Dear Meteor readers, 

Happy Pride! Or…is it? Since there have been (checks watch) more than 300 pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation introduced so far in this short, stressful year, we wouldn’t blame you for wondering exactly how festive to feel.

So how do you celebrate during a backlash? I asked my dear friend and former Teen Vogue colleague, Phillip Picardi, and he was emphatic: He is celebrating. This year, he told me, “we need to define our pleasure in order to identify what is worth fighting for, what’s worth protecting and nurturing.”

Phill joins us in today’s newsletter, in conversation with another friend: trans writer, activist, editor, and all-around icon Raquel Willis, about how to move beyond just celebrating Pride to using it as an opportunity to remember our history and clarify the priorities of the LGBTQ+ movement.

But first, the news!

Sippin’ slushies,

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

WHAT’S GOING ON

Leaning out: Billionaire Sheryl Sandberg is stepping down from her role as COO of Meta, formerly known as Facebook, aka your favorite home for disinformation and flourishing white-supremacist conspiracy theories. Sandberg, prior to being one of the faces of democratic erosion, was the head captain of workplace feminism through her New York Times best-selling book, Lean In. The book was a hit and a miss—both a refreshing, sometimes galvanizing voice in the change-resistant world of tech and business, and also, at its heart, a tome to individualistic, corporate feminism. Perhaps Sandberg, too, has accepted that you cannot have it all (even when you do have it all). In a statement posted to, obviously, Facebook, she says she’s leaving to focus more on her family and her philanthropic work, “which is more important to me than ever given how critical this moment is for women.” Sounds great! Let’s start by supporting an organization that is fighting disinformation.

233: On Wednesday, an armed gunman walked into a Tulsa hospital and killed four people, two doctors, a receptionist, one patient, and himself. He had bought the firearm, an AR-15, earlier that day; Oklahoma has some of the laxest gun laws in the country: you don’t need to register your firearm, get a background check, nor do you need a permit to buy, carry or conceal a gun. (It even has an “anti-red flag” law, which bans police from taking guns away from people who may pose violent threats, even temporarily. Truly.) Tulsa marks the 233rd mass shooting in 2022. Last night, President Biden appealed to the nation, saying that we *must* take action on gun violence, calling for a ban on AR-15s and pushing for red flag laws. Show your support for universal background checks and sign up to march for sensible gun legislation on June 11th here.

AND:

• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis continues his campaign to bring Florida back to the 1800s—this time by trying to ban transition care for minors and Medicaid holders. A new twist on the war on trans youth: including poor people, too.

• The French Open women’s finale today will be a nail-bitter: America’s Coco Gauff vs Poland’s Iga Świątek. I will be watching it, even if the director of the French Open claims it’s difficult to schedule the women’s matches for primetime because it’s been hard to find the right “confrontation or star.”

• There have been so many good pieces weighing the impact of the Depp/Heard verdict. Over at the Guardian, Moira Donegan called it an “orgy of misogyny” and evaluated the trial as the “tipping point” of #metoo backlash. At Rolling Stone, essential reporting from EJ Dickson exposed the impact the trial is already having on survivors, who was told by advocates that they are now hesitant to come forward, let alone consider legal action.

• Stop saying Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall are in a “catfight.” It’s more complicated than that.

IN CONVERSATION

How to Celebrate Pride in the Middle of an Anti-trans Backlash

Phillip Picardi talks to Raquel Willis

NAME A MORE FABULOUS DUO? WE’LL WAIT. (PHOTO BY ASTRID STARWIAZ VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

I’d love to start this newsletter off with a “Happy Pride!” but, to be honest, it’s hard to feel happy right now. As an out gay man who’s worked in the media for over a decade—I’ve never felt more disheartened by what I’m witnessing in the zeitgeist. I’m not just speaking of the senseless acts of police brutality, gun violence, and judicial overreach we’re witnessing in our country. I’m specifically speaking to the war being waged on the LGBTQ+ community, specifically on queer and transgender youth.

