This mom had no resources when her trans son came out. So she launched a global support network.

Roz Keith found out her son was transgender on his terms.

The suburban mom was asking about haircuts, and Hunter, just shy of 14 at the time, texted her some photos. “He started texting me pictures of boys with short haircuts. And I said, ‘Oh, these are very masculine. And Hunter said, ‘Uh huh,’ and walked out of the room.”

It was typical teenage behavior, but the conversation that followed was life-changing, Keith said.

“I went upstairs, knocked on his door, and said, ‘What’s going on?’ And that’s when he told me. He said, ‘I’m a boy. I’m transgender.’ That was how he came out to me.”

Keith was caught off guard on multiple fronts. “All the little things from the time he was super little then became the hammer over the head.” She thought about Hunter playing with boy dolls, preferring time with boys to girls, choosing Narnia’s Prince Caspian over all the Disney princess costumes.

“I saw this one male avatar in a game, this buff, masculine character that he had created, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s a guy.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, okay.’ You know, no explanation. So, all along, I just kept saying ‘Okay,’ too.”

Keith wasn’t a helicopter parent. “We really encouraged our kids to be independent,” she said, “and we wanted them to be happy and successful and productive, whatever that meant for them.” But she also said a transgender child “just wasn’t in my consideration set.”

“In my world, I didn’t have a friend who had a trans child. We didn’t have any adult in our community who was trans or in the process of coming out or identified in any way remotely that way. So it was really a foreign concept from that perspective.”

While those conversations weren’t happening in Keith’s world, they certainly were in her precocious online teenager’s.

“He figured it out because he was watching YouTube, and he saw a trans person on this show talking about their coming out. And that was his light bulb moment. And he said, ‘Oh my God, that’s me.’”

Hunter spent a long time contemplating his revelation and researching what to do about it before he shared anything with his family.

“He’d been researching for two years,” Keith recalled. “He had a checklist of everything he wanted to do.”

With Hunter’s declaration, his state of mind came into focus for his mom.

“Based on things he shared when he was younger, he felt different, and he didn’t know why he felt different, and he didn’t have language to explain it,” Keith realized. “And it created a lot of struggle and conflict, and, I think, anger for him.”

“He said, you know, ‘I just felt like the weird kid.’”

Keith decided to close that gap – for her son and for others.

In 2015, she founded Stand with Trans, a support network devoted to trans kids and their parents and caregivers. The nonprofit provides transgender and nonbinary youth with life-saving programs like mental health services, peer support groups, educational resources, and, most importantly, Keith says, “validation and empowerment.”

Stand With Trans also provides critical support to parents or guardians of trans youth. Its Ally Parents program allows loved ones to text, call, or email other parents of trans youth for connection and advice.

Letting go

“Parents can have a hard time when their child comes out and wants to transition to a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth,” Keith said.

“They struggle to let go of the child they thought they had and the dreams that they had, right? If a child was assigned female at birth, a parent might say, ‘I just imagined her walking down the aisle in the white dress,’ you know? And they grieve this child as if the child has died.”

“I never took that approach,” Keith said, “because I knew that my child was very much alive and that it was my job to make sure that he stayed that way. You know, it was my job to make sure that he was mentally well and that he got what he needed so he could thrive.”

For Hunter and his family, checking off those steps to transition wouldn’t come easily.

“There were no pediatric gender clinics who were seeing trans youth covered by our insurance. There were no therapists who we could find who were trained to see trans adolescents. There were no support groups. There were no parent groups. There was nothing for youth. Like, literally every phone call was a brick wall,” Keith said.

But Hunter wasn’t waiting on the details. He decided to come out on Facebook.

“My daughter came to me and said, ‘Did you see what Hunter posted?’ And I said, ‘No.’”

While Keith and her husband had talked to a few close friends about Hunter, the family hadn’t been sharing much “because it wasn’t our story to share — that was up to him.”

With Hunter’s announcement, “It was like the floodgates had opened,” Keith said.

The family agreed to tell their story.

They began speaking publicly about their experience. “And there was just like this swell of relief, I guess, and joy from families in the community who had been trying to manage this process with their kiddo and had no one to talk to. There was really nobody — medically, psychologically emotionally — just literally no one was there.”

“Families like mine, trans adults, multi-generational families, like, every member of the community were reaching out and saying, ‘Oh, my God, I could have uttered those words. Your son reminds me of my son.’”

Hunter’s story had inspired an outpouring of empathy and recognition, but the story he shared online didn’t address his lingering sense of isolation.

“Even my son said, ‘I don’t know anyone like me.’ And so as we started to meet families,” Keith said.

