I am endorsing the No Hate in Washington State
campaign, which is calling for a NO vote on two proposed appalling
anti-trans ballot measures that threaten the rights of all children. If
passed, IL26-001 would deny basic protections for child abuse victims
and IL26-628 would subject girls to invasive genital exams to play
sports. It is absolutely crucial that working people and the labor
movement ensure these measures are defeated by Washington State voters.
The working class needs to stand in solidarity against every form of
oppression as well as economic exploitation under the capitalist system.
My organization, Workers Strike Back, has also endorsed the campaign.
Both Workers Strike Back and my revolutionary socialist campaign for the
U.S. Congress will be doing everything we can to support the No Hate
campaign.
Working
people also need to set our sights beyond defending against attacks. We
need to fight for major victories for LGBTQ+ people — this is the best
way to defend against attacks and prevent them in the first place. The
fight for LGBTQ+ people should go hand in hand with the fight to win
historic change for working people of all genders and sexualities.
Discrimination, oppression, and violence is endemic to capitalism
because in order to squeeze billions of people for profit, the
billionaires and multimillionaires need to keep the working class
divided on gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and ethnicity, and
citizenship status. We need to get united as the working class against
the attempts of the right wing and billionaire class to divide us in
order to keep exploiting us.
Working
people are being squeezed on every front trying to afford housing,
healthcare, and even groceries. Trans people, especially trans people of
color, face violence and discrimination that make all those issues even
worse. One in five trans people have been fired or denied a job for
being trans and one in eight evicted or denied housing. One in five
transgender individuals have experienced homelessness at some point in
their lives.
My independent revolutionary socialist campaign for Congress is fighting for and demanding:
End
anti-trans and all LGBTQ+ oppression. Stop the advance of anti-trans
bills, and go on the offensive to fight for full LGBTQ+ rights
Free
healthcare for all, including full access to all gender affirming and
reproductive care and LGBTQ+ counseling services, funded by taxing the
rich
The
Equality Act, which would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (including
titles II, III, IV, VI, VII, and IX) to prohibit discrimination on the
basis of sex, sexual orientation and gender identity in employment,
housing, public accommodations, education, federally funded programs,
credit, and jury service
Living-wage jobs guarantee and the right for all workers to unionize
National
rent control to stop the price-gouging by corporate landlords, which
forces LGBTQ+ people out of their communities by economic eviction
Create
millions of affordable homes, including free emergency housing for
trans and queer people fleeing abuse, funded by taxing the billionaires
and the wealthiest corporations
End all military aid to Israel and cut the trillion-dollar war budget to fund housing, education, and other social services
AI-related regulations for the rights and safeguarding of queer children and adults.
The Republican Party has been the most direct in its attacks on trans people. Just in 2026, a shocking 44 anti-trans bills
have already been passed in 15 Republican-dominated states. Hundreds
more bills are making their way through the legislatures of states
across the nation. President Trump has attempted to carry out multiple anti-trans executive orders. These attempts include
denying new passports to trans and nonbinary individuals, eliminating
federal funding for schools that promote “indoctrination” based on
“gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology,” stopping
healthcare to trans adolescents and young trans adults, banning trans
girls from school sports, and erasing LGBTQ+ history by removing public
health data from federal government websites, such as decades of HIV
research and data on the mental health of girls and LGBTQ+ youth.
Defeating
Trump, the Republicans, and the right wing, however, will require
independent movements with leadership prepared to fight against both the
Republican and the Democratic parties.
Not only have the Democratic Party Congressmembers failed to defeat
Trump, their own betrayals of working people have opened the door to the
two Trump presidencies in the first place.
Trump
and the Republicans have demonized LGBTQ+ people in order to deflect
genuine anger working people feel against the billionaires. But
Democratic politicians have not fought for LGBTQ+ rights in any
meaningful way, and instead have used superficial and performative
rhetoric while betraying queer and all working people. Several
Democratic Congressmembers pay lip service to LGBTQ+ issues, but they
have not won, or led on, any substantive victories. Now, many prominent
Democrats have started abandoning even those empty promises to pivot
rightward for careerist reasons.
In
1996, 118 House and 32 Senate Democrats voted in favor of the
anti-LGBTQ+ Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a
man and a woman. Democratic
President Bill Clinton signed it into law. Even in 2008 in his
Presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Barack Obama said,
"I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of
gay marriage." In Seattle in 2013, I was the only City Council or
Mayoral candidate or elected official who publicly stood with the
first-ever Trans Pride march. No Democratic Party candidate or elected
official was willing to support it.
Last
year, Gavin Newsom said it is "deeply unfair" for trans women to
participate in women's sports. During the 2024 Presidential election,
Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, when asked if transgender Americans
should have access to gender affirming care, said merely, "I believe we
should follow the law." This was in a context in which hundreds of
anti-trans bills were being advanced nationally. In a 2022 Financial
Times interview, when asked about the "transgender debate," Hilary
Clinton said: "We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy,
and everything that everybody else cares about then goes out the
window. The most important thing is to win the next election. Whatever
does not help you win should not be a priority."
