Faefyx Collington

Democrats and LGBTQ+ advocates in Ohio are speaking out after Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) ran anti-trans ads in the state. The Republican opponent in Kaptur’s re-election campaign, Derek Merrin, ran ads claiming that Kaptur supported trans people. Kaptur responded with ads that pushed anti-trans slogans. “We are joining the call to ask Representative Kaptur to take down these harmful ads,” the Lucas County Democrats wrote on social media. “Kaptur is a better candidate with better policies and a long history of supporting equal rights, and even gerrymandered districts shouldn’t make us stoop to Derek Merrin’s level.” Kaptur’s new ads started […]

The First Circuit Court of Appeals is denying accurate gender markers for nonbinary people born in Puerto Rico, with new reasoning that has not been seen in other trans rights cases. The ruling claims to protect the privacy of nonbinary people by denying them accurate gender markers on birth certificates. Critics say the ruling might do the opposite and lead to the erasure of nonbinary people instead.  The case was sent back to the U.S. District Court for Puerto Rico for further debate. “This case is about the fact that every person should have access to government-issued identity documents that […]

In the 200s AD, the Roman emperor Elagabalus was known for dressing in women’s clothing and requesting to be called “Lady” instead of “Lord.”  In the mid 1600s, Queen Christina’s decision to abdicate the Swedish throne rather than marry a man fueled rumors that she was attracted to women.  But would Elagabalus have identified with the modern definition of trans? Would Queen Christina have called herself a lesbian? It’s impossible to know. One of the major challenges with queer history is how we attribute our current understanding of gender and sexuality to people of the past, who might not have […]

In the late 1980s, two women set about creating a lesbian community in Kansas City, Missouri. The result was Womontown, an urban community of over 70 women that spanned a 12-block radius and contained 28 homes and 14 apartment buildings. “We just started imagining, what if we could just walk hand in hand, freely, down the street, a bunch of lesbians all in this neighborhood,” said co-founder Mary Ann Hopper in the 2022 documentary, Womontown. “And I thought, well, if we can do the work, I could imagine that it would maybe be fun to live here.” The journey began when Hopper’s partner, […]