Carol Bergman

 

Do the wise thing and the kind thing too, and make the best of us and not the worst.

 

-Charles Dickens, Hard Times

 

I had finished my lap swim and was sitting on a bench in the shade facing the outdoor shower, a metal post with four hard-to-turn spigots. The water runs hot for an instant and then turns cold. I have a routine: I shower the chlorine off my skin, and then sit for a while to dry off and get myself together for the short walk home. It's a relief to day dream under blue skies after too many days of wildfire smoke from Canada, watch the kids romp, and listen to their screams of summer delight. My reverie on this particular day was broken by a stranger leaning his cane and a plastic bag filled to overflowing against the bench.

 

He was an old cadaverous guy, naked to the waist. I had noticed him in my peripheral vision entering the pool enclosure via the exit, far away from the check-in station, and then returned to my email. I looked up from my phone when he asked how to turn on the shower. His voice was soft, the request polite. He seemed sober, coherent, but his body was famine thin, his ribs were visible, he was barefoot, and his white hair was all akimbo. Pieces of twine or grass were tied decoratively around his ankles.  He whispered  thanks as I demonstrated how the odd-shaped spigots turned on and off, and then smiled a sweet smile. He had no teeth.

 

I returned to the bench and watched him revel in the water. He was no longer a stranger, he was a visitor, a guest.  I wondered where he lay his body down at night, if he had shelter, or food, or if the safety net he was dependent on had been terminated, but I did not ask. Why not?  Because he had interrupted my reverie? Destroyed my sense of well-being? Because I needed a break from mayhem and trouble? Then I worried that someone official might notice his presence and ask him to leave. He looked different, he was so very thin, famine thin. Images of the starving in Gaza surfaced. Here, at least there is fresh water, I thought, and it has washed away the dust and flattened his hair. And how would anyone know that he had wandered into this privileged enclave and didn't belong unless he'd been spotted, or I said something, which I had no intention of doing. And what is the meaning of the word belonging anyway? 

 

 

As veterans return from foreign wars, they find a nation that uncomfortably mirrors the conflict zones they left behind: communities fractured and exploited by extreme voices.

 

-Jake Harriman,  Marine Corps, co-founder of +More Perfect Union, in Stars & Stripes 1/27/25

      

 

If it is true—according  to climatologists— that every forest fire in the world is everyone's forest fire, that there is only one planetary forest fire, then  it follows that every war in the world also has no boundary, that every war is my war, and your war. Images of a flattened Gaza are reminiscent of Tokyo after the American bombing on March 9, 1945,  and images of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, destroyed by Russian forces on May 26, 1995, are reminiscent of Gaza and Gaza is reminiscent of Tokyo and Grozny. Choose images of any war—even London during the Blitz—and you will find survivors digging through rubble, searching for remnants of their lives, for the bodies of their neighbors and relatives,  for beloved family pets, for food and clean water.

 

Images transfix but they also anesthetize, Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography.  We gaze at suffering on oversized screens from the comfort of our living rooms. We get up to make some tea, but even before this impulse, the still image or the eerie drone images have vanished from the screen. The war is here, and then it is gone; it has become ephemera.

 

If we are able for a moment, or a day, to contemplate our one precious life on earth interlocked with other precious lives on earth, the image of children walking over the rubble searching for bodies, or food, or water may say to us: "pause."  In this contemplation, every avaricious war is a crime, and every arms dealer—individual, corporate, or nation state—is a war criminal.

 

I am a child of refugess from war and I am drawn to the heroism and right actions—in the Buddhist sense—of humanitarian workers who risk their lives to protect civilians, return them to health, or bring them to safety. They work in the interstices of conflict, in the afflicted neighborhoods of our cities, in the countryside, all over the world.

 

When Fascism came to Europe, citizens were unprepared for war as a consequence of Fascism. When Communism came to Russia, citizens were unprepared for the Gulag. When Project 2025 came to America, no one imagined a masked paramilitary army, or deportations, or children starving, or the capitulation of revered institutions, or students unable to attend colllege, or families unable to access medical care in what was once the "richest nation on earth."

 

There is always an earthquake preceding a tsunami. We must gather our energy, our wisdom, and our determination, to resist the rising tide of hatred and oppression.

