A transgender woman was found gunned down on a Chicago street in a shocking Christmas day slaying, a national advocacy group said Wednesday.
Officers found a body near 900 E. 82nd Street, in the South Side neighborhood of Chatham, at about 8:35 p.m. on Friday with an “open wound to the left side” of the victim’s head, police said in a statement.
The victim was pronounced dead at the scene.
Chicago authorities appeared to misgender the victim, as the Human Rights Campaign identified her as Courtney “Eshay” Key, a 25-year-old Black transgender woman.
“HRC has now tracked at least 43 deaths this year of transgender and gender non-conforming people,” the LGBTQ advocacy group said in a statement. “We say ‘at least’ because too often these deaths go unreported — or misreported.”
A police spokesman on Wednesday stopped short of calling this a hate crime and instead said: “At this time, the incident is being investigated as a death investigation.”
Key is survived by her mother and two siblings, childhood friend Beverly Ross said.
Ross said that Key frequently faced harassment on the streets and didn’t hesitate to fight back.
“(Key) was a girl who was not going to take s— from anybody,” Ross said.
When Jeff Taylor, a longtime AIDS advocate and survivor, learned about clinical trials for the new Covid-19 vaccine in his hometown, Palm Springs, California, he leapt at the opportunity to participate.
“I always want to be the first person to try something,” he said.
But Taylor’s enthusiasm was short-lived. As soon as he told a recruiter over the phone that he was HIV-positive, Taylor was informed that he was ineligible to join.
“I argued with him, but he said: ‘I don’t make the rules. This is what our sponsor told us to do,'” Taylor, 58, said.
Taylor understood, in a sense, why they were rejecting him. As head of the HIV + Aging Research Project-Palm Springs, he had read plenty of studies that excluded people who were immunocompromised or on immune-modularity drugs.
“It’s something that happens all time,” Taylor said.
A study published this year in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that 73 percent of over 1,090 analyzed cancer immunotherapy trials specifically excluded patients with HIV.
Not including a sample for the estimated 1.2 million HIV-positive people in the U.S. in the most significant vaccine trial in a generation seemed to him unwise. On July 18, Taylor notified a private listserv for HIV activists and researchers called IBT-Cure. Shortly thereafter, he got a response from Lynda Dee, executive director of AIDS Action Baltimore, another heavyweight in the HIV advocacy world who has been agitating for an AIDS vaccine since the 1980s.
Dee immediately recognized that someone running the trials had failed to include people with HIV. But, having long been an advocate for more inclusive medical trials, she also knew that the experiments were sprawling operations with plenty of opportunities for routine error.
“Vaccine protocols change, and there are usually 20 iterations before they actually get sent to the FDA for approval,” she said. “Someone must have stuck [the HIV exclusion] in there.”
She speculated that researchers didn’t want to include a population that they thought could compromise their results.
“Somebody must have thought: ‘Well, this is about immune systems. I don’t want to confound the data by including someone with HIV,’” she said. “They had no idea what something like that looks like and what hell they were going to get from people like us.”
Lynda Dee is an attorney and the executive director of AIDS Action Baltimore. Courtesy Lynda Dee
Alarmed by Taylor’s story, Dee put together a group of activists — including representatives from the Latino Commission on AIDS and the National Minority AIDS Council — and sent a letter to Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.
Written with a palpable urgency and more than a whiff of anger, the letter, which the activists also posted to Change.org, said the agency was shooting itself in the foot by excluding HIV-positive people from Covid-19 vaccine trials. Black and Latino residents of the U.S. had been disproportionately affected by both HIV/AIDS and Covid-19, the letter said, and now both communities were the most likely to express skepticism about the coronavirus vaccine.
The activists also pointed out that people with HIV who were responding well to antiretroviral therapy weren’t considered so “immunodeficient” that they were barred from getting other vaccines. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t recommend certain live vaccines for people with HIV whose CD4 white blood cell count is below 200.)
Dee said she also reached out to her contacts in the U.S. government, including Carl Dieffenbach, director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. She said Dieffenbach was able to quickly begin discussions with Moderna, because the drugmaker was using government-run clinical trial networks to test its vaccine. (Pfizer didn’t rely on funding from the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed.)
Dieffenbach did not respond to a request for comment.
