There is a sentence I keep coming back to. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, most powerful Democrat in Congress, told the advisors pressing her to drop trans protections from the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act: "I won't pass it in 100 years because I'm not ever taking out trans." She passed it with trans protections included. That is what holding the line actually looks like.
Pelosi is retiring in 2027, and she spoke recently to the Washington Blade about a career that spans decades of LGBTQ+ advocacy, from the earliest days of the HIV/AIDS crisis to the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Reading it, I found myself moved not just by what she achieved, but by how clearly she understood what was being asked of her when advisors told her to cut trans people loose to make the legislation easier to pass. She understood exactly what that trade-off meant, and she refused it.
"People told me, 'You can pass this in a minute if you take out trans,'" she said. The framing will be familiar to anyone who has watched this particular argument play out across thirty years of LGBTQ+ politics. Trans people are routinely positioned as the part of the coalition that makes everything harder, the political liability, the ask too far. The logic goes: take them out and the rest moves forward. What that logic never accounts for is what it does to the people being taken out, or what it signals about whose humanity is negotiable.
Pelosi was not having it. She held the line, the bill passed with trans protections intact, and the Hate Crimes Act became law in 2009. That is now settled history, and it is worth pausing on before moving on to the harder present.
Because the present is hard. Pelosi told the Advocate this year that her grandniece is trans and is scared. "It's just the saddest thing," she said. She described watching decades of social progress followed by an administration that has made trans people a focal point of attack, stripping away essential services, undermining families, and sending a signal to trans young people that the state does not believe they deserve to exist as they are. She called on Democrats to stand unequivocally with the trans community. "The message has to be: We are with you."
I think about the trans children hearing that message, and the trans children not hearing it, and the gap between those two experiences. A grandniece who knows her great-aunt fought for her. A young person elsewhere who has been told, in a hundred different ways, that they are the problem to be removed from the bill.
What I take from Pelosi's account of her own legacy is not that one politician saved trans rights. She is clear that progress came from the community itself, from the "very vocal participation of LGBTQ people and their allies." She describes her role as carrying the fight in Congress, not originating it. That is an honest and generous account of how change actually happens: outside mobilisation making inside maneuvering possible.
Trans rights have never been handed down. They have been argued for, marched for, mourned for, and nearly traded away at every legislative turn. The fact that trans protections are in the Hate Crimes Act at all is the result of someone saying no when it would have been easier and faster to say yes to their removal. That someone, in this case, was Pelosi. Her name deserves to be part of that history.
What strikes me most, though, is the simplicity of what she said. Not a careful political calculation. Not a nuanced weighing of the possible. Just: I am not taking out trans. A hundred years if necessary. There is a lesson in that for everyone currently deciding how loudly to say the same thing.
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Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender identity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.