Log Cabin Republicans drop the ‘T’: ‘We are an LGB organization’

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Log Cabin Republicans has formally ended national advocacy for transgender issues after adding the “T” to its mission in 2015.
President Ross Hemminger says the trans movement became consumed with minors, schools and women’s sports.
His warning: radical trans activism is actually eroding public support for gay rights.

For years, Americans have been instructed to treat LGBT as though those four letters represented one inseparable political constituency.

One of the nation’s most prominent gay conservative organizations just said: Not anymore. The Log Cabin Republicans’ board has voted to refocus its national mission exclusively on lesbian, gay and bisexual issues, formally walking away from transgender advocacy more than a decade after adding the “T” to its mission.

Organization president Ross Hemminger announced the change in an op-ed Thursday, arguing that what the group agreed to support in 2015 bears little resemblance to today’s transgender political movement. “At the time, we did not believe that we would find ourselves where we are today,” Hemminger wrote.

His central complaint is that transgender activism has moved overwhelmingly toward issues involving children. “The transgender movement has ceased focusing on adults at all,” Hemminger wrote, pointing specifically to gender ideology in schools, biological males competing in women’s sports and medical gender-transition procedures for minors.

And Hemminger says the consequences aren’t limited to transgender politics. He believes gay Americans are paying the political price.

Hemminger warned that public support for gay men and women — including previously broadly accepted issues such as same-sex marriage — is beginning to erode because younger Americans increasingly associate the entire gay community with today’s most controversial transgender activism.

That’s a remarkable argument coming from inside one of America’s oldest gay political organizations: The “T” isn’t merely different from the “LGB” — Log Cabin Republicans now believes transgender activism may be actively damaging the political gains gay Americans spent decades achieving.

The board therefore decided to redraw the line. “After significant discussion with our membership,” Hemminger announced, the organization voted to concentrate specifically on sexual orientation and conservative values.

“We are an LGB advocacy organization.”

Log Cabin Republicans isn’t abandoning gay-rights advocacy. Hemminger specifically identified marriage, adoption, military service, nondiscrimination and religious liberty as issues the organization will continue pursuing under the principles of equal treatment and limited government. Membership also remains open to transgender conservatives and anyone else who supports the group’s mission. But the organization is unmistakably planting a flag in a cultural battle that has been building for years.

Log Cabin Republicans has traveled an interesting political road itself. The organization partnered with the Republican National Committee on an “RNC Pride Coalition” in 2021, and its national leadership once supported transgender protections while attempting to place conservative “guardrails” around some of the more contentious issues.

Now those guardrails have become a dividing line. And the move puts the organization much closer to the direction of the broader Republican Party under President Trump, whose administration has aggressively challenged gender ideology in federal policy, women’s sports and programs involving minors.

Critics will undoubtedly call this abandonment. Log Cabin Republicans calls it returning to its roots.

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