 

 

 

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
     

― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

 

 

On a warm July Thursday, check-in day at Mohonk Mountain House, I sat with Sevan Melikyan away from the crowd in the cool Lake Lounge for an in-depth conversation. He is best known in the Hudson Valley as the founder and curator of the Wired Gallery in High Falls where he mounts shows of local artists. He also organizes pop-up art fêtes at Mohonk Mountain House, offers in-gallery art lectures, and conducts art tours abroad three times a year. He's headed to Istanbul at the end of September, and Sicily, Malta and Provence in 2026. His wife, Maria, a professor of arts management at SUNY Purchase, helps him with one tour a year. For the others, he hires an assistant.

 

Though New Paltz and environs is a small community with overlapping friendships and artistic circles, I had never met Sevan until a friend's recent photography show at the Wired Gallery. It's a small gallery with a beating heart, fully alive to artists and art-making. Sevan and Maria live upstairs, their kitchen the galley for refreshments during openings.

 

Sevan's journey to the mid-Hudson Valley was complicated. He was born in Istanbul to an Armenian family whose ancestors had survived the 1915-17 genocide without fleeing into a diaspora, but eventually migrated to Paris when Sevan was 9. His father was an engineer, his mother a homemaker. "They were the best parents anyone could have," Sevan says ruefully. And though they were strict when Sevan expressed a desire to study art—something practical, please—they also passed on the sustaining joys of culture, and the importance of learning the language where we live fluently. Sevan speaks four—Armenian, Turkish, French and English.

 

"I am thinking of myself as an immigrant again," Sevan reflects, "and how I was shocked by the feeling of being a foreigner in Paris. I never felt that way when I arrived in New York." How would Sevan feel if he arrived today, I wondered. How would my family have felt, and just about every family I know. Perhaps there's some solace in the reminder that unless we are indigenous, or descendants of slaves or indentured workers, everyone else in America is an immigrant, or a descendant of immigrants.

 

Sevan's eldest sister Sheyda had already arrived in New York and eased Sevan's transition to the New World. Before he left Paris, his father had told him he'd marry a green-eyed girl. A prophecy, or simply a heartfelt wish for his son? Sevan did not specify. Little did he know when he fell in love with the green-eyed Maria that she was a Smiley, a member of the abolitionist Quaker family that built Mohonk Mountain House in the late 19th century, and still own it. Sevan has keys to the mansion, literally and metaphorically. He took me on a guided tour through its history, into private locked rooms with solid old furniture and libraries of  leather-bound books. "Many are about gardens," he explains, "and there is an old bible on the top shelf." We were in a room on the ground floor that the family reserves for its gatherings and private conversations.

 

"Art offers hope in the darkest times," Sevan's Artblazing Tours website assures us. How interesting, I thought, as we meandered up the carpet-covered staircase to a closed-off sitting room on the second floor. The preserved Smiley history inspires this tall, lanky energetic man. He nourishes a dream of preserving art history in Ulster County. "I cannot believe how many talented artists there are here," he says. "I want to create an art museum as a permanent repository of this art for future generations." He's identified a property that is up for sale and hopes to develop his vision one day soon. "It will be hard work. How will I fit it in?" he asks rhetorically. It's not an unusual aspiration for a man whose family has survived war, massacre, displacement and flight. The work of unlocking and re-narrating history—all history—is both necessary and grounding. There is still so much we do not know about ourselves, and one another. What is essential in our pasts, and in our dreams, is often invisible, unless we bring it into the light.  

 

 

 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.

 

― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

 

 

How easily a hand becomes a fist, Margaret Atwood wrote in The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, which was prescient. How confident are any of us that when we are threatened with death, our basest, most animalistic impulses will not engage? Under siege, altruistic impulses and learned values thin and vanish. If our family needs water and food to survive, we push ahead of the line with our tin bowls.

