On a chilly February afternoon, Fifi carries mugs filled with Mexican scorching chocolate around her family farm in Elyria, Ohio. The goat watches from behind the rainbow fence as Fifi opens the compact back door to the barn, kicking spent ammunition shells aside.
Inside the barn, motorcycle parts lean against a wall where antiques are displayed. Fifi places the cups on a table near her best friend Bella, who is working with a group of students. Behind them, three trans and LGBTQ+ Pride flags move with the wind.
Bella’s black boots and long witch skirt kick up the ground as she moves, testing the student’s grip on the AR-15.
“Remove your finger from the trigger until you are ready to fire – aim and press slowly,” Bella instructs.
The student squeezes the trigger as the bullets fly through the wide open barn door and down into the handmade targets at the back of Fifi’s farm.
All students are LGBTQ+. Some had never shot a gun before but felt safe enough to do so with the assist of Fifi and Bella, two transgender people of color. (The Buckeye Flame omitted names and changed some names upon request for security reasons.)
Fifi was inspired to organize the classes after they returned home to Ohio in 2022. They lived in Portland, Oregon, and were shocked by the amount of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation being introduced by the Republican-controlled Ohio Statehouse. Rangers saw this right as key to their decision to own a gun and learn to shoot.
“I thought, ‘Damn! It’s a really different environment here,'” Fifi said. “There is hate for transgender people in Portland, but there is nothing like it here.”
Fifi said she has received “incredible feedback” about the classes since classes started last March.
“People were smiling, happy and felt comfortable [because] for the first time they have access to firearms in a safe place,” Fifi said. “To be able to offer it to people is amazing.”
Beginnings
Fifi’s father taught them how to shoot when they were 10, and they used firearms until they were 18. After moving to Portland as a newborn adult, Fifi didn’t feel the need to use firearms again until they began exploring their transgender identity in their 30s.
Fifi stated that safety is becoming a growing concern. They began to wonder how to keep themselves safe when there were people who “hated me for my existence.”
“For a lot of people, it becomes a very core part of their transgender identity,” Fifi said. “The more you explore your identity, the more marginalized you can fall into a certain category.”
In 2019, they flew to Ohio and told their dad about their plans to ride his motorcycle back to Portland. Dad insisted that they take a firearm with them on their trip, so they bought a gun and practiced with it.
Fifi said that during the trip they camped in the Badlands, Yellowstone National Park and other “completely remote areas where there are no facilities.”
“I never had to use it, but it really made me feel a lot safer because I was traveling as a queer person myself,” they said.
Feeling the need to connect with the queer motorcycle community, they founded the Cleveland chapter of the Queers on Gears LGBTQ+ motorcycle club. Fifi stated that it was a “natural transition” into the era of firearms, given the affinity motorcycle culture has for gun ownership.
There they met Bella, who was born and raised in rural Clermont County outside Cincinnati into a military family. Her dad bought her a Daisy Red Rider when she was 5, and she has been a lifelong firearms enthusiast ever since.
She moved to Cleveland in 2014. After losing her biker community to a move a year ago, she found a fresh one thanks to Queers on Gears.
“It’s all still fresh to me,” she said. “For most of my life, I’ve liked more ‘masculine things’. The idea is to pass on that knowledge. I want to take what I know about being a cis man and use it in this transition to help people who are often marginalized by the system.”
At the shooting range
Sarah B. stands up. He aims his 9mm pistol at three circular targets in the distance.
Under LGBTQ+ Pride flags, a single shot is fired from an open back barn door. Metal shields are suspended on a handmade wooden stand. Piles of soggy hay are scattered throughout the range, as well as trees and fields.
“You could even aim a little higher,” Fifi says, moving Sarah’s arm over her shoulder.
Sarah grew up in New York City in a liberal household. She came to Cleveland after spending some time in Los Angeles. Except for one summer in 1992, she knew nothing about firearms.
Due to her upbringing, firearms had a certain mystique about them.
“Oh my God, so if I touch this thing, will I suddenly start murdering people?” Sarah joked.
After Sarah helped Fifi organize and spotless their house, Fifi suggested Sarah come to one of their monthly queer gun days. She had previously thought about going to the local shooting range, but as a middle-aged lesbian she decided it would be too risky.
After visiting Fifi and Bella’s gun days, she went back to “crazy”.
