Though public support for pro-LGBTQ policies is at an all-time high, many queer people living in the South report that a caregiver tried to change their LGBTQ identity, a new survey found.
More than half, or about 58%, of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people living in 13 Southern states reported that a parent or caregiver tried to change or repress their sexual orientation or gender identity, according to a survey published this week by the Campaign for Southern Equality, which promotes LGBTQ equality across the South.
Some groups were more likely to report experiencing such efforts: More than two-thirds of transgender participants (68.7%) and participants of color (67.5%) reported experiencing these efforts, compared to 50.8% of cisgender participants and 57.4% of white participants. Younger LGBTQ Southerners, those ages 18-24, were also more likely to report that a caregiver tried to change or repress their identity (64.4%) compared to those 25 and older (51.1%).
The Campaign for Southern Equality partnered with Campus Pride, which advocates for LGBTQ inclusivity and safety at U.S. colleges and universities, to survey 4,146 LGBTQ Southerners in the fall of 2021. The new survey’s questions covered family, faith, education and health.
Austin H. Johnson, the director of the Campaign for Southern Equality’s Research & Policy Center and an assistant professor of sociology at Kenyon College, said in a statement that the dominant narrative emerging from the survey data “is that thousands of individuals throughout the South are not getting the social support they need and deserve at home, in schools, and in their communities.”
“This lack of support and inclusion is disempowering and may cause detrimental harm to their mental and physical wellbeing, especially when that lack of support gets compounded with clear, state-sponsored discrimination such as the passage of anti-LGBTQ laws,” he stated.
Among the other data, the survey found that more than two-thirds (68.82%) of respondents who identified as spiritual or religious reported that they were alienated or discouraged from participating in their faith community due to their LGBTQ identity.
More than one-third (33.9%) of all LGBTQ survey respondents reported experiencing efforts to repress or change their sexual orientation or gender identity in a religious setting, with participants ages 18-24 more likely to report such efforts (44.1%) compared to respondents 25 or older (30.7%).
The survey also asked LGBTQ Southerners about their physical and mental health. Most participants rated their physical health as fair (43.42%) or good (37.48%), though most also rated their mental health poor (28.7%) or fair (40.2%). More than half of LGBTQ Southerners surveyed (56%) reported experiencing suicidal ideation, and more than one in 10 (13.5%) reported attempting suicide at least once.
Shane L. Windmeyer, founder and executive director of Campus Pride, said in a statement that “it’s especially troubling that younger people are often perceiving and receiving less emotional, mental, and physical support and resources than older respondents.”
“Young LGBTQ+ people are being forced to conjure immense strength and resilience to combat marginalization and isolation — and it’s vital that we do everything we can, on every level of society, to support and affirm them for being who they are,” Windmeyer stated.
The survey recommends that educational institutions “take a proactive approach to inclusion” by having a clear mission statement against discrimination of LGBTQ students and by including queer students in school policies. It also recommends that schools create privacy policies that do not “out” LGBTQ students to their family or others without their knowledge and permission — a recommendation that contradicts guidance that some teachers say they have received due to new state laws.
“Considering both the findings of this report and the anti-LGBTQ sentiment among many school boards and decision makers across the South, it is clear that much of the harm experienced by younger LGBTQ individuals is in school,” the authors wrote in the report’s conclusion. “Regardless of the political and cultural attacks in the South, and the lack of protections from the institutions we rely on as Southerners, the LBGTQ community in the South is truly that — a community, one with an overwhelming amount of love, acceptance, joy, and beauty.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
For many gay and bisexual men, the sprawling and chaotic monkeypox outbreak has upended a summer that was supposed to be a well-earned opportunity — following the peak of the Covid crisis — to finally have some fun and revel with their gay brothers without the threat of viral infection hanging over them.
Soon after Memorial Day, however, these men, as well as transgender individuals and other queer people — GBTQ for short, because lesbians’ monkeypox risk is remote — were met head-on with harrowing reports about monkeypox’s often devastating and disfiguring effects on the body. Next came anger and frustration over what queer activists characterize as the Biden administration’s fumbling initial response to the outbreak.
Lost amid the frantic media and public health reports about monkeypox epidemiology, the delayed vaccine deliveries and the squabbling over how best to communicate about the virus are the millions of GBTQ people whose happiness, well-being and connection to one another have in many cases been considerably compromised by the mere threat of monkeypox infection.
Guillermo Rojas spent the summer in his native Mexico City because of the high rates of monkeypox in New York, where he now lives. Benjamin Ryan
“Life has sort of halted,” said Guillermo Rojas, 29, a Mexican citizen and public administration graduate student in New York City. “This was supposed to be the great summer that everything went back and opened.”
Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, a psychiatrist at the LGBTQ-health-focused Fenway Institute in Boston, said the outbreak has “been extremely distressing for community members and is also triggering in that it harkens back to the early days of the AIDS epidemic. It has a chilling effect on people’s sense of community, cohesion and belonging.”
Fortunately, there has been at most one U.S. monkeypox death in the U.S. — a potential case in a severely immunocompromised person in Texas is under investigation — even as the national case count has swelled to 19,465 diagnoses. And after a slow start, the federal government has now doled out approximately 800,000 vaccine vials, with a heady supply arriving in short order.
