An Open Letter to Ron DeSantis

Governor DeSantis,

You built a national profile on a simple trick: find a small group that unsettles people, and govern against it. You backed the laws restricting care for trans kids and narrowed what a teacher is permitted to say about people like me, and you called it freedom. It is a strange freedom that requires a list of words a child is not allowed to hear.

You sold it as parents’ rights, right up until the parents turned out to be the ones standing in your statehouse beside their trans children, asking you to stop. Their rights, it emerged, did not count. The protection was selective from the start, and the selection was the entire point.

I work from evidence, Governor, so here is some: the families you targeted are not leaving Florida quietly. They are organizing. You woke up a generation of trans Floridians and the people who love them, and political memory is longer than a term in office.