Legislators in Texas have passed a bill requiring a person’s sex assigned at birth rather than their gender identity for official state documents and records.
House Bill 229, entitled “Relating to general definitions for and collection of governmental information regarding biological sex” or the Women’s Rights Bill, passed the state Senate on a party-line vote of 20 to 11 late Wednesday night. The bill passed the House by a vote of 87 to 56 on May 12.
“A governmental entity that collects vital statistics information that identifies the sex of an individual for the purpose of complying with antidiscrimination laws or for the purpose of gathering public health, crime, economic, or other data shall identify each individual as either male or female,” the text of the approved bill reads.
The bill specifically defines male and female for official state government purposes as sex assigned at birth rather than gender identity.
“‘Female’ and ‘woman’ mean an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova,” the text of the bill continues, adding “‘Male’ and ‘man’ mean an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.”
The bill adds there are reasons for separating gender along a binary definition.
“There are legitimate reasons to distinguish between the sexes with respect to athletics, prisons and other correctional facilities, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, locker rooms, restrooms, and other areas where biology, safety, or privacy are implicated,” the bill reads.
In March, it was revealed that the Texas Department of Public Safety recorded every time a resident requested to update their gender on their driver’s licenses online. The gathered data also included people who inquired about the process via phone or in person.
Also in March, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton directed state agencies to ignore court orders on gender changes that conflicted with state law.
The bill now heads to the desk of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott for his signature or veto. It’s most likely that he will sign it.
Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Beautiful Room is Empty,” has died. He was 85.
White’s death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg, who did not immediately provide additional details.
Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement, and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the backlash of recent years.
Edmund White in Milan in 2010.Leonardo Cendamo / Getty Images file
A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. “A Boy’s Own Story” was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature’s commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet and books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates. He was an encyclopedic reader who absorbed literature worldwide while returning yearly to such favorites as Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Henry Green’s “Nothing.”
“Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,” cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The New York Times in 1995. “A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.”
The age of AIDS, and beyond
In early 1982, just as the public was learning about AIDS, White was among the founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which advocated AIDS prevention and education. The author himself would learn that he was HIV-positive in 1985, and would remember friends afraid to be kissed by him, even on the cheek, and parents who didn’t want him to touch their babies.
White survived, but watched countless peers and loved ones suffer agonizing deaths. Out of the seven gay men, including White, who formed the influential writing group the Violet Quill, four died of complications from AIDS. As White wrote in his elegiac novel “The Farewell Symphony,” the story followed a shocking arc: “Oppressed in the fifties, freed in the sixties, exalted in the seventies and wiped out in the eighties.”
But in the 1990s and after he lived to see gay people granted the right to marry and serve in the military, to see gay-themed books taught in schools and to see gay writers so widely published that they no longer needed to write about gay lives.
“We’re in this post-gay period where you can announce to everybody that you yourself are gay, and you can write books in which there are gay characters, but you don’t need to write exclusively about that,” he said in a Salon interview in 2009. “Your characters don’t need to inhabit a ghetto any more than you do. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.”
In 2019, White received a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an honor previously given to Morrison and Philip Roth among others.
“To go from the most maligned to a highly lauded writer in a half-century is astonishing,” White said during his acceptance speech.
Childhood yearnings
White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but age at 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer “who reigned in silence over dinner as he studied his paper.” His mother a psychologist “given to rages or fits of weeping.” Trapped in “the closed, sniveling, resentful world of childhood,” at times suicidal, White was at the same time a “fierce little autodidact” who sought escape through the stories of others, whether Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” or a biography of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.
“As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn’t the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,” he wrote in the essay “Out of the Closet, On to the Bookshelf,” published in 1991.
Edmund White in 1986.Louis Monier / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images file
As he wrote in “A Boy’s Own Story,” he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys, but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be “normal.” Even as he secretly wrote a “coming out” novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from “A Boy’s Own Story” told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection.
“For the next few months I grieved,” White writes. “I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?”
