Equality California, the nation’s largest statewide LGBTQ+ civil rights organization, endorsed California Proposition 1, the Reproductive Freedom Act, that seeks to amend the California Constitution to protect a person’s right to basic healthcare and reproductive freedoms on Wednesday. Senate Pro Tem Toni Atkins and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon introduced the Reproductive Freedom Act shortly after the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson was leaked in May, indicating that the Court would likely issue a ruling that would reverse Roe v. Wade and undercut nearly five decades of precedence that protects access to abortion. The California Legislature voted to place Proposition 1 on the ballot this November. If approved by the voters, it would bar the state from denying or interfering with a person’s right to choose an abortion and contraceptives.
“We are extremely grateful for the leadership of Pro Tem Atkins, Speaker Rendon, Governor Newsom and the California Legislature to protect access to reproductive care in California. Abortion and family planning clinics have become trusted providers of care to the LGBTQ+ community. LGBTQ+ people, especially those who are transgender, avoid medical care based on legitimate fears of being turned away or facing discrimination and ignorance, and find judgement free care from a clinic that offers abortions, said Equality California Executive Director Tony Hoang. “Reproductive freedom and LGBTQ+ equality are linked by the fight for bodily autonomy. We all seek control over our own bodies. We decide whether and with whom to have intimate relationships, when to start a family, whether to seek gender affirming care to align with our gender identity – We want to live as our true selves as determined by us, not by others.”
“Devastatingly, the Supreme Court has taken away the constitutional right to abortion — a civil right that has been the law of the land for generations and allowed people to make the best health care decisions for them. Thankfully in California, we stand ready to protect these rights, which is exactly what Proposition 1 will do,” said Jodi Hicks, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California. “We’re proud to stand with Equality California to add the right to an abortion and contraception directly into our state Constitution – and send the message that in California, extreme politicians can’t strip away our fundamental freedoms.”
The 35th Annual Art for Life Auction with proceeds benefiting Face to Face opens its bidding online Thursday, August 25 The dedicated family of AFL artists and supporters have donated an amazing array of paintings, jewelry, ceramics and experiences for you to bid on.
First register to bid, then view the gallery so you’re ready to bid when the auction opens next week. Register here: https://artforlife.f2f.org.
Bidding lasts until Tuesday, August 30 at 8:00pm (pst)
Once you bid you will be notified via text if someone places a higher bid on your item. You can then decide to raise your bid; or you may choose to let the auction software bid for you up to your pre-selected maximum.
For bidders who have registered previous years your Username and Password remain the same.
Singapore has no plans to lift its ban on same-sex marriage or end its tradition of censoring LGBTQ+ content despite confirming it will decriminalise gay sex.
The country’s LGBTQ+ community rejoiced on Sunday (31 August) after prime minister Lee Hsien announced the government would repeal Section 377A, which criminalises consensual sex between men.
But at the same time, they were reminded the fight for equality is far from over.
More than 20 LGBTQ+ groups called the repeal a “hard-won victory” and a “triumph of love over fear”, but stated that it was “the first step on a long road towards full equality for LGBTQ+ people.
During his speech, prime minister Hsein said that the government would iron-clad the definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
This followed suggestions from religious groups that decriminalising same-sex relations could cause so-called “reverse-discrimination” for those who do not support same-sex marriage.
Hsein’s comments came as a disappointment to the coalition of LGBTQ+ groups, who said the decision will “undermine the secular character of our constitution, codify further discrimination into supreme law and tie the hands of future parliaments”.
After his speech, the Ministry of Communication and Information (MCI) released a statement confirming its hardline approach to LGBTQ+ media would also remain in situ.
LGBTQ+ media will continue to be regulated according to in a statement after the speech as reported by CNA.
It said the repeal of Section 377A did not mean that “we are changing the tone of society”, and that content that “depicts alternative sexualities” and “non-explicit depictions of sexual activity between persons of the same gender” would still be restricted for anyone under 21.
A spokesperson from Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) said the decision was to “protect younger audiences” but let older people “make informed choices”.
It added that it would continue to “take reference from prevailing norms”.
