An organization that provides suicide prevention and crisis intervention services to thousands of young LGBTQ people in the United States announced on Wednesday that it is expanding its services to Mexico.
The Trevor Project — named after “Trevor,” an Academy Award-winning short film about a gay teenager who attempts suicide — estimates that more than 745,000 Mexico-based LGBTQ youths ages 13 to 24 are in crisis each year, though it notes that figure is a rough approximation due to the “severe lack of data.” It also estimates that over 40 million queer youths worldwide seriously consider suicide annually.
To counter the harrowing numbers, the group said that it will offer its round-the-clock digital services — including text and online chat suicide prevention and crisis services — for LGBTQ youths in Mexico by the end of 2022. The expansion into the U.S.’s southern neighbor is the first time the group will offer its services abroad since its founding in 1998.
“LGBTQ young people everywhere deserve not just to survive, but to thrive,” The Trevor Project CEO Amit Paley said. “We don’t think that just because you happen to have been born in one country that means you are more or less deserving of critical, lifesaving services and affirmation.”
The nonprofit has been pivotal in providing LGBTQ youths in the U.S. with mental health services, where it estimates 42 percent of LGBTQ youths and more than half of trans youth seriously considered suicide last year.
It hopes to replicate its efforts in Mexico, where its services will be available in Spanish, in addition to English. The group also said in a statement that it will be collaborating with local organizations throughout the country “to build on the progress they’ve already made.”
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LGBTQ rights have had several advancements in Mexico within the last two decades.
In 2009, Mexico City became the first city in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage. Since then, same-sex marriage has been legalized in at least a dozen of Mexico’s 32 states, according to the international advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
And beyond same-sex marriage, 19 Mexican states also have legal gender recognition procedures, allowing individuals to change their gender identity on their official documents, according to the advocacy organization.
However, Cristian González Cabrera, who researches LGBTQ rights in Latin America for Human Rights Watch, said there’s still “a lot to be done” and that The Trevor Project’s expansion in Mexico will be “very welcome.”
“Legal advances don’t always translate to social or lived progress for LGBTQ people in the region,” Cabrera said. “Mexico remains a conservative country in certain aspects and regions, and LGBTQ people continue to experience all sorts of discrimination in all sectors of life, whether that’s education, health care, in the job market, et cetera.”
Research has also shown that LGBTQ people living in Mexico are more prone to violence.
At least 79 LGBTQ people were killed in Mexico in 2020, more than six a month, according to the Mexican LGBTQ rights group Letra Ese.
Through its research in the United States, The Trevor Project has also found that LGBTQ youths who reported having at least one LGBTQ-affirming space had lower rates of suicide attempts.
The group hopes that by expanding its services to Mexico, it can help to create supportive spaces for the country’s LGBTQ youths and save lives as a result, Paley said.
“Mexico is going to be the first country we’re launching in, but it will not be the last,” he said.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., laid out a conservative blueprint this week for a GOP takeover of Congress, and included in his “11-Point Plan to Rescue America” are a number of proposals that would limit the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.
The document outlines Republican policy objectives on everything from the economy to abortion, but the point that caused the most alarm to LGBTQ advocates was in a section titled “Gender, Life, Science.”
“Men and women are biologically different, ‘male and female He created them,'” Scott wrote. “Facts are facts, the earth is round, the sun is hot, there are two genders, and abortion stops a beating heart. To say otherwise is to deny science.”
In this section, Scott — who served as Florida’s governor from2011 to 2019 — called for nationwide bans on government forms that “include questions about ‘gender identity’ or ‘sexual preference’”; gender-affirming procedures on minors; and transgender women and girls participating on female sports teams.
“We will protect women’s sports by banning biological males from competing,” the policy outline states. “It is hugely unfair and would erase many of the gains women have made in athletics over the last 50 years.”
Scott’s proposals echo the ongoing nationwide push of anti-LGBTQ legislation by state lawmakers.
So far this year, conservative state lawmakers have filed more than 170 anti-LGBTQ bills — already surpassing last year’s 139 total — according to Freedom for All Americans. The majority of the bills target transgender minors’ ability to receive gender-affirming health care or participate in sports.
In the eighth point of Scott’s plan, labeled simply “Family,” he called out the “radical left” for seeking to “devalue and redefine the traditional family,” using language associated with activists opposed to same-sex marriage.
LGBTQ advocates slammed Scott’s proposals.
Brandon Wolf, the press secretary for advocacy group Equality Florida, said that Scott’s manifesto was “affirmation of what we’ve been trying to warn folks about.”
“What is happening in Florida isn’t isolated,” Wolf told NBC News. “It’s a test market for a national strategy by the extreme right to legislate this country back to 1960, mire us in culture wars and decimate the progress we’ve won.”
Scott, a first-term senator who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is not the only Republican to preview how the GOP would pursue anti-LGBTQ legislation should it regain power in Washington.
Last month, former President Donald Trump said he would ban transgender women from participating in women’s sports nationwide if he were re-elected.
“We will ban men from participating in women’s sports,” Trump said during a rally in Conroe, Texas. “So ridiculous.”
Aside from how the GOP should navigate LGBTQ rights, Scott’s manifesto called for Republicans to “eliminate racial politics in America,” finish building a southern border wall and name it after Trump, and battle “the new religion of wokeness.”
