It seems not everyone is welcome in Idaho after the state’s attorney general ordered schools to prohibit signs that read “Everyone is Welcome Here” under a new state law.
H.B. 41, which went into effect July 1, bans the display of banners or flags in K-12 classrooms that represent “political, religious, or ideological views, including but not limited to political parties, race, gender, sexual orientation, or political ideologies.” Republican Raúl Labrador issued guidance on how schools should apply the law, determining that the policy applies even to vague messages promoting kindness.
Labrador specifically referenced signs hung by Sarah Inama, a sixth grade history teacher at Lewis and Clark Middle School who went viral in March after she revealed that Ada School District administration ordered her to remove signs in her classroom that read “In This Room, Everyone Is Welcome, Important, Accepted, Respected, Encouraged, Valued, Equal,” and “Everyone Is Welcome Here.”
“These signs are part of an ideological/social movement which started in Twin Cities, Minnesota following the 2016 election of Donald Trump,” he wrote. “Since that time, the signs have been used by the Democratic party as a political statement. The Idaho Democratic Party even sells these signs as part of its fundraising efforts.”
The “movement” that began in Minnesota referenced by Labrador was a group of local moms who carried pastel signs that stated “All are Welcome Here” in protest of someone tagging their children’s high school with racist graffiti following Trump’s election, as reported by Kare11. Some local businesses also displayed the sign in solidarity, but it is not the same design or slogan as the one in Inama’s classroom, which instead featured a row of hands with varying skin tones.
Per Labrador’s guidance, even children’s artwork could be prohibited under the law “if it meets the statutory definitional criteria of a ‘banner,'” though there is “an exception for a ‘brief curriculum-based educational purpose’ display which may apply to the artwork.”
After refusing to remove the signs for several weeks, Inama ultimately resigned. She told local station KTVB when the controversy first began that “I was told that ‘everyone is welcome here’ is not something that everybody believes. So that’s what makes it a personal opinion.”
“I don’t agree that this is a personal opinion,” she said. “I feel like this is the basis of public education.”
The U.N. Human Rights Council voted on Monday to renew the mandate of an LGBTQ rights expert, a move welcomed by advocates amid the absence of the United States, a former key supporter that is now rolling back such protections.
Western diplomats had previously voiced concerns about the renewal of the mandate of South African scholar Graeme Reid who helps to boost protections by documenting abuses and through dialogue with countries.
The motion for a three-year renewal passed with 29 votes in favor, 15 against and three abstentions. Supporters included Chile, Germany, Kenya and South Africa while several African nations and Qatar opposed it.
“The renewal of this mandate is a spark of hope in a time when reactionary powers worldwide are trying to dismantle progress that our communities fought so hard to achieve,” said Julia Ehrt, executive director of campaign group ILGA World.
The United States, which has disengaged from the council under President Donald Trump, citing an alleged antisemitic bias, was previously a supporter of the mandate under the Biden administration.
Since taking office in January, Trump has signed executive orders to curb transgender rights and dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion practices in the government and private sector.
His administration says such steps restore fairness, but civil rights and LGBTQ advocates say they make marginalized groups more vulnerable.
In negotiations before the vote, Pakistan voiced opposition to the mandate on behalf of Muslim group OIC, calling it a tool to advocate “controversial views.”
Virginia officials have agreed not to fully enforce a 2020 law banning conversion therapy for minors as part of an agreement with a faith-based conservative group that sued over the law, authorities said earlier this week.
The Virginia Department of Health Professions, represented by the state’s office of the attorney general, entered into a consent decree with the Founding Freedoms Law Center last month, saying officials will not discipline counselors who engage in talk conversion therapy.
Shaun Kenney, a spokesperson with the Virginia Attorney General’s Office, said on Tuesday his office was satisfied with the consensus.
“This court action fixes a constitutional problem with the existing law by allowing talk therapy between willing counselors and willing patients, including those struggling with gender dysphoria,” Kenney said in a statement. “Talk therapy with voluntary participants was punishable before this judgment was entered. This result—which merely permits talk therapy within the standards of care while preserving the remainder of the law—respects the religious liberty and free speech rights of both counselors and patients.”
A Henrico Circuit Court judge signed the consent decree in June. Two professional counselors represented by the law center sued the state’s health department and counseling board last September, arguing that the law violated their right to religious freedom.
The term “conversion therapy” refers to a scientifically discredited practice of using therapy in an attempt to convert LGBTQ people to heterosexuality.
The practice has been banned in 23 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ rights think tank.