Prime minister Lee Hsien Loong speaks during the National Day Rally 2022. (Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore/YouTube)
Singapore has been locked in debate for decades on whether Section 377A should be repealed. In 2007, Hsein said it was not being “proactively enforced”.
In his address on Sunday, the prime minister referred to his statement at the time.
“It would have been too divisive to force the issue then,” he said. “Now, 15 years later, attitudes have shifted appreciably. While we remain a broadly conservative society, gay people are now better accepted in Singapore, especially among younger Singaporeans.”
“Private sexual behaviour between consenting adults does not raise any law and order issue,” he added. “There’s no justification to prosecute people for it, nor to make it a crime… The government will repeal Section 377A and decriminalise sex between men.”
Influence of British colonial rule
Singapore inherited Section 377A while under British colonial rule, opting to keep it after gaining its independence in 1965.
Since then, the law has been used to oppress Singapore’s LGBTQ+ community and police any kind of behaviour that isn’t seen as heteronormative.
Téa Braun, chief executive of the Human Dignity Trust, said in a statement: “Section 377A is both archaic and discriminatory. Because of this announcement, gay men can look forward to no longer being presumed criminals, and Singapore has decisively moved past persecuting people on the basis of their sexual orientation.
“This decision is incredibly significant not only for Singapore but for its wider signalling effect across Asia and the world, where millions of people are still criminalised based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
A federal court of appeals judge ruled Tuesday that transgender people are protected from discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
As The Hill reports, the ruling stems from a 2020 lawsuit filed on behalf of a transgender woman who was incarcerated in a Virginia men’s prison despite the fact that she had been receiving hormone replacement therapy for nearly two decades.
Kesha Williams spent more than six months incarcerated alongside men and was periodically denied hormone therapy. After she was released in 2019, she sued Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid, as well as a prison nurse and a deputy, alleging that the prison had violated both the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act in failing to treat her gender dysphoria.
While the 1990 law specifically excludes “transvestism,” “transsexualism,” and “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments,” the American Psychiatric Association has since replaced gender identity disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with gender dysphoria, which is the distress a person feels when their gender identity doesn’t align with their sex assigned at birth.
In an amicus brief, attorneys for the GLBT Legal Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) explained that, “In short, the gender dysphoria diagnosis recognizes that incongruence between a person’s identity and birth sex is not the problem in need of treatment—the clinically significant distress associated with that incongruence is.”
“Reflecting this shift in medical understanding, we and other courts have thus explained that a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, unlike that of ‘gender identity disorder,’ concerns itself primarily with distress and other disabling symptoms, rather than simply being transgender,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote in her opinion.
“This is a thorough, well-reasoned opinion recognizing that the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination against individuals with gender dysphoria,” National Center for Lesbian Rights legal director Shannon Minter said in a statement. “This decision sets a powerful precedent that will be important for other courts considering this critical issue.”
GLAD Transgender Rights Project director Jennifer Levi called Motz’s decision a huge win. “There is no principled reason to exclude transgender people from our federal civil rights laws,” Levi said. “It’s incredibly significant for a federal appeals court to affirm that the protections in our federal disability rights laws extend to transgender people. It would turn disability law upside down to exclude someone from its protection because of having a stigmatized medical condition. This opinion goes a long way toward removing social and cultural barriers that keep people with treatable, but misunderstood, medical conditions from being able to thrive.”
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers signed defensive end Carl Nassib — pro football’s first openly gay, active player — bringing him back to where he delivered two of his most productive seasons, officials said Tuesday.
Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles lauded Nassib’s ability to stop the run and pressure the quarterback.
“He has a lot of versatility, he brings a lot of energy, he brings a lot of toughness,” Bowles told reporters Tuesday. “He understands the (team’s) system. He was comfortable in it, so we look forward to him coming here.”
The Raiders elected not to bring back Nassib for 2022, opting for a more cost-efficient edge rusher. He would have made $7.75 million this season had he returned to Las Vegas.
This signing by Tampa Bay could be as crucial a moment in the history of gay acceptance within sports as Nassib’s coming out last year, according to Cyd Zeigler, co-founder of Outsports.com.