“I was literally arranging play dates for my 14-15-year-old. Like, I was inviting kids to come over and just hang out, and — fly on the wall — they talked about stupid stuff, like, ‘Oh, don’t you hate getting socks for Christmas presents?’ And it showed these kids that being trans didn’t mean that you weren’t like other kids. You know, you were just another teen.”

Those interactions became the heart of the mission that guides Stand with Trans today.

The rise of parents’ rights

The founding of Stand With Trans accompanied a rising awareness of gender diversity in the 2010s, but with that also came a conservative backlash wrought with anti-trans animus.

Before Hunter came out, “Nobody was talking about bathroom bills and trans girls in sports. Those conversations weren’t happening,” Keith said.

Since then, trans kids like Hunter have been buried under an avalanche of discriminatory legislation, from gender-affirming care bans to a trans-erasing, book-banning frenzy organized by groups like Moms for Liberty to an online hate campaign led by accounts like Libs of TikTok.

Adding fuel to the fire: the president’s obsession with “gender ideology” and his “us” vs “them” politics of division.

The right has hawked its anti-LGBTQ+ agenda under the same, one-sided banner: parents’ rights.

Keith said the phrase is self-serving.

“I don’t think that any government should be allowed to say what my child has or doesn’t have access to, because I’m the parent. They’re not in my home parenting my child, so they don’t know what they’re going through. How do you make that global statement?” she asked.

“It is up to me to make a decision about my child’s medical care,” Keith said. “And as far as my child goes, if he was denied the opportunity to go on testosterone and not medically transition, I think our conversation would be very different.”

Keith points to a perversion of theology as one basis of the far-right’s anti-trans animus.

“I’m not Christian. I was raised Jewish. But my understanding from my friends who are Christian and very affirming and very accepting, their response is, ‘The Jesus I know would open the door for everyone, and would welcome everyone to the table.’ There’s really a disconnect between saying you’re a Christian and then not being open to accepting people as they are, as they show up.”

“Far be it for me to tell anyone what they should believe,” Keith added, “but you don’t get to bring it into my home and tell me how to care for my child, because those aren’t my beliefs. That’s not what I understand, right? It’s a secular society.”

“Your belief system should not infringe on my rights.”

Seeing around the corner

Stand with Trans was born to help protect trans kids from the attacks by providing love, knowledge and support — and power over their own lives.

“Our mission is so simple,” Keith said. “It’s empowering and supporting trans youth and their loved ones. So that’s it. We know that if we educate and support the caregivers, the loved ones, the parents, that the young people are going to do better, and if we find ways to make life better and easier for them, they’re not only going to survive, but they’re going to thrive.

“I know with my own kid, they couldn’t see themselves having a future. I think it’s hard enough for young people who don’t see around the corners, right? It’s hard to even imagine, like, ‘What do I want to be when I grow up.’ But for trans kids, it’s even harder.

“So it’s really important for us to show these young people that they can do whatever they want to do,” Keith said.

“Being trans is one part of their identity. It doesn’t define who they are.”

November 5, 2025 0

First-of-its-kind LGBTQIA+ hotline in Illinois offers support amid sweeping attacks

Judge nixes Justice Department subpoena of telehealth trans health care provider

Trump seeks to kill all medical care for trans youth by defunding hospitals that provide it

Read more at LGBTQ Nation.

Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seeks to end all Medicaid and Medicare funding for young people’s gender-affirming care (GAC), according to newly proposed rules shared by NPR. A trans activist said the rules would amount to a “de facto national ban” on GAC.

The proposed rules would prohibit all federal Medicaid and Medicare funding — as well as funding through the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) — for any services at hospitals that provide GAC for trans youth.

“These would be proposals that would go out for public comment, it would take months for the Trump administration to issue a final rule, and then, if past is prologue, we would see litigation over whatever the final rules are,” Katie Keith, director of the Center for Health Policy and the Law at Georgetown University, told NPR.

Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, a right-wing think tank that has pushed national transphobia as an effective Republican political strategy, said of the proposed rules, “I think these restrictions are very good. It’s going to change the entire transgender industry, and it’s going to take away a lot of their funding streams.”

“This would be a de facto national ban,” wrote trans activist and civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo via Bluesky. “There would still be providers in blue states that don’t take federal funding but the large interdisciplinary teams of just a few years ago would be nearly impossible to maintain. The result is that the care that remains would largely be underground with worse support and likely outcomes.”

“They’ll never be able to fully ban this care,” Caraballo added. “There will always be providers willing to provide it like abortion. Even without access to providers, many trans youth will simply go DIY [do-it-yourself] like trans folks have done for decades. They’re not actually banning this care, they’re making it less safe.”