On Aug. 5, about eight days after Dee posted the letter on Change.org, Moderna changed course and announced plans to drop its exclusions. Moderna recruited 176 people living with HIV out of 30,000 participants, according to data on the FDA’s website. Of those with HIV, one who received the placebo and none who received the vaccine developed Covid-19, according to the data.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=NBCNews&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1291056643464192001&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Ffeature%2Fnbc-out%2Finside-fight-include-hiv-positive-people-covid-19-vaccine-trials-n1252458&siteScreenName=NBCNews&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px
Pfizer made a similar announcement a day later and ended up enrolling a relatively small number of HIV-positive people — 120 out of 43,000 participants — in the last phase of its trials, according to information on the FDA’s website. An efficacy rate for the HIV-positive participants in Pfizer’s vaccine is not yet available.
The CDC’s website says people with HIV “may receive the vaccine” but notes that the safety data specific to this population “is not yet available.” The agency adds that people with weakened immune systems “should also be aware of the potential for reduced immune responses to the vaccine, as well as the need to continue following all current guidance to protect themselves against COVID-19.”
Even though Dee was able to exert pressure on much of the hulking bureaucracy that decides who gets injected first, she still laments that it took so long for the vaccine makers to change their rules.
“We got ’em in,” she said, “but my God, what a mistake,” she said of the initial exclusion of those with HIV.
Neither Pfizer nor Moderna responded to multiple requests for comment.
Dr. Larry Corey, a virologist who was chosen by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to run vaccine testing operations for Operation Warp Speed, said the pressure on Pfizer and Moderna has been immense, “similar to playing Wimbledon Center Court.”
“I think there were an overwhelming number of priorities and things to do, and it just fell off the radar,” he said.
Corey said there was never “any worry” in the advocacy world that people successfully managing their HIV infections on antiretroviral therapy would have bad responses to the Covid-19 vaccine. Other experts at the Joint U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS, the British HIV Association and Aidsmap have also said the Covid-19 vaccine should be considered safe and effective for people with HIV.
Now, Dee and others are working to amend CDC guidelines and prioritize HIV-positive people for vaccination after the elderly and essential workers, as Germany has done. Some data have emergedthat suggest that people living with HIV are also at an increased risk of severe Covid-19 (although more research is needed), and nearly half of Americans who are HIV-positive are over age 50 and thus more likely to live with co-existing conditions that can complicate the course of the illness, like diabetes or cardiovascular disease.
Dee, who watched all of her friends die of AIDS in the ’80s, said she’s ready for this next fight.
“I’m a pushy old broad, and I’ve been doing this for 33 years,” she said. “People know me, they trust me, and they’re often a little afraid of me because I’m this East Coast battle-ax, and I say what I think.”
A new pilot study funded by the Food and Drug Administration could be the first step toward lifting restrictions on blood donations by gay and bisexual men.
The program, called Assessing Donor Variability and New Concepts in Eligibility (Advance), has been launched by three of the nation’s largest blood centers — the American Red Cross, Vitalant and OneBlood.
Approximately 2,000 men who have sex with men (MSM) will be recruited at community health centers in San Francisco; Los Angeles; Memphis, Tennessee; Atlanta; Orlando, Florida; Miami; Washington, D.C.; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Participants must be 18 to 30, have had at least one male sex partner in the last three months and be willing to donate blood. The results could ultimately determine whether the FDA changes its blood-donor history questionnaire, asked of all potential donors to assess risk factors for infection by transfusion-transmissible diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis B.
“If the scientific evidence supports the use of the different questions, it could mean men who have sex with men who present to donate would be assessed based upon their own individual risk for HIV infection and not according to when their last sexual contact with another man occurred,” a statement on the Advance website reads.
Restrictions on certain blood donors date to the early 1980s, during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, when the FDA instituted a lifetime ban on any man who had had sex with another man since 1977. That rule, intended to keep HIV out of the blood supply, was replaced in 2015 with a year-long abstinence requirement.
After the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, more than 100 members of Congress — including Sens. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — signed letters urging then-FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf to eliminate the deferral policy.
“We can’t say some people can give blood, other people can’t based on their sexual orientation,” then-Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., who represented Orlando at the time, told reporters, according to The Washington Blade.
Gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men are the group most affected by HIV in the U.S., according to the CDC: In 2018, they accounted for 69 percent of the nearly 38,000 new HIV diagnoses across the country.
In April, as coronavirus lockdowns caused donations to plummet, the FDA quickly lowered the eligibility requirement for MSM to just three months.