He had a whirling, airborne imagination and New York and Paris had been in his dreams well before he lived in either place. After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese, he moved to New York in the early 1960s and worked for years as a writer for Time-Life Books and an editor for The Saturday Review. He would interview Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote among others, and, for some assignments, was joined by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Socially, he met Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood and John Ashbery. He remembered drinking espresso with an ambitious singer named Naomi Cohen, whom the world would soon know as “Mama Cass” of the Mamas and Papas. He feuded with Kramer, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, an early supporter who withdrew a blurb for “A Boy’s Own Story” after he caricatured her in the novel “Caracole.”
“In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who’d helped me and befriended me,” he later wrote.
Early struggles, changing times
Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would “dress as a hippie, and head out for the bars.” A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and “all hell broke loose.”
“Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,” wrote White, who soon joined the protests. “Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.”
Edmund White in 2001.Sophie Bassouls / Sygma via Getty Images file
Before the 1970s, few novels about openly gay characters existed beyond Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar” and James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room.” Classics such as William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” had “rendered gay life as exotic, marginal, even monstrous,” according to White. But the world was changing, and publishing was catching up, releasing fiction by White, Kramer, Andrew Holleran and others.
White’s debut novel, the surreal and suggestive “Forgetting Elena,” was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on “The Joy of Gay Sex,” a follow-up to the bestselling “The Joy of Sex” that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, “Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” was released and he followed with the nonfiction “States of Desire,” his attempt to show “the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren’t just hairdressers, they’re also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.”
With “A Boy’s Own Story,” published in 1982, he began an autobiographical trilogy that continued with “The Beautiful Room is Empty” and “The Farewell Symphony,” some of the most sexually direct and explicit fiction to land on literary shelves. Heterosexuals, he wrote in “The Farewell Symphony,” could “afford elusiveness.” But gays, “easily spooked,” could not “risk feigning rejection.”
His other works included “Skinned Alive: Stories” and the novel “A Previous Life,” in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published “City Boy,” a memoir of New York in the 1960s and ’70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels “Jack Holmes & His Friend” and “Our Young Man” and the memoir “Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.”
“From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,” he told The Guardian around the time “Jack Holmes” was released. “It’s on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There’s nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.”
A 54-year-old Petaluma man has been arrested after police say he threatened to have a Petaluma City Schools district official “executed” if pride flags posted at schools in the district were not removed. “The threat was considered specific, time sensitive, and caused safety concerns for school officials,” Petaluma police said in a news alert issued Friday.
Josh Garzoli was arrested without incident shortly after 12:30 p.m. Thursday by detectives and members of the Petaluma Police Department’s Community Impact Response Team. Garzoli remained jailed Friday on two felony counts of criminal threats. His bail has been set at $750,000 and he is scheduled for a court appearance on Monday, according to Sonoma County jail records.
In a statement issued Friday, Petaluma City Schools said it has “proudly flown” the pride flag annually from late May through the end of June since 2022, when the district’s school board unanimously supported a resolution to recognize Harvey Milk Day and Pride Month, which is the month of June.
Read the full article. Sadly, I can’t find a mugshot.
Two 13-year-old boys are suspected of assault and a hate crime after they allegedly threw fireworks and shouted homophobic remarks at a crowd gathered Wednesday night for a Pride event in downtown Redwood City.
Police said one of two victims of the assault suffered minor injuries, and that part of the attack was captured on video surveillance.
Officers responded shortly before 6 p.m. to Courthouse Square at 2200 Broadway, where the event was being held. The suspects fled before police arrived, but later that evening one of them was located. On Thursday, the second was found, police said. Both were taken to the San Mateo County Youth Services Center.
But no American leader has ever been as diligent in trying to crush higher education as Donald Trump. In particular, he has singled out Harvard, the nation’s most prestigious university, for punishment. Last week alone, Trump threatened to pull $3 billion in research funding from Harvard to send to vocational schools, issued an order intended to prevent the university from enrolling international students and directed the federal government to find “alternative vendors” for $100 million in contracts to the school.
“Harvard’s got to behave themselves,” he said. “Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper.”
