What should trans people be feeling about Gavin Newsom?

The California governor is earning meteoric goodwill with the digital world, but will the kerfuffle leave transgender Americans in the rearview mirror?

One memorable June evening in 2023, a couple of friends and I took mushrooms at Disneyland.

It was the very first “Disney After Dark” LGBTQ+ Pride Night, and Main Street USA was bathed in undulating rainbow projections and soft pink light. Someone had handed the aux to a twink CM who’d been training his entire life for this moment, so the playlist was jumping from Lady Gaga to Ricky Martin to Sam Smith and back again. At some point I wandered away from my group, completely enraptured by what the whole thing meant to me, and was moving like a tripping trans salmon through a crowd that was inexplicably thickening as I went.

And then I saw him.

In many moments after this encounter, people would ask me what he smelled like.

The truth is, Gavin Newsom smells f***ing fantastic.

I know this because we locked eyes as he appeared to me, flanked by cameras and a mooning entourage, on the sidewalk in front of the Penny Arcade. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first, like a nun squinting at all angles at a slice of toast that may or may not be singed in the image of the Virgin. With some celebrities, they look so different in person that it’s almost impossible to place them– the sheen of importance is scrubbed away by the harsh light of reality. With Newsom, the opposite is true. He looked so much like the most polished version of himself that it was almost like the screen was following him.

He saw me– a 6 foot tall trans guy in a bright floral button up and a bloodstream full of psilocybin – and seized his moment.

He opened his arms for a hug, and I dove in without hesitation. There’s a video of this moment, courtesy of a friend who tracked me down just in time, and you can see in my face that I am feeling 30 stories tall. There’s a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (where our Narrator, Nick, is definitely starting to fall in love with Gatsby) that sums up the feeling pretty well:

“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself…”

Wait why do they even kind of look the same?

Yeah, it was like that.

And as quickly as he appeared, he was gone.

I’ve thought about this moment every time Newsom has made the news since. Seeing his name in a headline will never prepare you for why it’s there: he’s a master of the political juke. Is he ducking left or right? Is he clearing homeless encampments? Ending California’s death penalty? Accepting dodgy donations? Passing sweeping environmental protections? Who’s to say? He keeps California on her toes.

And in the fight against the rising tide of fascism, Newsom always seems ready to lace up his gloves and duck into the ring while other Democratic leaders are penning shaky letters asking the worst people in our country to maybe think about somehow stopping if it’s not too much trouble perhaps.

In the early morning hours after Trump’s win in the 2024 presidential election, Newsom called a special session of California lawmakers in an effort to safeguard policies he felt would fall under attack after the inauguration (and spoiler alert: Trump is absolutely doing that). And in his latest move, he’s calling on California voters to approve a redistricting plan as a direct answer to the shady dealings of jerrymandering Texas Republicans.

Do I agree with all of his choices?

Absolutely not. Newsom has a murky (at best) record with the unhoused in California, and though he has gone to bat for queer and trans people in the past, he does not have both feet firmly planted on the right side of history.

Newsom’s past with the LGBTQ+ community is a hard circle to square. I remember the not-so-distant year of 2008, when a majority of Californians still believed that my marriage wasn’t worth legal recognition. Newsom, though it might have cost him the support of the majority, used his place as the mayor of San Francisco to signal that he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the ban– he would do what he had to do to protect the rights of his gay constituents. In 2022, he declared California the very first sanctuary state for trans youth. In 2024, he stood up against bullsh*t “parent’s rights” advocates to shoot down their latest weapon: initiatives that would compel teachers to “out” their trans students to their families against their wishes.

And still, none of that lets him off the hook from his latest screw up: inviting conservative weasel Charlie Kirk onto his podcast to mutually scuff their patent leather loafers on the rights and dignity of trans women athletes.

In many left-leaning media spaces, there have been never-ending cycles of conversation about what Democrats “need” in order to shift the political landscape in their favor. They love to say how absolutely critical it is that we find “our” version of a Joe Rogan. What they forget is that the monkey’s paw always collects its toll. If you want a Joe Rogan, part of the deal is wondering “wait, what the f*** did he just say?”

But maybe that’s a part of the deal.

Transgender Americans are getting pretty familiar with scapegoating lately, as it’s growing from all sides with increasing regularity. Even before gay Democratic fireball and former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg tossed in his two cents about trans women, it was clear that many Democrats were in their emotions about what support for the trans community might cost them. It’s hard not to feel like we’re the latest demographic whose benefits don’t outweigh the drawbacks for the officials we elected to help us. If our government is a sinking ship, are we the ballast tossed overboard first? Are we the battle worth surrendering in an effort to win the war?

F*** I hope not.

This still leaves us with what to do with Gavin Newsom, who is having a very good month right now.

All credit for this goes to his social media team, headed by Camille Harper Zapata, for the strategy that seems to be catapulting his goodwill into the sun. Newsom is a slick speaker, but his real good call here was trusting a grad student with a grudge and a wicked handle on what a lot of (especially young) people have been craving from their leadership. We’ve been trying “we go high” for more than a decade now, and it keeps sliding us deeper and deeper into the muck.

Honestly, as a trans person with a long memory, I’ve been waffling back and forth about how I feel. On the one hand, there’s a nausea that worms its way into my psyche when I think about the “If Kamala were president, we’d all be at brunch” kind of activism. It undermines a lot of what many of us would still be experiencing under “moderate” Democratic leadership, and it makes me think that a lot of people believe their social responsibility ends with voting. On the other hand, morale has been circling the toilet bowl for a while, and I get a jolt of excitement when a new Newsom TikTok drops.

I want to feel something again, you know?

And Newsom has always been a man who is meticulously styled and whose image is highly curated: he knows what he’s doing and how people see him. None of this is a mistake, and he’s doing something real. This isn’t just digital posturing: it’s psychological warfare.

My husband and I might live full time on the road now, but I’m a Californian through and through – I feel about Newsom the way I’m sure the X-Men feel when they have to team with Magneto or when the Powerpuffuff Girls realize they need the help of Mojo Jojo: sometimes we have to link up with our least favorite people when the stakes are higher than all of us.

So how should trans people feel right now? Where should they land on Newsom as he jukes for us and against us in his own effort to cement his legacy and drag Trump down into the mud with him?

I think we all have to decide how wide we’re willing to go as we cast our most effective fighters for the road ahead. Mario might be willing to share a go kart track or mini game party with Bowser, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to go in for a hug when the opportunity presents itself. I think I’ll take his lead if it comes up again.

I’ve never noticed how much T-Boy energy is radiating from Mario before this moment

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