape Drag Race and take out any political messaging.

SM: That’s what I think about though. Ru has so much money, she doesn’t need any more money, right? And the show is such a ratings juggernaut [that] they could go somewhere else. They have enough power from a ratings perspective that they don’t have to be with Paramount. They’re enough of a product there that they could dip out. Do you think they should dip out given the political climate?

P: I don’t know, I guess I have mixed feelings on it. I certainly see a world where Paramount, CNN, anything under this new umbrella is going to have to follow what their owner and boss wants. Every show, every network that’s been sort of sucked into the umbrella is gonna have to fall in line. That’s what fascism is about. You follow directions. And so I think that’s in the future for the show if they don’t leave. If they don’t leave, then it’s probably going to, just they’ll either be disbanded or we’ll wake up one day and there’s gonna be this weird messaging coming out of drag or something like, where’s the lip sync? Suddenly they’re like forcing us to say the Pledge of Allegiance, but with Donald Trump’s name in it. Like that’s what’s gonna happen. That’s what happens in fascism. Do I think they should? I don’t wanna see a “RuPaul’s Drag Race” that’s teaching us how to march in a certain way. So I don’t know, because by that point, it won’t even matter. But I think if they could just go online and start doing it on YouTube or whatever, I think they could do that. But I think ultimately no linear, traditional television is safe. They own most of it.

SM: It’s so interesting. You know this from being on camera. I know this from being behind the scenes that there are always little things that the viewer might not realize happen. And I wonder over at Paramount, while they’re putting together All Stars or the next season, whatever it is, the little decisions that could be being made in the final script. And I think that there might be a lot of silent things to the next season that we don’t realize have been edited out to appease the big bosses who are MAGA loyalists. And those are just the things we’ll never know.

P: We’ll never know. And I would be so surprised if they, it would be smart of them to just leave Drag Race alone. Drag Race is a wonderful thing because it’s, because it features wonderful drag entertainers. That’s what’s so great about Drag Race, in my opinion. But I don’t rely on Drag Race to get my political anything.

SM: I hear you. Fascinating conversation about media, I could talk about it forever, but we’re going into Pride 2026, right? And we are now six years after the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd’s murder that spawned into a submovement, the Black Trans Lives Matter Movement. And I’m curious, a lot of that has faded, at least from national international conversations, right? Where do you think we are now in 2026?

P: I think we are in a state of emergency, for sure. I think this administration has been successful. That’s where I think we are. It’s like a wild sort of, a wild, wild west. Do I think we need another moment? I mean, hopefully not, considering that what galvanized people was the death of an unarmed Black man. No, I don’t want that to happen, but it continues to happen on the daily and that we’re not marching in the street about it means that the sort of news cycle focus isn’t on it. And I’m grateful to see that people were able to become temporarily activated. And so I think we benefited from that, but I do think that it allowed people to sort of revert or to sort of jump to this automatic sort of social media style performative advocacy or reaction, which I think is a natural human response maybe in this situation. So by that matter, people posting a black square and thinking that they’ve done their part, fine, obviously it wasn’t enough. What I would like to see is instead of another sort of mainstream BLM moment is an awareness that yes, racism exists. Yes, transphobia exists. Yes, we have to fight those things, but also organizing and at the community level, connecting in sort of a mutual aid way so that we can’t say, “Oh my god girl, I can’t go out and protest because I’ll lose my job and I won’t be able to pay my rent.” Well, if we can make a way for your rent to be paid, you can go out in protest whether you lose your job or not, and then you don’t care and you’re more likely to challenge the system. And so that is where I want people’s minds to go because it’s gonna be necessary to withstand whatever’s coming.

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SM: I want to be respectful of your time. That was great, that was an important answer so thank you.

I think out of all the people we collaborate with, there’s a lot of people who want to amplify our work, but you really are at the top of the list for people who are like I don’t care if this post hasn’t popped or isn’t going to get me more followers or I just want to do this and I can tell your advocacy is absolutely authentic and selfless. How did you get here?

P: That’s a good question. I wonder, I sit around asking myself, why am I doing this, like what in the world, but I’m just like driven to it, you know? And it’s something that I would be doing whether I’m alone, whether I am with people, whether there’s a benefit of it or not, it’s not something that I’ve seen that people can do to make money or things like that, most of what I do now is advocacy and all of it is unpaid. And I do it because I care about it and I will continue to do it. But it also means that I’m extremely vulnerable to not being able to survive because I’m not spending my time doing the things that it’s necessary to do to survive. I just want to make sure that we’re able to live and have basic rights, which means, you know, advocacy. And I think it started along, I mean, it definitely started a long time ago and it evolves over time. You know, I think I got it from my grandmother. She was heavily involved in civil rights and so that’s probably where it came from. I don’t know if it’s genetic or if it was just instilled as I was watching, but it’s here now.

SM: And when you got celebrity from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and other things like that, how did that affect it? Because the celebrity status would have made you in a whole different ballgame with it, I would imagine.

P: Yeah, I remember thinking when I got on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” I was basically, yes, my platform sort of multiplied and sort of exploded tenfold, which I’m grateful for. And I remember thinking, well, I’m basically doing exactly what I’ve always been doing the entire time, just on a larger scale. I believe I’m quite the family-friendly entertainer and personality. But I’m sure that there’s people that have been like, “Let’s not hire her because she might say the wrong thing.” I’m sure that I’ve suffered that, but it doesn’t change that if I lose every follower I have, I’m still gonna be doing the same thing. I’ll just be back to where I was before I started this stuff. And so, you know, that’s kind of my thought on it.

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SM: I love it, and I feel like that is a beautiful place to stop. I could talk to you for a long time, but Peppermint, so grateful that you’ve given us your time. Thank you so much for speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today. This has been a really rich conversation.

P: Absolutely. I do want to remind people to tune in to the last job I held, which was “Survival of the Thickest” on July 2, right after New York City Pride.

SM: Absolutely, we can plug that also in the show notes. So yes, thank you again, Peppermint. This was fantastic.

P: Awesome, thank you.

Season 3 of “Survival of the Thickest” featuring Peppermint launches July 2 on Netflix.

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Focus on the Family (FOTF) is a Christian ministry with a half-century history of anti-LGBTQ advocacy. Through the years, they have worked with the biggest American politicians and lawmakers to pass or maintain laws that treat LGBTQ people as second-class citizens. The nonprofit, which today amasses more than $100 million a year in revenue, was founded by James Dobson, who believed secularism was the cause of the rapid decay of American society. Here is the organization’s complete track record on LGBTQ issues.

1970

James Dobson publishes Dare to Discipline, a book that recommends corporal punishment as a way to discipline poorly behaved children, writing:

“Pain is a marvelous purifier. … It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely.”

Dobson believes children are inherently sinful and that they must embrace authority in order to fix America’s societal problems.

1977

Dobson launches FOTF in Arcadia, California. As the president and sole employee at the time, he hosts a weekly radio show on 34 stations where he mixes his background in psychology and in working with children with his evangelical principles. On the show, Dobson says secularism has led to the “rapid decay” of American society and that biblical principles are the cure.

1980

FOTF’s radio show grows to broadcast every day on more than 200 outlets. Around this time, Dobson joins fellow evangelical Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr. in opposing IRS regulations that bar private religious schools from refusing to enroll Black students. Falwell is founder of the Moral Majority, a national effort to elect Christian Right politicians and whose early fundraising appeals used a “Declaration of War” on homosexuality.

FOTF now has about three dozen employees. Its radio show is offered via satellite, allowing other countries to access its programming.

1982

President Ronald Reagan appoints Dobson to the National Advisory Committee for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, representing FOTF’s most significant connection to the White House.

1983

Dobson launches the Family Research Council (FRC), an evangelical activist group that opposes LGBTQ rights, pornography, abortion and divorce and supports conversion therapy. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., FRC is referred to as FOTF’s “embassy.”

1985

Dobson is appointed to U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Commission on Pornography. The commission aims to investigate the harmful effects of porn and its connections to organized crime, though it is criticized for being ideologically biased.

1986

FOTF begins printing anti-abortion resources for crisis pregnancy centers. In that same years, it opens a book publishing divisions that sells many stories that highlight folks who have supposedly cured their homosexuality and are now “ex-gays.” Today, the publishing division sells books titled “Hope for the Same-Sex Attracted,” “Coming Out of Homosexuality,” “When Homosexuality Hits Home: What To Do When A Loved One Says, ‘I’m Gay,’” “A Change of Affection: A Gay Man’s Incredible Story of Redemption” and “Gay Girl, Good God.”

1987

FOTF begins printing Citizen, a magazine that features articles such as “How Would Homosexuals Affect the Military?” and “Homosexual Militants Invade the Pews.” In an editor’s note in the latter example, the article states:

“Homosexual activism is, by design, vulgar and intended to shock and offend. The following accounts are not suitable for young readers.”

The magazine would amass a million subscribers.

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FOTF continues to explode in growth. Its radio show now airs on 970 stations across 17 countries, and the organization has 450 employees.

Jan. 23, 1989

Dobson gets the final interview with serial killer Ted Bundy the night before he is executed. He gives Bundy a platform to blame pornography for his crimes.

1990

In a FOTF newsletter, Dobson writes:

“The widespread effort to redefine the family … is motivated by homosexual activists and others who see the traditional family as a barrier to the social engineering they hope to accomplish.”

In a special issue of Citizen magazine, Dobson predicts that the Cold War would be replaced by a “culture war” to be fought on three fronts: abortion, public education and homosexuality.

1992

FOTF’s campaign in support of Colorado’s Amendment 2, which blocks local LGBTQ anti-discrimination protections, sees success when the initiative passes. The campaign positions anti-discrimination laws as “special rights” that undermine religious freedom, promote homosexuality and destroy traditional families. However, the amendment never goes into effect.

1993

FOTF continues to grow and moves onto a 45-acre campus in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It reportedly now has 1,200 employees, receives 3,000 phone calls per day and has been sent approximately 10,000 letters from individuals seeking assistance with spiritual guidance, family matters and same-sex attraction.

1994

Dobson co-founds Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) along with other evangelical leaders. ADF has a cruel history with anti-LGBTQ advocacy to this day as the group who helped convince the Supreme Court to overturn Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy last month. This represented their 17th victory at the nation’s highest court.

1996

FOTF is instrumental in orchestrating a nationwide campaign to ban same-sex marriage, known as the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

DOMA is signed into law by President Bill Clinton, representing a major win for FOTF.

1997

FOTF endorses the Southern Baptist Convention’s boycott of Disney. In an article, it lists several “offenses” by Disney. This includes a Disney-owned movie that has portrayals of homosexuality.

Former Dobson aide and FOTF co-founder Gil Alexander-Moegerle publishes “James Dobson’s War on America,” an exposé on his former boss. The book includes an anecdote where Dobson expresses frustration at the lack of research that supports the intellectual inferiority of Black Americans.

1998

FOTF expands into Latin America, opening a branch in Costa Rica called Enfoque a la Familia. Today, the branch teaches that homosexuality is “wrong,” and promotes conversion therapy.

Later that year, FOTF launches Love Won Out (LWO), an “ex-gay” ministry for so-called former homosexuals where they offer conferences, education, counseling and research to “uphold God’s design for sexuality.” LWO’s homepage says:

“[Our] ministry exhorts and equips the church to respond in a Christ-like way to the issue of homosexuality. And to those who struggle with unwanted same-sex attractions, we offer the Gospel hope that these desires can be overcome.”

The group promotes conversion therapy and, in cases where “change appears impossible,” a life of abstinence. In its distributed literature, LWO claims:

“Focus does take strong exception to the activist movement that seeks to gain special privileges and protected minority status for the homosexual community … for their identity is based on changeable behavior, not on unchangeable skin color or ethnic status.”

LWO is taken over by Exodus International in 2009 and becomes defunct when Exodus shuts down in 2013. Exodus President Alan Chambers would later renounce conversion therapy, come out of the closet and apologize for the pain the group caused to the LGBTQ community.

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Oct. 12, 1998

After Matthew Wayne Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man, is beaten, tortured, tied to a fence and left to die, his murder sparks a national conversation around LGBTQ bullying and hate crime legislation.

For years, people say FOTF’s anti-LGBTQ campaigns and rhetoric influenced the crime. FOTF denies this and has published misleading articles as recently as 2024 backing claims that Shepard was killed over drugs and money and not his sexuality. FOTF calls Shepard’s story “an enduring fabrication” and “a legend.”

1999

FOTF publishes a book by John and Anne Paulk titled “Love Won Out,” regaling the story of their relationship to promote their “ex-gay” ministry. Both John and Anne claim to be formerly gay and say they overcame their homosexuality through their Christian faith. John would eventually renounce his anti-gay activism and apologize for the harm he caused in promoting conversion therapy.

2004

FOTF forms a separate lobbying and political action organization, which today is called the Family Policy Alliance (FPA). FPA would go on to be on the advisory board for Project 2025.

FOTF’s lobbying efforts would help drive 13 states to approve constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage by the end of the year.

Oct. 15, 2004

Dobson speaks at a “Mayday for Marriage” rally on the National Mall in D.C., whose organizer hopes the event “unif[ies] Christians in the legal and political battle against same-sex ‘marriage.’”

Nov. 12, 2004

After intense political lobbying during the 2004 elections, political analysts identify Dobson as one of the biggest players in conservative politics. Slate writes that “no one helped Bush win more than Dr. James Dobson.”

2006

In a FOTF newsletter, Dobson promotes the work of Joseph Nicolosi, one of the founders of the modern “reparative therapy” movement. He shares an excerpt that discusses “certain signs of prehomosexuality which are easy to recognize” and claims that “there is no such thing as a ‘gay child’ or a ‘gay teen.’” It also calls for fathers to “affirm their sons’ maleness” and suggests that a father can “take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.”

Oct. 22, 2008

Leading up to the presidential election, FPA publishes a “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” which includes excerpts that imply that homosexuals are pedophiles.

“The Boy Scouts chose to disband rather than be forced to obey a Supreme Court decision that they would have to hire homosexual Scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys.”

Oct. 28, 2009

Obama signs the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law. The measure expands the 1968 federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.

Dobson tells radio listeners that the law will “muzzle people of faith who dare to express their moral and biblical concerns about homosexuality.”

February 2010

FOTF’s new president, Jim Daly, wants the organization to reach a younger audience and be more inclusive on social issues. He tells Dobson these objectives can’t be realized if he continues as FOTF’s radio host. Dobson leaves the organization and begins a new ministry.

July 20, 2011

The Respect for Marriage Act is proposed for the first time. The act would repeal DOMA and require all states and territories to recognize the validity of same-sex marriages.

FOTF is present at a hearing defending DOMA. During the hearing, Sen. Patrick Leahy questions FOTF representative Thomas Minnery about how one can focus on the family while putting LGBTQ families at a disadvantage.

Leahy: “Yes or no … if you have parents legally married under the laws of the state – one set of parents are entitled to certain financial benefits for their children, the other set of parents are denied those same financial benefits for their children…are not those children of the second family, are they not at a disadvantage?”

Minnery: “That would be yes.”

2015

SCOTUS rules in favor of gay marriage nationwide. FOTF calls the ruling “disappointing.”

2019

FOTF rebrands their magazine into The Daily Citizen, an online publication they describe as “a faith-based perspective to counter the mainstream media’s anti-Christian bias.” Today, the site offers parenting resources on LGBT Pride, homosexuality, sexuality/marriage and transgender.

Articles include “‘Detransition Awareness Day’ - Hope and Healing for Those Caught in Transgenderism,” “Rosario Butterfield Drops Essential Truth Bomb on LGBT Lies” and “Feds Ask Parents: ‘Did You Know Gender Ideology Can Be Promoted in Kids TV Shows?’”

2020

FPA, which shares a headquarters with FOTF to this day, begins finding success from two of their campaigns to restrict transgender rights: “Save Girls Sports” targets trans girls’ participation in sports; “Help Not Harm” seeks to ban all forms of gender-affirming care for minors. Over the next three years, at least 20 states would adopt FPA’s model anti-trans legislation.

2021

An investigation by openDemocracy finds that FOTF connects LGBTQ people to conversion therapists nationwide.

Nov. 24, 2022

In late 2022, just days after a gunman massacred five people at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, vandals spray paint “THEIR BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS – FIVE LIVES TAKEN” on the sign outside FOTF’s headquarters. FOTF’s president releases a statement after the shooting, saying:

“We recognize the community is hurting in the aftermath of the reckless and violent actions of a very disturbed individual. This is a time for prayer, grieving and healing, not vandalism and the spreading of hate.”

April 24, 2024

Although FOTF argues that “conversion therapy” does not exist, they still promote “pastors, counselors and ministries that help people find freedom from bondage to homosexual sin.” This reflects a new rhetorical strategy by the group of distancing themselves from the term “conversion therapy” while continuing to promote the practice.

Feb. 2, 2026

FOTF publishes an article titled “Biblical View on Transgender Identity: A Primer,” where they promote the idea of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” a term coined in a retracted study that failed to obtain ethics approval. The article claims transgender identities are associated with “peer contagion” and falsely states that social media influencers and pro-LGBTQ school clubs are causing children to become trans.

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation in the U.S. through our 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

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If you’re in Canada and would like to donate, you can make a charitable tax-receipted donation here:

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“Canada, we are well-known to build equality, caring, and we stand up for each other, and that is so special,” Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow told a room of over 100 prominent Canadian queer people and allies last Tuesday at Uncloseted Media’s first Canadian fundraiser at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club.

“Right now, people are not really reading news. … So you have to cut through a whole lot in order to capture people’s imaginations. You have to really dig deep because truth matters. That’s why journalism matters,” she told the crowd.

“If we don’t have truth, we have this,” she said, pointing to Uncloseted Media stories covering anti-LGBTQ movements on a TV screen. “Can I call it bullshit? Homophobic bullshit!”

In a time when so many politicians have ditched LGBTQ rights or watered down their support, Mayor Chow’s unfiltered remarks were refreshing.

And I think that’s a core element to what makes Canada stand out on human rights issues.

As a born and raised Canadian and someone who has now lived in the U.S. for 12 years, I have a deep understanding of the nuances of how each country approaches LGBTQ rights. And this event represented those differences.

From a national identity standpoint, people around the world see Canadians as polite, practical and cautious. And to a certain extent, that’s true. But I remember learning in my “Introduction to Canadian Studies” course at McGill University that the most integral aspect of the Canadian identity and the pride we feel for our country is that we are not American.

