- When rights are denied to anyone, they diminish the freedom of us all.

Today's guest studies the discrimination that has targeted members of the LGBTQ community, as well as those living with HIV and warns us that our collective liberty is at risk.

He's Brad Sears, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(calming music) (calming music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Brad Sears, Executive Director of the Williams Institute at UCLA.

An attorney and scholar, Brad is a recognized expert on discrimination targeting members of the LGBTQ community.

Brad, thank you so much for being with us again.

- Thank you.

Thank you for having me back, it's great to be here.

- You know, we thought the moment was propitious, there's so much happening in this space.

But I also note that it's been 10 years since the US Supreme Court ruled that marriage equality was the law of the land.

10 years later, what has that meant for gay Americans and Americans in general?

- Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at the issue of marriage equality, it's meant a lot of progress.

We recently put out a report on the 10th anniversary of Obergefell, that Supreme Court decision that the number of same sex couples who had married had doubled.

And I think people know these couples, we also estimated that millions of people have attended their weddings.

They're familiar with them.

And so there's been a lot of progress.

But running alongside that has been, I think, some massive setbacks for the LGBT community, and particularly setbacks for Americans who identify as transgender and non-binary.

Those setbacks come from policy changes that really started at the state level a few years ago, and then have been adopted by the Trump administration in its first half year in office.

- Let's get some specifics about that.

What do you see happening that's being done to target trans people across the United States right now?

- Yeah, really starting four or five years ago, we saw what was a kind of trickle of activity by state legislatures really start to heat up where there were hundreds of bills, literally hundreds of bills each year targeting transgender people, but mainly transgender youth.

These were bills prohibiting access to transgender students from restrooms when they attended school, from participating in sports and from accessing gender affirming care.

Four or five years ago, most of those bills would be introduced but not passed.

But then they started passing, till we're at a point where about half the population lives in states that have one or more of those laws.

President Trump as a candidate campaigned on some of those very same issues, again, mainly focused on youth.

And quickly in his first day of office, began implementing some of those policies through the powers that the federal government has.

I think what's surprised me the most is that President Trump himself has said that kind of campaigning against transgender people was a campaign tactic to really bring out the vote, but the comprehensiveness in which this administration is not only changing policies against transgender youth, but also transgender adults.

So we saw quickly transgender people being kicked outta the military, for example.

- Brad, have you been surprised with the public response to this, to the weaponization of this issue?

- Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think there is a core set of issues where there wasn't majority support.

So it's not surprising in issues like transgender girls, young women participating in sports.

The public really is not resolved on this issue.

There's pretty strong opinions on both sides.

Providing gender affirming care.

Again, really strong opinions on both sides.

I think what's surprising to me is that some of those executive actions, like I said, rolled back the access transgender people had to serving in armed forces, rolled back non-discrimination places in the workplace that was adopted quickly by President Trump, really in his first week of office.

We've seen states like Iowa repeal its state law protecting transgender people from workplace discrimination.

If you look at surveys of Americans, they widely agree that people shouldn't be discriminated against in the workplace on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity.

So these are some of the ways that the administration is really going far beyond what they campaigned on and what American people believe.

- So Brad, let's turn to the larger LGBT community and tell us about changes to federal laws and policies.

And there have been a lot of them.

- Yeah, yeah, and I would break these down kind of into two categories.

Ones that directly are targeted or impact LGTQ people, and then larger policy changes that have a disproportionate impact on LGBTQ people.

In that first category are a lot of the federal executive actions that I've already mentioned, but they extend further to rollbacks and protections like non-discrimination protections for all employees of federal contractors for example.

There used to be prohibitions from federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identities they no longer exist.

If you look at enforcement agencies like the EEOC, which protects people from discrimination workplace, it's no longer prioritizing claims by LGBTQ Americans.

And so we're seeing a set of kind of rollbacks specifically focused on LGBTQ people.

But then if you go to this summer and the passage of what's called the Big Beautiful Bill, and you consider what we do know in the congressional budget office has repeatedly said about that bill, millions of Americans will be kicked off Medicaid and SNAP or food stamps.

What we know from our research at the Williams Institute is that those cuts are gonna disproportionately impact LGBTQ people who tend to rely more on federal support programs.