The pandemic’s impact on available blood was swift and severe: By mid-March, the American Red Cross had canceled some 2,700 blood drives, resulting in 86,000 fewer donations. In April, donations at the New York Blood Center were down from an average of 9,500 a month to fewer than 2,000, according to New York state Sen. Brad Hoylman, who is gay and was initially rejected as a donor despite meeting the new criteria. “A regular month they host about 600 blood drives,” Hoylman told NBC News in May. “Last week, they hosted two.”
The three-month deferral also affects women who have sex with MSM, sex workers, injection drug users and those with recent tattoos or piercings.
In an April letter to the FDA, two New York Democrats, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, chair of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and committee member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called the change “a good first step” but urged the agency to move toward assessing potential donors by individual risk.
“A policy that fails to do this perpetuates stigma and falls short of ensuring that every person who can safely donate blood in the United States has the opportunity to do so,” they said.
The Red Cross, which had encouraged the FDA to adopt the three-month deferral model, also called it “a scientifically based interim step” toward abolishing restrictions altogether.
“Blood donation eligibility should not be determined by methods that are based upon sexual orientation,” the relief organization said.
Jay Franzone.Reubelt Photography
Jay Franzone, an LGBTQ advocate who remained abstinent for a year to donate blood in January 2017, said the Advance study is long overdue.
“Italy, Spain and other nations modernized their donor policies years ago, before the U.S. even ended its lifetime ban,” he told NBC News.
More than a dozen nations — including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia — have adopted a risk-based questionnaire in place of a blanket policy based on sexual orientation. Earlier this month, the U.K. became the latest.
Franzone said he’s confident the Advance study will bear out what advocates like him have been saying all along: “Individual, risk-based assessment is safer for recipients of lifesaving blood.”
Jason Cianciotto, senior managing director of institutional development and strategy at New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis, said it’s exciting to reach this point after more than a decade of advocating for policy change.
He did have concerns about the Advance study, though, saying 2,000 individuals “is not a representative sample,” especially as no health centers in Chicago, New York, Boston or other Northeastern cities are involved.
He speculated that the pilot study, like the three-month deferral, was spurred by the pandemic.
“When we’ve lobbied the FDA in the past, their statements showed they didn’t really see an imperative” to change the current policy, Cianciotto told NBC News. “Even though we explained the ban contributed to stigma against people with HIV.”
A 2014 study by UCLA Law’s Williams Institute found that fully repealing restrictions on gay and bisexual donors could add over a half million blood units annually, increasing the available blood supply by 2 to 4 percent.
But when advocates had mentioned gay and bisexual donors could help alleviate blood shortages, Cianciotto said, the FDA has always claimed it didn’t really have any. “Of course, no one could have predicted a nationwide shortage of blood and blood products caused by a pandemic,” he added.
That the program has started under the Trump administration, which has been accused of rolling back LGBTQ rights, increases the likelihood that it was being driven by necessity, he said.
An FDA spokesperson told NBC News that the agency “remains committed to considering alternatives to time-based deferral by generating the scientific evidence that is intended to support an individual risk-assessment-based blood donor questionnaire.”
The spokesperson indicated there is no announced timeline for the study’s completion, although ABC News reported that researchers aim to present their findings by late 2021.
Cianciotto said he hopes the program is completed and implemented before the next election.
“In a Biden administration, we’ll have an advocate like we had in the Obama administration — in fact, one who actually was in the Obama administration,” he said. “But we can’t risk this becoming a campaign issue.”
Bella Pugh, a Black gender non-confirming teen, was shot to death after a Christmas party erupted into a night of violence earlier this month.
The 19-year-old was slain at a residence in Rosedale Avenue in Prichard, Alabama on 13 December.
Reports suggest that after Pugh was shot, party-goers waited 20 minutes before calling emergency services. Some did nothing, others took out their mobile phones and recorded.
Pugh’s mother Tiffany told Fox10 News that it was their rainbow-coloured jumpsuit that led to their murder, saying: “If [they] wasn’t wearing that dress [they] would still be alive.”
At least two other people attending the party were also injured, according to the Prichard City Police Department.
Officers added that a suspect, James Lee James Jr, turned himself in for questioning 16 December, NBC15 News reported.
He was later charged with murder and two counts of second-degree assault – however, authorities said that they are not investigating Pugh’s death as a hate crime. Their family disagree with the decision.
Tiffany believes Pugh “was killed because of what [they] was wearing, not because of who [they] was or what [they] did.”