After hearing that at first, I remember it sounding a bit pompous. But years later, I get it. There are many things that just work better in Canada: more equitable healthcare, better public education and more nondiscrimination protections.

All of these things contribute to a society that treats underprivileged groups with more dignity and respect. “The U.S. is a melting pot of ethnic groups. Canada is a multicultural mosaic,” I remember my prof saying.

And it’s true: The social programs we offer for immigrants, racial minorities and—yes—LGBTQ people, are much stronger than those offered south of the border. The Canadian ethos aims to celebrate the cultural independence of all groups rather than have them assimilate to one identity.

And don’t get me wrong: Canada is far from perfect. Racism, queerphobia and xenophobia are unfortunately alive and well in many pockets of the country. And we have to be wary of avoiding the stories that make us look bad.

But I think the priorities outlined above, coupled with the pride that we are not American, fuels a collective national identity that involves standing up for the underdog even when it isn’t popular, or speaking out against adversity when there could be consequences.

That may be why over 4,000 LGBTQ Americans contacted the nonprofit Rainbow Railroad about moving to Canada in the first eight months of 2025. Or why there was a nationwide movement called “Elbows Up” to resist Trump’s tariffs and insults towards the country last year.

For all of the reasons above, starting a nonprofit arm in Canada was a no-brainer. We’re a global leader in LGBTQ rights, and when queer people face adversity, we show up.

If you’re in Canada and would like to contribute, you can make a charitable tax-receipted donation here:

Donate to Uncloseted Media Canada

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

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• If you couldn’t make it out to the event last week, you can find all of the photos here:

  Facebook Album

• Our journalist Sam Donndelinger appeared on Fierce Healthcare’s podcast to talk about her latest investigation looking at the broken pipeline of mental healthcare for LGBTQ teenagers! You can listen here: https://omny.fm/shows/podnosis/the-broken-pipeline-of-mental-healthcare-for-lgbtq-teenagers

• Murdered trans student identified as Juniper Blessing, a “gifted singer with a transcendent voice” (LGBTQ Nation)

  • The alleged killer’s identity has also been made public.

• Trump’s ATF Takes Aim at Trans Gun Rights: What It Means and How To Fight Back (Trans News Network)

  • The federal firearms agency has proposed new background check rules that will restrict trans people’s constitutional right to legally purchase a gun.

• “Christ-centered” therapists sue Wisconsin governor to end conversion therapy ban (LGBTQ Nation)

  • It’s one of the first of many lawsuits that will be spawned by the Supreme Court’s decision against conversion therapy bans.

• Franklin Graham Attacks ‘Transgenderism,’ Gay Marriage at Rededicate 250 (Newsweek)

  • Evangelical preacher Franklin Graham used a speech at a prayer festival backed by President Donald Trump on Sunday to warn that “America has become morally rotten, completely sick with sin.”

• Former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank dies at age 86 (NBC Boston)

  • Barney Frank had been in hospice care in Maine, being treated for congestive heart failure.

Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:

• 🆕 SATURDAY: Focus on the Family is one of the most long-running and influential groups on the anti-LGBTQ Christian right. Uncloseted’s Nico DiAlesandro has the organizations complete track record on LGBTQ issues.

• 🆕 TUESDAY: On the next episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” I have the great pleasure of speaking with Miss Peppermint. You may know her as a runner up on RuPaul’s Drag Race, or for her stint as the first trans competitor on the runaway hit The Traitors or for her LGBTQ activism. Now, Peppermint is getting set to be the Grand Marshall of NYC Pride.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me with questions, complaints and story ideas!

Spencer Macnaughton, Editor-In-Chief — spencer@unclosetedmedia.com

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

Donate to Uncloseted Media

Design by Soph Holland. Photo by The White House.

“UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton” is a new podcast by Uncloseted Media, an investigative LGBTQ-focused nonprofit news publication. Follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. YouTube // Spotify // Apple

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On May 6, the Trump administration released their new counterterrorism strategy. It delineated three “major types of terror groups,” including “narcoterrorists and transnational gangs,” “legacy Islamist terrorists” and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.” In a glaring departure from the Biden administration’s strategy focused on far-right extremists and white supremacists, the Trump administration is cracking down on ideology that they call “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

In this episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Spencer talks with Jon Lewis, a researcher at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, as well as University of Maryland distinguished psychology professor Arie Kruglanski, to learn about what this new characterization of terrorism means for the safety of LGBTQ people and the security of all Americans.

Watch the video or read the full transcript below.

Spencer Macnaughton: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to UNCLOSETED with me, Spencer Macnaughton. Last week, the Trump administration unveiled its new counterterrorism strategy, which states that the government will crack down on “violent left-wing extremists,” who are “radically pro-transgender and anarchist.” Today, I’m here with Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the program of extremism at George Washington University and University of Maryland psychology professor, Arie Kruglanski. Jon and Arie, thanks so much for speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

Arie Kruglanski: It’s a pleasure.

Jon Lewis: Thank you for having us.

SM: Fabulous, so let’s get right into it. Last week, Trump and the Trump administration released a new counterterrorism strategy. This made quite a few headlines, but for those listeners who might not fully be aware of it, Jon, can you just give us some top line descriptors on what this strategy is and how it differs from prior strategies perhaps under the Biden administration?

JL: Absolutely. So, these documents are largely policy prescriptions. So they will lay out in generally broad details the main areas, the core ideologies, the threats that this particular administration views as the primary issues that it intends to tackle. When we look at previous administrations, both Biden and the first Trump administration, what you saw was a generally serious-toned, apolitical document. It generally looked at threats across the ideological spectrum, devoting pages to far-right, to jihadists, to Iranian actors. And I think with this document in particular, what the 16-page memo focuses in on most significantly is the threat from narcoterrorists and transnational gangs, the threat of what they call “legacy Islamist terrorists” and this sort of catch-all bucket of what what they describe as “violent left-wing extremists,” which they don’t define all that clearly but based on the the memo what they attempt to articulate is a set of individuals that they believe have anarchist, anti-fascist or radical transgender ideologies. And so I think from that what we see are these three core areas that the administration through this policy document is trying to paint as really the most serious elements of the domestic terrorism threat that it intends to tackle.

SM: But you mentioned the document didn’t used to be ideological. What, in your opinion, makes this document now ideological?

JL: Even starting with the tone—the number of references to the failures of the Biden administration, the efforts to paint with broad swaths anyone who they perceive to be political opponents as the preeminent domestic terrorism threat. And I think more than anything, it’s what’s lacking from the document that makes a lot of researchers stand back and raise these questions. We’ve seen, even in the first Trump administration, nearly 100 people killed by far-right extremists, namely white supremacists, antisemites. Far-right Extremism is not mentioned in this counterterrorism strategy, which is a massive oversight. So, too, missing is the threat from Iranian-backed actors. We’ve heard a lot of commentary in the media about Iranian sleeper cells, the threat of Hezbollah, homegrown extremists. Those areas are also missing from this counterterrorism document. And so it is certainly an ideological screed more than a balanced and thoughtful document.

SM: So interesting, and Arie, I find it interesting that Jon points out there’s no reference to far-right extremism. There’s also not one mention of white supremacists as a threat in the document, which Joe Biden’s administration said was the number one threat for domestic terrorism in the United States. What does that do for the psychology of terrorists or extremists when they see the president of the United States releasing a document like this and seeing, “oh, they’re not even worried about me. They’re not targeting me. They’re not even mentioning me.”

AK: Well, first of all, it’s a tremendous oversight, because in the recent decades, there’s been a huge surge in white supremacist terrorism to the tune of about 400% in the last 20 years. Most of it was on the far-right side. It was more prevalent and also more lethal, simply no comparison. So, to omit that wave of white supremacist terrorism from a document is a huge oversight. And it illustrates the idea that one man’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. And to label somebody as a terrorist is influenced very much about one’s own politics, one’s own motivation. And of course, the left terrorists, it exists to some extent, but it pales into insignificance in comparison to the far-right terrorism that is sweeping the United States, but also the world at large. Now, you ask what it does to be labeled as terrorist. It’s a very serious accusation, especially when you feel it’s totally unfounded. You feel that you are targeted unjustly. You are traumatized by that label. The fact that your own country, your own government, is turning against you for no good reason, it can affect your self-concept. It can affect your sense of security and sense of identification with your country. It’s a very serious thing to feel that you’re marginalized within your own country.

SM: Reading this document, which I did this morning for the first time, was breathtaking in many ways, that the government of the United States say they’re going to crack down on radically pro-transgender folks from the lens of terrorism. And in the presidential foreword, Trump writes, “if you hurt Americans or are planning to hurt Americans, we will find you and we will kill you.” Looking at a marginalized group where there’s no evidence that suggests that they’re disproportionately likely to commit acts of terrorism, how unprecedented is this for a U.S. Presidential administration to target a marginalized group like transgender folks in this way? Everything seems crazy when you look at the news, but how crazy is this?

AK: It’s very crazy. It creates a political atmosphere. The words and the ideas of the president of the United States have a lot of resonance.And that puts a target on the back of people who really do not deserve to be targeted at all. And we know what happened in Nazi Germany, that an anti-Jewish ideology created a situation where the entire country became rabidly antisemitic. And I think that it’s a similar situation here when an anti-LGBTQ ideology is becoming part of the establishment narrative. That is extremely scary, and it brings back memories of the 1930s, the kind of things that we thought would never happen again. And here we are at the brink of it possibly happening.

JL: It’s important to recognize that these things don’t happen in a vacuum. When we start to look even a couple of years back, in the aftermath of Jan. 6, during the Biden administration, what you saw were efforts to mainstream and normalize anti-LGBTQ hatred. You saw dozens of far-right extremist groups, elected officials, politicians at the state, local and federal level, encouraging individuals to go to drag shows, to go to libraries that were hosting drag queen story hours. There were concerted efforts to demonize, to dehumanize, to otherize groups of people based on, again, not their violence, not their tangible threat, but based purely on their gender, their gender identity. And I think that we have to look at a lot of what’s happening now as a continuation of those very trends. I think that when we look at it today, really what you see is a success of those efforts to normalize and to really poison that well against individuals who are perceived as the other or as un-American. And I think that, again, as Arie said, that has very significant effects downstream.

SM: And before I ran Uncloseted Media, I did a lot of work in far-right extremism. So I embedded with the Ku Klux Klan, with the Michigan Militia, with neo-Nazi terrorist entities like Atomwaffen. And what I learned was these groups are horrifically racist and antisemitic. They’re also really homophobic and transphobic.

AK: Absolutely, yes.

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SM: So to me, when I look at this counterterrorism strategy and realize there’s no mention of these groups as a threat, and then you’re also saying the threat is transgender folks and perhaps other LGBTQ folks, what do you guys imagine from all your research, these groups, like the far-right Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, the KKK, what are they thinking right now when they see this messaging coming from the most powerful people in the United States?

AK: I think it gives them tremendous legitimacy. They used to be the margins. There was a cultural consensus that they are the bad guys, that they’re the danger to society, and now they are becoming legitimate. And that’s the huge danger, that these attitudes will sweep into the center stage of American politics. As Jon said, it’s the normalization of extremism. That is the extreme danger. We have seen it happen time and time again in history. Human nature hasn’t changed much. And the same thing can happen again here. The well is poisoned by the most influential figures in our political environment. And those groups are gaining strength. We see all over Europe that groups that were once at the margins—for example, the neo-Nazi group in Germany, Alternative für Deutschland, is now the largest opposition party. They’re taking over. They’re becoming the normative attitude that prevails in society. And I think that’s extremely dangerous, extremely conflictual, it’s extremely unfair.

SM: We have folks in the administration, I’m thinking of Kash Patel, who leads the FBI, who has very little experience with national security, essentially none. And there’s reports coming out from the Atlantic that he’s an alcoholic. Of course, he’s denied those claims, but there are a lot of people in this administration who, beyond what this document says ideologically, just don’t have the chops to be there. What are your concerns from a domestic terrorist lens when not only is the information coming out inaccurate to the real threat, but the people in charge don’t have the credentials to really do a good job? Jon?

JL: Yeah, I think it certainly sends all the wrong messages. Especially, going back to the previous point, when you see the official DHS Twitter account putting out overt neo-Nazi propaganda. When you have, as you said, reporting around, whether it’s FBI, DHS, other federal agencies that are either hiring former Jan. 6 participants, downplaying the seriousness of far-right extremism, these things all send a message. And especially when you see very public failures by domestic law enforcement, whether it’s around the Charlie Kirk shooting, the shooting at, I think it was Brown University, where there was a subsequent manhunt for a couple days—groups that feel emboldened, that feel that they can get away with these actions. But even just for the lone individual, the lone actor, someone who is not in one of these groups but who is terminally online, who harbors some personal grievance, some bias, some insecurity, who is looking for justification to commit violence, who is looking for that trigger.

SM: Independent terror cells.

JL: Yeah, exactly. That self-motivated lone actor who is on the verge of either potentially harming themselves, harming others, and they go online and they see that, of their congressperson’s last 50 tweets, 45 of them are about transgender people or about LGBTQ issues. That paints a very clear target and gives people who, again, are maybe not deeply ideological, but who are disturbed, who are looking for a justification to go harm other people. The zone is flooded with those messages right now. And I think that really lowers the barrier to entry, which is deeply challenging. And also, again, as we know, it’s a lot harder for domestic law enforcement, for the FBI, to stop one individual if it’s not a group that they can put an informant into or round up that whole network. There’s a reason that the lone actor terror threat has been so prominent in recent years.

SM: And it’s not only the neo-Nazi propaganda that you mentioned, even the racist posts that Trump has put out on Truth Social, depicting the Obamas as apes, that type of messaging from the government, it’s speaking to the Ku Klux Klan, isn’t it? It sends a message.

JL: Yeah, there’s another researcher who described these not as dogwhistles at this point, but just as normal whistles. We have to call them what they are. These are so overt, so in-your-face, day after day after day. And I think the broader challenge that we have here seems to be that nothing matters, there are no consequences for this. There is great investigative journalism done that uncovers that this neo-Nazi anonymous Twitter account is actually an ICE attorney or a member of DHS. And you think in a previous time that that would have been a news cycle, that would’ve led to some tangible changes. And today it’s just another Tuesday. And so I think living in this sort of post-truth world where we are so siloed, where there are just no consequences for things that, again, in a previous time, these norms would have demanded, I think also does set the table and really allow for that normalizing of racism, of misogyny, of anti-LGBTQ to continue.

AK: I just wanted to mention another aspect of it, and that is the undermining of the citizens’ confidence that the government is there to protect them rather than to attack them. And of course, right now it’s the far-left or the transgender people that are being targeted, but insofar as it’s clear that they are not terrorists, that this is a made-up, trumped-up accusation, any group can be targeted like that. And therefore, now they are after a given group, they can, with equal justification or no justification, go after everybody else. So this kind of thing for bystanders who understand that this is unfair and this is trumped-up, introduces a great deal of insecurity and distrust in the government. It basically means the fraying of society, feeling that the government is out to get you rather than to protect you.

SM: What is, if you look—say we had a robot look at all the data. Dare I say AI? No. All the methodologically sound evidence-based research, what does that tell us, Jon, about what the actual threats are in terms of terrorism in the United States today?

JL: Yeah, it’s still predominantly the far-right. I think what you’ve seen in recent years is an evolution of what a lot of government and researchers are calling nihilistic violent extremism—definitionally, individuals who are motivated not by racism, by misogyny, by really any ideology, it’s more of just suffering of other people. That’s where you see a lot of these online networks in these places like Roblox, like Discord, that are really searching out young, disaffected, damaged individuals. And that’s really where you get a lot of the child sexual abuse content, the encouraging of self-harm, of animal abuse, really just the worst of the worst. And it’s something that the FBI has recently started to put a lot of effort into tracking and cracking down on. They’ve been touting in nearly every press release, every public testimony, their spike in these cases. And so it is very surprising to see that not included at all in the counterterrorism strategy.

SM: And are there, because I know 10 years ago it was more groups, and then it evolved into these lone wolf actors a little bit more, at least from when I was doing more reporting in this realm. Are there specific groups or people or even regions of the country you’re most concerned about that maybe aren’t being spotlighted by the current administration?

JL: It’s devolved so much in the last 10 years to the point where you do see these networks and movements pop up, like the Boogaloo, like you said earlier, these Hawaiian shirt-wearing guys that popped up in 2020. And again, no leadership, no hierarchy, no central geographic nexus. It’s one guy in Texas, one guy in New Jersey, one in California. They’ve never met, but they’re in a signal chat together. I think that that’s really been the evolution of a lot of these networks is they realize that, again, if there’s no headquarters, if there’s no hierarchy, if there’s no membership list, it makes it a lot harder for law enforcement to arrest their way out of those problems. And so what you are seeing today is increasingly younger, increasingly more online, and because of that, inherently transnational. Certainly, when you look at those trends, it is global far-right extremism. It’s individuals who want to commit violence at synagogues, at majority-black grocery stores, to target individuals who are not them. And I think that, yeah, it’s shocking that those are not reflected in the strategy either.

AK: There is a general uncertainty in the world today because of developments like globalization, the financial crisis, the pandemic, the immigration crisis, all the galloping technology that is not understood by masses of people. And that feeling of uncertainty, uncertainty about one’s own place in society, creates a vulnerability to ideology that identify a given target group as responsible for their suffering and that recommends violence against that group. It’s a very appealing idea that you can find the culprit, whoever is responsible for your suffering, be it immigrants, be it Muslims, being transgender, being the Jews, whoever, and encouraging people to aggress against them and therefore prove their own significance, feeling great again as it were. And of course, the danger is that politicians who sense that vulnerability would provide just the kind of populist ideologies that find the culprits and encourage people to aggress against them, and that creates waves of terrorism, of white right-wing terrorism, all over Europe and in this country as well. So it’s not just a bunch of damaged individuals, but it’s a general unease, malaise, that pervades on the planet these days that renders people vulnerable to very pernicious ideology.

SM: Well, and I’m looking at a part of the counterterrorism strategy. To name transgender, Arie, to your point, is essentially putting the target on a silver platter for Americans to read about. Like I said, it’s unbelievable.

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AK: Exactly. And it legitimizes the idea that transgender is really a violent group in society, which is, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Associating them with Islamic terrorists or other groups that are truly aggressive is just an untruth that is snuck into the public awareness, public consciousness. And the people will begin to identify transgender and left-oriented individuals as being anti-American. It’s a huge danger that signals the fraying of our society, it deepens the polarization, introduces conflict and insecurity on part of everybody. Today it’s transgender, tomorrow is me, academics or whoever it may be.

