The right-wing political views of the new head of Grindr are causing some users to delete the popular gay dating and hookup app.
The tag #DeleteGrindr is trending after news incoming CEO George Arison, 44, previously tweeted he was a conservative who supported some of the positions of then-President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Arison, who is gay, starts his new job October 19.
“FYI I am a conservative & agree with some Trump policies,” Arison wrote in a since-deleted tweet on February 28, 2020.
“Should totally run for President,” he wrote of Youngkin in a retweet dated February 24 of this year.
Arison appeared to express support for DeSantis in another retweet from January. In the retweet, he wrote that the man who championed the “don’t say gay” law was “not ideal” but agreed the Republican governor was “better-suited to advance a new, more comabtive [sic] and populist party.”
Users on social media responded quickly, calling out the past statements from Arison.
Another user called out Arison’s support for Youngkin.
Others indicated they were ditching Grindr.
Arison came to Grindr from e-commerce marketplace Shift Technologies, where he was CEO and cofounder.
In a statement to The Advocate about the issue, Grindr centered on Arison’s identity as a gay man, husband, and father.
“George is an out gay man, proudly married to his husband and the father of two children,” a Grindr spokesperson said. “George is passionate about fighting for the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ people around the world.”
Since a peak in August, the number of reported daily cases of the monkeypox virus has declined 85%.
That’s the latest seven-day average data from the Centers for Disease Control, indicating a drop from 443 reported cases at the height of the outbreak on August 6, to 60 cases reported on October 12.
As of yesterday, 27,022 cases of the monkeypox virus have been reported in the U.S.
Experts attribute the drop to a variety of factors. The monkeypox vaccine, with an 85% efficacy rate, helped slow the virus down. Men who have sex with men reduced their partners following the rise of cases in the wake of large gatherings around Pride month in June. And the virus, spread by close skin-to-skin contact, was self-limiting, unlike the airborne coronavirus, finding fewer places to spread as potential hosts reduced their exposure and the vaccine proved effective.
Centers for Disease Control
Another factor was a change in communications strategy. As cases began to rise sharply, it became clear that the virus was disproportionally affecting men who have sex with men, but officials at all levels of government were reluctant to highlight the fact, fearing the stigmatizing effect of a virus mislabeled as a “gay disease.”
In the middle of July, the New York City Health Department debated a strategy calling for gay men to reduce partners, issuing a statement that counseled caution: “For decades, the LGBTQ+ community has had their sex lives dissected, prescribed, and proscribed in myriad ways, mostly by heterosexual and cis people,” the statement read. New York would offer direction cognizant of “how poorly abstinence-only guidance has historically performed with this disgraceful legacy in mind.”
“Telling people not to have sex or not to have multiple sex partners or not to have anonymous sex is just a no-go, and it’s not going to work,” longtime AIDS activist and Housing Works chief executive Charles King told The New York Times at the time. “People are still going to have sex, and they’re going to have it even if it comes with great risk.”
In San Francisco, local officials decided the data should do the talking, expanding eligibility for the vaccine to all men who have sex with men who’d had multiple sexual partners in the previous 14 days. On July 28, the city announced a public health state of emergency, in an effort to prompt a more urgent response from the federal government and to put the city’s most at-risk population on high alert.
New York City followed suit with their own monkeypox state of emergency, at about the same time the World Health Organization’s director general recommended that men who have sex with men should consider limiting their partners. The CDC highlighted that guidance not long after.
At the federal level, in the beginning of August, the White House enlisted Dr. Demetre Daskalakis to help lead the administration’s response to the growing crisis and rectify a stumbling rollout of the vaccine. Daskalakis, who is gay, responded with a strategy directly targeting the MSM community, through outreach at large events attracting gay men, and even participating in a live Grindr forum addressing the issue, with explicit guidance for men who have sex with men to reduce their number of sex partners.
The new messaging seems to have worked. According to the CDC, by the middle of August, men who have sex with men reported changing their behavior because of the monkeypox outbreak: 48% reported reducing their number of sex partners, 50% reported reducing one-time sexual encounters, and 50% reported reducing sex with partners met on dating apps or at sex venues.
Centers for Disease Control
“The strategy worked,” Daskalakis told LGBTQ Nation, describing what he calls “a three-part trick that always works in addressing outbreaks and epidemics: community engagement, science and political will.”
