“We Can Still Be Hopeful.” Talking Trans Funding with Funders for LGBTQ Issues’ Alexander Lee

Photo: Funders for LGBTQ Issues

Alexander Lee has been a nonprofit founder, foundation and nonprofit board member, and leader in the LGBTQ movement for roughly 20 years, beginning when he founded and served as the executive director of the Transgender, Gender Variant & Intersex Justice Project the year he graduated from the University of California Berkeley's law school. Today, Lee serves as the deputy director of Funders for LGBTQ Issues, a funder affinity group whose work definitely includes the T, with initiatives including the Trans Futures Funding Project and the GUTC (Grantmakers United for Trans Communities) Pledge.

I recently had a conversation with Lee about topics including funders’ responses to the ongoing right-wing campaign against LGBTQ and particularly transgender individuals’ rights, the impact of tensions within the wider LGBTQ movement on grantmaking, and why he feels that funding intermediaries are essential to the success of so many queer groups. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You probably remember when trans folks were protesting the Human Rights Campaign in particular for its 2007 decision to back a version of the national Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA) that excluded transgender people. HRC wasn’t alone when it came to being willing to leave transgender individuals behind. Do you think the larger movement has caught up on trans issues?

I actually went to a meeting at the San Francisco LGBT Center with Joe Solmonese [HRC’s then-executive director] and it was a meeting to essentially apologize for being willing to jettison trans people out of ENDA. I do think that our main LGBT organizations have come around to understanding the importance of including and making sure trans people are part of our community, and are not to be thrown out when it becomes politically expedient. 

Do I think individuals across the board, all LGB activists, are in that place? No, I do not. I do think that, unfortunately, we still have some prominent people who believe that trans people don't belong in community, or who are transphobic. Who don't think we actually exist, who consider us a political liability. Those folks I worry about, because I think that there are certain political currents right now that would give them more prominence, or give that point of view more prominence. There is a movement called “LGB without the T” that's mostly online, because I think they don't have enough actual human beings in real life. But a lot of things start with these ideologies that circulate online, and then they become more emboldened as the political climate gets more conservative.

I also worry about backsliding. I've heard of some Democratic elected officials being willing to throw trans people under the bus — that’s the term we used back then, too — because they can see that the right has gotten to be very effective at demonizing us.

How do you think these different tensions in the movement are translating into funders’ support — or lack of support — for trans nonprofits?

I don't think we're at a point yet where most philanthropy, at least progressive philanthropy, is willing to say out loud, “Why are we funding these quote, unquote, pedophiles? Why are we involved in this quote, unquote, gender ideology?” I haven't seen too many funders outright say that. However, there have been funders who thought that all along. The current political climate is just giving them more coverage for not funding trans people, and giving them a more hospitable cultural climate within their own foundations to not engage in the GUTC Pledge or even talk to us, Funders for LGBTQ Issues, period. So I think that's happening. I haven't yet seen a funder fully say that we're not funding trans people anymore because we are concerned about all the… and then fill in the blanks with the lies the right tells about trans people. But I have seen some quiet quitting. I have heard of some foundations just essentially saying, “We're not going to fund you guys right now.” But they're not saying why.

Those sorts of retrenchments, definitely, we're concerned about. Our last tracking report already showed that funding actually decreased related to inflation in 2022. That's when we knew what was going on with the right, it became very clear what they were doing, and yet funders still decided not to really step up to the plate. Fortunately, we saw a shift in trans funding, but it was never a commitment to the whole. The whole community wasn't given more money; money just got moved around. And we hope that we see moving forward that more funders can give more to the entire LGBTQ community because we are a bellwether of where democracy is going. 

The right’s vitriol and the hatefulness of their actions arguably helped boost support for LGBTQ rights more broadly in the past, including support for marriage equality and allowing LGBTQ people to serve in the military. Do you think today’s increasing attacks against transgender children and adults will have the same effect?

I think it might. We're at a tipping point, and I think it could go either way. I definitely think that younger donors, progressive funders who are already funding things intersectionally, I think they can see more of what's happening because they understand this as part of an attack on democracy writ large. So they can see that the right is trying to demonize a vulnerable group and use us as a wedge issue to get more political power. I think that set of funders is more angry, more upset and more motivated than before, for sure. 

