New York state officials may continue to take legal action against a county outside New York City that has banned transgender players from women’s and girls teams, a judge ruled Thursday.
U.S. District Court Judge Nusrat Choudhury denied Nassau County’s request for a temporary restraining order against state Attorney General Letitia James, saying the Long Island county “falls far short of meeting the high bar for securing the extraordinary relief.”
Among other things, Choudhury said the county failed to “demonstrate irreparable harm,” which she said was a “critical prerequisite” for such an order.
The ruling, however, doesn’t address the legality of the county’s ban or James’ request that the lawsuit be dismissed. Those issues will be decided at a later date.
Last month, James, a Democrat, issued a “cease and desist” letter to the county demanding it rescind the ban because she said it violates New York’s anti-discrimination laws. The ban also faces a legal challenge from a local women’s roller derby league, which has asked a state court to invalidate it.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican, responded to James’ action with a federal lawsuit asking a judge to affirm that the ban was legal and to prevent James from taking action against it.
Blakeman’s February order, which affects more than 100 public facilities in the county just east of the New York City borough of Queens, states that any female sports organization that accepts transgender women or girls will be denied permits to use county-owned parks and fields.
Echoing the arguments of officials who have taken similar actions in other Republican-led cities and states, the county says women and girls will be discriminated against and their constitutional rights to equal protection will be violated if transgender athletes are allowed to compete alongside them.
James and Blakeman’s offices did not respond to emails seeking comment Thursday.
Cardiff has been chosen to host the EuroGames in 2027, marking the first time the LGBTQ+-inclusive event has been held in the UK.
LGBTQ+ sports development and inclusion organisation, Pride Sports Cymru, has been successful in ensuring that Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ sporting event would be staged in the Welsh capital.
The first EuroGames, governed by the European Gay and Lesbian Sport Federation, was held in The Hague in The Netherlands in 1992 and this year’s event will be staged in the Austrian capital, Vienna, in July.
Up to 10,000 athletes, including transgender sportsmen and women, are expected to descend on Cardiff in 2027.
The chairperson of Cardiff Dragons – Wales’ first mixed gender LGBTQ+ football club – Charlotte Galloway told the BBC: “People are allowed to identify and play in their authentic gender. That means trans women can play in the women’s category and trans men can play in the men’s category.
“I think it’s really important that we’re able to do this because there’s no other competition this big in Europe that allows gender-non-conforming people, trans people and non-binary people to compete this way.”
It shows that sport is for everyone, she added.
Duncan Cameron, the chairperson of gay and inclusive rugby union club Cardiff Lions, said: “One of the greatest things about the EuroGames is that it’s open to anybody, no matter how they identify, no matter who you are.
“A lot of people don’t know that there are inclusive rugby teams or football teams [and lots of other] sports that are going to be highlighted. It’s a great chance for us to show what we can do on a national and global stage.”
And Neil Roberts, from LGBTQ+-inclusive badminton club the Cardiff Red Kites, responded to the news by saying the games could help “embed the culture that sport is something everyone should enjoy, regardless of who they are, who they love, what race or what background they come from”.
Meanwhile, Pride Sports director Lou Englefield said: “We’re delighted to be bringing a EuroGames to Wales. It is a huge privilege. [It’s] an opportunity to highlight Wales’ commitment to become the most LGBTQ+-friendly nation in Europe.”
Pride Sports team member Jess Williams, added: “A EuroGames in Wales will be transformative for LGBTQ+ people in sport, and indeed the whole community. The legacy the games will create, and opportunity for positive change, is enormous.”
The chief executive of the Welsh Sports Association, Andrew Howard, congratulated Pride Sports Cymru on its successful bid. “The event will undoubtedly prove a celebration and awe-inspiring showcase of inclusive sport, in a first for Cardiff and the UK,” he said.
They zip around the rink, armed with helmets, pads and mouthguards. They push, bump and occasionally crash out as they jostle for position on the hardwood floor.
But for the women of the Long Island Roller Rebels, their biggest battle is taking place outside the suburban strip-mall roller rink where they’re girding for the upcoming roller derby season.
The nearly 20-year-old amateur league is suing a county leader over an executive order meant to prevent women’s and girl’s leagues and teams with transgender players from using county-run parks and fields. The league’s legal effort, backed by the New York Civil Liberties Union, has thrust it into the national discussion over the rights of transgender athletes.
Amanda Urena, the league’s vice president, said there was never any question the group would take a stand.
