The Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., the group that collects historic documents related to the federal government’s discrimination against and persecution of LGBTQ people in past years, announced this week that it is donating all its documents to a newly created Archive of American LGBTQ Political and Legal History at the College of William & Mary.
The Williamsburg, Va., based college announced last week that its new LGBTQ archive is being established at its Swem Library in memory of the renowned gay historian John Boswell, who was a 1969 Bachelor of Arts graduate in history at the College of William & Mary.
“There are many fabulous collections of LGBTQ historical materials in libraries across the country, but this archive will have a unique focus on the political and legal architecture of the movement,” said Carrie Cooper, dean of University Libraries at William and Mary.
“Our motto ‘Archive Activism’ brings us to this decision to donate all of our collection to William and Mary, for the benefit of historians, researchers, and students nationwide,” said Charles Francis, co-founder of the reestablished Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. The group was originally founded by D.C. LGBTQ rights pioneer Frank Kameny in the early 1960s as D.C.’s first politically active LGBTQ organization.
“This exciting new archive will collect materials that illuminate the history of LGBTQ Americans’ struggle to secure their rights through the political process and legal systems of the nation,” according to LGBTQ rights advocate and former William & Mary Rector Jeff Trammell.
Trammell is donating to the new archive material collected from his tenure as the first openly gay board chair of a major public university, a statement released by William & Mary says. It says Trammell’s donation is the second donation after the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., which made the first of what is expected to be many more LGBTQ-related documents to be donated to the new archive.
The Mattachine donation includes “original, declassified documents obtained by meticulous research into sources such as the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, numerous presidential library archives, and public and university libraries, to name just a few, according to attorney Pate Felts, the other Mattachine co-founder.
Bisexual Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) is being shredded for upholding the Senate filibuster and blocking possible gun reform even as she expressed heartbreak over Tuesday’s Uvalde, Texas elementary school shooting that killed 19 children and 2 adults.
“We are horrified and heartbroken by the senseless tragedy unfolding at Robb Elementary School in Texas and grateful to the first responders for acting swiftly. No families should ever have to fear violence in their children’s schools,” Sinema wrote in a May 24 tweet.
“Just stop,” Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) tweeted in response. “Unless you are willing to break the filibuster to actually pass sensible gun control measures you might as well just say ‘thoughts and prayers’.”
Republican politicians are notorious for offering “thoughts and prayers” after a mass shooting while avoiding any measures to actually prevent the massacres. Since Joe Biden was elected president, Sinema has slowly become more and more Republican-lite in her politics.
The 18-year-old shooter entered the predominantly Latino and lower-income Robb Elementary School on Tuesday morning clad in body armor and carrying a handgun and rifle. The shooter then killed 20 individuals located inside a fourth-grade classroom. He barricaded himself in the school and traded fire with police officials until an officer shot him dead. The massacre marks the 27th school shooting this year alone.
While Democrats have long sought federal gun control measures to help reduce mass shootings, the likelihood of passing any such legislation remains unlikely due to the Senate filibuster. Filibuster rules require 60 Senators to vote in favor of legislation before it can become law.
With the Senate split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans (and Republicans uniformly opposed to any gun control laws), the only way that Democrats can possibly pass national firearm reform would be to eliminate the filibuster. Eliminating it would allow the Democrats to unanimously vote in favor of such legislation while relying on a tiebreaking vote from Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
However, both Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Sinema have long opposed repealing the filibuster. In a January 2022 speech, Sinema said, “There is no need for me to restate my long-standing support for the 60-vote threshold to pass legislation. There’s no need for me to restate its role protecting our country from wild reversals in federal policy.”
“What is the legislative filibuster other than a tool that requires new federal policy to be broadly supported by Senators representing a broader cross-section of Americans – a guardrail, inevitably viewed as an obstacle by whoever holds the Senate majority, but which in reality ensures that millions of Americans represented by the minority party have a voice in the process?” she added.