The practice has been a matter of dispute in several states. A ruling is expected any day from the Wisconsin Supreme Court over whether a legislative committee’s rejection of a state agency rule that would ban the practice of “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ people was unconstitutional.
The U.S. Supreme Court decided in March to take up a case from Colorado to determine whether state and local governments can enforce laws banning conversion therapy for LGBTQ children.
According to the law center, the Virginia consent decree applies not only to the two counselors but to all counselors in Virginia.
“We are grateful to the Defendants in this case and to the Attorney General, who did the right thing by siding with the Constitution,” the law center said in a statement.
Democratic Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, who backed the 2020 bill, blasted the decree.
“This was a statute that was enacted to save lives,” he told reporters during a Zoom session on Tuesday. “All the research, all the professional psychiatric organizations have condemned conversion therapy. They say it doesn’t work, and they say it’s counterproductive.”
As new GLAAD research was released simultaneously, it is clear that there is an abundant overlap in findings: There are catastrophic effects from the lethal assault on the LGBTQ community with a flagrant focus on transgender people.
“We lead with facts first,” Tristan Marra, GLAAD’s Vice President of Research and Reports said.
Marra is responsible for making sure GLAAD’s emerging data gets out to the public in a way that helps shape accurate conversations about the at-large LGBTQ community.
“Facts are thought-provoking, facts build empathy, and facts are a bridge to greater understanding. Thoughtful research that shines a light on our lived experiences and the realities we face creates opportunities for cultural change,” Marra continued.
Today, the basic rights of trans people, about 1% of the population, continue to get eviscerated year-by-year, state-by-state, and now, under a federal administration dedicated to stripping trans people of their dignity.
Twenty-five states have bans in place for best practice healthcare for trans youth, and with at least 17 lawsuits challenging different states’ bans, according to the Movement Advancement Project (MAPS).
“They’re Ruining People’s Lives” documents the harm caused by bans on gender-affirming care for transgender youth in the U.S. It highlights the severe toll this takes on the mental and physical well-being of transgender youth,” the lead researcher and writer of the report Yasemin Smallens said at the press conference. Smallens is an officer in the LGBT Rights Program at Human Rights Watch.
The report is based on the interviews of 51 people including transgender youth, parents, healthcare providers, and advocates across 19 states, and illuminates the barbaric effects of transgender healthcare bans on transgender people in the U.S.
Of those interviewed, 11 families told Human Rights Watch they were compelled to travel out of state for care, often making regular trips to consult physicians, or obtain prescriptions. Four youth were unable to begin care due to legal barriers combined with geographic and financial obstacles. One family relocated to another state to secure reliable access to care and escape an environment hostile to trans people. Seven other youth attempted suicide in relation to the bans; three attempts led to hospitalizations.
Likewise, GLAAD’s latest research affirms these experiences, and further predicts expectations of violence in the future.
The 2025 ALERT Desk report released late last month shows that over the past year, 52% of all anti-LGBTQ incidents were targeting transgender and gender non-conforming people (485 out of 932 incidents). GLAAD’s 2025 Accelerating Acceptance also reported that two in three LGBTQ adults (68%) expect the violence or threats against LGBTQ Americans to increase within the next year.
For many, this data saves lives, even when it reveals the effects of maleficence.
“Research like this, reports like this, are used in court. They’re used to build policy in the legislature. They’re used to advocate for so much in a real, tangible way because there are reports out that are filled with misinformation and disinformation,” Executive Director of PFLAG NYCClark Wolff Hamel said at the press conference.
PFLAG NYC has services directly targeting the disinformation that prompts the bans that encourage such violence against a single community.
A large part of those services are educating families, the education system, state and federal legislature, and community.
That’s why producing research, Hamel continued, that backs correct information along with actual experiences from real people of the community sets an “incredibly important” precedent.
Hamel and Smallens were joined by Meredithe McNamara MD MSc, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Yale School of Medicine. NcNamara says that treatment described as gender-affirming care has been used for years.
She says that people lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of gender-affirming care for cisgender (or non-transgender) people is surgery. McNamara is trained in adolescent medicine and started learning about gender-affirming care in college. Now, with 15 years of experience, she advocates for trans truth through science and facts.
“Amongst youth, 97% of surgeries that could be described as for gender-affirming reasons were in cisgender teen boys who had an excess of breast tissue, and felt that did not align with their gender identity and wanted surgery,” McNamara said to the audience.