“The whole point of derby has been to be this thing where people feel welcome,” said the 32-year-old Long Island native, who competes as “Curly Fry” and identifies as queer, at a recent practice at United Skates of America in Seaford. “We want trans women to know that we want you to come play with us, and we’ll do our very best to keep fighting and making sure that this is a safe space for you to play.”
Amanda “Curly Fry” Urena at United Skates of America in Seaford, N.Y., on March 19, 2023. Jeenah Moon / AP
Sports leagues and teams seeking permits to play or practice in county-run parks must disclose whether they have or allow transgender women or girls. Any organization that allows them to play will be denied a permit, though men’s leagues and teams aren’t affected.
Bills restricting trans youths’ ability to participate in sports have already passed in some 24 states as part of an explosion of anti-trans legislation on many subjects in recent years. The largest school district in Manhattan is among localities also weighing a ban, following a school board vote last week.
The Roller Rebels sought a county permit this month in hopes of hosting practices and games in county-owned rinks in the upcoming season, as they have in prior years. But they expect to be denied, since the organization is open to anyone who identifies as a woman and has one transgender player already on the roster.
The ban will also make it hard for the league, which has two teams and about 25 players, to recruit and will hurt its ability to host competitions with other leagues, Urena said.
State Attorney General Letitia James has demanded the county rescind the ban, saying it violates state anti-discrimination laws, while Blakeman has asked a federal judge to uphold it.
That a roller derby league has become the face of opposition isn’t surprising: the sport has long been a haven for queer and transgender women, said Margot Atwell, who played in a women’s league in New York City and wrote “Derby Life,” a book about roller derby.
The sport, which dates at least to the 1930s and enjoyed its heyday in the 1970s, involves two teams racing around a track as their designated “jammer” attempts to score points by lapping the other skaters, who are allowed to use their hips, chests and shoulders to slow them down.
The latest revival started in the early 2000s and has been sustained by LGBTQ+ people, with leagues frequently taking part in Pride parades and holding fundraising matches, Atwell said.
“You come in here and you say, ‘I’m a trans woman. I’m a nonbinary person. I’m genderqueer.’ OK? We accept you,” said Caitlin Carroll, a Roller Rebel who competes as “Catastrophic Danger.” “The world is scary enough. You should have a safe place to be.”
Blakeman has said he wants to ensure female athletes can compete safely and fairly. He held a news conference last week with Caitlyn Jenner, who won Olympic gold in the men’s decathlon in 1976 and later underwent a gender transition. Jenner, a Republican who’s frequently at political odds with the greater transgender community, has endorsed the ban.
Blakeman, a Republican who was elected in 2021, has said constituents asked his office to act. But many critics dismiss the ban as political posturing, noting he has acknowledged there have been no local complaints involving transgender players on women’s teams.
“This is a solution in search of a problem,” said Emily Santosus, a 48-year old transgender woman on Long Island who hopes to join a women’s softball team. “We’re not bullies. We’re the ones that get bullied.”
The ones who will suffer most aren’t elite athletes, but children still trying to navigate their gender identities, added Grace McKenzie, a transgender woman who plays for the New York Rugby Club’s women’s team.
Members of the Long Island Roller Rebels during practice at United Skates of America in Seaford, N.Y., on March 19, 2023.Jeenah Moon / AP
“Cruel is the only word that I can use to describe it,” the 30-year-old Brooklyn resident said. “Kids are using sports at that age to build relationships, make friendships, develop teamwork skills, leadership skills and, frankly, just help shield them from all the hate they face as transgender kids already.”
In the larger discussion about trans women in sports, each side points to limited research to support their opinion. And bans often do not distinguish between girls and women who took puberty blockers as part of their transition — stunting the development of a male-typical physique — and those who didn’t, something one New York advocate pointed out.
The order in Nassau County puts some younger trans girls at greater risk by potentially pitting them against boys instead, said Juli Grey-Owens, leader of Gender Equality New York.
“They are not hitting puberty, so they’re not growing, they’re not getting that body strength, the endurance, the agility, the big feet, the large legs,” Grey-Owens said.
The ban could even lead to cisgender female athletes who are strong and muscular being falsely labeled transgender and disqualified, as has happened elsewhere, said Shane Diamond, a transgender man who plays recreational LGBTQ+ ice hockey in New York City.
“It creates a system where any young woman who doesn’t fit the stereotypical idea of femininity and womanhood is at risk of having her gender questioned or gender policed,” Diamond said.