SM: What has struck you that hasn’t been reported on enough about Trump and the administration’s counterterrorism strategy at large, its messaging?

JL: The first thing that comes to mind is the chilling effect that this has on speech and assembly. Even if it is not rising to the level of criminal prosecutions or designations, just the threat of these things has a chilling effect. If you’re a local community member, organizer, someone who has gone to libraries or drag shows to show support for your community, for people you know, there’s a very real fear that these people surely now have that they will be labeled a terrorist, that they will be debanked, that they will have records seized by the government, that they will be followed home by law enforcement agents, that they will get a knock on their door and questioned about, again, protected political or some other kind of speech. And I don’t think we can overstate how insidious that is, to try and paint with an overly broad brush anything that goes against this specific worldview as inherently anti-American and therefore terrorist. I think it sends all the wrong messages, obviously.

AK: On the deep level, it undermines the trust that Americans will have in their government. That you cannot have an assembly, you cannot express an opinion. Everything gravitates toward the label of terrorist. And if you are a terrorist, then you are worthy of being killed and persecuted by the government. It introduces an atmosphere of fear of government rather than trust in government. And that is an extreme danger for society that we will become an authoritarian state where the government can label anybody as anything and go after them without any legal justification, any grounding in the constitution or the law of the land. It’s basically the end of law and order.

SM: What can LGBTQ people, allies, what can they do? What should they be looking for before, God forbid, it’s too late? How can people be watching as it’s clear that the threat is ramping up to some degree?

AK: I think political action, I think convincing the powers that be, the opposition, Democrats, that it’s a fight that needs to be undertaken, that this is a very clear and present danger to society and we’ve got to ally all the different factions that would oppose it into concerted political action that would change things.

JL: I think local nonviolent action, protesting, making your voices heard as much as possible. And again, for those who are allies, who are in positions of authority or who do have that platform, I think it’s even more incumbent upon them, especially in times like this, to stand with those who are marginalized, who may feel understandably uncomfortable or unable to speak on those issues.

SM: And you see on the New York City subway “see something, say something.” I think a lot of people might not know what seeing something looks like as it relates to terrorism. What does that look like? What should people be on the lookout for?

JL: I think especially in the aftermath of Jan. 6, I think what we saw a lot of Americans struggle to conceptualize is the fact that increasingly the call is coming from inside the house, that these are our neighbors. It’s the guy who mows your lawn or drove your mom to the doctor’s office. These are the same people who, while again maybe not being explicitly terrorists, are so willing to use violence, use force, use the threat of force against individuals who they see as not being part of their in-group. I think with a lot of the discrimination that we’ve seen, either racial or against transgender individuals, it’s not exactly quiet. It’s very in your face. And I think especially when we see the number of neo-Nazi groups that feel comfortable going to cities like Columbus, Ohio and protesting, standing outside, with swastikas, of either synagogues or libraries, making clear to those people that they’re not welcome in your city, in your town, I think is a really good jumping off point. These are not mastermind terrorists. These are losers. These are guys who have nothing but the fear and the loathing to drive them. And I think increasingly, what we see is that at the first sign of pushback, these guys get back in their U-Haul and go home.

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AK: I would like to add to this two things. One is that there are obvious signs of hate speech against whatever group. And I think that we need to inoculate members of our society against hate speech for whatever reason, whether it’s against the left, against transgender, against immigrants, against Muslims, against Jews. Hate speech is hate speech, and it has to be recognized as such and delegitimized. And the second thing is that you should not feel that just because you are not targeted now, you are safe. If we allow law and order to be dissolved, and the government do whatever they want in targeting groups, there is a danger that it will come to you, whoever you are. So I think it’s not just these targeted groups right now, but come the day that they will be after you. And so it’s not an esoteric, marginal cause, it’s a cause at the very heart of our society and our democracy.

SM: I think that’s a really important note to finish on. This has been a great and really rich conversation. Arie Kruglanski and Jon Lewis, thank you so much for speaking with me andUncloseted Media today, this has been great.

AK: Thank you for having us.

JL: Appreciate it.

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This story was originally written for Gay Times Magazine.

Editor’s note: To protect Zebb’s privacy, this story uses pseudonyms for him and his parents.

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In the fall of 2023, Cindy Howard was in a hospital bed recovering from a cesarean section.

While the birth had gone smoothly, the pregnancy itself carried intense uncertainty.

In the months leading up to the delivery, a technician had indicated she was expecting a girl.

But during an ultrasound at around 30 weeks pregnant, she was told that while her baby had no visible penis, there were testicles. “We figured it was just a bad angle,” Howard told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES.

“We went to a 3D ultrasound just for fun. And then we spent about 10 minutes looking for the penis, and we couldn’t find it,” says Max Wilson, Howard’s husband.

Even though follow-up ultrasounds did not identify a penis, Howard’s doctor eventually confirmed XY chromosomes, which signify the sex is male.

Through the remainder of Howard’s pregnancy, the results were ambiguous. And by the time the baby was born, there was still no clear picture.

After giving birth, Howard remembers a doctor entering the room. “XY chromosomes,” she remembers being told.

“I already knew he wouldn’t have typically male genitalia,” she says. “There was some relief in finally knowing for sure.”

“Initially, they just told us he had a micro penis,” says Wilson. “Full transparency, we were both really disappointed to hear that. … Our culture is not kind to anybody’s body differences. You start looking ahead and thinking, ‘I don’t know what that’s going to look like for [his] life.’”

Doctors told Howard and Wilson that the sex of their child was to be decided by them. So later that day, they chose male.

Howard says it felt like the most logical decision, given her child had testicles and XY chromosomes.

“We did ask the pediatrician at the hospital after testing. She didn’t think there was any reason to not consider him a boy at that point,” she says.

But what followed would prove to be far more complicated.

What Doctors and Research Say about Surgery

Howard’s child, Zebb, was born intersex, which is an umbrella term for a range of variations in sex characteristics—including chromosomes, hormones, reproductive anatomy and genitalia—that do not fit binary definitions of male or female bodies. Intersex is not a single condition, but a broad category that can include differences noticed at birth, during puberty or later in life. It is distinct from both gender and sexual orientation.

An estimated 1.7% of people have intersex traits. While many intersex infants undergo genital surgeries each year, parents may opt to delay or forgo surgical intervention altogether, allowing their children to grow up without procedures that are medically unnecessary.

These surgeries are often justified by the anticipated psychological harms of appearing intersex, even though the decision is made many years before the child is old enough to weigh in.

For expecting parents whose minds may be clouded with worry, Dr. Arlene Baratz, a physician and advocate for intersex rights, underscores that there is nothing wrong with intersex children. According to her, about 1 in 100 people have such variations, making them almost as common as white people with red hair or green eyes.

A month after giving birth, Howard and Wilson returned for a follow-up appointment with a pediatric urologist. Additional testing confirmed that Zebb’s urinary function was adequate. At that stage, no surgical intervention had been scheduled, and the discussion remained focused on whether any treatment, which could be performed mostly for cosmetic reasons, would be considered.

The doctor examined Zebb and diagnosed him with epispadias, a rare condition where the urethra does not form in the typical position. In boys, it can mean the opening is located along the upper side of the penis rather than at the tip. In some cases, including Zebb’s, the penis appears shortened or buried. The condition affects roughly 1 in 117,000 male babies.

“He would definitely need surgery,” Howard recalls the doctor telling her. “If not, he [will] be very unhappy with his penis.”

“It’s just like the wildest thing to say,” Howard says. “Because he’s a literal newborn.” And already, someone was predicting his future dissatisfaction with his body and his identity.

Howard threw herself into researching Zebb’s diagnosis and joined intersex parent support groups on Facebook. She ultimately decided that surgery was not what she and her husband wanted. So she did nothing.

Baratz, who has two daughters with intersex variations, says surgeons often tell parents that tissues heal best if surgery is done in infancy. “Parents hear, ‘If you don’t do this now, it won’t work.’ This creates a false urgency,” she says.

This framing can leave families feeling as though there is only one acceptable path forward, even when medical opinions differ on timing and necessity.

“Parents are emotionally vulnerable in the delivery room,” says Baratz. “They’re being told something is wrong, [and] the solution is surgery. It’s a high-stakes decision made in a moment of shock and fear. … When families are overwhelmed and processing complex information, it can be difficult to fully engage with the range of options presented.”

On the flip side, Baratz says pediatric urologists face pressure to recommend early surgeries based on parental assumptions about functionality and appearance.

These preconceived notions may not be justified. In a 2017 statement from three former U.S. surgeon generals, they wrote that there is “insufficient evidence that growing up with atypical genitalia leads to psychosocial distress,” and that much of the justification relies instead on clinical assumptions about future well-being. They add that there is clear evidence that “the surgery itself can cause severe and irreversible physical harm and emotional distress.”

The Weight of Immediate Choice and Children’s Rights

These quick parental decisions are controversial as they relate to children’s rights.

“Children cannot consent to these surgeries, yet they carry lifelong consequences,” Sylvan Fraser Anthony, legal and policy director at interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “Legally, there’s tension: Physicians recommend interventions [and] parents consent, but the child is the one whose autonomy is compromised.”

According to one 2017 report by Human Rights Watch and interACT, these surgeries “can inflict irreversible physical and psychological harm” on intersex kids “that can last throughout their lives.” And a 2023 study found that these nonconsensual surgeries increased medical mistrust among intersex individuals, which in turn contributed to avoidance of healthcare.

The Psychological Impact on Parents

Niki Khanna, a marriage and family therapist and board member at interACT, has spent years examining how doctors communicate with parents. She says predictions about future psychological harm are rooted less in evidence and more in a mid‑20th‑century theory that anatomical conformity shields children from future psychosocial harm.

“When physicians tell parents that a child will be unhappy with their body, they are often projecting a binary framework—one that assumes there is a correct way for a male or female body to look and function, and that deviation from that norm will inevitably lead to distress,” says Khanna, who is intersex.

“Doctors are often presenting it as if there’s only one option … and if you don’t choose [surgery], you’re neglecting your child.”

Khanna says parents are rarely given space to understand variation outside of this clinical lens, which can make refusal feel morally fraught.

When Howard and Wilson sought out additional opinions, including a consultation with a specialist at a children’s hospital in Ohio, they asked a question that few clinicians could answer clearly: Are children who undergo these surgeries happy with the results?

“The parents are happy,” the specialist told them.

“I don’t care about the parents,” Howard responded, insisting that she was more interested in what intersex individuals themselves felt. The answer was murkier. Here, the specialist said that some patients were not satisfied, but that could be attributed to being “angsty teens.”

“Many adults report dissatisfaction with early surgeries, not necessarily because of function, but because they never had a voice in decisions about their own bodies,” Holly Nelson, a therapist who works with intersex adults, told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES.

Do Intersex Children Have Any Legal Protections?

Children have very few explicit protections preventing nonconsensual, cosmetic genital surgeries.

Fraser says that this system rests on a legal assumption that is rarely interrogated: “There is a legitimate question that’s not often really taken seriously about whether parents even have the legal authority to provide valid consent to these decisions.”

Fraser notes that while parental consent is broadly accepted in U.S. pediatric medicine, it is not absolute in law, especially in cases involving irreversible procedures.

“Procedures like sterilizations … are typically either flat out outlawed or require individual informed consent from the actual person whose body it is,” they say. Intersex advocacy groups argue that this same logic should apply to non-urgent, irreversible genital surgeries in infancy. But in practice, it is not consistently enforced.

Fraser says that some countries outside the U.S. have begun to delay non-urgent medical decisions until intersex children are old enough to participate.

In 2015, Malta became the first country to pass a law banning nonconsensual medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex infants. The law draws a clear line between urgent care and procedures that can wait, requiring doctors to postpone cosmetic or nonessential interventions until the individual can decide for themselves.

Other countries in Europe and Latin America have introduced similar policies. But these protections vary widely in how they are applied, and in many places, enforcement remains inconsistent.

‘It’s Going to Be Okay’

Two and a half years after making the decision not to have Zebb undergo surgery, Howard says the journey has been intense, but support groups have helped her along the way. “Talking to other parents helped me understand that surgery isn’t always the answer,” she says. “But it doesn’t erase the fear you feel in those first days, when the decision feels life-altering.”

Experts agree that transparency, patience and consideration of adult outcomes are critical.

“Parents should hear about the risks, the uncertainties, and the experiences of adults who lived through early interventions,” says Baratz. “Only then can they make a decision that truly respects the child’s future.”

Despite the stress Howard faced in determining whether or not to proceed with surgery, she says Zebb is enjoying his childhood.

On any given afternoon, he might be seen running across the living room floor, a small fleet of toy cars scattered behind him.

“[He] exclusively loves Hot Wheels,” says Howard. But he also plays with a baby doll he got for Christmas, and his favorite color was pink for a long time.

“We were very like, ‘You like what you like. … You point to it, you pick it.’”

“The most important thing that you can do for any child is to love them and make them feel confident, and that’s really your job,” says Baratz. “Your child has every expectation of having a beautiful life and being able to do everything that anybody else is able to do. It is going to be different. But you can do this, and it’s going to be okay.”

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Last week, the Trump administration released their new counterterrorism strategy. It delineates “three major types of terror groups” that the government will focus on targeting: “narcoterrorists and transnational gangs,” “legacy Islamic terrorists” and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.” That last one is a new addition by Trump and a stark departure from the Biden administration’s strategy, which was much more focused on far-right extremism and called white supremacy—which is not mentioned a single time in Trump’s strategy—the “most dangerous terrorist threat” to America

This new approach continues a troubling escalation of the administration’s threats to target trans people with the tools of counterterrorism. The document describes the ideology of so-called “violent left-wing extremists” as “anti-American” and “radically pro-transgender,” citing the long-debunked claim that Charlie Kirk was assassinated by “a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”

The entire strategy is rooted in pure politics—the overwhelming majority of mass shooters are cisgender men, and attacks by far-right extremists are far more prevalent in the U.S. than those by left-wing or Islamic groups, according to a study that the Department of Justice (DOJ) quietly removed from their website days after the killing of Kirk.

While the strategy promises to “use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map [left-wing extremist groups] at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent,” it remains unclear what exactly this will look like. Here’s a timeline of what we know so far:

• Aug. 27, 2025: After the perpetrator of a mass shooting in Minneapolis killed two children and injured 17 others is revealed to be trans, right-wing figureheads, including Trump administration assistant attorney general Harmeet Dhillon, promote the narrative that trans people are violent extremists.

  • Dhillon implies that gender-affirming healthcare could inspire violence, stating that “pumping a child full of drugs that purport to change their gender identity has numerous side effects.”

• Sept. 10, 2025: Charlie Kirk is assassinated. While the killer is cisgender, early reports mistakenly claim that his bullets were engraved with “transgender ideology,” leading prominent conservatives to blame trans people for the shooting.

• Sept. 18, 2025: The Heritage Foundation, whose leaders wrote Project 2025 and are close allies of the Trump administration, urge the FBI to create a new terrorism category called “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” (TIVE).

• Sept. 20, 2025: Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein releases a leaked Customs and Border Patrol intelligence brief on Zizians, a group they describe as a “Radical Leftist Trans Militant Cult.”

• Sept. 22, 2025: Trump signs an executive order designating Antifa, a decentralized movement focused on militant opposition to fascism, as the first ever “domestic terrorist organization.” Because there is no singular Antifa organization, advocates warn that this could be used to target left-wing organizations broadly.

• Sept. 25, 2025: Trump releases National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which directs intelligence agencies to investigate left-wing political organizations for their involvement in domestic terrorism. The memo singles out “extremism on migration, race, and gender” as particular targets.

• Dec. 6, 2025: A leaked memo from the DOJ reveals that the FBI is working on “a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” with a focus on groups with progressive views, including “adherence to radical gender ideology.”

• March 13, 2026: Nine activists are convicted of charges including providing material support to terrorists for their participation in an anti-ICE protest where a police officer was killed. The DOJ claims the group were part of an “Antifa cell,” and while two of the people convicted are trans women, this was not outwardly cited as a reason to suspect them of terrorism.

• Apr. 5, 2026: A budget request from the FBI reveals that the agency runs a new “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center” with the goal of “proactively” investigating and prosecuting “domestic terrorists.” “Extremism on gender” is once again mentioned as a targeted belief.

May 6, 2026: The Trump administration releases its new counterterrorism strategy.

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• We had our first Canadian fundraiser on Tuesday at Toronto’s Royal Canadian Yacht Club! The event was a wild success, and we’re grateful to everyone who turned out. We wanted to extend special thanks to Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, who came out to celebrate Uncloseted’s first event in the country. We’ll be sharing pictures from the event soon. And if you’re still looking to donate, you can do so here:

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• Jason Collins has died, leaving behind a legacy second to none (Outsports)

  • Jason Collins has passed away, leaving behind a legacy of excellence, courage and inspiration unmatched by any before him.

• ‘Our Communities Are Literally Dying’: Inside a Mexico City Activist’s Fight for Liberation (Trans News Network)

  • Trans News Network interviews Razzia Santillán, a long-time trans activist in Mexico City. After police assaulted her in 2023 for using the women’s bathroom, she’s fought legal battles while organizing tirelessly among marginalized people.

• NYU Langone First Known Hospital to Face Federal Criminal Subpoena Over Trans Youth Care (Erin in the Morning)

  • A federal grand jury in the Northern District of Texas issued the subpoena demanding information on every minor who received gender-affirming care since 2020.

• “Historic Lows”: Meta, X and YouTube Slammed in New LGBTQ+ Online Safety Report (Mamba Online)

  • A new report from LGBTQ+ advocacy organisation GLAAD has raised alarm over what it describes as a worsening online environment for LGBTQ+ people across major social media platforms, with Meta, X and YouTube all receiving sharply reduced safety scores.

• 19-year-old transgender University of Washington student fatally stabbed (The Advocate)

  • The suspect remains at large.

Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:

• 🆕 SATURDAY: Uncloseted’s Nico DiAlesandro and Hankycode’s Rebecca team up to track the full history of Focus on the Family, one of the most long-running and influential groups on the anti-LGBTQ Christian right.

• 🆕 WEDNESDAY: On the next episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Spencer sits down with psychologist Arie Kruglanski to discuss the implications of labeling trans people as a terrorist threat for the community’s well-being.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me with questions, complaints and story ideas!