The Yale professor said bans are contradictory, and focus on a minority of people who receive gender-affirming care, while purposely mystifying the majority of people (non-transgender) who receive this care without any issues. The internal inconsistencies and conflicts of a broad ban for trans healthcare will create confusion, and codify dangerous procedures on intersex infants.
In fact, GLAAD’s Alert Desk found that the increasing attacks on trans communities directly coincides with at least four executive orders from the Trump administration that specifically demean and discriminate against trans Americans, and following $215M in political ads during the 2024 campaign targeting trans people.
What those ads don’t state is that nearly all trans youth continue their care into adulthood, most studies show, and satisfaction rates are high. Despite its proven efficacy, legislative bans have disrupted or denied access to this health care, replacing nuanced medical decisions with blunt, all-encompassing restrictions.
For now, as a need for change bellows out of the hearts and minds of LGBTQ people everywhere, verifiable truth in the face of disinformation can act as a basis for successful resistance efforts for trans equality. “The integrity of data and the power of research as a center of truth and a catalyst for change are critically important. Measuring is the first step in moving the needle on acceptance,” Marra said.
More about the GLAAD Media Institute: The GLAAD Media Institute provides training, consultation, and actionable research to develop an army of social justice ambassadors for all marginalized communities to champion acceptance and amplify media impact. Using the best practices, tools, and techniques we’ve perfected over the past 30 years, the GLAAD Media Institute turns education into armor for today’s culture war—transforming individuals into compelling storytellers, media-savvy navigators, and mighty ambassadors whose voices break through the noise and incite real change. Activate with the GLAAD Media Institute now at glaad.org/institute.
Police Scotland has announced that trans women held in custody by police in the country will now be strip-searched by male officers, not female.
The decision comes over two months after the UK Supreme Court ruling. The landmark case brought by gender-critical group For Women Scotland against the Scottish government found that the legal definition of a woman excludes trans women and the protected characteristic of ‘sex’ under the 2010 Equality Act refers to biology.
In new interim guidance around searching members of the trans community, Police Scotland, which is the UK’s second-largest police force after the Met, issued a five-page document, which states that searches will be conducted “on the basis of biological sex”.
However, if someone requests an officer of their affirmed gender to perform the search, “efforts will be made to ensure an appropriate officer conducts the search, where this is operationally viable to do so”.
In these scenarios, written consent from the authorising officer, the person being searched and the officer/s conducting the search will be required.
Assistant Chief Constable Catriona Paton said via the press release: “This is a complex and important area of policing and searching members of the public is a significant intrusion of their personal liberty and privacy.
“It is critical that as an organisation, Police Scotland continues to fulfil its legal duties as well as ensuring officers and staff feel confident that they are conducting searches lawfully.
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“While the guidance will bring clarity to both our colleagues and members of the public, we are acutely aware of the impact and depth of feeling around this issue, both among the transgender community and those who hold gender critical views.
“Our priority continues to be ensuring that in all our interactions we police and make decisions in line with our service values of integrity, fairness, respect and upholding human rights.”
The interim guidance remains under review “with ongoing legal advice and engagement with key stakeholders”, amid the pending publication of revised national guidance. Police Scotland added that its wider review into sex and gender is ongoing, and further updates would “be issued in due course”.
A spokesperson of the Scottish government told the BBC: “It is for Police Scotland to decide their operational processes, including their guidance for officers, and ensure they are in line with legal obligations.
“The Scottish government has made clear we accept the Supreme Court ruling and that public bodies have a duty to comply with the law.”
Since 1989, the LGBT Life Center in Norfolk, Virginia, has built up what CEO Stacie Walls calls a “test and treat” model. For every patient that walked through the doors of their HIV clinic after working up the courage to get tested, there had been the promise that, if they tested positive, all they’d need to do to get treatment was walk down the hallway.
But since the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to HIV funding took place earlier this year, that’s no longer the case. “The grant money that pays for people who are uninsured is the grant money that they have canceled,” Walls told Uncloseted Media. “That’s so disheartening and scary and goes against everything that we’ve ever wanted to embrace as a nonprofit service agency.”
With these cuts, staff now have to send uninsured patients to the next nearest community HIV program in Hampton, a 30-minute drive away. Walls says they’ve already had to transfer 19 existing patients, including some of their frequent client base of low-income LGBTQ people of color, who are disproportionatelyimpacted by the virus. While the center has been able to shift to covering at least their initial treatment appointment, they are unable to cover further care, and Walls says that even this is not sustainable.
