FAJZULLIN: “Sarah, how can — what can you do about the political situation there?”
ELLIS: “Well, I mean, I have so many thoughts. You know, something that’s like permeating from here is like rising above our shame. And that’s always been weaponized against us as a community. And I think never before, like, we’re all of a sudden trying to prove that we don’t want more of the pie, we just want a piece of the pie. And — and I just want to acknowledge that here, that we have always existed, we will always exist. And you can legislate against us, you can politicize us. We’re not political. We’re everybody. We’re in every family as LGBTQ people. Trump’s first administration — he had about 280 acts against our community in his first administration. In his second running for — for this election, he spent over $280 million on ads specifically targeting the transgender community.”
FAJZULLIN: “That’s a lot of money that could go to a good cause.”
ELLIS: “That is a ton of money. At the center of that money was Elon Musk. There’s 1 percent of the community that’s transgender. It’s like the 1 percent. The 1 percent who is acquiring all this power and all this money, the billionaires, are targeting the most marginalized people in the world. To me, it’s a distraction. Don’t watch what they’re doing to us, watch what they’re really doing.”
FAJZULLIN: “Yeah.”
ELLIS: “Because as long as we’re fighting, or they’re putting us on guard, and they’re politicizing us, they’re making money and they’re grabbing more power. That’s my — my one. So I think also, in order for us to gain power back, I’m going to give you another statistic, I love statistics. That’s my thing. I love data. GLAAD is a 40-year-old organization as well. It’s our 40th anniversary this year. We were founded understanding that media could move the most hearts and minds around our community. And this — our recent study showed that, in the — this is in the U.S., U.S. media, 100 million right-wing people are reached a week with right-wing media, 100 million a week. Progressive media reaches 30 million people. You have a 70 million person gap. And I think that’s at — at the center of our challenge right now, because the narrative has gone to, we’re talking about ideology, they’re creating ideology. Being LGBTQ is just existing. And I think they’ve got the narrative. And so what we need to do is amass our power as influencers, as — LGBTQ people have always been on the forefront of culture, creating culture, entertainment, being entrepreneurs. And we need to do that more than ever before to get this narrative back and to ensure that our community is safe.”