Students have repeatedly vandalized Pride posters at Spencer Lyst’s high school in Williamson County, Tennessee. Teachers have skipped over LGBTQ issues in class textbooks. Trans kids in his state have been legally barred from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity. Parents have called on school officials to remove books about sexual orientation and gender identity from the county’s elementary curriculum. And while leading hisschool’s Pride club at a September homecoming parade, Lyst and other LGBTQ students were booed by a group of parents.
“I’m so used to it, but it shouldn’t be something I have to think about,” Lyst, 16, said of the near-constant feeling of being attacked at school because of his identity.
He even said it’s “difficult” to walk into the school bathroom for fear of what or who “might be in there.”
“Like, can I go to the bathroom or am I going to get hate for just existing?” he said.
Lyst’s school experience is a far cry from an isolated case.
Since the start of the school year, school officials in states across the country have banned books about gay and trans experiences, removed LGBTQ-affirming posters and flags and disbanded gay-straight alliance clubs. In school districts throughout the nation, students have attacked their queer classmates, while state lawmakers have filed hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills with many seeking to redefine lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer students’ places in U.S. schools.
“There is no separating any of these things,” Mary Emily O’Hara, the rapid response manager at LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, said at a media briefing on Monday. “What we’re seeing here is anti-LGBTQ groups, on a national level, making schools the new battleground across the board, across various kinds of school policies and various forms of legislation. Schools are the target right now for the anti-LGBTQ movement.”
In the majority of cases, conservative school officials, lawmakers and parents say LGBTQ issues do not belong in school because they are “political” and “not age-appropriate” for students. Conversely, queer youth and their families, along with LGBTQ and ally teachers, say they feel they are being “erased” from the U.S. education system.
‘I’m not going back in the closet’
South Florida mom Jennifer Solomon, 50, has four children. Her eldest child, Nicolette, 28, is a lesbian who teaches fourth grade in Miami-Dade County. Her youngest, Cooper, 11, identifies as male, but Solomon said his “expression is female.” Cooper “never wanted to be a girl,” his mom explained, but he prefers to wear his school’s girls uniform and enjoys dressing up like a fairy-tale princess for fun.
“An easy way to describe it is that he’s the opposite of a tomboy,” she told NBC News.
Despite how hard she works to protect her children, Solomon — who leads her local chapter of PFLAG, an LGBTQ family advocacy group — said the slew of anti-LGBTQ school policies “keeps me up at night.”
On Monday, Solomon’s governor, Republican Ron DeSantis, signaledthat he would support a new piece of state legislation — titled the Parental Rights in Education bill, but dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — that would prohibit the discussion of sexuality and gender identity in schools.
Speaking at a news event in Miami, DeSantis said it is “entirely inappropriate” for teachers to be having conversations with students about gender identity, citing alleged instances of them telling children, “Don’t worry, don’t pick your gender yet,” and “hiding” classroom lessons from parents.
“Parental rights? Whose parental rights? Only parental rights if you’re raising a child according to DeSantis?” Solomon, who is a nurse manager at a health care company, said of DeSantis’ concerns. “DeSantis tries to paint this picture that every family is this 1950s mom and dad with two kids and a cat and dog. That is not what Florida looks like; that is not what the country looks like.”
“DeSantis has found a weak spot, and that weak spot is children,” she added, suggesting that DeSantis is supporting the measure for political gain.
Nicolette Solomon said she is already hesitant to mention her wife — and by default her sexuality — at school, but she said passage of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill would be “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” and vowed to quit if it becomes law.
“If I can’t be myself, seven hours a day, five days a week, then I’m going back in the closet, and I can’t do that. It’s not good for my own mental health,” she said. “And I don’t think I can bear to see the students struggle and want to ask me about these things and then have to deny them that knowledge. That’s not who I am as a teacher.”
In less than two months since the start of the year, conservative state lawmakers have filed more than 170 anti-LGBTQ bills — already surpassing last year’s 139 total — with at least 69 of them centered on school policies, according to Freedom for All Americans. The nonprofit group, which advocates for LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections nationwide, said in an email that it didn’t track LGBTQ school policy bills last year, as it was not as much of a “sweeping trend” as it is now.
Three states — including Lyst’s home state of Tennessee — passed bills last year that allow parents to opt students out of any lessons or coursework that mention sexual orientation or gender identity, according to GLSEN, an advocacy group that aims to end LGBTQ discrimination in education. In addition to the “Don’t Say Gay” bill advancing in Florida, there are 15 bills under consideration in eight states that would silence speech about LGBTQ identities in classrooms, according to free speech nonprofit organization PEN America.
But perhaps the biggest trend in state bills targeting LGBTQ youths are those focused on transgender students.
Last year, legislators in at least 30 states weighed legislation that would bar trans students from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity, according to LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign. Nine of those states enacted the bills into law. So far this year, 27 states have proposed similar bills, with South Dakota enacting its version of the legislation into law this month.
While not school related, there has also been a slew of bills that seek to prevent transgender youths from accessing gender-affirming health care. At least 20 states have proposed such measures since early 2021, with two states — Arkansas and Tennessee — enacting these bills into law. However, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Arkansas law in July after the American Civil Liberties Union challenged it in court on behalf of trans youths and their families.
Cooper Solomon said he thinks lawmakers are pushing anti-LGBTQ legislation “because they were born in another time.”
“I guess back then, a long time ago, they didn’t accept this, and they thought it was really bad,” the fifth grader said. “I would just like them to know that it’s OK to be like this, and it’s not going to hurt anyone.”
Legislation aside, the last straw for Jack Petocz, 17, was when his high school in Flagler County, Florida, removed a young adult memoir detailing the trials of being a Black queer boy: George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue.”