The administration’s “toxic” war on gender-affirming care

Though there is no federal law banning gender-affirming care, the current presidential administration has sought to eradicate the practice through a January executive order (that has since been blocked by several courts). The order instructed the DOJ to extend the time that patients and parents can sue gender-affirming doctors and to use laws against false advertising to prosecute any entity that may be misleading the public about the long-term effects of gender-affirming care (GAC).

In April, Bondi issued a memo to DOJ employees, telling them to investigate and prosecute cases of minors accessing gender-affirming care as female genital mutilation (FGM), even though hospitals don’t conduct such female genital surgeries. The memo threatened to jail doctors for 10 years if they provide gender-affirming care to young trans people.

The following June, the DOJ sent subpoenas to 20 medical providers who offer GAC to trans youth, demanding patients’ Social Security numbers, emails, home addresses, and information on the care they received, as well as other sensitive information dating back to January 2020. A federal judge blocked the subpoena in one instance and accused the DOJ of going on a “bad faith” “fishing expedition” to interfere with states’ rights to protect GAC within its borders, to harass and intimidate providers from offering such care, and to dissuade patients from seeking such care.

Fewer than 3,000 teens nationwide receive puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy, according to a 2025 JAMA analysis of private insurance data. Gender-affirming care is supported by all major medical associations in the U.S., including the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, as safe and life-saving for young people with gender dysphoria.

One doctor interviewed by The Washington Post called the federal government’s crusade against gender-affirming care a “toxic plan” that will force some patients to detransition, potentially forcing them into adverse psychological and physical effects, including increased anxiety, depression, and the development of unwanted physical changes.

October 31, 2025 0

Republican official sued a Texas doctor for treating trans kids. She left the state.

Read more at LGBTQ Nation.

A Dallas pediatrician who became the first doctor to be sued under a Texas law banning gender-affirming care for minors has given up her license to practice in the state.

According to TownFlex, the Texas Medical Board confirmed that Dr. May Lau voluntarily surrendered her medical license. In a statement, Lau’s attorney, Craig Smyser, said that she has decided to move her practice to Oregon and sees no reason to maintain her license to practice in Texas.

Last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against Lau for allegedly providing gender-affirming care to minors in violation of S.B. 14. The state law, which went into effect in September 2023, bans doctors from prescribing hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers to minors, and from performing gender-affirming surgery on minors.

Paxton’s suit accused Lau of prescribing hormone replacement therapy to at least 21 minors between October 2023 and August 2024. It further alleged that Lau “used false diagnoses and billing codes to mask these unlawful prescriptions.”

Notably, Paxton’s suit falsely referred to gender-affirming care as “dangerous and experimental” and a press release from his office claimed that there is “no scientific evidence” to support the benefits of gender-affirming medication.

In fact, puberty blockers and hormone replacement drugs have for decades been used safely for the purposes of gender transition in trans minors and to treat other medical issues in cisgender children. Gender-affirming care, which encompasses a range of both surgical and nonsurgical treatments, has been endorsed by every major American medical association and leading world health authority as evidence-based, safe, and in some cases lifesaving for transgender minors. Gender-affirming surgical intervention is rarely performed on minors.

In his statement, Smyser said that Lau “continues to deny the Texas Attorney General’s politically- and ideologically-driven allegations,” according to TownFlex.

Paxton, meanwhile, said that Lau’s surrender of her medical license was “a major victory for our state.”

“Doctors who permanently hurt kids by giving them experimental drugs are nothing more than disturbed left-wing activists who have no business being in the medical field. We will not relent in holding anyone who tries to ‘transition’ kids accountable,” he said in a statement, according to TownFlex.

As the outlet notes, Paxton has filed similar lawsuits against two other Texas doctors. Last month, the Texas AG withdrew the state’s suit against Hector Granados after finding no evidence that he violated S.B. 14. However, a lawsuit brought against M. Brett Cooper is ongoing and expected to go to trial in May.

Equality Texas noted that the enforcement of S.B. 14 has led many doctors who provide gender-affirming care to leave the state — making it harder for trans adults to access care.

October 28, 2025 0

Cisgender male student kicked off boys’ basketball team due to birth certificate error in nightmarish ordeal

Read more at LGBTQ Nation.

In Arizona last week, a cisgender male 8th grader was “physically removed” from tryouts for his school’s boys’ basketball team because an error on his original birth certificate incorrectly identified him as being born female.