 

But I am not writing about a war zone today. I am writing about my own, small town in upstate New York. On Thursday night we were instructed to begin boiling contaminated water for drinking, brushing our teeth, even washing and rinsing our dishes. The mad rush for bottled water began. And the hoarding. Remember the shortage of toilet paper during Covid? How many of us shared our bounty if we identified a stash? How did local, state and federal government manage the shortages? They didn't.*

 

I started boiling water to fill the Britas—they do not filter bacteria—and our water bottles immediately. I put a bowl of boiled water on the bathroom sink. I hadn't figured out dish washing and rinsing. Boiling water for daily use is arduous and it didn't take long for me to feel exhausted. Early Friday morning, I set out early in search of bottled water.  I bought a half-gallon at Stewart's and then headed for another small shop in my hood—My  Market—to buy some well-priced apples and red peppers, and to checkout their bottled water if we didn't get the all clear soon.  Shoving me aside were two women stacking at least five gallons of water on the counter. Their focus and aggression were startling. When I suggested that they halve their purchase so that neighbors might benefit, they brushed me off. "It's for two families," one of them said dismissively.

 

How spoiled we are, I thought, to have clean water in abundance at the flick of a tap, or to be able to access and pay for bottled water. 

 

"Don't you have the Ashokan nearby?" a city friend asked when I told him about my conservation-conscious town losing its bearings.

 

The Ashokan. Now that's an interesting piece of New York City and New York State early 20th century history. Eleven towns were obliterated to create the Ashokan; descendants of those families still remember becoming refugees. More than a billion gallons of water from the Ashokan and other Catskill reservoirs have  flowed into New York City every day since 1915.   

 

Water is a finite resource, temperatures are rising, rivers and reservoirs are running dry, climate change continues unabated. Flood, fire, drought, water borne disease. I am not an expert on reservoirs, aqueducts and viaducts, but it is obvious that they—and we—are interconnected and interdependent whether we want to be, or not.

 

*The laws regarding the obligations of government are entangled with politics and the privatization of essential resources. I will leave it to a legal commentator to disentangle local, state and federal legislation.

 

 

 

 

Can you feel me hugging you Bryan? I am always going to be hugging you.

 

-Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy; A Story of Justice and Redemption

 

 

 

A young woman wandered into the café. I was immersed in reading my notes,  a writer at work in the midst of a distracting buzz, my attention laser focused, the woman in my peripheral vision. I looked up and she was standing at my table, invading my personal space, and holding up her phone.

 

"Would you have a charger?" she asked.

 

I was disgruntled by the intrusion. It's never happened to me before in this small, quiet, homogeneous, gentrified town. I stood up and grabbed my small backpack off the chair. I'd had my phone stolen recently and I wasn't up for another theft. This young light-skinned Black woman looked like a waif.  She was wearing a low cut sleeveless summer dress down to her ankles, running shoes that looked too big for her feet, her hair tied up neatly with a ribbon. Within seconds we had profiled each other. She was hitting on me—sweet older woman with whitening hair—and I was reflexively protecting my possessions.

 

What was her story?  What was my story?

 

"Are you a student?" I asked. That was one of my more innocent assumptions.

 

"No. I've been out at Bethel but my friend let me down and I can't stay with her."

 

Bethel, the site of Woodstock. A lot of folks wander through New Paltz searching for Woodstock. She'd found the empty field where it all happened, way back when. Now she was here, the only Black person in this too-expensive café. Situated on the environmentally protected rail trail, it attracts a lot of tourists with fancy bikes and helmets.

 

"What were you doing there?" I asked the young waif.

 

"Trying to save our democracy," she said.

 

"Thank you," I said. I purposely didn't ask if she had a place to stay. It was obvious that the phone charger request was a gambit.  But the saving our democracy project, however real or imaginary, pleased me.  This young woman couldn't have been more than 20 and where had she come from and where was she going to sleep? And did she have a grandmother who would always hug her?

 

"Did you ask the baristas if they have a charger?" I asked resisting my inclination to ask her to sit down, listen to her story, and buy her a cold drink. I wasn't in the mood that day, my work had been interrupted, and for goodness sake isn't there anyplace safe where we can rest and recover from the woes of our beleaguered nation? Apparently not. 

 

If I wasn't going to invite the young woman to sit down, there was nothing more to say. I gathered my papers and slid out of the café into the sultry air.

 

 

We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but not commit it.