Let’s make no mistake about it: We are once again in a dangerous era of American history for LGBTQ+ people. Our nation’s slide toward conservatism is not just nigh—it’s upon us. And newly emboldened, our enemies are betting that the complacency of cisgender, heterosexual people will allow them the opportunity to criminalize and demonize us once more. Many of us are starting to wonder if they’re right.

Trans activists have been warning us about this shift for years. One of them is my friend and former colleague, Raquel Willis, a community organizer who’s worked with the Transgender Law Center and formed Black Trans Circles, a healing and leadership-building program specifically for Black trans women in the South. She was also one of the lead organizers of the historic March for Black Trans Lives in 2020. Raquel and I grew close when I was editing Out and she became the publication’s first Black trans woman to hold a position of leadership, as our executive editor. In every editorial meeting, Raquel always asked us: Who’s missing here? Who is not in our pages? She was constantly holding a mirror up to us as journalists, as people, and as a community to take inventory of who we were valuing and who we were leaving out.

I was honored to talk to Raquel about what it means to “celebrate” Pride this year, where our movement is heading, and to hear more about her radical vision for gender justice.

“Happy” Pride.

THE BLUEPRINT, MARSHA P. JOHNSON (PHOTO BY BARBARA ALPER VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Phillip Picardi: How are you feeling about Pride Month this year?

Raquel Willis: I always feel conflicted about Pride. For me, it’s about acknowledging the queer and trans ancestors who furthered progress for the LGBTQ+ community and who built a foundation for us. [But], these last few years, we’ve seen the most concerted anti-queer and anti-trans legislation in the history of the United States. Not enough has been done to safeguard the rights and lives of queer and trans youth in particular, and unfortunately, it seems like the movement as a whole is solely on the defensive. Also, all of these attacks—against abortion access, voting rights, gun control—are swirling in the same pot. We’ve been conditioned as an American society to see these issues as separate, and because of that, we are not only fighting against the GOP, but we’re fighting against each other on the progressive side, just to be heard.

PP: It’s interesting how abortion and queer rights have always been linked. I was watching the Gloria Steinem documentary yesterday, and she was talking about the importance of feminists voting to make abortion a part of the women’s rights movement. In the same convention, they also voted as to whether or not discrimination against lesbians should be considered a feminist issue [they did so]. It reminds me of today: Some cis women say they should not include trans women as part of the feminist movement, that trans women are somehow infringing upon cis women’s rights.

RW: We have to contend with the fact that we live in an individualistic, white supremacist, cishetero patriarchal capitalist system. That means that a scarcity complex has been present even within the most leftist, most progressive circles. When you look at the larger movement for feminism, we have seen so many splinters throughout history—Black feminism, lesbian feminism, trans feminism, queer theory, etc.—because those wounds of exclusion have never been adequately addressed. They’ve continued to be weaknesses that conservatives have been able to exploit. When we talk about conservatives, we’re not just [talking about] cis, white, privileged straight men. It is also trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs).

PP: We know that conservative organizations are deliberately working to disguise bigotry as common sense talking points—which are then being parroted by people who we consider to be on the left.

RW:  A lot of what is being parroted by figures like JK Rowling, or Dave Chappelle, or Ricky Gervais, or Bill Maher is a regurgitation of a fascistic, fear-mongering ideology that comes from the GOP. They release it out into the zeitgeist because they can take advantage of confirmation bias—these baseline ignorant ideas that the average person has about queer and trans people or people of color. There has to be a villain. The villain becomes the Other. As a Black trans woman, I’m constantly disgusted by how trans people are discussed, particularly in niche media, like Black media. They know if they put up our image or our experiences without context, the average person within their target demographic is going to feel negatively about us.

YES, PLEASE END GENDER REVEALS. (PHOTO BY MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO VIA GETTY IMAGES)

PP: It’s especially disconcerting because people demonize trans people using familiar tropes that revolve around them being an “impostor”, or a ”traitor” to their gender. Similar tropes have commonly been employed to target women and especially Black women. People in the feminist movement were often called “angry lesbians,” or they were assumed to be ugly and sexless. Some Black women in the public eye who do not fit the mold of White Eurocentric beauty standards have been compared to animals. These are all ways to strip people of their personhood, and particularly to strip people of their womanhood. It is frustrating to see how people can’t relate these two issues and find solidarity among them.