“I loved [them] with everything in me, that’s why [they] could shine like [they] did. Everything I had I poured into [Bella].”
Pugh’s father Antonio Ruggs reflected: “Love your kids for who they
“Because you know one day they could be here, the next day they can be gone,” he added, according to MyNBC15.
With each year, the number of trans people murdered rises.
Pugh’s death is yet to be officially counted by monitoring group Human Rights Campaign, which has tracked a record number of murders of trans people in 2020.
With days left until the year ends, HRC’s count stands at 41 trans and gender non-conforming people murdered, more than any other on record.
Rising higher and higher each year, 2020 surpassed last year’s total in August.https://lockerdome.com/lad/13296932562903654?pubid=ld-5883-3439&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinknews.co.uk&rid=www.pinknews.co.uk&width=572
Activists say these numbers almost certainly fail to grasp the true scale of the problem. Local officials are not required to report killings to a centralised database, and the police and press often misgender trans and gender non-conforming victims.
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More than 40 groups that vehemently oppose LGBT+ rights are fundraising on Amazon, despite the online shopping giant’s pledges to support equality.
An investigation by openDemocracy found that the US AmazonSmile platform – that lets Amazon customers donate to charities as they shop online – has hosted groups that have intervened in court cases opposing equal marriage, described COVID-19 as “the consequential wrath of God” and punishment for sins including society’s “proclivity toward lesbianism and homosexuality”, and attacked TV shows for increasing “social acceptance of homosexuality”.
Among the anti-LGBT+ group hosted on AmazonSmile are Focus on the Family, American Family Association and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Amazon has made record profits this year amid the coronavirus pandemic, with profits 50 per cent up on last year. It is unclear how much money the groups have raised using AmazonSmile, but Amazon says the programme has facilitated $215 million in such donations since its launch in 2013.
Human rights activists are now calling on Amazon to immediately take down the anti-LGBT+ groups.
Evelyne Paradis, executive director of the LGBT+ advocacy group ILGA-Europe, told openDemocracy: “Companies, if they really walk the talk, shouldn’t be giving their platform to organisations that are working to limit the rights of other people.”
It’s good that Amazon has a diversity of groups on its platform, she said, but “they shouldn’t be giving space to any organisation […] that is actively fuelling hatred and/or working against the rights of other people”.
“It’s disappointing to see organisations that campaign against LGBT equality platformed on AmazonSmile,” said Robbie de Santos, associate director of campaigns and communications at Stonewall. “We have raised our concerns with Amazon and will continue our work until every LGBT+ person is free to be themselves worldwide.”
An Amazon spokesperson said: “Charitable organisations must meet the requirements outlined in our participation agreement to be eligible for AmazonSmile. Organisations that engage in, support, encourage, or promote intolerance, hate, terrorism, violence, money laundering, or other illegal activities are not eligible.
“If at any point an organisation violates this agreement, its eligibility will be revoked.”
In 2004 he founded The Inner Circle, a human rights organisation based in Cape Town which helps “Muslims who are queer to reconcile Islam with their sexuality” and gender identity.
He also runs workshops for imams across Africa, helping them to develop an inclusive understanding of gender and sexuality within Islam.
He explained: “It involves a re-examining of what it means to be Muslim…I focus on compassion, values, faith more than the rituals and sects that divide us.
“A lot of unlearning needs to be done [but] it is amazing what the imams come up with.
“They bring in research and context and match it with the religious text, and there are these ‘aha!’ moments.”
This work is vital in Africa, where homosexuality is still illegal in 32 out of 54 nations, and South Africa is the only country in the continent that allows same-sex marriage.
But when the coronavirus pandemic began, Hendricks feared that his workshops would have to stop.
He said: “It is such a challenge to give hope when people are experiencing loneliness, financial loss and low self-esteem in the time of COVID. But we had to pull it off.”
Hendricks managed to alter the workshops, running online sessions for imams in other countries and socially distanced meetings for those in South Africa.
The experience has taught him, he said, the importance of continuing dialogue while remaining safe.
He said: “Lets be safe, wash hands, wear masks, but let’s not stop engaging. If we continue to do what we need to do, we will make it.”
Bisexual men are more likely to experience eating disorders than either heterosexual or gay men, according to a new report from the University of California San Francisco.
Numerous studies have indicated that gay men are at increased risk for disordered eating — including fasting, excessive exercise and preoccupation with weight and body shape. But the findings, published this month in the journal Eating and Weight Disorders, suggest that bisexual men are even more susceptible to some unhealthy habits.