A 2022 Washington Post-University of Maryland Poll found that 55% of Americans were opposed to allowing trans women and girls to compete with other women and girls in high school sports, and 58% opposed it for college and pro sports.
Two cisgender female athletes said after listening to Jenner that men are stronger than women, so it will never be fair if transgender women and girls are allowed to compete.
“There is a chance I would get hurt in those situations,” said Trinity Reed, 21, who plays lacrosse at Nassau County’s Hofstra University.
Mia Babino, 18, plays field hockey at the State University of New York at Cortland and plans to transfer to Nassau County’s Molloy University.
“We’ve worked very hard to get to where we are and to play at a college level,” she said.
But that attitude runs against everything athletic competition stands for, and it sells women and their potential short, countered Urena, of the Roller Rebels.
“If people gave up playing sports because they thought they were going to lose, we wouldn’t have a sports industry,” they said. “I love playing against people that are faster and stronger because that’s how I get better.”
Dutch darts sensation Noa-Lyn van Leuven is facing backlash after historic back-to-back victories against both men and women in the same week.
Last week, the 27-year-old won the mixed PDC Challenge Tour in Germany, defeating several past male winners. She’s the first woman to win an event in the series, one level below the sport’s top tier.
Van Leuven then played a women’s event in the UK on Saturday, defeating two highly placed veteran players, including the current No. 1 woman, Beau Greaves. After that quarter-final victory, van Leuven went on to dispatch Ireland’s Katie Sheldon in the final.
Controversy has since courted van Leuven’s historic wins.
“No male bodies in women’s sports please, not even in darts,” out tennis legend Martina Navratilova, a vocal opponent of trans inclusion in women’s sports, wrote on X. “Again, women get the short end of the stick and it stinks.”
Two of van Leuven’s teammates, Anca Zijlstra and Aileen de Graaf, quit over her presence on the Dutch squad, citing disagreement over rules around trans inclusion.
“That moment when you’re embarrassed to come out for the Dutch team, because a biological man is playing on the women’s team, it’s time to go,” Zijlstra posted to Facebook. “I have tried to accept this but I can’t approve or validate this.”
“In sports, there should be an equal and fair playing field,” Zijlstra added. “I hope with all my heart and for all women in sports that people come to their senses.”
De Graff said van Leuven was free to “change and be happy,” but explained, “I just don’t think it’s right for a biological man to throw for the women or vice-versa. It’s either mixed or not.”
Trans journalist and activist Erin Reed wasn’t convinced a trans woman could have any advantage in the sport.
“Transgender women have a biological advantage at… Darts? That’s what is being claimed by a few people who are trying to get Noa-Lynn Van Leuven removed from a women’s darts team. There is no evidence transgender women are better at angles and throwing a dart.”
Van Leuven had little to say about the controversy, except to remind fellow players and keyboard warriors she has more in common with them than they’d like to admit.
“I think the only unfortunate thing about this issue is that a lot of people forget that I am also a human being.”
Following her mixed event win, van Leuven told OutSports she’s about to announce a new sponsor, and she’s looking forward to more appearances at upcoming televised tournaments.
She’s described the mostly online debate about her darts success as “insane” but says it’s not getting in her way.
“I just go out and do the thing I love. It gives me joy.”
Pro baseball, including Major League Baseball, has been played for about 175 years in the U.S. and during that time there have been only three gay or bi players in MLB who have come out, and nine in the minor leagues, including one woman.
It’s a weak legacy for a sport that did not accept Black players until 1947 and has always had a more conservative bent institutionally, so no one should have expected the sport to be welcoming to openly gay players. In contrast, the NFL has had 16 players who came out, including one who did so while active.
Yet progress has been made — many of the names on this list came out in the last 15 years, showing a growing acceptance. Six of these players, all in the minors, were out while still playing. There have also been out prominent front-office executives who have pushed inclusion. Yet the big victory will be having the first out active MLB player, something that has not yet happened.
As the 2024 season starts, here are the Major League Baseball and minor league players who have come out as gay or bi.
Get off the sidelines and into the game
Our weekly playbook is packed with everything from locker room chatter to pressing LGBTQ sports issues.
MLB
Glenn Burke (Outfielder: Los Angles Dodgers, Oakland A’s, 1976-79) As I wrote back in 2010: What’s remarkable about Burke is how out he was in the 1970s. Not in a “Hey world, I’m gay” way, but in the sense that his teammates knew as did the management of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Burke’s first team, and eventually fans who would taunt him from the outfield bleachers in Oakland by calling him a “fag.” A memorable moment came when the Dodgers — trying to stifle rumors that a popular player was gay — offered Burke $75,000 to get married. His reply: “I guess you mean to a woman?”