“It was really great,” Sarah said. “It was very accessible, down-to-earth and non-dramatic.”
Allie, a transgender Muslim from Texas, loved “the inherent fun and weirdness of learning to shoot in a barn,” she said. But as a first-generation American and Muslim, she had been “extremely vigilant” about security even before the transition.
She remembers having to shave her beard before going to the airport and people making jokes at her expense.
“They don’t understand it. They don’t live my experience. For example, the bad guys on ‘Call of Duty’ don’t pray to the same God as me,” Allie said. “I don’t necessarily think Texas smiles at a brown person with a gun. That’s a very real thing that needs to be taken into account.”
Pros and cons
Were murmurs of growth among LGBTQ+ people who own firearms, but this is still a compact percentage. The desire for additional protection is justified: A 2025 questionnaire of the Williams Institute suggests that LGBTQ+ people are five times more likely to be victims of violent crime than their cisgender and heterosexual counterparts. But on the other hand, LGBTQ+ people do disproportionately high risk suicide, and having a gun in the home could cause it enhance the risk of suicide.
Fifi actively engages in these types of conversations. During the training, they emphasize that if any gun owner is prone to a mental health crisis, they should identify a safe person in their life to whom they can safely transfer any firearm.
And ultimately, owning a firearm isn’t for everyone, Fifi said. They advocate for stronger gun laws — like class requirements and tighter background checks — and they know and listen to their friends who are victims of gun violence.
“There are absolutely 100% disadvantages to carrying a firearm,” they said. “I really want to make room for how dangerous and controversial guns are. That has to do with respecting the power of firearms.”
Fifi stated that carrying a concealed weapon could be used as a de-escalation tactic. They gave an example: In November, Fifi and Bella were attacked by a man and his daughter in Amherst following a traffic accident.
Fifi said the man hurled anti-LGBTQ+ insults at the couple and attacked them. Although Bella was able to restrain the man for a time, the man broke free and fled before police arrived. Although Bella was uninjured, Fifi suffered grave injuries but made a full recovery.
Fifi said the two were not carrying any concealed firearms that day.
“I feel like if I had had a gun on me at some point, I could have stopped all of this,” Fifi said. “I don’t think anyone is going to continue to try to attack you if you draw your weapon and protect yourself.”
Visitors to the shooting range had similar concerns. As Ohio and other parts of the country push forward with anti-transgender legislation, Allie and Sarah said they need to protect themselves and their neighbors.
“I wonder how many people I pass every day think that all trans people are weirdo rapists,” Allie said. “The people who I hope will stand up for us are silent. The only people who will save us are us.”
Trump administration introduced a total ban on the legal possession of weapons for transgender Americans last year under a a bigger shift in conservative rhetoric which codes transgender people as “mentally ill”, aggressive and risky. The discussions were most recently sparked by the mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis last year officials said the shooting was committed by a transgender person.
Since 2013 Gun violence archive found that transgender people committed only 5 of the more than 5,700 mass shootings in the United States.
Sarah, for her part, stated that she didn’t know if she would be able to carry a concealed weapon, although she is definitely considering purchasing a handgun for home defense. Even then, she doesn’t know if she could shoot and kill another person.
“I don’t want to see anyone I care about die,” Sarah said. “If that means learning how to properly use a firearm, then that’s what it means.”
For Fifi, the offer is not only an educational opportunity. It’s an extension of their activism, inspired by black revolutionaries like the Black Panthers. Fifi stated that as LGBTQ+ people become targets of further oppression, they look to the Black Panthers for inspiration and courage.
“Black revolutionaries have been through it all,” Fifi said. “The Black Panthers teach their syndicates and their members how to carry firearms, how to control attention in a room, how to demand respect, and never once wave their morals or ethics just so someone can take advantage of them.”
Bella believes instructing people how to use firearms safely is part of the transition process “to help those who are often marginalized by the system.”
“I still have friends everywhere from all walks of life,” she said. “I try to take the ability to make friends in every circle and use it almost as a given to help people who have been hurt.”
After a long afternoon, people emerge from the barn to their cars.
At the end of Fifi’s half-mile driveway, people hug and exchange phone numbers. Chickens are talking in the background. A handful of goats press their faces against the boards of a rainbow-painted fence.
Fifi waves goodbye from outside the garage as the cars roll toward the road.
A month later, Ohio Republicans introduced another bill targeting transgender people. 🔥
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