The LGBT Life Center is just one of the many U.S.-based HIV organizations and programs that have fallen victim to the billions of dollars worth of cuts by Trump and his newly created Department of Government Efficiency.
HIV funding has been hit particularly hard: Uncloseted Media estimates that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has terminated more than $1 billion worth of grants to HIV-related research.1 In addition, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has terminated 71% of all global HIV grants, and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has been the subject of temporary suspension and major proposed cuts.
Additional cuts are also on the horizon, with the Trump administration’s budget proposal for Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 calling for the closure of all Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) HIV programs.
The effects of these cuts are deadly. Researchers estimate that PEPFAR’s funding freeze alone may already be associated with more than 60,000 deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, and numerous experts say that the entire global health system could be upended if the administration’s HIV cuts continue as planned. Mathematical models show that the worst-case scenario is apocalyptic: nearly 11 million new infections, 3 million deaths, and an infection rate outpacing the virus’s peak in the 1990s.
“This is not something that’s just a matter of the scientists losing funding; the community is losing funding, and in the long term, losing ground in the fight against HIV,” says Noam Ross, executive director at research nonprofit rOpenSci.
The Domestic Impact
Cuts to HIV funding in the U.S. have been a significant casualty of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce spending and attack Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Researchers behind Grant Watch, an independent third-party database of grants terminated by the NIH and the National Science Foundation, have identified HIV-related funding as one of the most common targets for termination. As of June 17, Uncloseted Media has calculated roughly $1.353 billion in HIV-related terminations in Grant Watch’s NIH database, accounting for more than a third of the $3.7 billion in recorded NIH cuts overall.
List of terminated HIV-related grants in Grant Watch’s database | Screenshot
“They’re certainly casting an enormously wide net in this,” says Ross, who is also Grant Watch’s co-developer. “It doesn’t matter that they’re not explicitly saying that ‘it’s a war on HIV’ because if they’re gonna have a war on sexual minorities and transgender people, it’s a war on HIV too.”
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has explicitly told HIV groups across the country that funding was cut because it believes health research for LGBTQ people and racial minorities is unscientific. Researchers across the country have received letters and emails from the NIH with nearly identical statements informing them of their grant terminations:
“Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”
One of the programs subjected to cuts is the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network (ATN), an HIV program that has been active since 2001. Its goal is to prevent, diagnose, and treat HIV in young people.
Research under ATN’s umbrella has seen promising developments, including progress towards a product that could combine PrEP and birth control into one pill as well as new methods for reducing HIV transmission in young men who use stimulants. Despite this, NIH cut $15 million worth of grants to ATN because of its focus on high-risk LGBTQ youth populations. The program’s funds were later restored, but only after ATN agreed to cut off a study on transgender youth of color.
“There are particular issues around Black women, LGBTQ people, [and] the type of treatment that they need … that’s the social side of medicine, which is a very important part of medicine—it’s not just molecules, it’s people,” Ross says, adding that grantees focused on “delivery and participation and how to keep people in care,” such as programs that help vulnerable populations stay on PrEP or undetectable folks maintain their antiretroviral therapy regimen, are “very undervalued by [the] administration.”
“So that stuff feels like it’s faster to get canceled,” he says.
Rowan Martin-Hughes, senior research fellow at the Burnet Institute in Australia, says cutting programs that support prevention and long-term treatment is dangerous.
“With other infectious diseases, you treat people and then they’re recovered; with HIV, people require lifetime treatment,” he told Uncloseted Media. “Most of those people infected with HIV are still alive, and if you take treatment away from them, many people will die. And because treatment is also the best form of preventing transmission, many millions of additional infections will occur.”
Many advocates and lawmakers are pushing back against the cuts. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Boston ruled that the NIH’s DEI-related grant terminations—including many HIV programs—are illegally racist and discriminatory toward LGBTQ people, saying that in his four decades as a judge, he had “never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable.” HHS officials say they will consider an appeal.
NIH is far from the only agency issuing massive cuts to HIV. The CDC has terminated large grants to numerous HIV clinics across the country. Los Angeles-based St. John’s Well Child and Family Center lost $746,000, and the LGBT Life Center in Norfolk has lost over $962,000 and could potentially lose a whopping $6.3 million, which makes up 48% of their operating budget. Walls says it’s not just their treatment model that’s taken a hit—the center had to cancel 16 free mobile testing events in June alone, which she fears could cause many more people to contract the virus without knowing, contributing to its spread.
