In the midst of rising vitriol aimed at the transgender community by conservative media figures and government officials, One Colorado, the state’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, is launching a new organizing campaign aimed at “pushing back against anti-trans misinformation” in the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections.
Titled “Freedom for All: Pathway to Power,” the campaign will use multiple events this Fall as a space to train LGBTQ people and allies to become involved in their local communities, share information, and prepare to have hard conversations with those around them.
The Colorado Times Recorder spoke with Brandi Hardy, One Colorado’s Lead Field Organizing Strategist, to get an inside look at the campaign. She said the campaign’s premise was shaped by conversations with community members.
“One of the main things that we continue to hear are, Coloradans just don’t want to sit back and continue to wait for the next round of attacks,” said Hardy. “We are seeing the trans community being demonized and weaponized as a way to generate fear and create more division. And we felt that it was important that we took the feedback that we were receiving from our communities and actually responding with the programming that they’ve been asking us to provide.”
She continued, “A lot of the themes specifically for our fall campaign are really helping people understand how they can use their narrative to shift power. So translating their skills to power-building actions. So that’s going to be teaching them how to do a TikTok, write a blog post, volunteer at a local organization that may be doing different events around trans education, like trans community education, or even starting to have the conversations around how they want to get more involved in 2026, leading up to the 2026 elections.”
Anti-trans misinformation has been surging in the U.S., and seems to have reached a fever pitch in recent months. Federal officials and right-wing pundits have claimed, without evidence, that there is a connection between what they call “trans ideology” – defined as supporting the existence of trans people and their presence in public life – and violent extremism. Some conservative noisemakers have been open about their intent to exploit trans people as a wedge issue to galvanize voters.
Mainstream media outlets have, in many cases, enabled the spread of this misinformation. Following the killing of right-wing organizer Charlie Kirk, over 40 outlets published an unverified claim that the shooter’s bullets had been engraved with “transgender ideology.” The claim was later found to be false.
One Colorado’s organizing effort aims to push back at this national-level torrent by training grassroots advocates to reshape the public narrative on the local level in the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections.
“People know each other, people know each of their local communities, whether it’s a metropolitan area like Denver, or it is a smaller community on the Western Slope. And when we’re going in, we’re not focused on what mainstream media, celebrities are saying,” Hardy said. “We’re really focused on helping, talking to people about what their needs are in that community and making sure that there isn’t a misconception about the trans community having influence over a negative experience.”
Polling has shown that across the political spectrum, people who know a trans person are more likely to oppose measures that target them. The campaign seems to follow similar logic by training trans people and their allies to advocate for themselves within their own communities.
“It’s really about training and energizing folks so that they can go out and have really hard conversations with friends, family and neighbors, because that’s who they’re interacting with every single day,” Hardy said.
This comes as the federal government reportedly looks at ways to implement policies that will enable surveillance against people who advocate for transgender rights. Worries of escalating government persecution have led to a climate of fear and anxiety in the trans community in the past year. A UCLA study in May showed that nearly half of all transgender adult respondents had considered moving to a different state or leaving the country altogether, many of whom cited the current political environment and hostility to trans people as the reason why.
Though she herself is a cisgender woman, Hardy acknowledged the fear-steeped climate, saying, “Sometimes we have to operate within the fear and I say that from a position of doing the work that I do.”
She continued, “We are specifically reaching out and marketing this campaign towards folks who, again, believe that trans people deserve dignity, safety and freedom, not just in the state of Colorado, but in this nation. And so sometimes that fear is what actually mobilizes us and moves us forward because we have no other options, no other options other than to just start doing something. And that’s what we have to be doing right now.”
So far, four events for the “Freedom for All: Pathway to Power” campaign are scheduled, including two virtual webinars and in-person sessions in Greeley and Grand Junction.