Numerous pundits and commenters have pointed out that the filibuster has also resulted in the blocking of pro-LGBTQ, pro-reproductive rights, pro-voting rights and other progressive legislation supported by wide swaths of Americans. Approximately 52 percent of U.S. voters support stricter gun laws, according to a 2021 Gallup poll.
Sinema’s opposition to filibuster reform has led various Twitter commenters to criticize her tweet expressing heartbreak over the school shooting victims.
It’s been a month since a Montana judge temporarily blocked enforcement of a state law that required transgender people to undergo surgery before they could change their gender on their birth certificate, and the state still isn’t in compliance with the court order, the ACLU of Montana said.
Jon Ebelt, spokesperson for the state health department, said the agency is still working with the Department of Justice to review the April 21 ruling and its implications. He did not respond to an email asking if that meant the state was evaluating whether to appeal the order.
“We have continued to be patient in allowing the state time to comply with the court ordered preliminary injunction,” the ACLU of Montana said in a recent statement. “However, close to one month has passed and the State’s willful indifference to the court order is inexcusable.”
Montana is among a growing list of Republican-controlled states that have moved to restrict transgender rights, including requiring student-athletes to participate in sports based on their gender assigned at birth or making it illegal for transgender minors to be treated with hormones or puberty blockers.
Beginning in late 2017, transgender residents could apply to change the gender on their Montana birth certificate by filing a sworn affidavit with the health department. District Court Judge Michael Moses’ order requires the state to revert back to that process while the challenge to the new law is pending.
“The fact that the state refuses … evidences its lack of respect for the judiciary and utter disregard for the transgender Montanans who seek to have a birth certificate that accurately indicates what they know their sex to be,” the ACLU said.
If the state continues to violate the preliminary injunction, ACLU of Montana staff attorney Akila Lane said the organization would ask the court to step in.
“We’re only looking for the state to comply” with the preliminary injunction, Lane said Friday.
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A week after the ruling was issued, Billings attorney Colin Gersten inquired about an updated gender designation application form on behalf of a friend. The Office of Vital Records responded saying: “We will contact you once we are able to discuss your options.”
Gersten made another inquiry about the proper form on May 11 and did not receive a reply, according to emails shared with The Associated Press.
Many transgender people choose not to undergo gender-confirmation surgeries. Such procedures are sometimes deemed unnecessary or too expensive, two transgender Montanans argued in their July 2021 lawsuit.
Republican state Sen. Carl Glimm, who sponsored the legislation, has argued that the Department of Public Health and Human Services overstepped its authority in 2017 by changing the designation on a birth certificate from “sex” to “gender” and then setting rules by which the designation could be changed.
Half the states, plus the District of Columbia, allow transgender residents to change the gender designation on their birth certificates without surgical requirements or court orders, according to the policy organization Movement Advancement Project. Just over a dozen states require surgical intervention, and such barriers are being challenged in several states, including Montana.
Over the past few years, other legislation has been aimed at transgender people, and the new laws are being challenged in court.
Alabama passed a law making it a felony to prescribe gender-confirming puberty blockers and hormones to transgender minors, but a judge has blocked the law. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered child welfare officials to investigate parents of children receiving puberty blockers and other gender-confirming care as potential abuse. That, too, was blocked by a judge.
At least a dozen states have recently passed laws to ban transgender girls and women from participating in female sports, most recently Utah.
Sam, a transgender woman who lives in Georgia, said that on Tuesday evening, Reddit users started commenting on a photo of her that she had shared on the platform three months ago.
They told her the photo was being shared on 4chan, a forum website with little moderation, and people were saying that it showed the shooter who killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday. The shooter, identified as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, was killed on the scene by police.
Sam, 20, who asked to go by her first name to protect her privacy and safety, told NBC News that the photo and others were taken from her personal Instagram page, and that she’s faced harassment and threats as the image has spread.
“This isn’t the first time I was harassed, but it is the first time I’ve been accused of murder,” she said.The false claims started shortly after news of the shooting first broke. A photo of Sam was posted to 4chan on Tuesday afternoon, in a post that began with “here’s the shooter’s reddit” before linking to her Reddit account and posting a transphobic slur. While some users said they did not believe the photo was of the shooter, other users posted new threads soon afterward, using pictures with fewer details of Sam’s face from her profile.