Trump is saying that he is the country, and Harvard disrespects him because it won’t cave to his demands. Indeed, the school has taken a hard line against the president’s autocratic efforts, going to court and, so far, succeeding in at least temporarily stopping some of Trump‘s wishes.
The ostensible reason for Trump’s attacks on Harvard and other higher education institutions is that the universities are hotbeds of antisemitism. The administration points to pro-Palestinian protests on campuses last year. While many of the protests were peaceful, some were marked by antisemitic incidents.However, it wasn’t always clear whether those behind those incidents were students.
Trump himself dined at Mar-a-Lago with notorious antisemite and white supremacist Nick Fuentes in 2022. Fuentes has said that “perfidious Jews” should be executed. He showed up at the dinner as a friend of Kanye “Ye” West, who has said he likes Hitler and “loves Nazis.” After the dinner, Trump said he wasn’t aware of who Fuentes was at the time and that the dinner was “quick and uneventful.”
What the administration is doing is simply looking for an excuse. Moreover, the attacks on universities, along with those on the nation’s leading law firms, serve as a kind of proof of concept.
The administration has taken on the most powerful institutions in the country, knowing that if it can make them bend to its will, then everyone else will have to. While the administration could undertake an investigation and, based on the results, penalize Harvard for violating civil rights protections for Jewish students, it has decided simply to punish Harvard as harshly as possible without any legal process. Should Trump succeed in this effort, that is very bad news for LGBTQ+ organizations.
“If the government can coerce the richest school in America without due process, it can crush a community college—or a civil-liberties nonprofit—without batting an eyelid,” Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), wrote in The Atlantic.
There are already hints that Republicans would like nothing more than to pull the tax-exempt status of nonprofits they don’t like. A measure in the budget bill in Congress would have allowed that to happen for any nonprofit that supported a terrorist organization. The language was ultimately pulled from the bill, but the vague language was an indication that it would be a cudgel for the right to brandish against any group it didn’t like.
More importantly, Trump has also threatened to pull Harvard’s tax-exempt status. He doesn’t have the legal authority to do that, of course, but that won’t stop him. There’s nothing the right would like more than to start pulling the tax-exempt status of lots of organizations, including (if not especially) LGBTQ+ groups.
Even if Trump chickens out about looking at tax-exempt status, that doesn’t mean the administration can’t try other means to attack its opponents. It could initiate investigations, such as the one that Trump has called for against ActBlue, the Democrats’ biggest fundraising operation. The investigations are time-consuming, costly, and designed to beat the victim into submission.
Or the administration could go the religious liberty route. It could argue that some particular activity that an LGBTQ+ nonprofit engages in infringes on the rights of conservative Christians. As far-fetched as that may be, a court battle would be brutal. It’s one thing to be sued by another group. It’s an entirely different issue to have the U.S. Department of Justice put you in its crosshairs.
None of these has happened yet, and perhaps, with any luck, never will. At present, Trump is too focused on the whales to bother with smaller fry. Right now, the administration seems to think that if it can make an example of premier institutions, everyone else will fall in line.
A student-athlete who was banned from graduating with her classmates after she came out in a social media post is suing her high school, local NBC and ABC affiliates WSMV and WTVC report.
Morgan Armstrong was a senior at Tennessee Christian Preparatory School (TCPS), a private Christian school in Chattanooga. She played on the school’s basketball team and earned her diploma.
Then she came out.
“Cats outta the bag,” Armstrong wrote in the post dated April 23, according to court documents obtained by WTVC. The post contained pictures of Armstrong with her girlfriend, including the pair kissing.
Armstrong subsequently posted a separate comment urging others to like and comment on the post.
“go like and comment on my post guys bc if no one on my socials knew I was gay then they sure as hell do now so this is a big thing tbh, also I’m kinda scared about the facebook comments bc I have some ruthless trump supporting “jesus” mfs on there,” Armstrong wrote in the comment.
Following the post and comment, Armstrong and her family were summoned to the school and told that she was suspended and prevented from further school activities.