“When we’re out in the community in our mobile testing van, it’s super convenient for people. We’re parked there, they can just walk through, get their test and keep on going, and so that is a low-barrier way to test,” says Walls, who says that easy access is critical for low-income LGBTQ people of color. “[Without it], thousands of people that we test every month or every year are not going to be tested.”
The Vaccine Impact
DEI isn’t the only reason the government has given for HIV-related cuts. The Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development (CHAVD), a consortium of researchers at Scripps Research and Duke University, was informed last month that, after seven years of funding from NIH, their grant would be terminated next year.
Dennis Burton, the program’s director, says they are close to a major breakthrough, with promising technology based on broadly neutralizing antibodies that can disable thousands of different strains of HIV being nearly ready for clinical trials in humans. But without NIH funding, the project may be unable to continue.
“It would put back the development of an HIV vaccine by a decade or longer,” Burton told Uncloseted Media. “We begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel … it’s just the wrong time to stop.”
A senior NIH official told the New York Times that “NIH expects to be shifting its focus toward using currently available approaches to eliminate HIV/AIDS.”
And while Burton says that existing HIV treatment medicine like antiretroviral therapies is “a miracle,” the decision to jettison vaccine research in its favor is misguided.
“The drugs are fantastic … but they’re expensive and people have to take them—the great thing about a good vaccine is that with one or a limited number of shots you can get lifelong prevention,” says Burton. “We want people to live without the fear of HIV, and vaccines are the proven way of preventing viral infections and viral disease.”
The Global Impact
The most sweeping cuts to HIV funding have been to foreign aid. On his first day in office, Trump ordered a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid funding as well as a stop-work order for PEPFAR. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver to continue some critical operations, department memos specifically prohibited funding for PrEP for all populations except pregnant and breastfeeding women.
This move, coupled with the dissolution of USAID and a proposal to cut an additional $1.9 billion from PEPFAR in the FY26 budget request compared to the prior year, has created a perfect storm with staggering results.
The PEPFAR Impact Tracker, a project by Boston University infectious disease modeler Brooke Nichols, estimates that over 60,000 adults and over 6,000 children have died due to PEPFAR-related disruptions between January 24 and June 17. And a survey conducted over the first week of the stop-work order found that 86% of PEPFAR recipient organizations reported that their patients would lose access to HIV treatment within the next month, more than 60% had already laid off staff, and 36% had to shut down their organizations.
The impact hits the hardest in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest HIV concentration, accounting for an estimated 67% of HIV positive individuals globally as of 2021. Numerous long-running and influential LGBTQ health clinics in South Africa have been forced to close, and an investigation by The Independent found that communities in Uganda and Zimbabwe are rapidly being torn apart as more people risk death from lack of access to HIV treatment due to the cuts.
Numerous LGBTQ people told the Daily Sun, a South African digital newspaper, that the closure of long-running clinics like Engage Men’s Health in Johannesburg and Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute was devastating.
“I take PrEP, but you can’t go to any clinic as a queer person and ask for it without people looking at you weirdly,” one trans person told the Daily Sun. “At the trans clinic, it was different. Everything was smooth, everything flowed.”
The U.S. has historically been the biggest contributor to fighting HIV, accounting for more than 70% of international funding, but they’re not the only ones making cuts. Following Trump’s example, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced 6 billion pounds in funding cuts to foreign aid, including HIV, and France and Germany also announced multi-billion euro cuts.
“HIV has received a lot more funding than any other health area,” says John Stover, vice president for modeling and analysis at Avenir Health. “So it’s a likely target just because the money is so large.”
Martin-Hughes of the Burnet Institute thinks these cuts are dangerous for the entire global health system. He co-authored a study modeling the potential impacts of HIV funding cuts from the major global funders, and the results are grim.
In the worst-case scenario, where PEPFAR is discontinued with no replacement or mitigation alongside the proposed cuts from the top five biggest-spending countries, the study projects that there could be nearly 11 million new infections and nearly 3 million deaths by 2030, which would raise the annual infection rate higher than its 3.3 million peak in 1995.
This is not necessarily the most likely scenario, as PEPFAR is expected to be reinstated in at least some form. However, even the most optimistic estimates show that substantial cuts like the one proposed in the Trump administration’s FY26 budget could still put an end to 15 years of declining infection and death rates—especially since prevention and testing would likely be sacrificed first.
“The world has made really amazing progress on HIV,” Martin-Hughes told Uncloseted Media. “That kind of increase [in infections and death rates would be] a major reversal.” He says that major foreign aid cuts would leave programs for at-risk populations, such as gay and bisexual men, trans women, sex workers and people who inject drugs, particularly vulnerable to being shut down.