She said she’s feeling annoyed more than anything: “I’m more worried about the families of the victims of the attack,” she told NBC News.
Social media users and trolls on 4chan, Twitter and Facebook are using Sam’s photos and images of at least two other transgender women to spread the baseless theory that the shooter was transgender. In some cases, they have created collages that place the women’s photos alongside images from an Instagram page believed to have belonged to the shooter.
The claims were spread by some prominent conservatives on Tuesday.
Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, said of the shooter in a since-deleted tweet, “It’s a transsexual leftist illegal alien named Salvatore Ramos.” Gosar has not returned a request for comment.
One of Sam’s photos was shared by the Young Conservatives of Southern Indiana Facebook page, which has more than 4,000 followers.
Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who was successfully sued for defamation for falsely claiming the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting was a hoax, also echoed the misinformation that the Uvalde shooting suspect was trans. Representatives for Jones’ website did not immediately respond for comment.
Conservative personality Candace Owens joined in on Wednesday, referencing “cross-dressing” photos she said she’d seen of the suspect. Owens has previously shared misinformation in her feeds and unsuccessfully sued Facebook in 2021 after the company added a fact-checking warning to one of her posts.
The photos that social media users are claiming show the shooter are actually of three different transgender women wearing skirts, including Sam, according to Trans Safety Network, a U.K.-based group that monitors online threats made against the transgender community. The group wrote in a post that all three women have confirmed they are alive.
In an effort to debunk the theory, Sam shared a photo of herself standing in front of a transgender Pride flag on Reddit Tuesday evening and wrote, “It’s not me, I don’t even live in Texas.” In response to a comment on the post, she said she just wants “to live without being attacked when I leave my house.” She also shared another photo of herself holding a piece of paper with the date on it.
She encouraged people to be careful about what they see online.
“Transphobic people exist and people are quick to blame someone for terrible things instead of looking for the truth about what actually happened,” Sam told NBC News.
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Despite the fact that the posts including Sam’s photos violate Twitter and Facebook’s misinformation policies, the platforms have done little to combat the emerging false narrative.
A review of posts on Twitter and Facebook Wednesday morning found numerous tweets and posts using Sam’s image and labeling her as the shooter. In a statement, a Twitter spokesperson said, “In line with our hateful conduct policy, we will require the removal of Tweets that share misleading claims about the identity of the perpetrator with the intent to incite fear or spread fearful stereotypes about a protected category.” Additionally, the spokesperson said, “In line with our synthetic and manipulated media policy, we will require Tweets to be removed if they contain media that present false or misleading context surrounding the identity of the perpetrator.”
A Meta spokesperson said the company is removing content that violates its Bullying & Harassment policy, which forbids content “in which criminal allegations pose off-line harm to the named individual.”
“They’ve been relying on me and others to report the misinformation before doing anything,” Sam said.
Some advocates condemned the basely theory that the shooter was transgender.
“This has GOT to stop,” Erin Reed, a trans advocate, said on Twitter. She went on to reference investigations that Texas opened into the parents of some transgender youths in March following a directive from Gov. Greg Abbott that ordered state agencies to investigate claims of parents providing gender-affirming medical care to minors.
“A sitting congressman just spread a lie about the Texas shooter to pin it on transgender people spread by troll sites, in a state where they are spending more time banning trans kids than they are spending regulating guns,” she said.
Another advocate, Charlotte Clymer, criticized Gosar and said he “owes the public an apology.”
“It’s pathetic that @DrPaulGosar sought to exploit this horrific tragedy for anti-trans propaganda,” she said. “There is zero evidence that the shooter is transgender.”
Reporter and MSNBC contributor Katelyn Burns said this isn’t the first time “right wing liars have tried to falsely claim a mass shooter was trans.” She referenced an article she wrote in April 2018 following a shooting at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California, in which three people were wounded.
