John Russell

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A school board passed a blanket ban on rainbow imagery in schools. Students are suing.

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Two students are suing their Minnesota school district over a recently adopted policy banning Pride flags, rainbow stickers, and other symbols of support for the LGBTQ+ community. The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota last week on behalf of the students and their parents, claims the Detroit Lakes Public School District and four members of the district’s school board violated the students’ rights to free speech and equal protection under the state constitution and that the policy violates the Minnesota Human Rights Act’s prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. According to the ACLU, […]

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US ambassador removes gay artist’s “lesbian picnic” painting from embassy for being “very woke”

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Officials with the U.S. State Department have removed a painting by out artist Kehinde Wiley from the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic, which they have variously described as “very woke” and as depicting a lesbian picnic. The painting, Young Artists After Siamesas 1960, was commissioned by the U.S. government under former President Barack Obama in 2013 and has hung in the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo since 2015. In an August 21 interview with former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer, Erin Scavino, the director of the State Department’s Art in Embassies program, said that Leah Campos, the US ambassador to the Dominican […]

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LGBTQ+ adults are delaying getting healthcare for 2 alarming reasons

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LGBTQ+ adults are significantly more likely to face challenges accessing and paying for necessary healthcare, according to a new survey released last Thursday from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a health policy research non-profit. Out of over 2,600 LGBTQ+ adults surveyed, 58% said they skipped or postponed necessary healthcare in the past year compared to 38% of non-LGBTQ+ people. The two main reasons included costs and inability to get an appointment. Even among those with health insurance and those who make more than $100,000 a year, LGBTQ+ people were more likely to say they skipped or delayed care in the past year. […]

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Parents speak out after their teen died by suicide: Idaho’s anti-trans extremism took a toll

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The parents of a transgender teen who died by suicide earlier this year are speaking out about the toll Idaho’s anti-trans laws and the Trump administration’s anti-trans crusade took on their daughter. “You worry about that hatred being internalized, and that’s what happened to my kid,” Elyse Thorpe told NBC News in a recent profile. “It got inside.” Thorpe and ex-husband Joseph Pollard describe their late daughter, May Pollard, as an energetic and curious child who loved sloths, video games, and writing poetry. She just wanted to live her life and experience the same things any teen does. But she was […]

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Puerto Rico quietly passed an anti-trans bathroom ban & used trans swimmer Lia Thomas to justify it

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Earlier this year, Puerto Rico became the first U.S. territory to pass an anti-trans bathroom ban into law. Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón (R) signed H.B. 165 in late February, after it was passed by the Puerto Rican Legislative Assembly with votes of 37–11 in the House and 21–5 in the Senate, as reported by independent journalist Aleksandra Vaca. The “Public Government Restroom Facilities Regulation Act” requires all government buildings, including the University of Puerto Rico, to maintain sex-segregated multi-occupancy restrooms, and bans transgender and nonbinary people from accessing bathrooms that do not align with the sex they were assigned at birth. It […]

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University system chancellor orders schools to end academic programs “centered on” LGBTQ+ identities

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The Texas Tech University System is shutting down all its academic programs “centered on” sexual orientation and gender identity. In an April 9 memo, Chancellor Brandon Creighton, a former Republican state lawmaker, gave provosts at the system’s five universities until June 15 to conduct reviews “to identify specific degree programs, official tracks, majors, minors, and certificates that meet the ‘centered on’ threshold” and to submit their lists of programs to the Office of the Chancellor, the Texas Tribune reports. The memo defines “centered on” as “when sexual orientation or gender identity serves as the primary subject, main theoretical framework, central narrative, or driving […]

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United Nations rejects U.S. effort to erase trans women: “It stops here”

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Delegates at the United Nations 70th annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) overwhelmingly voted against considering a proposal by the U.S. to adopt an anti-trans definition of “gender.” On March 19, the final day of the nine-day conference, the U.S. introduced a resolution calling on U.N. member states to officially define “gender” as referring only to men and women. The resolution claimed that the landmark Beijing Declaration on women’s rights, adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, already defined gender as “referring to men and women.” But a letter from the progressive Women’s Rights Caucus […]

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Prominent LGBTQ+ activist just became Nepal’s first out trans lawmaker

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Nepal has elected its first out transgender lawmaker. On Monday, Nepal’s Election Commission confirmed that Bhumika Shrestha will serve as a Member of Parliament, taking one of 182 seats in the country’s House of Representatives that the centrist Rastriya Swatantra Party secured in this month’s elections. “I am very excited but also feel the responsibility on my shoulders,” Shrestha told Agence France-Presse (AFP). “Our constitution has provisions for our community, but they have not translated to laws and policies. Our community expects me to raise our issues.” The 37-year-old activist and actress has been a leading figure in Nepal’s LGBTQ+ rights movement. […]

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EU court tells member states: gender marker changes are the law

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European Union member states must allow transgender citizens to update their names and gender markers on identification documents, according to the EU’s highest court. On Thursday, the EU Court of Justice (COJ) ruled that member state Bulgaria’s ban on trans people updating their names and gender markers on birth certificates — established in 2023 with a Bulgarian Supreme Court decision — violates the right to “freedom of movement” between EU countries guaranteed by the European Commission. All EU citizens’ right to freedom of movement supersedes any member country’s laws, the court said. The decision came in a case brought by ILGA-Europe, Trans […]

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“Terrifying”: GOP unleashes wave of anti-trans bills nationwide. Here’s what they’re planning…

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Nearly a dozen bills targeting transgender rights have been introduced or passed in state legislatures across the U.S. in the first week of March. In seven states, Republican lawmakers are pushing legislation to ban trans residents from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity, ban trans women and girls from participating in women’s and girls’ sports, and even ban trans people from teaching. Missouri could ban trans people from public facilities of all sorts As Erin in the Morning reports, March 2 saw the Missouri state House of Representatives’ Emerging Issues committee hear three anti-trans bathroom bills. H.B. 2536 would not only […]

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