What a Superhero Movie and Dolly Parton Taught Me About the Machinery of Bigotry.
We went to see the new Spider-Man movie for the second time on Tuesday, and Mari and I sat side-by-side in the dark, crying like babies.
Part of it, undoubtedly, was the timing. Tuesday was the day we lost Dolly Parton—a woman who spent her entire life reminding the world that kindness is a superpower, that empathy has no boundaries, and that every single one of us is a divine child of God, perfectly and wonderfully made. Losing a national treasure like Dolly feels like a collective tear in the cultural fabric, a sudden dimming of a very bright room, especially at a moment when we need her radical, inclusive joy more than ever.
As the credits rolled and the emotional weight of the day settled over us, a specific monologue from Spidey’s Aunt May kept echoing in my mind. It cut straight through the cinematic noise and landed right on the raw, exhausting reality of what the trans community is facing today. In a political climate where continuous attacks from the current administration and various state legislatures attempt to legislate our humanity away, her words felt less like a movie quote and more like a lifeline:
“This whole thing can get really scary, but sometimes because you’re special, people can do dark, monstrous things to you. But this is what I want you to know: You’re beautiful. And the people who love you love you not because you’re special. We love you because you’re you. I want you to remember that no matter how powerful you become, that’s your deepest responsibility.”
It stopped me in my tracks. Because isn’t that the exact machinery of bigotry? When people step into their authentic truth—when they dare to live out loud, beautifully and unapologetically, refusing to hide who they are—fearful, rigid systems try to do dark, monstrous things to shrink them back down. The legislative bans, the administrative hostility, the constant political crosshairs—they aren’t about policy or protection. They are a direct, systematic assault on human dignity. They are designed to exhaust us, to make people feel small, isolated, and hunted for simply existing.
The architects of this anti-trans legislation want the world to believe that our existence is a threat. But Dolly understood the exact opposite. She knew that it is our very uniqueness that creates a more vibrant, beautiful, and deeply human world.
Dolly famously commanded us to “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” She didn’t just tolerate differences; she celebrated them, knowing inherently that someone else’s radiant authenticity poses no danger to your own. We should not feel falsely threatened by the beautiful diversity of the human experience—as all of our detractors would have the world believe.
The antidote to cruelty has always been connection, visibility, and unyielding love. It’s whispered in a superhero movie, and it was lived out every single day by Dolly, who famously reminded us that we should just be accepted for who we are.
You are loved because you are you.
Not because you fit neatly into a manufactured, majority-approved mold. But because your existence is inherently valuable, sacred, and true.
We are here. We are divine children of God. And no amount of political posturing, institutional hostility, or manufactured panic can strip away that core, radiant truth.
May’s reminder to Peter Parker (and, lest we forget, Jean Grey) is a clarion call to all of us who bear the weight of visibility and resilience right now. Our deepest responsibility is to hold onto that love, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, to protect one another in the dark, and to refuse to let the monsters dim our light.
But that responsibility also extends outward, demanding action from anyone who witnesses this injustice. The machinery of bigotry thrives on silence, but it shatters in the face of active, uncompromising love.
Rest in peace, Dolly. We’ll keep shining anyway—because you left us with a mandate we refuse to break: to look past the political noise, tear down the artificial divides, and honor the sacred, undeniable humanness in every single soul we meet. You’d expect nothing less from us.
And to everyone reading this, I challenge you to look inward and ask yourself: What can I do to make our world a more loving and accepting place—for everyone?
Sitting in church this past Sunday, a single phrase from our rector’s sermon struck a deep, resonant chord within me: “Where certainty ends, faith begins.”
He spoke of an unwavering mandate for our congregation—a call for radical outreach, unyielding inclusion, and the intentional expansion of our hearts to encompass, embrace, and protect everyone. But as those words settled over the room, my thoughts immediately turned to my community. To the LGBTQ+ family I love, advocate for, and walk beside every single day.
For us, the concept of “certainty” has long been weaponized. It is the rigid, dogmatic certainty of those who claim to know who we are better than we know ourselves. It is the cold certainty of policy architects who seek nothing less than the systemic erasure of our existence, our history, and our basic human dignity from public life.