We have also seen some other longtime queer funders actually become more trans-focused in their funding because they've seen that's who's bearing the brunt of the attacks on community right now. We've also talked to some funders who were very much part of the gay marriage debate, and part of paying for the fight for same-sex marriage, who are now saying, “We are really upset that a lot of these gains that we got in that journey are being peeled back.” So there's a set of funders who definitely can see all these things are connected. And so we're trying to ride that. 

Our Trans Futures Funding Campaign, GUTC itself as an initiative, and our Out in the South initiative are all trying to gather up those people and really organize and point them all in a common direction. That's been our main body of work in the last couple of years. We also know that there is a growing donor table of parents of trans kids, and trans youth, and they're really upset for obvious reasons. So that set of donors is out there. We're trying to do more work with them, as well.

But like I was saying before, there are some funders who already were looking for excuses not to fund trans people, not to fund LGB people. And this is giving them a very powerful reason not to, even if they don't believe all of the vitriol, all the lies that are being told about trans and queer folks right now, they can at least use this moment to say “It's too politically hot. Let's not go there.” And they don't see how all of this is about right-wing politicians and authoritarian thinkers and theorists infiltrating our politics and taking away people's rights to participate in our democracy.

Funders for LGBTQ Issues argues that funding intermediaries are essential assets that drive funding to important regional and local nonprofits. But intermediaries, at least in nonprofit journalism, have been criticized for growing faster than the nonprofits they were launched to serve. Is there something about the wider LGBTQ or the transgender movement that makes intermediaries particularly valuable?

In the queer community — and this is especially true for the trans community — the vast majority of organizations are small enough that most foundations, the ones that can provide larger grants, cannot fund them for technical reasons. They don't have the technical possibility to do that. So a large foundation that is used to giving multimillion-dollar grants is not going to give a $20,000 grant to a group, even though that group may actually really need that $20,000, and that $20,000 is a sweet spot for them. 

That's one of the core reasons why the rise of intermediaries and the success of queer intermediaries is so key in the moment, because those intermediaries are able to take those giant chunks of money and break them down into smaller pieces, and actually customize those grants, because they often also provide technical assistance. Intermediaries are able to make those large pots of money make sense for our movement, and make sense for the most progressive, most daring, most interesting work that's happening right now in our community. 

Another big piece of it is that a lot of our groups are not incorporated. Our community is used to doing without, so when stuff goes wrong, or we want to organize, it's literally people gathering on the street corner or in somebody's kitchen, and then we just do something. So the things that are common among nonprofit organizations — even just insurance, and having a board of directors and all that stuff — it's not organic to our community. 

That means that there are some nonprofits that began that way, and then became an incorporated nonprofit later, and then got bigger and had formalized staff and added a board and all that stuff. But we have a whole lot of groups that are not at that place, and they never want to get to be that kind of organization. And the way our current IRS situation is set up, those small groups then never get the benefit of the money that larger donors can give. So intermediaries, especially ones like the Trans Justice Funding Project, can take money from larger sources and give it to nonincorporated entities. I would love to see more of our funders be able to stomach that risk. Unfortunately, there have definitely been donors who have said they won't approach TJFP for that reason.

Most of your career has been spent in queer-led/queer-serving organizations. Are there any aspects of working in queer spaces that you find particularly motivating or inspiring?

I still get inspired when I work with the funders inside the Trans Futures Funding Campaign, for example, and other trans people who are working in philanthropy. I get inspired by their passion to make philanthropy work for us, and their resourcefulness to figure out how to make that work from wherever they're sitting, if they're in a large foundation or a small one. We do have people come up to us, either in person when we're out at conferences or through cold calls or emails, asking, “Can I join you guys as a member? I want to help figure out how to move my foundation to sign the GUTC Pledge,” or, “I want to know how I can survive in this profession, so I can get to the point where I have more power and I can say more about where money can go to our community.” 

So that is still a source of optimism, because there's still people who, despite all of the cons, and all the challenges, believe that we can get money to our communities more strategically and in greater quantities. It feels like there are people who are angry and motivated, and we're not the majority, necessarily, but there's enough passion there that I think we can still be hopeful.