Graham Platner welcomes attacks from 'fascists and bigots' over his support for trans rights

Days after marching in the Portland Pride Parade, Graham Platner, Maine’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, is promising to fight federal attacks on transgender Americans as he heads into a nationally watched general election against Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins.

In an exclusive interview with The Advocate on Wednesday, Platner welcomed the endorsement from the Christopher Street Project, a political action committee dedicated to electing transgender rights advocates. The group’s executive director, Tyler Hack, said Platner represents the kind of Democrat needed not only to build a congressional majority but also to prevent transgender people’s rights from being negotiated away.

“We are super excited to endorse Graham in his race for Senate,” Hack told The Advocate alongside Platner. “It’s abundantly clear that the only way that we take back our rights and freedoms and push back on all of these attacks on our community, whether that’s standalone anti-trans bills or whether that’s appropriations fights and poison pills in every single bill attacking the trans community, is if we take back the House and take back the Senate.”

Platner, a Marine and Army veteran and oyster farmer, won Maine’s June 9 Democratic primary and will challenge Collins in November. The contest could help determine control of the Senate.

The Christopher Street Project’s support came two days after the Planned Parenthood Action Fund endorsed Platner at a Monday event in Portland. Its president, Alexis McGill Johnson, backed him as a defender of reproductive freedom and contrasted his position with Collins’s vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who later voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Collins chairs the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, where Republicans have sought to attach restrictions on transgender health care and other LGBTQ+ protections to federal spending legislation.

Hack said stopping those provisions should be one of Platner’s first priorities if elected. “We are seeing poison pills in almost every budget bill unrelated to anything else that attack health care for trans kids and military families, that attack the rights and freedoms of trans federal employees,” they said.

Hack called for “clean budget bills” without anti-trans provisions. They also urged Congress to protect private patient information as the Trump administration seeks records involving transgender patients from hospitals and health care providers.

“No one, whether you’re trans or not, wants the federal government digging through your identifiable patient information and figuring out what they like and don’t like,” Hack said. “It’s an absolute overreach, and people are really scared.”

Asked whether Hack’s priorities were measures he could support, Platner agreed. “Yes, indeed. They most certainly do,” he said.

Platner said the proposals illustrate how protecting one marginalized community can strengthen broader civil rights and privacy protections. “When you stand up for one group’s rights, you’re actually standing up for everybody’s rights, which I firmly believe in,” he said.

Related: Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner admits using ‘indefensible’ antigay slurs in unearthed Reddit posts

Platner rejects a Democratic retreat on transgender rights

Platner described attacks on transgender Americans as an effort by wealthy political interests to distract voters from economic inequality, the country’s health care system, and other structural problems.

“This is just a mechanism of people with a lot of money trying to come in and get us all divided around culture war issues so we don’t sit around and talk about raising their taxes,” he said.

Graham Platner (center) marches in the Portland Pride Parade alongside his wife (left) and Tyler Hack.Courtesty Christopher Street Project

Platner said Democrats cannot build an effective political movement while treating the rights of marginalized communities as expendable. “You cannot treat politics as a game in which you can occasionally sell people out or occasionally just kind of push people under the bus for short-term gains,” he said. “A politics that’s willing to sell anybody out is eventually going to sell everybody out.”

The endorsement comes as Democrats continue debating how forcefully to defend transgender Americans following the 2024 election. Some party strategists and elected officials have urged candidates to retreat from transgender rights issues, particularly participation in school sports.

Platner rejected that approach. “You can either be a coward about it, and you can play into their game, or you cannot be a coward, and you can understand that trans rights are human rights,” he said. “Human rights cover absolutely everyone.”

The U.S. Supreme Court may issue opinions Thursday in two pending cases concerning state laws that prohibit transgender girls and women from participating on female school sports teams. During January’s oral arguments in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., the court’s conservative majority appeared inclined to uphold at least some restrictions.

Platner said voters should understand the controversy as an “invented moral panic” designed to divide working-class communities. That's why he said, candidates for office should stand firmly in support of the LGBTQ+ community, without hedging or apologizing.

“I have no patience for this kind of mealy-mouthed, wishy-washy thing on this,” he said. He said Republicans would portray him as a left-wing extremist regardless of whether he retreated on transgender rights. Platner noted that his support for “Medicare for All” and higher taxes on billionaires had already provided opponents with ample material for such attacks.

