Protecting LGBTQ People From MAGA’s Assault

With the LGBTQ community facing a vicious and brutal assault from the Trump Administration, we need a leader who will fight relentlessly to protect and expand our rights. Scott is that fighter, and his outspoken support for LGBTQ people has put his own personal safety at risk, drawing repeated personal attacks by Marjorie Taylor Green, Megyn Kelly, Ted Cruz, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., and others, in addition to a tidal wave of death threats and physical harassment by anti-LGBTQ bigots.

‍As a gay man who came of age during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in 1987, Scott knows our community has seen dark days before. The devastation of HIV/AIDS inspired him to volunteer for an HIV crisis hotline as a college student in North Carolina, and he advocated for transgender people as a student at Harvard Law School in the 1990s. When he moved to San Francisco, he was part of the core group that built San Francisco’s LGBT Community Center. When gay men were getting raped in the Castro, Scott stepped up and helped create a community safety organization to keep people safe.

In the Senate, Scott has fought to erase discriminatory laws that harmed LGBTQ youth, transgender women, and people living with HIV. He authored nation-leading laws to make PrEP available from a pharmacist without a physician prescription (similar to the birth control pill), establish the nation’s strongest legal protections for LGBTQ seniors in nursing homes and other long-term care, collect voluntary health data to fight health disparities in the LGBTQ community, repeal discriminatory felonies targeting people living with HIV, and end discrimination against LGBTQ people on California’s broken sex offender registry.

Scott has relentlessly defended LGBTQ people against the vicious attacks Trump and his MAGA cronies have unleashed. He authored the nation’s first LGBTQ refuge law, and expanded privacy protections to prevent harassment and targeting against transgender and nonbinary people. As Senate Budget Chair, he secured $15 million in state funds to cover gender affirming healthcare that Trump is attempting to cut from Medicaid.

In Congress, Scott will work to:

• Champion passage of the Equality Act, a federal civil rights law that finally gives LGBTQ Americans full legal protections in housing, employment, and public accommodations.
• Expand federal funding for HIV prevention, PrEP access, and LGBTQ-affirming healthcare, and make PrEP available over the counter, without a prescription.
• Reverse every executive order Trump has issued targeting transgender Americans in the military, healthcare, and schools, and restore LGBTQ programs gutted by the administration.
• Protect transgender youth and their families from federal prosecution. No parent should face criminal charges for getting their child medically recommended care.

Scott's Past Legislation

• SB 107 (2022): Establishes California as a refuge for transgender youth and their parents, who are being criminalized in red states for seeking medically recommended gender affirming healthcare.
• SB 159 (2019): Authorizes pharmacists to furnish pre- and post- exposure prophylaxis (PrEP and PEP) without a physician's prescription and also prohibits insurance companies from requiring prior authorizations to obtain PrEP coverage.
• SB 59 (2025): Protects transgender Californians from harassment and outing by automatically making legal records related to gender transition confidential.
• SB 497 (2025): Protects the privacy of medical data related to gender transition, and strengthens the protections of SB 107, the transgender state of refuge law.
• SB 957 (2023): Empowers efforts to eliminate health disparities by closing loopholes in requirements to collect LGBTQ health data.
• SB 219 (2017): Strengthens protections for LGBT seniors living in long-term care facilities against discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or HIV status. Later incorporated into an Executive Order issued by President Biden.
• SB 239 (2017): Ended criminalization of people living with HIV, by repealing outdated felonies — passed at the height of HIV panic in the 1980s — that only targeted HIV and no other infectious disease.