Gay Republican group abandons transgender people, calling decision a return to ‘moral’ clarity

The Log Cabin Republicans officially abandoned the transgender community, pulling the ladder of progress and support that benefited its members up behind themselves.

Ross Hemminger, president of the nation’s most prominent gay Republican organization, announced that Log Cabin had reversed a decision from 2015 to include transgender rights in its mission statement.

In an op-ed published by Townhall, he wrote that the board of directors had voted to instead “concentrate specifically on issues of sexual orientation and conservative values — in other words, we are an LGB advocacy organization, as our founders envisioned and as our moral center calls us to be.”

The group’s website now identifies it as “America’s oldest and largest organization for LGB conservatives and our straight allies.”

Related: Log Cabin Republicans president bizarrely defends Donald Trump's anti-LGBTQ+ record

Hemminger wrote in the op-ed that the issues now dominating conversations about trans rights, particularly regarding trans youth, prompted the change. While the group said a decade ago that all adults should be free to pursue happiness “free of government interference,” extending that principle to transgender young people is apparently no longer a priority.

“The transgender movement has ceased focusing on adults at all — nearly all of their efforts and those of their aligned special interest groups focus on minors,” Hemminger wrote. “They push schools to teach radical gender ideology; they want biological men in women’s sports regardless of the consequences; perhaps most offensively, they support gender reassignment treatments for minors, often without the knowledge or consent of the parents, knowing full well these treatments are mostly irreversible.”

While the recent board vote codifies the disregard for trans rights, the organization had already shifted over time toward supporting President Donald Trump even as he increasingly targeted transgender people. In 2016, the organization withheld an endorsement of Trump because of uncertainty about how he would treat LGBT Americans.

But a few years later, after Trump had instituted a ban on transgender service members and moved to allow government contractors to discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity, the group in 2019 relented and endorsed Trump’s reelection effort, an endorsement the Republican president ultimately embraced.

Related: Log Cabin Republican Praises Trump, ‘Don’t Say Gay,’ and Trans Hate

Trump lost that election. Four years later, the group cut a six-figure check to Melania Trump to speak at a fundraiser for the group as her husband made his comeback run for president. Even as Trump’s rhetoric increasingly targeted transgender Americans, including adults, the organization defended the Republican leader.

Hemminger said that dropping transgender issues from the group’s mission statement came only after “significant conversation.” He also stressed that membership in the organization remains open to trans members.

“Membership remains open to all conservatives. We welcome all of our allies in this mission and as participants in our organization,” he said. “Our chapters will continue to welcome all allies and will operate in ways that best serve their membership.”

But he said that further embracing transgender rights while debates over transgender women’s participation in women’s sports and gender-affirming care for minors continue ultimately threatened hard-earned conservative support for issues like marriage equality.

Related: Who are the Log Cabin Republicans, the LGBTQ+ conservative group?

“We have fought for the right to legally marry who we love, serve our country and our communities openly and proudly, and to enjoy the same inalienable rights afforded to all law-abiding Americans — and we succeeded. However, the new era of gender identity politics is not the movement we supported and fought for. Gay men and women are losing public support across the country, and support for gay marriage and other once-widely accepted rights is eroding,” he wrote.

“Why? Because many voters today weren’t alive or cognizant of the politics of gay marriage winding its way through the courts and gaining ground in public opinion. Their view of the gay community is based on today’s radical transgender activists with their unnecessary and discomfiting focus on America’s youth.”