Spencer Macnaughton, Editor-In-Chief — spencer@unclosetedmedia.com

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“UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton” is a new podcast by Uncloseted Media, an investigative LGBTQ-focused nonprofit news publication. Follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. YouTube // Spotify // Apple

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LGBTQ kids make up a third of the American foster care system and transgender kids enter it at five times the rate of the general population. But in 2026, there are few legal protections for LGBTQ youth in the system.

Uncloseted Media’s Sam Donndelinger spoke with case workers, advocates and survivors of the foster care system and uncovered why it’s failing trans kids. In this episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Spencer sits down with Sam and breaks down the story’s key findings.

Watch the video or read the full transcript below.

Spencer Macnaughton: Hi everyone! Welcome back to Uncloseted with me, Spencer Macnaughton. Today I’m here with our very own Sam Donndelinger, who just wrapped up a fantastic months-long investigation into how the American foster care system is failing trans youth. In her reporting, Sam found that queer youth often face instability and abuse, and new Trump rollbacks are making it even harder for LGBTQ youth in foster care to feel safe. Sam, thanks so much for coming on the pod and speaking with me today.

Sam Donndelinger: Hey, Spencer! Thank you for having me.

SM: Yeah, so you spent months working on what became a really powerful investigation into America’s foster care system and how it is, you say, failing trans kids. And in the headline you say you spoke to one kid who went through 150 foster homes in 10 years. That’s a heartbreaking headline. Tell us about their story.

SD: Yeah, so I met Hayden, Hayden Dawson. Now they’re 20 years old and they recounted their story, their journey throughout foster care, and they were placed in foster care at 8 years old, and essentially cycled through 150 different homes, and that was confirmed by two people close to them. And they explained their first home to me as just being very rejecting of their nonbinary identity. And essentially whenever they would try to express things that weren’t gender-conforming, like wanting to play with toys meant for boys or wear more masculine clothing, they’d be punished in different ways. And sometimes that looked like doing wall sits for hours and sometimes that would look like having to eat outside with the dogs and be so hungry that they had to eat sunflowers in the garden.

SM: Wow, so they would be forced to sit outside and eat with the dogs?

SD: Yeah.

SM: I repeat that to you. I’ve read it already in the investigation, but I remember when I was editing it, it was just so troubling to read that. And we know that Hayden is not alone. As you reported, LGBTQ kids make up a third of all children in America’s foster system and trans youth enter the system at five times the rate of the general population. So for people who might be surprised to hear this, why are there so many more LGBTQ kids in the foster system?

SD: Yeah, so we know that transgender youth experience homelessness at disproportionate rates, so they’re over 120% more likely to experience homelessness than their non-LGBTQ+ peers. And 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ. So there’s a lot of rejection from parents, from guardians, toward transgender and nonbinary youth, which ultimately places people in the foster care system. And then on top of that, we know that folks who are more religious are more likely to foster. And not that that inherently means you’re going to be rejecting, but there is a lot of tension between religious foster parents and LGBTQ youth. And so what ends up happening is trans folks will be placed in a home, they’ll be unaccepting, they’ll have problems and then the case worker will have to re-place them essentially. So there’s a lot of cycling through and a lot of instability, which prevents kids from getting adopted and essentially stay in the system.

SM: No, and that probably explains why people like Hayden go through such a high number of homes in such a short period of time.

SD: Exactly. Yeah, because if you think about it, they were in foster care for 10 years. So that’s 15 homes a year, which isn’t unheard of. That is, I mean, you’re jumping homes.

SM: Sounds crazy, though.

SD: Yeah, if you think about [how] that’s your home that you’re having to change 15 times on average a year? That’s so destabilizing.

SM: And I want to ask you more about the connection between foster care and LGBTQ kids and religion. But first, there’s a mental health epidemic brewing among LGBTQ kids in foster care. A Trevor Project brief from 2021, that found that LGBTQ youth in foster are three times more likely to attempt suicide than LGBTQ youth who are not. And 45% of fostered trans and nonbinary youth have attempted suicide. Almost half have attempted. Those numbers are so troubling and inexcusable. What’s fueling this?

SD: When you say LGBTQ youth are three times more likely if they’re in foster care, we know queer youth are already more likely to struggle with suicide ideation and to attempt suicide. So to add three times more likely to that equation, that’s so much pain that these queer youth are going through. But it makes sense. When I was speaking with the sources for the story, it was honestly some of the hardest interviews I’ve ever done because you hear these kids just talking about how they have no one there for them, they feel so unloved, so unaccepted. If they’re raised in an area that also doesn’t have affirming schools or affirming people in their circles, they really have no one and so they don’t have any tools also to process their anxiety, their depression, they don’t have mental health resources. And so it’s a very isolating and demoralizing experience for these kids. And also they’re children! They don’t know what these feelings are. They don’t know that they deserve acceptance and love in the outside world. And so they really have no reference for what it means to be accepted in their identity.

SM: And I’m assuming that a lot of the kids in the foster care system to begin with are coming from origin stories that were rife with trauma. Is that a fair thing to assume?

SD: Exactly. A lot of trauma, a lot of abuse, a lot of folks that I spoke to ended up in the system because they didn’t have parents that were accepting of their queer identities. And so it’s very retriggering to then be in a system where maybe your caseworkers don’t understand, they’re not using your pronouns, they’re not using your chosen name, and then you’re placed in homes where, again, the same cycle is repeated. So the parents, the foster parents, aren’t accepting and sometimes using physical or psychological abuse to try to basically convert you to a straight cis identity.

SM: And that’s interesting that you say that about the caseworkers, too. Because I think a lot of people would assume, “oh, the case workers are gonna be there for these kids and affirming.” Not necessarily?

SD: Not necessarily, and a lot of the caseworkers I spoke to for the story, they were lovely and they were affirming and they were trying their best, and I do think that also the system isn’t very supportive for caseworkers either. A lot of them are overworked, they have way too many cases and it’s very hard to connect individually with the youth and figure out their needs. So I don’t think there’s malintent, I think a lot of the time they really are doing their best. But that said, a lot of agencies don’t have proper policy in place. So private agencies, they’re not subjected to the same discrimination laws as public agencies, because they’re getting money from the government. And then as far as public agencies go, it pretty much varies state by state what the protections are and what the rules are. So sometimes caseworkers don’t even know what they’re supposed to do and which rule they’re supposed to follow. So the whole system really just isn’t set up to support the youth in the way that it should be.

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SM: Well, I remember editing your story and it was dizzying trying to understand how fragmented this industry is. At the state level, there is a lack of explicit protections for LGBTQ kids, and your report found that 16 states have no child welfare nondiscrimination protections for gender and sexuality and only 11 states require specific training for caseworkers for LGBTQ youth. And then, like you say, you add the public versus private agencies into the mix and it’s a smorgasbord. What does this mean as a bottom line for the kids and for trans kids?

SD: It’s confusing. It’s super confusing. And I do want to say, so the 14th Amendment on the federal level, the constitutional level, does guarantee that youth in state custody be treated equally and kept safe from harm. So essentially, once a child is placed into foster care, they’re now in state custody and the 14th Amendment automatically applies to them. That said, when a caseworker brings a kid in and they’re very stressed out and emotional and going through a big transition, the Constitution isn’t always the top of mind for these caseworkers. And so they’re not thinking, “okay, how can I guarantee equal and safe placement for this child?” And so that’s when I think the state policies and the specific agency policies are really important because the caseworker is going to know those, be familiar with those and implement them a little bit more locally.

SM: And just to be clear for people who are like “what the heck is a nondiscrimination protections,” but 16 states don’t have them. So is it fair to say if you have a, let’s say, an evangelical Christian foster care parent who says “I think trans people are akin to the devil,” they can project those belief systems onto a kid like Hayden and they would have nothing protecting them because there’s nothing set in stone if they’re in one of those states? Is that accurate in how I’m interpreting that?

SD: Yeah, so in 2024, the Biden administration tried to make a rule to basically amend that at the federal level, which essentially would have required state and tribal agencies to make affirming placements available to children, so kids who requested affirming placements would essentially have to have them. But in response to the rule, the Texas attorney general filed a complaint in federal court saying that it’s outside the statute of what the authority of HHS holds.

SM: So Biden tries to implement an affirming law that would protect trans and LGBTQ kids. Then the Texas attorney general gets in the mix. And then Trump gets in mix. So tell us what happens when Trump starts to weigh in on this.

SD: Yeah, and so in March of this year, 2026, the rule is now being rescinded officially, even though it was never in place, but it’s officially being struck down basically under the claims of the Texas attorney general. And in November of 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled—I’ll just read you the title—“Fostering the Future for American Children and Families,” which says that parents should be allowed to foster even if they report that religious beliefs would prevent them from caring for an LGBTQ child. So basically the very few federal protections that we have in place, now Trump is saying “okay, but these shouldn’t apply to religious families. We should be able to say that we’re not going to be affirming under religious beliefs and we should still be allowed to be in the foster care system as parents.” So the few protections that we do have are now being unraveled.

SM: And I think people could read that and say, “oh, it has nothing to do with LGBTQ,” because it’s talking about religious protections. But what did you find is happening on the ground with foster kids, with caseworkers, now that this federal policy has been implemented by the Trump administration?

SD: Well, to be honest, I think that before, there were still a lot of religious parents fostering who were not affirming and will never be affirming. And when I spoke to Hayden, they said that 80% of their homes were transphobic and not affirming.

SM: 80%?

SD: 80%, yeah. So quite a lot were not affirming and outright rejecting, but when they would encounter Hayden’s caseworkers, they would switch to using their proper pronouns and using their proper name and they would be a little bit more performative.

SM: They put on a show.

SD: They would put on a show for the caseworker. And now, I think what this executive order and the designated placement rule being rescinded, the effects that it will have is now families won’t have to pretend and they just can outright be discriminatory towards kids and say that it’s because of their religious beliefs and say that that should take precedent over a child’s identity.

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SM: Wow. And we know that Christian parents are way more likely to foster kids, right? So there are a ton of Christian parents who might think this way, believe this way. Believe that trans and gay kids are going to hell and they’re now legally allowed to put these belief systems onto kids. Is that all correct? Am I missing something?

SD: No, that’s correct. And it’s unfortunate because you can see that some foster agencies are trying to do better for queer kids. And so they’ll put in their application, “we have LGBTQ kids in our system. Would you be comfortable supporting a child in this way? Would you take them to appointments if they wanted gender-affirming care?” And people who have checked no have also then went on to sue the agency and say, “well, this is discriminatory against my religious beliefs. I should be able to say no, I’m not going to do this under my beliefs, and you should still allow me to be in the system.” So you can see that foster agencies are trying to remedy this, and they’re getting a lot of pushback legally. And unfortunately, the people who are suing, the courts are siding with them and saying that religious exemption should take precedent.

SM: Wow. That’s all really interesting. And you had a bunch of really salient points in this article. But one quote stuck out to me from Mary Kelly Persyn, who’s the founder and attorney at Persyn Law & Policy. She said to you, “if we have a bunch of Muslim faith kids and we need to place them, are we going to say no if your religion tells you? Would we allow that in the case of all black kids? Would we allowed that in case of the children of immigrants? Is there any other social category that the law recognizes where we would allow that?” And I just thought that was a really salient point. There is this get out of jail free card with so many issues in the U.S, but foster care is so serious because these are kids who are coming from traumatic livelihoods and backgrounds who are now being potentially subjected to more abuse because of their identity, just if the parents are interpreting Christianity in a specific way. It’s wild to me. Is there anything else you learned about how this affects the kids you spoke with? What were some of the themes that came to you from all of this?

SD: Yeah, no, and Mary Kelly was so helpful to the article and I think she explained really well that it really comes down to the SOGI identity not being protected as a class.

SM: The SOGI identity being sexual orientation and gender identity?

SD: Exactly. Yeah, it’s not seen across the board as a valid thing. And the effects are devastating. The children I spoke with, now they’re young adults, and you can see that they’re working so hard to put their lives back together and to be functioning adults in society. But frankly, they never received the love and support and the care that they should have as children and it’s really hard to deal with those mental health struggles. A lot of them have depression and anxiety. A lot of them, well, all of the kids I spoke with had attempted suicide and had to deal also with those repercussions and the trauma from that.

SM: I just want to stop you there and underscore what you just said. All of the kids you spoke with had attempted suicide.

SD: Mm-hmm.

SM: Wow. I just wanna make sure the listeners don’t scrub by that. I mean, it’s so infuriating, if I can be honest.

SD: It is, and honestly what broke my heart is the kids I spoke with were so, so kind and so resilient. They really wanted to speak with me for this article because they wanted other kids to not go through the experience that they went through. And their hearts were so open telling me their stories and they answered every question I had and really you could tell that they were trying to advocate for other queer youth in the system. But yeah, the kids I spoke with, they are still dealing with the mental health and the repercussions of, frankly, not being accepted their entire childhood and trying to find community as adults now.

SM: One thing that I found striking with your investigation was that there’s these massive Christian legal groups in America. Perhaps the biggest is Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). They’re a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group, and they just effectively were the lawyers who overturned Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy. I wasn’t expecting in your bingo card of reporting to see ADF in foster care. But they were, they turned up. So explain how foster care is connected to ADF.

SD: Yeah, I also was surprised to see their name. I feel like they have a finger in every pie these days. But they represented essentially a foster mom who was trying to adopt and, again, put in an application “I would not be affirming if I were to receive a queer child.” And they’ve represented quite a few families who are pushing back under religious exemption laws.

SM: And again, for people who think, “oh, is has just focused on religion and it’s not about LGBTQ,” this is the same group who has pushed to overturn gay marriage, overturn conversion therapy bans, they’re in the Caribbean and in South America lobbying to overturn LGBTQ policies. And they were co-founded by somebody who wrote a book called “The Homosexual Agenda.” So this is not a group that is not ideological as it relates to LGBTQ issues.1 And I think that translates into them being able to effectively impact policy at the legal level, too, as it relates to foster care, eh?

SD: Yeah, they’re not unbiased. And how I view it in my mind is foster care will take a couple steps toward being more progressive and safer for LGBTQ kids. And then ADF will be like, “okay, we’re pushing you back again.” It’s this push and pull, and it’s right now balanced between religious freedom exemption laws and protections for queer youth.

SM: And there is a silver-ish lining. There are affirming families out there. How can more trans and queer kids get to these affirming families? What needs to change?

SD: Well right now it’s hard because I really wanted to speak with some affirming group homes for the article and every group home I spoke with, they were like “can we please be off record because we don’t want our funding to disappear, we don’t want anyone to come after us and we also don’t wanna out our kids.” So it was really hard to find homes that wanted to speak on record or be included in the piece for that reason. But that said, what really turned around Hayden and their mental health was being placed in an LGBTQ-affirming home and having respect, and the group home was able to help them get on testosterone and help them figure out what they wanted for their future and little things too, like giving them an allowance for grocery shopping rather than just buying groceries for the house, like teaching them how to be an adult and how to function in the world.

SM: Parenting.

SD: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And another trans man I spoke to, Benjerman Xander, he had been in and out of foster care the majority of his life as well. And he said what really helped him is he finally got a caseworker in his late teens that actually gave him choices for which foster parents seemed like they might be a good fit for him. And so the caseworker would show him photos, give him a little bit of a description. And Benjerman actually got placed with a couple queer families, which just totally changed his perspective. And he was like, “wow, I didn’t know that this was possible to be queer and be happy and live a full life.” And so he said that part of it was having the choice and a little bit more autonomy of, “okay, I actually have a little bit of say in my life and my decisions,” and then also just the affirmation of being with affirming parents and parents who knew something about the LGBTQ community and could help support him.

SM: And that’s a really good example of what caseworkers can do. So what else did you learn caseworkers could do more to better serve this population?

SD: I think listening, so many of the kids I spoke with really just wanted a caseworker who asked them questions and listened and heard their identity. The system that Hayden was in, in Kansas, they didn’t even have a question about sexual orientation on their intake form. They had a comments section that you could add extra things if you wanted, but they didn’t explicitly ask, “what’s your sexual orientation? Are you part of the community?” I think something as small as that would be really affirming for kids who are queer and who want to talk about that with their caseworker. And then I feel like that would just set everyone up for more success if then they knew that and could go find an affirming home. Because there are plenty of affirming homes out there. They’re just not being coordinated with the queer kids who need them.

SM: Any of the big stories I’ve done through reporting as a journalist, I have takeaways. You spent a lot of time on this story. Do you have any major takeaways that you haven’t said yet here that you’ve really reflected on after the story has gone out to the world?

SD: I just still think about the interviews that I did for the piece and just how caring and still sensitive and kind the kids I spoke with are and how big their hearts are even though they’ve just suffered so much abuse and neglect their whole life. So that still sticks with me how they’re able to have capacity for such love and care. And also just how confusing the system is and I understand why kids are falling through the cracks because it’s set up in this patchwork way that makes it really hard for people to know even what they should do. And also, I think it is baffling that a third of foster care youth are LGBTQ. That’s just heartbreaking to me. So I think the more we can implement acceptance and care and love in parents toward their biological queer children and the more we can prevent people from even having to go into the system, obviously that’s the goal.

SM: No, that’s amazing. Last question, I’m sure a lot of people will want to know, and you mentioned it earlier, but any other updates on how Hayden is doing today?

SD: Yeah, so they live with their partner in Texas. They live in a trailer together and they have lots of pets which just cracked me up. We’d be on the interview and they’d be like, “my frog just jumped out. I have to go take care of this.” So they have lots of pets and they’re very connected with nature and they seem really safe with their partner, Grayson. I feel like they really found solace together and Grayson has also been through the system and had a similar experience. So I think that they understand each other really well and just having that acceptance and that love provided a safe space for Hayden. So they’re doing well now.

SM: That’s good to hear. It’s nice to hear a little bit of a silver lining, but also still think listeners, viewers should leave this understanding that this investigation has exposed a really, really big problem and that has only cracked the surface. Sam, thank you so much for your reporting and for coming on the pod to talk about it.

SD: Thank you so much for having me, Spencer. It was a really great conversation.

SM: And you can read Sam’s full investigation at unclosetedmedia.com. And to get our podcast episode every Wednesday morning, subscribe to YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation in the U.S. through our 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

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This article was reported in partnership with Fierce Healthcare, a healthcare outlet delivering news at the intersection of business and policy.

The first panic attack Quinn Pulsipher remembers having was at 8 years old. They describe it as “a pitch-black ghost that hugs them all over and tries to control their mind.” At the beach on vacation with their family, the wind suddenly picked up, and Quinn began hyperventilating, screaming and crying uncontrollably. Nothing could calm them down.

