Features

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Starbucks Fired a Trans Supervisor after Staff Played ‘Pig’ Prank on Cops

Starbucks fired a trans woman from her supervisor job after a police officer was given an order labelled “pig”. Lola Rose, a trans college student, said she was “made to be a martyr” after the incident went viral and is now considering legal action, She had been working as a shift supervisor at a Starbucks in Glenpool, Oklahoma, on Thanksgiving morning, when a police officer was handed a muffin with “pig” on the label. Rose told The New York Post that she’d noticed the label and intervened, thinking, “No, that’s not right.” “I jumped into action, apologised, then I thanked him for […]

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Supreme Court Rejects Inmate’s Bid for Sex Reassignment Surgery

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an appeal by a convicted murderer who filed a civil rights lawsuit because Texas prison officials denied her request to be considered for gender reassignment surgery. The justices let stand a lower court’s decision to reject the claim by inmate Vanessa Lynn Gibson that denying the surgery request violated the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Gibson, 41, who is transgender, was assigned male at birth and has lived as a female since age 15. Gibson was incarcerated in 1995 for aggravated assault, then was convicted of […]

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Facebook’s ‘Inaccurate’ HIV PrEP Ads an ‘Imminent Danger,’ LGBTQ Groups Say

More than 50 LGBTQ, HIV and public health organizations have signed an open letter calling on Facebook to remove “factually inaccurate” advertisements placed by law firms that “suggest negative health effects” of HIV-prevention medication Truvada, a type of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. “The advertisements are targeting LGBTQ Facebook and Instagram users, and are causing significant harm to public health,” the letter states. “The law firms’ advertisements are scaring away at-risk HIV negative people from the leading drug that blocks HIV infections.” The ads were bought by various law firms looking to use the platform’s targeted advertising capabilities to recruit gay and bisexual […]

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Pioneering Testicle Transplant Raises Hopes of Future Surgery for Transgender Men

A groundbreaking testicle transplant operation has taken place, raising hopes of potential future operations for transgender patients. Several of the world’s leading experts in genital surgery performed the pioneering operation for an unnamed cisgender man in Belgrade, Serbia.ADVERTISING The man was born without testicles due to a rare condition, leaving him reliant on injections to receive testosterone, similar to transgender men. The six-hour operation saw a testicle transplanted from the patient’s twin brother, which will allow him to produce his own testosterone. The two brothers, who now have one testicle each, are both doing well, transplant surgeon Dr Dicken Ko […]

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Federal Court to Consider Bathroom Use by Transgender Student

A transgender student’s fight over school bathrooms comes before a federal appeals court Thursday, setting the stage for a groundbreaking ruling. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta will hear arguments about whether a Florida school district should be ordered to allow students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity. Drew Adams, who has since graduated from Nease High School in Ponte Vedra, won a lower court ruling last year ordering the St. Johns County school district to allow him to use the boys’ restroom. The district has appealed, arguing that although it will permit transgender […]

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Queer Google Employees Give Damning Indictment after being Fired at Thanksgiving

Three LGBT+ workers who were fired by Google during Thanksgiving week are alleging that they were dismissed by the tech giant because of their employee activism, and plan to file federal charges. Laurence Berland, Sophie Waldman and Rebecca Rivers, who all identify as LGBT+, were fired duing the same week, along with another employee, Paul Duke, who is not LGBT+. Google told its employees that the reason for firing the four workers was “clear and repeated violations of our data security policies”. But the former Googlers, according to The Guardian, deny any wrongdoing and are alleging their dismissal was to send a […]

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U.S. to Give Free HIV-prevention Pills to Uninsured — with One Costly Loophole

The U.S. government will start a national HIV prevention program that will distribute free HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis medication, or PrEP, to uninsured Americans at risk of acquiring the virus, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday. Activists, however, say the plan doesn’t go far enough. Health Secretary Alex Azar called the new “Ready, Set, PrEP” program a “historic expansion of access to HIV prevention medication” and a “major step forward” in President Donald Trump’s Ending the HIV Epidemic plan, which was announced in February and seeks to reduce HIV transmission by 90 percent by 2030. “Thanks to Ready, Set, PrEP, […]

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Leading Experts ‘optimistic’ about Ongoing Trials of HIV Vaccine

The global fight against the human immunodeficiency virus is poised to make important advances thanks to three experimental HIV vaccines that are entering the final stages of testing at sites across the globe. While any of these three late-stage HIV vaccine trials — known as HVTN 702, Imbokodo and Mosaico — could fail, scientists say they are more hopeful than at any time since 1984, when Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler raised hopes by predicting that there would be a test-worthy HIV vaccine within two years. This is “perhaps one of the most optimistic moments we have […]

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DNC Blasts Trump On World AIDS Day: He Is No Ally

World AIDS Day provides us the opportunity to support those living with HIV, unite in the fight to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and mourn those we’ve lost. Today, we’re thinking about all the progress we’ve made, and the work still before us. This president is no ally of people living with HIV, who are disproportionately LGBTQ and people of color. His administration has proposed cutting global HIV-prevention programs and attacked health care services that people living with HIV rely on, including the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, and Planned Parenthood. Just last month, we saw firsthand just how uninformed and callous […]

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150 Best and Worst Countries for LGBT Travel, Ranked

Nigeria has emerged as the world’s most dangerous country for LGBT+ travel in a new index of global LGBT+ safety released earlier this month. The LGBTQ+ Danger Index ranks the 150 most-visited countries using eight factors, including legalised same-sex marriage, worker protections, criminalisation of violence and whether, based on Gallup poll findings, it is a good place to live. Nigeria earned itself a ‘top’ score of -142 on the danger index due to its total lack of LGBT+ protections, alongside the criminalisation of same-sex relationships and propaganda. Homosexuality is punishable by up to 14 years and, under Sharia law, the death penalty. Even the […]

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