CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy June 4 Lavender Graduation
commencement speech
Pauline Park
City University of New York
4 June 2026

 

I am honored to be invited to address Lavender Graduation here at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy. And I would like to thank the associate dean of student affairs Dr. Lynn Roberts for the invitation. I would also like to thank my friend and colleague Bob Lederer for suggesting me to Dean Roberts for this Lavender Graduation; Bob and I work together as part of the collective that produces Out-FM, the LGBT show that airs on WBAI-FM at 8 p.m. every Tuesday. You can find all of our segments on OutFM.org.

And now for a few thoughts that I humbly submit to you upon your graduation from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy. I greet you at a moment of great promise and great peril. First for the peril. Never before have we faced more ruthless attacks on public health from a secretary of health and human services than from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And never before has the transgender community faced more vicious attacks than from the administration of Donald Trump in which RFK, Jr. serves. A few of you might know that Trump’s grandfather was a draft dodger in the Second German Reich and so when he returned to his native Bavaria after some time in the United States, he was threatened with prison, so he returned to the US and anglicized his name Drumpf to Trump. His son became notorious for housing discrimination and his grandson has Trump-ed both his ne’er do well grandfather and racist father by becoming the worst president in our country’s history. I like to call the president ‘Reichskanzler Drumpf’ — using the title of ‘imperial chancellor’ that Adolf Hitler won in 1933 before he declared himself ‘Der Führer.’ And it is no exaggeration to say that the current descent into fascism threatens the very survival of American democracy — at least what’s left of it.

And it is shocking — if not entirely surprising that major hospitals in this city — including Mount Sinai and NYU Langone have capitulated to the diktat of the Reichskanzler Drumpf by eliminating the provision of gender-affirming care for trans youth; this anticipatory compliance must be challenged and I am quite certain that there are dedicated health care providers on the staffs of those hospitals who will be looking to public health professionals such as you  to fight the good fight even as their corporate overlords put profits over people. The truth is that all too many hospitals and health care providers are profit-driven corporations using their 501(c)(3) status as charities to garner individual and corporate donations and federal, state and local funding. The nominal commitment to LGBTQ people and the transgender community in particular turns out to have been more of a marketing strategy for the corporate masters of these institutions than a genuine commitment to LGBTQ health care.

At the same time, the role(s) you play in safeguarding and enhancing public health will be crucial in the genuine resistance to the Trumpian triumph of the will as well as this corporate backsliding in the commitment of major hospitals to trans health care. Despite the challenges we face, I would argue that it is precisely in this moment of maximum peril that you have the potential for maximum impact in the work that you will do in public health. Allow me to draw on 32 years of experience in activism and advocacy to offer a few thoughts on how you might have a real impact on public health. Here are three thoughts:

First, be steadfast in your commitment to fundamental principles; if you are committed to public health and to the empowerment of LGBTQ community members through that work, never compromise on such principles; but at the same time, be flexible with regard to strategy and tactics; no social movement has ever succeeded without a degree of strategic and tactical flexibility.

Second, eschew binary thinking in favor of a more sophisticated  analysis that takes into account the crucial distinction between structural factors and individual agency; this may seem abstract and requires some explanation. What I mean by this is that the successful activist, advocate and clinician all have one thing in common: all will recognize that there are structures of oppression — race, ethnicity, immigration status, class, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity to cite the most obvious. At the same time, we have to not only allow for individual agency but identify ways to empower individuals; indeed, to deny individual agency would be to render all action pointless. In philosophy (which was my undergraduate major), there is a debate going back centuries about free will and determinism; to put it as succinctly as possible, there is no such thing as absolute free will but we all have a degree of free will constrained to a different degree for each individual by existing structures of race, class, and the others I have already mentioned.

Third and finally, seek to engage in as objective analysis of any situation as possible while recognizing the fact that there is no absolute objectivity: there is no ‘Archimedean point,’ as the saying goes. I have known many activists and advocates fail precisely because of their inability to overcome their own subjectivity. Effective action requires effective thinking and that is as true in the field of public health as in any other realm. Consider RFK, Jr.’s absurd and dangerous attacks on vaccination despite the overwhelming evidence that vaccines save lives; resistance to the H&HS secretary’s dangerous nonsense requires an objective assessment of the situation and the most effective strategies and tactics for challenging it. At the same time, it is important to avoid a false scientism that constructs science as an infallible tool and replaces a belief in an omnipotent and omniscient God with science as a deity to be worshipped; Western science as we know it is an extremely important tool but one that must always be regarded with critical distance. Consider for example how the medical establishment has fought a decades long fight to exclude traditional Chinese and Asian medicine from being approved by the private insurance companies that control our broken health care system; in the last few decades, acupuncture has gained some acceptance but so many other possible traditional Asian approaches to health and wellness are still excluded from payment by the profit-driven corporations that control our system of health care — which is really a profit-driven system of health care denial.

In closing, I would like to quote the great Indian writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, who famously wrote, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” May your lives of service working to improve public health in this benighted land bring you joy.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), which she co-founded in 1998. Park led the campaign for passage of the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines — adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 — for implementation of the new statute. In March 2011, Park co-founded New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA) and in January 2012, she participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation to Palestine, a seven-day tour of the West Bank and Israel that included meetings with LGBT- and non-LGBT Palestinians and Israelis. Park did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.