Radar Naughty List: Campaign for Southern Equality

RADAR News
Dec 11, 2025
7 min read

12/11 The Campaign for Southern Equality wants you to believe it is fighting for equality and representation. But in reality, this nonprofit has built a sprawling infrastructure that connects children to medical transition, trains schools to socially transition them behind parents’ backs, and helps families work around state protections that restrict experimental “gender-affirming” procedures. From small “emergency grants” to K–12 policy toolkits, the group positions itself as a one-stop shop for trans activism in thirteen Southern states. Its focus is clear: embed gender ideology in schools, churches, and clinics, then provide the money and navigation that keep minors on the medical conveyor belt even when voters and legislators say no.

Campaign for Southern Equality (CSE) was founded in 2011 by Reverend Jasmine Beach Ferrara, an ordained minister in the liberal United Church of Christ. InfluenceWatch describes CSE as a “left of center activist organization” based in Asheville, North Carolina, operating across the South to finance and organize LGBT activists, litigate, and lobby for policy change. Beach Ferrara is not just a local pastor. She served on the Biden Foundation’s advisory council for “Advancing LGBTQ Equality” and has built CSE into a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) with revenue topping $1.3 million in 2020. Through its Southern Equality Fund and related programs, CSE has distributed tens of thousands of dollars in grants to LGBT grassroots groups, including non-charitable activist organizations, while simultaneously running its own litigation and lobbying campaigns against traditional marriage laws, adoption protections, and state-level safeguards for children.

On its homepage, CSE frames its mission as creating “a South where LGBTQ+ people are equal in every part of life,” presenting anti-grooming and child protection laws as “unprecedented” attacks. The site calls on supporters to help “build political power through long-term strategies,” including funding and training local activists, creating “rapid response” campaigns, and mobilizing voters. The centerpiece of CSE’s current work is the Southern Trans Youth Emergency Project (STYEP), branded as a “regional effort” that gives “rapid response support” to families of trans-identified youth impacted by bans on “gender-affirming care” in the South. The project offers emergency grants and patient navigation to help parents locate providers willing to prescribe puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, then helps pay to get kids there. CSE’s own site describes STYEP as the largest national program of its kind, providing one-on-one logistical support so families can identify out-of-state options and receive travel grants. The Advocate reports that CSE has disbursed roughly 350 grants of $500 each to families of trans-identified minors across Southern states. These grants are explicitly used for travel, insurance co-pays, and “gender-affirming clothing and supplies” for children.

One Alabama mother describes stockpiling a $500 CSE grant in a savings account while her teenage daughter rationed testosterone injections. Another Mississippi family received $1,000 in CSE funding to drive across state lines in search of a clinic willing to continue their child’s transition, before ultimately deciding to uproot and move across the country. In state after state where lawmakers have restricted or banned sex-rejecting procedures for minors, the Campaign for Southern Equality steps in to:

Tell parents that “help is available,” even when their own states have outlawed these procedures for minors.

Provide cash to cover travel, lodging, and medical costs so families can bypass local protections and find clinics willing to treat children.

Offer “patient navigation” so families can interpret the shifting legal landscape and identify workarounds.

In short, CSE is positioning itself as a shadow insurance provider for child transition, paying families to keep kids on hormones and puberty blockers regardless of what voters or legislatures decide.

CSE’s “Trans in the South Guide: A Directory of Trans-Affirming Health & Legal Service Providers” boasts “more than 400 Southern health service providers who are trans affirming.” The directory lists “trans-friendly” mental health professionals, primary care doctors, endocrinologists, HIV specialists, Planned Parenthood clinics, attorneys, and more across thirteen Southern states.

The searchable database allows users to filter by provider type, state, and services offered, including options such as:

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT)

“Informed consent” clinics

Telehealth appointments

Sliding-scale fees

All-gender restrooms

Providers who have completed CSE’s “trans sensitivity training”

The guide also includes a “Funding Your Transition” section with information on financial resources and insurance navigation, turning economic obstacles into solvable problems for anyone pursuing medical transition. CSE acknowledged that many providers are suspending services “because of anti-transgender laws or policies,” then encouraged users to treat the guide as a starting point and contact providers directly. Crucially, CSE directs trans-identified youth and their families in states with gender medicine bans to STYEP, which offers “patient navigation services, $500 emergency grants, and more” to keep minors in the pipeline. Taken together, Trans in the South and the Southern Trans Youth Emergency Project function as a coordinated system. The directory tells families where to go. The grants and “navigation” pay for it and walk them around state-level protections.