The shooter died by suicide by the time police arrived at the scene, and afterward, some far-right websites and conservative critics speculated, without evidence, that the shooter was transgender.
Similarly, Burns noted that following a 2015 shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that left three people dead, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, shared the unsubstantiated theory that the shooter was transgender after a far-right outlet reported that he registered to vote as a woman.
“Well, it’s also been reported that he was registered as an independent and a woman and transgendered leftist activist, if that’s what he is,” Cruz said during a campaign event in 2015, according to audio obtained by the Texas Tribune.
Cruz’s campaign later told news outlets that he was trying to make a point that there were still many unknown details about the shooter.
It turns out that a large number of Republicans believe that teachers can actually make children turn queer.
40% of Republican adults said that they believe teachers can influence students’ sexuality and gender identity, according to a new Morning Consult poll. Only 27% of Democrats and 29% of independents agreed.
Respondents were more likely in the poll to say that teachers can affect students’ academic performance, social skills, intelligence, values, and even religious views, but the alarmingly large number who believe that sexual orientation and gender identity are learned at school may be why so many Republican parents don’t want LGBTQ people to work with children.
The survey found that 31% of Republican parents are “uncomfortable” with LGBTQ people working with their kids, and another 13% had no opinion. Slightly over half – 57% – said they were “comfortable” with LGBTQ people working with their children.
In contrast, 84% of Democratic parents said that they were “comfortable” with LGBTQ people working with their kids and only 10% were “uncomfortable.”
The survey also asked parents if they were comfortable with lessons about “the LGBTQ civil rights movement” being taught in school, and compared that to whether they were comfortable with discussions of “sexual orientation and gender identity.” Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law bans discussions of “sexual orientation and gender identity” in early grades and requires them to be “developmentally appropriate” in older grades – without defining what that means – and many advocates on both sides have taken that language to mean that discussions about LGBTQ people are restricted.
59% of Republican parents said that they oppose lessons about the LGBTQ civil rights movement in schools, and 60% opposed lessons about sexual orientation and gender identity. Democratic parents were less homophobic; only 25% opposed lessons about the LGBTQ civil rights movement and 29% oppose lessons about sexual orientation and gender identity.
Conservative pundits have been saying that parents, generally, don’t want LGBTQ people mentioned in schools. But it looks like it may just be Republican parents who get upset with teachers who mention their same-sex spouses (but never their opposite-sex spouses).
Video taken at night caught footage of a “person of interest” allegedly vandalizing the Little Queer Library, a rainbow-colored roadside book box maintained by a female couple in Waltham, Massachusetts. The incident marks the fourth time that the library has been vandalized in the last three months.
The May 11 footage showed a person removing all of the library’s books and placing them into bags. After doing this for about 10 minutes, the person then walked away with the books, removing nearly $1,000 worth of materials, library curators Krysta Petrie and Katie Cohen told WCVB.
Cohen and her wife, Petrie, established the Little Queer Library during the pandemic. It offers informative LGBTQ books for children and young adult readers. The couple said they wanted the library to be a community resource for people who might feel fearful about checking out queer content from schools or local public libraries.
“We want to be a place where people are accepted and seen and celebrate who they are,” Cohen said. “[The recent vandalism] really feels a lot like censorship.”
Petrie added, “There’s really only a couple of reasons why [such vandalism] could happen: One is straight-up hate, LGBT hate. They just don’t want to see the community or something.”
Several major anti-LGBTQ politicians – including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) – won their primary elections in Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia yesterday and Texas’s run-off elections.
Greene – who tried to shut down the House of Representatives twice because it was debating a ban on anti-LGBTQ discrimination and who has a transphobic sign in front of her office – won her primary yesterday with 69% of the vote in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. 73% of her district voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 elections, so she has an advantage going into the general election.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) won his primary after being challenged by Trump-endorsed former Sen. David Perdue (R-GA). Kemp signed three anti-LGBTQ bills in April, which banned trans athletes from participating in school sports, allowed parents to challenge any material taught in school, and banned “offensive” books from school libraries, which has been understood to include books with LGBTQ content.