-

-Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza; A Reckoning

 

 

When James Baldwin was invited to visit Israel in 1961, he observed brutality at every checkpoint. I caught one of the filmed interviews he gave on an Instagram feed recently. "Wherever we go, there is always a border," he told reporters interested in him and his pilgrimage. He went on to say, "The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of 'divide and rule' and Europe's guilty conscience for more than thirty years."

 

The image of divide and rule—in  a stark physical sense—stayed with me. I am missing my Palestinian-American friends, friends I have not seen since the October 7 massacre and the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Once in a while I write a text or email just to say: "Thinking of you, hope we can get together for a coffee and a hug soon." Once in a while, I receive a reply.

 

These friends, friends of many long years, know my backstory and my politics. They are educated and well-traveled yet, in this terrible historic moment, our friendship has been cast asunder. Though the rift feels biblical in its intensity, the antidote is obvious: build bridges and do not stop building bridges.

 

This week, I interviewed a new barber in town. His name is Mohammed Shadi Aldalaq, Mo for short, and his reputation for artistic haircuts is growing as fast as hair in summer. In the two days I hung out with him in his cozy, comfortable shop, there was a steady stream of customers. A mother with three kids in tow—all needing cuts—was  delighted by the reasonable prices; two balding men, including my husband, appreciated Mo's sensitivity; a young student with thick curly hair had specific instructions about the latest haircut fad.

 

Teachers and barbers often run in families. The tradition in Mo's family began with his refugee grandfather in the Zarqa City Refugee Camp in Jordan, one of the camps created in 1948 by the International Red Cross to accommodate the uprooted Palestinian families during the Arab-Israeli war. Palestinians consider the forced displacement and killings during that war their "Nakba," or catastrophe.

 

Mo's grandfather taught in the camp and also learned how to cut from an experienced barber. He passed the skill along to his son, who passed it along to Mo, who started cutting hair when he was 14.

 

"Do you like to draw?" I asked him.

"When I have time."

 

I wasn't surprised. He has the hands and eye of a sculptor.

 

A sign above the cash register in the shop reads: Work hard. Stay humble. It was a gift from his wife, Shadia, a finishing touch before the shop opened a year ago in August at the southern end of the New Paltz bus station.

 

On the second day of my visit, I met Shadia whose father, Radi Serdah, is well known for his entrepreneurial ventures. He owns New Paltz Taxi, the Trailways bus stations in New Paltz and Kingston, and Main Street Auto on North Chestnut. American born and educated, Shadia does some of the billing for her dad.

 

She fell for Mo in 2015 when she was visiting her mother's Lebanese-Palestinian family in Zarqa City, Jordan where Mo grew up and was still living with his parents. His mom was cooking that day and Shadia said, "She's a terrific cook. I want to marry someone in this family."

 

During our conversation, Mo was pulling up photos from his phone of his mom, and all his nieces and nephews; he has four sisters. Before the Nakba, the family owned orchards in Jaffa, he said. My heart sank. Jaffa is the Hebrew name the Rabbi gave me on my wedding day. It means beautiful, and I have cherished it quietly over the years. But it's also an ancient city on the Mediterranean, not far from Tel Aviv. An Arab majority city during the Ottoman era, it still has a large Arab population, and is now best known in the US for its oranges.

 

More of the family's story unfolded with another photo. Mo and Shadia are sitting on a balcony. They are engaged, they are in love, they are laughing. In the foreground, the remaining tents in the Zarqa Refugee Camp are visible; they abut what became a built town over the years. Beyond them a desert landscape, hills, some low slung houses, and Israel. Mo says, "And there, in the distance, is Palestine." The longing in his voice was like an ocean sounding, or the lament of a cello's basso notes.

 

I hadn't mentioned that I come from a Jewish Holocaust family. In the moment, it seemed irrelevant. I do not feel any longing for Israel and have never visited, though I have always been curious about its culture. I am grateful my parents chose the multi-ethnic United States as their safe haven from genocide. Praise be it remains a safe haven, I thought to myself, as Mo expressed two of his American dreams—to work hard, to own a house one day with Shadia.

