and etc.
Post from July 2025 below. A new addenda follows that, from September 2025.
NYC MAYOR ERIC ADAMS INCLUDED A TRANSGENDER HEALTH EMERGENCY FUND IN HIS NEW BUDGET!
YOU CAN DO IT TOO, FRIENDS!
But really, we got New York City Mayor Eric Adams and First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro to contribute $2 million in the FY 2026 Adopted Budget for transgender emergency needs.
This budget money will support health and social services for transgender people as such services face almost certain obliteration, and until then, at best, increased service loads due to the immense fascist threat against transgender New Yorkers–many of whom are immigrants.
Getting this funding was Popular Front Project’s first major goal. It was our initial reason for existing, beyond getting all the Blue governments to be maximally supportive of trans folks, immigrants, and anyone at the business end of state violence.*
Massachusetts also created a fund as a part of their FY26 budget. It’s actually a non-budget fund: it takes funding that are specifically not budget appropriations (like grants, gifts, etc, rather than State tax revenues) and puts them toward gender-affirming care needs. It’s a different way of doing things from New York City, but it’s an excellent approach. Thank you to the state legislators and advocates (Fenway Health, of course!) for bringing it home!
From PFP’s Executive Director: If you’re a government staffer in some executive office like I was, and you’re banging your head against the wall trying to get your government to do the right thing for vulnerable people, absolutely email me at andy@popularfrontproject.org.
More on the NYC budget’s trans funding
This is part of nearly $14 million in new funding given between the Mayor and New York City Council for transgender community needs in the Adopted Budget. Indeed, Council gave a nearly $12 million increase in its trans-focused funding.
We did a bit for the Council end, too, but major credit for the Council funding goes to the rad Council Members and staff who push trans funding annually, and then bumped the appropriation up intensely this year, and the NYC Trans and Queer Provider Advocacy Coalition, who are my very dearest friends, and busted their hides to make this all happen.
Excerpt from the Mayor’s Office Press Release below.
*This line comes from my friend Andy Izenson, who said it to me when prepping me to protest in 2020. “Just remember, marginalized people are always going to be on the business end of state violence.” I probably have quoted this at least daily since the current federal regime took office. Anyway, credit to Andy Izenson for this line.
SEPTEMBER 25, 2025 UPDATE TO JULY VICTORY ENTRY.
I have to be extremely clear, lest history think I’m carrying water for a monster: Eric Adams is irredeemable.
I worked in Adams’ Mayor’s Office. I will proudly say that I actually worked for Maria Torres-Springer, The Greatest Living Public Servant In New York City, who held two different Deputy Mayor roles for Adams through my tenure with her. And Maria always reminded us that our true boss was the People Of New York City–no Mayor, no power other than the people we lived with, near, and passed on the street and subway daily.
Because I served New Yorkers and not Adams, I found myself working against Adams, because morality gave me no other choice. And I tell you this, because I want you to know, dear fellow lover of justice, that any win wrought from Adams that you’ve read about from PFP is not meant to wipe away, and never can wipe away, Eric Adams’ sins.
See: we need to count our wins. And we’re fair! We believe in redemption, and love that kind of story, too! We’ll squeeze and escalate to get what we need from a government that’s not giving us what we want, but celebrate you if you do the right thing.
But Mayor Eric decided he didn’t want that character arc.
From January through March 2025, I had to organize an internal resistance with Mayor’s Office staff just to get the Mayor to release statements of support for transgender people and immigrants. All that time, and then after I left the administration, I was still trying to educate the good people in City Hall–an effort that was ultimately successful–about the importance of creating the kind of fund written about above. There were awful people doing horrible things I fought against, while good people won. Currently, the good people have still won, and the terrible people (Adams and his enablers) make noise, and are basically just a bunch of play actors pretending to run a City government that, for all intensive purposes, is truly run by a handful of skilled hands (e.g., Randy Mastro, Liz Vladeck at NYC Public Schools) while we wait for January 1, 2025.
I always want to put bitterness behind me, and we should want that. Of course, the last nearly-ten months have been so brutal, the thought that this is still the beginning finds me in my worst moments variously wanting, depending on the moment, to be like one of the two sadder poles of Wuthering Heights: sickly Linton, or raging, wrathful Heathcliff.
In my better moments–let’s say the ones where I’m a good, strong Cathy–I’m inspired by the vast majority of the New York City Mayor’s Office workforce: the amazing humans who are in their jobs to make sure New Yorkers live the best lives possible. Such people created the fund that will continue to backstop trans peoples’ health and social service needs. I salute them.
-Andy, Executive Director and Founder.
