Fight for Trans Rights and Safety for all LGBTQ+ People
Solidarity With Everyone Mourning the Loss of Juniper Blessing
I stand in solidarity with the family and friends of University of Washington student Juniper Blessing. Condolences to all those mourning the loss of Juniper, who was brutally murdered recently in Seattle, while simply doing laundry. While the killer's motivations remain unclear, this horrific act of violence is still another reminder of the dangerous reality facing LGBTQ+ people everywhere, even in a supposed sanctuary city like Seattle. It needs to serve as a call to action to renewedly fight for justice for all our trans and queer siblings.
We need to build mass movements of working people to fight back against the right-wing, anti-trans attacks, and to defeat the anti-trans bills being advanced around the country.
Kshama Sawant speaking at Trans Pride in Seattle in 2025
I am endorsing the No Hate in Washington State campaign, which is calling for a NO vote on two proposed appalling anti-trans ballot measures that threaten the rights of all children. If passed, IL26-001 would deny basic protections for child abuse victims and IL26-628 would subject girls to invasive genital exams to play sports. It is absolutely crucial that working people and the labor movement ensure these measures are defeated by Washington State voters. The working class needs to stand in solidarity against every form of oppression as well as economic exploitation under the capitalist system. My organization, Workers Strike Back, has also endorsed the campaign. Both Workers Strike Back and my revolutionary socialist campaign for the U.S. Congress will be doing everything we can to support the No Hate campaign.
Working people also need to set our sights beyond defending against attacks. We need to fight for major victories for LGBTQ+ people — this is the best way to defend against attacks and prevent them in the first place. The fight for LGBTQ+ people should go hand in hand with the fight to win historic change for working people of all genders and sexualities. Discrimination, oppression, and violence is endemic to capitalism because in order to squeeze billions of people for profit, the billionaires and multimillionaires need to keep the working class divided on gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and ethnicity, and citizenship status. We need to get united as the working class against the attempts of the right wing and billionaire class to divide us in order to keep exploiting us.
Working people are being squeezed on every front trying to afford housing, healthcare, and even groceries. Trans people, especially trans people of color, face violence and discrimination that make all those issues even worse. One in five trans people have been fired or denied a job for being trans and one in eight evicted or denied housing. One in five transgender individuals have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives.
My independent revolutionary socialist campaign for Congress is fighting for and demanding:
End anti-trans and all LGBTQ+ oppression. Stop the advance of anti-trans bills, and go on the offensive to fight for full LGBTQ+ rights
Free healthcare for all, including full access to all gender affirming and reproductive care and LGBTQ+ counseling services, funded by taxing the rich
The Equality Act, which would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (including titles II, III, IV, VI, VII, and IX) to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing, public accommodations, education, federally funded programs, credit, and jury service
Living-wage jobs guarantee and the right for all workers to unionize
National rent control to stop the price-gouging by corporate landlords, which forces LGBTQ+ people out of their communities by economic eviction
Create millions of affordable homes, including free emergency housing for trans and queer people fleeing abuse, funded by taxing the billionaires and the wealthiest corporations
End all military aid to Israel and cut the trillion-dollar war budget to fund housing, education, and other social services
AI-related regulations for the rights and safeguarding of queer children and adults.
The Republican Party has been the most direct in its attacks on trans people. Just in 2026, a shocking 44 anti-trans bills have already been passed in 15 Republican-dominated states. Hundreds more bills are making their way through the legislatures of states across the nation. President Trump has attempted to carry out multiple anti-trans executive orders. These attempts include denying new passports to trans and nonbinary individuals, eliminating federal funding for schools that promote “indoctrination” based on “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology,” stopping healthcare to trans adolescents and young trans adults, banning trans girls from school sports, and erasing LGBTQ+ history by removing public health data from federal government websites, such as decades of HIV research and data on the mental health of girls and LGBTQ+ youth.
Defeating Trump, the Republicans, and the right wing, however, will require independent movements with leadership prepared to fight against both the Republican and the Democratic parties. Not only have the Democratic Party Congressmembers failed to defeat Trump, their own betrayals of working people have opened the door to the two Trump presidencies in the first place.
Trump and the Republicans have demonized LGBTQ+ people in order to deflect genuine anger working people feel against the billionaires. But Democratic politicians have not fought for LGBTQ+ rights in any meaningful way, and instead have used superficial and performative rhetoric while betraying queer and all working people. Several Democratic Congressmembers pay lip service to LGBTQ+ issues, but they have not won, or led on, any substantive victories. Now, many prominent Democrats have started abandoning even those empty promises to pivot rightward for careerist reasons.
In 1996, 118 House and 32 Senate Democrats voted in favor of the anti-LGBTQ+ Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. Democratic President Bill Clinton signed it into law. Even in 2008 in his Presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Barack Obama said, "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage." In Seattle in 2013, I was the only City Council or Mayoral candidate or elected official who publicly stood with the first-ever Trans Pride march. No Democratic Party candidate or elected official was willing to support it.
Last year, Gavin Newsom said it is "deeply unfair" for trans women to participate in women's sports. During the 2024 Presidential election, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, when asked if transgender Americans should have access to gender affirming care, said merely, "I believe we should follow the law." This was in a context in which hundreds of anti-trans bills were being advanced nationally. In a 2022 Financial Times interview, when asked about the "transgender debate," Hilary Clinton said: "We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy, and everything that everybody else cares about then goes out the window. The most important thing is to win the next election. Whatever does not help you win should not be a priority."