So a lot of people in the community will become uninsured.

We already know that people in the LGBT community have higher rates of food insecurity, which basically people are asking question, "Did you have enough money to feed yourself and your family this week?"

Higher percentages of LGBT people say "No."

They're also gonna lose access to important support services like food stamps.

- So there's also been defunding of LGBT organizations and that has had a profound effect too.

Can you talk about that a little bit, please, Brad?

- Yeah, and I think when you think about this administration and some of the actions that it's taken is some of them are substantive policy actions on issues like Medicaid, food stamps, LGBTQ rights, but others are really directed at undermining both places of higher education as well as nonprofit and community groups and research that's being done by Research on a lot of the social issues that are really pressing in the United States today.

So this also impacts LGBTQ organizations.

So when you hear about the federal government pulling back grants, for example, from the Department of Health and Human Services, a lot of LGBTQ organizations do HIV prevention services.

If that funding gets pulled, their ability to meet their whole budget becomes much harder.

Probably one of the most dramatic examples of this is a cut in funding for our nation system of suicide hotlines for young people and old to call up if they're depressed and they're thinking about suicide.

The option that you had on the main federal number to click to get someone trained on dealing with LGBTQ youth and issues that youth face, and we know LGBTQ youth have much higher rates of suicide.

That's no longer an option on that federal line.

The funding that went to the Trevor Project, which was the main contractor that supported that line and runs an independent line, also cut.

So at a time with increasing attacks on LGBTQ people, this really important, and I'll say lifeline, 'cause it is a lifeline, for LGBTQ youth has been unfunded by the federal government.

- Yeah, Brad, I wanna linger for just a second on the issue of trans rights that we began with.

The cascading series of decisions and executive orders that we've seen come out of this White House, the cavalcade of bills that have been offered in state legislatures across the country, and the number of laws that certain states have passed have to be alarming, is probably a very mild way to put it, for trans Americans and the people who love them.

Where does this legal, legislative, political onslaught leave those Americans?

- Yeah, I think in a great deal of fear.

The Williams Institute did a survey in December of 2024, so right after the election, but before inauguration day, of transgender Americans about not only how they were feeling, but what were they doing as a result of the election to protect themselves and their families.

And what we heard from them is that they were very scared.

They were scared about safety, about discrimination, and in particular about access to healthcare.

And what many of them were doing, were going to lawyers to try to shore up their rights.

And as a matter of fact, a lot of same sex couples also got married right after the election because they were worried about marriage equality.

But transgender people were trying to shore up their legal rights with their name changes or identification documents or protecting their marriages or their rights with their children.

They were also considering moving.

A very high percentage was considering moving to another state in order to be in a place that was more supportive of transgender people.

And so, you know, I think that survey was of transgender adults, the other group of people here who are really impacted our parents with transgender and non-binary children.

And I think it's important to remember that we now have an administration that's saying that healthcare providers can't provide gender affirming care to transgender youth.

That's not limited to surgery.

It's pretty much all types of care and care that has been done for decades.

And the Supreme Court has also said, these state laws that prohibit that care are constitutional.

And so if you're a parent of a transgender child and you're thinking about, "Well, maybe things will change, maybe there'll be another administration."

You don't have a timeline for 10 years, 20 years thinking about, you know, the country evolving.

Your timeline is a timeline of your kid going through adolescence.

That's the timeline that you have.

And so those parents have to act now.

And I think for a lot of transgender adults and parents with transgender kids, they're having to make this decision, do I change who I am or do I change where I live?

Do I ask my kid to change who they are or are we gonna change where we live?

And that's the decision facing a lot of transgender Americans and their families today.

- I mean, that's a brutal set of decisions that people are facing.

- Yeah, yeah, and I mean, what we know is we are pretty mobile in this country.

People do move quite a bit, but the people who move are those that can move.

They have to have the resources to be able to do so.

You have to know when you get to that place you're moving to, you'll be able to find a job.

So particular people with lower incomes, we found were the most likely to say they wanna move.

But saw cost or employment as the biggest barriers to moving.

And I guess I'll just mention one thing, and I think that's really changed from when we did our survey in December to today, is that the reach of the federal government is in every state.

So while there's a geography in the United States to anti-transgender laws, mainly in the Midwest in the south, the reach of the federal government is national.

