Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Paxton
This is definitely not an all-encompassing, exhaustive list of the villains who have plagued the LGBTQ community. We know there are plenty of others. But these are the ones who rose to the top of the villainous heap.
Ken Paxton
There was no bigger villain for the LGBTQ community in 2024 than Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Paxton turned his attention toward targeting the community, especially transgender Texans early in the year, using the power of the Office of the Attorney General as a weapon against them.
In late January, just days before attorneys for plaintiffs — including PFLAG — challenging Texas’ Senate Bill 14, the 2023 law banning gender-affirming care for trans minors, were to argue their case before the Texas Supreme Court, news broke that Paxton had requested private medical information about Texas youth who received gender-affirming health care from a Georgia-based telehealth clinic. Paxton had earlier demanded such information from Seattle Children’s hospital in November 2023.
Still no word on how Paxton managed to access confidential health records of private citizens.
In February, Paxton demanded that PFLAG National turn over information and documents about its support of Texas families seeking gender-affirming medical care for their transgender children, prompting PFLAG to sue the Texas OAG in response, calling his demands “outrageous and unconstitutional.”
Paxton sued three Texas doctors in 2024, two in North Texas and one in West Texas, alleging that the physicians had violated SB 14 by continuing to provide gender-affirming care to transgender minors.
While trans youth were Paxton’s favorite target in 2024, Paxton also used the OAG to target trans adults, too.
After Paxton asked the Driver License Division of the Department of Public Safety to provide him with a list of every Texan who had requested name and gender-marker changes to licenses or state IDs, the Driver’s License Division chief notified employees in a secret email leaked to the press that they were no longer allowed to make such changes, even when those changes had been court ordered.
The head of the entire DPS later asked Paxton for a legal opinion that would allow the department to rescind such changes that already had been made.
In April, Paxton sued the federal government over the U.S. Department of Education’s updates to Title IX that explicitly include protections for sexual orientation and gender identity. (Shortly after, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a directive to Texas public schools ordering them to ignore the new regulations.)
Then in September, Paxton filed yet another lawsuit against the Biden administration, challenging the administration’s new rule defining gender dysphoria as a disability under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Ryan Walters
Ryan Walters, the superintendent of instruction for the state of Oklahoma, cemented his place on our list of villains by implementing policies and promoting attitudes that foster of climate of hate against LGBTQ children in the Oklahoma public schools. Even after Nix Benedict, a gender-expansive 16-year-old student at Owasso High School in Oklahoma, died a day after being severely beaten up by classmates in a bathroom at the school, Walters doubled down on his transphobia and homophobia, blaming the teen’s death on LGBTQ groups who he said were “pushing a false narrative” and declaring that he was committed to “never backing down from a woke mob.”
The medical examiner on the case eventually ruled Benedict’s death was a suicide, saying it was caused by an overdose mixture of diphenhydramine and fluoxetine (Benedryl and Prozac).
As an editorial in The Oklahoman noted, “One would expect the state schools superintendent would rise above his tired script of blaming one group or another for what ails Oklahoma’s education system to focus in this moment on healing,” but Walters instead turned the death “into a political statement … .”
“How does a 16-year-old LGBTQ+ individual represent ‘one of the biggest threats to our democracy?’” The Oklahoman demanded of Walters. “What is the ‘false narrative’ the ‘woke mob’ is pushing? That the ignorance, fear and otherness about the LGBTQ+ community you’re pedaling is empowering youths under your purview to do the same?”
Walter Wendler
Walter Wendler, president of West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas, sparked outrage, a lawsuit and a vote of no confidence by the school’s faculty by canceling a drag show a campus student group had planned to benefit The Trevor Project.
Despite the vote of no confidence and the lawsuit, Wendler chose to stick to his homophobic guns in 2024, cancelling yet another planned drag show at West Texas A&M, claiming that he would not allow “any show, performance or artistic expression which denigrates others.” Drag, Wendler claims, is misogynistic and insulting to women.