“I don’t care if they attack me,” he said. “If people want to come after me and say, ‘It’s a bad thing that you think people should be free and equal and treated with dignity,’ let them make that argument.

“That’s the argument of a fascist. That’s the argument of a bigot,” Platner continued. “And if fascists and bigots hate me, then I welcome that.”

Related: Graham Platner abruptly cancels campaign fundraiser at New York City gay bar

Protecting LGBTQ+ troops and veterans

Platner also committed himself to protecting transgender service members and LGBTQ+ veterans.

President Donald Trump’s administration has moved to exclude transgender people from military service. The Department of Veterans Affairs recently ordered that LGBTQ+ Veteran Care Coordinators be redesignated as general care coordinators and directed facilities to eliminate gender identity-related initiatives.

Platner called those actions “abhorrent and utterly disgusting.”

“This is an ideological White House that is pushing its ideology and its bigotry, using its power within federal agencies where it feels like it has power to further that goal,” he said.

Graham Platner marches in the Portland Pride parade on June 20, 2026. Sam T/Flickr

Platner warned that the administration’s military policies reflected a broader effort to define who qualifies as a “real American.” He connected the treatment of transgender troops with what he described as the Trump administration’s removal of women and people of color from prominent military positions.

“They’ve got a vision of who real Americans are, and they’re going to use their power and try to use the military as a way to further that,” he said. Platner, who said that he receives his health care through the VA, said protections and specialized services for LGBTQ+ veterans should be written into federal law rather than left to agency policies that a new administration can eliminate.

“This is why we need people in the United States Senate and Congress who are going to pass legislation, want to protect these kinds of services, not just have them be rules within an agency, but actually be federally mandated by law,” he said.

He also called for Congress to appropriate money specifically for those programs so an administration could not simply eliminate them.

“If you serve the country with honor and dignity and respect, we’re not going to treat you with that now just because we don’t like who you are,” Platner said, describing the administration’s position. “That shouldn’t be an option.”

Related: A gay Maine man seeking Susan Collins’s Senate seat says he isn’t buying Graham Platner’s redemption story

Platner’s past tests his promises

The Christopher Street Project’s endorsement is particularly significant because of Platner’s complicated history with the LGBTQ+ community. In October, The Advocate broke the news that Platner had repeatedly used antigay slurs and degrading language in Reddit posts written between 2016 and 2021. Platner acknowledged that the Reddit account and comments were his.

He told The Advocate at the time that his words were “indefensible” and apologized for using them. “Today I find that stuff abhorrent,” Platner said in October. “And I am sorry that I ever used it.”

Despite those controversies and other damaging disclosures about his past, Democratic voters in Maine appear largely to have accepted Platner’s apologies or decided that his previous conduct should not disqualify him.

Platner won about 72 percent of the June 9 primary vote, defeating a field that included Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who had suspended her campaign but remained on the ballot. The decisive result suggested that the controversies had not severed Platner’s connection with much of the state’s Democratic electorate.

His reception at Portland Pride over the weekend offered another, though less scientific, indication that many LGBTQ+ Mainers are willing to support him.

Hack said thousands of attendees greeted Platner enthusiastically during the celebration. “Someone came up to me in a bar after and was like, ‘It was like seeing Madonna,’” Hack said. “There is no candidate I’ve seen who’s united both local organization leaders and rank-and-file folks in the way that Graham does.”

Hack said national organizations should listen to LGBTQ+ people working and organizing in Maine rather than attempting to dictate how they should evaluate Platner. “He’s done the work,” they said. “He has the support of the community in Maine. They’re showing out.”

Platner said he welcomed further input and endorsements from LGBTQ+ organizations but emphasized that relationships with advocates inside Maine would guide his campaign. “The input from people in the state of Maine, the organizations doing this work in the state, matters to me more than absolutely anything else,” he said.

Platner said Maine’s LGBTQ+ community faces challenges specific to the state and that he would continue developing relationships with local advocates.

“At the end of the day, Maine is unique, our community is unique, our population is unique, and the struggles that people face in Maine, the challenges, the things that need to be done, they can be specific,” he said. "I count myself very lucky that I already have very close relationships in that world and will continue to build even more."