Trex Proffitt canvasses in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.Mother Jones; Handout Trex Proffitt

In early April, Trex Proffitt opened his mail-in primary ballot and saw that no Democrats were running for state senate in Pennsylvania’s 13th district.

It made sense: The district, which covers the city of Lancaster and its surrounding suburbs, has been represented by Republicans for over a century. The incumbent, Scott Martin, is vocally anti-abortion and the sponsor of a bill banning instruction around gender identity and sexual orientation in elementary schools. Martin won a decisive eleven-point victory against a well-funded challenger in 2020. The odds for Democrats have likely gotten slimmer after the district was redrawn in 2022 to include more rural areas.

But Proffitt, a 56-year-old history teacher at a small Quaker school, still felt something could be done. He decided to run against Martin, winning a write-in campaign to become the Democratic nominee for state senate. After a personal tragedy, Proffitt wanted to center LGBTQ rights in his campaign—even in a reliably Republican district.

In 2019, Proffitt’s son George, who was transgender, died at the age of 20 from a drug overdose. George loved folk punk music and was active in the local LGBTQ community. He had struggled for years with depression and suicidality, but he seemed to be doing better before his death.

In the years since, Proffitt has watched anti-transgender rhetoric become increasingly visible in his community, as a national backlash towards trans people amplified and enabled sentiment that was already “endemic” to Lancaster, he said. As my colleague Kiera Butler has reported, Lancaster County is home to a burgeoning Christian nationalist movement.

In his free time, Proffitt had been walking for long stretches around Lancaster as part of a fundraiser for the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that supports LGBTQ rights. Though he had raised a good chunk of money, he said, “it didn’t feel like I had done enough.”

It was in the wake of the suicide of another trans young person in the area, that he saw no one running against Martin. At the time, he told me, the death left him “looking for something more to do in my life.”

Since then, he has campaigned fiercely on transgender rights, an unusual pitch against a conservative incumbent. But, Proffitt hopes, it will show Democrats they do not have to back away from talking about people like his son.

Transgender........

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