Also in Georgia, former NFL player Herschel Walker won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate and will face Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) in the general election.
“Don’t call- Don’t put that ghetto g-word on me,” he said in a Twitch stream in January. “I just like masculine men. I’m not a— I don’t wanna be lumped in with the rainbow people.”
In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey (R) won her primary yesterday with 54% of the votes counted so far. Ivey signed a law earlier this month that would throw doctors in jail for providing gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth and young adults, but a federal court stopped the state from implementing it.
“I thank you with all my soul,” Ivey said on Tuesday night. “I am so proud to be your governor.”
In Texas, the incumbent Paxton won his run-off election for state attorney general against George P. Bush. While Paxton got the most votes in Texas’s primary in March, he didn’t get a majority of the vote and had to face Bush in a run-off yesterday.
Bush said that he challenged Paxton because he wanted to advance “good government.”
“This campaign is about good government – making sure we don’t have indicted felons serving at the top of the chain of command of our law enforcement officials here in Texas,” he said on Texas Public Radio.
Earlier this year, Paxton published a non-binding opinion that allowing transgender youth to transition violates their constitutional right to reproduce, a right that is not mentioned in the Constitution. His opinion was so full of medical errors related to transgender people that Yale medical and legal researchers published a report about it and said it was “not grounded in reputable science and are full of errors of omission and inclusion.”
“These errors, taken together, thoroughly discredit the AG opinion’s claim that standard medical care for transgender children and adolescents constitutes child abuse,” the Yale researchers wrote.
Trump-era White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders won the Republican primary for Arkansas governor, winning a campaign where she avoided talking about state issues and instead focused on national Republican talking points.
Sanders attacked LGBTQ equality repeatedly when she was at the White House, including saying that “religious liberty” requires allowing “a baker to put a sign in his window saying we don’t bake cakes for gay weddings” and saying that allowing transgender people to serve openly in the military is “a very expensive and disruptive policy,” even though experts did not agree with that statement.
Chris DeSett said the first time he started to feel comfortable with his sexuality was the first night he moved into a dorm at American University in Washington, D.C.
DeSett, 28, moved there ahead of his freshman year in August 2012, from his childhood home near Kansas City, Missouri. He chose the school for its international studies program but also because he wanted to get out of the Midwest to figure out who he was away from his family.
After he moved into his dorm, and everyone’s parents had left, he said other students started banging on doors to gather people to hang out together.
“So we’re all rushing down to this meeting area, and we’re talking and we’re playing ‘Never Have I Ever’ and stuff like that,” he said. “It felt very welcoming and felt very affirming, and I kind of dipped my toe in the water and just said, ‘Oh, I think I might be bisexual.’ I didn’t feel that way, but I was just testing the waters for a reaction. And everyone’s like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s so great.’”
After the first semester of his freshman year, he came out as gay. He said that moment on the first night in the dorms had a lasting impact on him.
“The reason why that’s so important to me was I wasn’t met with rejection,” said DeSett, who now works for the federal government. “That affirming environment did give me the confidence to really explore my identity and then land on the conclusion that, ‘No, I am a gay man, and I’m confident that I know that for a fact. I know that I’ll be loved for who I am.’”
New research from the Williams Institute, a think tank at the UCLA School of Law, revealed that LGBTQ people who attended college or graduate school were four times more likely, at 21.5 percent, to report having chosen a university in a different city or state to seek a more welcoming climate than non-LGBTQ people, at 4.8 percent. Nearly one-third, or 32.6 percent, of LGBTQ people reported picking a college elsewhere to get away from their family, compared to 14.1 percent of non-LGBTQ people.
DeSett said he chose a school in Washington, D.C., because he “wanted an experience where I had room to grow and be myself without having to worry about someone calling my parents” and outing him before he was ready.
The Williams Institute found the majority of LGBTQ people surveyed, at 71.9 percent, said they experienced a sense of belonging at their college. That number is slightly lower than non-LGBTQ people, at 83.5 percent.
