Good Queer News

Enjoy this Clip of the lates episode of the Hella Chisme Podcast. 

Queer Pride Parade - Community Care, Trans Advocacy & What Real Allyship Looks Like ft. Ben Greene

This week, host Dana sits down with internationally recognized transgender advocate, educator, and storyteller Ben Greene for a deep, honest, and joy-filled conversation about what it really means to show up for one another, especially right now.

We talk about community care beyond the buzzword. We talk about the very real divide happening inside the LGBTQIA+ community between the gay community and the trans community  and why that conversation is long overdue. We talk about advocacy fatigue, what it feels like to be the only person speaking up in a room, and how queer people keep finding ways to heal collectively even when the world keeps making it harder.

We play "Who's In Your Chosen Family?"  a love letter to all the roles queer people play for each other. We built the Official Queer Survival Kit for 2026. And we close with a community check-in that asks the questions we need to sit with after the parades are over.

Ben Greene is the author of My Child is Trans, Now What? A Joy-Centered Approach to Support, creator of the Substack Good Queer News, a GLAAD Media Award nominee, and a relentless voice for trans youth and their families at the Missouri State Capitol and beyond.

Pride is not just visibility. It's protection. It's my responsibility. It's love that refuses to disappear.

San Diego Pride is July 17th — let's celebrate all the way there.

📸 Instagram: @HellaChismePod

🎵 TikTok: @HellaChisme 

▶️ YouTube: Hella Chisme Podcast

📚 Find Ben Greene: Good Queer News on Substack | My Child is Trans, Now What?

📩 Guest inquiries: chismehellapod@gmail.com

LINK: https://linktr.ee/hellachismepodcast

Topics to include:

LGBTQ+ Pride Month 2026, Pride Month podcast, transgender advocacy, trans rights 2026, community care queer community, Ben Greene transgender educator, My Child is Trans Now What, Good Queer News Substack, GLAAD Media Award nominee, trans allyship, queer chosen family, LGBTQIA+ division, trans community support, advocacy burnout, queer healing, queer joy as resistance, Stonewall history, Pride Month history, San Diego Pride 2026, LGBTQ+ mental health, queer survival, Black queer community, trans youth advocacy, mutual aid LGBTQ, chosen family podcast, intersectionality LGBTQ, queer community care, trans inclusion, real allyship, queer podcast interview, Pride special episode, Hella Chisme Podcast, Dana podcast host, San Diego podcast

Transcript

Why Good Queer News Exists

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So I wanted to talk about good queer news. So tell us a little bit about what inspired you to start it and what you feel like the community that reads it is getting from and or what you want the community to get from good queer news.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Yeah.

Doomscrolling Through Anti-Trans Bills

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Okay, so when right before I got involved really in Missouri politics, it was January 2023 when the wave of anti-trans legislation really picked up quite intensely at the beginning of 2023. I was feeling terrible. I was scrolling on social media for so many hours a day, looking at all these horrible videos of testimony and hate and seeing people saying words like, you know, complete erasure and genocide and devastation and all these things to say, here's what's happened to the trans community right now. I was terrified, I was isolated, I was totally disempowered. And then I saw the advocacy organization post and say, we need people for a hearing.

Showing Up At The Capitol

SPEAKER_01 1:02

The hearing is tomorrow at 8 a.m. Sign up for a carpool group. And I was like, I should do that. And I kind of signed up. Honestly, I don't know why, but I did. And it and I was bustled off to the Capitol. And I, you know, it was 24 hours' notice. I had to leave at 5 a.m. So I had basically 12 hours to write my whole testimony, prepare myself mentally for it. I thought it was gonna be terrible. I show up at the Capitol, there were over 200 people gathered in support of the trans community, and in opposition to the trans community, they had four people. And that moment blew my mind. And the people that were in the room, I was in Missouri and I had a lot of expectations of what somebody who cared looked like. And instead, what I found was that it was mostly old white people, priests, pastors, nuns, rabbis, grandparents, farmers, rural folks. It was mostly not trans people. It was allies showing up and saying, I'm here so my trans kid doesn't have to be. And it kind of blew my mind. Every single week we had hundreds in support and a handful, if any, there against us. The more time I spend going to the Capitol, the more victories I'm getting to see. The bills that we defeated, the strength that we had, the amount of hearts and minds that we were able to change of our legislators who then made different decisions based on the conversations we had with them, these amazing victories. And