In a sampling of over 4,500 LGBTQ adults, a quarter of bisexual men reported having fasted for more than eight hours to influence their weight or appearance, compared to 20 percent of gay men. Eighty percent of bisexual men reported that they “felt fat,” and 77 percent had a strong desire to lose weight, compared to 79 percent and 75 percent of gay men, respectively.
Not everyone who diets or feels fat has an eating disorder, said a co-author of the study, Dr. Jason Nagata, a professor of pediatric medicine at UCSF. “It’s a spectrum — from some amount of concern to a tipping point where it becomes a pathological obsession about body weight and appearance,” Nagata said.
Of all the respondents, 3.2 percent of bi males had been clinically diagnosed with eating disorders, compared to 2.9 percent of gay men. That stacks up to 0.6 percent of heterosexual men, according to research from the Yale University School of Medicine.
Nagata said the discrepancies highlight the need to conduct eating disorder research on various sexual identities independently. “Prior studies on eating disorders in sexual minority men have grouped gay and bisexual men together, so it was difficult to understand the unique characteristics in bisexual men.”
Several factors may be at play, he said, including “minority stress,” the concept that the heightened anxiety faced by marginalized groups can manifest as poor mental and physical health outcomes.
“LGBTQ people experience stigma and discrimination, and stressors can definitely lead to disordered eating,” Nagata said. “For bi men, they’re not just facing stigma from the straight community but from the gay community, as well.”
The bisexual advocate and author Zachary Zane said this “double discrimination” often leads to loneliness, depression and a fear of coming out.
“We face ostracization from both sides, or if we’re embraced by the LGBTQ world, it’s because we’re hiding our authentic selves,” Zane said. “When you feel everything is out of control, [food] is something you can have control over. I can understand how that would be appealing.”
Thirty percent of bi men in the survey reported being afraid of losing control of their eating, and nearly a third said they had difficulty focusing on work or other activities because they were thinking about food, eating or calories.
While binge eating was similar among gay and bi men in this report, a 2018 American Psychiatric Association study of university students found that bisexual men were three times as likely to binge eat as their gay classmates and five times as likely as heterosexual male students.
Subjects for the report were chosen from the Pride Study, the first large-scale, long-term national health study of sexual and gender minorities, sponsored by UCSF and other institutions.
It relies on self-identification for sexual orientation and allows respondents to choose multiple identities or even write in their own. For the sake of the report, Nagata’s team categorized cisgender men who identify as bisexual, pansexual, polysexual or otherwise attracted to more than one gender as “bisexual-plus.”
Bisexuals, the largest demographic in the LGBTQ community, face numerous health disparities, including higher rates of obesity, substance abuse, binge drinking, sexually transmitted illnesses, cardiovascular disease and even some forms of cancers. Thirty-nine percent of bisexual men say they have never told a doctor about their sexual orientation, three times the percentage of gay men, according to a 2012 study by the Williams Institute.
A recent study in JAMA Pediatrics found that, in the first three years after having come out, bisexuals were twice as likely to start smoking as lesbians or gay men.
Bisexual youth are at an elevated risk for self-harm: Forty-four percent of bi high schoolers have seriously considered suicide, compared to a quarter of gay teens and less than 10 percent of heterosexual students, according to a 2011 study from the University of IllinoisCollege of Education. And a 2013 report in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that suicidal thoughts did not decrease as they entered adulthood, as they did for gay and straight people.
But few diagnostic tools or treatment programs make adequate distinctions, Nagata said, even for gender: Most assessment tools for eating disorders, for example, were devised for cisgender women, and they can overlook behaviors more common among men, like eating more to gain mass. While only 3 percent of the bisexual male study subjects had been diagnosed with eating disorders by clinicians, nearly a quarter met the criteria based on their answers.
“Raising awareness of these differences is the first step,” he said. “Having tailored interventions for LGBTQ people, for bisexual people, is just common sense. It’s not a one-size-fits-all treatment program.”
Zane said that if researchers want to help bi men with eating disorders, they need to address the unique roots of bi men’s depression, anxiety and need for control.
“When researchers lump bi and gay men together, it not only contributes to bi erasure — implying that bi men have the same struggles and identity as gay men — it also leads to ineffective treatments,” he said. “If the goal is to actually help bisexual men, then all research needs to parse them out from gay men, period.”