“I think that the really frank, direct information that we generated through governmental public health, and then saw the community alter, magnify, and contextualize, got out,” said Daskalakis. “Seeing people who reduced their behaviors that could potentially expose them to monkeypox was definitely a part of this.”
Daskalakis added: “What’s important is that you don’t associate a virus with an identity, but rather talk about the behaviors that are associated with transmission of virus, and make sure the right people know.”
“I think the Biden administration kind of got its act together, but it was slower than it should have been,” Supervisor Raphael Mandelman, who pushed hard for San Francisco’s monkeypox emergency declaration, told LGBTQ Nation. “It was not a pleasant exercise, seeing this health crisis that the federal government was not adequately addressing, and seeing how slow the country was to get this vaccine, that had already been discovered, distributed into people’s arms.”
But, says Mandelman, “It seems like the gays have done a good job of getting their monkeypox vaccines, and it seems like we’ve kind of turned a corner. I can say this cautiously.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said its policies prohibit any reference to LGBTQ people being “groomers,” a term for would-be child rapists that conservatives have applied to LGBTQ people and allies – especially teachers and doctors – this past year.
The slur has increasingly been used by conservatives to oppose LGBTQ content in schools and gender-affirming care for transgender youth, leading to an increase in threats and harassment.
However, Facebook has continued to make money from at least 150 ads using the slur, even though the media watchdog group Media Matters alerted Meta to the issue. These ads have been seen over one million times, Media Matters reported.
On September 6, Media Matters told Meta about 134 ads using the slur. Meta removed only 40 of the ads from their platform. Now, Media Matters has discovered 19 more ads using the slur. Collectively, the advertisers paid Meta $13,600 to display these ads.
One ad, purchased by the conservative student group Turning Point USA featured a tweet from conservative pundit Candace Owen stating that she has “no patience for this child groomer movement.” The ad read, “Protect your kids.”
Another ad from The Dallas Express, one site of many in a right-wing propaganda network, purchased an ad referring to the anti-trans group “Gays Against Groomers” as an “an organization against the sexualization, indoctrination, and medicalization of children.”
New Jersey’s Holmdel Republican Party ran an ad asking people to support political candidates who “publicly state their opposition to the States [sic] new sex education curriculum which sexualizes our children to advance the agenda of groomers.”
Yet another ad by Republican Illinois state senate candidate Philip Nagel featured him stating that he is “fed up and pissed off with the sick perversion that is being pushed on our children” by “a political class full of pedophiles and groomers.”
Meta has also allowed several ads falsely linking LGBTQ rights to “the supposed normalization of pedophilia in society.”
Kayla Gogarty, deputy research director at Media Matters, told The Daily Dot that Meta’s policies against the slur don’t apparently matter.
“Those are just empty words when we see them turn a blind eye to the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric on their platform,” Gogarty said. “It’s really just another instance of Meta putting profit and engagement over the safety of its users.”
Jamie Lee Curtis is opening up about the struggles her daughter and other members of the transgender community face on a daily basis.
While speaking about her career as a scream queen and “Halloween Ends” in an interview with Spanish publication Cadena SER, the actor, 63, revealed that the emotions she displays in her films come from a genuine source of fear.
Curtis described herself as “incredibly emotional” and said that she has had so much success in the horror genre because her reactions are “real.” She explained that her sensitivity allows her to draw on real-world problems and dangers that are facing our society today.
“There are real threats,” she said in a conversation with the outlet published on Oct. 10. “I have a trans daughter. There are threats against her life, just her existence as a human being. There are people that want to annihilate her, and people like her.”
During her interview, Curtis compared transphobia to fascism. She said, “Like we haven’t learned what the result of that is. The extermination of human beings. That is terrifying.”
Referring to herself in the third person, she continued, “So Jamie Lee Curtis is scared, and you should be too.”
The “Knives Out” star ended her response by encouraging people to speak out against transphobia.
“Jamie Lee Curtis has a voice, and she’s trying to use it, and you should too,” she said. “And that’s how we change things is we think about them, we learn about them, and then we use our voices to bring attention to them and to fight against them.”
Last year, Ruby and her famous mom spoke to People about her coming out to her parents.
“It was scary — just the sheer fact of telling them something about me they didn’t know,” Ruby recalled. “It was intimidating — but I wasn’t worried. They had been so accepting of me my entire life.”
