WASHINGTON— When President Trump’s Federal Trade Commission hosts its Wednesday workshop where experts are expected to speak out against the so-called “gender affirming care” industry, there will be one somewhat shocking participant: a top deputy to New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has been a fierce defender of transgender procedures on minors.
Glenna Goldis, serves as the assistant attorney general for James, who is one of the most liberal and anti-Trump attorney generals in the country. But the self-described “lefty lesbian lawyer” based out of New York City is also outspoken against the dangers of gender ideology pushed on children by transgender activists.
Goldis will participate in the workshop workshop in her personal capacity, and she’s aware that her positions on gender ideology put her at odds with James.
“You can see in the public record that my employer has taken positions that are supportive of pediatric gender medicine,” Goldis said in a phone interview with The Daily Wire. “You can see in the public record that Letitia James’ view is not my view.”
James has not only spoken in support of what she calls “gender-affirming care,” but she’s taken legal action against Trump’s efforts to protect children from transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers. James called the policies “cruel, discriminatory, dangerous, and not based on science or law,” pushing the falsehood that transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers are “medically necessary” as she argued that “every young person deserves access to medically necessary care without government interference.”
Goldis says she’s “motivated by the fact that I’ve seen so many other people silenced, especially people who are similar to me,” she explained. She says, in many ways, “we are the people who are most silenced in America right now on this issue.”
“I want to end that, I want to break the taboo,” Goldis added. “There’s a taboo out there which is just performing so much work for the gender doctors. The healthcare industry is able to make all this money and pass off all these lies because there’s a taboo against criticizing it. And so I want to smash that taboo.”
The FTC workshop appears to be the first step towards major action against the industry, which is being investigated for “unfair and deceptive” practices. The FTC often holds such events before initiating legal action against an industry to gather information and solicit the input of affected Americans, bolstering the case against its target. A memo reported on by The Daily Wire in May indicates that the FTC looks to build off the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on radical gender ideology.
And Goldis’ presence at the event signals something significant as well: that the movement against gender ideology is not merely conservatives, as left-wing activists suggest, but a cohort of politically diverse individuals united to fight back against something much bigger than political party.
That coalition includes Goldis, but it also includes detransitioners like Chole Cole and Prisha Mosley, women who attempted to transition to become men as teenagers, medical whistleblowers Jamie Reed, Eithan Haim, and Vanessa Sivadge, conservative experts and leaders like Jay Richards of the Heritage Foundation and Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project, and more.
For her part, Goldis is tired of leftists suggesting that men and women who identify as gay are in complete agreement with the transgender agenda.
“I think it’s especially important for gay people to speak out,” she told The Daily Wire. “One of the big tools that trans advocates have used since the 1990s to normalize what they’re doing and to build public support is to pretend that they have something in common with gay people. And if gay people ever speak out and say, ‘Well, I don’t think that’s quite true,’ then they get clobbered. This has been true, like I said, for decades.”
The general public can be forgiven for “thinking that there is a connection there,” Goldis said, since activists are constantly promoting the LGBTQ moniker — “It really gets in your head, even though it’s not a particularly catchy collection of letters, but at this point in history you do recognize it.”
She suggested that wealthy nonprofits and global lawfirms promoting transgenderism like the ACLU and Lambda Legal hire gay or lesbian spokespeople in an effort to build on this theme.
“They give awards to gay people who join their cause,” she said. “They give jobs to them. So, with all of that happening and with all that money and all the carrots and the sticks that are out there for gay people. I think it’s important to stand up to all of that.”
“I just think our voice has to be heard, even though we don’t have a megaphone, naturally, we don’t have money, we don’t have the healthcare industry or big law coming to amplify our message of gender nonconformity being natural and something that should not be medicalized, especially in minors. We don’t have any of that.”
She pointed to her friends in the movement, like whistleblower Jamie Reid and Lauren Leggieri of the LGB Courage Coalition, which describes itself as “a lesbian and gay advocacy group committed to promoting evidence-based medical care, ending the medicalization of gender nonconformity, safeguarding homosexual rights, and building a pathway back for LGB individuals who have undergone medicalization.”
“We’re all just going out there in our personal capacities and using our voices to stand up to the health care industry,” Goldis said.