Jo Yurcaba

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Transgender victory over Hobby Lobby could have national impact

An appellate court deciding Hobby Lobby violated Illinois anti-discrimination law by denying a transgender employee access to the women’s restroom could have nationwide implications, experts say. Meggan Sommerville, a trans woman who has worked at a Hobby Lobby location in Aurora for more than 20 years, has been denied access to the store’s women’s room since transitioning at work in 2010. As a result, she has had anxiety and recurring nightmares and has been forced to limit her fluid intake, according to filings.  On Friday, the Illinois 2nd District Appellate Court upheld a lower court decision that determined the crafts […]

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LGBTQ Americans taking bigger economic hit amid pandemic, census data finds

As the nation battles new variants of the Covid-19 virus, LGBTQ Americans have felt the economic brunt of the pandemic harder than the general public, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau. Released Wednesday, the latest version of the agency’s Household Pulse Survey is the first to include gender identity and sexual orientation.  It found 19.8 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adults lived in a household where there was a loss of income in the past month, compared to 16.8 percent of non-LGBTQ adults.  Economic disparities between LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people existed long before the pandemic, says […]

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Nearly half of trans people have been mistreated by medical providers, report finds

For three years, Jesse Brace avoided getting care for their seizures after they experienced discrimination at an emergency room near their home in Lawrence, Kansas, in 2017.  They said they told the staff that they are transgender and nonbinary, that their name is different from their legal name and that they use gender-neutral pronouns. “They refused to even so much as acknowledge this information, and not only did they not use [my pronouns], but they also sent me home without treating me for what I went in for,” said Brace, 25.  When they tried to get care elsewhere after that, […]

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LGBTQ sex workers ‘in limbo’ after OnlyFans policy change

OnlyFans, the online content subscription service, has faced widespread backlash from sex workers after it announced last week that it will ban sexually explicit content starting Oct. 1.  Some LGBTQ OnlyFans creators say the changes could jeopardize one of their primary sources of income during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many sex workers, such as Stacey Monroe, 27, have been using OnlyFans to create sexually explicit video content and photos during the pandemic because they can’t see clients in person safely.  Monroe said she left her career in health care to focus on advocating for transgender rights after she faced discrimination from multiple past […]

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HIV is no longer a death sentence, but decades-old stigma persists

In 2014, Deondre Moore, who was 19 at the time, decided to get an HIV test while he and his friends were at a nightclub in Houston.  Moore wanted his friends to get tested, “so I knew that the best way to do so was to lead by example and do my test first,” he said. He was tested earlier that year, and had recently been in what he thought was a monogamous relationship with a man he was in love with, so he wasn’t worried about the results. “They tested me for HIV, I knew it would come back […]

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Transgender recruit sues New Orleans Police Department for alleged hiring discrimination

Britton Hamilton said, as a trans man, he wanted to become a police officer to help promote change from the inside. He applied to the New Orleans Police Department in June 2020, and after several exams and a panel interview, he received a conditional job offer in December. “It was like a dream job,” Hamilton said. “I want to be able to help the community and help people to view police officers differently than how they are feeling now.” The offer was conditional on him passing a routine medical and psychological evaluation, during which he said the psychologist asked him […]

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N.J. will house transgender inmates by gender identity after lawsuit

New Jersey has adopted a policy that requires state prisons to house transgender people according to their gender identity rather than their sex assigned at birth. The policy change is part of a settlement the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey announced Tuesday, and it puts the state among the handful of others with similar policies. The ACLU of New Jersey and attorney Robyn Gigl of GluckWalrath LLP sued the N.J. Department of Corrections and its officers in August 2019 on behalf of a trans woman who went by the pseudonym Sonia Doe in court documents. Prior to Doe’s lawsuit, the […]

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Rep. Ritchie Torres to introduce measure condemning anti-trans bills

Rep. Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat, said he plans to introduce the first resolution to condemn state bills targeting transgender people this week.  This year, state legislatures have considered more than 100 bills targeting trans people, “making 2021 the worst year for legislation that discriminates against the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) community since 2015,” the bill states. Eighteen anti-LGBTQ bills have passed, and 10 await governors’ final signatures, it adds. Most of the bills target transgender youth by seeking to ban them from school sports teams that align with their gender identity or limit their access […]

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Bill seeks U.S. apology for ‘hundreds of thousands’ of fired LGBTQ government workers

LGBTQ civil servants and service members were systematically fired or forced to resign due to their sexual orientation or gender identity over the past seven decades, and a proposed bill is seeking to have the federal government issue an official apology acknowledging its past discriminatory policies.  The bill, introduced Thursday by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., says the federal government “discriminated against and terminated hundreds of thousands” of LGBTQ people who served in the armed forces, the foreign Ssrvice and the federal civil service for decades, “causing untold harm to those individuals professionally, financially, socially, and medically, among other harms.” Kaine and Sen. […]

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Court’s foster care ruling has experts, advocates split on potential LGBTQ impact

Legal experts and advocates are split on what a decision Thursday by the Supreme Court on the rights of religious groups means for LGBTQ rights in the near term. The court ruled unanimously in favor of Catholic Social Services, a religious adoption agency that wanted an exemption from Philadelphia’s nondiscrimination law, which would have required the agency to allow LGBTQ couples to adopt. Experts say the ruling was much narrower in scope than it could have been. The court could have ruled that religious social services providers contracted by governments are broadly exempt from nondiscrimination laws, which would have allowed them to […]

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