Leadership is Not Morally Neutral: Supporting LGBTQ Youth
A Conversation Between Tim McCarthy & Sam Ames
In September, the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative LGBTQ Working Group and the Harvard College Office of BGLTQ Student Life co-hosted a conversation between Professor Tim McCarthy and Sam Ames, the Director of Advocacy and Government Affairs at The Trevor Project. They discussed the struggles and accomplishments of the LGBTQ+ community and advocacy in this very difficult political environment.
Timothy Patrick McCarthy (LEFT) is an award-winning scholar, educator, and activist. At the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he is core faculty in both the Equity & Opportunity Foundations Curriculum and the new online Master’s Program in Education Leadership. At the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was the first openly gay faculty member and still teaches the school’s only course on LGBTQ matters, he is faculty affiliate at the Center for Public Leadership. A noted historian of politics and social movements, he is author or editor of six books, including Stonewall’s Children: Living Queer History in an Age of Liberation, Loss, and Love, forthcoming from the New Press. He is a frequent media commentator whose work has been featured in many publications and in several documentary films. In June 2019, Tim was guest editor for The Nation’s historic “Reclaiming Stonewall 50” forum. Inspired by the activism and organizing of his student years, Tim has devoted his life to public service and social justice. A respected leader in the LGBTQ+ community, he was a founding member of Barack Obama’s National LGBT Leadership Council, gave expert testimony to the Pentagon Comprehensive Working Group on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and was part of the first-ever LGBTQ delegation from the United States to Palestine/Israel. Tim’s complete biography can be found below at the end of this article.
Sam Ames (RIGHT) (they/he) is the Director of Advocacy and Government Affairs at The Trevor Project. They are a civil rights attorney, author, and national advocate with fifteen years of experience fighting for LGBTQ rights, with a focus on transgender youth and conversion therapy. Before joining The Trevor Project, Sam served as the Interim Executive Director of Trans Lifeline, an organization that provides direct emotional and financial support to transgender people in crisis. They also served as the Interim Executive Director at Our Family Coalition, an organization working to advance equity for the full and expanding spectrum of LGBTQ families and youth. They started out their legal career as a Staff Attorney at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, where they were the founder of the Born Perfect Campaign to end conversion therapy and served primarily on constitutional cases involving employment discrimination, marriage equality, and family law. Sam additionally served a year as a hospital chaplain at UCSF Medical Center, with a focus on inpatient psychiatric treatment and religious trauma. Sam’s complete biography can be found below at the end of this article.
Timothy Patrick McCarthy: Sam, I'm thrilled and honored to be in conversation with you today. In the “Queer Nation” course that I teach, one of the central frameworks is what I call “the paradox of progress.” Social movements do so much of the hard work to push for change in society. And certainly the LGBTQ movement, over many generations now, has done work that has created a lot of change and that has led to enormous progress. It’s really important, as an expression of respect to our elders and ancestors, to acknowledge that change and progress.
Yet the paradox of progress means that the forces of reaction, resistance, and prejudice are always lying in wait and swirling around us. That is certainly true right now. We find ourselves once again in this moment of ascendant anti-LGBTQ discrimination, homophobia, and transphobia, especially here in the United States where so much progress has been made recently. Once again, our community is under siege and our progress is under attack and assault.
So I wanted to start by asking you to provide your sense of where we are right now in terms of politics and policy. I'd love for you to think out loud with us about why LGBTQ+ issues and peoples are so persistently sources of division and conflict. What are the salient issues in this current culture war?
Sam Ames: I love that you started this with a call to the elders and ancestors. There is something deeply profound about our legacy of resistance and resilience. There is something in our bones that contemplates the world as it could be, particularly for transgender and non-binary people. Part of what defines us is our ability to see the world as it is and the world as it could be, to see the gaps between them, to transform the things around us into the kind of beautiful we know is possible.
That said, I don't think we're inherently salient or divisive. Depending on the era, depending on the culture, sometimes we are seen as divisive. But sometimes we are seen as unifying. Sometimes we are celebrated. Often, we are sacred. And I want to hold on to that, especially coming from the Divinity School here at Harvard.
Right now, you are correct — in this culture, and not just in the United States, but across the globe right now, we are seeing a surge in the politicization of our existence, which is about power. The code words we're hearing now are the same ones we heard when Anita Bryant raised her carton of Florida orange juice and launched the "Save Our Children" campaign. But notions of purity and innocence, particularly focused on children, and particularly focused on white children, go back long before her.
