The U.S. organization Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative group that defends the rights of gay people and is linked to the Republican Party, has abandoned trans people and the defense of their rights. The organization — “America’s oldest and largest organization for LGB conservatives and our straight allies,” as it now describes itself on its website — has decided to “concentrate specifically on issues of sexual orientation and conservative values — in other words, we are an LGB advocacy organization.” Numerous LGBTQ+ advocacy groups have condemned the decision. Among them, the National Federation of Stonewall Democrats, affiliated with the Democratic Party: “[The Log Cabin Republicans] are throwing trans people under the bus.”
“We are an advocacy organization for LGB people, as our founders imagined and as our moral center calls on us to be,” Ross Hemminger, president of Log Cabin Republicans, said in a piece published last week. In doing so, the organization reversed the decision taken in 2015, when the fight for trans rights was included in their statement of principles. At the time, the organization said all adults should be free to pursue happiness “without interference from the government.” Hemminger has now linked trans rights to an alleged “radical gender ideology,” an argument that echoes the one used by the Donald Trump administration in its attacks and rollbacks of trans rights, which have intensified since the start of the Republican’s second term.
That assault by Trump has materialized in requirements to encode sex assigned at birth on documents such as passports; the revocation of driver’s licenses; bans on enlisting in the military; cuts to gender-affirming care, especially for minors; and the exclusion of trans women from sports. “The transgender movement wants biological men to compete in women’s sports regardless of the consequences,” Hemminger said, using one of the favored slogans of U.S. conservatives in the so-called “culture war.”
Log Cabin Republicans was founded in 1978 in California in response to the Briggs Initiative, or Proposition 6, the proposed law that sought to ban gay and lesbian teachers from working in public schools. Although the organization did not support Trump’s candidacy in 2016 because of his anti-LGBTQ+ positions, it did back him in the next two presidential elections — the one he lost in 2020 to Joe Biden and the one two years ago when he returned to the White House. That Trump-aligned shift solidified under Charles Moran’s presidency, which ran from August 2019 — after Jerri Ann Henry resigned precisely because the organization decided to endorse Trump — until January 2025.
Moran is a “magay,” a term that groups together gay men tied to the MAGA universe: “Overwhelmingly white men who do not use the word queer and are not bothered that their party’s leader fuels moral panic against trans people,” as The New York Times describes it. After serving on Log Cabin Republicans’ executive board, he was rewarded with a position in the Trump administration at the Department of Energy.
“The Log Cabin Republicans have completed their magafication and have fully yielded to Trump’s wishes with a cowardly, principle-free measure intended to save their own skins,” Jeremy Comeau, president of the National Federation of Stonewall Democrats, said in a statement posted on social media. He also warned that those who deny trans rights will not stop there: “Anti-trans legislation is the first step. The same coalition is already attacking marriage equality, adoption rights [for same-sex couples] and protections against discrimination.”
“Burying your head in the sand doesn’t make you safe, it just means you don’t see what’s coming. LGB people are also in the crosshairs. They always have been,” Comeau added, stressing that the organization he represents will continue to support trans people, highlighting their role in activism and the fight for the community’s rights “at Stonewall and in every struggle that followed.” “Stone walls remain standing centuries later. Log cabins rot from the inside,” he added.
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