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notes
Join us for art activities at our first hang out of 2023! Materials and snacks provided! This group is BIPOC only and will be happening the 1st Monday of every month. It is meant to be a social hangout space for Black, Indigenous, Queer, and Trans people of color (18+). Se habla español! For questions please reach out to marian@posimages.org
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.
The Supreme Court on Friday bolstered religious rights as it ruled in favor of parents who objected to LGBTQ-themed books that a Maryland county approved for use in elementary school classrooms.
In a 6-3 vote, the court backed the parents’ claim that the Montgomery County Board of Education’s decision not to allow an opt-out option for their children violated their religious rights under the Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects religious expression.
“The board’s introduction of the ‘LGBTQ+ inclusive’ storybooks, along with its decision to withhold opt-outs, places an unconstitutional burden on the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religion,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court.
The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority that is often receptive to religious claims. The liberal justices dissented.
“The result will be chaos for this nation’s public schools,” liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion.
“Given the great diversity of religious beliefs in this country, countless interactions that occur every day in public schools might expose children to messages that conflict with a parents’ beliefs,” she added.
A selection of books featuring LGBTQ characters that are part of a Supreme Court, on April, 15, 2025, in Washington. Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP file
The dispute arose in 2022 when the school board in the diverse county just outside Washington revised its English language arts curriculum.
The board determined that it wanted more storybooks to feature LGBTQ elements to better reflect some of the families who live in the area.
Approved books include “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” which features a gay character who is getting married, and “Born Ready,” about a transgender child who wants to identify as a boy.
The school board said that although the books are in classrooms and available for children to pick up, teachers are not required to use them in class.
Initially the school board indicated that parents would be able to opt their children out of exposure to the books, but it quickly changed course, suggesting that would be too difficult to implement.
Plaintiffs include Tamer Mahmoud and Enas Barakat, a Muslim couple who have a son in elementary school. Members of the Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox churches also sued, as did a parent group called Kids First that has members of various faiths.
They said they had a right to protect their children from being taught content that conflicts with their religious beliefs by expressing support for same-sex relationships and transgender rights.
The Trump administration backed the challengers.
A federal judge and the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals both ruled in favor of the school board.
The Supreme Court has in the past backed religious rights in cases involving conflicting arguments made by LGBTQ rights advocates. In one recent ruling, the court in 2023 ruled in favor of a Christian web designer who refused to work on same-sex weddings.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Friday that age verification “porn ID” laws are an appropriate way to regulate content for minors without infringing on the First Amendment rights of adults.
The ruling, in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, has major implications for the accessibility of any online speech the government could decide is harmful to children.
Laws that potentially curb civil liberties are subject to rigorous legal standards. Two lower courts had applied different standards to the Texas law, and the Supreme Court decided that the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ lower standard was correct in this case. Strict scrutiny, the standard applied by the Texas district court, requires that a law must be narrowly tailored, further a compelling government interest and be the least restrictive option. The 5th Circuit used a lower standard, known as rational basis, to evaluate the law, essentially saying it has no potential to jeopardize freedom of speech.
Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas held that the law should be evaluated based on intermediate scrutiny, the standard in between, because it only “incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults.” Laws must further an important government interest and do so by “means substantially related to that interest.” Texas’ law survives this test, Thomas wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.
By saying the law does not have to meet strict scrutiny, the opinion paves the legal way for increased site-based age verification on the web. The privacy concerns accompanying the uploading of verifiable identification to sensitive websites are not seen as overly burdensome to adults.
Consequently, the court ruled restrictions on protected free speech for adults can be applied in the name of protecting children.
In 2023, Texas passed a law requiring websites with at least one-third sexual content — characterized as “material harmful to minors” — to verify the age of users using government identification or other reliable techniques. The law was initially blocked by a district judge, but then the preliminary injunction was overruled by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The law has been in effect while the Supreme Court considered the case.
Many digital civil rights groups have raised the alarm over privacy risks of web-based age verification. Texas, like the majority of states, does not have a state-recognized digital identification system. Websites would need to contract with a third- party company that handles photos of physical IDs or runs face-scans to determine the age of users. The risk is compounded as a user typically must verify their age every time they try to view a page. Device-based age verification, where pieces of technology like phones or computers are age-locked, generally only requires identification once.
Critics of age verification laws worry how state governments will determine what kinds of content qualify as “harmful to minors,” especially as right-wing extremists increasingly characterise any type of LGBTQ+ media as inappropriate for children — or outright consider the existence of queer people to be pornographic. The ability to easily access information about reproductive health or dissenting political opinions could be targeted by laws championing children down the line.
The Booksmith recently posted a notice letting customers know that they would not be selling the series anymore in light of Rowling founding “an organization dedicated to removing transgender rights ‘in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.'”
“With this announcement, we’ve decided to stop carrying her books,” the store wrote. “We don’t know exactly what her her ‘women’s fund’ will entail, but we know that we aren’t going to be a part of it.”
Rowling said in May that she would be starting the “J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund” using her personal fortune. The website for the group states that it “offers legal funding support to individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.”
It is not the first time Rowling has used her over $1 billion net worth to influence legal cases involving so-called women’s sex-based rights — a dog whistle used by herself and other anti-trans activists to exclude trans people from public spaces and reduce women to their genitals.
Rowling donated £70,000 (roughly $88,200) to the anti-trans group For Women Scotland in 2024 after it lost its challenge to a 2018 Scottish law that legally recognized trans women as women. The group appealed its case to the U.K. Supreme Court, which ruled last month that trans women aren’t considered women under the nation’s Equality Act.
Rowling responded to the decision by posting a picture of her having a drink and smoking a cigar, with the text “I love it when a plan comes together.” The post was widely criticized, including by The Mandalorian and The Last of Us star Pedro Pascal, who called it serious “Voldemort villain s—” and referred to Rowling as a “heinous loser.”
The Booksmith included in its announcement a list of fantasy and young adult books to read instead of Harry Potter. It wrote, “As a group of queer booksellers, we also had our adolescents shaped by wizards and elves. Look at us, it’s obvious. If you or someone you love wants to dive into the world of Harry Potter, we suggest doing so by buying used copies of these books. Or, even better, please find below a list of bookseller-curated suggestions for books we genuinely love that also might fit the HP brief for you and yours.”