Victories The Headlines Ignore

SPEAKER_01 2:24

then I'd go home and I'd tell my friends about it and they'd say, wow, that's not what I'm reading about at all. I realized more and more that good news was not making headlines. I had thought it was because it wasn't happening. But as I started to get deeper involved into it, I realized that was the point. The despair was keeping people from showing up. Even if there were only five bills that were actually threats, constantly saying Missouri has, you know, proposed 70 anti-trans bills, the 70 was so overwhelming we couldn't get people to show up for the five. And that was the point. As I looked more into it, as I learned more about social media algorithms and the news, I developed this mantra, which is that your despair is someone else's business model. That's right. And so I started Good Queer News because it was early 2024. I'm in this writing group, and every week we're getting on the call, and people are just looking so gloom and doom. They were so hopeless. And I was like, hey, this amazing thing happened. Nobody's heard about it. And could I start the call by giving you all a recap

Building A Weekly Good News Ritual

SPEAKER_01 3:30

of the good queer news? And they were like, sure. And I did, and they were like, wow, I feel better. So then every week I would start our group by saying, here's the good queer news of the week. It lived in my notes app. And they'd be like, Can you like write that down and text it to me so I can send it to all my friends? And I was like, Yeah, sure. And eventually they were like, Ben, you gotta post this. You gotta put it on Instagram, put it on YouTube, do something with it. So I started writing about it on Substock and it blew up. And it kind of blew up. And then after the election, everybody was like, Well, there will never be good news again. All hope is lost. I'm going to crawl into a hole, and the world has now officially ended. And in particular, that attitude was most common among my friends in blue states, my friends in big cities, my friends who were like white, non-trans queer people and white liberals, people who had not been in the shit before. Everybody in Missouri was like, okay, my sleeves are already rolled. It already smells like shit shit in here. I'm just gonna get back to work. So I brought that attitude I'd learned in Missouri of we persist, we survive, there is still good news worth celebrating, right? That on election night, I was in a giant ballroom with two TV screens in the room. One was a TV screen tracking the presidential race, one was a TV screen tracking the ballot initiative to overturn a full abortion ban. Missouri was the first state to overturn completely a full abortion ban

Holding Wins And Losses Together

SPEAKER_01 4:55

with a constitutional ballot initiative. It was incredibly hard work. And we simultaneously watched both those screens, understood that we were going to lose one and win the other. And we had to hold in our hearts that tension that we worked incredibly hard and in some ways we would win, in some ways we would lose. It's always going to be like that. And we couldn't just say we cannot celebrate, it's not worth it, because we lost something. We won something incredible. The number of people whose lives will be safe, who will be safer, who will have access to the healthcare they need to survive, to build lives that they feel good about. We won that and we lost something terrible. Learning to hold both and writing that into good queer news was so important. So then it really took off. And I think that's what people are getting away from it is that it's not toxic positivity. I'm not putting, you know, heartwarming, this trans kid raised money with a lemonade stand to be able to flee the country. That's not heartwarming. That's dystopian. That's not a good queer news story. A good queer news story is today, May 15th, Missouri has ended their legislative session. They defeated every single anti-LGBTQ bill proposed. There are so many states recently that have ended their sessions, beating every single one with incredibly hard, strategic, brilliant work. So I bring good news and put the bad news in context, saying, I'm not here to fear monger you. Here's what's happening, here's what isn't,

Good News Without Toxic Positivity

SPEAKER_01 6:20

and here's what we're going to do about it. So my hope with good queer news, honestly, what I want to do with it and what I have begun to do with it more and more is that I built up a platform where people trust me. They trust that I'm going to be honest, that I'm going to talk about hope, that I'm dreaming about how we move forward and what we can build. And that means that I have the social capital to bring up really difficult conversations. I can write about, you know, racism within the white queer community. I can write about transphobia within the gay community. I can write about misogyny. I can write about how I want white queer people to stop using AAVE. I can write about toxic positivity and, you know, the hopelessness and despair of people on the coasts who are mostly safe. I can use it to be a safe container for difficult conversations that help us say, well, if I'm dreaming of this future, maybe I do need to act differently or think differently if I want to get there. So I'm really excited at the space that I've been building. And

Hard Conversations And Real Empowerment

SPEAKER_01 7:20

it seems to be giving a lot of people a the uh ability to act. Empowerment is really what I want people to get out of it. The understanding that it will take all of us. Something is better than nothing. No one is coming to save us but us. And that attitude, I think, is what people are taking away from it now.

SPEAKER_00 7:37

It's just a good blog. Like, is it okay if I call it a blog? Like, is it Yeah?

SPEAKER_01 7:42

I don't really know what it's like.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

It's a good project. Let's say good project. It's a good writing project, it's a good space, it has built it builds good community. And you know, I I don't people know this, but I also don't think people think about it enough that the negative news is someone's paycheck. Like literally, there are there are platforms, there are the news channels are specifically built to keep sometimes to keep you scared, to keep uh feel month fear mongering, and to keep you your eyes peeled to know, but and always want to be in the know, but it's always the negative stuff.