Protect Trans Futures and ACT UP Disrupt Charity Gala at Fenway Health
The LGBTQ+ community health center recently announced they would no longer offer gender-affirming care to trans young people under the age of 19.
by Evan Urquhart
Activists from Protect Trans Futures arrived early to picket the Fenway Health Gala on Friday, November 14. Fenway Health’s Gala is an annual charity affair to raise funds for the Boston based LGBTQ+ focused community health center.
Guests in long coats against the cold Boston November evening walked passed picketers chanting for hormone replacement therapy “safe, free, and on demand” in front of the SoWa Power Station, lit with rainbow lights for the event. The picketers were there to protest Fenway’s decision to end gender affirming care for patients under 19. However the biggest disruptions were yet to come, with activists using tactics inspired by an earlier generation of activists protesting over HIV and AIDS.
Once inside, the coats came off to reveal a well-heeled, predominantly older male crowd, many in fun ties or patterned shirts. On the auction table paintings by local artists shared space with a Xyrtex sperm donation discount and gift basket ($300 starting bid,$600 total value).
The Gala billed itself as a night of joy and an opportunity to help LGBTQ+ people facing extreme pressure from the Trump administration. “Your presence fuels more than a night of celebration—it fuels a movement,” the event website states. “Together, we will carry forward Fenway Health’s mission to provide affirming care, drive groundbreaking research, and lead on justice-centered advocacy for all.”
But affirming care is no longer being provided to every Fenway patient who needs it. While youth care remains legal and protected under Massachusetts law, the center has bowed to pressure from the federal government, a major source of its funding. The contradiction between Fenway’s rhetoric of advocacy and its decision to end care for certain patients exemplifies what many community members view as a betrayal.
“You come to Massachusetts, you come to Boston, because of the promises that are being made of a sanctuary city for LGBT people,” Teddy Walker, an organizer of Friday’s protest, said in an interview with Assigned Media. Fenway’s decision to withdraw care “represents a big broken promise to the community,” they explained.
For Fenway Health, the economic realities of providing high quality LGBTQ+ focused health care collided with national politics under the second Trump administration. The organization reportedly receives approximately $20 million in federal funding, and according to Fenway’s most recent financial disclosures, this represents their single largest source of funding outside of patient service revenue. Under Trump, the agency overseeing healthcare grants has stated that they will deprioritize funding for organizations that provide youth with gender affirming treatments, citing a politicized HHS report crafted to reach the opposite conclusion on youth care of every major medical organization.
The tension between Fenway as a champion of LGBTQ+ healthcare and their decision to end care for some patients was acknowledged by several of the evening’s speakers, and addressed head on by CEO Jordina Shanks. Shanks described the way the Trump administration’s policy had “put [Fenway] in an untenable position, one we could not ignore.” She continued, “We cannot absorb the loss of this funding and continue to operate at the scale this community needs. Sometimes to protect care we must let go of the idea that care must come from us alone. That is not surrender, that is strategy.” This sentiment was met with cheers from the crowd, but outside the cadence of the demonstrators could be heard, their words indistinguishable but their anger impossible to mistake.
Not everyone inside the Gala at SoWa agreed that it’s strategy, not surrender for an LGBTQ+ community health center in the heart of blue America to end gender-affirming care for youth and young adults. Also in attendance was activist Alejandra Caraballo, who rose to shout “Shame! Shame!” as the speeches commenced, before being forcibly escorted out of the event by security guards. At another point, during Shanks’ speech, demonstrators attempted to gain entry to the festivities, and were turned back by police.
The group behind these disruptions, Protect Trans Futures, was started recently by Walker and a friend. The two describe feeling an urgent need to act in the wake of Fenway’s October 13 announcement to end affirming care for patients under 19. Their goal is to create sustained pressure on the health center and build on the energy of the first Fenway Health protest October 17, organized by ACT UP Boston, which drew 200 picketers.
Walker and their co-organizer, who preferred not to give his name, are both transmascs in their early 20s. They’re also both Fenway patients who rely on the health center for hormone therapy. Not only is Fenway’s decision to end care for youth wrong, they say, its inclusion of legal adults in its withdrawal of care has left them in fear for their own care.
Concern that bans on youth care are only the beginning are widespread among trans people in the United States. Politicians in Missouri have introduced bills to ban medical transition under 25. One noted anti-trans politician, state Rep. Gary Click of Ohio, reportedly told supporters he sees the endgame as a blanket ban on care, regardless of age. While the stakes for trans youth who are unable to access care can be life or death, many trans people further feel a line must be drawn to protect necessary healthcare from hate-fueled ideological attacks.
Staging protesters both inside and outside a gathering is a tactic drawn directly from AIDS activism during the height of that epidemic, and in fact Protect Trans Futures is working in close collaboration with ACT UP Boston, a storied direct action group forged during that earlier crisis. ACT UP Boston’s chapter leader Gerry Scoppettuolo, whose affiliation with ACT UP goes back to the 1980s, is one of the young activists’ strongest supporters. He told Assigned Media he sees many similarities between then and now.
“Though we don’t see people all around us dying, it’s still a life or death matter for trans people,” Scoppettuolo told Assigned Media. “Trans people have huge targets on their backs. They’re the focus of huge hatred, with everything wrong in society being blamed on them.”
To Scoppettuolo, the connection between anti-trans hate and HIV/AIDS activism goes deeper than a symbolic torch-passing from gay rights veterans to young trans organizers. He points to the ongoing funding battles in congress, where HIV and AIDS treatment has been politicized and zeroed out in some Republican proposed budgets.
He also points to the CDC’s informational pages on HIV that were taken down in January by the administration and only restored under a court order. These pages now include text that states, “Per a court order, HHS is required to restore this website as of 11:59PM ET, February 11, 2025. Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female.”
“How dare they?” asked Scoppettuolo, voice shaking with fury, “Only a court order is allowing the CDC pages to exist and be a source of support and health information for people.”
For activists, old and young, the fight to keep trans youth care at Fenway needs to be fought both for its own sake and to lay down a marker that the health of LGBTQ+ people cannot be sacrificed in the name of some vague greater good that no longer includes them. For Fenway Health, the fear of losing funding has driven them to make moves that many feel are a betrayal of the very community who they exist to serve. It’s one small fight among many for a trans community whose very survival is openly under threat during this second Trump term.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of Fenway Health CEO Jordina Shanks.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.