Daniel Villarreal

As Republican attacks on transgender people continue nationwide, five Democratic House representatives have introduced a Transgender Bill of Rights that would protect trans and non-binary people. The bill would ban discrimination against gender identity and expression in public accommodations, employment, housing, and credit. The bill would also ensure access to gender-affirming medical care — including abortion and contraception — and would ban forced surgery on intersex children and infants. Intersex individuals are often subject to unnecessary genital surgeries before they can provide informed consent. The bill would ban so-called “conversion therapy,” the pseudoscientific form of mental torture that purports to […]

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has expressed interest in loosening libel and defamation laws to allow an anti-LGBTQ hate church to sue an organization that called them out as a hate group. Thomas, who supports ending same-sex marriage in the U.S., expressed this interest in his recent dissent disagreeing with the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the anti-LGBTQ church’s case. He was the lone dissenter to comment on the court’s recent refusal to hear a lawsuit brought by D. James Kennedy Ministries, an evangelical Christian media company that operates the Florida-based Coral Ridge Ministries (CRM). CRM sued the Southern Poverty […]

About one-third of the 1,586 books banned from schools nationwide have LGBTQ themes and characters, according to a report from the free-speech organization PEN America. The bans have largely come from Republican politicians, conservative school boards and so-called “parents’ rights” groups that have opposed such content as “woke” “indoctrination” that’s “inappropriate” for school children. For their report, PEN America examined publicly noted book bans occurring from the start of July 2021 to the end of March 2022. During that time, school districts banned 379 LGBTQ titles, including 84 that deal with transgender topics and characters. Four of the most frequently banned […]

In order to defend Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, and others like it being introduced across the country, some rightwing media figures are stating that all male teachers are likely pedophiles. On Sunday night, David Mamet, a 74-year-old Pulitzer prize-winning playwright who is also a male teacher of playwriting, told Fox News host Mark Levin, “What we have is kids being — not only indoctrinated — but groomed in a very real sense, by people who are, whether they know it or not, sexual predators.” Related: Florida teen goes viral for defying Don’t Say Gay law & teaching class about Stonewall […]