There is some debate as to whether Burke was an “out active player,” but Outsports has never considered him so, though that was not necessarily his doing. His teammates knew he was gay since he made little attempt to hide who he was, and fans suspected, but Burke did not publicly talk about being gay until 1982, after he had retired.
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In fact, Allen Barra, writing in the Atlantic in 2013, said of Burke: “His story was greeted by the rest of the news media and the baseball establishment, including Burke’s former teammates and baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, with silence. Even his superb autobiography, ‘Out at Home,’ which published the year he died, failed to stir open conversation about homosexuality in sports. Practically no one in the sports-writing community would acknowledge that Burke was gay or report stories that followed up on his admission.”
Burke is credited with inventing the high-five along with then-Dodgers teammate Dusty Baker. Burke died from AIDS complications in 1995.
Billy Bean (Outfielder, first baseman: Detroit Tigers, Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres, 1987-95) Bean was closeted during his Major League Baseball career and did not come out until 1999. Since then, though, he has been a forceful advocate for LGBTQ inclusion, especially since he joined the MLB front office.
TJ House(Pitcher: Cleveland Indians, Toronto Blue Jays, 2014-17) House came out on Dec. 8, 2022, after attending a White House ceremony where President Biden signed the “Respect for Marriage Act” and where House announced his engagement.
“Today’s passage of the Respect for Marriage Act protects us to have the same rights and opportunities that each of you have,” House wrote on Facebook. “It protects the same benefits. It makes us equal to you. It allows Ryan Neitzel and I to come together and create something beautiful. It gives me the confidence to get engaged to the person I love (he said Yes!), to marry them. I have a wonderful fiance, who challenges me daily to become a better person. To live life authentically. One who I never deserved but blessed to have. Love you see, it’s for everyone.”
Minor leagues
Anderson Comas (Pitcher, 2017-23) Comas came out in 2023, writing: “I’m proudly and happily part of the LGTBQ+ community. I’m also a human with a great soul, I’m respectful, I’m a lover, I love my family and friends and that’s what really matters, I enjoy my work a lot, being a professional baseball player is the best thing that happened to me so I just wanna say something to those people that says that gay people can not be someone in this life, well look at me I’m Gay and I’m a professional athlete.”
Solomon Bates (Pitcher, 2016-23) Bates came out to his teammates in 2019 and publicly in 2022. “I haven’t been out as my complete self because I’ve been hiding myself,” he said. “I’m a masculine man who loves the sport of baseball, and now I want to open up doors for gay athletes like me.”
“I was also one of the unfortunate closeted gay athletes who experienced years of homophobia in the sport I loved,” he wrote. “I was able to take most of it with a grain of salt but towards the end of my career I could tell it was affecting my relationships with people, my performance, and my overall happiness.
“I experienced both coaches and players make remarks … during my time in baseball, and each comment felt like a knife to my heart. I was miserable in a sport that used to give me life, and ultimately I decided I needed to hang up my cleats for my own sanity.”
Sean Conroy (Pitcher, 2015-16) On June 25, 2015, Sean Conroy, a pitcher for the minor league Sonoma Stompers in California, made history by becoming the first openly gay active professional baseball player. This led the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., to display the lineup card and scorecard from the game.
“It’s very humbling and completely unexpected,” Conroy told the Hall of Fame. All of Conroy’s teammates signed the lineup card,
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Jason Burch (Pitcher, 2003-08) Burch played for four minor league teams and told teammates he was gay if they asked. His one regret was not coming out publicly while active.
“Looking back, I wish I had told the whole world that I’m gay from Day 1,” he told Outsports. “That feeling of being relied upon, that people must turn to you as a closer to make things right, to have that role – and to have people have that feeling about me in that role – as a gay man, I think that would have been a powerful message. If we are talking about changing people’s opinions, I do think that would have been a powerful message. But I wasn’t really thinking about that at the time.”
“I made some off-hand comment and one of my teammates was just like, ‘So what do you identify as? Because you’re not straight, are you?’” Lovegrove said. “And I was like, ‘No, I’m not. I’m bisexual. I appreciate you asking.’ And everyone was just like, ‘Oh, cool! OK! Cool!’”