The school claimed the comment was “vulgar and disrespectful” and “produced the wrong perception of who Tennessee Christian is and what we represent, Christ.” The letter said the comment, not the post, “reflected on the institution, faculty, staff, alumni, and students in the most negative possible way.”
The letter also contained a threat that “records of posts and messages will be forwarded to colleges and universities as part of a comprehensive student file.”
“I was shocked and then I went to anger,” Monica Armstrong, Morgan’s mother, told WSMV.
In her lawsuit, Armstrong claims she was not talking about folks at school but “members of Morgan’s own family with whom she was connected on social media – people who, in Morgan’s view, profess but do not practice Christian principles of love, acceptance, and compassion.”
Armstrong is claiming the school violated its policies on suspensions, noting that she received a far harsher penalty for a first-time violation, as well as breach of contract.
The school’s 2024-2025 Parent-Student Handbook appears to apply a blanket agreement between the student and the school regarding social media activity.
Students at the school agree to a set of rules about their social media posts to “TCPS-sponsored sites or other websites or social media (including but not limited to Text messages, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.,).”
“Students who choose to post editorial content to websites or other forms of media (texts, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) must ensure that their submission does not reflect poorly upon the school nor violate behavioral guidelines as outlined in the school Parent and Student handbook,” the handbook states.
School administrators issued a statement denying the allegations in the lawsuit.
“Tennessee Christian Preparatory School firmly rejects the misleading allegations outlined in a recent lawsuit supposedly filed against the school. As of 11:00 AM on May 22, we have yet to be served with process for the alleged lawsuit. The administration and Board of Trustees express deep disappointment over the inaccuracies contained in the alleged filing by Daniel A. Horwitz with Horwitz Law in Nashville. Despite this supposed legal dispute, Tennessee Christian remains fully committed to delivering Morgan Armstrong’s diploma. Our goal continues to be the academic and personal success of each student, even in the face of conflict or disagreement. We wish Morgan Armstrong the very best as she continues her academics in college.”
Armstrong is asking that her school records be cleared of the incident, that the school refrain from “sabotaging Morgon’s college admissions process,” and that she and her parents be awarded unspecified compensation for monetary losses.
She and her family staged a mini-protest outside the school on the graduation night.
“It was difficult having to stand across the street knowing that the people I’ve grown up with for the last four years were able to walk across the stage and I wasn’t allowed to,” Armstrong told WSMV.
The school follows a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible and Christianity. The handbook classifies same-sex sexual relations on the same level as sex with animals and incest.
“We believe that any form of sexual immorality (including adultery, fornication, homosexual behavior, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, and use of pornography) is sinful and offensive to God,” the handbook states.
J.K. Rowling is using her wealth attained from the Harry Potter series to create an organization dedicated to removing transgender people’s rights “in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.”
The author announced in a Saturday post to X, formerly Twitter, that she would be founding 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.”
“I looked into all options and a private fund is the most efficient, streamlined way for me to do this,” she said. “Lots of people are offering to contribute, which I truly appreciate, but there are many other women’s rights orgs that could do with the money, so donate away, just not to me!”
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.”
Pascal, whose younger sister Lux is trans, urged his followers to not “buy a single Harry Potter thing ever,” including by boycotting the upcoming HBO series and attractions at Universal Studios theme parks.
“It’s time to tell these corporations that transphobia loses money,” he said.
The current presidential administration has ended funding for the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development (CHAVD), a move that researchers say will likely set efforts to end HIV globally back by a decade.
The two teams leading the $258 million vaccine program at Duke University and the Scripps Research Institute were informed of the move on Friday, May 30, by officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), The New York Times and CBS News reported. A senior NIH official told the Times that the agency’s leadership had reviewed the program and “does not support it moving forward.”
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has also instructed NIH not to fund HIV vaccine research in the next fiscal year, with some exceptions, CBS News said.
An HIV vaccine has proved elusive, both aforementioned news outlets reported. But Dennis Burton, an immunology professor with the Scripps team, told CBS that researchers have “begun to see light at the end of the tunnel after many years of research.”
“This is a terrible time to cut it off. We’re beginning to get close. We’re getting good results out of clinical trials,” Burton said.
