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The Trump Administration is pushing a dangerous and sweeping attempt to control our bodies, our families, and our lives and a Supreme Court case this term will shape the future of transgender people’s freedom — and bodily autonomy for all. The state of Tennessee wants the Supreme Court to expand its ruling overturning Roe v. Wade to allow the state to target transgender people’s autonomy over their own bodies. Continuing down this road will hurt everyone's freedom to control their bodies and lives.
The ACLU told the court that everyone deserves the freedom to control their bodies and seek the health care they need. The government has no right to deny a transgender person the health care they need, just as they have no right telling someone if, when, or how they start a family.
This past Saturday, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker delivered an impassioned speech at the Human Rights Campaign's Los Angeles Dinner. At a moment when some Democrats seem to be calculating whether trans rights are a political liability worth abandoning, Pritzker chose to plant his flag firmly on the side of full LGBTQ equality and told the spineless members of his party exactly what he thinks of their political cowardice.
"I know that there are transgender children right now looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for them and for their simple right to exist," Pritzker declared to the crowd. "Well, I am. We are. We will." More than just a throwaway line, this was the climax of a fiery address that connected his personal history with the current political moment — and called for "mass activism" against the Trump administration's policies.
What's refreshing is how Pritzker completely rejected the political hemming and hawing that's infected too many Democrats lately. While some have begun to distance themselves from transgender issues in response to relentless Republican attacks, Pritzker's remarks represent an uncompromising defense of the entire LGBTQ community. He explicitly warned against "taking the soul-sucking path of sacrificing the most persecuted for that which we deem to be most popular" — a direct rebuke to the strategists who keep suggesting Democrats should throw trans people under the bus to win elections.
In a political environment where even some progressive politicians seem to be calculating just how many trans rights they can sacrifice to maintain power, Pritzker's speech is a reminder of what actual political courage looks like. As he put it bluntly, "Bullies respond to one thing, and one thing only, a punch in the face." Perhaps more Democrats could benefit from taking notes.
You can watch the full video of Pritzker’s speech on YouTube. I’ve transcribed the text of it below.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D-IL) Speaks at the 2025 HRC Los Angeles Dinner:
Thank you so much to James. Hey everybody, are you ready for the fight?
Okay, listen, it's so wonderful to join you all here. Of course, as you know, I come from Chicago. I haven't brought any of the cold weather from Chicago, I promise you, but I have brought the fresh air from Chicago, which is so important because the mixture of the energy of California and the freshness of Chicago honestly is a recipe that's especially fitting for tonight's gathering.
About a century ago, our nation's first known gay rights organization opened its doors in my hometown of Chicago. Then the first national gay rights organization was founded right here in Los Angeles. And in celebrating the work of HRC tonight, I like to think that we are also honoring that trailblazing spirit of justice that's long connected our two communities. Now more than ever, we need to remind ourselves of our shared histories and rekindle the bonds that we once forged in the face of tyranny and injustice.
Now I first got my start in activism right here in the state of California. As a little kid growing up in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, my mother was an activist for reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights. And she took me to pride parades back when, well, they weren't really parades, they were protests. So I have to laugh when I hear the right-wing carry on about the dangers of exposing kids to trans people or same-sex couples because I'm living proof that introducing your kids to the gay agenda might result in them growing up to be governor.
Now my mother marched and fought at a time when the advances in LGBTQ rights of the last 20 years would have been unthinkable. But she understood something important about the legacy that we leave our children. That the greatest thing that a parent can do for the next generation is plant seeds of freedom in the hopes that their kids are able to one day take refuge in the shade of a fully grown tree.
What is so dangerous about the moment that we find ourselves in today is that we're watching the most vile and cruel people in our country take an ax to the trees planted and nurtured by the most courageous of Americans. With the right amount of force, a redwood that took centuries to grow can be felled in just a few minutes.
I've been governor of Illinois for more than six years now and for most of that time my focus has been on the very important and oftentimes mundane business of running a state. I'm kind of a nerd. I like spreadsheets and data and long reports about how to spur economic growth. I find the minutia of governing to be gratifying, especially when you can summon the patience and the perseverance to take on big problems. I believe in the methodological approach of putting your shoulder to the wheel to overcome the maddening inertia of bureaucracy.
I've always embraced the norms and rules of decorum that have governed our democracy for almost 250 years. And as a Democrat, I believed that even when the other side of the aisle was periodically tossing those norms to the side, we had a responsibility to try and maintain the guardrails of our public discourse. I maintained that posture of decorum through the first two years of my term, which were the last two years of Donald Trump's first term. And I maintained that posture through the entirety of the COVID pandemic. Now, I also maintained that posture during the first, the four years rather, of Joe Biden's presidency.
But, despite my own experience with this president back in 2019 and 2020, and my own warnings to the public on the campaign trail last year, I hoped that some part of Donald Trump's cruel nature would bow to two and a half centuries of tradition. For ten years, ever since Donald Trump descended that ridiculous gold escalator to announce his entrance into the political world, I hoped that the Republican Party would seek out and find its better angels. Hope is a delicate and wonderful thing, a seed that we should never stop planting. But I won't let hope be a blindfold. And I won't continue to advocate that we wage a conventional political fight when what we really need is to become street fighters.
