This is part one of a two-part series about the Imperial Valley LGBT Resource Center and the broader landscape of support for the valley’s transgender community. Part Two will be published tomorrow.
For nearly a decade, a bright rainbow sign welcomed visitors to the Imperial Valley LGBT Resource Center in the heart of El Centro.
The center was the first of its kind when it opened in 2015: a physical place for the Valley's LGBTQ+ community.
But over the last few months, that rainbow sign has been taken down and replaced by a new ocean-blue placard. It’s part of a rebranding at the center that also includes removing the letters “LGBT” from the organization’s name. Now, it’s called the Donnelly Community Services Center, after a local judge and longtime financial supporter.
Rosa Diaz, the center's founder and CEO, says the rebranding is part of a larger effort to widen the center's reach and connect with other communities like poor families and unhoused people. She insists they will continue their support groups and other services for LGBTQ+ clients.
But that decision to rebrand the center has unleashed a flood of criticism from other LGBTQ+ rights advocates in the Imperial Valley and San Diego. They said the branding was the latest in a series of decisions that show the center has strayed from its mission of being a safe place for the community. In particular, people are concerned over signs that the center may be distancing itself from the cause of transgender rights.
KPBS spoke with a dozen people connected to the Donnelly Center, including current leaders, supporters and critics. We found Diaz has been increasingly at odds with trans rights advocates in recent years and has developed ties to two hate groups that spread false science about trans people.
Experts and advocates said the center’s decision comes at a particularly vulnerable time for the trans community amid the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to restrict trans rights and exclude trans people from public life. Advocates said it underscores the need for more safe places for the LGBTQ+ community in the Imperial Valley.
“I was almost grateful that she was being honest,” said Raúl Ureña, the former mayor of Calexico and the first transgender Latina mayor of a city along the U.S.-Mexico border. “That she had no intentions of serving the LGBT community anymore.”
A search for belonging
When Diaz founded the Center in 2015, it was part of her own search for connection.
A county social worker from Brawley, Diaz, 64, found her community at church for many years. She credited her Christian faith and religious mentors with setting her on a stable course as a young adult. In later years, she went to bible college, became a minister and joined her church’s leadership, helping out with their youth group.
In the early 2010s though, Diaz began hearing more and more from youth members who were questioning their identities. She was also starting to accept that she was lesbian after suppressing that identity for many years. She wanted the young people she was hearing from to have a healthier relationship between their faith and their other identities.
Diaz worried about coming out to her pastor but eventually asked him if she could start a group for youth who were questioning their sexual orientation.
“I wanted very much to be able to share … scripture with LGBT youth, but do it in a way that would draw them near and not necessarily separate them from coming to church,” she said.
But the pastor rejected Diaz’s request. Because she had come out to him, she said, the church also stripped her of her ministry role.
Diaz’ experience reflects that of many LGBTQ+ people with roots in the Imperial Valley, who say the rural county used to harbor strong prejudice against them and still does not always freely accept the queer community.
After losing her leadership position, Diaz felt cut off from her church. She reached out to a few other people she knew who were involved with LGBTQ+ issues but didn’t receive a response.
“I felt alone,” she said.
Eventually, Diaz decided to create her own group for queer people. She posted an ad for an LGBTQ+ Bible study group in the local newspaper. In June 2014, they held their first meeting and began meeting every Tuesday.
In 2015, she took another leap and founded the Imperial Valley LGBT Resource Center.
Her efforts received strong support from LGBTQ+ rights advocates in San Diego. Kathie Moehlig, the founder and executive director of TransFamily Support Services, said she visited El Centro to meet with Diaz and other mental health providers in the Valley.
It was, “how can we have a better, deeper relationship in order to uplift their work?” Moehlig said. “When we work together, we’re stronger.”
The Center takes shape
At first, the Center was mainly connecting visitors with county agencies, doctors and other services. But soon, they began to build their own programming. They held support groups for mental health, youth and transgender clients. In 2016 and 2017, they held their first Pride parades.
Many Imperial Valley residents were thrilled to see the Center take shape. Among them was Donal Donnelly, 70, a retired Imperial County Superior Court judge.
Back in the 1980s, when Donnelly first moved to the Imperial Valley, he found himself wondering whether the queer community would ever have the same presence as more metropolitan areas. During law school in San Diego, Donnelly, a gay man, had been involved in advocacy efforts for gay rights.
That changed for Donnelly in 2017 when he saw hundreds of queer people and their friends and families rallying at Buckland Park in El Centro for a Pride celebration. It was like the “culmination of a dream,” he said.
“I was just blown away,” Donnelly said. “I go, ‘You know what? This is going to work.’”
After seeing the celebration, Donnelly connected with Diaz and became a major financial supporter.
But not everyone felt as welcomed by the Center.
Ureña, the former-mayor and one of the youngest progressive politicians elected in the Valley, said she had some involvement in the Center’s early days but was excluded because of her views on reproductive rights and queer inclusion.
“I was definitely pushed out a little bit,” she said.
In 2022, another trans advocate named Andee Lopez joined the center as an outreach assistant.
Like Diaz, Lopez, 41, felt forced to suppress questions about her sexual orientation and gender identity growing up. It was during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 that she had time to reflect and get to know herself. She came out as transgender and soon began volunteering at the Imperial Valley LGBT Center. Shortly after, she was hired as a staff member.
But Lopez said the Center was a difficult environment for trans employees.
In a 2022 workplace discrimination complaint to the California Civil Rights Department, she said some of her colleagues there repeatedly misgendered her and other trans employees. That’s despite California law, which protects the right of workers to be addressed by their preferred name or pronouns.
