Earlier this month, the GLAAD Media Institute’s Education & Advocacy team traveled to Washington, D.C. in advance of the Victory Institute’s 2024 LGBTQ International Leaders Conference, to train and consult public officials on how to best message for their constituents and proactively thwart anti-LGBTQ messaging when on the campaign trail.
The GLAAD Media Institute is GLAAD’s consulting, training, and research division of the organization.
According to The LGBTQ+ Victory Fund – which works to elect to public office pro-equality, pro-choice candidates who are out members of the LGBTQ+ community – LGBTQ-electeds made history this year, winning 72% of races.
Since the General Election in November, a number of the Presidential cabinet picks of the incoming administration have continued to make and regurgitate baseless claims about LGBTQ people, including inflammatory anti-transgender rhetoric and attacks on the broader LGBTQ community.
Through it all, LGBTQ electeds are using their platforms to fight for good governance, while also combatting harmful, disinformation against the LGBTQ community, predominantly, the transgender, two-spirit, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming community. As the GLAAD Media Institute sat with public officials, transgender activists from Gender Liberation staged a sit-in at Capitol Hill in response to Sen. Nancy Mace and Rep. Mike Johnson’s transgender exclusionary bathroom bans, directly on the heels of United States vs. Skremetti’s oral arguments.
READ MORE: Fact Sheet: Landmark Supreme Court Case Challenging Tennessee Transgender Health Care Ban, RECAP: Oral Argument in Landmark Supreme Court Case on Transgender Health Care
In opening remarks, LGBTQ+ Victory Institute President & CEO Annise Parker talked about steering “progress under pressure.”
“One of the things we saw under the first Trump administration – in 2016 he came in – in 2018 we saw a huge surge in candidates,” Parker said. “Candidates of all kinds, stepping up for the first time, and saying: ‘this is not the America that I want to see. I want to do something about it.’”
“Just watch and see,” Parker instructed with a confident smile.
READ MORE: Inside the 2023 LGBTQ International Leaders Conference
For Lexington, Kentucky, City Councilwoman Emma Curtis being transgender and a public official are inseparable. Curtis, the daughter to a family of farmers, says she is one of the first trans people in Kentucky to hold city office. Curtis joined Vice President of the GLAAD Media Institute Ross Murray, Consultant Brian Martin, and Associate of the GLAAD Media Institute Lana Leonard to discuss her historic win.
Last week, I was blessed to attend and speak at the @victoryinstitute.bsky.social International LGBTQ+ Leaders Conference in Washington, DC.
It was a humbling and restorative experience to be amongst so many friends and colleagues as we prepare for the fight ahead.
Here are 5 highlights from it 🧵👇
— Emma Curtis (@emmacurtis.bsky.social) December 14, 2024 at 11:35 AM
“It’s just who I am,” said Curtis. “For a long time I thought that if I wanted to succeed or have any sort of impact, I had to leave Kentucky. I couldn’t fathom that I could be trans and be a Kentuckian simultaneously. But over time, I came to realize that those two parts of my identity were equally important.”
Curtis happens to be trans and ran for office because she saw a “lack of leadership” on the current council. Like others, Curtis ran on issues that mattered to the people she would eventually serve. For her constituents, that matter was Nicholasville Road.
“That road has been a pain for me my entire life,” Curtis said. “My mom was late to my own birth because she was stuck in Nicholasville Road traffic.”
Now, since losing a friend at a red light on the road, it only reminds Curtis of the people she has lost. Nicholasville Road was also the unifying issue that helped to get Curtis elected. She showed people rather than telling them.
She only finds herself confounded when trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming people – about 1% of the population – are a prevailing talking point of 2024 campaign strategies.
“It’s bullying,” Curtis said. “I think that at the end of the day, it’s just bullying and cruelty is the point. When you don’t have anything that’s going to make people’s life better, you have to pick on somebody and say they’re making your life worse.”
Similarly, Virginia State Delegate for House District 19 Rozia Henson, ran to help save lives from gun violence, but also told GLAAD that he didn’t have to hate on transgender people to win, so he includes trans people in his campaign because he sees that the at-large community “just wants to exist.”
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Henson, like Curtis, made history when he was elected. He is one of the first openly gay Black men to be elected to the Virginia General Assembly, and in that role focuses on the issues his constituents raise without excluding people.
Henson was called to public office after tragedy swept his town. His knee jerk response was to lead the charge for change.
The delegate discusses a time when gun violence traumatized the life of a 9-year-old girl in his district who was playing in the park with her friends. While she survived the attack, it was not without significant medical hurdles. In a different district 10 years ago, a similar incident occurred to Brendon Mackey, a seven-year-old, except Mackey didn’t live. He was killed by a stray bullet from “celebratory gunfire.”
In 2014, before Henson ran for office, he worked closely with Senator Henry Macky to draft and enact Brendon’s Law. The delegate’s ability to enact stricter gun law changes eventually resulted in Henson’s governance as a delegate to the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s 19th District.
“When is enough going to be enough,” Henson exclaimed with empathy in his voice. “For years we’ve been talking about gun safety, and what we know is for people under the age of 18, a majority of those folks, [the] worst case scenario is gun violence in our schools.”
READ MORE Remembering the Lives Taken at Club Q and the Year of Extremism that Followed
Henson ran on other issues, like adding additional bus routes, ensuring all schools have working heat and cooling systems for students, and economic prosperity for all. He says when anti-LGBTQ people in power fearmonger and scapegoat against transgender people and other marginalized communities they are distracting voters from the issues they care about, that LGBTQ people care about too.
“I think the main focus is that trans people go through everyday things like we all do, so trying to get to work, trying to pay for groceries, trying to make sure that the car runs because its now winter time and you check your car, it won’t turn over because of the battery,” Henson said. “My main job is making sure that everyone can get ahead while we’re still in office.”
In fact, gun violence is an LGBTQ issue.
LGBTQ people “are more than two times as likely to be victims of gun violence than their straight and cisgender peers, a number impacted by intimate partner violence (IPV) and anti-LGBTQIA+ bias,” according to the League of Women Voters. This disparity grows for Black children (aged 0-17), who are over 13.6 times more likely to die by firearm homicide than their white peers.
“We want equal access to the same opportunities as someone who would not be trans or not be part of the LGBTQ community,” said Henson. He says the epidemic the public needs to be worried about is gun violence in schools, not LGBTQ people.
More on the GLAAD Media Institute: Using the best practices, tools, and techniques we’ve perfected over the past 30 years, the GLAAD Media Institute turns education into armor for today’s culture war—transforming individuals into compelling storytellers, media-savvy navigators, and mighty ambassadors whose voices break through the noise and incite real change.