Cuts to PEPFAR, a program started by Republican president George W. Bush in 2003, have been controversial even among Republicans, with Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins publicly opposing them. While many researchers and policymakers advocate for funding and leadership on HIV to shift away from foreign aid and more towards local governments, Stover and other experts argue that that transition can only be possible with support from PEPFAR in the interim.
“Overall, we all have a vision of more local ownership and control over the resources and how they’re allocated,” Stover says. “[But] it takes time to make this transition, so it’s gonna be practically impossible if funding is just cut off abruptly.”
Cuts on All Sides
Walls says cuts are also happening at the state level. Virginia’s Republican governor Glenn Youngkin slashed hundreds of thousands of dollars for HIV programs, and Walls’ center recently lost multiple corporate donors, including Target, due to pressure from the Trump administration to roll back their DEI efforts.
She says that the fear of backlash for supporting LGBTQ initiatives is so pervasive that even some of their continued donors are now requesting that their contributions remain anonymous.
“Now, if Target was to advertise that they were giving money to the LGBTQ community center in their neighborhood or city, they would have consequences from the administration or even shoppers,” she says. “They’re not gonna take that risk.”
Meanwhile, Walls says the LGBT Life Center is staying afloat thanks to the local community stepping up, with an unprecedented number of people signing up to be volunteers and local restaurants and other businesses providing their assistance, whether that’s by participating in citywide fundraising events or offering to help paint the clinic.
“It is amazing to see, and I know that through all of this the community will help carry us through, because we have brought value to this community for 36 years and I feel confident that people see value in our services,” she says.
Still, experts, advocates, and infectious disease modelers agree that if HIV funding doesn’t continue, the effects will be devastating.
“I think it’s hard for people to look at these numbers and not feel like it’s important to prioritize,” says Martin-Hughes. “There needs to be, to avert these worst-case scenarios, sufficient funding for those programs.”
This story was originally published in Uncloseted Media. For all their LGBTQ-focused journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at UnclosetedMedia.com.
Keir Starmer has urged public bodies currently not enforcing the Supreme Court’s gender ruling to bar trans people from single-sex spaces “as soon as possible”.
The court verdict, handed down in April, deemed that the legal definition of the protected characteristic of “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act referred to “biological sex” only, so excluding trans people.
In response, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the UK’s equality watchdog, issued interim guidance which called for transgender men and women to be banned from single-sex facilities which matched their gender and, in some cases, from using those which matched their “biological sex”.
When asked at the NATO summit in The Hague if hospitals, universities and government departments should implement the findings of the Supreme Court into internal policies, the prime minister said: “We’ve accepted the ruling, welcomed the ruling, and everything else flows from that, as far as I’m concerned.
“Therefore, all guidance needs to be consistent with the ruling and we need to get to that position as soon as possible.”
Maya Forstater, the chief executive of gender-critical campaign group Sex Matters, said Starmer’s comment was an “important intervention from the prime minister” given the “huge number of public bodies failing to implement the Supreme Court judgement and therefore operating outside the law”.
She went on to say: “Political leadership is essential if women, whose rights are being stolen, are not to be forced to turn to the courts, where public bodies will end up losing – at great expense to taxpayers.”
The EHRC’s public consultation period into changes to its Code of Conduct, which aims to “support service providers, public bodies and associations to understand their duties under the Equality Act and put them into practice” closes today. A mass lobby took place at Westminster last week, where trans people hoped to voice concerns to their MPs.
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The situation has left many trans people feeling fear for their rights, and Green co-leader Carla Denyer warned that the EHRC’s interim guidance would “act as a bigot’s charter”, with the potential to unleash “vigilante harassment, intimidation and violence against trans people when they try to use facilities in public spaces”.
Following the Supreme Court judgement, he told the BBC: “I welcome the decision, which has given us much-needed clarity, and I think for those now drawing up guidance, it’s a much clearer position. I’m really pleased the court has clarified the position. We can move on from there and that’s very helpful. I welcome that.”
Starmer went on to say that “a woman is an adult female”, and when asked by ITV West Country if he believed trans women are women, he replied: “I think the Supreme Court has answered that question. A woman is an adult female. It’s important that we see the judgement for what it is: a welcome step forward. We need to move [on] and ensure all guidance is in the right place according to that judgement.”
The Supreme Court case was brought against the Scottish government by gender-critical For Women Scotland, supported by author JK Rowling, following a lower court’s finding that sex was not limited to biology.
