Gender Transitioning Advocates Call On Massachusetts Legislature To Replace Lost Federal Funding

Gender-transitioning advocates in Massachusetts say they want state legislators to replace federal funds the Trump administration has eliminated..Some expressed concern and even anger during an event at the Massachusetts State House on Wednesday."We are probably in the best, safest jurisdiction right now, given the federal assault, but we can do more. I need guarantees that our funding is not going to get cut ... I want to understand what's the actual strategy to safeguard our patients, to safeguard our community,” said Dr. Carl Streed, a physician who serves as research lead for the GenderCare Center at Boston Medical Center, according to State House News Service.Brittany Charlton, an epidemiologist who is the founding director of the LGBTQ Health Center for Excellence at Harvard University’s school of public health, said federal funding cuts are hurting her center’s work."Just in the last several days, several of my very large-scale, multi-million dollar grants that are funded by the federal government have been terminated. Halting this work ... is setting a really concerning precedent where scientific inquiry is going to be stifled by political rhetoric and potentially erasing our entire community from future research agendas,” Charlton said, according to State House News Service.She said private donors can help fund the research her center does, but that it still needs state and federal funding.State Representative Marjorie Decker (D-Cambridge), who co-chairs the Massachusetts Legislature’s Committee on Public Health, described an atmosphere of agitation."I'm standing here and my heart is racing because quite honestly, like many of you, the level of anger that I feel here — in turn, that anger is only going to fuel the organizing that we will do to think out of the box, to collaborate and to make sure that at the end of the day, there will still be a system of access of care to everyone in our state," Decker said, according to State House News Service.On Monday, March 17, both the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Massachusetts Senate approved a resolution "congratulating the National Coalition for LGBTQ Health on the observance of LGBTQ+ Health Awareness Week," according to the House Journal and the Senate Journal for that day.During the event Wednesday, March 19, State Representative Samantha Montaño (D-Jamaica Plain), who told Jamaica Plain News in March 2022 that she uses “she/they” as her personal pronouns, criticized U.S. Representative Seth Moulton (D-Salem), a liberal Democrat who drew widespread criticism from members of his own party for saying that he thought Democrats were hurt in the election by the party’s position on gender identity.“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” Moulton said, according to the November 2024 story in The New York Times.Montaño said Tuesday the Massachusetts Legislature is committed to the cause, but she highlighted Moulton as a weak link in Congress."Where I'm not sure that we're so good is our federal delegation. And I think we've seen that through Seth Moulton, you can see that through other folks who haven't been outwardly supported, who have questioned this movement," Montaño said, according to State House News Service.President Donald Trump signed an executive order on January 20, 2025, the day he took office, ordering federal agencies to use the term “sex,” which it says is “immutable,” instead of “gender” or “gender identity,” which it describes as fluid and not useful for identification.The order also denounces what it calls “gender ideology,” which it says “replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.”On January 28, President Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services to “take all appropriate actions to end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children” through gender transitioning.

Gender Transitioning Advocates Call On Massachusetts Legislature To Replace Lost Federal Funding

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