Now, let me be clear. The Trump administration and his Republican lackeys in Congress are looking to reverse every single victory this community has won over the last 50 years. And right now, it's drag queens reading books and transgender people serving in the military. Tomorrow, it's your marriage license and your job they want to take. Bending to the whims of a bully will not end his cruelty. It will only embolden him. The response to authoritarianism isn't acquiescence. Bullies respond to one thing, and one thing only, a punch in the face.
But you see, that starts with fully acknowledging what is happening. The meme lords and the minions in the White House are intentionally breaking the American system of government so they can rebuild it in their own image. They've shut down cancer research and HIV prevention. They've eliminated drinking water and clean air regulations and upended the lives of veterans. They've said that a recession that Trump is likely to cause will be worth it, which is an assessment worthy of Trump University.
At its core, what Elon Musk and Donald Trump are doing isn't about efficiencies or cost savings. It's about giving their wealthy friends a tax break and making the middle class and veterans and public school kids pay for it. It's a few idiots trying to figure out how to pull off the scam of their lives.
Meanwhile, the scariest part is that they're using the power of the presidency to try to delight their base by targeting vulnerable people, people they think can't fight back, calling them domestic enemies or claiming they'll ruin American culture. Remember their slogan, "Make America Great Again." Authoritarians target vulnerable minority communities first because they think that if they can conquer those that they deem weak, and they can show everyone else who's boss, which is why we can't sit back right now and wait to see what happens. If we wait, I guarantee you the battle will have already been lost.
Donald Trump cannot take anything from us that we don't choose to give him. He and his henchmen don't want people to realize that. But now is the time for us to wake up. The good news is every day I'm seeing more and more people across this country realize that they don't want to give him much at all.
The question I get asked most right now is, "So what can I do? What can I do?" And I'm going to be blunt about this. Never before in my life have I called for mass activism, but this is the moment. Take to the streets, protest, show up at town halls. Jam the phone lines in Congress, 202-224-3121, and afford not a moment of peace to any elected representatives who are aiding and abetting Musk and Trump's illegal power grab. This is not a drill, folks. This is the real thing.
Seize every megaphone you have. Go online and make a donation to the legal funds fighting Trump, to HRC, and to the candidates for Congress that vow to take this country backward. And don't limit your voice to the traditional political channels. Be like Lucy Welch. When JD Vance went to vacation at the Sugarbush Resort in Warren, Vermont, Lucy, who writes the Sugarbush Daily Snow Report, used her report to defend her diverse and wonderful community, ending by saying, "I am using my relative platform as a snow reporter to be disruptive. What we do or don't do matters."
What we do and don't do matters. It matters right now more than it ever has before. When my future grandkids look back on this moment, I want them to know that my voice was one of the loudest in the room, screaming for justice and fighting against tyranny.
And in the midst of this existential fight, this battle that seems to consume everything, well, let's not take the soul-sucking path of sacrificing the most persecuted for that which we deem to be most popular. I know that there are transgender children right now looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for them and for their simple right to exist. Well, I am. We are. We will.
I know that amidst the ongoing assault on our institutions, it is easy for people to fall into despair about our democratic system. But I love this country too much not to fight for it. You're here tonight because you do too. And when I think about that love, I think back to all the times in our history when our ancestors had to fight back against tyrants and racists and those who couldn't understand that freedom and justice are our foundational promises in this country.
That group of people, that small group of people that got together in Chicago to found this country's first known gay rights organization. Well, it was called Society for Human Rights. It was 1924 and the flicker of light was brief. It only lasted a matter of months before social persecution and criminal prosecution bankrupted the promise of the group's charter. But oh, that flicker ignited something. By whisper and by word of mouth, folks around the country started to catch wind of the idea. And eventually, it ended up in the ears of a man here in California who later said the idea of gay people getting together at all was an eye-opener for him.
Well, that man's name was Harry Hay. And a couple of decades later, he went on to found the Mattachine Society right here in Los Angeles. It was the first sustained gay rights organization in the United States. Harry said that he was first told about the Chicago group as a warning that the idea was too dangerous and nobody should try to pull anything off like that ever again. How lucky the world is that Harry didn't listen.
When we say history repeats itself, it's not because the villains and battles don't evolve with the ages. They do. But the fight itself remains elemental. It's always men who would be king, blaming the suffering of the masses on those who look different or sound different or live differently. And since the dawn of time, the triumph of good over evil has relied on those who believe in empathy and kindness, summoning the steel spine needed to defend those values that by their nature leave us vulnerable to attack. This community knows that. You have lived and breathed this fight for generations. Our hope, our hope lies in this room.
The fact that we are still here today means that we have the faith and courage that we will win the battles that really matter. Now, when I first ran for governor in 2018, I started every single stump speech by saying, and this will tell you why Donald Trump doesn't like me very much. I said at the beginning of every stump speech, everything we care about is under siege by a racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic Donald Trump.
And I ended every single speech with a question to the crowd, are you ready for the fight? So here we are again. Everything we care about is under siege. And so I guess I just have one question for all of you tonight. Are you ready for the fight? Are you ready for the fight? HRC, are you ready for the fight? Los Angeles, are you ready for the fight? Let's go get 'em, everybody! Let's go get 'em!
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