After that first episode, the panic attacks occurred whenever there was a storm, sometimes even when there was just a light breeze.

By the time Quinn was 14, they were “spiraling down.”

They began failing most of their classes. They rarely left their room, even avoiding going to the store with their mom.

Quinn, who is nonbinary, says the deterioration of their mental health was related to the rejection they received for their identity. At school, teachers continued to misgender them even after their records were updated. They endured cyberbullying, transphobic slurs from classmates and lawmakers across the country restricting their rights.

For those six years, Quinn cycled through five therapists who, according to their mom, Hilary, did not understand the challenges Quinn faced as a queer kid.

Hilary spent hundreds of hours searching for help—filling out intake forms, sending emails and calling therapists across Utah—only to get to the scheduling stage and repeatedly hear that providers “weren’t willing to treat a trans kid.”

The therapists who agreed to work with Quinn often failed to understand how being transgender intersected with their anxiety and depression. Some confused gender identity with sexuality. Others dismissed the idea that Quinn’s gender identity could be connected to their worsening mental health.

One night, after a teacher refused to use their pronouns, Quinn reached a breaking point. They came home and cried for hours.

“The feelings were too much,” they told their mother. “I shouldn’t have to fight for my pronouns and name to be used.”

“They kept repeating, ‘I just can’t do it anymore,’” Hilary told Uncloseted Media and Fierce Healthcare. “So I flat-out asked if they were suicidal, and they said ‘yes.’ I was terrified. I prepared myself for the possibility that my child might not be alive when I checked on them.”

Hilary scheduled an emergency appointment with a nonbinary therapist Quinn has now started seeing after getting off a six-month waitlist.

“It didn’t fix everything,” says Quinn. “But what helped was talking to somebody who got it. [My therapist] is just so kind, respectful, calm and accepting. I don’t know any other way to describe just how amazing it is to have someone like this.”

“I feel so lucky we found [their therapist] when we did because I could have lost my kid,” Hilary says.

As almost 1 in 4 American teens identify as LGBTQ, affirming therapy can be life-saving. Yet availability is shrinking. Access to mental healthcare for LGBTQ youth dropped from 80% to 60% from late 2023 to late 2024, according to The Trevor Project. And in 2025, though 84% of LGBTQ youth wanted mental healthcare, 44% of them could not get it.

Over four dozen interviews with transgender teens, their families, clinicians and researchers reveal a fragmented health system plagued by long waitlists, prohibitive costs, parental consent complications and a shortage of affirming providers. Clinicians receive little to no formal education on LGBTQ health, often leaving young patients to repeatedly explain their identities in spaces intended to support them. Many LGBTQ youth say they have encountered provider homophobia and transphobia. These barriers are compounded by political hostility and school environments where bullying is pervasive.

“It’s really a wall of barriers and there’s these layers and layers of obstacles that, taken together, make accessing care feel impossible,” says Lana Lipe, a licensed clinical social worker and private practice therapist serving queer patients in Indiana.

“Not only is the need growing, but there’s not enough resources,” adds Jenna Glover, chief clinical officer at Headspace.

The Journey to Affirming Providers

On every major mental health and suicide risk indicator, queer youth struggle more than their heterosexual peers. Analysis of 2023 national data found that queer youth are more likely to experience persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness (66% versus 31%), poor mental health (54% versus 22%) and suicidal ideation (41% versus 13%). They were also more likely to attempt suicide (20% versus 6%).

Experts stress that the mental health struggles of queer youth are not inherent to their identities. Rather, they exist because of the minority stress they experience. Six in 10 LGBTQ teens experienced bullying in the past year. And those who did reported significantly higher rates of attempted suicide.

“They’re struggling because of what’s being done to them, and what isn’t happening for them,” Lipe says.

Finding affirming providers is difficult in part because there is no mandated LGBTQ cultural sensitivity training for mental health professionals in the U.S. And when training is offered, experts interviewed for this story agree that it’s not sufficient.

“We know that affirming care saves lives,” Lipe says. “The question isn’t whether we can do better; it’s if we’re willing to.”

From 2009 to 2010, medical school curricula included an average of only five hours of LGBTQ-related content, one study found. By 2022, that average had increased to 11 hours, which some maintain is still inadequate. Dustin Nowaskie, a psychiatrist and founder of OutCare Health, a nonprofit offering LGBTQ health resources and provider training, has argued that med schools should require 35 hours of LGBTQ training.

“This leaves the burden of educating providers to patients,” Ellesse-Roselee Akré, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Uncloseted Media and Fierce Healthcare. “It has an impact on people’s willingness to receive care, people’s willingness to continue getting care and contributes to a lot of people finding alternative ways to self-medicate and treat their health themselves.”

Daniel Trujillo, a trans teen from Arizona, was lucky enough to find an affirming therapist.

As early as 3 years old, Daniel expressed his gender identity in drawings. His parents were paying attention and helped Daniel socially transition at 8 years old, which included a haircut and new clothes. Soon after, they found Daniel an affirming care team, including a psychologist for whom they paid out of pocket.

“They had had years of experience navigating how to support transgender youth and how to talk us through things we didn’t know, and help us better understand the needs of our child,” says Daniel’s mother, Lizette Trujillo.

Daniel, now 18, saw his therapist for about eight years. “During my tween and early teen years, it felt really important to have someone to help identify things I was going through,” Daniel says. “As I got older … it was more just someone to debrief with.”

The Trujillos, who have long advocated for trans rights in legislative sessions, moved to Spain in 2025 to keep their family safe due to the current political attacks on trans rights in the U.S. The move meant Daniel could no longer see his therapist.

“The political climate has made it harder and scarier for parents to say that they support their children,” Lizette says.

One way that LGBTQ patients can find providers is through online directories. GLMA, the national association of LGBTQ and allied health professionals, maintains a public list of over 5,000 queer-affirming providers, which it says is one of the largest online directory of its kind.

To be approved, providers must attest to their approach to LGBTQ care, thereby signaling their commitment to an affirming practice. GLMA reviews each provider’s online presence for anti-LGBTQ activity or affiliations, including social media posts and ties to Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate groups. In cases where a provider has a limited or no online footprint, GLMA may request professional references. Providers are also asked questions to test their competency in LGBTQ topics and training.

“To be an affirming provider means that you are meeting patients exactly where they are,” Alex Sheldon, GLMA’s executive director, told Uncloseted Media and Fierce Healthcare. “It’s more than just checking a box that says, ‘I’m not going to outright discriminate against you.’ We ask for folks to go a little bit further in their exploration of their own educational ability. … Did you receive LGBTQ-specific training in medical school [or while you pursued your doctorate]? Have you published any LGBTQ related materials? Do you do research in the space?”

In a survey of 375 providers, the findings of which have not yet been published and were shared with Uncloseted Media and Fierce Healthcare, OutCare Health found nearly half of providers stated that the current political climate has made them feel more cautious about being publicly visible as an LGBTQ-affirming provider. “We have witnessed … a shrinkage of LGBTQ+ providers and practices,” Nowaskie wrote in an email.

There are many ways to deepen knowledge. Providers can voluntarily engage with medical association-accredited trainings from organizations like OutCare Health or Violet, which offer provider training on marginalized populations. Companies can either mandate these trainings or offer bonuses to clinicians for completing them.

Violet’s training revolves around a few key questions including whether providers feel confident in their knowledge of a given identity and whether they know what therapies are appropriate. Violet can then track if the training led to changes in provider behavior and patient outcomes.

Violet has seen steady interest in its LGBTQ health training: Across 2024-2026, over seven hours of education per provider were completed each year, suggesting sustained engagement. And the number of providers who completed LGBTQ education grew 51% on the platform, from over 7,600 to nearly 11,600.

Headspace’s Glover says LGBTQ education should not be a specialization: “It should be a general part of education that any provider should be able to provide this level of care.”

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Schools Can Be a Source of Pain or Support

The lack of affirming providers has real-world effects. It took Emma, a 15-year-old trans girl from Fredericksburg, Virginia, years to find an affirming therapist to help with her anxiety and depression and to deal with the daily bullying she experienced. Emma’s mom, Angela, who asked to not include her last name and use a pseudonym for Emma due to ongoing litigation and safety reasons, says that many therapists who use the tag “trans-accepting” themselves still lack expertise.

“They say LGBTQ-affirming and LGBTQ-welcoming, but … do you know how to deal specifically with gender dysphoria, body dysmorphia, all of the unique and complex things that go along with being trans? Emma is still having to explain who she is over and over again. They don’t even have that concept or grasp of it because, where’s the training?” Angela says.

In 2024, Emma and her family left Florida, where she had been bullied for being trans to the point of fearing riding her bike outside. After researching Bloomington, Illinois, Angela felt it would be a safe home for her daughter, joking that half of the 1.6% of the population who identify as trans in the U.S. live in Bloomington.

But a few months into seventh grade, Emma was beaten unconscious in a school hallway.

In footage of the attack as described in a lawsuit, another student—who had been overheard saying she would “bully this girl until [she] transfers”—approaches her from behind, pulls her hair and forcefully and repeatedly slams her head to the ground until Emma loses consciousness. She then punches her in the face until someone pulls her off.

“She has officially lived the purest form of hate,” Angela says. “She was only four feet tall and 50 pounds at the time. She is a kid.”

After the attack, Emma was diagnosed with a concussion, a potential traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the family’s lawsuit against the school. She says the trauma left her feeling unsafe and severely disrupted her education and well-being.

“I was just really depressed and I was always in bed. … I couldn’t eat more than a few crackers a day. All I did was sleep,” Emma told Uncloseted Media and Fierce Healthcare. “[The hate and bullying] just kind of makes you feel like a burden and like you shouldn’t be like the person that you are, even if that’s who you should actually be.”

When done right, schools can offer crucial opportunities for community, resources and support, but they are increasingly a breeding ground for bullying and political threats. Queer students reported their school climate felt more hostile during the 2024-25 school year due to an anti-LGBTQ political climate, a Glisten survey found, and over two-thirds of respondents faced harassment or assault because of their gender identity or expression.

Some states have instituted explicit policies to repress LGBTQ identities. In Florida, schools must abide by so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws that restrict K-3 classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity and prohibit all employees in K-12 public schools from using students’ preferred pronouns. Teachers must also report changes to a student’s name, pronoun use or restroom use to parents, which effectively outs children who haven’t told their parents about their identity. In Ohio, teachers are required to notify the parents if a student requests to identify as a gender that doesn’t align with their biological sex.

And even in Massachusetts, a blue state with the country’s only Commission on LGBTQ Youth, schools have become tight-lipped in their support, whether out of fear of losing funding or retaliation from parents. “Almost all districts [have] some anti-LGBTQ activity,” the Commission’s executive director, Shaplaie Brooks, says. Examples include parents opting students out of LGBTQ-inclusive education; rejection of parent advisory councils meant to ensure LGBTQ inclusivity; bullying from students and rejection from educators; and administrators requesting flag removal or other material signaling affirmation.

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Not ‘The Next Nex Benedict’

Angela didn’t want Emma to be “the next Nex Benedict,” referring to the nonbinary 16-year-old who was beaten unconscious by kids in a school bathroom and later died from the injuries.

Even before the bullying started, she created an extensive integration plan with Emma’s junior high school. All was going smoothly until a teacher accidentally deadnamed Emma while taking attendance, even though the records were updated. From there, bullying “spread like wildfire,” according to Angela. And once it began, Angela exchanged over 60 emails with school administrators to ensure that the bullying would stop, but to no avail.

The school did not respond to Uncloseted Media and Fierce Healthcare’s request for comment.

Beyond attacks on queer rights, some lawmakers are deprioritizing mental health in general. In 2025, just a month after President Donald Trump ordered the closure of the Department of Education (DOE), the agency ended $1 billion in grants meant to train and support mental health professionals who work in schools. And in Indiana, Republican legislators removed teacher training requirements related to social-emotional learning and cultural competency.

Schools are the most common institutional entry point into mental healthcare for youth. But staffing models vary wildly. Some districts have well-staffed health centers, while others share a single provider across multiple schools. Half of all U.S. schools cite inadequate access to a licensed mental health professional as a top factor limiting their ability to provide mental health services to students, according to KFF, a nonprofit research organization.

The share of schools reporting inadequate funding for mental health services has grown since 2021 and resources vary by state. In California, public school students on private or government insurance qualify for free therapy and counseling. Meanwhile, Alabama ranks last nationally in mental health access, with many rural districts struggling with staffing shortages and inconsistent funding. Last June, 16 states successfully sued the DOE over terminated grants, with funding restored for those states by a federal judge in October.

Even organizations trying to support schools are hitting roadblocks. Bring Change to Mind, co-founded in 2010 by actress Glenn Close, operates a national student-led high school club program focused on mental health. In 2025, the organization found that 92% of registered club participants said they take better care of their mental health as a result.

Bring Change to Mind had spent seven years building out its high school program in Indiana with the support of the state education department. The organization also launched a middle school pilot at the agency’s request. But in 2025, its DOE funding was not renewed. “I have to find money elsewhere, until things change,” says Pamela Harrington, the organization’s executive director.

And last month in Minnesota, administrators shut down student attempts at Benilde-St. Margaret’s to start a mental health club, despite Bring Change to Mind offering seed funding. The school is near where a shooting took place last year, and the club was intended to support students struggling with the tragedy.

Harrington has also noticed that many students have stopped self-identifying as LGBTQ over the past several years. Registration for the organization’s annual student summit is down, even though participation is up. “Some students don’t feel safe registering,” she says.

Crisis Care Is Another First Entry Point for Many

All of these barriers may be contributing to a surge in youth going to the hospital in a mental health crisis. From 2011 to 2020, despite an overall decrease in pediatric emergency department (ED) visits, the portion of mental health-related ED visits by kids and teens soared, with the sharpest increase for suicide-related visits.

In New York state, Northwell’s Cohen Children’s Medical Center sees a disproportionate number of kids who are queer. Whether it’s bullying, depression, anxiety, trauma or suicidality, “all the rates are much higher for these kids, they’re much more vulnerable,” says Vera Feuer, the former vice president for child and adolescent psychiatry at Northwell, who left the organization in April. “Because community access is so difficult, we are often the first mental health providers that these families ever see,” says Feuer, who is now the chief clinical officer of the Child Mind Institute.

She says the main reasons kids end up in the ED for mental health are suicidality and self-harm, or behavioral problems like aggression. Conflicts involving sexuality or gender identity are often part of the trigger, and can get worse in a hospital environment if staff are not properly trained. “Feeling like you add value to the people around you versus feeling like you’re a burden, are really important components of suicidal crises,” Feuer says.

Many patients in the ED deal with trauma. And while evidence suggests that trauma-informed care has a positive impact on patients, the approach isn’t always used in EDs. The psychiatry team at Northwell is trained to be trauma-informed and affirming, which could look like wearing a Pride badge, asking a patient their pronouns or determining if they want to disclose their identity to their parents.

Feuer says even in cases of significant self-harm, some parents are “in utter denial” about their child’s identity. They might see the behavior as attention-seeking and be more concerned about their school test the next day. “The parent is also in crisis, and their brains don’t work particularly well when they’re with us,” she says.

When Emma was admitted to Carle Foundation Hospital in Illinois after the attack at school, Angela says she was offered “zero resources.”

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Speaking generally about the hospital’s policies, Holly Cook, director of the Carle Foundation Hospital ED, wrote in an email that the ED has multiple protocols in place for patients experiencing mental health crises, including referrals to the outpatient psychiatric team and community mental health resources. “The top priority … is keeping the patient safe, treating the patient with dignity and helping to explain the processes as they occur,” Cook wrote.

But Angela says none of those supports were offered to Emma after her hospitalization. She says they were left without referrals for counseling, trauma services or clear guidance about where Emma could receive ongoing emotional support.

“The hospital ER doc was aware of the situation,” Angela says. “They didn’t even give me the proper ‘victim information’ paperwork that includes those types of resources. … We got nothing regarding mental health resources from the hospital. … I ended up finding resources on my own for crisis counseling because I just really needed somebody to help my kid.”

A Carle Health spokesperson declined to comment on Emma’s case, citing HIPAA, and reiterated the hospital’s priority of patient safety and dignity.

In other parts of mental healthcare, resources are strained. Last year, the Trump administration cut the LGBTQ-specific option on the 988 suicide hotline, even though suicide rates dropped 11% below projections since its rollout. And the 10 states with the largest 988 service uptake saw rates drop 18% below projections.

All of this is occurring when research demonstrates that LGBTQ youth who are able to access affirming mental healthcare report lower rates of suicide attempts.

Angela, aware that her daughter needed urgent support after she was attacked, found Project Oz, an Illinois nonprofit that provides survival aid to youth. They provided crisis care weekly to Emma, which helped her process the trauma of the attack. But the care was limited to six weeks due to their care model.

“She really listened and included my [trans identity] in the care,” Emma says. “I wish I had a little bit more time because I got to a point of recovery but it wasn’t complete. I get it could only be six weeks, but it takes time to process this stuff.”

“My biggest barrier to mental healthcare has honestly been people not understanding,” she says. After searching for years, Emma has found a trans therapist that Angela says “sees all the trans youth in [their] town.”

After working with him, Emma’s self-harm has reduced from an average of once a month to only once in the past six months.

“I’m happier. I’ve worked through my struggles a lot more and [don’t] keep it in the back of my mind because that’s what I used to always do. I would just avoid my problems.”

Parental Consent Is a Significant Barrier to Care

Emma was fortunate to have her mom in her corner. For many LGBTQ youth who need mental healthcare, getting their parents on board can be a barrier. Family rejection has among the strongest associations with suicidality and poor mental health in LGBTQ youth.

Jessica Schleider, an associate professor at Northwestern University, came across this in her research as director of the school’s Lab for Scalable Mental Health.

When she initially required parental consent for teen participation in youth mental health research, it led to homogenous samples. But when the researchers secured university approval to waive parental consent for future studies, “samples suddenly became about 80-85% LGBTQ, from 5-10%,” Schleider says. Through follow-up studies, it became clear that fearing parents was often the reason teens avoided care.

This revelation prompted Schleider to lead a study analyzing parental consent laws for mental healthcare around the country. In 2024, she found that a third of states have laws prohibiting teens from independently consenting to therapy. In these states, the study found teens with depression were significantly less likely to get treatment. Things have likely gotten more restrictive since then, per Schleider.

