LGBTQ Nation

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Queer Colorado legislator sponsors bill to require schools use students’ preferred name

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Stephanie Vigil, a queer Colorado state legislator, flipped her district from Republican to Democrat. Now, she’s ready to make some other changes. While the GOP has launched repeated attacks on transgender students nationwide, a local effort to prevent teachers from asking a teenager about their preferred pronouns has spawned a response from Vigil. She’s introduced a bill requiring teachers to use a student’s preferred name in the classroom. Deadnaming a trans student would be considered discrimination. “Making sure that we can create space for them to be seen and heard as their true self is very important,” said Nadine Bridges, the executive […]

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The Kids Online Safety Act could ruin the internet for LGBTQ+ youth. Or will it protect them?

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The CEOs of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Snap, and Discord testified in the Senate on Wednesday to discuss the online exploitation of children. The discussion brought up the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bipartisan bill that seeks to protect minors from online harm. But KOSA has come under fire from some LGBTQ+ activists and groups who fear that the bill will enable Republicans to block queer youth from seeing age-appropriate LGBTQ+ content online.  Laura Marquez-Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center, says revisions to the bill have helped ensure that its current version will protect all kids and […]

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Retired gay couple has fostered 33 kids

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Two gay elders have opened their home and lives to a slew of foster children since they retired. So far, they have fostered 33 kids and have no intention of stopping any time soon. Their first placement was a six-year-old boy and his nine-year-old sister. The siblings stayed with the couple for a year. Swiis Foster Care clients Barney and Rajainder spoke to Pink News about the challenges and rewards of being foster parents.  “As the main carer, I decided that emergency and respite care would be more suitable to our lifestyle. Obviously, emergency and respite care entails a high turnover of placements, […]

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Gender-affirming care clinic burned down in horrific arson: “This is terrorism”

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Firefighters in Decatur, Georgia have determined that an October fire at a local gender-affirming care clinic was intentionally set in a move one activist has labeled “terrorism.”  The fire in the city’s historic Blair Building was “contained to one office and no injuries were reported,” according to a recent statement from the City of Decatur Fire Rescue Department.  The statement expressed that an investigation has determined the fire “to be incendiary in nature, indicating the fire was intentionally set.” No suspects have been identified.  The Blair building houses several medical providers, but a police report confirms that the target of […]

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Transphobia hurts trans women’s health, new HIV research finds

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New research published this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that social and economic marginalization, including employment and housing discrimination, increases transgender women’s risk of contracting HIV. The report, published Thursday in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, analyzed data from a survey of more than 1,600 transgender women in seven U.S. cities from 2019 to 2020. The goal of the survey was to assess for the first time the factors that have led transgender women—and especially trans women of color—in the U.S. to have disproportionately high rates of HIV infection. Survey participants were also […]

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Massachusetts Senate unanimously passes bill to repeal sodomy ban & anti-trans laws

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While many state legislatures across the country are scrambling to pass anti-LGBTQ+ legislation this year, Massachusetts is going in the other direction. The state’s senate passed a bill yesterday — unanimously, as in, even the chamber’s Republicans voted for it — that repeals the state’s ban on gay sex as well as a law known as the “walking while trans” law. “I’m just really happy that it passed. And I hope that it will pass seamlessly in the house. There’s absolutely no reason for it not to pass,” Tanya Neslusan of MassEquality told the Washington Blade.  The state’s criminal code bans “the abominable […]

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Gay man from Chechnya who was tortured in a police station finally escaped Russia

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After months of torture in the basement of a Grozny police station, a gay Chechen man has finally fled the grip of Russia and his native country’s rabid homophobia, the North Caucasus LGBTQ+ rights group SK SOS reported Wednesday. Rizvan Dadayev was detained by police in the summer of 2022 after he was outed by a group of local extortionists in the Chechen capital in a video distributed online, SK SOS told The Moscow Times. He hadn’t been heard from since. The organization said Dadayev had been abused at the hands of law enforcement officials with direct ties to Chechen leader […]

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Maine legislators frantically working to make the state a trans refuge

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A proposed law in Maine would make the state the 15th “trans refuge” as lawmakers push back on attempts by some activist state attorneys general to demand private medical information from health authorities. Texas, in particular, has been at the forefront of attempts to persecute trans youth and their parents, along with hospitals, doctors, and healthcare providers, across state borders. Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has gone so far as to send special investigators across the state border to interrogate children and their families. The bill would protect Texans who flee to the state to seek medical care for their children or […]

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Biden administration allocates $700,000 to sex-ed program for trans boys

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The Biden administration is dedicating approximately $700,000 to a sexual health program aimed at pregnancy prevention for transgender boys.  The Department of Health and Human Services has approved a grant to the Center for Innovative Public Health Research in California, which will spearhead a program focused on sex education and condom usage for trans boys. The grant summary explains that trans boys are “at risk for negative sexual health outcomes yet are effectively excluded from sexual health programs because gender-diverse youth do not experience the cisgender, heteronormative teen sexual education messaging available to them as salient or applicable.”  It also said trans […]

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Texas’s anti-LGBTQ+ book ban law blocked by federal court

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A federal appeals court has issued an injunction against part of Texas’ book-banning law that requires book vendors to rate books for “sexually explicit” and “sexually relevant” materials. Vendors must submit those ratings every year to the Texas Education Agency (TEA), the agency overseeing public schools. The TEA can then overrule a vendor’s ratings and place vendors on a “noncompliant list,” forbidding schools from buying books from them if the vendors disagree with the TEA’s decisions. Two Texas bookstores — Austin’s BookPeople and Houston’s Blue Willow Bookshop — filed a lawsuit against the 2023 Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources […]

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