We are living through an unprecedented barrage. With the 2026 midterm elections fast approaching, the political rhetoric is escalating into a desperate, fever-pitched campaign of mis- and disinformation. This isn’t abstract political theater; it carries real-world consequences:
Legislative Onslaught: Civil rights organizations like the ACLU are currently tracking over 500 state-level anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in 2026 alone, targeting everything from essential healthcare and inclusive education to simple public existence.
Escalating Hostility: According to recent data from GLAAD’s ALERT Desk, targeted incidents of anti-LGBTQ+ hate and harassment averaged over two every single day over the past year, with more than half specifically aimed at transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals.
Targeting the Next Generation: The Trevor Project’s latest national findings show that over 80% of LGBTQ+ youth report that the sheer volume of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and legislation has directly degraded their mental health and safety.
And yet, in the face of this relentless onslaught, despair does not get the final word.
Where the dogma of certainty seeks to shrink our world, our faith steps in. Not necessarily a dogma or creed, but a profound, unshakeable faith in our shared humanity, our enduring resilience, and our capacity to build a better future.
Every time they try to write us out of the history books, we write new chapters.
Every time they try to force us into the shadows, we build brighter, stronger, and more vibrant spaces.
Our history is not a footnote to be erased; it is a testament to survival, authenticity, and love overcoming fear.
The attacks will likely grow more severe in the weeks and months ahead as election day approaches. Desperate movements always grow loudest right before their foundations crumble. They push fear because they know that authenticity and truth are infectious.
So here is my call to action for every leader, ally, friend, and member of our community reading this:
We must make our tent bigger, and we must shine our light brighter than ever before.
Now is not the time to retreat or quiet our voices. Now is the time to extend our reach to those who have yet to feel the warm glow of living in their full, unfiltered truth. Now is the time to surround the most vulnerable among us—our trans youth, our elders, and those isolated in hostile spaces—with our collective love, resources, and protection.
Shadows cannot survive where the light is absolute. When we stand together in unwavering authenticity, no campaign of erasure can touch the core of who we are.
Hold fast to your faith. Keep building. Keep loving.
Because together, we win.
Why Justice Thomas’s gratuitous concurrence is a dangerous roadmap for the rollback of trans civil rights.
Author’s Note: Following the Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling on transgender youth in sports, much of the media coverage focused on the majority opinion. But the real danger lies in a separate, gratuitous concurrence filed by Justice Clarence Thomas. As I prepare for upcoming speaking engagements and dive deeper into macro-institutional power dynamics, decoding this specific roadmap feels urgent. Here is my analysis of why we cannot afford to ignore what Thomas is signaling.
The weight of the Supreme Court’s recent 6–3 decision allowing states to ban transgender women and girls from scholastic sports is heavy enough. For LGBTQ+ Americans and allies, it is a devastating structural blow to inclusion, dignity, and the simple human right of young people to participate fully in public life.
But as the dust settles, a second, sharper sting has emerged from the text of the ruling. It didn’t come from the majority opinion written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It came from a completely gratuitous, separate concurring opinion filed by Justice Clarence Thomas.
It is an opinion that leaves readers asking: Why did he feel the need to write this?
To understand the sheer malice of Thomas’s concurrence, we have to look at what a concurring opinion actually is. In Supreme Court logic, a justice writes a concurrence when they agree with the final outcome of a case but want to emphasize a different legal theory. But Thomas didn’t stay in his lane. He used his platform to issue a blunt, sweeping rejection of transgender identity itself—a subject that had absolutely nothing to do with the specific legal questions of the case.
While the majority focused its legal definitions narrowly on Title IX and high school athletics, Thomas decided to pull back the curtain and say the quiet part out loud. He wrote that “gender dysphoria is a mutable mental state that is the object of psychiatric treatment,” actively reducing a deeply held human identity to a clinical anomaly. He went further, explicitly declaring that transgender status does not deserve heightened equal-protection scrutiny under the Fourteenth Amendment, unlike race or biological sex.
It feels like piling on at its most heinous. It is raw, unvarnished transphobia preserved in the federal reporter.
It is easy, and entirely accurate, to point to the staggering ethical rot surrounding Thomas—the undisclosed luxury travel, the real estate deals, and the conservative money that has lined his pockets and anchored his seat on the Court alongside his partner-in-crime, Samuel Alito. But reducing this to simple corruption misdiagnoses the danger. Thomas isn’t changing his votes for money. The money is doing something much worse: it is funding the absolute insulation of his ego.
