What The Hell America!

Ahead of her sophomore year of college, Lily Rood was thinking about her future: her career, her LGBTQ+ advocacy, her interest in politics and government. As the first transgender woman to be class president at Mount Holyoke College — and someone who first went door-knocking for a congressional campaign at 13 — she wanted to find ways to become a better leader. 

She looked for conferences to hone her skills. She searched for groups cultivating trans leaders at a national level, and came up short. So, she decided to make her own. It’s not just for her future: the United States needs transgender leaders now more than ever, she said. 

Trans Americans are being targeted under a presidential administration that is hostile to their very existence. To counter this dehumanization, Rood said, trans leadership is key. Empowering trans people is an antidote to the divisions that politicians create for their own gain, she said: If more trans people run for Congress, get involved in their local school board, create art, lead scientific research or do community service, these actions create stronger community bonds that enable more people to understand what trans experiences are like. 

“When we’re understood and when we’re known, we can’t be so easily villainized with rhetoric that is simply untrue and manipulative,” Rood said. The anti-trans political movement wants to keep people divided from each other, to ostracize trans people from their communities, she said. The more she watches this, the more she feels the need to do something.

“I just feel a sense of defiance. I feel like, no, I’m not going to step back, I’m not going to hide.” 

Rood has seen how that rhetoric can become violent. She’s seen the hate messages that trans leaders receive. And she’s watched that vitriol be encouraged by the president of the United States. It can be scary, she said, but she feels driven to keep going. 

At 19, Rood is founding a group to cultivate trans leaders across the country: the National Transgender Leadership Conference Committee (NTLCC). The goal is to launch a summit this fall in Western Massachusetts for 30 young and early-career trans people. Based on how well fundraising goes, Rood and her colleagues will organize a conference in 2026 or 2027. 

To launch NTLCC, Rood called on other student advocates — including Jay Jones, the first transgender student body president at Howard University, and Forest Cusolito, a student at Smith College who has been active in LGBTQ+ advocacy since they were 15. NTLCC isn’t meant only for students, but right now, the group is entirely student-led. Rood, Jones and Cusolito all juggle advocacy with schoolwork, part-time jobs or consulting gigs. They want to oversee a nationwide effort to create the next generation of trans leaders. 

“We have a need for this,” said Jones. “We are starting to witness leadership, people in the highest offices of the land, essentially saying we don’t exist.”

Jones, who’s 22, serves as the group’s executive vice president and director of partnerships. She wants to help trans people build the kind of leadership skills that so many are never guided on — particularly through mentorship. To become the first trans woman president at a historically Black college and university (HBCU), she relied on her own network of mentors who advised her on what to do and not to do, where to get involved, and how to spend her time. 

“If you’ve seen it, you can believe in yourself that you can do it. And I think sometimes people really just need to see that someone else has done it before, and here was the route that they took,” she said. 

Jones and her colleagues want to offer online programs throughout the year to help trans people build skills in communication, networking, accepting feedback, facilitating meetings and organizing, while bringing prominent trans keynote speakers to their conference and summit. Trans leaders may also need to develop deeper skills in community building than cisgender leaders, Rood said, especially to navigate moments of crisis or situations where they have to speak to members of the press.

Those programs, and the conference itself, are meant for trans adults who have held two or fewer professional leadership roles, regardless of age. Trans people who came out later in life are just as welcome as recent college graduates. The group also plans to keep advocating against anti-trans policies: In January, NTLCC wrote to 47 senators urging them to block the first federal anti-trans law brought to a vote in a newly Republican-controlled Congress. 

NTLCC plans to expand its senior leadership team, Rood said, and the group will file for 501(c)(3) status later this year. Right now, the group is volunteer-run, but she hopes that a successful fundraising campaign will enable everyone to get paid.

Transgender people have long faced uphill battles to attain and keep leadership positions, let alone to stay afloat in their careers. Many trans people are fired or passed up for promotions because of their gender expression, or not hired in the first place. Trans women face one of the widest pay gaps of any demographic in the workforce, and trans and nonbinary employees are more than twice as likely as cisgender queer employees to face discrimination and harassment on the job. 

Now, trans people living in the United States face a political environment that is actively trying to erase them from public life. Trans people working in the military and the federal government are fighting to keep their jobs and fear for their safety under the Trump administration.

Trans people are constantly facing hatred and despair amid so many political attacks, Cusolito said. To them, focusing on trans leadership means looking to the future, instead of falling into despair — and that’s what resistance should look like. 

“They want us to give up. The Trump administration doesn’t want us to fight back, they want us to feel despair and feel like there’s no avenue for us to still create change. Giving up is just giving in to what they would want,” Cusolito said. 

Cusolito, who’s 19, feels like they have no other choice but to advocate for their community. They need other trans people to know that they can still find ways toward a better future. As vice president for administration at NTLCC, their job is focused on recordkeeping and organizing behind the scenes. They’ve already been doing that work for years: They were organizing protests as an LGBTQ+ advocate in high school and president of the Genders & Sexualities Alliance. 

Jones and Rood have similar backgrounds: feeling drawn to advocacy from a young age.  Jones has worked with the Human Rights Campaign to advise C-suite executives on how cisgender women can be better allies to trans women. While studying politics, Rood has been following the careers of trail-blazing trans women for years, including Zooey Zephyr, Andrea Jenkins and Danica Roem.

Although Rood knows that inherent risks come with taking on a more public advocacy role, she feels that the risks would be the same even if she did nothing. 

“If I were to stop my advocacy, if I were to not make this organization, as many risks as it may take on for me, I still wouldn’t be safe from the people who don’t understand trans experience and want trans people to be eradicated,” she said. “We won’t be safe if we’re silent, or if we speak out. So I’m going to keep speaking out.”