 

It is foolish and unhelpful to compare atrocities—the Holocaust, the Nakba, the October 7 terrorist massacre, the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Cause, effect, vengeance in a continuing bloody cycle. The history of the decimation of  Gaza and its people will be written by those who survive, or their descendants, not by me or anyone else discussing and arguing the unrelenting invasions, massacres, atrocities and bombings.

 

 

 

 

And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge…

 

-William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

 

 

Former New York State Governor Cuomo looked and sounded like an old dog throughout his resurgence into the limelight. But if Cuomo was an old dog wreaking vengeance without media savvy, Mamdani was a puppy with a blue sky smile. Are we kicking an old—"experienced" – dog  to the curb and elevating an–"inexperienced"—puppy  to higher office?   That's what many in the city fear, including many of my city friends. 

 

I had intended this post as comedy today. Reading the news every morning is hard enough, and the image of the old dog and the puppy amused me. Even though I moved out of the city in 2018, I still follow every electrifying, insane New York city election. But this one hurt and, in the end, was not amusing. It was amplified by hate, ageism, innuendo, tropes, and entitlement, an echo of the devolution of political discourse and language, especially on social media, but  not only on social media. Despite Elon Musk's getting-to-Mars fantasies, there is no Planet B, as yet. We have to settle down and try to make things work right here. I hope you will join me in an experiment to broaden and steady our frontal lobe thinking, as follows:

 

1.      Study in earnest-- and with as open a heart and mind as possible-- any issue which engages and challenges your life. Read  more, scroll less. Get more informed—more  educated—than you have ever been.  Read what you would not normally read in the mainstream media. Read and listen to media from other countries. Podcasts are available in abundance.

 

2.     Try not to assume that your point of view is the right one, or the only one. Consider-with an open heart and mind-other points of view. 

 

3.     Mentor anyone younger than you are. Showcase your experience, but allow new ideas to surface. 

 

4.     In general, listen more, talk less, as per my last blog post.

 

5.     Define and then re-define smear words, stereotypes, imprecise phrases. Study their historic source. Study propaganda. Take notes.

 

6.     Take a deep breath. Exhale.

 

I look forward to your findings and observations in this  utopian experiment.  We can reach for the stars, and one another, right here on earth.

 

 

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way… For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best."

 

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

 

 

         

I have a new friend in town and we have so much to talk about that there is very little oxygen left in the café. We usually hang out for two hours or so, though I could listen to him and talk to him all day. I have no illusions that we'll agree on everything we discuss as we get to know one another, but it doesn't matter, the air is clear, the conversation is civil, there is no judgment at the table.

 

 It seems particularly important these difficult days to practice deep listening especially when we are just getting to know someone and their politics. What if our opinions are deeply held and divisive?  The tenor of conversation must remain respectful if we are to remain at peace with ourselves and one another.

 

Tea and empathy. Talk less, listen more. These are my mantras as I interview people, run a writing workshop, or cultivate a new friendship. Though we have no need of bomb shelters in upstate New York, and hopefully never will, we are enduring internecine warfare, gunshots ringing out across a peaceful suburb in the dead of night, hatreds old and new ascendant even among relatives, friends and colleagues. How easy it is for fury to turn violent, three-time poet laureate Joy Harjo reminds us in her poem, "Overwhelm." She warns that a country that "drinks from illusion," can "go down."

 

Listening to a Haaretz podcast this morning, I heard a still sane reporter gasp for breath as he used what Aldous Huxley called  "pleasant sounding vocabulary" to describe mass murder in Gaza and a missile attack on Haifa. After a while I did not hear this reporter's words, I felt his breath, escaping from his chest with a hiss, like steam. He was burning up inside.

 

Even in the safe enclave where I live, I encounter hatred daily. There is shouting and accusation, racialized slurs, and palpable fear. A man at a dinner party challenges what I have written and misunderstands my intention: to describe accurately, to report deeply, to understand a different point of view and analyze it with discipline and attention. I receive belligerent emails and delete them, turn my back on rage, move sideways out of range. Hatred is not sustainable. If it persists, we will annihilate each other.

 

We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!

― Arthur Miller, The Crucible

 

 

 

The asylees and refugees arrived for a resume workshop. I could imagine my refugee parents in that room pulling an old suitcase with all their belongings, all their valuable dog-eared, well-fingered documents neatly held in a small satchel, the sorrow of family and friends left behind visible in their gestures and facial expressions. I am here because the United States took them in, a lifeline.