In November, a school board member filed a criminal complaint against school officials for allowing copies of the book— which has been challenged in at least 19 states —to remain in two of the county’s high schools. The complaint was dismissed, but the superintendent decided to keep the book off of shelves until new policies are drafted to give parents more control over the library’s collection.
“I felt that my community was under attack, that they were trying to silence LGBTQ+ experiences and voices within our community,” Petocz, who is gay and led a student protest in response to the book’s removal, said. “We’re already a minority. Why are you trying to suppress this critical information within our libraries, you know? These books are critical to providing a sense of identity.”
Books about race, sexual orientation and gender identity have historically been challenged in schools, but over the last several months, school libraries have seen a surge of opposition.
In the fall, as book bans started to take off in counties across the country, national groups — including No Left Turn in Education and Moms for Liberty — began circulating lists of school library books that they said were “indoctrinating kids to a dangerous ideology” to rally support.
The bans then became a talking point in the contentious Virginia governor’s race, where the Republican candidate, former private equity executive and political newcomer Glenn Youngkin, made education a central issue of his campaign and swept to victory.
Youngkin’s victory prompted other politicians to jump onto the issue, with the governors of Texas and South Carolina urging state school officials in November to ban several books, deriding them as “pornography” and “obscene” content.
School board members in Virginia’s Spotsylvania County made national headlines after calling for LGBTQ books with “sexually explicit” material to be incinerated.
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom, said in November that while challenges to books with LGBTQ- and race-related content have historically been “constant,” the association has recently seen a “chilling” uptick.
“I’ve worked at ALA for two decades now, and I’ve never seen this volume of challenges come in,” she said.“The impact will fall to those students who desperately want and need books that reflect their lives, that answer questions about their identity, about their experiences that they always desperately need and often feel that they can’t talk to adults about.”
To counter LGBTQ book bans — and school bans on race-related texts — a group of more than 600 writers, including bestselling children’s author Judy Blume; publishers; bookstore owners; and advocacy groups signed a joint statement in December condemning the trend, arguing it “threatens the education of America’s children.”
Setting a ‘different tone’
While state bills and book bans have garnered the most media attention, advocates say there are a host of other troubling trends adding to the distress that many queer students are feeling: removals of Pride flags and other LGBTQ-affirming symbols from classrooms, disbandments of gay-straight alliance clubs and resignations of teachers in protest of anti-LGBTQ policies.
In the fall, for example, rainbow stickers were ordered to be scraped off classroom doors at MacArthur High School near Dallas.
“While we appreciate the sentiment of reaching out to students who may not previously always had such support, we want to set a different tone this year,” an email from a school official addressed to school staff read. NBC News obtained the email from a MacArthur High School teacher.
The sticker removals prompted a protest from the student body, but the pushback did not successfully encourage school officials to change their stance on the policy.
School board members in Newberg, Oregon, made national headlines in the fall for taking similar actions. In September, the school board banned educators from displaying Pride and Black Lives Matter flags and other symbols it considered “political” in school.
“We don’t pay our teachers to push their political views on our students. That’s not their place,” the school board member who authored the policy, Brian Shannon, said at a recorded board meeting.
The policy prompted town protests that attracted some members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group that has endorsed violence, who counterprotested the efforts. An attempt to recall Shannon and another school board member over the flag removals failed last month.
Some teachers have resigned in school districts over similar measures, like a Missouri teacher who resigned in September after his district mandated that he take down his Pride flag and not discuss human sexuality or “sexual preference” at school. In December, parents accused teachers at a middle school in Tennessee of trying to “indoctrinate” kids into being gay after helping students start a gay-straight alliance club.
In addition to parents, school officials and lawmakers, classmates are among those targeting LGBTQ students, according to advocacy groups and local news reports.
A national survey of LGBTQ students published in 2020 by GLSEN found that 69 percent of respondents reported experiencing verbal harassment at school based on their sexual orientation, 57 percent based on their gender expression or outward appearance, and 54 percent based on their gender identity.
Last year, more than a dozen local news articles —from California to Florida — reported on trans students being harassed or attacked by other students, some of them in bathrooms. However, advocates say it is unclear whether the attacks have increased or whether local outlets are reporting them at greater rates.
Impact of affirmation
Advocates have long been warning educators about the mental health risks plaguing LGBTQ youths and how anti-LGBTQ policies can exacerbate them.
A survey last year by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, found that 42 percent of the nearly 35,000 LGBTQ youths who were surveyed — and over half of trans and nonbinary youths — seriously considered suicide within the prior year. Separately, two-thirds of LGBTQ youths said debates about anti-trans legislation have impacted their mental health negatively, according to a small survey The Trevor Project conducted in the fall.
However, researchers at The Trevor Project have also found that LGBTQ youths who reported having at least one LGBTQ-affirming space — such as a school, home or workplace — were significantly less likely to attempt suicide.
With that in mind, Lizette Trujillo drives three hours a day back and forth to her 14-year-old transgender son’s school in Tucson, Arizona. From the time when he socially transitioned in 2015, Daniel’s school was open to the idea of letting him use the bathroom that corresponded with his gender identity — which Trujillo said was not a given in Arizona — and already had experience teaching trans youth.
Trujillo said while the commute “is not without its challenges,” sending Daniel to a school where he is “not ‘othered’” has made him happier.
“The biggest difference at my school is that I’m supported by all my teachers and the principal and staff; I have access to sports and the bathrooms,” Daniel said. “It makes learning easier.”