Ruby sent her mom a text after initially planning to share the news with her parents at their Los Angeles home. Curtis said there were “tears involved” after her daughter came out to her.
Curtis shared that she has made mistakes while also being supportive of her daughter.
“It’s speaking a new language,” she told People at the time. “It’s learning new terminology and words. I am new at it. I am not someone who is pretending to know much about it. And I’m going to blow it, I’m going to make mistakes. I would like to try to avoid making big mistakes.”
In May, Ruby tied the knot with her partner Kynthia in a cosplay ceremony held in Curtis’ backyard.
The proud mother officiated the nuptials and gushed about the wedding on Instagram.
She uploaded multiple pictures from Ruby and Kynthia’s special day. Next to a photo of the newlyweds embracing, Curtis cheered, “YES THEY DO AND DID! MARRIED! RUBY and KYNTHIA 5/29/2022.”
Ruby and her sister Annie Guest, 35, joined their mom for the red carpet premiere of “Halloween Ends” on Oct. 12. The film will be Curtis’ final appearance in a horror franchise that has spanned decades.
Curtis posed alongside her two daughters as the trio all held hands. The actor posted a photo of the three of them on Instagram. The caption said, “My family. Proudest mother. Loving support.”
During the past week, Curtis has been promoting her upcoming film and also using her platform to address societal issues. She stopped by TODAY on Monday and condemned Kanye West’s recent antisemitic tweets.
In a tweet that has since been removed from Twitter, West, who goes by Ye, wrote that he planned to “go death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” The tweet received backlash across social media platforms.
Curtis said she “burst into tears” after seeing the hateful message. “I woke up and burst into tears. Defcon 3 on Jewish people? What are you doing?” she said.
She called his tweet “abhorrent” and said she hopes the rapper “gets help.”
“It’s bad enough that fascism is on the rise around the world,” she told Hoda Kotb. “But on Twitter, on a portal, to pour that in? As if Jewish people haven’t had it hard enough?”
West’s Instagram account has been restricted for other problematic posts and a spokesperson for Twitter confirmed on Oct. 9 that his account has been locked for violating the social media platform’s policies.
Virginia governor Glenn Younkin has insisted his trans student bathroom ban isn’t “controversial”, despite widespread outrage.
The Republican proposed the policy – which disallows trans students to use bathrooms corresponding with their gender – in September.
He claimed during an interview on CNN’s State of the Unionon Sunday (9 October) that it was designed to allow parents to make decisions for their child.
n fact, along with making bathroom access dependent on gender assigned at birth, Youngkin’s policy proposal states that schools should defer to parents on names, nicknames and “pronouns, if any” for their children, as well as any “social transition”. It also suggests that schools should out trans students to their parents.
“I just think the idea that we’re going to have policies that exclude parents from their children’s lives is something that I have been going to work on since day one,” Youngkin said.
“We campaigned on it. We empowered parents to make decisions with regards to [COVID-19] masking in Virginia. We have empowered parents to make decisions with regards to curriculum that fits their families’ decisions.”
As well as instructing students to use the bathrooms of the sex written on their birth certificate, the policies also prohibit preferred pronouns and given names without express consent from parents.
Youngkin describes these policy changes as fixing “a wrong” with previous guidance allowing for schools and institutions to decide on policies for specific students.
“The previous administration had a policy that excluded parents and, in fact, particularly didn’t require the involvement of parents,” he said. “Children don’t belong to the state, they belong to families.
“And so, in these most important decisions, step one has to be to engage parents, not the exclusion of a trusted teacher of an advisor, but to make sure that parents are involved in their children’s lives.”
Regardless of how significantly Youngkin believes in his policy changes, the assertion that the legislation is uncontroversial is not true, given the amount of pushback he has received from activists and allies.
Senate Democrats lambasted the move in a joint statement reported by The New York Post, saying they were “an outright violation of Virginian’s civil rights.”
Democratic delegate Mike Mullin called the new policy “absolutely shameful” in a tweet that criticised “calls for the misgendering and outing of children in schools where they’re supposed to be safe.”
Additionally, thousands of Virginia students from nearly 100 schools walked out of school on 28 September to protest the policy, saying that they are fearful of how the new policy could affect them.
“We want our school districts to stand up for us and support us and say they’ll reject these guidelines,” 16-year-old Lauren Truong told The Guardian after she lead fellow schoolmates in a walkout.