This isn’t a transactional relationship; it is a system of ideological patronage. The billionaires didn’t create Thomas’s worldview, but they built the fortress that protects it. Because he holds a lifetime appointment and sits within a catered, soundproof bubble of elite praise, he answers to no one. He faces zero consequences. That total lack of accountability turns his judicial megaphone into a weapon of pure unchecked ego. He never has to look a transgender kid in the eye. He never has to live in the reality his rulings distort.
Instead, he operates in a realm of deep, historical grievance. Thomas has spent over three decades acting not as a conservative who wants to preserve American institutions, but as a legal radical who wants to burn them down. For him, the cruelty isn’t a byproduct of his legal theory; the cruelty is the theory.
And there is a chilling method to this malice.
Historically, radical concurrences from right-wing justices are not just passive complaints—they are legal signals. They are bat signals sent to conservative legal funds, right-wing think tanks, and red-state legislatures. Thomas is effectively telling them: “If you pass sweeping laws that completely strip trans people of civil rights far beyond sports, I am already on board. Here is the blueprint you can use to defend it when it reaches my desk.”
This is how the groundwork was laid to overturn Roe v. Wade, and it is exactly what is happening here. Thomas is signaling that the sports bans are just the beachhead. The ultimate goal is a total rollback of equal protection under the law.
Anger is a completely rational response to this. But our anger cannot just be a scream into the void; it has to be a diagnostic tool. We need to see Thomas’s concurrence for what it truly is: a roadmap.
When someone with that much power tells you exactly what they intend to do next, you don’t ignore them. You prepare.
Author’s Note: A couple of weeks ago, I drafted this piece as an op-ed submission for the Seattle Times. After a week of silence from traditional media, I realized: why wait for the mainstream press to decide if our lives and rights are “fit to print”? The conversation about our dignity cannot wait on centrist hesitation, so I am delivering it directly to you.
In times of economic anxiety, center-left political strategists frequently retreat into defensive, hyper-pragmatic postures. Faced with mounting pressure from populist opposition, the temptation to make tactical concessions—sacrificing the civil liberties of a vulnerable minority under the guise of “electoral realism”—becomes acute.
We are seeing this play out across our political landscape. As critical election cycles approach, progressive coalitions are grappling with a highly coordinated, existential assault on transgender individuals. To understand the profound danger of this transactional approach, we must synthesize the macro-institutional warnings issued by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the clear accountability demanded by Representative Pramila Jayapal, and the ground-level tracking of investigative journalist Erin Reed.
In his address at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Prime Minister Mark Carney articulated a stern critique of traditional “transactional politics.” He warned that democratic institutions and alliances degrade rapidly when they treat core principles—such as human rights, pluralism, and human dignity—as flexible capital to be bartered away for short-term stability. Carney’s warning against “wishing the world to be what it isn’t” serves as a profound cautionary tale. When progressive coalitions view the defense of a marginalized community as a negotiable luxury rather than a foundational axiom, they compromise their moral authority and structurally weaken the democratic fabric they claim to defend.
This macro-warning aligns precisely with the alarms being raised from within the halls of Congress. Representative Pramila Jayapal, co-chair of the Transgender Equality Task Force—who recently reintroduced the landmark Transgender Bill of Rights—has forcefully called out this emerging hesitation. She has warned her fellow Democrats that transgender rights must never be treated as political leverage or a transactional bargaining chip. Jayapal’s mandate is clear: civil rights are not commodities to be traded away to appease the opposition or soothe centrist nerves.
The necessity for this absolute clarity becomes undeniable when contrasted with the chilling reality documented by Erin Reed. Through exhaustive tracking of anti-trans legislation, Reed has illustrated that the conservative apparatus is actively utilizing state power to systematically eliminate transgender public life via healthcare bans, the weaponization of medical data, and the legal erasure of trans identities.