It also freed up space for his mother to focus on securing her son gender-affirming health care, filing for new identification documents and working through emotional hardships.
“What people don’t realize is that you’re not just worried about school when your child socially transitions,” Trujillo said. “As you start this gender journey, you start to hit walls, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize I needed that,’ or, ‘I didn’t realize that was going to be a problem. I didn’t realize we were going to lose family.’”
In response to the slew of challenges plaguing LGBTQ students and teachers, President Joe Biden has vowed to lend his support. Earlier this month, the White House issued a rebuke of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, while connecting the legislation to the disputes happening nationally.
“Make no mistake — this is not an isolated action. Across the country, we’re seeing Republican leaders take actions to regulate what students can or cannot read, what they can or cannot learn, and most troubling, who they can or cannot be,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement to NBC News. “This is politics at its worse, cynically using our students as pawns in political warfare.”
Students ‘fighting for their basic rights’
There are a number of examples across the U.S. of students getting proactive and successfully turning around anti-LGBTQ policies.
Aaryan Rawal, 17, was one of more than 400 students in Fairfax County, Virginia, who successfully urged their school officials to reinstate two LGBTQ books in November. Rawal, who is gay, said he was relieved when school board members heeded students’ demands, but he lamented that the organizing efforts forced him to miss class and lose sleep.
“No student in any county in this country wants to go to school fighting for their basic rights,” Rawal said. “Instead of doing statistics homework or hanging out with friends, we were expected to go to school board meetings and lobby school board members for stuff that really shouldn’t be up for debate.”
Last month, a group of students in Palm Beach, Florida, met with their newly hired superintendent to describe their experience being LGBTQ in their county’s schools. They went around, one by one, and relayed stories of harassment and assault from students and bullying from teachers, according to two students who attended the meeting.
“Students have just gotten a collective consciousness that, ‘School sucks and because I’m LGBT this is to be expected,’ and that’s not normal,” Marcel Whyne, a nonbinary high school student who attended the meeting, said. “That shouldn’t be the level of standard that we have for LGBT kids. You’re entitled to be treated like your peers and go to school and, you know, just be bored at school like a normal student, not terrified that you’re going to be harassed and have photos taken of you and be embarrassed and assaulted just because you’re trying to be who you are.”
As for Spencer Lyst, in Tennessee, he set out to start his high school’s Pride club, Indy Pride, last fall with the goal of spreading awareness about the school’s LGBTQ community and providing “a place for people who may feel like they don’t have one.” While being booed by adults at his school’s homecoming was a “difficult” experience, he said he remains undeterred.
“People should know that no matter what bill they try to pass or book they try to ban or thing they try to ban teachers or students from talking about in schools, it doesn’t change who people are, and it doesn’t change who we’re going to continue to be,” Lyst said. “So trying to take a legal route to ‘protect your kids’ doesn’t work. They are who they are, and if you can’t accept that, maybe it’s you who has some work to do.”
A business coalition that is urging the passage of landmark LGBTQ rights legislation grew to more than 500 companies Tuesday.
Launched in 2016 by LGBTQ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign, the Business Coalition for the Equality Act is a group of U.S. corporations that have pledged their support for a bill that would federally ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, known as the Equality Act.
As of Tuesday, the group was composed of 503 corporations — including 160 Fortune 500 companies — making it the largest business coalition to pledge support for LGBTQ equality, the HRC said. Corporations new to the coalition include McDonald’s, Harley-Davidson, Sony, REI, Honeywell, Edward Jones and Stop & Shop.
“Today’s announcement reinforces the breadth and depth of support for the Equality Act among America’s business leaders, who are joining a majority of Americans, hundreds of members of Congress, hundreds of advocacy organizations, and more than 60 business associations — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers — in endorsing the federal legislation,” the HRC said in a statement.https://iframe.nbcnews.com/JijNweL?_showcaption=true&app=1
As it stands, LGBTQ people in 29 states lack explicit nondiscrimination protections in employment, housing, loan applications, education, public accommodations and other areas.
To ensure protections nationwide, the House passed the Equality Act in February, largely along party lines, with only three Republicans throwing their support behind the bill.
The legislation faced Republican opposition again, stalling in the Senate in May. Republican senators argued that the bill would undermine women’s rights by allowing transgender girls and women to play on girls sports teams and would limit religious freedoms, among other things. Their argument echoed the nationwide push by conservative state lawmakers to restrict trans students’ athletic participation.
If the Equality Act were to pass in the Senate, President Joe Biden has repeatedly vowed to sign it into law. However, if he gets the opportunity to do so, he would still fall short of his campaign pledgeto sign the bill into law within his first 100 days in office.
While Congress is split on the matter, a large majority of Americans, 82 percent, favor laws that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, according to a poll published in October by the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute.
The HRC cited the protections’ bipartisan backing among the American people as it lauded Tuesday’s milestone of corporate support for the Equality Act.
But as the HRC celebrated, some critics called its business coalition a form of “pinkwashing,” a term used to describe corporate exploitation of LGBTQ people.
“It’s a way for HRC to, like, ‘play with the big boys’ as it were, as well as to bring in money,” said Jay W. Walker, an organizer with the Reclaim Pride Coalition, the group behind New York City’s alternative LGBTQ Pride march. “For the corporations, it’s a way for them to pinkwash their images and to make LGBTQ people who don’t pay attention to the details think: ‘Oh great, they’re wonderful. They’re great corporate citizens.’”