It’s the latest episode in a “gender ideology”-inspired nightmare for the teenager, Laker Jackson, and his family.

“I’m sad for everybody that it’s come down to this,” mom Becky Jackson told KNXV News in Phoenix.

The Kafkaesque drama was inspired by a clerical mistake 14 years ago, when hospital staff mistakenly identified Becky Jackson’s newborn son as a girl. It was an error Laker’s parents never noticed.

“I give him the birth certificate and they’re like, ‘Did you know this says female?’” Becky Jackson recalled about handing over enrollment paperwork to a school administrator last year.

“I was like, ‘What?’” Becky Jackson said. “I was like, ‘Oh man, that’s so funny.’ So we come home, everyone’s laughing.”

The busy mom of six said correcting the document wasn’t a priority.

“So we just put it in the drawer and moved on,” she said.

The mix-up didn’t cause issues until recently, she told AZ Family.

Last spring, school staff began treating Jackson as female, Becky Jackson said.

The district removed Laker Jackson from an all-boys gym class and mandated he use a separate restroom, despite the family’s assertion that their son is a cisgender boy, assigned male at birth.

Becky’s mom had already started work on changing Laker Jackson’s birth certificate, but “it’s not something that you can fix quickly. You have to have an affidavit signed,” she said.

In the meantime, the 14-year-old continued training to make the boys’ basketball team at his Mesa high school, a 7th to 12th-grade school in the Queen Creek Unified School District.

Becky Jackson said she received the corrected birth certificate over the summer and provided the district with the revised document, along with a doctor’s note confirming Laker’s sex.

But Queen Creek administrators said it wasn’t enough, standing by a rule stating that the school’s determination of a student’s sex would rely solely on an original birth certificate.

“They sent the athletic director of Eastmark High to physically remove Laker from the basketball tryouts in front of all of his friends, in front of the coach,” Becky Jackson said.

“I am a biological boy. I was born a boy,” said Laker Jackson, who heard from friends on the basketball team that “they were talking about it for the entire tryout and even the next day’s tryouts because they were really confused.”

After the family continued to raise objections to Laker Jackson’s treatment, a letter from an administrator said genetic testing to confirm their claim that the child is a boy “could be considered.”

“They may consider changing it if we get chromosomal testing. They didn’t say they would,” Laker’s mom said. She estimated the cost at $1500.

“So who’s going to pay that?” she asked.

In a statement, the district said it was “committed to ongoing dialogue.”

Becky Jackson also said her son will try out for a girls’ team if that’s what it comes to.

The ordeal is a prime example of what activists have long warned: that anti-trans policies are bad for everyone. It’s also quite ironic, considering the very people who want to stop anyone assigned male at birth from playing on girls’ sports teams may wind up forcing a cisgender boy to do just that.

October 23, 2025 0

Anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes have risen around the world since 2020: report

‘They break you’: Colombia debates a ban on conversion therapy

Third time’s the charm?

Two previous proposed bans were defeated after conservative lawmakers and evangelical and Catholic groups mobilized in opposition.

They argued that a ban on conversion therapy could land priests and parents in prison, and some said LGBTQ groups wanted to turn children gay and trans.

Such a ban “infringes upon family autonomy by preventing parents from guiding their children,” said conservative senator Maria Fernanda Cabal after voting against last year’s bill.

From Brazil and Mexico to Spain and Vietnam, at least 17 countries have nationwide legislation in the works targeting the practice, according to ILGA-World, an international LGBTQ rights group.

LGBTQ activists in Colombia hope the third time is the charm.

“When we first started to talk about these practices, people just didn’t believe something like this could still happen in Colombia,” said Danne Belmont, executive director at GAAT, a Bogota-based trans rights group.

Belmont, a trans woman, said she was given testosterone as a child and underwent exorcisms in efforts to change who she was.

Advocates have altered their approach since the first bill was introduced in 2022, trying to broaden its appeal.

In the current rendition, the campaign is not only that LGBTQ people have “nothing to heal” but it asks their parents to “always love them,” Belmont said.

“This bill is aimed at Colombia’s families, at offering safe spaces where people can ask questions about their sexual orientation and gender identity,” she said.

Contrary to claims made by some Catholic lawmakers and ultra-Catholic groups, Father Carlos Guillermo Arias Jimenez of Colombia’s Bishop’s Conference said the latest bill does not contradict religious freedom.

“The church could not accept, nor has it ever taught, the practice of actions aimed at changing or reversing people’s sexual orientation,” he said.

Colombia’s Evangelical Confederation did not reply to several requests for comment.

In Congress, the bill passed its first reading in April with support from members of various political parties, but it must pass two more readings before next year’s elections.