CSE’s reach does not end at the clinic. Through its Supportive Schools Program, the organization trains administrators, teachers, and students to embed gender ideology into K–12 policy and daily school life. The program describes its mission as helping schools become “more inclusive and welcoming” for “students of every sexual and gender identity,” while advising on youth policy issues, backing school Gender and Sexuality Alliances (GSA), and targeting “anti-LGBTQ state laws.” The flagship document, Supportive Schools for LGBTQ+ Students: A Guide to Policies and Best Practices, was published in September 2022 as a roadmap for public, private, and charter schools across the United States, with a special focus on the Southeast. Administrators and school boards are urged to use it to craft or revise school policies, while students and parents are told to treat it as a “know your rights” advocacy tool.

In the guide, CSE lays out a detailed checklist for “gender-inclusive” culture at school. Among its recommendations:

Create a campus culture that actively educates all students and staff on “gender identity and expression,” including training and resources on pronouns, “affirmed names,” and gender identities.

Normalize having every student and staff member share their pronouns if they wish.

Replace sex-based language such as “boys and girls” with neutral terms like “students,” “friends,” or “scholars.”

Use a student’s “affirmed name” in virtually all school records, reserving the legal name only where absolutely required.

Treat accidental “misgendering” or “deadnaming” as minor slips that should be quickly corrected and moved past, specifically to avoid “drawing attention” to the transgender student.

Guarantee that “transgender and non-binary students have a right to use the bathrooms and locker rooms which correspond with their gender,” as defined in a gender support plan.

The guide goes beyond internal culture and directly attacks parental rights laws and curriculum protections. CSE characterizes book censorship, “harassment legislation,” and so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws as attacks on the “inclusion of LGBTQ+ identities” in school curricula, and dedicates an entire resource hub to opposing North Carolina’s S.B. 49, a parental rights bill that restricts curriculum and school secrecy around sexuality and gender.

The Supportive Schools page also promotes:

“Mirrors and Windows,” a toolkit for “affirming and bias-free classrooms” that frames book bans and DEI rollbacks as stripping students of their right to see themselves in the curriculum.

“Teachable Moments,” prewritten scripts activists can read at school board meetings to pressure boards into adopting LGBTQ-centered policies.

A Title IX complaint guide that teaches activists and students how to frame opposition to gender ideology as discrimination under federal civil rights law.

A “Using Professional Ethics” resource that encourages school staff to cite their professional codes of ethics as justification for refusing to comply with “unethical” laws or policies, and even provides instructions for filing complaints against professionals who do not affirm these norms. In practice, CSE is coaching educators and activists on how to resist democratically enacted protections, keep parents in the dark, and treat sex-based boundaries as discriminatory obstacles to be dismantled from the inside.

CSE’s own materials, including its Trans in the South resources, acknowledge a broader ecosystem of organizations that help fund transition. The group thanks partners such as the Jim Collins Foundation, Rizi Timane Ministries, Point 5 CC Surgery Fund, Trans Love Fund, TopSurgery.net, Out 2 Enroll, and transguys.com for supporting the trans community and contributing to the information used in their guides. Many specialize in financing or facilitating irreversible procedures like “top surgery,” while others focus on enrolling people in insurance plans that cover cross-sex hormones and experimental interventions. CSE’s role is to pull these strands together, then direct families and youth to them through its directories, training, and “emergency” programs.

In the medical sphere, CSE builds directories of “trans-affirming” providers, trains them in “trans sensitivity,” and funds youth travel to clinics even when state law has tried to close that door. In schools, CSE rewrites policy language, installs pronoun and bathroom mandates, equips students and activists with scripts and complaint templates, and frames parental rights laws as human rights violations. In politics and law, CSE litigates against measures passed to protect children from radical gender ideology. All of it is wrapped in soft language about “equity,” “healing and resilience,” and “a South where all of us can thrive.”

Underneath, the Campaign for Southern Equality is building the infrastructure that keeps kids on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, trains schools to socially transition them, and teaches adults how to defy laws meant to protect children. Parents, lawmakers, and community members in the South need to understand what CSE really is: an activist-sponsored machine that exists to entrench gender ideology, override democratic safeguards, and medicalize children in the name of “equality.”

Welcome to the Naughty List, CSE! Leave the kids alone.

References

Thank you to our brilliant investigative team, led by Mandy, for their thorough investigation and for providing all the sources to share with our readers.

Advocate – For Families in the South Struggling to Find Gender-Affirming Care, Small Grants Make a Huge Difference

https://www.advocate.com/news/gender-affirming-care-small-grants

Campaign for Southern Equality – About

https://southernequality.org/about/

Campaign for Southern Equality – Home

https://southernequality.org/

Campaign for Southern Equality – Our Team

https://southernequality.org/about/our-team/

Campaign for Southern Equality (CSE) – InfluenceWatch profile

https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/campaign-for-southern-equality-cse/

Funding Your Transition

https://southernequality.org/resources/transinthesouth/funding-your-transition/