But, researchers noted, despite some LGBTQ people’s efforts to find more welcoming environments, more of them reported facing bullying, harassment, assault and mental health issues than their non-LGBTQ counterparts. Nearly one-third (32.6 percent) of LGBTQ people who attended a four-year college or graduate school said they experienced bullying, harassment or assault, compared to 18.9 percent of non-LGBTQ people. More than one-third (35.3 percent) reported that their mental health was not good for all or most of the time they were in college, compared to 10.8 percent of non-LGBTQ people.
Majorities of LGBTQ people in four-year colleges (60.4 percent) and graduate school (56.3 percent) also said they were not out as LGBTQ to any faculty or staff.
Adon Cooper said he thought he would feel comfortable being out when he started undergrad in 2004 at the State University of New York at Purchase, a public liberal arts college about a half-hour north of his home in the Bronx borough of New York City.
“Literally, the first time walking on campus, I was greeted by a bunch of drag queens, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be really cool,’ but I realized that I wasn’t really ready to have those kinds of conversations,” Cooper, 35, said.
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Even though he wasn’t ready to be out, he said he faced peer pressure and verbal abuse from people who tried to force him to come out.
But he said college was still where he found his “footing,” and he started to feel more comfortable with the idea of coming out. One day, his first roommate in college, who was a dancer, went into the bathroom “as his normal self and came out fully in drag,” Cooper recalled.
The two talked about drag and watched “Paris Is Burning,” a 1990 documentary about New York City’s ball scene, a subculture created by LGBTQ people of color where members of different “houses” dress up and compete in elaborate balls. He said they are still friends.
“He started to really educate me on what a queer lifestyle can look like, and it made me feel like maybe if and when I’m ready, I’ll at least have someone I feel comfortable enough to have this conversation with,” he said.
The report found that transgender and gender-nonconforming students face additional issues, including their colleges or universities lacking policies to support them. Resources for transgender students were less commonly reported by participants than general LGBTQ resources. One in four LGBTQ respondents reported that their school had a policy of allowing transgender students to change their gender markers on their school records, and more than half (59.8 percent) were unaware of such policies.
Less than half (44 percent) of LGBTQ respondents reported the presence of at least one gender-neutral bathroom, and less than one-third (29.3 percent) reported that their college had gender-inclusive housing, defined as housing that isn’t segregated into men’s and women’s spaces and welcomes students who identify outside of the gender binary.
JJ Nichols, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, attended Samford University, a private Christian school outside of Birmingham, Alabama, starting in 2013. They said they didn’t come out until two years after they graduated, but, looking back, they said if they had asked to use gender-neutral pronouns at school, it “would be met with a lot of pushback.”
“It’s still inside Birmingham, which is the major city, so the homophobia was low-lying,” they said. “It was like more of that, ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin.’”
The Williams Institute researchers concluded that their findings show “the need to improve conditions for LGBTQ students, a sizable and heterogeneous minority population.” They recommended that colleges include sexual orientation and gender identity in nondiscrimination policies that protect LGBTQ students, faculty and staff; include LGBTQ content in diversity training for staff; and start a campus climate survey to identify emerging issues, among other suggestions to make campuses safer for LGBTQ students.
Nichols said that, despite the climate at their school, they remember meeting a professor in the school of music who helped them feel a little more comfortable with their identity. The teacher was pregnant, and she made a comment that if she had a son who was gay, it wouldn’t be a problem.
“It was just the note — the knowledge that somebody was OK,” they said.
Because of the disciplinary infractions he received for leading the protests at Flagler Palm Coast High School in March, school administrators are preventing him for running for the elected student body office, Jack Petocz said in a letter posted on Twitter on Tuesday. The school is located about 30 miles (48 kilometers) north of Daytona Beach.
“I am continuing to be punished for standing up for my identity and against widespread hatred,” Petocz wrote. “We shouldn’t be subject to abuse both in Tallahassee and at-home.”