My
main opponent, 29-year Democratic Congressmember Adam Smith pays lip
service to LGBTQ+ rights, while his actions have been geared towards
attacking working people (including the queer community), promoting war,
and serving the profiteering billionaires. Smith was one of 51 House Democrats
who voted for hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare and
Medicaid in 1997, as part of Bill Clinton’s Balanced Budget Act. This
bill also opened the door to the privatization of Medicare. Under both
Republican President Bush and Democratic President Obama, Adam Smith
repeatedly voted to bail out the big banks after the Great Recession,
which plundered the millions who faced home foreclosures and handed over
tens of billions of dollars worth of real estate to private equity.
This bipartisan robbery against working people is a big reason why rents
have been skyrocketing. In 2011, Adam Smith voted to cut billions of
dollars from publicly funded rent controlled housing. Smith voted to
break the strike of the Railroad workers in 2022. He has voted to create
and fund ICE and to fund tens of billions of dollars for the genocide
in Gaza.
Even a Democratic Party strategist, Charlotte Clymer, who is also a trans activist, admitted in 2025:
“We’ve been largely abandoned by the Democratic Party… Looking at the
past six months or so, it’s become pretty clear that most federal
Democratic lawmakers have no clear or obvious intention in standing
beside trans people in this critical moment.”
Throughout
history, the ruling classes have systematically used a
divide-and-conquer strategy in order to keep the exploited masses
atomized and subjugated. The early American and European capitalists
manufactured the false and destructive racist ideology of Black and
indigenous inferiority in order to exploit Black people as slaves, to
carry out the genocide of indigenous people, and to keep white, Black,
indigenous, and other immigrant workers divided and pitted against each
other, diverting the blame for their miserable conditions away from
those in power. Similarly, it is in the interest of the billionaires and
multimillionaires today to prevent progress on LGBTQ+ rights and to
promote bigoted and divisive ideologies.
Under
the pressure of mass protests, including the George Floyd rebellion,
billionaires and big corporations were forced to set up superficial
programs of “inclusion” in relation to people of color, women, and the
LGBTQ+ community. As movements have lost ground, It’s not surprising to
see billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg blatantly roll back even the
minimal policies they had put in place. This shows that the liberation
of oppressed people or the working class as a whole will never come
about via corporate “inclusion” programs that allow a wealthy few to
make lucrative careers while the overwhelming majority of the oppressed
are left behind.
The
only way LGBTQ+ and other oppressed people have achieved any progress
is through independent working-class mass protests and civil
disobedience.
The movement for LGBTQ+ liberation was really kicked off by trans, gay,
and lesbian working people in multiracial fightback against harassment
by New York City police in the historic 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. It was
further mass action by the rank and file of the movement that won
marriage equality and many other LGBTQ+ rights.
The
LGBTQ+ movements at the time were strong also because they happened in
the context of nationwide labor strike actions and powerful movements to
end the Vietnam War and for women’s and Black rights. Many of the
rank-and-file leaders of these movements were independent of both the
Democratic and Republican parties and identified as revolutionary
socialists. Mass action for LGBTQ+ rights today will be stronger if we
also build mass movements to end imperialist wars, including ending
military funding to Israel, to cut the military budget to fund housing,
jobs, and education, and to win free healthcare for all by taxing the
rich.
The
fight for LGBTQ+ rights is also linked with these larger struggles
because the disproportionate poverty, housing instability and healthcare
disparity faced by queer people can only begin to change if we fight
for affordable housing, free healthcare for all, full funding of
services, and living-wage jobs, along with anti-discrimination laws. To
win any of this, we will need independent mass working-class movements
with leadership that will fight the billionaires and both their parties.
During
my decade as the sole socialist on a Seattle City Council filled with
Democratic Party politicians, I consistently used my office to fight for
queer and trans working people, often facing the sharp opposition of
the Council Democrats. In partnership with the Gender Justice League and other LGBTQ+ organizations, my office hosted a landmark LGBTQ+ Hate Crimes Forum
in 2015, attended by hundreds of people, to highlight the surge in hate
crimes against the queer community. This forum had so much public
support that it forced the Democratic establishment to attend and take steps
following the forum. Alongside leaders like Danni Askini of the Gender
Justice League and Marsha Botzer of the Ingersoll Gender Center, my
office passed proclamations
in consecutive years for Trans Pride Day. The movement, with the
leadership of trans rights organizations and my office, won hundreds of
thousands of dollars for an LGBTQ+ senior center in the heart of Capitol
Hill, Seattle’s historically queer-friendly neighborhood, an LGBTQ+
wellness center at NOVA High School, and other trans community services.
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