Today, there are somewhere between 200 and 400 anti-LGBTQ bills pending in this country, depending on how you count. But no matter how you count, it’s record-shattering. Those bills — and a lot of extra-legislative policies as well like the child abuse guidance in Texas and the Medicare restrictions in Florida — are particularly focused on transgender and non-binary youth. They regulate locker rooms, classrooms, doctors’ exam rooms, living rooms, and libraries. That diversity itself should tell you that this is not really about any one of those rooms, or even about LGBTQ people or transgender kids.
The question you're asking — why this is happening right now — is about power. I want to always bring this back to power — the power that has to do with two groups — the dogmatists and the demagogues.
On one hand are true believers — those who, given a choice between a world with us and without us, would genuinely choose a world without us. These are the people and institutions that resisted same-sex marriage, that resist anti-discrimination laws, that will always resist our claim as human beings to inherent worth and dignity.
That’s not who we are up against right now. What we’re talking about here, when we talk about power, is the demagogues.
What we are witnessing play out in the public square is not just another political controversy. It is a coordinated, unprecedented, nationwide campaign by what actually comes down to a very small number of people. What's happening right now isn’t because we exist. It's because there are a set of pollsters who have spent the last five years drilling down on one question — what makes the most effective wedge issue in the political landscape leading up to the next two to four election cycles.
This wedge issue is not about identity politics. It’s not even about party politics. It’s about electoral politics. This is about the game, not the players. If you take a map of all of the anti-trans legislation in the country right now, and overlay it against two other maps, the first being swing states in the last presidential election and the second being the top ten places where the next election is likely to see presidential contenders, you will see a perfect overlap (with one exception, and that's Nevada, which is always a little contrary). This is about a game that incentivizes the kind of division that doesn't exist inherently.
I’m a big believer that the purpose of advocacy goes beyond passing or defeating any one piece of legislation. It is absolutely heartbreaking out there right now — living and dying by the numbers is not a sustainable way to fight. But there is one number that I do think is important — 85%. 85% of trans youth tell us that they are watching these debates over their existence, and that it is negatively impacting their mental health. For LGBTQ youth across the board, that number is 2/3. This is not a politically apathetic generation. And so, every single time I talk about policy, about politics, I try to end with a message to those actual young people I know are listening: “This is not about you. This is not your fault. What is happening to you is not because you're wrong or a troublemaker. It is because someone believes you are powerful that they can use. What they are doing is not about strength; it’s about control. When I see you leading walkouts at your school, giving testimony at your state house, insisting that your own knowing of your own heart is something sacred — I see strength. You are so much more than a tool. You are a force.”
McCarthy: Sam, let's talk a bit about LGBTQ+ youth. The Trevor Project plays an outsized role, as a trailblazer and leader in this space, in providing direct services, as well as spaces for healing, protection, and advocacy — a whole range of work that is life-affirming and literally lifesaving. I know people whose lives have been saved by the Trevor Project. So thanks to all of you in the Trevor Project for that work.
Two of the through lines in our vast and complicated history are, on the one hand, the idea that queer people are “deviant” and “harmful” to children — the “grooming” discourse that comes up over and over again. The other, and not unrelated, is the discourse of saving and protecting children. So the “harms children” assault on queer people and the “save the children” mantra recited by the folks who are actually harming kids are both in ascendancy again right now.
I know the Trevor Project has been trolled by the very people who are the architects of this ascendancy, the perpetrators of this prejudice. What impact does all of this have on young queer people, and also on all of you doing the work?
Ames: The Trevor Project is a suicide prevention and mental health organization. We are the largest organization in the world specifically designed to support the mental health of LGBTQ youth and to prevent suicide.
Across all our crisis and support services right now, which include a hotline, text services, and an online community for LGBTQ youth, we are hearing kids talk about how scared they are by politics. That should tell you something is wrong with politics.
There is also this horrifying reality that right now it's not possible to work on behalf of LGBTQ youth without a daily awareness of safety. That's always been true to an extent, but I’ve been doing this work for 15 years, and I have not experienced anything like this before. I actually want to acknowledge that one result of that is that today, in this discussion, we have a closed chat. The organizers of this event are aware of the security risks that come with our existing.
In the last few years, we have seen the Overton window move more and more toward making the extremes acceptable. That The Trevor Project is in the middle of this firestorm means that it has made the extremes acceptable. Trevor exists to end the public health crisis of suicide. We are explicitly nonpartisan. We stay out of many things that don't directly impact the mental health of LGBTQ youth. But as we've become a resource for more and more young people, and as a result become more and more visible, there has also been an increase in individuals and groups who are targeting and mischaracterizing us — calling us “groomers”. As a suicide prevention organization, we're designed to highlight the importance of affirming spaces, respecting everyone, raising awareness of risk factors and protective factors so that you can make sure that the people around you in your community know that they are supported if they are in crisis.
