Christopher Wiggins

Julia Curlee spent nearly two decades carrying the country’s secrets. She worked in war zones, traveled to 35 countries, briefed presidents, and boarded Air Force One with the President’s Daily Brief. She was trusted to decide what some of the world’s most powerful people needed to know before beginning their days. Stay up to date with the latest in LGBTQ+ news with The Advocate’s email newsletter, in your inbox five days a week. But in a remarkable first-person account published Monday by The Atlantic, Curlee describes how the second Trump administration came to view something else as dangerously sensitive: the fact that […]

The Trump administration moved transgender women in federal custody into segregated housing despite a court order barring their transfer out of women’s facilities. An attorney for the inmates told U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth that the administration had violated the court’s May order by moving the women into segregated units, according to the Associated Press. Lamberth is now considering how to enforce his injunction. Stay up to date with the latest in LGBTQ+ news with The Advocate’s email newsletter, in your inbox five days a week. When Lamberth pressed Justice Department attorneys on whether the action violated his prior court order, administration attorneys said they had complied with […]

Less than a month after workers at Advocates for Trans Equality ratified a contract designed to protect their jobs, one of the nation’s most prominent transgender rights organizations warned that some of those jobs may disappear. Now, employees are accusing A4TE’s leadership of financial mismanagement, withholding essential information and violating the collective bargaining agreement the two sides spent more than a year negotiating. The Union for Trans Liberation said A4TE management notified union representatives after 5 p.m. July 20 that the organization was entering a period of “economic retrenchment.” Less than 24 hours later, A4TE sent donors an appeal saying it may “potentially eliminate […]

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, has appointed a former Republicanlawmaker with a long record of opposing transgender rights and attempting to curtail civil rights enforcement to the state commission charged with protecting Pennsylvanians from discrimination. Former State Rep. Seth Grove, who represented part of York County in the Pennsylvania House for 17 years, is among seven new members of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission. The agency investigates discrimination in employment, housing, education, and public accommodations and enforces the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act. Stay up to date with the latest in LGBTQ+ news with The Advocate’s email newsletter, in your inbox five days a week. Grove is […]

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to knock most of the transgender service members out of a lawsuit over military retirements that the Air Force approved and then abruptly revoked. In a 10-page ruling Wednesday, U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Elaine D. Kaplan, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, denied the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss, allowing all 17 plaintiffs to continue pursuing claims that the government unlawfully stripped them of retirement pay and benefits after promising they could leave military service with early retirement. Stay up to date with the latest in LGBTQ+ news with The Advocate’s email newsletter, in your […]

A leading Democratic-aligned think tank is urging political leaders to defend transgender people from discrimination while accepting that restrictions on their participation in sports “may be appropriate under some circumstances,” a proposed political reset that is already drawing criticism from within the LGBTQ+ community. The Center for American Progress published the six-page report, “Ending the Backlash on LGBTQI+ Issues,” on Thursday. Written by Caleb Smith, CAP’s director of LGBTQI+ health policy, and Winnie Stachelberg, a longtime LGBTQ+ policy strategist who founded the organization’s LGBTQI+ policy program, the document offers Democrats a framework for responding to Republican attacks on transgender health care, athletics and military service. Stay up to date with the latest in […]