Everybody’s Business

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Zuckerberg and Starbuck teaming up is great news for the future of bigoted, straight white men

Back in the day, August was considered a no-man’s land, with “out of office” email replies the norm. But that’s no longer the case. This week Trump militarized Washington, D.C., hijacked the Kennedy Center Honors, and pompously flew to Alaska thinking he can outsmart Vladimir Putin. And amidst all this, came the news that was almost too absurd to process: Mark Zuckerberg has decided to bring the insidious Robby Starbuck on board as an “AI advisor” to Meta. The last time I checked, Starbuck didn’t have a computer science or information technology degree. In fact, after graduating high school at 16, and dropping out of community college, he went […]

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Lesbian teen cornered by server in bathroom and forced to prove gender files charges

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A cisgender teenage girl from Minnesota has filed a gender discrimination case against a Buffalo Wild Wings location after a server reportedly followed her into the bathroom and made her prove she is not transgender.  Gerika Mudra, an 18-year-old high school student who is biracial and a lesbian, was out to dinner with a friend at the restaurant chain’s Owatonna branch in April when the incident occurred. She recounted how the two sensed hostility from the staff from the moment they arrived, saying in a video posted by local advocacy organization Gender Justice that their server was “rude” and “giving us dirty looks.”  Their server largely […]

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D.C. bar owners say Trump’s federal law enforcement crackdown is killing their business

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President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C. policing, billed as a crackdown on violent crime, has quickly turned into an economic and cultural crisis for the capital’s LGBTQ+ nightlife. In the most LGBTQ+ city in America, bar owners say sales have collapsed, patrons are staying home, and workers are carrying passports and legal documents just to walk the streets. “This whole thing is being billed as a violent crime crackdown, but it’s just an immigration sweep,” Mark Rutstein, co-owner of Crush Dance Bar, told The Advocate on Saturday. A deserted corridor Rutstein said that on Wednesday evening, federal and local agencies staged checkpoints on 14th […]

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Trans couple takes over beloved bookstore after anti-trans law forces owners to move

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A South Dakota community has rallied to help a transgender couple buy the town’s only bookstore now that the state’s anti-trans bathroom ban has forced its original owner to move east to protect his 10-year-old daughter. As The Washington Post reports, the people of Vermillion, South Dakota have so far donated over $27,000 via a GoFundMe campaign for Nova and Elias Donstad to make a down payment on Outside of a Dog, a beloved family-owned bookstore. The shop’s owner, Mike Phelan, opened the store shortly after moving to Vermillion with his family five years ago and discovering that the town did not have a […]

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LinkedIn exposes transgender users to targeted harassment after company quietly changes hate speech policy

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LinkedIn, the popular professional networking platform, has quietly stripped explicit protections for transgender and nonwhite users from its English-language hate speech rules, repeating a playbook now familiar to LGBTQ+ advocates tracking the rollback of content safeguards across major social mediaplatforms. The changes, first flagged by the nonprofit Open Terms Archive and independently confirmed by The Advocate, involve edits to LinkedIn’s Professional Community Policies, specifically the “Hateful and Derogatory Content” and “Harassment and Abusive Content” sections. In both, references to protections for transgender people and people of color were either weakened or removed entirely. Before Monday, the site’s “Hateful and Derogatory Content” page included a line explicitly prohibiting the “misgendering […]

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Why are Visa and Mastercard banning ‘adult’ purchases? Here’s everything you need to know

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Earlier this month, a set of payment processors, including Visa and Mastercard, forced video game marketplaces to remove thousands of adult video games from their storefronts. The financial companies forced gaming marketplaces Steam and Itch.io to remove their library of Not Safe For Work (NSFW) video games, or else customers would be prevented from using their credit cards to make purchases on the platforms. Itch.io was forced to “deindex” its entire NSFW library, saying it was vital to “ensure we can continue to operate and provide a marketplace for all developers.” “This is a time critical moment for itch.io. The situation developed […]

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10% of new business owners are LGBTQ+ — and they’re offering better benefits

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There are more LGBTQ+ new business owners than ever recorded — and they’re treating their employees better than others. Ten percent of all new business owners in 2024 identified as LGBTQ+, according to a new report from Gusto, marking a 50 percent increase from 2023. This is in line with demographic shifts, the study notes, as about 9.3 percent of U.S. adultssaid in a Gallup survey last year that they identify as something other than heterosexual, up from 7.6 percent from the previous year.  This suggests that “more LGBTQ people are seeing fewer barriers to entrepreneurship and are choosing it as an accessible and viable path to make a […]

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San Francisco bookstore drops ‘Harry Potter’ over J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans donations

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An independent bookstore in San Francisco has announced that it will no longer carry Harry Potter books after J.K. Rowling dedicated her private wealth to anti-transgender organizations.  The Booksmith recently posted a notice letting customers know that they would not be selling the series anymore in light of Rowling founding “an organization dedicated to removing transgender rights ‘in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.’” “With this announcement, we’ve decided to stop carrying her books,” the store wrote. “We don’t know exactly what her her ‘women’s fund’ will entail, but we know that we aren’t going to be a part of it.” Rowling said in May that she […]

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Two red states have a disproportionately high number of gay porn viewers

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Voters in two states won by Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election have been revealed to watch gay porn much more often than the national average, according a study by Pornhub. The porn site’s latest Pride Insights research revealed that North Dakota topped the charts in terms of hours of gay porn watched in the past year, with Wyoming not far behind. Both are notorious for implementing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and both have Republican governors. North Dakota’s proportion of gay porn fans seemingly exceeded the national average by 43 per cent, and Wyoming by 29 per cent. Other states with a higher-than-average interest included […]

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JD Vance becomes the most blocked account on Bluesky after anti-trans post

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JD Vance has become the most blocked account on Bluesky just two days after joining the social media platform. The vice president signed up for the site, a competitor of X/Twitter, on Wednesday. Vance used his first post to mock transgender people by sharing part of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion in U.S. v. Skrmetti, in which he incorrectly said that gender-affirming care relies on “questionable evidence.” “Hello Bluesky, I’ve been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis,” Vance wrote. “So I’m thrilled to be here to engage with all of you.” Within just one day, Vance became the most […]

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