Let’s Get To a Minute From Now!

Gay rights happened fast.

Flashback to my childhood, mid-’70s: As a little kid, I knew my brother was gay before I first heard the word gay or knew what that meant. I wasn’t special—kids just know stuff.

Cyril was in high school, I was in grade school in our small postindustrial city. My brother wasn’t sneaking around with boys. He wasn’t even out to himself then, he says. This aspect of him was, to me, like his brown eyes or curly hair, nothing big.

I also knew that if I brought up this topic with our mom and dad—because I knew they didn’t know—they would not get it.

They were grownups, and very stupid.

Just a few years later, knowledge of gay people in straight culture sped up like a flower opening in time lapse. The montage in my brain starts with Jodie Dallas on Soap, whom Cyril looked like, and winds through Tim Curry in Paradise Garage, my first friend coming out in high school, AIDS, George Michael, Audre Lorde, Harvey Milk, the opening of marriage to same sex couples....

It seems impossible to me that my high school biology and theater teachers weren't out! By the early ’90s it was nothing big among the straights to know gay people, consume TV and movies with gay characters, have gay teachers, kids, siblings, parents, friends.

My parents struggled when Cyril came out. There was a decade of no-contact. Now, Cyril has been with his partner Matt for going on 14 years. They don’t plan to get married, but if they did, no one would be happier than mom and dad, who lived long enough to evolve.

Whoosh.

Not to make out like we’re all fine. There is a parallel montage of rights setbacks and violence on queer people, especially black, brown, disabled, noncitizen, and poor gays/lesbians, over those decades, with Trump time (MAY THAT PHRASE BE OUTDATED ANY SECOND) a nadir.

But the movement for lesbian and gay rights has had more rapid success than any other civil rights struggle in U.S. history.

It takes my breath away to think about.

Lives, Celebrities, Stories

I did not sense my daughter was trans. It totally surprised me! One can lose that kid-bloodhound ability to intuit people when one becomes a grownup, and very stupid.

Fortunately, cis culture at large had been exposed to trans lives, kids, celebrities, and stories for a few years, so I wasn’t starting from zero.

There were a couple relatively calm years after her coming-out for me to start to educate myself, catch up with her, find community, and for her to be seen by doctors who followed the latest international guidelines for trans health (WPATH) set out in 2022. All was going well.

Then came Trump’s second chapter, and Project 2025. That montage for me starts with Izzy and so many other kids losing health care and winds through joining forces with fellow trans families; traveling to other states for care; meeting older trans activists; fighting hundreds of laws across the country targeting trans youth; rallying, protesting, refusing to be invisible; parting with trans friends leaving the country; and loving our kids publicly with defiance.

How parents in the South are organizing to support their trans kids

Many families with trans children are advocating and creating alternative spaces across the South. Others fear they will have to leave.

TransLash MediaLewis Raven Wallace

End Times Prom Time

My kid’s gender care was cut. But this trans family is euphoric. The dance goes on

GENDER DEFIANTNoa Rabinow

The montage continues into this minute, with—among other things—the Trump administration trying to bankrupt WPATH with frivolous lawsuits. No WPATH, no more established healthcare guidelines for trans people. Trump & Co. plan to write their own guidelines—deleting trans people from public life.

But before that could happen, you'll have checked your voter registration. November will come. Then more Novembers. New presidencies. Our kids will stay alive, have jobs, have kids, and make us cringe with their funny stories about growing up with us. It will be inconceivable that hospitals could have ended legally mandated, vetted health care.

A minute from now, it will have been ordinary for such a long time to know trans people, to be trans, have trans teachers, kids, siblings, parents, friends. I mean there's already a trans dean in the Episcopal Church. Nothing big.

— N.R.

Noa Rabinow is a health care worker, an editor at Gender Defiant, and mom to a trans teen.