Transgender Uprising in Boston

By Gerry Scoppettuolo, ACT-UP Boston

Almost lost in the torrent of Trump/white supremacist attacks on the working class is the crisis facing the transgender community in this country. If you are paying attention, it is amounting to a crisis of survival. At stake is not just the right to change one’s name on a passport or to be addressed by the correct gender pronoun. The federal government is now threatening to deny Medicaid and Medicare to healthcare providers of trans youth as well as their hospitals and clinics.

While most agencies are still providing care, one notable exception has yielded to fear, if not avarice.

In recent weeks the struggle to defend access to transgender healthcare has broken out in an intense struggle in Boston, Massachusetts. Fenway Community Health Center, founded on the need to provide services to the LGBTQ community in1970, suddenly announced on October 15 that it was ending hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers to hundreds of its transgender patients under the age of 19, even though no current law prohibits such care and every major national medical organization supports the provision of such care. This decision followed a threat by President Trump to withhold federal funds from institutions providing transgender healthcare, a threat issued in the form of a presidential executive order months ago.

This order has no legal effect and, in any case, has thus far been nullified nationally by a temporary restraining order issued by a federal judge. Other hospitals and clinics in Massachusetts and nationally continue to provide this care, refusing to submit to threats. Boston Children’s Hospital withstood bomb threats in 2023 rather than abandon transgender youth in its care.

The day after the Fenway announcement, (October 16) ACT-UP Boston (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) announced a picket line protest at Fenway Community Health Center, for the following day. Two hundred and fifty queer community members and allies showed up and forged a loud and effective protest a block long featuring many speakers from ProtectTransFutures, ACT-UP Boston, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and other groups.

This action was followed by a community meeting to plan direct action and a rally on November 14 at Fenway’s annual Gala Fundraiser in Boston’s South End. On that day attendees to the event had to pass a gauntlet of protestors to enter the Gala and present their $400 admission tickets. Activists, led by ProtectTransFutures surreptitiously entered the event site, disrupting it with chants before they were forced out by security at the direction of Fenway Health Center staff.

The queer community’s outrage is well justified. Thus far, not a penny of federal funds has been held back by the government, which in any case would require the passage of a federal law to have effect and then withstand certain blockage by a federal court. Fenway Health is a huge and wealthy institution, its highest nine paid executive staff average over $250,000 a year in salary and its extremely busy grant development department, over the years, has received tens of millions of dollars in federal grants to research and study the very transgender health programs it now unnecessarily proscribes. (source: 2024 IRS 990 tax return)

Regular staff at Fenway recently organized a union with District 1199/SEIU. The concerted and well-financed effort to completely erase transgender health and legal rights is being organized by a host of powerful and well-heeled non-profits led by the Heritage Foundation as outlined in its Project 2025. For years these groups have slowly taken over many state legislatures, threatened libraries and spread malicious lies about transgender people.

What happened in Wisconsin in 2012 provides a textbook example of what can happen. Wisconsin lawmakers passed ACT 10 that year making Wisconsin an anti-union Right to Work state resulting in the elimination of thousands of good-paying union jobs. Wealthy non-profit juggernauts have circulated anti-trans laws in every state of the union. At least 1,105 such laws are and have been proposed. Of these 505 are actively being considered, 124 have passed and 382 have failed. (https://translegislation.com/).

The Heritage Foundation: Fascist Roots and the Road to Trumpism

Founded and financed in 1978 by the Coors Brewery interests, over the decades the Heritage Foundation has sought to eliminate every working-class economic program and benefit ever enacted in this country. It first came to public attention in 1981, by proposing the so-call Family Protection Act in the U.S. Senate in the first months of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Early versions of this law would have made employment discrimination against homosexuals legal in all cases. Other sections that made it into the final text included the following:

• Prohibits the expenditure of Federal funds to any organization which presents male or female homosexuality as an acceptable alternative lifestyle or which suggests that it can be an acceptable lifestyle;
•  Amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to provide that any action taken by an employer against a homosexual shall not be considered unlawful employment practice;
• Prohibits any instrumentality of the Federal Government from seeking to enforce nondiscrimination with respect to homosexuals;
• Homosexual Organizations — Denies federal funds to any organization which uses these funds for the express purpose of advocating homosexuality as a lifestyle. (Section 108);
• Legal Services:-Homosexual rights — Prohibits any funds from the Legal Services Corporation from being used in litigation 1nvolving homosexual rights. (Section 106)

The Family Protection Act never passed, but many of its other far-reaching domestic provisions regarding abortion, labor rights, charter schools and the like have become law after years of Heritage Foundation and Coors brewery financial support.

Older readers may remember Reagan/Kissinger warmaking on movements for self-determination in Central America in the 1980s with special regard to El Salvador and Nicaragua. In order to subvert the congressional cutoff of Pentagon funding of the fascist contras in Nicaragua at that time, war criminal Oliver North set up an illegal private funding operation for the contras.

This was exposed in the 1987 Iran/Contra scandal that severely undermined the Reagan administration in its final year. Heritage founder, Joe Coors, was forced to admit under oath to supplying military arms to the contras, including a helicopter. (Coors was by no means the only corporate and non-profit source of this dirty money). By the end of the 1980s the contras had killed 50,000 Nicaraguans in their effort overthrow the Sandinista government.

The multi-billion-dollar non-profit wrecking crew led by the Heritage Foundation, includes such other non-tax paying groups like the Bradley Foundation, Focus on the Family, the Council on National Policy, Moms for Liberty and the like which issue policy briefs, testify before legislative bodies and dress up hateful talking points for mass consumption.

When more bare knuckles action is required, a host of right wing so-called “influencers” take to Facebook, Tick-Tok and podcasts to generate lies and hate. Continued activities of Neo-Nazis like the Proud boys, the Patriot Front and NSC-131 complete the full scope of the authoritarian, if not incipient fascist power that progressive forces are up against currently. The danger is real. In the pages of Project 2025 and in many cases on the streets and in the so-called “public square” our trans siblings are dehumanized as dangerous creatures to be scorned, ridiculed and stripped of their rights. In truth, this brave community must be defended at all costs and deserves love and support from the organized Left and all freedom-loving people.

It is time for the militant LGBTQ movement to be revived from its present acquiescence. The remaining chapters of ACT-UP have linked up in what is now ACT-UP Nation and part of a March on Washington being planned for World AIDS Day, December 1. Queer activism has proven to be a force for change in the past. Now more than ever, we must take to the streets and organize.