For a team, especially a high-profile Super Bowl contender like Tampa, to sign an openly gay player is “huge,” Ziegler wrote.
The acquisition shows that Nassib’s on-the-field production trumps any lingering homophobia, according to Ziegler, who contended that“people claiming that men’s pro sports broadly hate gay athletes (and yes, this is still a claim) simply have no leg to stand on.”
A journalist for the Manchester Evening News and his companion were verbally and physically harassed last week in the city’s iconic Gay Village.
“He started to get right up in my face, pushing me, shoving me, grabbing me and kicking me in the legs quite hard, then he went to go towards my friend. He said, ‘You are in my space, you are trying to touch me, you queer.’”
Daniel McLaughlin, 28, a podcast producer at Manchester’s largest news daily, was waiting for a taxi with his nonbinary friend in the early hours of Friday morning after a night out in the city’s popular gayborhood centered around Canal Street. McLaughlin, who identifies as bisexual, was wearing a rainbow badge.
McLaughlin told the Evening News he noticed a man who appeared to be in his early 20s heading towards them from nearby Sackville Gardens.
The man was “muttering to himself,” McLaughlin said, then directed “absolute hatred” towards them. “He was calling us nonces, fa***ts, perverts, every homophobic slur under the sun. He fixated on calling us names.”
“I started saying, ‘We’re not nonces, we’re puffs, there’s a difference,’ to which he became more aggrieved, shouting the same slurs. He was clearly inebriated, clearly angry about something.”
McLaughlin recounted that as a taxi pulled up, the “aggressive drunk” pushed him onto the moving vehicle, then continued to hurl abuse and followed McLaughlin as he tried to get into the taxi on the other side.
As the man was shouting “Get in the f**king car right now!” McLaughlin and his friend managed to get inside and pull the door shut. The driver sped away quickly from the ugly scene.
Daniel said the “old slurs” hurled at the pair were “nothing original,” but the young man’s age and level of aggression had shocked him.
“It didn’t particularly hurt,” McLaughlin said. “He was drunk, they were not focused attacks. But the thing I found the worst was the absolute hatred in his eyes, just the aggression and hatred towards us.”
“We hadn’t done anything. We had stood outside. But there was absolute hatred towards us, and the fact this guy was our age, to come up with this vitriol.”
“My theory was, he had all this pent up aggression. I think he went to the Gay Village looking for a fight. He went there with the purpose of starting trouble. The words he was using were recycled, words he had clearly heard elsewhere. Just archaic, older insults.”
“He wasn’t making arguments, he was just using the words, he wasn’t stringing a full sentence together.”
McLaughlin says he didn’t report the incident to police, believing there was “very little they could have done.” While he didn’t suffer any major injuries from the attack, McLaughlin said it did raise concerns about the safety of the LGBTQ community away from the Village itself.
“It’s something that’s not untypical, and that’s the frightening thing really. I moved to Manchester in 2012 for university and one of the big reasons was the Gay Village — I wasn’t quite out the closet at the time, but — having this place where I could be myself.”
“That’s why so many gay people move to Manchester, but in recent years it’s not felt like a sanctuary. It’s not necessarily aggressive, but I feel that the queer community is being pushed out.”
“The village itself I think would be safe, but because we had just left the Gay Village at Sackville Gardens, just a bit further away, that’s where the protection ends. I do feel trepidation when I exit the Village.”
Boston Children’s Hospital has warned employees about mounting threats and is coordinating with law enforcement after far-right activists on social media began targeting the hospital with false claims about its treatment of young transgender people.
It’s the most recent in a series of attempts to target hospitals for their work with trans youth, adding to an ongoing wave of anti-LGBTQ sentiment that has hit libraries, schools and even a trans-inclusive Los Angeles spa.
The public relations office of Boston Children’s Hospital sent an email to employees with guidance on how to respond to harassment and threats earlier this week, citing an “increase of threatening and aggressive” phone calls and emails sent to the hospital commenting on treatment of transgender patients.” The email was confirmed to NBC News by a current employee.
