Alex Rikleen Says Democrats Can’t Stay Quiet on Trans Rights
Rikleen spoke to Assigned Media about his candidacy challenging Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey in 2026.
Senatorial candidate Alex Rikleen, from his campaign website
by Evan Urquhart
Earlier this month, anti-trans Democrat Seth Moulton announced his intention to challenge Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey in 2026. Markey is known as a progressive stalwart and a supporter of trans rights who recently spoke at the Boston No Kings rally with a trans pride flag draped over his shoulders.
But has Markey done enough to turn his longstanding support for trans rights into actions protecting a vulnerable community under siege? Another primary challenger, Alex Rikleen of Acton, says he has not. Rikleen says the lackluster response by Democrats, including Markey, to the Trump administration’s attacks on transgender Americans are among the reasons he entered the race. He spoke with Assigned Media via video call Tuesday morning, October 28, and his remarks have been lightly edited and condensed.
Assigned Media: Thank you for speaking with me. Can you start by telling me why you’re running for senate?
Alex Rikleen: I’m running for senate because I think that Democrats in Washington are playing it safe. As a former history teacher, I know that when opposition parties play it safe, I think that that’s how you lose a democracy.
I think their strategy is primarily to wait and hope that we win more seats in 2026 or 2028, or both, and that they’re letting that guide their actions and doing less in the immediate term to push back than they otherwise could, because of that goal. As a result I think that more people are being harmed right now and may continue to be harmed for the next three years.
Historically, I think that when you take an approach like that it doesn’t work as well and a lot of people get hurt along the way.
AM: You’re a newcomer, and the senate is very arcane with all sorts of tricksy procedural rules. Should voters be worried about electing a newcomer to replace someone like Senator Markey, who has a ton of experience with this very strange body?
Rikleen: I don’t think they should be worried about that. Those arcane tricks, as you put it, are exactly why I chose the senate as the seat to run for.
The senate is where Democrats have the most tools at their disposal to push back and obstruct and get in the way of Trump’s harmful agenda, even while they are in the minority. There are a lot of things that just one person can do, and some of those are things that Senator Markey did during Trump’s first term but has not yet done during Trump’s second term. That’s why I chose this race. I’ve studied up on the procedures and rules of the senate and I think in terms of the arcane procedural elements, that’s actually a mark in my favor.
AM: So you’re saying that Senator Markey may know these ins and outs, but he’s not using them effectively?
Rikleen: Correct. He’s leaving a lot of them on the table.
AM: Trans people, as I know you know, have been among the biggest targets of the Trump administration. What would you do differently around trans rights compared to national Democrats?
Rikleen: The first thing is that we can’t be afraid to talk about it. Senator Markey, I willingly admit, is better than a lot of his peers on this topic, but that’s just such a low bar. I think he has gone along with the Democratic plan of trying to stay quiet on trans issues since Trump got elected.
Senator Markey was silent when Moulton made his comments in November. Senator Markey was silent on the attempt to strip Medicaid coverage for trans healthcare of all ages during the summer budget fight. He held multiple press conferences specifically about the impact of Medicaid cuts and he didn’t even mention trans people in his long list. They didn’t even merit a comma. He hasn’t said anything about the recent decision of Fenway Health to stop covering trans care [for those under 19]. As far as I can tell he was silent when the Trump administration was trying to subpoena medical records of trans people.
These are important issues and I think that they are issues that trans people I’ve talked to say are scaring them, and step one is not retreating. We have to signal that we are going to defend everyone. When we try to pick our spots it doesn’t just send a scary message to the trans community, it sends a scary message to every community that we can’t be relied upon.
Senator Markey talks about how he proposed the Trans Bill of Rights in the last congress. The most basic thing in congress is, once you’ve proposed a bill, you refile that bill every term. Why hasn’t he refiled that bill this term? We have to continue to be fighting for everyone, especially and including the people who are most directly attacked.
AM: I hear that. But, you know, Representative Moulton changed the race a bit by getting into it. He’s made national news, as we both know, with these centrist coded attacks on the trans community. What would you say to voters who are worried about the risks of splitting the trans supportive vote in the race for senate?
Rikleen: First of all, the election is a long time from now. If August comes and you want to start thinking about viability, okay, fine, we can have a different conversation. For now, support the candidate you like.
When we get to August, I’m going to make the next argument, which is that Democrats have gotten themselves into a lot of trouble historically by trying to play the pundit instead of voting for the candidates we like. This is one of my longstanding philosophies: Support candidates you like. If you like me, vote for me. If you like Senator Markey, vote for Senator Markey. If you like Representative Moulton, vote for Representative Moulton.
We end up with worse candidates when we try to play the pundit. We would all be better served if we just vote for the person we like.
AM: One of the biggest issues of your candidacy is court reform. It’s a very important issue to trans people, especially in light of the Skrmetti decision stripping healthcare rights from trans youth, and there have been other quite bad decisions in the Supreme Court as well. Tell me a bit about your plans for addressing the Supreme Court.
Rikleen: There’s a crisis in the Supreme Court right now. Now, there are a number of reforms that I would like to see that would over time improve the quality of the Supreme Court. I would love to see term limits and an every-other-year appointment schedule. I would love to see an enforceable code of ethics. Those are changes that, over the long term, would set us up for a much better, fairer court that is more representative of the population and our expressed preferences.
However, neither of those will solve the current crisis, which is that we have a captured court. The Supreme Court majority is no longer making decisions based on law or precedent but based on their ideological preferences. We now have multiple judges writing that in their decisions. This is so unprecedented to have such an extreme outcry saying this is a crisis in the courts.
And the only way you are going to solve that is by addressing who is on the [Supreme] Court right now, and that means expanding the court. We have to do it. We have to expand the court. Any Democrat who is unwilling to expand the court is saying that they are willing to punt on every other priority that they have. You cannot have one without the other.
AM: Is there anything more you’d like to say to our audience?
Rikleen: The focus of my campaign is How do we push back against Trump? And that is where I think Democrats are failing. But there’s also a personal decisionmaking process, and what motivated me, Alex, to take this leap was what I saw as Democratic capitulation on trans issues.
It was one of the key motives for me to do this. As a historian and a Jew, I grew up with the poem first and foremost, and the poem begins with communists, but a more accurate version of the poem would have communists and trans people in the same first line.
I saw this administration on step one of the poem. My upbringing literally had posters in every room saying, if you see this, ACT. So it was the attacks on trans people in particular and Democrats failure to respond to that that was a major motivation for me to say, yep, okay, I will do this.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.