This seizing of abuse language is so dangerous. When we seize the language of child abuse and childhood sexual assault and dilute it, we are confusing the language of those very real young people who are being victimized by those very real things. We're making it harder for kids in harm’s way to name what's happening to them.
We have been attacked recently by Kiwi Farms and 4chan, two online forums. Kiwi Farms exists almost entirely to harass high-profile transgender leaders (and a handful of other targets) into dying by suicide. 4chan is an online forum that often devolves into similarly horrific goals. What they have done is target The Trevor Project’s crisis services and flooded our lines with calls, making it more difficult for LGBTQ young people who are in crisis to reach support. They’re also actively trying to traumatize those who answer those calls, who are by and large volunteers. There are people who are pretending to die by suicide on the line, or harassing them, or subjecting them to violent vitriol and threats. The political rhetoric we’re talking about today is creating the kind of conditions that turn into breeding grounds for serious, life-threatening danger. It’s not happening in a vacuum. We are seeing the people who represent us — the people we have been raised to look up to — send the message that it is okay to use the language of violence, to bully people, to belittle them. They have decided that in their rise to power, there is an acceptable risk of casualties — an acceptable risk of child casualties.
Lawyers like me who speak the language of politics are trying to keep our youth alive long enough that they live to see the day that we reach liberation. We are going to win. As awful as the political landscape is right now, and it is brutal, we are going to win. The question isn’t whether. The question is, how many young LGBTQ people are going to survive to see the day we do. And that's the work right now. Our work right now is keeping the young people caught in the crossfire of this moment alive.
McCarthy: Let’s talk for a minute about the adults who can be allies and caretakers, and also the adults who are leaders shaping policy and the law. But first I wanted to mark something you said. You said we are winning and also constantly under assault. That's the paradox of progress I was talking about earlier. I think it's really important for people outside of the work that we do and the community and movement spaces that we occupy and work in to understand the constant threat we are under despite — and often because of — the progress.
So let's talk about the adults. What is the impact that adults, allies, and activists can have in supporting LGBTQ youth in this moment? How can adults step into this space more boldly and bravely? What are the consequences of adults failing to do that? And what about the leaders — the folks many of us were taught to look up to because they have power?
Ames: Sometimes in this work, the illusion of control is a painful thing. There is this hope that if you could just make people really understand the consequences of their actions, they would not take those actions. The hard thing is, we’ve been making these arguments and sharing the research for an awfully long time. And, on the one hand, we've made enormous progress. There is now a massive foundation of shared language that we have as a society that we did not have before. The hard truth is there are plenty of adults, plenty of powerful leaders, who do know the consequences of their policies and rhetoric, and who have decided that clinging to this wedge issue is worth the gamble. They have accepted the risk of casualties knowingly.
The Trevor Project has an amazing in-house research team that regularly publishes data in the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals, among other places. And that research is incredibly consistent. It explores the nuances of what the vast majority of research confirms — that affirming LGBTQ youth, especially trans and non-binary youth, significantly reduces their risk of attempting suicide.
The numbers actually matter. Our 2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health found that more than half of trans and non-binary youth seriously considered suicide in the last year. Nearly one in five made an attempt on their life. An overwhelming number of those same trans and non-binary youth say they are worried about the anti-trans legislation at the state and local level. 93% are worried about being denied access to gender affirming medical care, which in some states is being criminalized with threats of ten years to life in prison for supportive doctors and families. 91% are worried about trans people being denied access to the bathroom. Having to plan every time you leave the house for where you’re going to be safe — or how long you can go without drinking any water — is something that is directly impacting the health of these kids. 83% are worried about being denied the ability to play sports. Lest it be forgotten, we're talking about kids here, and what they care about is whether they get to play with their friends. Our trained crisis counselors at The Trevor Project hear from youth seeking support every single day, and those young people haven’t just been talking about recess and report cards. They’re calling a crisis hotline to talk about legislation.
What's clear in all of this is the importance of support and acceptance. Every kid, no matter what their sexual orientation or gender identity, needs a couple of basic things. They need to be loved unconditionally. They need to be believed when they tell us things that are important to them, or that have happened to them. And they need a safe place to come home to. Frankly, everything else is details.
What I hope we can all agree on is that, while the adults figure out exactly how to navigate
the questions that naturally emerge as we become a more diverse, dynamic society, the people who bear the burden of our disagreements should never, ever be children. I think we can actually all agree on that.