Walker also noted that some of the same companies that publicly backed the passage of the Equality Act are funding the politicians who are standing in its way.
For example, AT&T, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines — which are member companies of the coalition — have each donated at least $48,000 to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, since 2017, according to campaign finance nonprofit organization OpenSecrets. Cruz was one of the Senate’s lead proponents against the Equality Act, calling it “dangerous.”
“We live in a society where you have to ferret out information in order to get the whole picture,” Walker said.
The business community’s support of the Equality Act is not the first time corporate America has tried to leverage its power to enact change for LGBTQ Americans. But the results have been mixed.
In support of same-sex marriage in 2015, 379 companies filed anamicus brief in the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court case, which resulted in the nationwide legalization of same-sex unions.
Conversely, as of Jan. 21, 2021, more than 150 companies had signed on to a pledge criticizing the slew of anti-trans bills proposed around the country. Hundreds of similar bills have been filed since then, with roughly 10 enacted into law last year.
LGBTQ Afghans have increasingly been threatened, beaten and raped since the Taliban took control of the country in August, a new report found.
The advocacy groups Human Rights Watch and OutRight Action International compiled a snapshot of how the freshly reawakened Taliban regime has targeted Afghans based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. And while LGBTQ Afghans have long lived in peril, the groups concluded that the situation has “dramatically worsened” following the Taliban’s takeover.
“The thing that I think we heard most commonly from people who we interviewed, who are still in Afghanistan, is that they don’t leave their rooms. The level of fear of being targeted is so great that they feel like they’re risking their lives to go buy food,” said J. Lester Feder, one of the study’s co-authors and a senior fellow for emergency research at OutRight Action International. “And beforehand, these were people who had jobs or had ways to eat, who could go about their cities — and that’s a real change.”
For the report, released Tuesday night, the researchers interviewed 60 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Afghans, most in their 20s, from October to December of last year. Through telling the stories of their interviewees’ allegations of abuse, the report illustrates how threats, violence and harassment against LGBTQ people have become more common under the Taliban’s rule.
A few weeks after Taliban forces overtook Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, in August, a 20-year-old gay man reported that Taliban members had detained him at a checkpoint. He was then beaten and gang-raped, he said.
“From now on anytime we want to be able to find you, we will,” Taliban members told him following the attack, according to the report. “And we will do whatever we want with you.”
After the incident, the young man went into hiding, the report said, but the Taliban then moved on to harass and attack members of his family. In one instance, Taliban fighters spent three days in his family’s home, interrogating and beating them, researchers reported.
The report also detailed an uptick in abuse faced by LGBTQ Afghans from their own family members.
One interviewee, a lesbian from a small Afghan village, said that her uncle and male cousins became emboldened to kill her after they joined the Taliban.
“If you’re not going to do this, we will do it,” she recalled a relative saying to her parents, according to the report. “We have the authority.”
Heather Barr, a co-author of the report and an associate director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch, attributed the attacks by family members to fear of the Taliban’s wrath themselves.
“There’s a kind of feeling that you get credit from the Taliban for turning people in, that a way to keep yourself safe is to rat out other people,” Barr said. “Some people are clearly feeling like the way to keep themselves above suspicion is to hand in other people in this environment where there’s no kind of protection from rule of law.”
The report also outlined how gender-nonconforming individuals, in particular, have been subjected to danger under the Taliban’s rule. Several of the report’s interviewees told researchers that they were beaten on the street for wearing clothes that did not conform to gender norms, or looked “too Western.”
“Every moment we receive threats and calls,” said an Afghan trans woman, according to the report. “Even children on the street say, ‘You’re still here? Why hasn’t the Taliban taken you yet?’”
Nemat Sadat, a former political science professor at the American University of Afghanistan, echoed the sentiment that, among LGBTQ Afghans, trans and gender-nonconforming Afghans are more vulnerable to attacks.
“A cisgender gay or bisexual male, who could grow a beard, who can look like the Taliban, who could wear their clothing, who could dress like them … they won’t even be questioned,” said Sadat, who told NBC News that he has spoken with over 200 Afghans who have been targeted or tortured by the Taliban since August.
“A lot of Afghans want to get out, and we should try to help all of them, but we have to prioritize,” Sadat added, suggesting trans and gender-nonconforming Afghans should receive help first.
To aid LGBTQ Afghans, the authors of the report urged other countries — and the United States specifically — to expedite their applications for evacuation and resettlement, support humanitarian assistance programs that specifically target LGBTQ Afghans and apply diplomatic leverage.
Throughout the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, advocates and lawmakers urged the State Department to specifically include LGBTQ Afghans in its pledge to evacuate vulnerable people from the country. That request, however, went unanswered.
But, describing the efforts as of “utmost importance,” a spokesperson for the State Department told NBC News in an email that the Biden administration will continue to help LGBTQ Afghans through “diplomacy, international influence, and humanitarian aid.” The spokesperson also acknowledged that evacuating LGBTQ Afghans is “extremely difficult” and “potentially dangerous.”
“The best we can say is that we know by numbers that we will help some, but we are unlikely ever to be sure how many since many people cannot disclose their sexual orientation, gender identity, or sex characteristics due to shame, stigma and fear of backlash,” the spokesperson said.
Only Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland have publicly announced that they would commit to resettling LGBTQ Afghans.
“I’m disappointed overall in the international community’s sort of growing disengagement from all human rights issues in Afghanistan, but I think that this one has been particularly neglected from the beginning,” Barr said, referring to the plight of LGBTQ Afghans.