“Then we had nine hours left on the bus ride. And from that point, everyone just sort of embraced that as a fact of my life and didn’t treat me any differently because of it.”
Bryan Ruby (Infielder) Ruby played in six foreign countries and in a U.S. independent league and came out in 2021. He is also a co-founder of Proud To Be In Baseball, an advocacy and support group focused on elevating LGBTQ inclusion in the sport. He is also an accomplished musician based in Nashville.
Ila Borders (Pitcher, 1997-2000) Borders was the first woman to earn a scholarship in collegiate men’s baseball and a pitcher in the independent minor leagues in the late 1990s. Borders’ girlfriend is Sherri Murrell, at one time the first out gay coach in women’s Division I basketball.
Outsports writer Ken Schultz contributed to this report.
Last week, I attended an event at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, focused on “seizing the moment to defeat DEI.” I have written before about the right’s use of the acronym as a codeword to attack social progress generally and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifically. The panel at Heritage—a think tank that in recent years has taken a turn from Reagnite conservatism to Viktor Orbán-loving, Trumpian populism—was a particular strain of this provocation.
There is one kind of discussion over Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, with critics across the spectrum debating the efficacy and benefits of such programs. And then there is Heritage’s view: that DEI is a hidden agenda pushed by the Black Lives Matter movement—the plan of “committed Marxists nursed by an international network” who are “dedicated to overthrowing America and its entire system.”
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This ignores that, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has written in the New Yorker, DEI is often a “popular tool of the upper management of businesses and universities [adopted] after the so-called racial reckoning of the summer of 2020” to quell frustrations—and “hardly constitutes a theory, an ideology, or a political movement.” (Many on the left even say it is, in fact, the corporatization of more radical strains of anti-racism.) But at Heritage and in other conservative circles, a potential compromising of leftist values is being touted as proof that the Reds have won and enshrined their agenda.
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Speakers at the event made the case that DEI and Critical Race Theory (CRT) have metastasized like cancer across every fiber of American society: from high schools, to colleges, to corporations, and even to the military. In their view, left-leaning ideologies that pit oppressors against the oppressed are replacing empathy and patriotism with anger and divisiveness. DEI is a “Frankenstein monster” under the bed.
But it isn’t all despair. They also celebrated that, as one of the moderators put it, “DEI is on the run.” Even Hollywood is turning against it, Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, claimed, saying that American Fiction—an adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure—was an “anti-DEI” movie. “I find that reading of the film and my novel incorrect and offensive,” Everett told me in an email. “The right-wing, in fascist form, will take the slightest critique of a complicated subject and run with it. It takes a lot to misread so badly, but the educated followers of such people will, sadly, buy into it.” (Gonzalez clarified to me he “should have said that the movie was anti-woke” as it “questioned many of the tired shibboleths of wokeism.”)
The conservative obsession with DEI should be taken seriously. At the event I attended, there was no direct mention of the Project 2025 playbook for a second Donald Trump term. But the panelists—a mix of Heritage Foundation fellows and conservative activists—revealed their aspirations to dismantle and divest institutions, and eliminate guardrails for social and racial progress.
For over two hours, they talked about taking the American Bar Association “out of law schools,” getting rid of “agitators” (aka chief diversity officers), and cutting off DEI programs entirely. If DEI was not ousted, funding should be pulled away from universities and towards, conveniently, organizations like the Heritage Foundation. “If you hit them with the money they will change,” Jay P. Greene, a Heritage Foundation senior research fellow, said of universities. “And if you take some heads—so getting some presidents out—that also will produce change.”
In Heritage’s 920-page Project 2025 manifesto endorsed by about 100 right-wing organizations and filled with contributions by Trump loyalists, the group suggests the next conservative presidential administration “must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for culture warriors” and proposes removing terms such as gender equality, DEI, abortion, and reproductive rights from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
It also calls for: amending Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to prevent the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from collecting data on race and ethnicity; doing away with disparate impact legal theory; limiting the applications of the Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. ClaytonCounty that established Title VII protections for employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity; and rescinding regulations that bar discrimination based on “sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”
Christopher Rufo—who helped launch an overt campaign to rebrand CRT and DEI and publicly pushed for the resignation of Harvard’s former President Claudine Gay—didn’t attend the event, but he was represented by his right-hand man and chief of staff Armen Tooloee. In true Rufo fashion, Tooloee laid out their “deliberate strategy” clearly: To publicize the “most egregious” examples of DEI in universities and “create this illusion that we have eyes and ears everywhere.” (Toolee one of his tasks for doing this included doing Google searches on universities’ domains for mentions of “George Floyd.”)