Additionally, high school senior Natasha Sanghvi said to NBC Washington that the group decided to hold the walkouts “as a kind of way to disrupt schools and have students be aware of what’s going on.”
Officials at Vanderbilt University Medical Center announced Friday that they are pausing gender-affirming surgeries for minors in order to review their practices.
The news, delivered in a letter sent to a lawmaker who has demanded an end to the surgeries, was publicly released Friday afternoon. It comes amid mounting political pressure from Tennessee’s Republican leaders — many of whom are running for reelection — who called for an investigation into the private nonprofit hospital after videos surfaced on social media last month of a doctor touting that gender-affirming procedures are “huge money makers.” Another video showed a staffer saying anyone with a religious objection should quit.
None of the politicians could point to a specific law that the hospital had violated, and no agency to date has committed to an investigation. Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s office said they had passed their concerns to the Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, but his office has not commented on whether he is looking into the Nashville-based hospital.
“We are pausing gender affirmation surgeries on patients under age 18 while we complete this review, which may take several months,” wrote C. Wright Pinson, VUMC’s deputy CEO and chief health system officer.
The GOP-dominated Legislature is scheduled to reconvene in January, and many lawmakers have vowed to introduce legislation further limit gender-affirming treatments. If successful, it’s unclear if VUMC would be allowed to resume gender-affirming surgeries for minors, regardless of their internal review.
“We should not allow permanent, life-altering decisions that hurt children,” Lee tweeted late Friday. “With the partnership of the General Assembly, this practice should end in Tennessee.”
According to Pinson, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health recently changed its recommendations for transgender treatment, which helped prompt the need for a review.
On average, VUMC has provided five gender affirming surgeries to minors every year since its transgender clinic opened in 2018. All were over the age of 16 and had parental consent, and none received genital procedures.
“The revenues from this limited number of surgeries represent an immaterial percentage of VUMC’s net operating revenue,” Pinson wrote.
Emails provided to The Associated Press through a public records request show hundreds of Tennesseans reached out to the governor’s office in support of shutting down VUMC’s transgender youth health clinic, with some asking him to call a special legislative session to address the issue. Others asked if he could suspend the licenses of the doctors who work at the clinic.
A few criticized Lee for not taking harsher steps earlier when he signed legislation banning doctors from providing gender-confirming hormone treatment to prepubescent minors.
Only a handful defended the clinic’s services, with some saying the transgender health care they received had been life-saving.
More than half of trans and non-binary people are misgendered in death by officials, new research suggests.
Research, published in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, found that between 2011 and 2021, more than half of transgender and non-binary people who died during this time period were misgendered on their death certificates.
Kimberly Repp, chief epidemiologist for Washington County and one of the study’s authors, noted that this could impact the allocation of resources like social services and public health programs, which can change depending on a region’s vital statistics.
She said: “What we learned will likely alarm anyone who identifies as transgender or non-binary – or anyone who cares about the rights of transgender and gender non-conforming people.”
“When a population is not counted, it is erased.”
The HRC, which trans violent deaths of trans people, has often warned that many trans people are misgendered in death, and therefore go uncounted.
The research was conducted by public health officials from Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas, and focussed on the Portland, Oregon, metro area, and looked at the recorded deaths of 51 trans and non-binary people.
It revealed systemic gaps in coroners’ ability to accommodate trans and non-binary people.
The majority of medical examiner case management software does not include a field for gender identity, and there is no national requirement for death investigators to be trained about how to verify a deceased person’s gender identity.
Next-of-kin also have unilateral power to declare a deceased person’s gender and have it changed on a death certificate, which can lead to what the study calls “nonconsensual detransitioning” – when the next-of-kin rejects the deceased’s trans identity.
Kimberly DiLeo, chief investigator with the Multnomah County Medical Examiner’s Office, said that while it has been “proactive in training our staff to record gender identity… without adequate tools to collect this data and changes at a national level, we are limited in what we can do”.
in 2019 the American Medical Association made attempts to tackle increasing violence among transgender people by establishing a more consistent way to collect data on trans identity.
Despite this, the report noted that no agency regularly collects information about gender identity at death.
“I didn’t know if there was a place and a space for me to do this sort of work that I’ve really come to love and enjoy, while also getting to be myself while I do it,” she said on the same day that she officially filed for a name change with the Iowa courts.
