Local LGBTQ+ advocates and community members are urging the Montgomery County Council on Tuesday to approve a budget appropriation that would go to support the leading organization providing social services to the county’s LGBTQ+ community, saying the funds are urgently necessary.
“This is a real and present emergency. Threats of violence [toward the LGBTQ+ community] persist and are extreme,” said Phillip Alexander Downie, CEO of the MoCo Pride Center, an organization that promotes health, well-being and social events for the local LGBTQ+ community, during the public hearing on Tuesday. The organization does not have a physical building.
While the $200,000 appropriation is comparatively low when it comes to county government spending, advocates said it’s necessary for MoCo Pride Center to get through the rest of the fiscal year, which ends in July. Downie said the organization has been “bridging the gap to provide basic necessities” for LGBTQ+ county residents.
County Executive Marc Elrich transmitted the supplemental appropriation to the council in March.
“The increase is needed because the County has identified a lack of venues, resources, and services for its diverse, multicultural LGBTQIA+ communities,” Elrich wrote in his memo. “The MoCo Pride Center, Inc. provides safe space, events and culturally specific community programing for LGBTQIA+ communities, which are essential to vital service linkages.”
The appropriation would come out of undesignated reserves in the current fiscal year budget.
Advocates said Tuesday a lot of the work to support LGBTQ+ county residents falls to its community members.
“I’ve often been the first call that people make in Montgomery County when a young person who is transgender or queer is kicked out of their house,” Lee Blinder, founder and director of Trans Maryland, an organization that advocates for the trans community and helps connect trans Marylanders with resources, testified at the hearing. “I’m not paid by the county to be a 24/7 youth crisis housing responder. However, it is part of my uncompensated duties because I’m very dedicated to our young trans and queer people.”
The county has relied on the MoCo Pride Center for much of its HIV and STI testing services, according to the agenda packet. The organization provided more than 250 HIV tests at Pride Month events in May and June 2023, according to county data.
An LGBTQ+ community survey report released publicly by Montgomery County in October 2023 revealed stark inequities for LGBTQ+ residents, particularly when it came to health care.
According to the report, more than 41% of trans and gender expansive county residents faced difficulty finding gender-affirming care and gender-affirming mental health support. One in six of trans and gender expansive respondents to the survey reported that a provider refused to provide them with gender-affirming care. Over a quarter of respondents said they had to “teach their provider about their sexual orientation or gender identity to receive appropriate care,” according to the survey.
Respondents to the county survey also reported difficulty in accessing nondiscriminatory general primary healthcare services. Almost 47% of trans and gender expansive respondents said a medical provider had misgendered them or used the wrong name for them. Almost 8% reported abusive language from a medical provider, 4.4% reported physical abuse and 4.6% reported instances of medical providers refusing to treat them due to their gender identity or sexual orientation.
County resident Greer Hamilton said Tuesday they were disappointed that there were not as many resources in Montgomery County for trans residents as in other places they previously lived.
“I wonder what it would be like to navigate transition to trying to find health care that understands my needs as a trans person,” Hamilton testified Tuesday in support of MoCo Pride Center. “As a resident of Montgomery County, I have to travel to Prince George’s County to receive the health care I need.”
A Montgomery County Office of Legislative Oversight (OLO) report released in January found that the Montgomery County government could be doing more to support its transgender residents. One of the recommendations included in the report was to create an LGBTQ+ resource center.
“From the day I came out and even today, I faced discrimination inside and outside of our public schools. Students are taught to accept and ignore normalized biases against queer people. I felt scared and isolated myself,” said Marshall Friedman, a Poolesville High School student. “I cannot understate how the MoCo Pride Center is so important. … They’re dedicated to ensuring a support system for LGBTQ people of all ages.”
The council’s Health and Human Services Committee and Government Operations Committee will hold a work session on the appropriation on April 29. A vote has not yet been scheduled.