In an interview with KPBS, Lopez also said other colleagues would discourage her from bringing up the subject of her transition. She said one volunteer would make inappropriate sexual advances towards her and other trans employees.
In her complaint, Lopez said Diaz knew about these behaviors but never took any actions to stop them.
Later in 2022, the center fired Lopez. That was when she filed the civil rights complaint, according to records obtained by KPBS. Lopez alleged that she was fired in retaliation for reporting the harassment.
Diaz denies those allegations.
In an email to KPBS last month, she said Lopez never reported those behaviors to the center’s staff. Diaz said she first learned that Lopez was alleging harassment when the state Civil Rights Department called her in December 2022.
Diaz declined to answer questions about why the center fired Lopez, citing state privacy law.
In 2023, state authorities closed Lopez’s discrimination case after Lopez and the center agreed to mediation meetings, according to state records obtained by KPBS.
Extremist influences
During the same time period that the center fired Lopez, Diaz was seeking guidance from organizations classified as hate groups for spreading misinformation about transgender people and healthcare.
In interviews with KPBS, she said she was looking for alternative, “more balanced” perspectives on healthcare for transgender people — also known as gender-affirming care.
Diaz said her research was spurred by conversations with several people who considered gender-affirming care but later changed their minds, including clients at the center and her own child.
“Sometimes you have to go outside of Google.com to find information,” she said.
Gender-affirming care is supported by every major medical organization in the United States. The term describes a broad range of services, ranging from therapy and social services to puberty-blocking medications and surgery. These types of care, the American Medical Association says, are a “medical necessity” for the mental and physical health of many transgender people.
But gender-affirming care has increasingly come under attack in what researchers who study extremism describe as a coordinated campaign by anti-LGBTQ+ groups.
As of last August, lawmakers in 26 states have passed bans on gender-affirming care, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Together, those bans have restricted access to care for more than a third of all transgender youth in the U.S.
R.G. Cravens is a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremism across the country. He says these bans are part of an effort to pressure hospitals and other public institutions, like schools and libraries, to become less inclusive of trans people.
“Those are all institutions of American civil society, and they're supposed to work for everybody,” Cravens said. “The point is to attack them to the point that they exclude.”
Diaz’s search led her to two groups involved in that campaign: Genspect, a Palm Springs-based group, and Gays Against Groomers, a national, chapter-based organization. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies both as hate groups.
Diaz said those groups have influenced her thinking. Gays Against Groomers, she told KPBS, recently published a book that “gives you a lot of research–a lot of information.”
She also named other influences, including the book “Time to Think” by former-BBC journalist Hannah Barnes, which investigates a United Kingdom-based gender-affirming care clinic.
Diaz said she didn’t agree with groups like Gays Against Groomers entirely but wanted to hear their perspectives.
“Look, these are people from the LGBTQ community that are saying these things,” she said. “These people have numbers, just like the other people have numbers. There's research on both sides.”
But Cravens says just because someone is part of a marginalized group doesn’t mean they can’t spread extremism. Dividing civil rights coalitions, he said, is an intentional tactic that some anti-LGBTQ+ groups they track have said they use.
“It was a political strategy,” Cravens said. “A choice to focus on trans people — to delegitimize and dehumanize them so much that the people become sort of toxic and nobody wants to stand with them.”
Other LGBTQ+ rights groups outside the Valley began to take notice of Diaz’s shifting views on trans rights. Moehlig of TransFamily Support Services said they began to distance themselves from the organization.
A new name
When Diaz announced that they were rebranding to the Donnelly Center this past December, the simmering tension spilled out into the open.
Four major San Diego LGBTQ+ organizations, including TransFamily Services and the San Diego LGBT Community Center, released a joint statement condemning the rebranding.
“This rebrand deliberately distances the Center from trans-inclusive services and the broader fight for trans rights, reflecting harmful anti-trans narratives that have no place within our community,” they wrote. “We stand firmly against the harm this decision represents.”
That criticism was heightened by remarks Diaz made during the rebranding announcement. In an interview with the Desert Review, she criticized a new California law that banned schools from sharing a student’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression without their permission. The law had widespread support from other LGBTQ+ rights groups.
Some Imperial Valley advocates issued their own statements on social media. Other local advocates remained quiet but said the attention was welcome.
“I think the statements that have been put out by other people — individuals and organizations — in response to the Donnelly Center have been well thought out,” said Clarissa Padilla, a former-board member at the center. “They’ve pointed out very important things about how misinformed this fearmongering is.”
Donnelly, the now-retired judge, implored San Diego LGBTQ+ organizations to keep in contact with the center.
“Please don't cut us off,” he said. “I think our enemies would love to divide and conquer us, and I don't think we should allow that to happen.”
Diaz insisted that the center will continue to serve the Imperial Valley’s queer community, including trans people. She said it feels like other LGBTQ+ advocates have been too quick to set aside the decade of work that went into building the center.
“You want to destroy me for what?” she asked. “Do we have to be 100% on the same page in order for us to be able to communicate? In order for us to be able to work together?”
Diaz said critics who feel the Donnelly Center is not serving a specific community should try to meet that need themselves.
“We could have two, three, four, five LGBT organizations in Imperial County,” she added. “What's stopping you?”
Already, some LGBTQ+ advocates in the Imperial Valley are doing just that. A number of them are currently working to start their own alternatives to the Donnelly Center.
“LGBTQ+ people of my desert border community are extremely resilient,” Ureña said. “I have full faith that this is just another step in the battle.”
This is part one of a two-part series about the Imperial Valley LGBT Resource Center and the broader landscape of support for the valley’s transgender community. Part two explores grassroots efforts to expand LGBTQ+ services in the Imperial Valley region.