 

I had volunteered that day because I wanted to do something useful after the strengthened restrictions at our southern border and the belligerence against our neighbor to the north. We share a 5,525 mile border with Canada, the longest international border in the world; our problem becomes their problem, and though we may share firefighters during a wildfire season, as we did on the Minnewaska Ridge in upstate New York last summer, we don't share a culture of acceptance when it comes to refugees and asylees. According to the Pew Research Center, and the UNHCR, Canada leads the world in refugee resettlement.

 

I have two cousins who grew up in Canada because the refugee agency placed them there, separating our family. This happens a lot, even today, or even more so today. My husband and I recently mentored Nathan, a young Tamil man from Sri Lanka. His family was displaced during the Civil War after his father was killed. Nathan and his mother and sister fled, eventually reaching a refugee camp in Tamil-speaking South India. Because he was young and fit, Nathan was sent by the UNHCR to America to work and study; his mother and sister were sponsored by relatives in Canada. But Nathan had been granted asylum in the United States, which meant that he could not request asylum in any other country. "At least we are close enough to visit," he told us during one of our last visits before he disappeared. His mother's promise to find him a bride could be easily fulfilled from within the Tamil community in North America, he assured us. But he was having a hard time. He'd finished some schooling, received his US Citizenship, but he was still living with six other unmarried asylees and working two menial jobs. We had him over for dinner most Fridays to cook together, practice English, talk about everything and anything, a surrogate family, but not his family. And then he'd disappeared. We heard he was visiting his mother and sister in Canada.

 

At the workshop, I was matched with a young man from the Arab-speaking world whose father and uncle had been killed in a civil war. His schooling had been interrupted, his family scattered, many killed; his mother was missing and assumed kidnapped. I didn't get the full story; that wasn't my job. I had to find a way to create a one-page resume quickly so that he could find an internship or volunteer position while awaiting asylum, which can take years.

 

The young man has to be nameless here—asylum is not guaranteed, and deportation is always a possibility now—but suffice to say he was sophisticated, educated, a former competitive swimmer and marathon runner, easy to work with—eager like most young people are—to complete his education and remake his life. I enjoyed myself, enjoyed getting to know him, enjoyed helping him. I am a swimmer, too, so that was our first touching point. Many others followed.

 

It takes a village, and this young man had lost his through no fault of his own.

 

 

I hope that cisgender people realize that we are fully formed human beings, and often after our transitions, we feel even more fully formed. And getting to know us as people, rather than as just trans people, is very important.

 

-Erin Reed, author of "Erin In The Morning" Substack, in an interview with Kairo Weber in Sociologists for Trans Justice

 

  

The trans son of a friend of mine suffered for more than 15 years before he figured out that he wanted—needed—to transition. Raised in the Hudson Valley, he's living in New York City now which I would have thought—before talking with him recently—was congenial for trans men and women. But, since the 2024 election, the atmosphere, if we can call it that, is anything but congenial. "I've put my 'I'm proud to be trans tee-shirt away'," S. told me. "I don't want to be targeted again on the street."

 

Please note I am keeping S. anonymous here, for several reasons. He's a professional who works for a private organization that caters to trans men and women, and he's active in the trans community. But he's had his share of challenges. "I still need to go to a gynecologist," he told me. "Just imagine what could happen if the doctor has not been trained properly, or has never met a trans person before?"

 

I am not sure it is entirely analogous, but my conversation with S reminded me of what it was like for women not that long ago who wanted to procure birth control, or an abortion, without being sent to prison. And here we are again, fighting for the basic freedom to choose in a democracy.

 

Fortunately for S. and many others these days, he has a loving, empathetic, educated family, and he grew up in a liberal enclave. But when I asked about his high school experience he said, "I kept my identity to myself."  I wondered why that was necessary in a "liberal" town, but didn't probe further.  I felt sad that closeting in public, or at work, may again be necessary to feel safe in the threatening, abusive eco-system we are all navigating right now, especially if we are in any way "different." 

