Sam Brinton: A Trans Activist With Baggage
This week trans-identified male and gender activist, Sam Brinton, has been accused of a second luggage theft and faces another felony charge.
Recent events mean that Brinton, hitherto the they/them du jour of US politics, is having to deal with some media scrutiny. Given the influence he seems to wield at the highest levels, this scrutiny is, perhaps, long overdue.
34-year-old Sam Brinton serves under the Biden administration as the Department Of Energy's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition. He was a nuclear waste adviser during Trump’s presidency and was appointed to his current role in February 2022.
A few weeks ago Brinton was charged with felony theft. He admitted to stealing a suitcase from Minneapolis-St Paul Airport in September. Initially, he had lied to authorities and denied stealing the designer luggage. However, he had not checked in a bag prior to his flight and surveillance footage shows him taking the case from the carousel and removing its tag before leaving with it. The woman to whom it belonged identified the case and estimated the cost of the luggage and its contents to be around $2,325. Brinton admitted using the case and keeping its contents in his hotel room.
He has now been accused of a second luggage theft, this time at Harry Reid International Airport near Las Vegas. Police sources told 8NewsNow that Brinton has been charged with grand larceny of item/s valued between $1,200 and $5,000.
Brinton is bisexual, uses they/them pronouns and ‘identifies’ as ‘non-binary’ and ‘gender fluid’. He performs as a drag queen called Sister Ray Dee O’Active and used to be part of a group called the Order of Perpetual Indulgence, “A worldwide order of queer people of all sexualities and genders” in which members dress up in nuns’ habits to raise awareness of LGBTQ+ issues.
Brinton is known for having a ‘kink lifestyle’ and there have been several articles published about his various fetishes. In 2016 he was profiled by Metro Weekly in a piece called Puppy Love.
In 2017 Brinton presented a ‘kink seminar’ at the Rensselear Polytechnic Institute and gave a lecture entitled ‘Ropes, Whips, & Kinks, Oh My!!’. An article from the campus newspaper, The Polytechnic, says that Brinton was ‘open about his experiences’ and described his various sexual fetishes to the students. These fetishes included pup play, adult babies, diaper play, humiliation, degradation, bondage and choking. The article’s author explained that Brinton used the students to illustrate BDSM techniques. “He took volunteers that he used to demonstrate the rope tying techniques, and others to demonstrate them on himself… He even demonstrated the use of a carbon fibre rod on those who were interested, and the marks he left on my arm lasted for a few days.”
According to the The Daily Mail, Brinton has been teaching a ‘Physics of Kink’ class at universities and community events all over the US for years. A few months ago Brinton hosted a bondage seminar in Los Angeles using the pseudonym NuclearNerd. The mail also claims that Brinton has a profile on a kink hook-up site where his bio reads, “Bondage and control are my fortes... Flogging, chastity, fisting, electro... I've done them all and will happily put a guy through them”.
Brinton clearly has no respect or regard for female-only spaces and, attending the 2018 Oscars, he was described as having ‘sailed into the women’s room’.
For a while he was a co-chair at the National Centre for Lesbian Rights, overseeing the organisation’s campaign against conversion therapy.
Brinton has been a poster-they of LGBTQ+ activism for years and is an vociferous advocate for gender identity ideology. He describes himself as a conversion therapy survivor and claims to have suffered barbaric experiences in childhood after telling his parents about his bisexuality. This, according to LGBT rights journalist Wayne Besen, gave Brinton “A seemingly perfect ex-gay survivor story”.
Brinton first came to public attention in 2010 when he was interviewed on I’m from Driftwood and described, as Besen puts it, “The most shocking conversion story activists had heard since the 1960s”.
In 2019 Brinton was appointed as the head of advocacy and government affairs at The Trevor Project which describes itself as “The world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning) young people”.
He is, of course, a supporter of the affirmation-only model and seems to advocate medical transition for gender-confused children even without their parents’ consent.
In 2015 Brinton wrote an op-ed piece in The Advocate magazine. He condemned the federal government’s attack on the website, Rentboy.com, and the arrest of several of its staff members on prostitution charges. Brinton said he didn’t know if the site had broken the law and even acknowledged that it was ‘dangerous’. However, his anger seems to be not at the people exploiting the young men by operating or using the site, but at the government employees who shut it down. Brinton’s argument appears to be that because young gay and trans people can people find themselves in dire straights, it’s fine to sexually exploit them.
Speaking at an LGBTQ+ event in 2020 Brinton propagated the myth that children will commit suicide if not affirmed in their chosen gender identity. “When you question our gender identity or our sexual orientation, you are literally questioning whether you should exist. That’s how you get really young youths potentially considering suicide.”
At the same event, Brinton commented that his work in nuclear engineering gives him an opportunity to influence political decision making. “The reason we are getting so many Republicans to vote against conversion therapy is because I worked with them on nuclear weapons issues. So I literally transferred the trust from one issue over to another.”
Although it’s not usually an outlet one would expect to be critical of Brinton, an article in LGBTQ Nation has cast doubt on the veracity of his conversion therapy story and censured the organisations which were so quick to make him their darling.
Journalist Wayne Besen has questioned Brinton's account of his childhood, pointing out various inconsistencies in the narrative, such as his claim that he cannot remember his therapist’s name, despite attending sessions with him for over two years, and the fact that the type of severe conversion therapy he described was ‘exceedingly rare’ by the late 1990s.
Besen suggests that Brinton’s story could have been ‘contrived or embellished’ in order to ‘manipulate high-profile leaders’ and achieve celebrity by becoming part of ‘the upper echelons of LGBTQ+ activism’.
Talking of the recent felony charges, Besen comments, “While this is a personal calamity for Brinton, the fallout faced by the LGBTQ+ community could have easily been avoided. The red flags regarding Brinton were overwhelming and obvious to all who cared to see them. Unfortunately, some of America’s top LGBTQ+ activists and organizations were willfully blind to Brinton’s shortcomings… While these advocates were well-intentioned, they took a shortcut, looked the other way, and elevated them [sic] without ever asking: Is Sam Brinton’s story too good to be true?”
Although placed on leave following the charge for felony theft, Brinton remains employed by the Biden government.
Oh JL. Thank you. This is a corker! A second theft, why surely not. This looks like a teensy tiny bit of a pattern now, even a waveform pattern of stealing and breaking boundaries...then stealing and breaking boundaries...then...and all in plain view with everyone being told to look the other way and cancelled for raising eyebrows. Ripley's Believe It or Not! It's hard to credit it's happening and been allowed to unfold as it has.
A while back this all reminded me of men stealing our underwear from washing lines or communal washing facilities, making dirty phone calls (heavy breathing, threats, filthy language or the silent ones). All that pent up frustration, vitriol, force, control and coercion. The weird sense of being followed, stared at or then harassed in the street. You know, we all know. Boundary breaking. Often accepted as 'just part of life'. They're all still at, down through the generations but this lot have been lauded and applauded.
A toxic man is a nuclear waste adviser.