“The strategy we had behind it was we timed it out to be going on during the legislative session in Florida specifically,” Tooloee said of their initial focus on Florida and Texas universities, “because we knew we had buy-in from the state government and from Governor [Ron] DeSantis that this was something they wanted to move on but they needed political cover basically because you know if you start targeting diversity and inclusion you’re going to get an enormous backlash in the press.”
For all the backlash, this histrionic crusade and “gotcha” denunciation of DEI has found powerful adherents. Most notably, billionaires Bill Ackman and Elon Musk. Now, Heritage and its allies are betting on the 2024 elections to take their playbook nationally. “[We] get a bigger majority in the House, get the Senate, get a President Trump who really loves our country…,” Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah said at the event. “20 months and we’ll be exposing so much more and turning this whole thing around.”
Once again, the health of the LGBTQ+ community is under attack — on multiple fronts.
Restrictions on gender-affirming care have become a high-profile wedge issue at both the state and national levels.
A recent Alabama court ruling has risked the hard-fought gains by same-sex couples to secure equal access to in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
A host of federal protections — including rules prohibiting healthcare providers and insurers from limiting coverage or care based on sexual orientation and gender identity — may well hinge on the election this fall.
This is a dangerous and slippery slope. Access to essential healthcare for all LGBTQ+ people is not a political or cultural issue that’s open to debate. It is not a DEI initiative or a “woke” issue. It is, first and foremost, an equity issue — one that deserves broad support not only from the LGBTQ+ community and our allies but also from the employers and health insurers that provide healthcare to two-thirds of the U.S. population.
Health equity should be clear common ground. Whatever our individual political leanings, all of us — as individuals, taxpayers, employees, and employers — have a vested interest in addressing LGBTQ+ health disparities, which include disproportionately high rates of depression and anxiety, substance abuse disorders, cancer, and chronic medical conditions like diabetes.
All of these life-altering health problems are costly; many are preventable and avoidable if people get the right care at the right time. But far too many LGBTQ+ people are not getting the care they need.
Headline-grabbing issues like gender-affirming care and IVF are just the tip of the iceberg. LGBTQ+ people frequently encounter barriers to healthcare of all kinds, including routine primary and preventive care, mental health care, and specialty care.
As a gay man, I’ve experienced many of these barriers firsthand. I’ve struggled to find providers I feel comfortable with, who didn’t shame me, discriminate against me, or deny me services — and I know many others in the community have experienced far worse.
Even when outright discrimination or refusal of care isn’t at play, navigating health insurance and the healthcare system in general is more complex and challenging for the LGBTQ+ community.
A recent nationwide survey of insured U.S. workers conducted by Included Health and YouGov found that LGBTQ+ people were more likely to experience difficulty understanding their health benefits, healthcare costs, and billing. Notably, LGBTQ+ respondents were more likely than the workforce overall to say they had delayed or skipped care due to admin headaches or insurance challenges.
What happens when people delay or skip care? Cancer screenings are missed. Chronic conditions and mental health issues go unmanaged (and often feed on each other). People are more likely to end up in the emergency room or hospital.
No one wants these outcomes. LGBTQ+ people want to stay healthy and out of the hospital, and the employers and health insurers who are footing the bill want the same thing.
The good news is we know how to address these disparities and close these gaps in care. As the co-founder of an LGBTQ+ healthcare organization that now covers six million people, I’ve seen time and again that ensuring equitable access to high-quality care creates more confidence in the healthcare system, less care avoidance, and better health outcomes for LGBTQ+ people. We know what works.
First, employers and health insurers need to do their part. Organizations that are committed to health equity should focus on a few essentials:
Data. Identifying health disparities is the first step in addressing them. Build an accurate picture of the healthcare needs of your LGBTQ+ population by tapping into self-reported data on sexual identity and gender orientation, surveys, healthcare claims, and more. Aside from identifying disparities, these health equity assessments will enable you to design benefits and initiatives tailored to the LGBTQ+ community — and to measure their impact over time.
Diverse provider networks. Finding healthcare providers with LGBTQ+ expertise is a constant challenge. (Just 24% of the LGBTQ+ workers we surveyed were confident they could find a provider who understands LGBTQ+ health issues.) Yet we know culturally competent care drives better patient engagement and outcomes. Diversifying provider networks — including through virtual care — increases the odds that LGBTQ+ people can easily find primary care physicians, specialists, and mental health professionals that meet their needs.