 

June is the month to celebrate the courageous, vocal LGBTQ+ community. Despite fear and struggle, they carry on, they resist.

 

An Addendum to this post: Human Rights Watch Issues Scathing Report on Anti-Trans Healthcare Bans in the US.  A first-of-its-kind Human Rights Watch report documented the impacts of trans youth care bans in-depth.  Here's the link:

 

https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/06/03/us-bans-gender-affirming-care-harm-trans-youth

 
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Human Rights Watch released a sweeping report on Tuesday detailing the harrowing experiences of trans youth, their families, and their healthcare providers in the United States—a first-of-its-kind analysis, the global non-profit says.

"It is the first comprehensive account by an international human rights organization to document how US state bans on gender-affirming care violate fundamental rights—including the right to health, the rights of the child, the right to non-discrimination, and the right to personal autonomy," said Yasemin Smallens, an officer in the LGBT Rights Program at Human Rights Watch, who is the document's principal author.

The report is titled "They're Ruining People's Lives": Bans on Gender-Affirming Care for Transgender Youth. Smallens told Erin in the Morning that, while gender-affirming care bans are often framed solely as an "LGBT issue," these findings situate trans health care within the broader framework of international human rights law. The bans may outlaw surgeries, hormone therapies, or affirming psychotherapy; they may criminalize providers of such care and punish parents who support their trans child.

The report was based on 51 interviews across 19 states with transgender youth, parents, healthcare providers, and advocates. The testimonies were pseudonymized to protect interviewees amidst growing political attacks. Even with guaranteed anonymity, however, Smallens said during a press conference that trans people and their loved ones were reluctant to speak out, especially upon the election of Donald Trump.

"With time, people were more and more afraid to speak to me," Smallens said. The report also notes that it was largely limited to trans kids who had supportive parents, and that the harm runs even deeper for trans kids in unsupportive families.

However, these narratives are vital in informing public debate about trans health and policies, especially as junk science and studies are elevated by the Trump Administration and anti-human rights zealots. In May, Trump's Department of Health and Human Services released a 400-page anti-trans screed full of pseudoscience and transphobia couched in graphs, charts, and the veneer of statistics and academic rigor.

"People are talking about the ontology of sex as opposed to the people that these policies are harming," Smallens said. "But these histories and these stories will remain."

Participants described navigating the current minefield of care barriers as devastating. "I want [lawmakers] to know they're ruining people's lives," one trans teen, identified as Sophia, said.

Multiple families reported having to move or otherwise change their location of care on two different occasions; when they fled to one place, another ban was enacted. Parents said they pay tens of thousands of dollars out-of-pocket for out-of-state care. They discussed doctors who have abruptly stopped care without warning, and that even the appearance of offering a referral sparked fears of legal action under states' "aiding and abetting" laws. One family reported that their gender clinic was targeted by an arson attack.

At the same time, the report supported and was supported by the overwhelming body of evidence that shows trans-affirming care is life-saving. Many of the trans young people profiled were happy, thriving members of their community until the healthcare bans, or the threat of such bans, drove children to attempt suicide.

"It felt like I wasn't allowed to have puberty and be happy and just be a regular child," said Kai, a trans youth. "I had to feel horrible and depressed and suicidal because it isn't who I am—to be in a woman's body, to be going through a female puberty—because I'm not a girl."

Meanwhile, Smallens struck a hopeful note about the potential for radical change at every level, issuing recommendations for the Oval Office and Congress cascading down to the most local levels of government—things lawmakers and officials can do to protect trans kids, their families, and their providers. State legislatures can enact "Shield Laws," which protect doctors from out-of-state, anti-trans prosecution. Medical boards can reaffirm their support of holistic, evidence-based best practices when it comes to treating trans patients. County officials can resist orders to investigate families for providing gender-affirming care to their trans children.

When these kids are allowed the care and support they need, Smallens' report highlights the potential for trans joy, growth, and resilience. One parent, Grace, said her son used to cry at his own reflection until he accessed gender-affirming care. "Shortly after [he started] testosterone, I walked by and he was in the bathroom grinning, grinning at himself [in the mirror] like an idiot," she told Human Rights Watch "And I'm like, 'What are you doing?' And he said, 'I finally feel like myself.'"