Jo Yurcaba

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Trans men enter Miss Italy pageant in droves after trans women are told they can’t compete

More than 100 transgender men have entered the Miss Italy pageant this week, according to an activist leading a protest against recent comments by the pageant’s organizer, who said trans women wouldn’t be allowed to compete. The comments came after another European pageant, Miss Netherlands, crowned its first transgender winner, Rikkie Valerie Kollé, this month. About a week later, Patrizia Mirigliani, the official organizer of Miss Italy, told an Italian radio station that Miss Italy wouldn’t allow trans women to compete.  “Lately, beauty contests have been trying to make the news using strategies that I think are a bit absurd,” Mirigliani said, according […]

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Trans man punched by L.A. County deputy, video shows, then asked to show genitals at jail

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is investigating after a deputy threw a transgender man to the ground, punched him and held him down as the man called for help. During the encounter, which was caught on recently released surveillance video, the man could be heard telling the deputy that he couldn’t breathe and at one point said, “You’re going to kill me.”  Emmett Brock, 24, told NBC News he was driving home from his job as a teacher in February when he passed a deputy who appeared to be having a heated conversation with a woman on the side […]

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Explainer: What does nonbinary mean?

As the country and world become more aware and accepting of LGBTQ identities, an increasing number of people are coming out as nonbinary, which means their gender identity is neither exclusively male nor female. A Pew Research Center survey published last year found that about 1.6% of U.S. adults identify as transgender or nonbinary. Transgender means someone’s gender identity, or the personal sense of their gender, differs from the sex they were assigned at birth, which is based on their external sex characteristics.  Transgender can be thought of as an umbrella term, and nonbinary exists under that, though not all nonbinary people […]

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Montana State Library withdraws from national library group over president’s ‘Marxist lesbian’ comment

The Montana State Library Commission voted Tuesday to leave the American Library Association, the oldest and largest library association in the world, because the ALA’s president described herself as a “Marxist lesbian” in a social media post last year. Emily Drabinski, who was elected president of the ALA in April 2022 and took office this month, celebrated her election in a social media post that has since been deleted.  “I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of @ALALibrary,” Drabinksi wrote in […]

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Penguin Random House and Florida parents sue school district over book bans

Penguin Random House, authors, parents and a free speech group filed a lawsuit Wednesday against a Florida school district for removing 10 books related to race and the LGBTQ community after a high school teacher complained.  In addition to the publishing house, PEN America, a nonprofit group that advocates for free expression in literature, five authors whose books have been removed from the district, and two parents whose children go to school in the district filed the suit against the Escambia County School District and the Escambia County School Board in Pensacola, Florida. The plaintiffs alleged that the district and the board […]

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Raising a trans kid in Missouri has become a ‘dystopian nightmare’ for families

When Kyle Freels got off work Tuesday, he and his wife, Rene, drove from their home in Missouri across the Mississippi River to look at neighborhoods in Illinois. They also picked up three months’ worth of estrogen for their daughter, Chelsea, who is transgender. The Freels are preparing to potentially leave St. Louis, where they moved 17 years ago just before Chelsea was born, due to the state’s repeated efforts to restrict the rights of trans people.  “I never thought we’d have to be refugees in the United States, but now we’re being forced out,” Kyle Freels said. So far […]

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Trans Montana representative silenced by GOP colleagues for three days

Rep. Zooey Zephyr, the first openly transgender woman elected to the Montana Legislature, held her microphone in the air during a House session Monday as her supporters chanted “Let her speak!” from the gallery.  For the third day in a row, Zephyr’s House colleagues refused to allow her to speak on bills that would restrict the rights of transgender people. The refusal followed a comment she made last week during a hearing on a bill that seeks to ban gender-affirming care for minors.  “I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see […]

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Missouri man sentenced to 21 years in prison for shooting gay teen

A Missouri man was sentenced to nearly 22 years in prison Thursday for a hate crime after shooting a gay teen in May 2019.  Malachi Robinson, 25, shot the teen, who is referred to as M.S. in court documents, eight times after meeting him at the Kansas City Public Library and luring him into the woods under the guise of looking for a place to engage in a sexual act, according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri.  On the day Robinson met M.S., who was 16 at the time, he messaged his girlfriend about M.S. and […]

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North Dakota advances record-setting 10 anti-LGBTQ bills in one day, advocates say

North Dakota’s Legislature advanced 10 bills Tuesday that advocates say target the state’s LGBTQ community, setting a single-day record for such legislation, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group. The state Senate passed all 10 bills, which had already passed the House, on Monday. Eight of them are headed to Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, for either a signature or a veto. Those eight include a broad measure that would ban “adult-oriented performances” on public property or in front of minors, which could restrict many forms of drag. Some of the bills passed with veto-proof majorities, including […]

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Education department proposed a change to Title IX that would prohibit categorical bans on trans athletes

The Education Department proposed a rule Thursday in connection with the growing number of states that have banned transgender student-athletes from participating on school sports teams that align with their gender identities. The department’s proposed rule would change Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 — which prohibits discrimination based on sex in federally funded education programs — by, in part, prohibiting blanket exclusions of trans girls and women from female sports teams, which have become law in 20 states. The measure would, however, permit some restrictions in certain sports at more elite levels of competition, such as in high […]

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