Pride Flag Raising

On May 30th, Medford hosted its annual Pride flag raising and kickoff festival in front of City Hall. I delivered the following remarks.

I am thrilled to celebrate and kick off Pride with you today! Gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts in 2004, the first in the nation. I feel so proud to say that, every time. I, and I think many others, thought most of the fight was won at that point. But, of course, there is more work to do, more equality to strive toward, every day. And people will try, and sometimes succeed, at rolling back rights that were granted long ago. Progress gets made and then there is the inevitable backlash.

I am routinely surprised and confused by backlash. I am a stubbornly optimistic person. But importantly, I also think that if people were to meet others who represent the kind of people they are afraid of, or that are members of the groups whose rights they want to remove, that they will no longer want to remove said rights. This doesn’t always happen, but it sometimes does. The capacity for human cruelty is vast. The capacity for human kindness is vaster, I think.

I hope.

There are forces at work trying to stop progress that you have asked your elected officials to make. We have officially welcomed immigrants. We have enshrined noncooperation with ICE into our local laws. And we recently passed the Gender Affirming Care and Reproductive Healthcare ordinance.

As the Chair of the Public Health and Community Safety Committee of the Medford City Council, I have worked with the health department and the Police department on ways we as a local community can offer safety to our residents in Medford, especially under the current Presidential administration. Safety is what it always comes down to. I am so lucky to work with such honest and brave individuals, who see the clear risk our residents face every day.

This is especially true for our trans residents.

When I went back to school for a second graduate degree during the first Trump administration to study public policy, I did the Gender, Leadership, and Public Policy program at UMass Boston, a very diverse public University in Dorchester. This was 2017, and in that program, we studied public policy through an intersectional feminist lens informed by critical race theory before 2020 when people started either encouraging or disparaging those practices in the common parlance. I learned about white lady tears by doing them in class, not to brag.

Our trans neighbors in Medford manage many intersecting identities: whether they pass or not, whether they are poor or wealthy or in between, whether they are young or old, whether their families are supportive or not, sexuality (which is not the same as gender identity), and race. As these identities intersect, they complicate the experience of every individual, and they may or may not build upon each other and exacerbate the fears and calculations our neighbors must go through as they move through the world. When Councilor Tseng and I were working on the Gender Affirming Care portion of the ordinance I mentioned earlier, we thought it was especially important to bring it forward as soon as possible, so that we had somewhere to point our residents who were doing those calculations every moment of every day, wondering if they would lose their healthcare and whether they would be able to continue to live freely in all of their full identities.

As we all continue to do these calculations, I think the best thing we can each do is exactly as much as we can within the boundaries of our abilities. I am a City Councilor so I can write resolutions and ordinances and speak in favor of them in meetings and encourage my colleagues to vote for them. In this case, I worked to craft an ordinance assuring our residents that if they are trans or nonbinary or gender fluid and they take medication, they can keep accessing that medication in Medford without fear of denial or retribution or prosecution, for as long as I have any power over that. If they need surgery, they can get it. That is one thing I can do. For now. Was it a little scary? Did we feel afraid that we were making ourselves targets or that we would lose Federal funding? A little bit, yes. Did we do it anyway? We did.

Something I tell my kids a lot, when they are nervous to try something new or do something that makes them fearful, is that being brave is not about never being afraid. Being brave is about doing something even though you are scared. This time in our country demands that we do the right thing even though we are scared. Our trans and gender nonconforming residents face much greater threats every day and we owe it to them to show up and do what we can for them.

Today, when we raise this flag, and every day when our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office opens in City Hall, when we show up to events like this, we are saying that even though we are maybe a little afraid, we are doing it anyway. We are living as our authentic selves. We are not apologizing. We are refusing to live in fear, and we are showing up for our neighbors. I am grateful to live in a City where our LGBTQIA+ neighbors are celebrated. I am proud to live in Medford, Massachusetts. Happy Pride.