A proud Cuban American transgender man, Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen is the Executive Director of Advocates for Trans Equality (A4TE).

METRO WEEKLY: Tell me about your experience on election night. How did you feel as the night started and when did it sink in for you that things weren’t going as hoped?

RODRIGO HENG-LEHTINEN: I was nervous going into election night, as so many of us were. We know how high the stakes were. We know that our freedoms were on the line. So I was anxious.

As the night went on and things started looking like the vote count was against us, I still was quite patient. I’ve worked on campaigns for a long time now and have learned a lot about how vote counting works. You have to keep in mind that every ballot has to be counted, it takes time, and mail-in ballots are often the last ones to be counted, and they tend to skew Democrat. So I was patient, patient, patient, anticipating. We’ve got to count every vote to actually see where this lands. But as the hours passed, of course, that did not turn out to be enough.

It’s been very disheartening to face the fact that now we’re going to have a second Trump administration. All of us are going to need to take a deep breath to get grounded again, but then we’ve got to roll up our sleeves. This is the new chapter of our resistance. As discouraging as it is, I still believe in us. Trans people have always been overcoming long odds. We have never had the kind of support that we deserve. So we’ve had each other’s backs, and I think that’s going to remain true no matter who is president. We still got us.

MW: I’ve been covering the trans community for thirty years, and I have never seen anything like the kind of focused, direct attacks that I have seen in the last few years from the Republicans.

HENG-LEHTINEN: Yeah. It’s true. It’s true. The reason this is happening so much now is that progress comes with backlash. We are in the midst of an incredible backlash right now.

Twenty years ago, most Americans didn’t even really know what the word transgender meant. We used to be a pretty invisible community. We were out there — we’ve always been here — but most people didn’t understand anything about us, and the only time they ever really thought about us was maybe as the punchline to a joke, or a salacious episode of Law & Order. Then we had a few decades where we made incredible advances as a community. We secured a ton more visibility.

Now, there’s a much greater level of awareness than there was before, and that’s important, but that really galvanized our opposition. Anti-LGBT ideologues looked at this and felt threatened, and they said, “Oh my God, we’ve got to figure out a plan to turn the tide back.” They saw that support for LGBT people was growing, and they were like, “We got to find a way to stop it.” And they figured out their way was by attacking trans people, and trans kids especially.

They picked the least understood part of the whole LGBTQ umbrella and went after us with all they had as a way to undermine public support for all LGBT rights across the board. They’re going after us trans people because they want to go after all LGBTQ people.

So, yes, attacks against us have really, really, really been growing. We see this in state legislatures with hostile bills being filed. We see this in Congress with hearings and all this political theater designed to spew hatred at us. We see it in media with anti-trans people being platformed and given a megaphone for their hatred.

Oh, and I should say hate crimes increased under the first Trump administration because when you set that environment where it is okay to disrespect someone just because of who they are, you are opening the door to violence. You are making it okay to come after us physically as well.

MW: I do think there’s one positive aspect to this year’s election, and that is all the transgender re-elections and wins that happened during this cycle. Sarah McBride making history particularly, but throughout the nation.

HENG-LEHTINEN: I’m so glad you brought this up. Yeah, transgender candidates won their elections all around the country. There was Sarah McBride, now the first openly trans member of Congress, which is incredible. There are also trans candidates who won that a lot of people don’t know about yet.

Emma Curtis won her election in Kentucky — a state that you would never stereotypically expect transgender acceptance, and yet an openly trans woman won her election, and now she is the first ever trans person elected in the state. There’s also Leigh Finke in Minnesota, who won her re-election. Zooey Zephyr in Montana won her re-election, and same for Brianna Titone in Colorado.

And there’s also people who won their races in — I’m looking at the list — in Appleton, Wisconsin, in New Hampshire, in Iowa. Precious Brady-Davis was elected to the Water Reclamation Board in Chicago. She’s an out Black trans woman.

Transgender candidates won all over the country. It’s incredible. So that goes to show that most everyday Americans are not that motivated to hate on their transgender neighbors. It is actually only a very vocal, dangerous minority that is motivated to attack transgender people.

These MAGA extremists are a threat. There’s no doubt about it. And still, voters across the country are willing to vote for transgender candidates when they get to know them. So, I think that goes to show our dynamic political reality right now.

We are in a historic push-and-pull. This is an epic fight of pro-transgender equality versus anti-transgender hatred. Both of our forces are battling it out right now. We are the generation that’s going to have an extremely big impact on who wins. We are the generation that has to fight right now because there is an active push-and-pull going on. And I’m confident that we as a community can succeed in turning public opinion back our way — but we’re going to have to fight for it.

MW: How do you plan to use your organization’s resources to fight the administration?

HENG-LEHTINEN: We’ll be fighting the administration with everything we’ve got. This is even part of why A4TE was created. We merged two national transgender rights organizations — NCTE and TLDEF — because we needed to build power. We saw this on the horizon. We knew that transgender people were under escalating attack, and we needed to be better positioned to weather that storm ahead. That’s why we created Advocates for Trans Equality.