My main opponent, 29-year Democratic Congressmember Adam Smith pays lip service to LGBTQ+ rights, while his actions have been geared towards attacking working people (including the queer community), promoting war, and serving the profiteering billionaires. Smith was one of 51 House Democrats who voted for hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid in 1997, as part of Bill Clinton’s Balanced Budget Act. This bill also opened the door to the privatization of Medicare. Under both Republican President Bush and Democratic President Obama, Adam Smith repeatedly voted to bail out the big banks after the Great Recession, which plundered the millions who faced home foreclosures and handed over tens of billions of dollars worth of real estate to private equity. This bipartisan robbery against working people is a big reason why rents have been skyrocketing. In 2011, Adam Smith voted to cut billions of dollars from publicly funded rent controlled housing. Smith voted to break the strike of the Railroad workers in 2022. He has voted to create and fund ICE and to fund tens of billions of dollars for the genocide in Gaza.
Even a Democratic Party strategist, Charlotte Clymer, who is also a trans activist, admitted in 2025: “We’ve been largely abandoned by the Democratic Party… Looking at the past six months or so, it’s become pretty clear that most federal Democratic lawmakers have no clear or obvious intention in standing beside trans people in this critical moment.”
Throughout history, the ruling classes have systematically used a divide-and-conquer strategy in order to keep the exploited masses atomized and subjugated. The early American and European capitalists manufactured the false and destructive racist ideology of Black and indigenous inferiority in order to exploit Black people as slaves, to carry out the genocide of indigenous people, and to keep white, Black, indigenous, and other immigrant workers divided and pitted against each other, diverting the blame for their miserable conditions away from those in power. Similarly, it is in the interest of the billionaires and multimillionaires today to prevent progress on LGBTQ+ rights and to promote bigoted and divisive ideologies.
Under the pressure of mass protests, including the George Floyd rebellion, billionaires and big corporations were forced to set up superficial programs of “inclusion” in relation to people of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. As movements have lost ground, It’s not surprising to see billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg blatantly roll back even the minimal policies they had put in place. This shows that the liberation of oppressed people or the working class as a whole will never come about via corporate “inclusion” programs that allow a wealthy few to make lucrative careers while the overwhelming majority of the oppressed are left behind.
The only way LGBTQ+ and other oppressed people have achieved any progress is through independent working-class mass protests and civil disobedience. The movement for LGBTQ+ liberation was really kicked off by trans, gay, and lesbian working people in multiracial fightback against harassment by New York City police in the historic 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. It was further mass action by the rank and file of the movement that won marriage equality and many other LGBTQ+ rights.
The LGBTQ+ movements at the time were strong also because they happened in the context of nationwide labor strike actions and powerful movements to end the Vietnam War and for women’s and Black rights. Many of the rank-and-file leaders of these movements were independent of both the Democratic and Republican parties and identified as revolutionary socialists. Mass action for LGBTQ+ rights today will be stronger if we also build mass movements to end imperialist wars, including ending military funding to Israel, to cut the military budget to fund housing, jobs, and education, and to win free healthcare for all by taxing the rich.
The fight for LGBTQ+ rights is also linked with these larger struggles because the disproportionate poverty, housing instability and healthcare disparity faced by queer people can only begin to change if we fight for affordable housing, free healthcare for all, full funding of services, and living-wage jobs, along with anti-discrimination laws. To win any of this, we will need independent mass working-class movements with leadership that will fight the billionaires and both their parties.
During my decade as the sole socialist on a Seattle City Council filled with Democratic Party politicians, I consistently used my office to fight for queer and trans working people, often facing the sharp opposition of the Council Democrats. In partnership with the Gender Justice League and other LGBTQ+ organizations, my office hosted a landmark LGBTQ+ Hate Crimes Forum in 2015, attended by hundreds of people, to highlight the surge in hate crimes against the queer community. This forum had so much public support that it forced the Democratic establishment to attend and take steps following the forum. Alongside leaders like Danni Askini of the Gender Justice League and Marsha Botzer of the Ingersoll Gender Center, my office passed proclamations in consecutive years for Trans Pride Day. The movement, with the leadership of trans rights organizations and my office, won hundreds of thousands of dollars for an LGBTQ+ senior center in the heart of Capitol Hill, Seattle’s historically queer-friendly neighborhood, an LGBTQ+ wellness center at NOVA High School, and other trans community services.
Kshama Sawant presenting the Trans Pride Proclamation at the Seattle City Council in 2017.
Through my office, we won Seattle’s Amazon Tax, which raises hundreds of millions of dollars annually for affordable housing by taxing the city’s wealthiest corporations. We also fought for and won an additional $20 million expansion of the tax to fund student mental health services in the Seattle Public School system. Affordable housing and affordable access to gender-inclusive healthcare and mental health services, as my campaign is fighting for now, are disproportionately needed by the queer and trans communities.
I am the only candidate in the race with the track record of fighting and winning for LGBTQ+ rights. I am also the only candidate in this race fighting for demands that would dramatically improve the lives of queer and trans community members.
We need a new political party for the multigender, multiracial working class to organize mass struggles against the rich and their political servants. Fighting for our campaign to win our election to the U.S. Congress will be a historic breakthrough towards that goal.
Our fight is not only against corporate politicians or the right wing, but against the capitalist system itself that thrives on attacking oppressed communities and all working people in order to further enrich an already grotesquely wealthy billionaire class.
Solidarity,
Kshama