“Parental rights movements have really been sweeping recently, and a lot of these laws are getting more stringent,” says Schleider. The movement hinges on a “push for parents to be involved in every facet of their children’s lives to their detriment,” Schleider adds.

Trans youth are much more likely to experience homelessness than their peers and are overrepresented in foster care. Getting kicked out of their home for identifying as LGBTQ further complicates access. Will they have an ID? Will they know their Social Security number? What about transportation? “We have a healthcare system that’s built on forms and insurance cards,” says Lipe, the private practice therapist in Indiana. “When you don’t have those things, getting access to long-term care or even just routine care becomes impossible.”

Schleider says states, both red and blue, don’t realize the extent to which parental consent laws create barriers to accessing care. “It reflects how these structures and systems are all built, which is without youth input,” she says.

Astrid, a 17-year-old in central Florida who didn’t want her last name included for safety concerns, says that her mental health struggles are fueled by her parents’ rejection of her trans identity. She says these struggles are compounded by the fact that it’s been difficult getting her parents on board with seeking consistent care.

Astrid has experienced depression and anxiety and has self-harmed since she was 10. As therapy helped lessen her gender dysmorphia and body dysphoria as she transitioned, it was a blow when her family had to change insurance and their provider was no longer in network.

“I just can’t have this fight with my parents again,” she told Uncloseted Media and Fierce Healthcare. “It took so long to convince [them] to let me try therapy. … They just think I should occupy myself more, and it will distract me.”

As a result, Astrid has not been in therapy for the last two years.

LGBTQ youth who report living in very accepting communities attempted suicide at less than a third of the rate of those who live in very unaccepting communities, per The Trevor Project. “That’s why chosen family, chosen community is so important,” says Glover. “That’s the basic safety net that we need.”

With his family’s and care team’s support, Daniel Trujillo never experienced suicidality, his mother says. “He’s proof of what happens when you affirm and you love someone,” Lizette says.

Freedom of Speech Makes It Harder to Police Harm

Once parents are on board, navigating the network of providers and discerning who may be affirming or rejecting still remains a challenge. To demonstrate this, Avery, an 18-year-old from Mississippi, opened up his laptop to Psychology Today, a therapy provider directory, to find a therapist. Avery, who is questioning his gender and has been in and out of therapy for six years to help with his anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation, filters for “transgender” therapists, and only a handful in his area appear. When he adds another filter looking for therapists who work with trans people with autism, zero results turn up.

“There’s a big difference between mental healthcare and good mental healthcare,” says Avery, who asked to use only his first name for safety reasons. “A lot of queer people are dealing with complex cases. I have autism and I want to be able to work with someone who understands that as well as my gender.”

Avery describes a long history of therapy providers who were unequipped or dismissive of his gay identity. Several therapists avoided engaging with his gender questioning altogether, leaving him feeling ignored.

There were more extreme scenarios. He says one therapist used a form of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, a type of psychotherapy often used for PTSD, suggesting that his sexuality was something he could change.

“He said, ‘Have you considered that identity is culturally constructed and that you could just construct an identity that’s not gay?’” Avery says. “It made it hard to trust therapists for me.”

With Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy being overturned by the Supreme Court on free speech grounds last month, therapists now have more legal protections to use nonaffirming language with clients. Beyond that, the ability for LGBTQ-affirming therapists to practice freely in certain states is being challenged. In March, Texas’ attorney general issued a legal opinion declaring that the prohibitions outlined in a law that makes it illegal for healthcare providers to “transition” kids also apply to certain mental health providers. This limits what they can say in sessions.

“They want to make any mental healthcare for trans kids that is affirming punishable but they are saying free speech protects conversion therapy, so that is hypocritical in our minds,” GLMA’s Sheldon says. “It is going to be a very challenging landscape for mental health providers.”

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If You Find It, Can You Afford It?

Even when you identify an affirming provider, finding one that takes insurance is another battle. According to The Trevor Project, affordability was the top reason queer youth couldn’t access care in 2025, with 46% reporting they could not afford it.

Many therapists don’t accept insurance, citing difficulties in becoming in-network with payers and low reimbursement rates.

“We’re quite literally pricing kids out of survival,” Lipe, the therapist in Indiana, says.

Aaron Martin, a licensed marriage and family therapist with a virtual private practice in San Francisco, accepts several commercial insurance plans. And his reimbursement rates are not only low but also sometimes delayed. For over a month, Martin was owed over $1,000 by a major insurer. Chasing them down by phone meant wasted time that could’ve been spent seeing patients. “It becomes this really awful game,” Martin says. “It makes a lot of sense why providers are just opting out [of insurance] altogether.”

The Savannah Pride Center offers therapy for free or as low as $5, regardless of insurance status. But getting in is challenging. Parental consent is required, and there is a waiting list. “We definitely saw an uptick in clients right after the election,” Michael Bell, the center’s executive director, says.

The Path Forward

To combat the shortage of providers, especially in more rural areas, experts interviewed for this story agree that telehealth has emerged as a powerful medium to support queer patients. Use of telehealth for mental healthcare has increased in schools, though some schools are parting ways with virtual providers as federal COVID-19 relief funds expire.

“Technology is here,” says Ashwin Vasan, a physician and epidemiologist and the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “Let’s make it better. … When you do that, you can actually steer it towards meeting the needs of the most vulnerable.”

Virtual providers like Charlie Health are seeing the positive impact. In 2025, 34% of Charlie Health’s teen patients identified as LGBTQ, many of whom struggle with suicidal ideation. “Virtual care can really meaningfully change access and safety equations,” says Caroline Fenkel, co-founder and chief clinical officer at Charlie Health. For example, for trans youth who have not had top surgery, being able to log on virtually where they only have to show their face can feel more comfortable.

Though telehealth can help in some cases, policy change is needed. Akré, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says the barriers trans youth face are systemic, not individual. “Our mental healthcare system as it’s designed, is not really meant to accommodate individuals with diverse identities,” she says.

Echoing Akré, Lipe notes chronic stressors like poverty and disability don’t have an easy fix: “We don’t currently have solutions that match the complexity of that problem.” Some social needs are addressable, like transportation to care. “Anything we can do to help reduce those barriers, so that they can access those types of services, is critical for upstream prevention,” Lipe says.

While expanding LGBTQ-specific training for providers is often cited as a solution, Akré argues that education alone won’t fix the problem. “It doesn’t change behavior at scale—policy does.”

In addition to mandating training requirements, Akré recommends stronger accountability for discrimination in care and clearer reporting systems so patients aren’t left “reporting into a black hole.” Without those structural changes, she says, trans youth will continue to navigate a system that too often requires them to fight for care at the very moment they need it most.

When it comes to schools, Glisten, a national nonprofit advocating for LGBTQ students, says queer kids feel safest when reports of bullying are taken seriously. Glisten recommends that bullies should be held accountable, with parent involvement, and schools should support students in organizing gender and sexuality alliances.

In the absence of sweeping policy changes, non-therapy tools remain a key access point. Schleider’s lab runs Project YES, a free online mental health support tool that offers referrals to local or crisis resources. Within the tool, users can access Project RISE, designed for LGBTQ youth, which teaches skills to overcome internalized stigma.

“I definitely believe that’s our best bet, particularly for these historically stigmatized groups, where changing laws and policies is going to take too long,” Schleider says.

For Quinn, things are still hard, but their affirming therapist has changed how they move through tough moments.

After years of shutting down when things felt overwhelming, Quinn’s biggest change, according to their mom, is their ability to express what they want and need.

“[Their therapist] was kind of the catalyst for us to find a gender clinic and start on estrogen and puberty blockers,” Hilary says.

Quinn says they feel more themselves and feel more engaged with life. Their mom has noticed.

“I went to Costco the other day, and they wanted to come with me,” Hilary says. “That didn’t used to happen. I get to see my kid again.”

Neither the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine nor the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which publish clinical guidelines for providers, responded to multiple requests for comment.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with corrected figures from Charlie Health: In 2025, 34% of its teen patients identified as queer, not 43%

Editor’s note: in a previous version of this story, GLMA claims to be the largest online directory of affirming providers. It has been updated to “one of the largest.”

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This story talks about addiction, suicide and substance use. If you or someone you know needs help, resources can be found here.

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Last year, at 17 years old, Jack Wonnacott remembers taking a work break in his car, tears streaming down his face as he clutched the steering wheel. He had been keeping his gay identity a secret, and the weight of staying closeted was destroying his mental health.

As he sat in a Vancouver parking lot, he contemplated suicide.

“My mindset that day was, ‘I’m probably not going to go back to my home after this. I’m probably not going to see my family again,’” Wonnacott, now 18, told Uncloseted Media. After making a phone call to the 988 crisis hotline—a mental health helpline funded by the Canadian government—the operator felt that Wonnacott was a danger to himself. They called the police to have him picked up and taken to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

His parents were eventually notified and picked him up. After returning home, he came out to his family and found acceptance. But getting to that point had felt impossible.

Wonnacott’s experience is not rare. Though Canada is widely considered one of the most LGBTQ-friendly countries in the world, and in 2022 committed to providing $100 million CAD to support its queer communities, rates of mental illness among LGBTQ Canadian youth are similar to those of the U.S.

In both countries, LGBTQ youth report mental health challenges at significantly higher rates than their cisgender, straight peers. In Canada, 77% of LGBTQ youth report being the target of bullying. In addition, they are five times more likely to consider suicide and seven times more likely to attempt it.

And despite its universal healthcare system, 75% of Canadian kids with mental health disorders, including countless LGBTQ young people, do not have access to specialized treatment.

“If you think we’re in some sort of progressive place where everything is good, that’s absolutely not the case,” says Dani Gagnon, a registered psychotherapist (qualifying) who specializes in working with LGBTQ clients ages 16 and up. “It’s really disappointing that this is happening in Canada.”

“I think that there needs to be an overhaul in the way that we think about providing service, and the availability of those services needs to be rapidly ramped up,” Aaron Sanderson, the president and CEO of Kids Help Phone Foundation, told Uncloseted Media.

Jack’s Story

Wonnacott started feeling a looming anxiety when he began questioning his sexuality at 14 years old. “Knowing people are going to judge me, it impacted me quite a bit. I went through a phase of bad depression,” he says. “Am I risking losing access to my home, my freedoms, necessities? [What] if my family doesn’t accept it?”

Social settings and school made things worse. As an avid gym-goer, Wonnacott remembers locker room talk that made him question how safe it would be to come out. “There was a lot of talk about girls, and it was also a lot of conservative political talk,” he says. “You got a lot of use of slurs, a lot of calling things ‘gay.’ It just made me feel like maybe it’s not the best environment for me.”

The use of anti-LGBTQ slurs can be a destructive force for many young queer Canadians. A 2021 Egale Canada survey found that 62% of LGBTQ students felt unsafe at school, and a 2025 study found that the health disparities faced by queer Canadians are the “result of stigma associated with queer identities.”

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The Boiling Point

As Wonnacott continued to spiral, his depression intensified. “If I don’t fit in, is there going to be some sort of repercussion? Am I going to be ousted?” he remembers thinking daily.

The weight of keeping his gay identity a secret led Wonnacott into a “dark mental place.” Paying attention in school, enjoying soccer games and even playing the guitar became challenging. To cope with his mounting anxiety and depression, he tried to conform.

“It built up over time, but it turned into ‘Maybe I just need to correct myself … to become normal,’” he says. “It snowballed into trying to change myself, and feeling like I’m not accepted or worthy.”

The desire to alter himself to fit in led to a cycle of restrictive eating. “I was not eating as much. Almost … starving myself at times,” he says. “I did it almost to punish myself. I felt like I was inherently wrong.”

One 2025 study found that gay and bisexual young men in both Canada and the U.S. are over two times more likely to meet criteria for a probable eating disorder diagnosis than their heterosexual peers.

By the 12th grade, Wonnacott’s mental health went from bad to worse when a crush on a friend led to complicated and intense feelings. He knew he needed support and managed to get on an antidepressant medication, commonly known as Lexapro, which Wonnacott says helped to even out his mood. Connecting with a gay therapist through a local government-funded youth wellness support center was also a big help. “We made a connection, and he was able to understand what I was going through,” he says.

Unlike Wonnacott, many Canadians face intense barriers to accessing free therapy. One 2023 study found that Canadians face wait times of over five months to see a mental health professional.

“We hear about young people waiting for years for access to counseling services,” says Sanderson.

That leads many to pay for therapy, where the average cost of a session ranges from $125 to $225 CAD. This creates a cost barrier for many queer kids, and especially the 25-40% of homeless youth in Canada who identify as LGBTQ.

“There’s a lot of therapy that is not covered by the government. It’s hell on earth trying to get an appointment with a psychotherapist,” Gagnon says.

Gagnon believes this leads many providers to send queer kids, many of whom need talk therapy, to psychiatrists “because it’s the easiest way to get into the mental health system.”

Sanderson agrees: “Canada struggles in [this] regard.”

Even with strong support, the homophobia Wonnacott had internalized at school translated into a deep fear that his parents would reject him.

“At one point, I was leading a double life,” he says. “If I had [known] that support from my family was coming, then it would have been different. I would have known that I shouldn’t be ashamed or scared. That would have been a game changer.”

One 2023 review published in Frontiers in Psychiatry suggested that internalized stigma is impacted by messaging and information that deem queerness as “abnormal, unhealthy, unnatural, psychopathological, and harmful.” The review found that this messaging leads LGBTQ people to develop similar negative attitudes and beliefs about themselves. And a 2009 study from McGill University found that 65% of its 220 participants dealing with internalized homophobia struggled with suicidal ideation at some point in their life.

“[The stress] built up into a feeling that I couldn’t ignore. It became bigger and bigger,” he says. “And that just built up to, ‘How do I fix it if trying to change how I look or diet didn’t help?’ Then it turned into, self-harm [and] thoughts of suicide.”

“I am isolated, I am alone in this. I am broken,” Wonnacott remembers thinking.

All of this led him to that parking lot and nearly taking his life.

Trans and Nonbinary Youth and Familial Rejection

Of all queer young people, trans and nonbinary Canadians experience the highest levels of social stigma, with trans youth being two times more likely to consider suicide than LGB youth. As a closeted kid, Casey Mariani, who identifies as nonbinary and queer, remembers being chased around the schoolyard by their peers brandishing makeshift crosses and Bibles in their face. After showing interest in starting a gay-straight alliance at their school in Toronto, Mariani’s classmates turned against them.

“At recess, they all made an anti-gay club and chased me around,” Mariani, now 23, remembers of their experience at Catholic School. “It was like I was a vampire and they’re trying to get away from me.”

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Around age 14, Mariani first started to think they might be queer. They had entered online spaces on Tumblr and found acceptance there. “I changed my name to Casey online, and I started going by that. … I was kind of living this double life. In real life, I was still going by my birth name. I hadn’t told my family anything,” they told Uncloseted Media.

Mariani grew up in a strict Catholic family with Filipino and Italian parents, where secrecy felt like the safest option.

Their concerns reflect the data: Only 7% of trans youth from immigrant families say their cultural or ethnic communities are supportive. Mariani’s mom was born in Manila and raised in a world of strict gender roles. They believe this may have contributed to their mom’s difficulty in accepting their trans identity.

“A lot of kids don’t feel comfortable or safe talking to their family about their gender identity or about their sexuality,” says Gagnon. “It sets them at a disadvantage.”

When Mariani came out in grade 10 as trans, their identity was met with skepticism. “My mom would come up to me and be like, ‘So why can’t you just be a lesbian? Why do you need to be a boy? Why do you need to transition?’” they say.

While Mariani did get a therapist at 15-years-old through a Toronto hospital, they say it didn’t provide any relief because they didn’t feel like they could trust their therapist. “There would be very long silences in the sessions because I didn’t know what I could say. … I remember she just kept trying to push me to come out to my family,” they recall.

“If I could have trusted my therapist to where I could get into the nitty-gritty of it … I think that would have lifted a huge weight off my shoulders.”

Gagnon says LGBTQ-specific training is not mandatory for licensed therapists in Canada. “Not only is queer-affirming practice not mandatory, but there’s also limited formal training around working with BIPOC clients, intersectionality and inclusive clinical language,” they say. “Much of that learning is left up to therapists to pursue independently after graduation, which creates variability in care, quality and accessibility.”

Mariani, who is autistic, remembers feeling like their therapist did not understand them. “I never really had a safe space to talk and to feel like I was being listened to,” they say.

With little to no support, Mariani’s mental health deteriorated, and at around 17 years old, they leaned into restrictive eating and alcohol. “I started taking Tylenol and drinking a whole bottle of wine almost every night,” they say.

Finding Healing

It took years until Mariani started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where they met their sponsor, who became a transformative mentor. They say if they had someone who is queer in their corner when they were younger, it would have been a huge help. “I think I wouldn’t have gotten burnt out,” they say. “They are definitely the most cherished person I have in my life right now.”

Aaron Sanderson with the Kids Help Phone Foundation believes support services for LGBTQ youth in crisis need to be made more accessible through an increase in virtual services.

“We have to consider the role that in-person, physical services might play in relation to stigma,” says Sanderson. “Walking into a building takes a different level of bravery than it does to, for example, connect with a confidential or anonymous service. … We need to make it really easy for those people, because it’s when people are not at their best that they need the support.”

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Gagnon says more training and easier access to mental health services for queer youth is essential. For Mariani, it was game changing when they eventually got paired with a gay Filipino gender therapist. They say they felt like someone could finally understand the nuances that come with being queer and from an immigrant family. “It was like, there’s finally this person seeing me,” they say.

Since calling 988 and coming out to his parents, Wonnacott is now out and proud. His relationship to his family has improved. “I am close now with my parents,” he says.

Wonnacott is now in a relationship, and says his boyfriend is “a constant presence and someone [he] can trust.”

“Coming out felt almost like a bit of defiance. I’m going to make this space for myself and not let other people’s judgment impact that,” he says. “This is my identity. I don’t have to hide it.”

Additional reporting by Hope Pisoni.

If you are a Canadian and would like to support our journalism, please consider a charitable tax-receipted donation to Uncloseted Media Canada here:

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In 2025, the global cannabis market size was valued at nearly $103 billion. By 2034, that number is expected to explode by roughly 1,400% to more than $1.43 trillion.

In short, as an increasing number of countries legalize marijuana use, everyone is starting to consume a lot more weed. And LGBTQ people tend to use cannabis at much higher rates than the general population. One study found that 55% of lesbian and 45% of gay young adults use marijuana, compared to about 33% and 37%, respectively, of their straight counterparts.

