June 10 2017; Manchester, TN, USA; Lucy Dacus performs at Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival
Queer singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus has pledged to donate $10k to people seeking gender-affirming care.
On Wednesday, January 22, the Boygenius member announced in an X post that she would give $10k in $500 increments to transgender people looking to fund gender-affirming surgeries through GoFundMe campaigns. Dacus asked her followers to share links to their campaigns in the post’s comments and also urged others to donate as well.
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“The government will never be the source of our validation or protection,” she wrote. “We have to do it ourselves.”
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While Dacus did not mention the new administration directly, her announcement came a day after President Donald Trump issued a Day 1 executive order rescinding dozens of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders and actions. Several of Biden’s orders protecting LGBTQ+ rights were among those rolled back, including Executive Order 14075.
Signed by then-President Biden in June 2022, the order, titled “Advancing Equality for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Individuals,” directed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “promote expanded access to comprehensive health care for LGBTQI+ individuals, including by working with States on expanding access to gender-affirming care,” among other pro-LGBTQ+ provisions.
On Inauguration Day, Trump also signed his “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” executive order. The anti-trans order declares that the U.S. government will only recognize two sexes, male and female, and falsely characterizes “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex” as fundamental attacks on women “depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.” Among its many anti-trans provisions, government agencies are instructed “to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.”
As Billboard notes, in recent years major medical organizations including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and the Endocrine Society have all called for an end to state level policies intended to limit access to gender-affirming care, which is widely acknowledged to be safe, medically necessary, and in some cases life-saving for people suffering from gender dysphoria.
As of Friday, January 24, Dacus’ post has received over 1,000 responses and been viewed by 1.2M X users.
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