So we are ready for this. We were already doing contingency planning and scenario planning before the election even happened, including preparing for this grim possibility. So we’ll be adapting our work, we will be ready to fight the anti-trans regulations that the Trump administration will inevitably propose. And I really encourage everybody to join us in flooding the court with our public comments.

A lot of people don’t realize that when a president like Trump puts forward all these horribly hostile rules, they still have to open it up to comment. We, as people living in the United States, still have the chance to make our voices heard, and the government is required by law to read those comments.

Now, the Trump administration is still going to be packed with opposition, people who are against us, and they’re not realistically going to be persuaded, but they can be pressured. And we can slow these attacks down, we can jam up those gears of the machine if we submit enough comments, if we show up in high enough numbers to rallies, if we make our voices heard loudly enough. There are still ways to do this. So we really encourage everybody to sign up, follow some social media, get engaged, because we are going to be organizing.

MW: How can people sign up?

HENG-LEHTINEN: They can sign up on our website, transequality.org, or by engaging with any of our social media platforms. We’re on the usual ones, @transequality on X or @transequalitynow on Instagram. And if you sign up for our email list and put in your state, we will also keep you updated on everything that’s happening in your state.

The states are going to be key. If you live in a blue state or an area that’s more supportive, there are opportunities to pass stronger protections to have some safer areas in our country. And if you live in a red or purple state, there’s going to unfortunately be bad bills to fight. But we can keep you updated, we can keep you engaged if you just sign up with us and let us know where you live.

MW: Some Democrats are saying that the party has to walk away from the trans issues to make gains in the next round of elections, particularly the participation of trans women in women’s sports, which has become this major wedge issue, despite the fact that it’s actually very small in its scope nationwide. How do you feel about this?

HENG-LEHTINEN: It is absolutely wrong. It is misreading and missing the point about why people voted the way they did. If supporting trans people was really the reason for Democratic losses, we wouldn’t see trans candidates winning their races all over the country, even in places like Kentucky.

Another point of evidence is that there were many candidates who were attacked with these anti-trans ads, candidates who are not trans themselves, but were pummeled with ads for their support of transgender people, and those candidates nevertheless won their election. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin was pummeled with anti-trans ads, and she still won in Wisconsin. There were also two state representatives in Oregon, Hoa Nguyen and April Dobson, who were pummeled with anti-trans ads, and they still got elected in both their races. So these anti-trans ads don’t actually work. They don’t actually drive voting behavior.

The reason that Donald Trump won, I would say, is because of racism and because of all the misinformation and disinformation that is out there spinning these lies about the economy and that somehow Trump is going to help people in a way that is simply untrue.

That’s what happened in this election, and that’s why we as LGBT people have to really keep building our own power and voting in even bigger numbers. But that’s what it’s about. Trans people actually got elected around the country. Being trans is not the problem.

There have been polls after polls that show voters don’t really care about transgender issues. It is simply not a priority. I can send you one that maybe you’ve already seen from Gallup that asked voters to rank their top issues out of a list of 22, and transgender issues ranked 21 out of 22. People overwhelmingly cared about so many other topics before they even thought about trans rights. This is not a motivating issue. Unfortunately, racism and sexism are motivating issues. That is what motivated, inevitably, some people to not vote for Kamala Harris. It has nothing to do with trans people.

MW: What would be your advice to LGBTQ people who just want to give up on politics, on activism, even volunteerism.

HENG-LEHTINEN: I would say it is understandable to feel dismayed. That is a natural, normal reaction to the scary environment we are in. I encourage you to take a deep breath, take a break. A break isn’t quitting. It is always okay to take a pause to recharge your batteries. You can definitely take the time to get grounded again and then come back to the fight with us.

This is the new chapter of our resistance. So many trans people have fought hard before us so that we could even get to this point that we are at today. We have a long history of organizing and marching and testifying. We’ve been through repression before. This is not our first rodeo.

We have been in these kinds of situations where regressive forces have tried to control us through oppression, but every generation has always fought back, and we can be part of that history. Now it is our turn to pick up this baton and show up.

This is not the end of the story. It is just one chapter in the story, but there is a whole lot more to be written, and it’s on us to be part of it. And you don’t have to do it alone. We are all here with you. No one is alone. Trans people are in every community all over the country, and we are organizing. So join the team, and let’s gather up together.

MW: And finally, how are you personally feeling at this moment about our community and our country’s future?

HENG-LEHTINEN: I’m feeling like this is really a time to double-down. I’m feeling determined. It is a scary time, and that’s a time to fight back. So I’m feeling determined. I’m feeling focused. We got to be eyes on the prize.

We’re in the… What do they call that in scriptwriting? The hero’s journey? We’re at that hard part, that climax, and then we’re going to get to the other side if enough of us band together.

For more information about Advocates for Trans Equality, visit www.transequality.org.