“I mean, it’s been neglected as long as I’ve worked on Afghanistan, honestly, but this moment is more important than ever for people to actually engage and raise this issue,” added Barr, who has worked on Afghanistan-related human rights projects for 15 years.
A gay rights advocate who was integral in legalizing same-sex marriage in Florida was found dead in a landfill in what is being investigated as a homicide, authorities said Wednesday.
Jorge Diaz-Johnston, 54, the brother of former Miami Mayor Manny Diaz, had been last seen alive Jan. 3, Tallahassee police said. Shortly after a missing person alert was issued for him Saturday, his body was found in a trash pile at a landfill in Baker, Florida, about 60 miles west of the Alabama border, according to the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office.
Diaz, who served as mayor of Miami from 2001 to 2009, released a statement on Twitter confirming his brother’s death.
“I am profoundly appreciative of the outpouring of support shown to me, my brother-in-law Don, and my family after the loss of my brother, Jorge Diaz-Johnston,” he wrote. “My brother was such a special gift to this world whose heart and legacy will continue to live on for generations to come.”https://iframe.nbcnews.com/jv8Jwwr?_showcaption=true&app=1
While he had a high-profile brother, Diaz-Johnston made a name for himself. In 2014, he and his husband, Don Diaz-Johnston, and five other same-sex couples sued the Miami-Dade County clerk’s office after they were barred from getting married.
“For us, it’s not just only a question of love and wanting to express our love and have the benefits that everyone else has in the state, but it’s an issue of equality, and it’s a civil rights issue,” Jorge Diaz-Johnston told NBC Miami at the time.
In January 2015, a Miami-Dade circuit court judge ruled in the couples’ favor, legalizing same-sex marriage in the South Florida county more than a year before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
Elizabeth Schwartz, who represented the six couples in the case, called Diaz-Johnston’s death “heartbreaking.”
“They fought so hard for their love to be enshrined and to be able to enjoy the institution of marriage, and for the marriage to end in this way — in this gruesome, heartbreaking way — there are no words,” she told NBC Miami.
Shortly after winning their case, Jorge and Don Diaz-Johnston married in March 2015, according to public records. Coupled with an image of his husband grinning at the camera over dinner, Don Diaz-Johnston addressed his death on Facebook.
“There are just no words for the loss of my beloved husband Jorge Isaias Diaz-Johnston,” he wrote. “I can’t stop crying as I try and write this. But he meant so much to all of you as he did to me. So I am fighting through the tears to share with you our loss of him.”https://iframe.nbcnews.com/oZecGrV?_showcaption=true&app=1
The current mayor of Miami, Daniella Levine Cava, acknowledged Diaz-Johnston’s role in advancing LGBTQ rights in the city.
“In Jorge Diaz-Johnston, we lost a champion, a leader, and a fighter for our LGBTQ community,” she wrote on Twitter. “His tragic loss will be felt profoundly by all who loved him, as we honor his life and legacy.”
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem released a national advertisement on Thursday promoting legislation that targets transgender youths.
Without saying the word “transgender” or “trans,” the ad promotes a bill that Noem, a Republican, introduced last month. The measure would prevent trans girls from playing on any female sports teams at school, including club teams.
Noem, the first woman to serve as South Dakota governor, said it would be “the strongest law in the nation protecting female sports.”
“In South Dakota, only girls play girls’ sports,” the ad begins. “Why? Because of Gov. Kristi Noem’s leadership. Noem has been protecting girls’ sports for years and never backed down.”https://iframe.nbcnews.com/Qt6aXee?_showcaption=true&app=1
Noem wrote on Twitter that the ad, which promotes her 2022 re-election campaign, will appear on prime-time national news shows Thursday evening.
But last month, she made an about-face, introducing the new bill, which mandates that students compete on sports teams that match the sex listed on their birth certificates “issued at or near the time of the athlete’s birth.”
“Common sense tells us that males have an unfair physical advantage over females in athletic competition,” the governor said in a statement at the time.
“I am certain that Governor Noem would much rather talk about this issue than her pandemic response,” said Gillian Branstetter, a longtime trans advocate and the media manager for the National Women’s Law Center. “We have significantly larger problems, for example, problems that exist! Those would be good problems to solve as opposed to conjuring fictional ghosts of a changing society and attempting to exploit people’s ignorance.”
Major sports organizations, including the NCAA and the International Olympic Committee, allow transgender and nonbinary athletes to compete on teams that correspond to their gender identity under certain conditions. The IOC updated its guidelines on transgender athletes in November, removing policies that required competing trans athletes to undergo what it described as “medically unnecessary” procedures or treatment.
However, South Dakota and 29 other states introduced restrictions on trans athletes last year, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group. Ten states have passed laws restricting trans athletes, with nine doing so last year.
Since the start of the new year, state lawmakers in at least seven states have proposed laws that would limit the rights of transgender and nonbinary youths. Several of those measures mirror Noem’s bill, blocking trans students from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity.
Nearly seven years after the Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage the law of the land, New Jersey enacted a law Monday to protect this relatively new right throughout the Garden State.
Prior to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges — which legalized sex-marriage nationwide in 2015 — New Jersey’s state courts had already struck down a same-sex marriage ban in 2013.
But as a majority of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices appeared open to overturning Roe v. Wade last month, new fears that the court could also make an about-face on the Obergefell ruling have prompted some lawmakers to enshrine same-sex marriage into state law.
