For LGBT nonprofits, Trump's orders target their very existence
The Los Angeles LGBT Center describes itself as the world's largest provider of services to the LGBTQ community, with more than 500,000 client visits a year. But under President Donald Trump, the organization is being forced to confront an existential crisis: either stop serving transgender people or lose its federal funding.
Los Angeles LGBT 'has been told it must remove terms like 'LGBT' (which is in the organization's name), 'queer,' 'trans' and 'transgender' from its materials' or forfeit its $2.25 million grant from the U.S. Office of Family Violence and Prevention Services, lawyers for the group and others targeted by the administration have told a federal judge as part of an ongoing lawsuit in Oakland.
The lawsuit, filed by a number of LGBT-serving organizations in San Francisco and across the country, is just one of dozens — if not hundreds — over the last three months that challenge sweeping moves by the Trump administration to reshape the role and mission of the U.S. government.
But the groups in this suit are not just arguing that cutting their funding would crush their budget or squeeze their staffing. Worse yet, they contend, by targeting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — as well as denying the existence of transgender people — the administration is challenging their very right to operate. While the administration is cutting resources to the U.S. Forest Service, for example, it is not asking the agency to deny the existence of trees.
'These executive orders are a direct threat to our mission,' Dr. Tyler TerMeer, chief executive officer of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, one of the groups suing, told the Chronicle. 'Without acknowledging the existence of trans and gender identity, we can't do our work' on programs that serve more than 27,000 people a year.
Or, as TerMeer put it in a court declaration, 'HIV advocates are once again being told to stay silent, forced into an impossible choice: speak the truth about systemic inequities and risk losing federal funding or comply with harmful restrictions that undermine life-saving services. But as the movement learned decades ago, silence equals death.'
On Jan. 20, Trump's first day in office, he issued an executive order declaring a government policy to recognize only 'two sexes, male and female,' as determined at birth. Denying the biological existence of transgender people, he has sought to exclude those who identify as transgender from military service, cut off their federal health care funding and ban transgender females from girls' and women's sports teams.
In February, the Trump administration's National Park Service, on its website commemorating the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York, changed the government's former 'LGBTQ+' label to 'LGB,' deleting the 'transgender' and 'queer' references.
The administration hasn't ordered the Los Angeles LGBT Center to change its name in order to keep its funding. But the government has asked the center's clients to remove all LGBT references from their websites, said Jose Abrigo, an attorney with the advocacy group Lambda Legal representing the center and other organizations in the multistate lawsuit.
'It is impossible for the LA LGBT Center to fulfill its mission and provide any of its services to transgender patients and clients without acknowledging and recognizing transgender people for who they are,' the center's CEO, Joe Hollendoner, said in a court declaration.
'After a person has been told enough times by an emergency room: 'We don't serve your kind here,' they are not likely to go back even if it means they might die,' the LGBT Center's chief medical officer, Dr. Katherine Duffy, said in another declaration.
Hollendoner said one of the Trump administration's orders 'prohibits the promotion of 'gender ideology,' seeming to condition federal funding on the denial of the very existence of transgender people.'
Similarly, Lance Toma, CEO of the San Francisco Community Health Center, cited a Jan. 31 order from its federal contractor to immediately halt 'all activities promoting gender ideology.' The order 'threatens the very existence of all of our health center's programs,' Toma told the court.
Jessyca Leach, CEO of Prisma Community Care, a nonprofit in Phoenix that is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said her organization is 'unsure if there is any way to maintain access given that so many aspects of our operation depend on an equitable approach to the provision of health care, and respectful acknowledgement of the dignity of transgender people.'
Another plaintiff is FORGE, a nonprofit serving transgender and nonbinary people in Wisconsin. Its executive director, Michael Munson, told the court that 'we are uncertain about how to conduct our work since every aspect of our programming and services revolve around transgender and nonbinary survivors and the providers who serve them. … It is an impossible position with no way forward.'
U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar of Oakland has scheduled a hearing May 22 on the organizations' request for an injunction against the funding restrictions. A federal judge in Maryland previously blocked the restrictions, but an appeals court has put his order on hold.
According to Trump's Justice Department, the transgender advocacy groups — and not the administration — are the ones violating civil rights by allowing people who were born male to compete with female athletes, use women's restrooms and identify themselves as female.
The organizations challenging the administration's actions 'have no First Amendment right to engage in illegal conduct,' Justice Department attorney Pardis Gheibi said in a filing asking Tigar to dismiss the lawsuit.
Trump is entitled to 'align government funding and enforcement strategies with (his) policy priorities,' Gheibi wrote, and 'the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government does not penalize, prohibit, restrict, or otherwise infringe on speech simply because it chooses not to pay for it.'
But Lambda Legal attorney Jennifer Pizer said the funding cutoffs are 'sweeping attempts by the government to control and chill private speech.'
The Trump administration is trying to require LBGT groups to 'repudiate the identities and very existence of their transgender patients and patrons, and deny services to them,' in order to keep their federal grants, Pizer wrote in a court filing.
'Gender identity is real,' she said, quoting past court rulings, 'and no matter how much the Administration proclaims otherwise, so are transgender people.'
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