If you are an adult who has an LGBTQ kid in your life, a lot of these issues may be new to you, and that’s okay. You don't have to understand every part of someone in order to love them. I don't understand a lot of things about my partner, or my best friend, or my cat, and I still love them so much. It’s embarrassing (to them, I’m cool with it). You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to know all the right things to say. All you have to do is make sure the young people in your life know that they are loved unconditionally, that they'll be believed when they tell you important things, and that they have a safe place to come home to. All you have to say is, “I love you no matter what.” That’s it.
McCarthy: It's fitting that you should mention that because I often get asked by friends, colleagues, folks of a certain age: “What do I do when my kid comes out?” or “What do I do when my kid comes home and says they are embracing a different aspect of their identity?” My response is always the same: “Say I love you.” It's not that hard. And you don't have to say anything else in that moment.
Ames: And you're never getting that moment back. But your kid is going to remember what you say in that moment. So keep it simple. I love you. We can work everything out after that.
McCarthy: Absolutely! I’d like to talk a bit about your origin and evolution in this work. In particular, you're a lawyer, so you went to law school, but you also went to the Divinity School here at Harvard. How do the sacred and the secular influence your faith-based work and your legal work as they relate to advancing social justice?
Ames: When I announced that I was leaving the National Center for Lesbian Rights, an extraordinary organization that litigates some of the most impactful civil rights and constitutional law cases in the country, to go to theology school, every lawyer turned to me and said, “What?”
About three months after I had announced my decision, Michelle Alexander, a brilliant attorney, critical race theory scholar, and author of The New Jim Crow, made the decision to leave her teaching position at The Ohio State Law School to go to the Union Theological Seminary, New York’s brilliant bastion of progressive faith voices. I wish I’d waited a few months to try to explain this to my colleagues, because she did it so much better:
“There is no easy answer to this question, and there are times I worry that I have completely lost my mind. Who am I to teach or study at a seminary? I was not raised in a church. And I have generally found more questions than answers in my own religious or spiritual pursuits. But I also know there is something much greater at stake in justice work than we often acknowledge. Solving the crises we face isn’t simply a matter of having the right facts, graphs, policy analyses, or funding. And I no longer believe we can ‘win’ justice simply by filing lawsuits, flexing our political muscles or boosting voter turnout. Yes, we absolutely must do that work, but none of it — not even working for some form of political revolution — will ever be enough on its own. Without a moral or spiritual awakening, we will remain forever trapped in political games fueled by fear, greed and the hunger for power.”
I wish I had had those words when I came out as a would-be theologian.
Lawyers aren't often on the road to liberation. That's not because we're not working toward it. It's because the law is not a tool of liberation. The law is a tool of survival. Survival at its best, and control at its worst.
At the time, I had been working for a number of years with survivors of conversion therapy. It had reached a point where I was writing fewer briefs than I was answering phone calls late at night from someone in crisis. I was dealing with a kind of religious trauma that I didn't fully understand. I was incredibly lucky to grow up in a progressive faith tradition that told me that I am sacred, no matter who I am, and more importantly, the things that make me different make me sacred differently. I went to Harvard Divinity School because I wanted to learn about how we heal. I wanted to learn about religious trauma and religious ethics, and how they interact with human politics.
My story isn’t linear. A gift of being queer is that we know better than almost anyone in the world how to build family, because a lot of us don't have it from where we came. We know chosen family can transform the world because it transformed our world.
Sometimes law students ask me for advice on how to network into positions of power, and I say, “Don’t network. Build authentic relationships. Don’t mistake ego for pride. Remember that everything you do is service. Don't climb the ladder. Your next career move is where you can best serve. And don't be afraid to blow your career up every once in a while. It’s good for the soul.” It certainly was for mine.
But I actually want to come back to something that you said earlier, which is the ethical obligation of leadership. Leadership is not morally neutral. Power is not morally neutral. That is what I mean when I say control is different than strength. There is an ethical and moral valence to how we talk about issues right now, and it comes back to how our leaders are modeling what is acceptable. If I am a young person today watching my representative debating the very humanity of my most bullied classmates, calling them everything but a child of God, and I have been raised in a culture that says these leaders are supposed to be the best of us, the representatives of us, then the message I am getting is that humanity is up for debate, and not all children are worthy of it. The message I am getting is that what makes us powerful is punishing the powerless.
McCarthy: My late great mentor, Howard Zinn, wrote a memoir, You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train. History is constantly moving, and so at every moment in history, we must figure out how we step up, how we step in, how we speak up, and what side we choose in history. This is not just an ideological or political project. It's also a moral project when it comes to these matters of life and death, discrimination, and liberation.