Boston Children’s Hospital first became the target of activists in recent weeks, when well-followed social media accounts such as LibsofTikTok, which has often promoted “groomer” discourse that falsely linked LGBTQ teachers and parents to pedophilia, began to make a variety of false claims. One allegation said that the hospital offered gender-affirming hysterectomies to children under 18 years old.
Conservative influencers with millions of followers pushed similar false talking points and fanned the flames further. David J Harris, a podcaster and supplement seller, and single-issue activists including Chris Elston, who goes by “Billboard Chris” for the anti-trans statements he wears on sandwich boards, are among the right-wing social media stars who have spread the allegations online.
Last week, fact-checking organizations debunked the claims from right-wing accounts, but many of the same accounts continued to spread the false allegations this week.
“In response to commentary last week critical of our Gender Multispecialty Service (GeMS) Program, Boston Children’s Hospital has been the target of a large volume of hostile internet activity, phone calls, and harassing emails including threats of violence toward our clinicians and staff,” Boston Children’s Hospital said in an emailed statement. “We are deeply concerned by these attacks on our clinicians and staff fueled by misinformation and a lack of understanding and respect for our transgender community.”
“Boston Children’s is proud to be home to the first pediatric and adolescent transgender health program in the United States,” the statement added.
Videos from the YouTube account of Boston Children’s Hospital in which several physicians discuss services provided to trans patients were shared by the accounts to suggest the Center for Gender Surgery was performing genital surgeries on children. The videos, which have since been removed from the hospital’s channel, included one titled, “What Does It Mean To Be Transgender?” and did not suggest such surgeries were provided to minors.
Boston Children’s Hospital houses the Gender Multispecialty Service, the nation’s first pediatric and adolescent transgender health program, which has treated more than 1,000 families, according to its website. Despite the separate Center for Gender Surgery being within Boston Childrens’ Hospital, treatment is only provided to “eligible adolescents and young adults,” according to the center’s website. “All genital surgeries are only performed on patients age 18 and older,” the site reads.
A representative for Twitter said they were looking into the harassment campaign.
Boston Children’s Hospital said in its statement that the online attention “was based on the incorrect statement that Boston Children’s performs genital surgeries on minors in connection with transgender care. For hysterectomies and other genital surgeries performed as part of gender-affirming care, Boston Children’s requires a patient to be capable of consenting for themselves. Age 18 is used to reflect the standard age of majority for medical decision-making. Boston Children’s does not perform genital surgeries as part of gender-affirming care on a patient under the age of 18.”
Nevertheless, the posts demonizing Boston Children’s Hospital quickly spread through the far-right media ecosystem, promoted by right-wing media personalities including The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh and conservative websites like The Post Millennial and The Daily Caller.
Anti-trans activists also targeted the individual doctors who appeared in the YouTube videos from Boston Children’s Hospital, leaving vulgar and harassing comments on their social media accounts and flooding their online pages with negative reviews. Some hospital staff have since made their social media profiles private.
This isn’t the first time that far-right activists have targeted doctors and medical institutions — or even Boston Children’s Hospital.
Lee Leveille, co-director of Health Liberation Now, a trans rights advocacy group that investigates the effects of policy on trans health, said the hospital was also a target in May 2021 for providing gender-affirming care amid a similar wave of targeted harassment on medical facilities.
“The original organized network that jump started the clinic protests has been slowing down a bit and is more decentralized,” Leveille said over email. “Local pockets will still operate here and there, but they’re less connected to a central organized push than the original ones. Now we’re seeing new faces rallying the cause — including the likes of Matt Walsh and Libs of TikTok.”
In June, Chaya Raichik, the Brooklyn real estate agent behind the Twitter account LibsofTikTok tweeted about a children’s hospital in Omaha, Nebraska, for hosting an informational booth at a Pride event. Earlier this month, Raichik and right-wing activist Christopher Rufo targeted a children’s hospital in Pittsburgh for its informational video about puberty blockers. The tweets directed waves of harassment to the hospitals’ larger accounts.
Under a tweet from the Pittsburgh hospital about children with cancer, commenters’ replies included, “Pedophiles,” and “We will destroy you.”
The targeting of children’s hospitals is just the most recent in a spate of online abuse aimed at institutions that promote pro-LGBT ideas and events.