For months, the city of Columbia, South Carolina, has been steeped in a battle over conversion therapy in the state capital.
The Republican candidate for governor is for conversion therapy and threatened the city with withdrawing state funds over the issue. The Democratic candidate running for mayor of Columbia is against it; she called efforts to reinstate the debunked practice “a betrayal.”
On Tuesday, the conversion therapy advocates won when the city council voted to overturn its ban, which has been in place since 2021.
The 4-3 council vote reaffirmed another vote with the same result a week earlier. That vote followed months of delayed city council action as activists flooded City Hall chambers urging officials not to repeal the ban, according to the Post & Courier.
The council’s reconsideration began in April with a letter sent by state Attorney General Alan Wilson (R), who’s running for governor in 2026.
Wilson argued the city’s conversion therapy ordinance violated state and federal law, and he enlisted the South Carolina Legislature to introduce a provision that would strip Columbia of $3.7 million in state funding if the council didn’t overturn the ordinance.
Since then, every city council meeting has been packed with LGBTQ+ advocates, licensed mental health workers, and ACLU members urging the council to resist Wilson’s raw power play aimed at riling his MAGA base at the expense of the LGBTQ+ community.
Wilson formally announced his run for governor on Monday.
In the end, current Mayor Daniel Rickenmann (R) and three other council members voted to lift the ban, citing the threat of massive funding cuts.
The loss in state money would be too significant, they argued, over an ordinance some claim was largely symbolic: over the life of the ban, no licensed counselors had been fined or reported in violation of the ordinance. Infractions could have earned counselors a $500 fine.
“For y’all to give in and capitulate without a battle of any kind is strange to me. Where is the outrage?” asked Dr. Isabelle Mandell at Tuesday’s meeting, reported by the South Carolina Daily Gazette. “You haven’t tried. You haven’t fought it.”
“The job now is just to get boots on the ground, spread the message that, ‘Hey, we need new leadership in these positions,’” said Justice Hills, who has shown up to every meeting since April to urge council members to keep the ban.
In a statement following the vote, Columbia’s LGBTQ+ Harriet Hancock Centerurged the community to persevere.
“Our work doesn’t stop with this vote,” the center’s director wrote. “For those who are asking, ‘What now?’ ‘What’s next?’ I encourage you to turn our anger into action.”
Four of the city council’s members are up for reelection in November.
Names of seven transgender trailblazers were added to the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall Inn Thursday night.
The Wall of Honor posthumously celebrates LGBTQ+ activists, artists, and others who played crucial roles in the LGBTQ+ rights movement. This year’s inductees are all transgender at a time when trans Americans are under attack from the federal government and elsewhere. They were inducted by the National LGBTQ Task Force and the International Imperial Court Council.
“This year’s focus on transgender trailblazers and changemakers underscores the importance of recognizing our history and the current climate for our trans siblings,” Cathy Renna, communications director for the Task Force, said in apress release. “As we continue to fiercely battle against attacks on our trans and nonbinary communities, we are honored to uplift their legacies. Their courage inspires our ongoing fight for liberation, both within the Task Force family and across every queer advocacy organization.”
“In these times, when there are radical and extreme campaigns trying to erase our transgender community, the Imperial Courts and Task Force are reminding us all that transgender people have not only always been here, but have also been some of our community’s most dedicated activists and leaders,” added Nicole Murray-Ramirez, founder of the Wall of Honor, a San Diego city commissioner, and titular head of the Imperial Court System. This year’s honorees are Ruddy Martinez, Chilli Pepper, Lynn Conway, Alan L. Hart, Jiggly Caliente, the Lady Chablis, and Sam Nordquist.
Martinez, a.k.a. “Mami Ruddys,” was the matriarch of Puerto Rico’s LGBTQ+ community and a pioneering drag artist, activist, and trans woman who, since the 1980s, opened her home to young queer people rejected by their families.
Chilli Pepper appeared on talk shows, including Phil Donahue’s and Oprah Winfrey’s, in the 1980s to discuss life as a trans woman and debunk harmful stereotypes about trans and queer people. She also was an activist for AIDS awareness.
Conway was an electrical engineer, computer scientist, and trans activist. While facing discrimination as a trans woman in her field, she created a simplified method of microchip design and helped develop the Very Large-Scale Integration design.
Hart, a physicist and writer, was among the first people to receive gender-affirming surgery and identify and live as a man. He attended medical school after the typhoid epidemic in 1912 and contributed to tuberculosis research.