“We’ve been fighting for marriage equality for decades, and to turn back the clock would be devastating,” New Jersey Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle, who co-sponsored the newly passed bill, told NBC News. “I can’t emphasize enough the fact that we need to safeguard it in light of what’s happening on a federal level today.”
Both chambers of the New Jersey Legislature passed the bill last month, and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, signed it into law Monday.
“Despite the progress we have made as a country, there is still much work to be done to protect the LGBTQ+ community from intolerance and injustice,” Murphy said in a statement. “New Jersey is stronger and fairer when every member of our LGBTQ+ family is valued and given equal protection under the law.”
Last month, the Supreme Court heard 90 minutes of oral arguments concerning a Mississippi law that would ban almost all abortions in the state after 15 weeks of pregnancy. A majority of the court’s conservative justices appeared prepared to uphold the law and possibly overturn Roe v. Wade — the 1973 landmark decision holding that women have a constitutional right to have an abortion before fetal viability, usually around 24 weeks.
The prospect of the 1973 ruling being overturnedhas prompted fears among lawmakers and LGBTQ advocates that the justices might also walk back precedent on a range of other cases, including Obergefell.
Before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, 37 states and U.S. territories had already legalized marriage equality. But of those, only 19 had legalized the nuptials through state legislation, according to an NBC News analysis. Therefore, if the Supreme Court were to overturn Obergefell, same-sex marriage would be prohibited in the majority of the country and vulnerable in states where it was not written into law.
“The Supreme Court right now is showing us that nothing is guaranteed,” West Virginia Del. Cody Thompson said. “A lot of things that we take for granted right now, that we think are enshrined and are safe, ultimately now we’re realizing are not safe and are not necessarily always going to be there for us unless we remain vigilant.”
In response to the court’s oral arguments on reproductive rights, Thompson and fellow West Virginia Del. Danielle Walker — who are the Legislature’s only out LGBTQ lawmakers — said they will introduce a bill this month to codify same-sex marriage into law, similar to the legislation New Jersey enacted this week. West Virginia legalized same-sex marriage through litigation in 2014, but it never enshrined the right through legislation.
While the court’s seeming willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade has sparked fears among some state lawmakers, lawyers who argued in favor of gay rights in landmark LGBTQ cases shot down the notion that the high court would overturn the same-sex marriage decision even if given the opportunity to do so.
“I appreciate that you have legislatures who are trying to step in and do what they can to update their laws,” said Mary Bonauto, who argued on behalf of same-sex couples in Obergefell and now serves as the civil rights project director at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, or GLAD. “We all just have to be careful to avoid giving credence to the idea that reversing Obergefell is inevitable. We are not expecting this. It would be outrageous.”
Bonauto added that Obergefell was “constitutionally correct” because the court has repeatedly made clear that “marriage is a choice for the individual to make and not the government” and is “part of equality.”
Over the last several decades, the court has struck down laws when states tried to prevent people from marrying on the basis of their race, criminal history and their ability to pay child support payments.
Paul Smith, who argued in favor of gay rights in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state laws criminalizing consensual same-sex activity in 2003, agreed with Bonauto, saying it is “unlikely” that the court would overturn Obergefell because it is “incredibly popular.”
Support for same-sex marriage among Americans reached an all-time high last year, according to a June Gallup Poll, with 70 percent of Americans — including a majority of conservatives — in favor of it.
“The court would be shooting itself in the foot if it were to do this,” Smith said.
Regardless, in 2020, following the Supreme Court’s rejection of an appeal from Kim Davis, a former Kentucky county clerk who denied marriage licenses to same-sex couples, two of the court’s conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, issued a blistering rebuke of the Obergefell ruling and signaled that they would be open to reversing it.
The justices said Davis “may have been one of the first victims of this Court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision, but she will not be the last,” adding that the high court “has created a problem that only it can fix.”
Some legal experts pointed to this statement and some of the court’s more recent rulings involving same-sex couples as evidence that marriage equality remains vulnerable.
In 2018, the court issued a narrow ruling in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. And last year, in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, the court ruled in favor of a Catholic adoption agency that wanted an exemption from Philadelphia’s nondiscrimination law, which would have required the agency to allow LGBTQ couples to adopt.
“The justices have been asked to chip away at the equality and liberty of same-sex couples in a variety of different contexts, and the Supreme Court has not done an adequate job in recent years of rebuffing those efforts,” said Camilla Taylor, director of constitutional litigation for LGBTQ civil rights organization Lambda Legal. “And so, certainly our opponents feel like they have an open invitation right now.”
Throughout the first week of the year, state lawmakers in at least seven states proposed laws that would limit the rights of transgender and nonbinary youths.
Republican lawmakers in Arizona, Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, New Hampshire and South Dakota introduced at least nine measures that target trans and nonbinary youths, such as their ability to participate in sports, receive gender-affirming care or use the bathroom.
“Unfortunately, I think we’re getting ready to watch a race to the bottom among legislators who are in a competition to see who can do the most harm to trans kids,” said Gillian Branstetter, a longtime trans advocate and the media manager for women’s advocacy group the National Women’s Law Center. “It is a hostile and dangerous trend that I’m sure we’ll see continue through the year.”
The majority of this week’s measures mirror the two types of legislation that dominated last year’s record number of anti-trans bills: measures that block trans kids from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity and those that restrict their access to gender-affirming care.
Last year, bills prohibiting health care for trans youth were introduced in more than 20 states, with two states — Arkansas and Tennessee — signing them into law, according to a tally from the American Civil Liberties Union. And out of the more than 30 states to introduce restrictions on trans athletes last year, nine states enacted the legislation into law, according to advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign.