As LGBTQ people face a mental health crisis, the mainstream stereotypes that depict weed as an antidote for anxiety, panic and depression aren’t painting the full picture. And that could be exacerbating the mental health struggles so many queer people, and especially youth, face.

Here’s what the research demonstrates about marijuana and its effects on mental health:

• Multiple studies suggest a link between marijuana use and an increased risk of mental health disorders, including schizophrenia, depression and anxiety in individuals who are genetically predisposed.

• One study found that daily marijuana use, especially among younger people, makes some individuals seven times more likely to develop psychosis.

The increase in higher-potency strains of marijuana could pose unknown risks. In 1995, the average content of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in confiscated marijuana was less than 4%. In 2022, it was more than 16%. Researchers don’t know the full extent of the impact that these higher concentrations can have on mental health and especially on younger people whose brains are still developing.

• A systematic review of studies published between 2013 and 2025 found damning results for the mental health of young cannabis users:

They were 51% more likely to experience depression, 58% more likely to experience anxiety, between 50 and 65% more likely to experience suicidal ideation and 80 to 87% more likely to have attempted suicide.

• While the above stats paint a grim picture, there is also some research that suggests benefits of cannabis use:

  • A 2025 systematic review found that medicinal weed showed some efficacy in relieving withdrawal symptoms of opioid use disorder.

  • THC use has been associated with improvement of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, bipolar symptoms and sleep quality.

  • Other studies found that THC administered in a controlled setting was associated with a decrease of symptoms and adverse effects for a range of mental health disorders, including schizophrenia, psychotic symptoms and anorexia nervosa.

Beyond what we pulled from academia, there is an astounding lack of information about the interplay between weed and mental health. As we dive deeper into Mental Health Awareness Month, I hope advocacy organizations, influencers and news outlets ramp up their coverage of this important topic that affects the countless LGBTQ weed smokers, many of whom are already struggling.

Donate to Uncloseted Media

• Last month, our work was republished or cited in 20 different publications! We share all of our new stories for republication with our Uncloseted News Network, an editor’s digest of roughly 100+ editors, reporters and creators. If you want to be a part of it, shoot me an email and CC Sam Donndelinger at sam.donndelinger@unclosetedmedia.com.

• After growing up there without a safe space, a trans man creates his rural Ohio county’s first Pride (The Buckeye Flame)

  • The 24-year-old hopes to bring a sense of community to his home in Adams County

• A new US phone network for Christians aims to block porn and gender-related content (MIT Technology Review)

  • Launching next week on T-Mobile’s network, the cell plan takes a nuclear approach to online safety.

• Trans model Aariana Rose Philip makes history as first wheelchair user to attend Met Gala (PinkNews)

  • Philip is an Antiguan-American model and musician who has quadriplegic cerebral palsy. In 2018, she became the first-ever Black, transgender and physically disabled model to be represented by a major modelling industry.

• Donald Trump calls “Y.M.C.A” the “gay national anthem” & brags he’s the reason it went number 1 (LGBTQ Nation)

  • “Y.M.C.A.” spent two weeks at No. 1 in 2024, not months as Trump claimed.

• Man charged with hate crime after trying to ‘beat gay out of child’ (PinkNews)

  • The victim is reported by the Polk County Sheriff’s Office to have suffered a fractured wrist, marks and bruising across his legs, arms, stomach and back, and a contusion to his forehead.

Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:

• 🆕 SATURDAY: Though Canada is widely considered one of the most LGBTQ-friendly countries in the world, rates of mental illness among queer Canadian youth are strikingly similar to those in the U.S. Why? Canadian journalists Sophie Holland and Emma Paidra investigate.

• 🆕 TUESDAY: Why are 50% of trans youth in the U.S. who want access to mental health resources not receiving them? In a joint investigation, Fierce Healthcare and Uncloseted’s Sam Donndelinger talk with youth, families, and industry experts to uncover system-level gaps in care.

• 🆕 WEDNESDAY: On the next episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” I talk to Sam Donndelinger about her recent investigation into the foster care system, where trans youth face abuse, instability and systemic discrimination.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me with questions, complaints and story ideas!

Spencer Macnaughton, Editor-In-Chief — spencer@unclosetedmedia.com

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

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Peter Boykin used AI to create his “dream image” with President Trump. Photo courtesy of Boykin.

UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton is a new podcast by Uncloseted Media, an investigative LGBTQ-focused nonprofit news publication. Follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. YouTube // Spotify // Apple

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Peter Boykin founded Gays for Trump 10 years ago as an organization to “get out the vote” for gay Trump supporters during the president’s first run for office. The organization grew fast by creating Facebook campaigns and hosting events at the Republican National Convention. Now, over one year into Trump’s second term, Boykin’s group is smaller but still boasts 11,000 members.

In this episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Spencer sits down with Boykin to learn about why he remains “hopeful for Donald Trump” despite his disagreements about how the president has been handling LGBTQ issues.

Watch the video or read the full transcript below.

Spencer Macnaughton: Hi guys, welcome to Uncloseted Media’s new podcast with me, Spencer Macnaughton. Today, I am here with Peter Boykin. He is the founder of Gays for Trump, an organization he created during Trump’s first presidential run 10 years ago. Boykin’s group was prominent during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign when they created social media campaigns and organized events at the Republican National Convention. Now, he’s the founder of the website Go Right News, and this year he’s running for county commissioner of Alamance, North Carolina. Peter, thanks so much for speaking with me and coming on our podcast today.

Peter Boykin: Thanks for having me on today.

SM: So we talked, I think over a year ago today, shortly after Trump was elected for his second term and you were optimistic and excited about him taking the reins for a second time. We’re a year out now, how do you think he’s doing?

PB: Well, first of all, I’m saying that you got a lot of slack for talking to me, so thank you for actually talking to me. But I think it helped a lot, but I think we’re doing pretty good. I’m hopeful for Donald Trump, as Donald Trump. I’m still wary of a lot of the Republicans and some of the people in his cabinet. Not the gay members per se, but the other people like Hegseth and other individuals that I’m not really satisfied with.

SM: It’s interesting you say you’re still hopeful for Trump. I mean, him and his administration in the last year, they’ve waged an unprecedented, relentless attack against the LGBTQ community. They’ve slashed HIV and AIDS funding and funding for many other LGBTQ healthcare issues, erased mentions of transgender people, and the people he’s surrounded with aren’t just anti-trans, they’re aggressively anti-LGBTQ. How do you square that away by saying you’re still hopeful despite all he’s done?

PB: Well, I’ll tell you. First of all, a lot of the people that he’s surrounding himself [with], the gay members, are a lot of Log Cabin type people, and if you’ve done the research on Log Cabin, they do include the LGBT, you know, possibly Q. As for Trump, unfortunately, he’s got a lot other fish to fry. And there’s other members, unfortunately, that have taken back over, you know? The evangelistical Christians, for one, love to take over our groups and good ideas and I feel like they’ve kind of weaseled their way back in unfortunately, and I don’t see a good future for the Republican party if they continue down that road. So I’m not optimistic on the future of the Republican party, I’m only going to be optimistic about what Donald Trump’s doing that’s not regarding the gay community. I can also say that a lot of these, if you break it down, it just seems to be a tax on the trans community per se. I’m not exactly happy with that, but I know a lot of the gays take up for it, but it’s usually the trans community that we’re seeing different rules and laws and things happen. And again, I’m not exactly happy on those issues. It’s again, not the same Trump that we had before, but it’s a different ballgame, and I guess that’s how politics are, unfortunately.

SM: Mm-hmm. And you’re 100% right. I mean, he’s passed a litany of executive orders rolling back trans rights, and the rhetoric that he’s projected toward the trans community has been unrelenting. But he’s also done a lot for gay and lesbian rights by wiping references to all LGBTQ people from certain spaces on White House pages. I find it interesting because a lot of folks I talk to who are Republican or conservative leaning want to blame everyone else but Trump for these things. And at the end of the day, he’s the president of the United States. So why can’t you say, “This is fucked, what Donald Trump is doing”? It’s not the conservatives. It’s not the people around him. He’s the man. He’s the number one and he’s in charge. What makes you have pause by pointing the finger right at him?

PB: Well, Donald Trump is one person. Our government is more than one individual. He might have appointed these individuals, but you’ve got people like [Pete Hegseth] that want to basically do a query search on gay, get rid of the null and gay and other things like that.

SM: Pete Hegseth, you mean? Pete Hegseth?

PB: Whatever his name is, he’s a drunk. I don’t care. I can’t stand the man. I want him gone. I think that you’ve got stupid people involved in this cabinet. Unfortunately, Donald Trump falls for people flattering him. And I don’t know if he exactly knows everything that’s going on. He’s an older man now, he had an assassination attempt, you’ve got other things on his plate and unfortunately you’ve got these individuals in his cabinet doing these. So I find it hard to believe, I find it hard to say it’s on Donald Trump per se. Maybe it’s a little bit. Maybe he could stand up and say, “Hey, I support Pride Month” or whatever it is. I would like to see that. I’ll tell you this, I think it was the election season. He came to North Carolina at our North Carolina dinner and he spoke about building a wall and things like that. Then he mentioned, I think there’s a common thing that Donald Trump said, something like trans for all or something like that, I don’t know. But he said something about trans. And unfortunately—

SM: He says consistently, he wants to get rid of, quote, “transgender for everybody.” That’s something he said dozens of times. Yeah.

PB: He said something into effect like that and then everybody stands up, clap clap clap, standing ovation. But Donald Trump also said, “Well, I wish y’all would clap like that, and be excited about things that actually matter, you know, like the wall and immigration.” So he literally called them out. So unfortunately I think he fell into the whole, “Well this is what the base wants,” you know? And all you hear is this woke, anti-woke, anti-woke which to me, all I hear is anti-gay, anti-gay, anti-gay. And I’m not happy. Again, I’m not happy with a lot of the Republican Party. I went and spoke to our local North Carolina LGBTQ Nation. I talked about it. There’s an article about that where I literally said, “The Republican party is barking up the wrong tree. They’re letting the social conservatives in too much.” But that doesn’t change my commitment as a gay Republican or a Republican because the only way that I can fight that BS is from within the party. You can’t fight it from outside the party, that’s just not how politics works. I’m having a fight internally with Republicans. I’ve got an 11,000-plus group of gay Republicans now on Facebook, that’s not just the gays for Trump now it’s gay Republicans and gays for Trump, and I’m dealing with this whole drop the T crap coming from the group and I am fighting with that daily. “I hate pride. I don’t like the rainbow flag. Oh good for what they’re doing in Stonewall.” And it’s irritating, I consider myself a constitutional for liberty. I consider myself a moderate, right-leaning moderate. I don’t really like the word conservative. And the more I’m getting down the rabbit hole of politics, I’m like a lot of individuals. We ar3—more and more people are becoming unaffiliated because they’re tired of both parties’ BS.

SM: And when you get frustrated and irritated by them, by conservatives who want to drop the T or do away with Pride Month or these sort of things, you mentioned that you don’t think that’s the best strategy for the party. Why does it irritate you and why don’t you think that is the best strategy?

PB: To me, personally, social policy should not be left or right, period. Like civil rights, gay rights, things like that, they should not be left or right. If I’m for gay rights you shouldn’t be able to consider me like some leftist. Unfortunately, we’ve got a lot of social conservatives in my party, and they’re ready to die on the hill because a guy in heels bothers them. And it’s stupid. It’s just ridiculous.

SM: And when you think about that, there’s a group of, I think, more than 40 socially conservative groups who just launched the Greater Than campaign, which is a new effort to overturn gay marriage. What are your thoughts on that? And again, these groups are directly tied to the Trump administration. I mean, it’s confusing to me how you can still stand by him when at the end of the day he’s the final voice on these issues a lot of the time.

PB: Trump can be the final voice, but unfortunately, again, he’s still just one voice. You’ve got these groups who will organize—

SM: But he’s the president of the United States and he’s surrounded by—

PB: He can be the president in the United States, but he can’t make other people do everything.

SM: He can’t make other people do anything, but he’s decided to appoint people like Pete Hegseth, people like Kristi Noem, people who have horrifically anti-LGBTQ and anti-gay backgrounds. So, you know, I think there’s a lot of people out there who still stand with him, but how can you stand with him when you’re denouncing these people who he decided to put in charge?

PB: I still don’t like ‘em. I mean, if you put other people like Scott Bessent and other individuals who are gay, he’s got a very good gay cabinet. Of course, you’re going to hear about the Petes and the Kristi Noems, you know, and I don’t like ‘em. I verbally have said I don’t like ‘em, that’s my only way I can fight it. I’m not Donald Trump, I can’t make him change his mind. Maybe he’s got a choice of, maybe the choice is worse, maybe he doesn’t have a choice. Shit, I’d like to take the job and there’s plenty of other people you can bring in. Unfortunately, I think he’s trying to keep some sort of legacy, but unfortunately to me it’s tattered a little bit. Again, I still support Donald Trump because I think he was the best person in office. Maybe if the Democrats had got off their ass and actually got a decent candidate? You know, I could support a decent candidate. I don’t hide the fact that I didn’t vote for our governor candidate of Mark Robinson. Unfortunately, Donald Trump, I don’t know. I don’t know if it was adjustment because of the almost the suicide—not the suicide—almost the assassination attempt. You’ve got the killing of Charlie Kirk. There’s a lot of factors in play. I’m not making excuses for Donald Trump. By supporting Donald Trump, I’m not making excuses. Ronald Reagan, and I say it all the time, 80% my friend, 20% my foe, does not make you my enemy. Donald Trump still sits in that 80% range. But everything I work on is not just because gay rights is not going to be the only issue like, oh, I’m out. I can still openly, I’m not hiding it, I’m openly disgusted with a lot of the things that happen. And I tell my group of 11,000 people that I might have to fight against half of them how I feel. And if they don’t like it, they can get the hell out.

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SM: Mm-hmm. And for the record, you mentioned Mark Robinson and I’m glad you denounce him. He is a former North Carolina gubernatorial candidate who has compared gay and trans people to maggots and filth. And that was shortly before his porn history leaked and it was discovered that he had a strong affinity for trans porn, but that’s another story for another day and one you can read at UnclosetedMedia.com if you like. But Peter, what are you telling those 11,000 gay Republicans? Because I think a lot of people listening to this are like “how in the hell can you be a gay Republican at this point given everything that’s happened?” What are you hearing are their reasons at this point?

PB: I get a lot of comments, I take flack. People actually have discussions in there. I had to lay down the law on some people because I would post just something simple and all of a sudden it’d be a meme of cut the T, you know, cut the T and I literally just got like all caps like “Tired of hearing this crap. Don’t post it on this. Get the hell out.” You know? And I’m sure that some of them are like, “Oh, I won’t leave,” you know? “Oh, you’ve got this group turned leftist.” I’m like, bullshit. I’m the same as I was before. I established the group, not as a Republican group, as a group that supporters of Donald Trump and the big tent and the MAGA and everything. Unfortunately, MAGA has kind of devolved again. The Evangelisticals took over the Tea Party. They took over America First. They took over MAGA. They always take over our groups.

SM: But Peter, it’s interesting that you say you want to stick with the Republican party. You still believe in the Republican party. That’s really interesting. But when there has been such a strong evangelical takeover of the party, and you have a lot of the people in the highest positions of power who believe that gay marriage is akin to giving pets or pedophiles the right to marry, does part of you not just want to say, screw it? The Democrats are way more in line with who I am and my existence and my life with my husband?

PB: I would say that, again, that you’re separating the social part. [That] it should be left to right. I’m like, no.

SM: It’s still fiscally that you really feel strong about it.

PB: And the issue is, if you’ve got to think of it, you do a deep dive? The Democrat party, the people, members of the Democrat Party are really good at separating their politics from their religion. Unfortunately, the Republicans, it’s like you’ve got to embed the religion with the politics, which goes to the whole groups trying to get rid of our gay marriage.

SM: I mean, you know, speaking about the transgender community specifically, like it has been an all out war that the administration has waged against this community. There have been, you know, false claims that they’re linked to terrorism. A lot of the trans people that I’ve spoken with, they’re really afraid. They’re thinking about moving. There’s been a brain drain of people leaving the United States to other countries where they can feel safer. What would you say to trans Americans who are listening to this interview and saying, “You are supporting somebody still who is literally putting me in danger, not making me feel safe, making me want to leave the country”?

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PB: Well I can still say, you gotta hold on to your constitutional values. I’m fighting for people’s constitutional values, and that includes transgenders. I do not like what Pete did with the military. Unfortunately, you’ve got, you know, far-right groups, far-right groups, I’m telling, and they’re all this trans-trans crap. Donald Trump’s fell into it, I don’t like it, and I can continue to say I don’t like it. But again... You gotta have a candidate on the Democrat side that can do the job of other things. We’re not gonna have a country if we have some great president up there then all he can do is gay issues. If he can’t do crap else other than gay issues then hey, I would say you probably still need to leave this country because honestly I don’t care how safe it is for gays and trans or anything if the rest of the country’s falling apart.

Then it’s not gonna do us any good. I even said it the other day, it was like a few months ago where there was illegals or whatever undocumented people raising hell in California setting fire to places and meanwhile there was a nice trans group of like what 50 people at a pride just walking you know with their flags and I literally posted, I said, I’d rather hang out with those 50 people than what’s going on in California. Meanwhile, I got Republicans griping about those 50 people and ignoring what’s going on in California. Like get your mind on what matters. And that’s what I always say all the time. Get your mind on what matters. Quit worrying about the trans. I’m telling people in my group that I didn’t create this group to bash trans or bash another group, because that’s BS. That’s just escapism. That’s actually, we’re no different, those people are no different than Republicans trying to blame the gays for everything. Like educate yourself on our history and our gay rights and our rainbow flag and you know, that’s the only thing I can do in my group is spend more time doing damage control trying to keep our group going the right path, not as in politically but going the right path, you know, for our Constitution and understanding what to do. Then fighting—you know, I’m exhausted, honestly.

SM: No, I think a lot of people are exhausted in every pocket of this country, perhaps. You also run Go Right News, which, and you say you’re a journalist, that the publication stands up for truth, integrity and accountability. Tell us a little bit more about Go Right News.