Wrap-around support. Extra support with the many non-clinical aspects of care — including care coordination, navigation services, claims advocacy, and more — is helpful for anyone, but especially so for the LGBTQ+ community. As with healthcare providers, it’s a plus if case managers, care coordinators, and other non-clinical care team members have expertise with LGBTQ+ health.
LGBTQ+ individuals and our allies — including the parents and guardians of LGBTQ+ youth — also need to play a part in advocating for these resources and support. Actionable steps you can take today include:
Sharing your sexual orientation and gender identity with your employer and health insurance plan when asked in surveys and paperwork. This data is vital not only for representation but also for surfacing disparities and gaps in care. Feel empowered to let them know who you are.
Research your health benefits. Are you able to find providers in your network with LGBTQ+ expertise? What does your current plan cover for primary and preventive care, mental health, and LGBTQ+ health? You may have benefits you’re not aware of — and if you don’t have essential benefits, raise that with your employer’s HR team and/or health insurance company..
Join an LGBTQ+ employee resource group (ERG) at work — or start one if it doesn’t already exist. These groups are an important source of peer support, as well as advocacy and organizing. Check out Out & Equal for tips and recommendations on how to get an ERG off the ground.
If you have an internal DEI person or team, engage with them to ensure the LGBTQ+ voice is heard within your organization.
The politicization of LGBTQ+ health is frightening and discouraging, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the things we can control and act on today.
If the LGBTQ+ community, employers, and insurers rally around healthy equity, there is so much we can accomplish together that will have an immediate impact on the lives of millions of LGBTQ+ individuals and our workplaces and communities as a whole.
Colin Quinn is Included Health’s president of Communities. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, he understands firsthand the challenges members of the LGBTQ+ community face navigating their healthcare. He is passionate about raising care equality for underserved patient populations. He also co-founded Included Health, which was acquired by Grand Rounds Health and Doctor on Demand and rebranded under the same name.
New York’s attorney general sent a cease-and-desist letter on Friday slamming a Long Island lawmaker for issuing a “discriminatory and transphobic” executive order designed to keep transgender athletes from playing sports.
Attorney General Letitia James ordered Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman to “immediately rescind” his order on the basis it discriminates against people based sex, gender, identity of expression — a violation of New York law.
“The law is perfectly clear: you cannot discriminate against a person because of their gender identity or expression. We have no room for hate or bigotry in New York,” James said Friday. “This executive order is transphobic and blatantly illegal. Nassau County must immediately rescind the order, or we will not hesitate to take decisive legal action.”
The executive order bars transgender athletes from competing against girls at all 100 sports facilities run by Nassau County, including ball fields and ice rinks. It is believed to be the first ban on transgender participation in sports on a county-wide level in the U.S.
Blakeman argued that transgender athletes don’t belong on the same field as girls, adding that he has been considering instituting the ban for months.
When asked by reporters last week what spurred such a ban to be enacted, Blakeman could cite no examples of such a thing occurring in Nassau County. Neither could the executive director of the agency that oversees high school sports in the county.
“We have not had any issues with transgender athletes participating in section 8 athletics…no complaints, and I’m not sure that there are any,” noted Pat Pizzarelli, of the Nassau County Public High School Athletic Association.
James gave the county executive five days to rescind the order “or else face additional legal action.”
Blakeman doubled down on claims he seeks to protect athletes from “bullying” at a press conference Friday afternoon. He also invited James or her office to meet with county lawyers to examine state and federal law.
GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) media advocacy organization, was among those in the coalition demanding better from the Times.
To date, the coalition has not received a response from the Times. The coalition had three asks of the newspaper, none of which appear to have been met.
Demands from the 100-plus organizations and notables (full list below) signed onto coalition letter on February 15, 2023:
Listen to trans people: hold a meeting with trans community leaders within two months.
Hire at least four full-time trans writers and editors within three months.
On the one year anniversary of the letter’s publication GLAAD returned to the New York Times headquarters with a digital billboard.
“The New York Times’ inaccurate, irresponsible coverage of the transgender community is regularly utilized by extremist lawmakers to justify taking away best practice health care from youth,” said GLAAD President & CEO Sarah Kate Ellis. “The Times has continued down its path of ignoring the trans community, their healthcare providers, and medical experts.
