Ten years ago, I was sitting in my bedroom, packing and getting ready for my second summer at Brandeis’s Precollege Programs, when I saw the news about Obergefell. Jamie, my then-boyfriend-now-husband, and I had only been dating for a few months, and I joked that if we ever got married we could finally have an Idaho destination wedding. That moment felt emblematic of my memories of the latter half of the Obama years in which I came of age, years where we knew that there was so much more to do, and so much farther to go, but that we could be going in the correct direction. The optimism of the years Obama was president, which coincided almost perfectly with my adolescence, shaped my approach to organizing and to the world I was coming of age into. The videos I watched obsessively in 2010 were right: It got better.

A full decade later, I’m filled with so much frustration as I recognize there is an entire generation of queer and trans Jewish youth who never got to experience that hope and the resolve that it brings. I had worried that there would be attempts to fight the hard-won rights that for which our queer and trans ancestors and colleagues, but I never expected that we would be clawing our way through attacks on hard-earned rights and things that we didn’t think we would need to fight for, things that were taken for granted. 

Thank G-d, there are young people with whom I work today who don’t remember a time when queer people couldn’t marry. But they also are coming of age at a time when they are seeing attacks on the rights of LGBTQ+ people in general, and trans people in particular,. They are coming of age at a time when things don’t feel like they’re getting better, and it feels like the government is actively working against us.

They deserve hope, joy, and optimism. They deserve to come of age into a world where they don’t need to witness their rights being debated publicly and being stripped away. Queer and trans youth deserve better.

Amram Altzman is Keshet’s Associate Director of Youth Programs