From Play Dates to Protest: Rainbow Families Chart a Trans Evolution
Founded in a far different era, the Bay Area group has emerged as a highly effective advocate for policy and press strategy.
photo by Bart Nagel courtesy of Rainbow Families Action
by Evan Urquhart
They say they never set out to be an advocacy group. A social group, a resource center, a way to set up play dates, a source of support – that’s how parents of trans youth from Rainbow Families described their aims 12 to 13 years ago, long before children like theirs became among the earliest and most consistent targets of the authoritarian Trump regime.
As the regime has lied, threatened and broken the law in escalating attempts to force their children to stop being who they are, families say the bonds they formed over years are giving them the courage to fight back, and the power to win.
Rainbow Families was a large but mostly informal cluster of roughly 300 families setting up play dates and sharing advice and support, according to Calder Storm, Arne Johnson, and Nikki, all parents of trans kids in the Bay Area of California.
The group evolved rapidly after Donald Trump won a second presidential term. Today, the group’s advocacy arm, Rainbow Families Action, can stage a rally, get their message in the press, collaborate on legislative proposals, and successfully pressure a major health provider to reverse course on ending youth trans care.
“We were not an activist organization, partly because we’re just really fortunate in the Bay Area to have really strong supports,” said Arne Johnson, one of the semi-official leaders of Rainbow Families Action. “Our main concern was just taking care of our kids and getting them the safest, best experiences that we could.”
Johnson says that changed after the trans community was attacked relentlessly in the last election, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on anti-trans campaign ads. “We knew what that all meant for our kids,” he said in an interview with Assigned Media.
Some of the parents started doing weekly Zoom calls to discuss how they might respond.
“At first it was just a couple people, then a couple people more. We would just get together and gnash our teeth and cry, then bit by bit we launched an email campaign about a bill and started to feel our way into activism,” Johnson said.
This was where things stood when some Rainbow families learned from their doctors that Sutter Health, a major Bay Area medical company, would stop providing care for their children.
“On Trans Day of Remembrance [November 20, 2025] some families of Rainbow Action heard from their Sutter provider that Sutter was going to be ceasing all gender-affirming care for people 18 and under,” said Calder Storm. A trans man and parent of a trans daughter, Storm has also become something of a leader within the Rainbow Families Action subgroup.
Nikki, who prefers not to publicize her last name, was among those contacted by her doctor. She says she was informed that Sutter would stop providing support for her son’s care in three weeks.
Nikki’s son is now 14. She says he came out to his parents when he was seven years old. Together, the family has been through years of therapy, followed by years of puberty blockers as he took time to consider his eventual gender presentation. Less than a year ago, her son, family, and their doctors at Sutter agreed that testosterone therapy was the right next step to ensure the boy could have as normal an experience growing up as possible.
But on November 20, Nikki was abruptly informed that the care that had helped her son become more confident, more social, the care that helped him like his body in ways he hadn’t before, would soon be cut off.
Their doctor from Sutter informed Nikki that gender care would stop in three weeks. The doctor offered no referrals saying “they felt badly, but it was implied, like, good luck, figure this out on your own.”
What the families figured out was that they weren’t going to take this lying down.
The group first reached out to Sutter to discuss the situation. When informal attempts failed, they put together a letter from Rainbow Families Action and partner organizations such as PFLAG. Sutter did not agree to meet with the families, eventually issuing a vague statement to media outlets that avoided confirming that they were ending care.
That’s when the group decided to take to the streets. On December 8, a group of about 150 protesters marched to Sutter’s administrative headquarters, staging a rally there with speakers including activist and drag performer Honey Mahogany, clergy, healthcare worker advocates, and trans youth. While Sutter did not respond publicly, within days, families whose children had their appointments canceled were contacted to say they’d been put back on the schedule.
This was a huge win, and the only reported example of an advocacy group securing a reversal from a healthcare provider who stopped care (some providers have halted and resumed care in response to actions by federal courts).
As of this writing, nonsurgical care remains available to trans youth at all four major Bay Area providers. However, soon after Sutter’s quiet reversal, the Trump administration proposed a radical new rule, threatening the families’ fragile sense of peace. The rule would deny Medicaid and Medicare funds to any facility offering treatment for gender dysphoria to trans youth, making it financially untenable for any major hospital to continue providing care.
This move by the Trump administration is seemingly unlawful, as the text of the Social Security Act establishing Medicaid and Medicare explicitly bars the federal government from using the program to achieve “any supervision or control over the practice of medicine or the manner in which medical services are provided.”
The ACLU has already pledged to challenge the rule in court. However, the families are afraid that, as before, providers will stop providing care beforehand out of fear of losing funding. In response, Rainbow Families Action has launched a “no pause without cause” campaign, seeking to pressure providers to follow the law and provide treatment unless a rule or law preventing it actually goes into effect.
Nikki says she’s frustrated she needs to be so vocal just to ensure her child continues receiving the medical care he needs. She says she sees a difference between how Sutter views her son’s needs compared to those of other kids.
“If [Sutter’s] administration unanimously agreed that trans kids matter as much as everybody else, they would be making wholly different decisions,” Nikki said. “They’d be much more vocal to us in affirming that they’re not going to stop things until they’re absolutely legally required to.”
Until trans kids matter to hospital administrators as much as every other kid, Rainbow Families Action say they will be fighting on.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.