Survivors, not victims

Belmont said trauma often prevents many LGBTQ people from realizing they have undergone conversion therapy until they hear stories from their peers.

A national network was set up in May of more than 50 people who have undergone conversion therapy to share their stories on social media and at events in hopes they will help others.

“Sometimes conversion therapy is a gradual, sophisticated process that mixes religion, spirituality and psychology that lays the ground,” David Zuluaga, 27, who was raised in the small town of Antioquia.

What started as manipulation and social isolation at age 12 turned into being hit in the stomach at age 14 to make him “vomit the spirit of homosexuality,” he said.

The conversion therapy lasted until he was 17, but it took him far longer to understand what had happened, let alone speak about it.

“Fear has to change sides. We used to be ashamed of having gone through this,” said Zuluaga, now an out gay man.

“But they should be the ones who are ashamed of having done this, of still doing this — mistreating, abusing and torturing people.”

According to research by the United Nations’ independent expert on LGBTQ rights, which has documented conversion therapy in at least 100 countries including Uganda, the Philippines and the United States, the practices leave deep physical and psychological traces.

“It broke my relationship with my family, with spirituality, with my body,” said Viana, who added that it has taken decades to rebuild bonds with his family, trust people and find love.

“Darkness needs to be total to exist. For light to exist, a single spark is enough,” he said.

“The work we’re doing is to multiply these sparks along the way… which we all light up together.”

October 14, 2025 0

Only 0.03% Opt Out Of LGBTQ+ Education In Maryland After SCOTUS Gives Them A Right To

Donald Trump ends LGBTQ+ health programs under the cover of the shutdown

Read more at LGBTQ Nation.

On Friday, the Trump administration began massive layoffs throughout the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). As part of that, they completely removed the Office of Population Affairs, which was responsible for a wealth of public health programs, including specific initiatives for the LGBTQ+ community.

“This wasn’t a budget decision — it was ideological,” a former member of the Biden administration told The Advocate. “These are the programs that centered reproductive and queer health, and now they’re gone.”

Donald Trump has welcomed the government shutdown as an opportunity to cut what he has called “Democrat Agencies” to shrink the government. The process is being led by Russ Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and key author of Project 2025, which advocated for such cuts. However, he has also tried to blame those government cuts on the Democrats.

Vought took to X/Twitter on Friday to announce the start of the “Reduction in Force,” or RIF. His office confirmed via Politico that federal employees were being permanently fired, not temporarily furloughed for the duration of the shutdown: “Can confirm RIFs have begun and they are substantial. These are RIFs, not furloughs.”

Adrian Shanker, who served as deputy assistant secretary for Health Policy during the Biden administration, told The Advocate that while the Office of Population Affairs often had its programs politicized, this is “the first time that the office itself is being cut.”

The Office of Population Affairs manages a huge range of public health initiatives. Those include Title X family planning services and grants; programs for adolescents that cover issues such as pregnancy prevention, mental health, and substance abuse; the Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services program; screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted infections and information on preventing the spread of HIV; and LGBTQ+ health initiatives, including information on gender-affirming care.

As well as restricting programming targeted specifically at the LGBTQ+ community, these cuts will restrict access to family planning programs that LGBTQ+ people are more likely to make use of to grow their families.

The cuts to the Office of Population Affairs will leave us lacking when it comes to sex education and with less support for LGBTQ+ youth, Shanker noted, saying it “leaves us more vulnerable to health inequities and worsened health outcomes.”

Wider cuts to the HHS will have broader effects as the CDC is losing over a thousand employees, including the elimination of entire departments. “CDC is over. It was killed,” said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the out gay former director of the CDC’s National Center on Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, after 1000 scientists, doctors, and public health officials were fired from HHS on Friday. Daskalakis, an infectious diseases expert, resigned in protest of the administration’s war on science-based public health earlier this year.

“This administration only knows how to break things. They have made America at risk for outbreaks and attacks by nefarious players. People should be scared.”

Some reports have suggested that some laid-off employees have been contacted and told that their reduction-in-force notices are being rescinded. This happened with federal layoffs from DOGE in the past, with some employees being rehired after DOGE cut their jobs. However, reports are unclear on how many RIFs have been rescinded.

Previous federal layoffs have been litigated in court, with some resulting in court rulings that the people cannot be fired, while other courts have allowed the dismissals to proceed. That process, if it occurs here, will take time, during which public health will suffer a setback.

“Without these people in place, it’s unlikely that a lot of these programs will be able to continue even after the government reopens,” predicted Shanker.

October 13, 2025 0