Features

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The fight for trans rights is beyond the ‘visibility era’: ‘This moment calls for radical defiance’

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Just over a decade ago, in 2014, TIME magazine declared on its front cover that we were at the “The Transgender Tipping Point“.  The cover itself was simple, a full body shot of actress Laverne Cox – who was then playing Sophia Burset on Netflix game-changer Orange Is the New Black – and a byline for writer Katy Steinmetz, who said in the piece that trans rights would be the next civil rights frontier. “We are in a place now,” Cox told the magazine at the time, “where more and more trans people want to come forward and say, ‘This is who I am.’ […]

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GOOD ON THEM: Apple, Costco stand behind DEI programs

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At a time when many businesses are abandoning their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, Apple and Costco are standing behind theirs. Both are encouraging shareholders to vote against resolutions asking them to reevaluate their commitment to DEI. A shareholder resolution is a means by which those who hold stock in a company can seek to influence the company’s policies. Most are nonbinding and most do not receive a majority vote, as the bulk of shareholders usually vote among company lines. But if a resolution receives even 10 percent support, it’s hard for the company to ignore. The Apple and Costco resolutions were both submitted by National […]

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Impact of the Executive Order Redefining Sex on Transgender, Nonbinary, and Intersex People

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On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”1 Although the executive order sweeps broadly across many areas affecting transgender, nonbinary and intersex people, a central tenet of the directive is the redefinition of the word “sex” as applied across federal programs and services to refer only to biological characteristics “at conception,” and as unchangeable.2 Redefining “sex” is something the president attempted to do in his previous term,3 particularly in the context of sex discrimination in education under Title IX,4 and had committed to doing in his second term.5 As […]

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Transgender people with autism suffer poor healthcare and high rates of self-harm

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The first large-scale study on the experiences of autistic transgender people finds that they are more likely to have long-term mental and physical health conditions, including alarmingly high rates of self-harm, data from the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University shows. Researchers found that these individuals also report experiencing lower quality health care than both autistic and non-autistic people whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth. “These findings add to the growing body of evidence that many autistic people experience unacceptably poor mental health and are at a very high risk of suicide-related behaviors. We need to consider how other aspects […]

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Google erases Pride Month from Calendar app

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The Google Calendar app has stopped mentioning various cultural observances, like LGBTQ+ Pride Month, Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, and Indigenous Peoples Month.  The company said that it wasn’t “sustainable” to keep mentioning these observances, but commenters accused Google of removing them in response to the recent right-wing pressure campaign against “diversity” efforts. “Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world,” Google spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld wrote in a statement to The Verge. “We got feedback that some other events and countries […]

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Canadian LGBTQ+ group issues U.S. travel ban amid Trump’s anti-trans & tariff threats

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The prominent LGBTQ+ rights organization Egale Canada will boycott events in the U.S. in protest of the Trump administration’s continued assault on the transgender community. “After deep consideration, we have decided not to engage in-person in this year’s Commission on the Status of Women or any other UN, OAS (Organization of American States) or global convergings, including WorldPride, taking place in the United States in the foreseeable future,” a statement from the group reads. WorldPride, which drew five million attendees to its biannual gathering in New York in 2023, is slated to take place in Washington DC at the end of May. […]

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Pentagon to ban trans people from joining military, pauses gender-transition procedures

The U.S. military will no longer allow transgender individuals to join the military and will stop performing or facilitating procedures associated with gender transition for service members, according to a memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth filed in court on Monday. President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month that took aim at transgender troops in a personal way — at one point saying that a man identifying as a woman was “not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.” “Effective immediately, all new accessions for individuals with a history of gender dysphoria are paused,” […]

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It’s time to dial up your trans allyship. Here’s how.

For trans people, these times are a nightmare come true.  Every day for the past four years seems to have brought news of a new state law or policy aimed at us. And just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, the federal government has jumped on us, too.  Even those of us who are relatively privileged — white, educated, or middle class—now live every day looking over our shoulders. Not since the days of the gay roundups and purges of the 1950s and the Black Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s has the government been wielded this intentionally […]

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In a major win for trans students, New Jersey court rules against forced outing policies

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This week, the New Jersey Superior Court’s Appellate Division issued twounanimous rulings blocking forced outing policies in school districts across Morris and Monmouth counties. In mid-2023, Hanover Township Public Schools in Morris County, Marlboro Township Public Schools in Monmouth County, Middletown Public Schools in Monmouth County, and Manalapan-Englishtown Regional School District in Monmouth County implemented policies mandating the disclosure of a student’s transgender status to their parents. The policies varied in scope—some required notification only if a student formally changed their gender identity at school, while others mandated disclosure if a student merely mentioned being transgender in counseling sessions. Shortly after the policies were enacted, […]

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Anti-LGBTQ+ policies harm the health of not only LGBTQ+ people, but all Americans

In 2024, state legislatures introduced an all-time record of 533 bills targeting LGBTQ+ populations. These policies create a patchwork of legal landscapes that vary widely between and within states, affecting aspects of everyday life ranging from how kids learn and play to where adults live and work.  All of these policies have implications for the health of not only LGBTQ+ people but also the general public. I am a health policy researcher who studies how state and federal legislation affect public health. Research has shown that the social determinants of health – the opportunities and resources that affect how people live, learn, play, work and age […]

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