Log Cabin Republicans, the nation’s largest group representing gay conservatives and their allies, will no longer advocate for transgender rights, a senior leader for the organization announced in a column Thursday.
Ross Hemminger, the group’s president, wrote that the organization’s board of directors voted to narrow its national advocacy focus on issues relating to sexual orientation and conservative values. The group will now focus on lesbian, gay and bisexual advocacy, officially dropping the “T” from the widely used acronym LGBT.
“We are an LGB advocacy organization,” Hemminger said, “as our founders envisioned and as our moral center calls us to be.”
The federal government has significantly rolled back transgender rights since President Donald Trump’s return to office. Trump has pushed to remove federal funding for gender-affirming care for minors, pressured schools to remove transgender student athletes from women’s sports and issued an executive order that all passports must reflect an individual’s assigned sex at birth.
Trending
Hemminger embraced Trump and hard-right conservatives’ anti-trans arguments in his column, writing that the “transgender movement” seeks to push schools to teach “radical gender ideology” and supports gender affirming care for minors.
GLAAD, an LGBT+ media advocacy organization, has pushed back against that framing and said that use of the phrase “trans agenda” by right-wing media figures and politicians frames “the pursuit of visibility and basic rights — such as access to healthcare and public safety — as sinister or threatening.”
Log Cabin Republicans voted to include transgender Americans as a part of their advocacy in 2015 “out of a belief that all adults should be allowed to pursue their own happiness” as long as it did not “impede on the inalienable rights of others,” Hemminger said.
“At the time, we did not believe that we would find ourselves where we are today,” Hemminger continued.
Hemminger said that the shift away from transgender advocacy does not change who can join the Log Cabin Republicans. The group has maintained a close relationship with First Lady Melania Trump, who made rare public appearances during the 2024 election cycle to host a fundraiser for the group and speak at one of its events.
The first lady’s office did not immediately return to a request for comment on the Log Cabin Republicans’ new national focus.
Author
