Abigail Swetz:
So under this new administration, I think there are a few things to keep in mind. Number one, trans and non-binary people are here, they have always been here, they will always be here. And no president can change that with a line in a speech or the stroke of some sort of executive order pen. We also have to, as a community and as a general public, understand that we can't make it easier for this administration by assuming he's actually going to be successful at implementing these discriminatory policies. There is a lot of vagueness in some of the things he stated, and even in the executive order that he signed on day one that was anti-trans. I wouldn't be surprised if there was litigation any moment about quite a bit of it, and some of this is going to take some time for us to see what it really, really means. But what is most important, I think for the general public and for the LGBTQ+ community, is to really hold true to that fact, that our community is not going anywhere. The LGBTQ+ community has faced hostile federal governments before and we are still here. Part of the movement, part of the fact that the LGBTQ+ movement is a movement, is knowing that that movement sometimes gets more and more difficult, and more and more challenging, and can go in other directions. And it is really, really important that we continue to center those trans and non-binary voices in this movement, and to follow their lead. Also, the general public needs to make sure that we're understanding the experiences, because as we have seen, the numbers are scary when it comes to mental health and emotional wellbeing, when it comes to suicide ideation, when it comes to suicide attempts. It's also important to understand the joy and the affirmation that can be the flip side of that. I think it's important that this movement lifts all of that up, and that the general public really comes to understand that. ...

When the the president said the factually untrue statements about sex and gender, and gender identity, it made me think about how he was attempting to follow through on what I would consider a campaign promise of his that we saw in the attack ads, in the anti-trans attack ads. I find it incredibly disappointing, to say the least, that those attack ads ever happened. They were disgusting and they were hateful. I think the most important thing to know about them, actually, is that they did not work. Those attack ads that were anti-trans did not drive voters — there is research that shows that, and some of the people who ran those attack ads won, but they did not win based on their ugly rejection of trans people. And to me that's incredibly important to keep in mind, 'cause it shows what we as a general public need to know about holding our elected officials accountable. Because if those attack ads did not drive voters, and those votes did not happen because of any kind of support of these anti-trans policies, we need to know that. We can't let these people who think they have an anti-trans agenda govern as though they have a mandate, because they don't. Some of them won, but they didn't win because they were anti-trans. I think the rest of us need to be able to hold them accountable and say this is a cycle that needs to stop, and this ugliness has no place in our politics, and definitely no place in our actual government.