Supporters of the bills have largely argued that they want to prevent young people from making medical decisions they might later regret and to protect the rights of cisgender girls and women in school sports.
“It is unfortunate that we see this as removing the rights of any people,” Republican state Rep. Rhonda Milstead, who introduced South Dakota’s trans sports ban this week, told NBC News in an email. “If competitive sports are made to be fair, there is a place for everyone to compete according to the biology they were born with.”
Conversely, major sports organizations, including the National Collegiate Athletic Association and International Olympic Committee, allow transgender and nonbinary athletes to compete on teams that correspond to their gender identity under certain conditions. The IOC updated its guidelines on transgender athletes in November, removing controversial policies that required competing trans athletes to undergo what it described as “medically unnecessary” procedures or treatment.
Another type of measure proposed this week aims to block trans kids in South Dakota from using multi-occupancy shower rooms, restrooms or locker rooms. However, Republican state Rep. Fred Deutsch, who introduced the bill, denied that the bill involved trans youth and disparaged the concept of gender identity.
“All across the country, including in South Dakota, laws and policies are being changed to redefine sex in a manner that denies the material reality of sex,” Deutsch wrote in an email. “This bill is designed to ensure that, at least in South Dakota, we maintain a definition of sex that actually reflects reality.”
The South Dakota proposal would also allow students to sue their school district if they encounter trans students in any of these settings or if a teacher permits trans students to use single-sex bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
In other words, the proposed legislation relies on “bounty-type penalty systems” modeled after Texas Senate Bill 8, a controversial law that permits private citizens from across the country to sue abortion providers in Texas, said Chase Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project.
Strangio predicted that legislation with similar clauses will be a common theme of 2022.
“One concern that people have moving forward is, ‘How are lawmakers going to try and avoid accountability and judicial review?’ I think one way is to limit government enforcement of their laws and sort of deputize private individuals to act as government officials to essentially be the people enforcing the law through private lawsuits,” Strangio said.
While state lawmakers have been aggressive in their efforts to limit the rights of transgender and nonbinary youths in recent years, Americans overwhelmingly oppose anti-trans laws: Two-thirds of Americans and majorities among every political ideology and age group oppose laws that would restrict transgender rights, a 2021 PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll found.
Major medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the Pediatric Endocrine Society, have also openly opposed bills that limit trans rights, with the AMA warning that they could cause “tragic health consequences, both mental and physical.”
Concerning mental health specifically, LGBTQ advocates have long warned that the bills have been damaging to the already vulnerable group of youths.
A 2021 survey conducted by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, found that 1 in 5 trans and nonbinary youths attempted suicide within the past year.
Last year’s slew of anti-trans bills cannot be directly attributed to the decline in mental health of LGBTQ youths. However, a separate report from The Trevor Project last year showed that crisis lines experienced a surge in calls from young people living in Texas, which considered over 50 bills targeting trans kids last year, according to advocacy group Equality Texas.From January through August, the organization received nearly 4,000 crisis calls from trans and nonbinary Texan youths, a 150 percent increase compared with the same time period in 2020.
Going forward, Branstetter urged trans and nonbinary Americans to “stand up and fight with every breath that we have” but acknowledged that the drumbeat of anti-trans legislation can sometimes trigger a “sense of doom.”
“It’s very dark, and there’s a strong sense among trans people that we are having the door slammed in our face just as we got our foot in the door,” she said.
“Jeopardy!” champion Amy Schneider made history again on Friday, becoming the highest-earning female contestant in the game show’s nearly 57-year run.
The engineering manager’s 18th consecutive win brought her total earnings to $706,800, bumping her above Larissa Kelly to become the show’s top-earning female player.
Kelly, a science fiction writer and academic who built up a record $655,930 through regular season play and tournament competitions, applauded Schneider’s historic win on Twitter.
“Well, it was fun to hold a Jeopardy record for a few years…but it’s been even more fun to watch @Jeopardamy set new standards for excellence, on the show and off. Congratulations to Amy on becoming the woman with the highest overall earnings in the show’s history!” she wrote.https://iframe.nbcnews.com/fOv9xz6?_showcaption=true&app=1
Schneider responded, tweeting: “Thanks so much, I’m honored to be in your company, and I look forward to some day watching the woman who beats us both!”https://iframe.nbcnews.com/RSvqMQI?_showcaption=true&app=1
The Oakland, California, native’s record-breaking win marked the second time she made game show history this year. Last month, Schneider became the show’s first transgender contestant to qualifyfor the Tournament of Champions, an annual competition among 15 players who have earned the most money from the prior season.
Despite the historic nature of her win for the LGBTQ community, Schneider has said she does not want her gender identity to be her entire persona.
“I didn’t want to make too much about being trans, at least in the context of the show,” she wrote in a Twitter thread last month. “I am a trans woman, and I’m proud of that fact, but I’m a lot of other things, too!”
Schneider’s Friday win also made her the fourth-highest earner in a single season, according to a tally on the show’s website. Her earnings put her behind only Ken Jennings, James Holzhauer and Matt Amodio — who earned $2,520,700, $2,462,216 and $1,518,601 in a single season, respectively.
On Monday night, Schneider nudged her earnings up to $745,200 with a 19th consecutive win.
If she wins again Tuesday, Schneider will make game show history for a third time this year, tying with supply chain professional Julia Collins, who won the most consecutive games among the show’s female contestants in 2014.