RW: Absolutely. No one should be moving through this world thinking that their lives are not political. Everything about your existence, everything about what you have and don’t have, is political. We’re all being impacted by these restrictive ideas about what it means to be a man or woman, or nonbinary, or everything and nothing all at once. And the sooner we can grasp that, the sooner we can come up with the solutions to make our families, our communities, and our societies better.

PP: You mentioned earlier that a lot of advocates warned that resting our laurels on Roe [to protect abortion access] could be dangerous. You could say the very same thing about the Gay Rights Movement’s very deliberate move to adopt marriage equality and military representation as their pet causes. The driving idea at that time was obviously palatability. We knew that if we could appeal to we’re just like you, we’re people, love is love, let us serve, let us be patriots like you, that we could win public approval. And ultimately we did. What the movement didn’t anticipate was that those rights could be stripped away less than a decade later.

RW: When I think about this long arc of the LGBTQ+ movement, there have been those people who thought that if they could just move into cis-hetero society, then all of their issues would be fixed. So when cis gay men and lesbians were thinking about what political power looked like, they wanted to assimilate and be palatable because that was the extent of their imagination.

And there were decisions made along the way to exclude trans folks, and gender non-conforming folks, and nonbinary folks. We have to contend with that history and we have to contend with the fact that our infrastructure nationally has been built with that mindset in place. And so that’s why our movement has not been ready to react in a moment where conservatives have pinpointed the Achilles heel of our movement: the exclusion of trans and nonbinary folks.

THE LESBIAN AVENGERS, NYC PRIDE PARADE 1995 (PHOTO BY STUART LUTZ VIA GETTY IMAGES)

PP: And now that our “wins” are being rolled back, we need to rely on each other more than ever—by banding together as a community that doesn’t prioritize the cis-hetero patriarchy. One of the things that I do find to be extremely practical and inspiring about trans liberation is that I, myself, was considered a gender traitor. I was an effeminate young boy who refused to act more masculine, who insisted on wearing pink, and loving the Spice Girls, and wearing makeup, and putting on my mother’s clothes. I was policed, and bullied, and called names often by people in my own family. That doesn’t make me trans, but it reinforces my belief that trans liberation, had it existed back then, would have laid some sort of blueprint to say: You don’t need to conform, you can be exactly who you are, you can be beautiful, and you can be loved.

RW: I think you get to an essential element of what ties everyone’s experience together. It’s not that I believe that everyone is trans. No, honey, I don’t think everyone is that gifted, that brilliant, that colorful, and that’s okay! But everyone is “gender nonconforming,” and the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can break down all of these expectations that are not only hurting trans and gender-nonconforming folks, and queer folks, and women, but [also] hurting these cishet men who dream of embodying a toxically masculine ideal.

PP: A lot of what you’re saying reminds me of your speech at the Brooklyn Trans Liberation March in 2020, where you said, “I believe in my power. I believe in your power. I believe in our power. I believe in Black trans power.” Can you tell me a little bit about how that worked in your mind and why it’s an important rallying cry moving forward?

RW: One thing that was always clear to me is that there’s something about queerness that forces you to look at people differently. It forces you to understand that there’s this whole interior world that everyone has. Hopefully you get to a point in your journey where there’s healing and you understand at least a smidge of your own power.

I figured along the way that if I was going to have to have this difficult life that I was told I was going to have by religion and community and society, then I was like, well, let’s fuck some shit up along the way. And how do I inspire other people to fuck some shit up along the way? Because if we’re going to be damned, honey, then I want to be damned and cute and at least have these little moments of joy that I can grasp at. I think that’s where I’m at with movement work and with social justice and with our society. We have so many deep issues within our world that it will probably take centuries to figure out some better way forward for everyone. The best we can do is figure out how to be a part of that fight and also have whole, full, and joyful lives along the way.

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