And so you see, I live in Los Angeles, you see Children's hospital here in Los Angeles, one of the biggest providers of gender fairing care to youth in the country, shutting down those services because the federal government says, "We will not fund any of your work.

The incredible groundbreaking work you do on kids with cancer, for example.

We won't fund any of it if you continue to gender affirming care."

Children's Hospital basically had to decide it had to stop gender affirming care.

And although that was very controversial and there was a lot of pushback, their reality is that they would've had to shut down as a hospital, as a facility within several months if they lost all federal fundings.

And that's what they explained to their staff and their public is this is really against our mission, but we can't help any kids with any conditions unless we do what the federal government is demanding of us.

So when you think about those families who are moving, they also now have to question, even if we move, am I gonna be able to take care of my kid to, you know, in a place like Los Angeles, which has traditionally been very supportive of transgender people.

- So to say this is inhumane would be a gross understatement.

I'm curious, are there any historical precedents to what's happening to the larger LGBTQ community here in the US or abroad?

- Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think if you look at other countries to this day, you have places that don't provide any gender affirming care that still do kind of forced conversion therapy of LGBTQ adults.

There are places like Iran, which the government solution to male adults who are gay is to require them to have sex changes.

So there are very forcible medical interventions around the world today.

And so criminalization, you could be put in jail for engaging in same sex sex are even expressing or meeting together as a group of LGBTQ people.

That's all part of our history here in the United States.

Hopefully we'll remain part of our history, but we also have a history here of requiring people to be committed to institutions to go through conversion therapy.

And until 2003, not that long ago, it was still constitutional in this country to criminalize people who engaged in same sex sex.

So that is not so distant part of our past, these kind of forced government interventions.

I would like to say just one thing here though, which is if you think about the Republican party, (laughs) it's always been the party of limited government.

This is the exact opposite.

This is a government that is telling Children's Hospital what they can and cannot do, and the medicine that they can and cannot practice, telling parents what kind of care they can provide their kids and what kind of care that they can't.

So when you think about what we traditionally thought of as values of the Republican party, this is not limited government, this is government getting into, really into the weeds in a lot of aspects of people's lives in very private areas of their lives.

- Yeah, Brad, you mentioned criminalization in other contexts.

One of the things that the Williams Institute reported on, I think just last year, was the criminalization of HIV status in the American state of Indiana.

What's going on there?

- Yeah, and so in the 1980s and early 1990s, a number of states passed laws that criminalized basically people with HIV for exposing other people with HIV.

That was a time of a lot of fear, a lack of knowledge and discrimination against people with HIV.

Not surprisingly, those laws were overwritten and include a lot of behaviors that cannot transmit HIV like biting, spitting, scratching.

Those laws are still on the books in many states.

What the Williamson Institute has been able to do, working with a number of other organizations and state legislatures is show that the laws are outdated, that are science around HIV, we know a lot more.

We have a lot more effective treatments.

And we've known for a long time that a lot of these behaviors actually can't transmit the virus.

And so most of these states had laws that criminalized people who never intended to give someone HIV, who never engaged in behavior that could actually transmit the virus and which in fact did not transmit the virus, but they were ending up with felonies and sentences that could be up to 25 years.

I would say this is an area, if you're looking for some silver lining out there today, there's been a lot of bipartisan support based on research and science to repeal or modernize these laws.

And we've seen a number of states do that really in the last 10 years, a number of states have started to repeal these laws.

And we're hoping states like Indiana will follow the lead of other states, which include Georgia, Nevada, Maryland recently did some modernization of its laws, North Carolina, Missouri.

So it's not just the blue states.

State legislatures in red states are also seeing that these laws don't make any sense.

- So given everything that is happening now, how important are next year's midterm elections in your view?

- Yeah, I think they're really important obviously across a number of issues, but particularly on LGBTQ rights.

And I think one thing to flag is that in that Big Beautiful Bill, there was a provision that would've prohibited any spending on Medicaid for gender affirming care.

That passed in the house.

It probably was gonna pass definitely in the Senate since pretty much everything ended up getting passed.

It was really the Senate parliamentarian who took it out and said, "Hey, this isn't a budget issue.

This shouldn't be in the bill."

Otherwise it wouldn't pass.