A federal court on Wednesday struck down an Ohio policy that prevented transgender people from changing the gender marker on their birth certificates, clearing the way for trans residents to alter their legal documentation to reflect their gender identity.
The judge, Michael Watson, stated in his decision that Ohio had previously allowed people to change their birth certificates but the policy, which was instituted in 2016, violates the state’s constitution.
The case, Ray v. McClous, was filed more than two years ago by Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Ohio and Thompson Hine on behalf of plaintiffs Stacie Ray, Basil Argento, Ashley Breda and Jane Doe. The plaintiffs are all trans Ohio residents who were denied when they attempted to change their birth certificates to match their gender identities.
Prior to Wednesday’s ruling, Ohio was one of just two states that prohibited alterations to residents’ gender markers. Tennessee is now the only state with this type of policy.
Melanie Amato, press secretary for Ohio’s Department of Public Health, said in a statement that they were reviewing the decision but did not say whether the state would challenge the court’s decision.
Watson ruled that the policy violated the 14th Amendment, which states that states must provide equal protection under the law for its citizens and cannot set “intentional and arbitrary” discriminatory policies.
“At bottom, the court finds that defendants’ proffered justifications are nothing more than thinly veiled post-hoc rationales to deflect from the discriminatory impact of the policy,” he wrote in the ruling.
According to a 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey almost a third of trans people who showed an identity document with a gender marker that contradicted their perceived gender were harassed, assaulted or discriminated against.
“[Birth certificates] are foundational to our ability to access a variety of benefits such as employment and housing, and to navigate the world freely and safely, as who we truly are,” Kara Ingelhart, one of the attorneys for Lambda Legal, said in a statement. “Courts across the country have overwhelmingly determined these archaic and harmful laws are unconstitutional and today we are closer than ever to eradicating them once and for all.”
As pro-Trump supporters descended on D.C. for the second MAGA march Saturday, some men wearing Proud Boys gear were seen sporting yellow kilts…to the shock of the kilts’ maker.
The owner of Verillas in Fredericksburg, Allister Greenbrier, said his business produced the yellow kilts seen in the photo snapped by NPR reporter Hannah Allam.
Other videos have circulated social media showing the same men mooning the crowd, with the words “Fuck Antifa” written on their butts in sharpie markers.
Allister Greenbrier, the owner of Verillas, tells Yahoo Life that when the team saw a photo of the men wearing the kilts, “we thought we were doomed.”
“Our voice is small, and even a business as large as Fred Perry [a British clothing label whose polos were adopted by the Proud Boys earlier this year] has said little about this kind of thing,” Greenbrier says.
“But when we donated the proceeds, and then some, from this unfortunate sale, the support pouring in behind our message has been tremendous.”
The company later confirmed it has now pulled the yellow kilts from sale and is offering a free color exchange for anyone who has previously purchased one but does not want to be inadvertently associated with the far-right group. The Proud Boys appear to have chosen the kilts to match their uniform of black and yellow polo shirts.
Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard has introduced a “blatantly transphobic” bill to deny trans-inclusive schools funding, despite claiming to support the LGBT+ community.
On Thursday (10 December), representative Gabbard introduced a bill to the house, co-sponsored by Republican representative Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, called the “Protect Women’s Sport Act”.
The bill aims to clarify Title IX rights (outlawing sex-based discrimination in federally-funded education) as “based on biological sex”, and prevent schools from receiving federal funding if they allow trans girls and women, as well as non-binary people, to compete on women’s sports teams.
In a statement, Gabbard said: “Title IX… led to a generational shift that impacted countless women, creating life-changing opportunities for girls and women that never existed before.
“However, Title IX is being weakened by some states who are misinterpreting Title IX, creating uncertainty, undue hardship and lost opportunities for female athletes.
“Our legislation protects Title IX’s original intent which was based on the general biological distinction between men and women athletes based on sex.”
Gabbard is the US representative for Hawaii’s second congressional district, who also ran for the Democratic presidential nomination last year.
During her campaign she came under fire for her history of opposed marriage equality and having called LGBT+ activists “homosexual extremists”.
However in a grovelling apology she insisted that her views had changed and that she was now an LGBT+ ally.
She was swiftly criticised for the new legislation, especially as just last year she insisted that would “work toward passing legislation that ensures equal rights and protections on LGBT+ issues”.
Activist Charlotte Clymer wrote on Twitter: “Tulsi Gabbard is now introducing a blatantly transphobic piece of legislation aimed at trans and non-binary young people.”