In an email, school district spokesman Jason Wheeler said Flagler Schools was not permitted to speak about individual students’ disciplinary records. Requirements for individual on-campus clubs or organizations are set by the schools or clubs themselves, he said.
“The district has no say in setting those requirements or in how those requirements are enforced,” Wheeler said.
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Petocz is being honored next week with an award at the 2022 PEN America Literary Gala for organizing students to protest the Florida legislation and fighting book bans. PEN America is a New York-based nonprofit that advocates for free speech and is made up of novelists, journalists and other writers.
“Jack Petocz is leading his generation in fighting back against book bans and legislative efforts to police how individual identities can be discussed in schools,” PEN America said in a news release announcing that the Florida student would be receiving an award.
The Florida legislation, signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in March, bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade.
More than 500 Flagler Palm Coast High School students walked out in protest of the legislation in early March, as well as thousands of other students around Florida. Petocz says he defied school officials’ orders not to distribute 300 rainbow pride flags he had purchased for the protest. He was suspended for four days afterward, he said.
A draft policy is circulating among top officials of the U.S. Army that would allow soldiers to be able to request a transfer if they feel state or local laws discriminate against them based on gender, sex, religion, race or pregnancy.
Steve Beynon writing for Military.com reported last week the guidance, which would update a vague service policy to add specific language on discrimination, is far from final and would need approval from Army Secretary Christine Wormuth. But if enacted, it could be one of the most progressive policies for the Army amid a growing wave of local anti-LGBTQ and restrictive contraception laws in conservative-leaning states, where the Army has a majority of its bases and major commands.
“Some states are becoming untenable to live in; there’s a rise in hate crimes and rise in LGBT discrimination,” Lindsay Church, executive director of Minority Veterans of America, an advocacy group, told Military.com. “In order to serve this country, people need to be able to do their job and know their families are safe. All of these states get billions for bases but barely tolerate a lot of the service members.”
This policy tweak to the existing Army regulations pertaining to compassionate reassignment would clarify the current standard rules, which are oft times fairly vague.
A source in the Army told Beynon the new guidance has not yet been fully worked out through the policy planning process or briefed to senior leaders including the Army secretary or the office of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
“The Army does not comment on leaked, draft documents,” Angel Tomko, a service spokesperson, told Military.com in an emailed statement. “AR 600-100 and 600-200 establish the criteria for which soldiers may request for a compassionate reassignment. The chain of command is responsible for ensuring soldiers and families’ needs are supported and maintain a high quality of life.”
The Crystal City-based RAND Corporation had published a study on sexual orientation, gender identity and health among active duty servicemembers in 2015 that listed approximate six percent of LGBTQ troops are gay or bisexual and one percent are trans or nonbinary.
A senior analyst for RAND told the Washington Blade on background those numbers are likely much lower than in actuality as 2015 was less than four years after the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and prior to when the Trump administration enacted the trans servicemember ban in 2017, which has had a chilling effect on open service.
The Biden administration repealed the Trump ban.
Another factor is that the current 18-24 year old troops colloquially referred to as “Gen Z” are much more inclined to embrace an LGBTQ identity and that would cause the numbers to be higher than reported.
Also factored in is uncertainty in the tweaking of policy in light of the recent leak of the draft U.S. Supreme Court decision that would effectively repeal Roe v. Wade.
According to Military.com it’s unclear whether the Army’s inclusion of pregnancy on the list would protect reproductive care for soldiers if Roe v. Wade is overturned. That language could be intended to protect pregnant service members or their families from employment or other discrimination, but could also be a means for some to argue for transfers based on broader reproductive rights.
One advocacy group pointed out that the current wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation will negatively impact the moral of service members:
“What we’re seeing across the board is a small group of elected officials who are trying to politicize and weaponize LGBTQ identities in despicable ways. They’re not only doing that to our youth, but the collateral damage is hurting our service members,” Jacob Thomas, communications director for Common Defense, a progressive advocacy organization, told Military.com. “[Troops] can’t be forced to live in places where they aren’t seen as fully human.”