PB: Before I had like MAGA First News. I called it MAGA First News and then I’m like, “You know, MAGA is not gonna be around forever.” You know, I’m gonna think of, like, a direction for people. And then I think you had Melania with the be nice, do good, be nice kind of thing so I was like Go Right News. I know people are gonna think, “Oh well you’re talking about like go right politically,” and you can think that if you want. Especially as time goes, it’s more like, go right. As I say, do right, be right, think right, vote right. And it’s not exactly like, right wing. So when I do my articles in my news, and I’m not a journalist like, as in like, I’m more of a citizen journalist, I am more of an opinionist. I write articles, I change things, I try to wait, I try not to jump on the news right off the bat. I don’t care if somebody sees it as left or right, I write and I put my opinion out there.

SM: Yeah, and it’s interesting. And Trump has obviously coined the term fake news, right? And has really kind of introduced this concept to many Americans that you can’t trust mainstream media. You can’t trust professional journalists, you know? I’m curious for you, somebody who’s claiming to be producing news and calling yourself a citizen journalist, do you think you’re accurate news? And if so, what are the processes you go through to get an article out there? Like, do you have a legal department, a standards department, do you have fact checkers? What’s the process for your news articles?

PB: I research articles from all over the venue: right, left, middle, check on some of the AI sites. You can do some fact checks on items. I try to search different areas, I have a few people I talk to about individual things, but I’ve also stated if the news changes or if something’s different... I’m gonna be the first one to say, “Look, I got that wrong.” And then a lot of times what I’m putting out is my opinion. I’ll state it, it’s my opinion. If I have sources, I’ll put the sources in. But it’s usually based on my opinion but I’ll also put the fact that we know of at the time. And if I had a correction or whatever, I have no problem correcting it because I go on the, I go especially with these shootings and things they’ve had recently, and it does so much from the left and the right, sharing just bullcrap, you know, just like viral crap, you know, that got no facts behind it.

SM: And what do you think is the most accurate news source today in 2026? If you had to pick one, what would you say?

PB: I don’t really trust all of them. They’re all, everything is opinionated now, unfortunately. You have to really have to cross-reference all of them. I mean, you’re probably looking for me to say like Fox News or like, no.

SM: I’m not looking for, I’m just curious. Because I think a lot of people who create sites like you, I’m genuinely curious as someone who runs a news publication, like where do you guys distill the truth from, right? So like name some publications that you’d take to distill the truth. I’m super curious.

PB: I mean, I pull from all sides. I kind of see a cross-reference, you know, like say NBCU news, Fox News, Skynet—whatever they call it, Sky News—even Al Jiro, Al Jazeera, whatever. Mainstream media that tries to put out correct news, but you find a lot of stuff on telegram. You find a lot of stuff on… some things on Reddit. You know and you know Reddit’s very left-leaning.

SM: But how do you know that what you find isn’t just a robot or a bot in China or an AI machine?

PB: Well, I have to look at what they’re saying and I have to compare to see if there’s actually accurate news somewhere else that kind of agrees with it.

SM: You held an event on Facebook on February 5th, and that was called, “If Arresting Journalists Is a Dictatorship, What Was January 6?” Why do you compare those things? Why do you bring those two things up, arresting journalists and January 6? Because when I think about those two things, they’re starkly different.

PB: The article, and it was a comparison of that recent event, I can’t, what’s his name, um...

SM: Don Lemon?

PB: Yeah, Don Lemon, you know, went into the church when they were doing this protest, which I don’t believe they should have been going into the church. And I was comparing it, like they were saying, “Oh, I shouldn’t have been arrested because I was covering the news.” And in that retrospect, I was talking about [how] there was actually legitimate people there that were covering January 6. And those individuals got arrested, just like he got arrested. So if all of a sudden the First Amendment rights and your journalism rights work for the left, or him, then they should have worked just as easily for individuals on the right.

SM: But Don Lemon, I mean, didn’t cause any violence, didn’t break windows.

PB: There was a lot of journalists at January 6 that didn’t cause any.

SM: Yeah, and I think when you watch the videos of Don Lemon in that church versus the hundreds of rioters in the Capitol and compare the videos, we can let the audience decide how to compare those two things, and maybe we can agree to disagree. I don’t wanna take too much of your time, Peter, but I wanted to end just one last question, because it sat with me last year when we spoke that it really seems like you really do genuinely care about people’s lives, and that’s what motivates a lot of what you do. And I know you mentioned you care a lot about LGBTQ youth last year, right? And still, you know, roughly 40% of queer kids in America seriously considered suicide in the last year. You know, last June during Pride Month, Trump axed the 988 LGBTQ youth hotline option where queer kids struggling with mental health could call for assistance and help. I know I keep asking how you square it away, but I mean, I think a lot of people watching will be wanting me to ask this question. How do you still support a president who does something like that?

PB: To me, I agree that they should have the option there, you know? Just like the veteran option, just the LGBT—why not? What was it hurting to have a stupid number on there? How much money does it cost to really have an extra number on there? You know, “press 2 for if you’re LGBTQ.” I again, I think that’s just more of the BS bullcrap. Like oh we got to get rid of the woke stuff. Oh, we got to get rid of this. It’s ridiculous. It’s stupid. It doesn’t serve us at all.

SM: Well, let’s leave it there. Peter, I really appreciate you coming on and speaking with me and Uncloseted Media. I think it’s good to have these nuanced conversations and to hear your perspective. And yeah, thanks for chatting today.

PB: Thank you.

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Natalia Soloviova always knew she was putting herself at risk. As the chair of the Russian LGBT Network, the largest queer advocacy group in the country, she had spent years preparing detailed security protocols for what she would do if the government came after her.

But it was still a nasty shock when she had to use them. In November 2023, almost two weeks before Russia’s supreme court would designate the “international LGBT movement” as an extremist organization, Soloviova’s heart sank when she watched Channel One, a state-funded TV network, air a report about her organization. They flashed her and her colleagues’ names on screen while accusing the organization of “extremist” activities, including spreading propaganda to minors and trying to destroy “traditional family values.”

The Channel One report that led Soloviova to flee Russia.

“It was so disturbing, and it made me physically sick,” Soloviova told Uncloseted Media.

She knew she had to get out. The following days blurred together as she checked off the steps in her security protocol: She called her lawyers, told her mom and wife she was leaving, and boarded a plane to another country. Over the next few years, she would move between several countries before settling in New York City.

It all happened so fast that she didn’t process her emotions until a month later, when she was scrolling Instagram and saw a video of her hometown, Novosibirsk.

“I start just crying … because my previous life was lost,” she says. “I started to feel anger for the government, for the situation itself, because it was absolutely horrific and absolutely unfair.”

While U.S. intelligence agencies under the Trump administration have indicated an interest in targeting trans people, Russia’s extremism designation has allowed for a whole other level of persecution. Because the designation targets the entire LGBTQ movement, the court’s ruling allows the government to impose broad crackdowns on the community.

As of June 2025, Human Rights Watch (HRW) had identified 101 people convicted on LGBT extremism charges, with punishments ranging from fines to 12-year prison sentences. Since late last year, the government has also taken eight Russian LGBTQ advocacy organizations to court, aiming to label them as extremist groups.

These cases are ongoing—Soloviova’s organization was just declared as extremist on April 27.

“I woke up at home with my wife, and the first thing I saw were messages from our lawyers,” Soloviova says about the news. “Honestly, I was furious. But as usual, there was no time to be angry. My first thought was my colleagues still in Russia. I spent the entire morning in bed, messaging back and forth about emergency evacuations, security measures and our next steps.”

People have been jailed for posting photos of pride flags in an 11-person Telegram chat and for wearing rainbow-colored earrings. In response, LGBTQ advocates have gone underground, finding new ways to support a terrified community. Despite everything, Soloviova says that “most organizations” have continued to do their work.

“They can ban us on paper, but they cannot erase us,” Soloviova says. “We will not abandon our values, because human life, safety and dignity matter more than any repressive labels.”

How Did Russia Get Here?

The Russian government began targeting the LGBTQ community in 2013, when they passed a law banning the spread of “propaganda” of “non-traditional sexual orientation” to minors. The next year, Russia’s military occupied Crimea, leading to condemnation from the U.S. and other world powers.

Sasha Kazantseva, queer sex educator and author of “The Conservative Web: Russia’s Worldwide War on LGBTQ+ Rights,” says that in order to combat the backlash, Russian President Vladimir Putin leaned into “traditional values ideology” to build support among more conservative countries.

“[Putin says] ‘Western ideology is about making your kids trans and gay, and we can save your kids and your traditional families,’” Kazantseva told Uncloseted Media. “LGBTQ people are very important for this traditional values conservative ideology as an image of some internal enemy.”

After invading Ukraine in 2022, Putin’s government escalated their attacks on Russia’s LGBTQ community. They expanded their anti-propaganda law to include adults, and in 2023 they banned trans people of all ages from medically transitioning or changing their legal gender. On Nov. 30, 2023, they issued the extremism ruling.

“[In] 2022, they see again that people are not happy with the war, and they start to play the same game as 10 years ago,” Kazantseva says. “Nobody cared [about trans people], and out of nowhere, Putin starts to mention trans people in every speech.”

Since then, things have escalated. Last November, the Justice Ministry began a court case to declare Irida, a small LGBTQ advocacy group, as an extremist organization. Eight advocacy groups, including ComingOut and the Russian LGBT Network, both of which provide services including psychological support and legal consultation to LGBTQ Russians, have had similar cases against them.

Crackdowns Under the Extremism Ruling

Maks Olenichev, a European Union-based lawyer who supports Russian LGBTQ defendants in court, says there are two types of charges for violating extremism laws.

First, displaying the symbols of an extremist group—often the rainbow pride flag in this case—is considered an administrative offense. Of the 101 individuals HRW identified, 81 were convicted for displaying symbols. First-time offenders face fines or short jail sentences, while repeat offenders can receive up to four years in prison.

Second, participation in the international LGBT movement is a criminal offense punishable by up to 12 years in prison. HRW identified at least 20 people facing these charges.

Participation in the movement can seemingly include any public activities related to the LGBTQ community. Authorities arrested several employees at Eksmo, Russia’s largest publishing house, for extremism because some of their books contained LGBTQ themes. And last year, a Moscow court posthumously found Andrey Kotov, the leader of a Russian gay travel agency, guilty of extremism after he died in a pretrial detention center.

“If [Kotov] had asked me whether he could do it, I would say, ‘Yes you could do it, it’s legal.’ And then he goes to jail and dies there,” says Ksenia, who works outside of Russia as legal assistance program coordinator for ComingOut. “I have 20 years’ experience in law. What can we expect from people who are not experienced lawyers?”

Olenichev agrees: “There’s no 100% foolproof way to not being charged with anything.”

Alise Sever learned this the hard way in 2024, when her Halloween weekend celebrations were interrupted by masked police officers banging down the doors. Sever was partying at Black Clover, an LGBTQ-friendly club she had opened just over a year earlier in Kirov, Russia.

At 2:00 a.m., militarized special forces burst in to raid the club and immediately hauled Sever off to the precinct while they pinned several patrons against the wall, arrested them and confiscated what came out to be roughly 1 million rubles, or 10,000 USD, worth of music equipment, alcohol and other club property—a price so steep that the business would need to shut down.

“I knew that something [like this] could happen,” Sever, 28, told Uncloseted Media. “But I was sad. I was grieving a loss of money, a loss of the time and work that I have put into this.”

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Sever and five other people who were arrested that night—including the club’s co-founder and multiple queer artists—were charged with extremism. As part of the court proceedings, Russian police revealed that they had been monitoring Sever and her girlfriend for almost a year and had amassed thousands of pages of documents containing information about her and her business as well as transcripts of intercepted messages and phone calls.

“They apply these laws very randomly, and they do it not to show that this person is the most brutal criminal you can imagine, they do it to show that anyone can be targeted by this law,” Kazantseva says. “So you live in permanent tension, in permanent self-censorship. And that’s how they control people.”

Kazantseva, who has published zines, blogs and books about LGBTQ issues, has also experienced this firsthand. Despite having fled the country for Lithuania in 2023 due to crackdowns on anti-war advocacy, Russia’s financial monitoring system added her to their list of “terrorists and extremists” last October. This bans her from accessing Russian bank accounts, essentially locking her out of any financial activities in the country. The federal government has also placed her on their “wanted” list, and a court has ordered “arrest in absentia” of Kazantseva, meaning that she will be detained if she enters Russia or one of its allied countries.

Russian authorities have also threatened charges to pressure LGBTQ people into enlisting to fight in the war. In 2024, the government issued a new policy allowing defendants to be exempted from criminal liability if they join the army.

Ksenia, who requested that Uncloseted Media omit her surname for fear of not being allowed to return to the country, says she knew a boy who was part of a group chat for LGBTQ teenagers. When federal authorities discovered the chat, they threatened him with criminal convictions, and after significant pressure, he abandoned his plans to go to university and signed up to fight in Ukraine shortly after his 18th birthday.

“I know I should feel outrage at how defenseless he is facing the state machine,” Ksenia says. “But at this point, [I’m] just numb.”

These legal crackdowns have caused many LGBTQ people to withdraw from public life. In a 2025 study of 1,683 queer women by Olenichev and other Russian scholars, more than half of the respondents said extremism laws had made them afraid to contact law enforcement, 36.5% had gone back into the closet, and many have “severely restricted their circle of friends.”

Sometimes, taking these precautions isn’t enough. Sever’s club, which hosted drag performances, only allowed people who had not publicly come out as queer online to perform, and had to issue rules that performers could not touch or interact with the audience or mention the terms “LGBTQ” or “Ukraine.” They also had to remove wall paintings of humanoid cats wearing shibari rope and lingerie after getting fined by police in early 2024 under the propaganda law. None of that, though, was enough to save them from being raided.

How Are Advocates Responding?

Zhenya, a Russian trans emigrant to Canada who asked to use a pseudonym because they still visit their home country, got hands-on experience with the new normal for queer activism when they signed up to volunteer for ComingOut.

Ksenia says the organization now relies almost entirely on workers outside of Russia like Zhenya. In order to start volunteering for the group, Zhenya had to go through a round of interviews designed to weed out infiltrators. And once they joined, they learned that all their coworkers’ identities would be hidden.

“Partially why they do interviews is because it’s known sometimes that police agents will try to insert themselves in the group to get names,” Zhenya told Uncloseted Media. “They never ask you for your passport info, they don’t ask you for your real name.”

Ksenia says ComingOut now has its security measures down to a science and “almost nothing” needed to change when they were declared an extremist organization. Because of that, they now offer security consultation to other organizations.

Another initiative that has needed to adapt to this new reality is Centre T, a trans and nonbinary support organization that will likely be declared an extremist group at a trial set for May 4. Sasha, the group’s media coordinator, says volunteers must use a VPN and communicate through encrypted messaging apps. Initially, this would often be Telegram, but with the Russian legislature weighing a ban on the app, they’re considering moving to other platforms like Matrix.

Even with these precautions, Centre T had to cut some programs: They no longer host online chats or dating programs, and they’ve mostly had to stop sharing personal stories in order to protect people’s identities. Still, their most crucial programs, which include assisting trans people in leaving the country and connecting them to medical specialists that aid them with transition under the table, are still operating.

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Fleeing the Country

Like with ComingOut, most of Centre T’s workers and volunteers have left Russia. Olenichev says this is generally the safest option. In many extremism cases, he says lawyers focus less on actually winning and more on fighting for lighter sentences and using stall tactics, like requesting extra documentation, to buy time for defendants to flee.

“It’s impossible to win those cases since [they] usually are political and not legal,” Olenichev says.

Sever is a success story for this strategy. After her arrest, she spent two months alone in a jail cell, isolated from her friends and family as they were scared that sending her letters would lead the government to target them. After she was released, she spent 11 months on house arrest, trapped at home with her “very religious” mother who tried to convince her to accept the charges and abandon her pansexuality.

“There were moments when my friends were visiting me while I was on house arrest, and they were later on [interrogated], so that led for them to stop. … It took a toll on me.”

As Olenichev and other advocates fought to prolong her case, she concocted a scheme to flee the country despite being under house arrest. When she came down with a disease, she was allowed to call an ambulance to the hospital, where her friends were waiting to help smuggle her over the border.

“I ended up in a safe place where I’m awaiting a visa to go to Europe, now,” says Sever, who did not reveal her location due to concerns about violence from local anti-LGBTQ groups.

Centre T is currently operating a temporary shelter in Armenia for trans people leaving Russia, providing food, housing and psychological and medical support. While they say they’ve recently lost U.S. grants and the ability to fundraise in Russia, the shelter remains open because of crowdfunding through Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee.

“We are funded by our community,” Sasha says. “It’s been really amazing, honestly … because it’s very difficult to find funding for direct service projects like a shelter.”

How Do Queer People Continue to Live in Russia?

Zhenya visited St. Petersburg for the first time since the extremism designation in the summer of 2024. Surprisingly, they still managed to find communities of queer people.

“I don’t think there’s anything official, it’s all where gay people just go, and you just know,” they say. “I went to one [such] place and that went just fine. I know a couple trans people who still live in St. Petersburg, and there’s still events and things happening, but it’s just way more lowkey.”

Zhenya says it’s easier to do this in bigger cities where they say people are relatively accepting and less likely to report LGBTQ people to the police.

Sasha believes that the community’s future lies in whisper networks like those Zhenya describes.

“It’s time for some decentralized, horizontal activities and initiatives,” she says. “Because it’s more safe right now to make a group only for friends, for people that you know.”

Sasha says it’s critical that queer Russians take precautions and strongly recommends ensuring no LGBTQ content is saved on your phone in case it gets hacked or confiscated.

In such dangerous conditions, Natalia Soloviova says every step is important. Seemingly simple actions, like opening up about your queer identity to trusted loved ones, covertly spreading information among other queer people, or simply allowing yourself to rest and recover are necessary to make it through.

“You’re keeping community alive,” she says. “If you’re supporting your friends, even with drinking mimosas on a Sunday after a really hard week, it’s keeping community safe, it’s spreading the words of community. Better to do something than not to do something.”

For herself, life goes on in New York. While she still misses Novosibirsk, she says she will continue to fight from abroad and is grateful that there are still so many queer Russians fighting to live safely.

“This urge of people who want to improve the life of our community can be unstoppable.”

Uncloseted Media interviewed Maks Olenichev and Alise Sever in Russian via interpretation from Lieb Fischbach of Qaravan, a New York City-based nonprofit providing support for LGBTQ immigrants from post-Soviet countries. Fischbach also provided assistance with other translation needs, and Uncloseted Media is very grateful for his contribution.

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