“They’ve received just an absolute torrent of abuse, oftentimes, with real, in-person, consequences,” said Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic and LGBTQ+ advocate.
“We’ve already had months and months of this reinforcing propaganda, that LGBTQ people are groomers, that they’re pedophiles, that they are threats to children,” she said. “It’s very disturbing to see people justify attacking a children’s hospital because of their transphobia and their hatred of trans people.”
Leveille and Ky Schevers, the other co-director of Health Liberation Now, said they feared violence could come next, targeting doctors, patients and medical facilities that provide gender-affirming care.
Boston Children’s Hospital said it was working with law enforcement to ensure the safety of its staff.
“We condemn these attacks in the strongest possible terms, and we reject the false narrative upon which they are based,” the hospital said in its statement. “We are working with law enforcement to protect our clinicians, staff, patients, families, and the broader Boston Children’s community and hold the offenders accountable. We will continue to take all appropriate measures to protect our people.”
The state of Idaho has been ordered to pay $321,224.50 in legal fees because of an anti-transgender law it passed in 2020 that had already been ruled unconstitutional.
In 2018, U.S. Magistrate Judge Candy Dale ruled that it was unconstitutional for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW) to completely block transgender people from correcting the gender marker on their birth certificates. That case was brought by a transgender woman who was called a “tra**y” and a “fa***t” at a Social Security office when she showed them her birth certificate.
In 2020, state Rep. Julianne Young (R) introduced a bill to ban changes to birth certificates outside of a narrow set of exemptions. She claimed that the birth certificate is a “historical document” and that allowing transgender people to have birth certificates that reflect who they are threatens women.
“There is an ongoing discussion about this, but I will tell you, as a woman who is aware of the crime statistics related to the vulnerability of females as a group, this concerns me,” Young said at the time.
Later in 2020, Judge Dale ruled that IDHW had to follow her ruling and let transgender people correct the gender markers on their birth certificates.
The plaintiffs not only succeeded in getting the state to follow the Constitution, but they asked the court to have the state pay their attorneys’ fees. Instead of getting the nearly $450,000 that they initially requested, Dale awarded them $321,224.50.
The ruling would not have surprised opponents of the 2020 bill. State Rep. John Gannon (D) said at the time that it would be “a legal disaster” that would open the state up to “an expensive losing lawsuit paid for by taxpayers” since a federal judge had already ruled against it.
A hit-and-run car crash that killed three men and injured another in front of a Black-owned gay bar early Sunday morning “appears to be intentional,” the Chicago Police Department said in a press conference Monday. Officials said the incident is not currently being investigated as a hate crime.
Police said the crash occurred after an argumentinside the Jeffrey Pub turned into a physical altercation on the street. At one point, one of the parties involved got into his car and slammed it against the group standing outside the pub. Officials said they recovered the vehicle that rammed into four men outside the bar, but they are still searching for the driver.
Brendan Deenihan, the department’s chief of detectives, is asking the public to come forward with information.
“You can’t charge a car with a crime, obviously,” Deenihan said. “We need to know who the driver was, and we know that people out there know that.”
The four male victims were taken to local hospitals, with three succumbing to their injuries, according to the police.
The deceased victims were identified as Donald Huey, 25, Jaylen Ausley, 23, and Devonta Vivetter, 27, according to Brittany Hill, a spokesperson for the Cook County Bureau of Administration. The surviving victim has not been named publicly and is still hospitalized, according to NBC Chicago.
Dashcam footage of the incident obtained by NBC Chicago shows several people on the street when a physical altercation broke out. The video also shows the moments just before the car is about to hit the men but does not show the actual hit-and-run incident.
A woman who witnessed the crash said she saw a car speeding down the street before “a lot of chaos” ensued.
“I was standing outside the bar talking to one of the victims,” she said. “I took like three steps, and a car came and hit him, and he flew over the car.”
The Jeffrey Pub shared a message on Facebook about the sad episode, offering condolences to the victims’ families and encouraging anyone with information to come forward.
“Our hearts heavy this morning that such tragic event has occurred,” the post stated. “And to those that lost a loved one or friend we stand with you.”