They have not taken our coalition up on our offer to meet with leaders from the trans community, nor have they hired any trans journalists full time, and have gone so far as to discipline their employees for bringing up valid and accurate critique of the newspaper’s trans coverage. As the Times continues down this path, they become more irrelevant every day. We remain eager to meet with the Times to help correct these coverage failures.”
Trans journalists Erin Reed and Evan Urquhart issued a comprehensive takedown of the Times’ most recent biased, inaccurate piece on trans healthcare here. Medical expert Dr. Jack Turban also weighed in to correct disinformation in that piece here.
Immediately after the last biased, inaccurate piece in the Times, it was cited in an anti-trans legal brief by the extremist Alliance Defending Freedom, a SPLC-designated hate group.
A January 2024 expose by The Flaw magazine looked at the Times’ “distinct culpability” in the paper’s ongoing trans coverage, citing journalist Maximillian Alvarez: “the Times knows damn well that its articles are being cited in state legislatures around the country as justification for the hundreds of genocidal, anti-trans anti-queer bills that are being introduced left and right.”
Note that despite claims made by the Times in an effort to discredit their own contributors, the coalition letter was a wholly separate effort from a letter on the same topic signed by more than 1,000 Times contributors last February.
Additional response to the Times’ irresponsible, biased coverage includes:
There’s been a noticeable uptick in police harassment since 2023, that began with legislators proposing bills aimed at LGBTQ people. More recently police and other public officials have seemingly gone out of their way to target the LGBTQ community. This includes spaces in “red states,” like Missouri where police officers arrested the owners of Bar:PM (a leather bar in St. Louis) after they wrecked their police cruiser into it. “Blue states” however, are not immune to this — as was the case in Seattle where authorities raided The Cuff and The Seattle Eagle citing them for “lewd conduct” because of a bartender’s exposed nipple, and patrons wearing jockstraps.
As many LGBTQ activists are already aware, federal policymakers have been enacting legislation at the local and federal level targeting the LGBTQ community. Among those at the federal level is the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill introduced by Sen. Richard Blumenthal in May of 2023. Endorsed by President Joe Biden, the bill is a bipartisan initiative to “protect” kids from harmful content online by placing a responsibility on online social media platforms to regulate content and services. Republicans have noted, if passed, the bill would be used to protect “minor children from the Transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence.”
While KOSA seems to have stalled, despite urging from the Biden administration to pass it, some states have begun passing their own versions of the bill — or by enforcing laws at LGBTQ venues like The Cuff in Seattle. Utah’s obscenity laws has even caused PornHub to pull out of states passing these laws, due to their vagueness.
While some may dismiss these concerns as overblown, it seems clear that it is only one part of a larger strategy aimed at curtailing LGBTQ expression. The irony is that those espousing “freedom” are the same ones passing censorship laws. This gradual ratchet effect, which began last summer by targeting children’s books and LGBTQ persons online, has now shifted into something targeting LGBTQ institutions. It’s the same rhetoric used in the 1960s—which included government produced propaganda directed at LGBTQ people painting them as a social contagion dangerous to kids. At the height of this moral panic were laws prohibiting positive depictions of LGBTQ persons, the impact of which is still being felt today through stereotypes and negative framing.
Even in states that aren’t adding to this moral panic, KOSA has provided the framework by which states can pass vague “obscenity” laws that appear neutral, but in practice are aimed at LGBTQ people. Structural forms of discrimination also exist online as social media platforms act as determiners of what is allowable under their guidelines. In reality, moderation disproportionality impacts LGBTQ people, and especially trans women online. According to a recent study, content moderation against trans people was roughly five times more to occur than cisgender counterparts. These facts and figures resonate with trans content creators we spoke with, like Polly People who was recently de-platformed for “inappropriate attire” — the same attire that is promoted by cisgender women on the same platform.
Whether it’s jockstrap night at the local leather bar, trans content creators trying to express themselves, or protests of expressions of sexuality at Pride or events at Folsom, we are quickly descending into an age of marginalization that many LGBTQ people haven’t experienced since before Stonewall. While some of the established forms of collective organizing and community have been forgotten or lost, new forms are emerging to fight against these laws and regulations designed to further marginalize and render invisible the lives of LGBTQ Americans.
Christopher T. Conner is assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Missouri. They are author of numerous scholarly publications, including ‘The Gayborhood: From Sexual Revolution to Cosmopolitan Spectacle.’ Fletcher Jackson is a senior undergraduate student at the University of Missouri, Columbia in Religious Studies and are co-teaching a class in spring 2024. Their research is at the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and queer visibility.