Jiggly Caliente, a.k.a. Bianca Castro-Arabejo, died at age 44 on April 27 of this year. The Filipino-American drag queen rose to fame in season 4 of RuPaul’s Drag Race and also starred in the sixth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars. She was a resident judge of Drag Race Philippines and appeared in Pose as Veronica Ferocity.
The Lady Chablis, a performer in Savannah, Georgia, was portrayed in John Berendt’s nonfiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which highlighted the city’s underground nightlife scene and a scandalous murder. She played herself in the film based on the book. While publicizing the film, she charmed journalists and audiences with her charismatic presence.
Nordquist, a Black trans man from Minnesota, died in February in upstate New York after being tortured for more than a month. Seven people have been charged with first-degree murder in connection with his death. All have pleaded not guilty.
Nordquist’s family attended the ceremony. “We just wanted to thank everybody for acknowledging Sam and having Sam being honored on the wall,” his mother, Linda Nordquist, said at the event, according to TV station WHEC. “There’s no words to express how we’re feeling.”
The Supreme Court wrapped up its term last week, and true to form, the right-wing majority went out of its way to prove that they think their job is to give Donald Trump and Christian nationalists as much power as possible. That the Court’s radical decisions coincided with the tenth anniversary of the Obergefell ruling, which legalized marriage equality, should give one pause as to where the future of marriage may be headed.
In perhaps the most shocking ruling, the six conservative justices did away with the national injunctions prohibiting Trump from ignoring birthright citizenship.The fact that birthright citizenship is as solid a constitutional construct as can be imagined – it has more than 100 years of rulings to support it – didn’t figure into the justices’ reasoning. They looked at a technical issue, which is whether district courts can make a decision that applies nationwide, and decided the courts cannot.
Birthright citizenship is such a basic issue that the ruling blessed Trump‘s lawlessness. If Trump decided that slavery wasn’t, in fact, illegal, courts couldn’t issue a nationwide injunction saying otherwise. Instead, cases would have to wend their way through the system before they would end up at the Supreme Court. The conservatives also may be hinting that they’re okay with doing away with birthright citizenship, which would be an extreme act.
What makes the ruling all the more reprehensible is that when Joe Biden was president, he was subjected to multiple nationwide injunctions from Trump-appointed judges. The Supreme Court didn’t have any issue with those injunctions. It was only when Trump resumed office that the justices suddenly found the problem to be a burden.
In another ruling, the majority decided that parents can pull their children from school rather than let them learn that LGBTQ+ people exist by reading some sweet storybooks. “The storybooks unmistakably convey a particular viewpoint about same-sex marriage and gender,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority.
This is just the most recent example of the right-wing justices favoring the rights of religious conservatives above anyone else’s. The fact that Alito wrote the decision is not surprising. The decision is laced with thinly disguised homophobia. Alito frets about “young impressionable children,” as if they might be recruited to be LGBTQ+. He talks about people who are “apparently” transgender, dismissing their reality. He shudders at the idea that the books present same-sex weddings as “cause for celebration.”
For many experts, that seems unlikely. GLAD Law’s Mary Bonauto, who represented Obergefell before the Supreme Court, says the Court doesn’t have the appetite for such a drastic move.
“The Court understands this issue is about the foundational importance of family,” she told The New York Times. “That’s why it has described marriage as ‘the most important relation in life,’ a ‘basic liberty,’ essential to ‘the pursuit of happiness.’” A lot of others agree.
However, these are not normal times. And this is definitely not a normal Court. It has already demonstrated its disdain for precedent and public opinion in overturning a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. Moreover, this term, the conservative majority has gone out of its way to pave the way for the kind of changes that Project 2025 has put in writing. That includes enshrining marriage as only being between a man and a woman – the very thing that the majority in last week’s ruling was letting parents ensure their children would experience.
Perhaps overturning Obergefell outright would be too much (although that’s a gamble). But the justices could erode it. They could let the Kim Davises of the country opt out of providing marriage licenses on religious freedom grounds, thus creating marriage deserts. Davis is appealing her case up to the Supreme Court, and her attorney, Mat Staver of the anti-LGBTQ+ legal group Liberty Counsel, would like nothing more than to land a blow against marriage equality.
The current majority on the Court has made it clear that it’s folly to try to argue with them about accepted legal precepts. They pretty much figure out what their ideological interests are and then justify them with legal word salad. Logically, there is no reason for the Court to revisit Obergefell. But in the Trump era, logic is in short supply, while raw power is all the rage.