Ames: We talk a lot in our movement about what it means to serve, about what it means to sacrifice. I think so much of this comes back to the importance of reclaiming and remembering that we are part of a legacy of resistance, a legacy of resilience. We have been attacked since time immemorial, and there are exactly as many of us now as there were then. We are not going anywhere. And the reason is that we have relentless elders and fierce ancestors who made sure that it was possible for us to carry on. It’s a radical legacy, one that asks something of us. We carry on for the young people who will need relentless elders and fierce ancestors next.
McCarthy: Amen, Sam! So here's to the work, and here's to the future that will liberate us all.
About the Authors:
Timothy Patrick McCarthy is an award-winning scholar, educator, and activist. At the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he is core faculty in both the Equity & Opportunity Foundations Curriculum and the new online Master’s Program in Education Leadership. At the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was the first openly gay faculty member and still teaches the school’s only course on LGBTQ matters, he is faculty affiliate at the Center for Public Leadership.
Tim is the Stanley Paterson Professor of American History and Academic Co-Director of the Boston Clemente Course, a free college humanities course for lower income adults in Dorchester and co-recipient of the 2015 National Humanities Medal from President Obama. He has taught in Clemente since its founding in 2001.
The adopted only son and grandson of public school teachers and factory workers, Tim graduated with honors in History and Literature from Harvard College and earned two masters degrees and a Ph.D. in History from Columbia. A noted historian of politics and social movements, he is author or editor of six books, including Stonewall’s Children: Living Queer History in an Age of Liberation, Loss, and Love, forthcoming from the New Press. He is a frequent media commentator whose work has been featured in many publications and in several documentary films. In June 2019, Tim was guest editor for The Nation’s historic “Reclaiming Stonewall 50” forum.
Twice named one of Harvard Crimson’s Professors of the Year, Tim has received many awards for his commitment to students, including the 2019 Manuel C. Carballo Award, the Kennedy School’s highest teaching honor, and the 2022 Outstanding Alumnus Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association.
Inspired by the activism and organizing of his student years, Tim has devoted his life to public service and social justice. A respected leader in the LGBTQ+ community, he was a founding member of Barack Obama’s National LGBT Leadership Council, gave expert testimony to the Pentagon Comprehensive Working Group on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and was part of the first-ever LGBTQ delegation from the United States to Palestine/Israel.
Sam Ames (they/he) is the Director of Advocacy and Government Affairs at The Trevor Project. They are a civil rights attorney, author, and national advocate with fifteen years of experience fighting for LGBTQ rights, with a focus on transgender youth and conversion therapy.
Before joining The Trevor Project, Sam served as the Interim Executive Director of Trans Lifeline, an organization that provides direct emotional and financial support to transgender people in crisis. There, they rooted the mission in crisis line services and community; developed advocacy and data-collection tools to advance upstream crisis interventions in transgender issues, sex worker rights, and health disparities; pursued policy alternatives to policing in mental health crises; and raised thousands of dollars in direct commissary funding to trans people incarcerated in a range of detention facilities. They also served as the Interim Executive Director at Our Family Coalition, an organization working to advance equity for the full and expanding spectrum of LGBTQ families and youth. They started out their legal career as a Staff Attorney at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, where they were the founder of the Born Perfect Campaign to end conversion therapy and served primarily on constitutional cases involving employment discrimination, marriage equality, and family law. Sam additionally served a year as a hospital chaplain at UCSF Medical Center, with a focus on inpatient psychiatric treatment and religious trauma.
Sam holds a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard University, with a focus on Religion, Ethics, and Politics; a J.D. from George Washington University Law School, with honors; and a B.A. in Psychology and Theatre Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz, cum laude. They served as the Senior Articles Editor on the Federal Circuit Bar Journal and were the recipient of the 2012 Thurgood Marshall Civil Liberties Award. They are a member of the Professional Advisory Group for the UCSF Medical Center’s Spiritual Care Services department and the board of trustees for the National Trans Bar Association and have also served on the boards of the Prisoner Reentry Network, TransLaw, and the First Unitarian Church of Oakland.
Sam has testified in state legislatures, Congressional events, and the United Nations Committee Against Torture, and has been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, TIME, VICE, and MSNBC.
Outside of work, Sam writes children’s books on the places where science, history, and social justice intersect – from sharks and octopuses to the untold history of abolitionists in the United States. They are also a five-time AIDS LifeCycle rider, a Shakespeare nerd, and an evangelist for their home state of California.
Julie Allen (Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow 2020/Senior Fellow 2021) is Senior Advisor at The EdRedesign Lab at The Harvard Graduate School of Education, Senior Editor-Education for the Harvard ALI Social Impact Review, Chair of the Board of Read Ahead, and a Volunteer Lifeline Counselor at The Trevor Project.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.