She is not the first reporter to make that announcement. ESPN journalist M.A. Voepel announced in a tweet in August that he is transitioning and would use male pronouns.
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In an interview with a friend who is a former reporter for the station, Reichardt said she had thoughts about being transgender in high school. But she noted that her Minnesota hometown is rural and she “didn’t even have the language to describe what I was feeling.”
She said that at work she felt like “I was someone I didn’t really feel like” when she dressed in slacks and button-up shirts.
“A while after I started being on air, I kind of just reached a personal breaking point where I thought, ‘Why don’t I like the person that I am seeing every time I am going out in the field? Why don’t I connect with that person? Why don’t I want to be that person?’”
Reichardt said she gradually came into her identity as a transgender woman over the course of several years and began a medical transition process in September 2021.
“To gradually come into a role where I am feeling more and more at home in my body than I really ever did before has been amazing to get to experience and share with people,” she said.
A conservative judge in Texas has issued a ruling against a federal guidance ensuring workplace non-discrimination protections for transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming employees.
In an October 1 ruling, Matthew Kacsmaryk, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, declared that, in June 2021, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued guidance that incorrectly interpreted the June 2020 Supreme Court ruling Bostock v. Clayton County.
The 2020 Supreme Court decision found that discrimination against gay and transgender employees is a form of sex discrimination forbidden by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
One year later, the EEOC issued a guidance stating that the ruling required workplaces with more than 15 employees to allow all transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming workers to use the pronouns, dress codes, facilities, and healthcare practices matching their gender identities.
In response, the state of Texas sued the EEOC, and Judge Kacsmaryk just ruled in the state’s favor. He ruled that although the 2020 Supreme Court decision declared that employers can’t discriminate against workers for their sexuality or gender identity, it doesn’t protect an employee’s “correlated conduct.”
As such, Kacsmaryk declared the EEOC’s guidance unlawful and said that Texas doesn’t have to follow it. However, the matter is far from settled.
That’s because 20 Republican-led states have also sued the EEOC over the guidance, alleging that the federal agency violated the Administrative Procedure Act by not following the required process for making new rules and also the Constitution’s 10th Amendment by trampling on states’ authority over privacy expectations in workplaces.
Kacsmaryk’s ruling isn’t entirely surprising considering that he once served as the deputy general counsel for the First Liberty Institute (FLI), a legal organization that generally represents conservative Christians, attacks the separation of church and state, and opposes LGBTQ rights.
“Five justices of the Supreme Court found an unwritten ‘fundamental right’ to same-sex marriage hiding in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — a secret knowledge so cleverly concealed in the nineteenth-century amendment that it took almost 150 years to find,” he wrote.
Thirty-one-year-old Clayton Hubbird has been charged with first-degree reckless homicide and use of a dangerous weapon for killing Regina “Mya” Allen.
August 29 video footage from a BP gas station showed that Allen and Hubbird briefly talked inside the station before she stepped into the passenger’s seat of his black Chevy Tahoe SUV, police told FOX6. When the two arrived at Allen’s apartment complex, a witness told police that he saw them arguing in the vehicle before hearing a gunshot.
Allen reportedly stumbled out of the vehicle and exclaimed, “I’m shot!” before dialing 911 for emergency services. When police arrived, she told an officer that she had met the man who shot her at a gas station. She later died from her injuries, barely a month before her 36th birthday.
On August 30, police found the SUV parked in Wauwatosa, a city about seven miles east of Milwaukee. Investigators found ammunition and firearm magazines in Hubbird’s bedroom.
Police issued a warrant for Hubbird’s arrest on September 6.
Hubbird appeared in court on October 2, and cash bond was set at $250,000, according to FOX6.
Friends remembered Allen as full of laughter.
“I remember seeing her, and I was jut like, amazed by her, her beauty and the way that she carried herself,” said Ananna Sellers, a member of a Wisconsin Black trans leaders coalition called The Black Rose Initiative. “I really did have a soft spot in my heart for Mya.”
Sellers added, “Whenever something happens to a girl like us, it’s always got something to do with [being trans] to some capacity.”
Thirty-one trans people have been murdered so far this year, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). A majority of the individuals murdered have been Black trans women. The number is likely an undercount seeing as some trans people are misgendered by their families, police, or media after death while others are never identified at all.