So right now you have majorities in Congress who will also enact anti-LGBTQ laws.

I think that provision showed us that.

The other thing that is happening is that there's been a great consolidation of power in the executive agencies.

Judges are obviously very important players in deciding what's constitutional and not, and those nominations are happening again at a quick pace like they did under the prior Trump administration.

And so, particularly in the Senate, the midterms would be very important to making sure that we're not putting people in either in charge of agencies or are approving appointments that are anti-LGBTQ or making them federal judges.

- What about the presidential election coming up 2028?

Same question, how important is it?

- Yeah, again, you know, always important and for some of the same reasons that we're seeing today, but now more important than ever.

And I think due to the actions that this president has taken and then the support of the actions by the Supreme Court, there's never been such a consolidation of presidential power, at least in the recent history of the United States, perhaps in the entire history of the United States.

And so what's interesting about this consolidation of power is that it cuts both ways if the administration changes in the next election.

So a Democrat or a pro LGBTQ President would have all the powers that this president has in the Supreme Court as a firm.

So perhaps there's a little bit of hope in that, in that the speed in which we've seen this administration act to dismantle LGBTQ rights that same speed will be available to restore them.

But I think it's also gonna be a moment to pause and really consider, have the rules of the game changed so much under this administration, and do we wanna keep that?

Is that an acceptable change to our democracy?

Or are we going to return to some of the norm we had prior to this year?

- And I'm curious, Brad, to the extent that, you know, there's a discernible, you know, motivation in some of the things that the Trump administration has done and that some of these state legislators have done.

Where do you think the General American public stands on issues of LGBTQ rights?

- Yeah, like I said, I think there's some issues around youth where the public opinion is split and more education needs to be done.

That a better understanding of what it means, you know, that most kids saying that they participate in sports means that they're having fun after school and getting good exercise and it's highly competitive or down to a scholarship, in 99% of the cases we're not talking about that.

We're talking about being yourself at school and doing the other stuff at school that kids do and they do after school.

And so it's better education there.

Same for gender affirming care, really talking and educating more.

And that education needs to happen.

It needs to happen in every civil rights movement.

And so I think that's important.

But as I mentioned, there's a set of issues where I think Americans already in vast agreement, they do think you should be able to get a job and that who you are doesn't matter.

It's like what you bring to the workplace, like your skills should matter, not these other characteristics.

There was a memo that came out last week from the Trump administration, which basically authorizes supervisors to try to convert the people that work for them to their religion.

I don't think Americans are...

So I think that's gonna be seen as overreach.

Americans are not supportive of that.

I think a stronger identity and LGBTQ identity is the identity of parents.

People care for their kids.

I think when it really brings home to people, hey, the same sort of healthcare decisions I find that are important to make for my kids, my friends, the people I go to PTA with are not able to make with their kids and their doctors.

I think that's also gonna be seen as an overreach, as the really damaging effects of those policies come to light.

- You know, so we've got less than a minute left here.

One of the things that just happened here in Rhode Island was the opening of a retirement community for gay Rhode Islanders.

What sort of, you know, we've talked a lot about the impacts on children and young people, but what about for older members of the LGBTQ community?

Are there unique challenges that they're facing in this environment?

And we got literally about 45 seconds?

- Yeah, definitely, I think a lot of older Americans, when they go into retirement, if they have to go into nursing care or live in a retirement community, basically it feels like going back in the closet.

This isn't a part of our culture that is caught up like other areas which cater to younger people.

And so it's scary for LGBTQ Americans, they often enter retirement with less resources to take care of themselves, less family members around to provide that personal support and care that is needed.

So we were making great strides, ARP, a group called Sage, the Biden administration was really working to support LGBTQ Americans.

That work has also been stopped and unfunded, and we're seeing many more LGBTQ people reach retirement age or needing those services.

So another group, when I talk about adolescents not having time, you have the time of their adolescents to make these decisions.

I think for older LGBTQ Americans, they can't afford to wait for the next decade.

They really need that support now.

- Brad Sears, Williams Institute at UCLA, this important set of issues, we thank you for spending some time with us this week.

That is all the time we have though.

If you wanna know more about the show, you can find us at salve.edu/pell-center where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For Wayne, I'm Jim asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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