“The HIV pandemìc will never be ended without a vaccine, so kìlling research on one will end up kìlling people,” John Moore, an HIV researcher at Weill Cornell Medical in New York, told the Times. “The NIH’s multiyear investment in advanced vaccine technologies shouldn’t be abandoned on a whim like this.”
While a senior NIH official told the Times that the agency expects to shift its focus away from vaccine research and “toward using currently available approaches to eliminate HIV/AIDS,” the president’s second-term administration has essentially reversed course on the president’s first-term plan to end HIV by 2030.
Following the president’s January executive order calling for a 90-day hold on all U.S. foreign aid, the administration shut down United States Agency for International Development’s operations, including those of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPRAR). In February, the State Department backtracked slightly, announcing that the program to prevent HIV in low- and middle-income foreign countries could provide PrEP medications to pregnant and breastfeeding women, but not to LGBTQ+ people and other high-risk groups for contracting HIV.
HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard told CBS News that “critical HIV/AIDS programs will continue” under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s proposed new agency, the “Administration for a Healthy America.” But as the Times notes, details about the new agency are scarce.
Meanwhile, Scripps Research’s Burton warned that shutting down crucial HIV vaccine research would have consequences that linger for years, even if a subsequent administration were to restore funding. “This is a setback of probably a decade for HIV vaccine research,” he told CBS.
While the Times notes that clinical trials based on CHAVD’s work may continue if NIH continues funding for its HIV Vaccine Trial Network, a spokesperson for pharmaceutical and biotech company Moderna said that the agency also paused funding for its own clinical trial for an HIV vaccine last week. Mitchell Warren, executive director of the HIV prevention organization AVAC, warned that even if funding for clinical trials is maintained, research out of the Duke and Scripps programs is crucial to developing vaccine candidates for those trials.
“As they take a wrecking ball to HIV treatment & prevention, they’re now ending the work to create an HIV vaccine,” California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D) wrote in a Bluesky post responding to the news of the CHAVD funding cut. The current presidential administration, he added, “truly [doesn’t] care if HIV surges. They don’t care if people die.”
Both chambers of the Texas Legislature have passed a bill banning students from forming LGBTQ+-focused clubs like GSAs in schools and have sent it to the governor’s desk.
Democratic lawmakers denounced the bill, S.B. 12.
“The real monsters are not kids trying to figure out who they are,” said state Rep. Gene Wu (D). “The monsters are not the teachers who love them and encourage them and support them. They are not the books that provide them with some amount of comfort and information. The real monsters are here.”
“This bill is hate,” said out state Rep. Erin Zwiener (D). “This is one of the most nakedly hateful bills we have had on the floor of this House.”
Republicans, though, claimed that LGBTQ+-supportive clubs are “sexualizing” children.
“We’re not going to allow gay clubs, and we’re not going to allow straight clubs,” said state Rep. Jeff Leach (R). “We shouldn’t be sexualizing our kids in public schools, period. And we shouldn’t have clubs based on sex.”
S.B. 12 bills itself as a “Bill of Parental Rights” and also restricts diversity initiatives in public schools and requires more parental notification when it comes to mental and physical health in schools.
It’s unclear how S.B. 12 will survive legal challenges because the federal Equal Access Act requires federally funded public secondary schools to provide equal access to extracurricular student clubs. While that law was passed in 1984 because Christian activists worried that schools might stop Bible clubs from meeting, it has long been used by GSAs to protect their right to meet on school campuses.
GSAs – Gay-Straight Alliances or Gender-Sexuality Alliances – have been targeted by conservatives ever since they were first formed in the 1980s.
In the late 1990s, when Salt Lake City tried to shut down a local school’s GSA, and, when they were told they were legally required to give all clubs equal access to school resources, the school board decided to cancel all extracurricular clubs just to stop the GSA, which eventually led to a federal lawsuit. A federal judge ruled that the school district had violated the Equal Access Act and students’ First Amendment rights, which resulted in the district allowing the GSA to meet again.
