Features

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Man who contracted HIV after being raped warns of dangers of drink spiking

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New statistics have revealed the alarming prevalence of drink spiking in the LGBTQ+ community, with one man telling of the experience that left him cutting himself off from work, family, friends and “anything that looked towards the future I didn’t think I would ever have”.  Released on Thursday (4 April), the Ladbible Group and Stamp Out Spiking study surveyed 2,063 people aged between 16 and 24, in an effort to understand the rise in the number of drinks being spiked.  “Spiking” refers to when someone is given alcohol or drugs without their consent, usually in a drink. A person might spike a […]

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1 in 3 LGBTQ adults say they’ve been treated unfairly by a health care provider

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer adults are twice as likely as their non-LGBTQ counterparts to report having had negative health care experiences over the last three years, according to a new report. One-third (33%) of LGBTQ adults say they were treated unfairly or with disrespect or had at least one negative experience with a health care provider, compared to 15% of non-LGBTQ adults, according to a new report by KFF, a health care and polling nonprofit formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation.  Of the LGBTQ adults who reported negative experiences, 61% said a provider assumed something about them without […]

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A quarter of trans people have had health care disrupted in the past year

For the past several years, Republican lawmakers all over the country have been attacking transgender people’s access to gender-affirming health care, and soon half of the states in the U.S. will ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth.  However, the legislation is also having a negative effect on trans adults since many of the laws also attack their access to health care. A new study from Data for Progress found that 24% of transgender adults have had their access to gender-affirming care disrupted in the past year, and one in five said that they didn’t go to a doctor or the hospital when […]

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Meta regularly allows anti-trans hate posts calling for murder of “pedophiles”

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Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads — has failed to enforce its own policies against anti-transgender hate posts, including posts made by high-profile political influencers and media outlets, according to a newly released report from the LGBTQ+ media advocacy group GLAAD. GLAAD cataloged numerous posts referring to trans individuals as the slur “tr***y” as well as “mentally ill,” “satanic,” “sexual predators,” pedophiles,” “terrorists,” and “perverts,” The Washington Post reported. One illustrated image showed a group of people stoning a trans-identified person to death; another showed a masked person holding a gun standing on top of a demon painted in the […]

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Sen. Kim Jackson gets real on anti-trans legislation: “It is killing kids”

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State Senator Kim Jackson of Georgia was sworn into office in January 2021, becoming the state’s first openly LGBTQ+ senator. She’s running for a second term this year. Jackson, 39, also serves as Vicar at the Episcopal Church of the Common Ground, where she “co-creates Church” with people who are unhoused in downtown Atlanta. Her wife is an imam at her local mosque. The couple lives on a small farm on the outskirts of Atlanta with their three-year-old son, whose current obsession is trucks. “The boy could say excavator before he could say, like, ‘Hello, my name is Rhys,’” Jackson […]

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Older people, especially gay men, are getting more STIs than ever

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Infectious disease experts say more needs to be done to address rising STI rates in older people. The call to action will be presented next month at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Disease in Barcelona, Spain. In a press statement in advance of the conference, they explained what was happening… and suggested some reasons. For example, STIs in Americans aged 55 to 64 years have more than doubled over the past decade. It’s even worse for gonorrhea, rising from 15 cases per 100,000 people in 2015 to 57 per 100,000 in 2019. In England, the number of over 45s […]

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Republican anti-LGBTQ+ legislation bad for mental health and quality of life: survey

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After a record year for anti-LGBTQ+ legislation at the state level and in a year that threatens to outdo it, LGBTQ+ Americans are seeing a negative impact on their mental health and quality of life, according to a new survey from Data for Progress. Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate’s email newsletter. In 2023, more than 550 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in state legislatures across the U.S., and more than 80 became law, by the Human Rights Campaign’s count. The number of bills introduced this year is approaching 500. Many of last year’s bills were […]

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Best Buy offers to screen LGBTQ nonprofit donations after conservative pressure, filing shows

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Best Buy offered to screen donations from its employee resource groups going to LGBTQ causes following pressure from a conservative think tank that holds shares in the company, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing made public this week. The SEC filing contains a monthslong email exchange between the National Center for Public Policy Research, which describes itself as a “nonpartisan, free-market conservative think tank,” and Best Buy. The dialogue, which hasn’t been previously reported, shows how the center said it would make “a splash” unless the consumer electronics giant moved in favor of its demands.  In some of the last correspondence […]

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Texas appeals court blocks state from probing transgender kids’ parents

A Texas appeals court on Friday upheld a lower court’s injunction blocking the state from investigating parents who provide their transgender children with gender-affirming medical treatments, which Gov. Greg Abbott has called abusive. Abbott, a Republican, had ordered the state Department of Family Protective Services to carry out child abuse investigations into families whose children were receiving puberty-blocking treatments in February 2022. A month later, a district court judge imposed a statewide temporary injunction on such investigations, saying the probes endangered children and their families. The appeals court in Austin upheld the district court judge’s injunction in a pair of rulings on […]

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Conservatives say boycott over trans-inclusive policies cost Planet Fitness millions. It’s a lie.

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Chaya Raichik, who goes by Libs of TikTok online, believes Planet Fitness is currently facing the “most successful boycott since Bud Light” because the gym chain allows trans women to use women’s locker rooms.  But while Raichik and right-wing media outlets have claimed that the boycott caused the gym to lose “$400 million in value” — something Raichik called “a bloodbath” — there’s no proof, either of the boycott or its alleged financial harm to the gym. In fact, Planet Fitness has stood by its trans-inclusive policies and LGBTQ+ support for years despite right-wing backlash. Raichik alleges that the boycott started […]

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