We saw this playbook manifest at the highest level just weeks ago, with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on trans youth athletes—a decision narrow in legal scope but massive in its potential to be weaponized for further anti-LGBTQ+ efforts. As election deadlines draw closer, right-wing strategists, facing vulnerabilities on economic fronts, inevitably escalate this kind of hateful rhetoric to trigger moral panic. Reed’s reporting uncovers a disturbing trend within this environment: the occasional quiet silence or defection of center-left politicians who cross the aisle to vote for restrictive measures. They operate under the delusion that minor capitulations will satisfy a predatory opposition, failing to realize that weakness only invites further legislative aggression.
Centrist political consultants often justify this silence by pointing to public opinion polling indicating that the broader electorate ranks economic anxiety far higher than issues of gender identity. From this, strategists extrapolate an insidious conclusion: that progressive parties should downplay transgender rights to avoid alienating voters.
This argument is both a moral failure and a profound strategic illusion.
For the transgender community, civil rights are economic rights. The ability to secure employment, access healthcare, retain housing, and navigate public spaces without fear of state-sanctioned discrimination directly dictates material survival. Furthermore, a party that signals it will compromise the basic dignity of its constituents destroys the trust of its most vital asset: the young voters, activists, and organizers who provide the passion and energy required to win tight campaigns.
The LGBTQ+ community and its allies must draw an unyielding line in the sand. Transgender rights must be an explicit, demonstrable, and vigorously defended plank of the progressive platform.
If a party can be bullied into treating its own people as a transactional liability, it lacks the moral fortitude to defend democracy itself.
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I am a trans elder.
There, I said it.
For perhaps the first time in my life, I am fully embracing and owning that fact.
Initially, I struggled to write a message of hope for Pride Month this year. It is hard to find the right words when we are constantly inundated with hateful misinformation and disinformation from those who seek nothing less than the total eradication of the transgender community.
There is an active, coordinated effort to completely erase our existence from the history of the United States and the world.
Living on the tip of the culture war spear is exhausting, and, I might add, something we never asked for (but I digress). So, finding hope in the current landscape can feel nearly impossible. Our community is embattled at every level of government and in every corner of society—not just here in the U.S., but across the globe.
So, where do we find the hope?
I recently caught up with my dear friend and trans icon, Jamison Green, PhD . As we chatted about our lives, our loved ones, and how we are holding up in today’s hostile environment, our conversation turned to legacy. We talked about how we, as elders, are being seen and heard by the younger generations of trans men and trans women.
While most of our interactions have been deeply positive, James shared a troubling trend. A small minority of the younger generation seems to have little to no regard for hearing our stories of becoming our true selves. The dismissals usually sound something like this:
● “You’re irrelevant.”
“That was so long ago, things have changed.”
● “That just doesn’t apply to me and my generation.”
With everything happening to our community right now, there is simply no room for that brand of dismissiveness.
The Connective Tissue Across Generations
I fully recognize that our specific circumstances are different. The world was a completely different place when I came out in 2004, just as it was a different place when James came out in 1988. But different circumstances do not make histories irrelevant.
As James beautifully put it: “Our history is now more important than ever.” Another close friend once reminded me: “We are our history.” We cannot afford to lose sight of that.
If we want to find hope this Pride and beyond, the times call on us, as trans and queer people, to focus entirely on what we have in common. We share powerful, universal experiences that transcend time:
● The Moment of Truth: That profound second where we said to ourselves—and to anyone who could hear us—”This IS who I am. I am no longer going to hide my authentic self from the world.”
Or, as Anai Nin so eloquently put it, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
● The Daily Practice: The universal notion of “living into yourself” each and every day – in ways that no one else can see.
● The Shared Core: The resilience and fortitude we develop as we walk this path.
This resilience is the connective tissue that spans generations. It is what binds us together as ONE community at a time when unity is our best defense.
The Road Ahead: Buckle Up
We need this unity immediately. The mid-term elections are a mere five months away. Do you think for a second that the despicable rhetoric surrounding the transgender community is going to lessen?
To that, I say: “Buckle up. You ain’t seen nothing yet!”
True hope requires us to create space to learn from one another. Elders must listen to the unique challenges of today’s youth, and the youth must anchor themselves in the roots of those who cleared the path.
This June, let’s reject the generational divide. Let’s protect our collective narrative, honor our survivors, and remember that our visibility is our power.
We. Are. Our. History.
Let’s own it, let’s protect it, write the next chapter of it, and march forward—together.
Happy Pride Everyone!!!