S.B. 12 is one of five anti-LGBTQ+ bills that the Texas Legislature is considering this session. H.B. 229 defines men and women based on gamete size and requires state documents to only list a person’s sex assigned at birth. It has been passed by both chambers of the Texas Legislature. Trans rights advocates said that this could out people against their will, exposing them to the possibility of discrimination.
S.B. 1257 requires insurance companies to cover “detransition” care, which is gender-affirming care for people who are transitioning back to living as the gender associated with their sex assigned at birth. Detransitioners have been central in recent years to conservatives’ understanding of transgender people and take an outsized role in their minds; studies have shown that few trans people detransition and that, in most cases, detransitioning is temporary.
The Texas Legislature also passed that bill.
H.B. 1106 redefines “abuse” and “neglect” to say that misgendering a child or not using their current name is not a form of child abuse. Democrats denounced the bill, saying that parental rejection is often used to abuse children and that the bill would take away protections from LGBTQ+ youth.
“This bill tells LGBTQIA+ kids across Texas that their pain doesn’t count — that being dismissed, misnamed, or denied support isn’t just tolerated, it’s protected by law,” said Texas Freedom Network Political Director Rocío Fierro-Pérez in a statement. “H.B. 1106 dresses up rejection as a right. But the truth is, when lawmakers carve out space for families to ignore who their kids are, they’re creating a shield for cruelty. Wrapped in the language of ‘parental rights,’ H.B. 1106 invites rejection and erasure into the home and labels it as care. When lawmakers vote to strip away recognition and affirmation from young people who need it most, they are endorsing harm.”
This bill has been passed by the Texas House of Representatives.
S.B. 1188 requires all medical records to include a person’s sex assigned at birth.
“Health care is a human right, and to be able to have a doctor who respects who you are should be mandatory,” said out state Rep. Jolanda Jones (D). “This bill, as it’s currently written, if it doesn’t allow me to put in my medical records who I am, will negatively affect the doctor-patient relationship.”
This bill was passed by the Texas House of Representatives, but it hasn’t passed the Texas Senate.
Bigots in the Utah cities of Providence and North Logan celebrated the first day of Pride Month by leaving anti-gay and white supremacist messages in front of homes with pro-LGBTQ+ displays.
North Logan homeowner Ryan Thorell, whose family displayed pro-LGBTQ+ signs outside of their home, found several posters stapled to nearby utility poles facing his house — the posters said “White power,” “man plus woman,” and had homophobic slurs, he told KSL-TV. He called the signs “very targeting and inflammatory,” and said that he took down 17 similar signs around his neighborhood, each facing homes that had LGBTQ+ flags and signs outside.
“It made me feel like our community is under some sort of attack,” he told the news station. “It made me nervous for the kids in my neighborhood. It’s one of the most affected community groups of our youth in our state. And these kids are very vulnerable to this sort of thing.”
Meanwhile, Providence resident Dayne Teigeler and his neighbors found numerous Ziploc bags containing rocks and pamphlets entitled, “It’s okay to be white,” and “Straight Pride.” Both phrases are used as reactions to anti-racist and racial justice advocates as well as LGBTQ+ Pride events, respectively.
Some of the Ziploc bags were thrown into neighbors’ yards, and others were found in the street. The pamphlets and aforementioned posters both contained URLs leading to the same website of a white supremacist organization.
“It definitely sounded like a more coordinated effort that this was to be done all at once,” Teigeler said. “Maybe because it is the start of Pride Month, that effort was stepped up by this organization to do this, and several places were hit all at the same time.”
The North Park police chief said it will investigate the incident with the Cache County Sheriff’s Office. Officers are now seeking images to help identify the perpetrators. The county attorney’s office will decide whether to file charges.
“This kind of thing does not divide us,” Teigeler said. “It makes us come together to come against this kind of hate speech and this kind of feeling in the community, as we want our community to be a safe spot.”
Over the past year, GLAAD’s ALERT Desk tracked 208 incidents specifically targeting Pride flags and other symbols of the LGBTQ community, down 25% from the desk’s 2023-24 data.
