The Resistance Brief: How We Close the Distance

Blog by Ricardo Martinez (he/him), Executive Director

My friend Genevieve lost her battle with an extremely rare form of cancer in 2017. She would have turned 44 two days ago. She had a gift for bringing people together across difference. Which is probably what made her a great teacher – helping students learn difficult concepts through methods and approaches they could internalize and apply. She cut through and helped students and her friends thrive. I met her freshman year of high school in biology class; the day she walked a student who’d vomited on himself to the bathroom to help him clean up  – while others laughed. 

She made people feel seen, loved, important, and cared for. Nearly everyone who knew her considered her their best friend. I’ve always wondered what made her so good at building real, lasting relationships with so many different people. She was the best of us. She didn’t just see people’s shared humanity – she found a way to make other people see it too, the same way she made a hard concept click for a struggling student. 

As her birthday approached this year, I found myself thinking about her more than usual. We live in a polarized society where finding common ground, seeing each other’s shared humanity, feels nearly impossible. How do we get past this moment? How do we build a collective understanding that everyone is inherently worthy – regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, ability, religion, and immigration status? How do we break through algorithms built to keep us angry, distracted, and divided? 

Part of the answer is understanding how we got here. COVID’s unimaginable losses and the isolation that followed. Livelihoods upended. Ongoing economic injustice. An unfinished reckoning with racism. All of it sowed fear – and fear is the perfect container for disinformation. Anti-LGBTQ+ forces know the formula well: take something about our community most Americans don’t understand, fill that knowledge gap with disinformation, use the resulting doubt and outrage to legislate against us, then litigate to erode whatever rights remain – and try to chip away at public support along with them. 

We’ve seen this most recently with transgender people, our own community members bearing the sharpest edge of this formula right now. Most Americans have never knowingly met a trans person, never heard them talk about who they are, never spoken to a parent who spent years loving their kid as they came into who they are. Into that gap, opponents poured a story designed to provoke fear and doubt – one that had almost nothing to do with the careful, deliberate process trans people and their families navigate. That story became bathroom bills. Then sports bans. Then bans on transgender health care. Then lawsuits trying to strip away whatever rights remain. Each step made the next one easier, because by then the public had been fed a version of trans people built to be feared, not met. 

Opponent attacks on family formation work the same way. Most people don’t know that LGBTQ+ parents build their families through adoption, foster care, surrogacy, IVF – the same paths many straight couples use – navigated with extra legal hurdles. Into that knowledge gap, opponents inserted a story about families and children who need saving. That story became fights over parent recognition. Restrictions on surrogacy and fertility care access. Custody battles where a parent’s sexual orientation gets weaponized in family court. Each one chips away not just at rights, but at the basic public sense that our families are real families. 

It’s the same formula every time: find the topic people don’t understand, fill the gap with fear, then legislate, litigate, and let public support erode while people watch, too disoriented by disinformation to object. 

But disorientation isn’t permanent. We’ve broken this formula before. Conflicted people can be moved with facts, with stories, with the truth about who we are delivered via trusted sources. 

The fight for marriage equality wasn’t won only in courtrooms – it was won because millions of people had a conversation with someone they loved: a daughter came out to her father, a coworker asked a colleague why it mattered so much to them, a neighbor watched two men raise their kids next door and realized nothing was being lost. Real, personal, non-judgmental conversations instead of arguing facts – moved people more than any ad campaign. The strategy was never “win the argument.” It was “close the distance.” 

That strategy still works, but the terrain has changed. People used to get their sense of the world from a handful of newspapers and networks; those gatekeepers had power, but they also created a shared set of facts to argue about. Now most people get their sense of the world from algorithms built to keep them scrolling, not informed – and those algorithms reward outrage over understanding. You can’t outshout that system with a press release. But you can out-love it the way people have always out-loved bad information: person to person, story to story, trusted voice to trusted voice. 

That means investing not only in convincing strangers on a platform but also in equipping the people who already have relationships – parents, teachers, coaches, faith leaders, coworkers – to have those conversations in their own words. It means telling our stories through channels people already trust, not just through institutions asking to be trusted. It means understanding that a decade of change starts with one dinner-table conversation, one classroom; one parent deciding to listen to their kid – repeated millions of times, off camera, with no algorithm involved at all. 

I don’t know exactly what Genevieve would say if she were watching the world unfold today. But I think I know what she’d do. She’d say go find the kid nobody’s helping and go help them. Don’t wait for the room to agree they are worth it. Don’t wait for consensus on their humanity.  

That’s a critical part of the work. GLAD Law will continue making the argument for LGBTQ+ people’s rights and dignity in court. But consider this, too: Genevieve never won an argument: Genevieve never won an argument to get that student help. She just moved. Find the person nobody’s defending. Defend them. Do it in your classroom, your family, your workplace, your ballot. Do it especially when it costs you something. 

Think about a person in your life who loved as fiercely and unconditionally as Genevieve – a person who stepped in when others backed away. The truest way to celebrate them is to close the gap they always tried to close – the one between people, one person at a time. 

What to know, what to do:

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