People lined up outside of Department of Health & Mental Hygiene clinic on June 23, 2022 in New York.Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Over 100 gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people responded to an NBC News online survey seeking to learn about how monkeypox has affected their lives. What this diverse cross-section of the community most had in common were missed opportunities. They wrote about sex they never had, dates they never went on and gatherings with friends they avoided.
All that avoidance, the respondents made evident, was enmeshed in a cat’s cradle of fear — of contagion, of pain and suffering, of lonely and potentially financially ruinous weeks of isolation at home should they contract the virus.
They spoke of a summer they had hoped would prove invincible but that for them has turned out to be anything but.
A decade of sexual liberation, interrupted
Over the past 10 years, the introduction of PrEP, the HIV prevention pill, and the emergence of landmark studies proving that successfully treating HIV blocks transmission of the virus have cultivated a resurgent sexual liberation among many GBTQ people. Long-standing anxieties about HIV have eased, and hookup apps have made meeting sexual partners as convenient as procuring takeout — hence the term “ordering in.” As a result, people like Rojas have felt free to explore and revel in sex in a way queer people haven’t since the AIDS epidemic brought to a crashing close the sexual freedoms gay men enjoyed during the 1970s.
Then, in 2020, a new viral plague kept all of society cooped up and longing for freedom.
“Post-Covid,” said Rojas, recalling how he experienced the free-spirited bacchanalia into which monkeypox arrived in New York City this spring, “everybody went crazy, and there were sex parties all over town.”
Monkeypox swiftly pushed the contemporary safer-sex playbook out the window. Queer people have been left scrambling for answers about how to protect themselves and have expressed bewilderment as they’ve struggled to process mixed messaging from public health leaders and journalists about what poses a substantial risk of infection.
Rojas was one of the first U.S. residents to receive the prized monkeypox vaccine, in late June. But even with the benefit of his first jab of the two-dose vaccine, he has still sharply curtailed what he had hoped would be a long-awaited libertine summer.
“I’ve stopped going to sex parties,” he said, given that public health authorities identified such gatherings of men as major monkeypox risk factors. “I also stopped having sex with people who live off their OnlyFans. I additionally stopped cruising at the gym, I did not continue to go to Fire Island, and I stopped attending orgies.”
Evidence suggests a recent tidal shift in sexual behaviors in responses to monkeypox. According to the American Men’s Internet Survey, which conducted an online poll in early August of 824 gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, 48% reported reducing their number of sexual partners because of the outbreak, while 50% reduced hook-ups and 49% reduced partners met on hookup apps or at sex venues.
“It’s just a small, temporary break until everybody gets the vaccine,” said Rojas, who remained so concerned about living in the nation’s monkeypox epicenter that he decamped to his family’s home in Mexico City for the summer.
Fighting over — and for — sexual freedom
Not everyone in the queer community has been on the same page regarding monkeypox precautions. Just as battles over mask mandates and school closures have turned neighbor against neighbor during the Covid pandemic, fierce internecine conflicts have arisen among GBTQ people this summer about the best ways to respond to and communicate about monkeypox.
Michael Weinstein, the president of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, dusted off his outspoken antipathy toward PrEP and published a scathing rebuke of the sexual liberties the HIV-prevention pill has facilitated in an op-ed titled “Monkeypox Reckoning” in the Los Angeles Blade on Monday. Notorious for an unapologetically strident, moralizing and fear-based approach to HIV-prevention communication, one that is far out of step with that of the vast majority of the public health community, Weinstein decried “a wholesale abandonment of safer sex promotion in favor of PrEP.”
“There has always been a sex radical group that has defined gay liberation as absolute sexual freedom,” Weinstein wrote, blaming monkeypox on those freedoms.
For another man named Michael, who like some people interviewed preferred to go only by his first name to shield his privacy, protecting himself against monkeypox by sacrificing the very sexual freedoms that Weinstein castigates has come, he said, at a great cost.
“I am not changing my behavior with an attitude of cheerful, take-one-for-the-team compliance,” said Michael, 42, who works in education in Philadelphia. “Instead, I find the situation fearful, miserable and diminishing. I am experiencing this outbreak as a serious setback to something that is very important to me, namely sexual freedom.
“Sex,” he continued, “isn’t just a frivolous pastime. For many of us, sex has serious meaning, sex is one of the things that makes life worth living.”
LaRon Nelson is an associate professor of nursing and public health at Yale University and a long-time researcher in the HIV field.Mara Lavitt
After more than two years of Covid restrictions, the arrival on U.S. shores of yet another major virus has also dealt a blow to the already strained mental health of many queer people, said LaRon Nelson, an associate professor of nursing and public health at Yale University.
“The fear of contracting monkeypox and the concern about access to the vaccine have led people to isolate or continue to isolate,” Nelson said. “That chronic exposure to this type of stress also comes at the expense of their psychological well-being.”
J.J. Ryan, a bisexual trans man assigned female at birth, spent the height of the Covid pandemic transitioning.
“I felt like I was just surviving before. I wasn’t really living,” Ryan, 34, said of his pre-transition life. “So I was really excited to get out and live my life — for this to finally be my ‘hot boy summer.’” Instead, he said, he has sadly “sharply reduced” his sexual exploration.
Fears of resurgent discrimination
With so many broken social, romantic, familial and sexual connections lying in pieces around them, many of the respondents to NBC News’ survey said they further dreaded that the monkeypox outbreak would fuel discrimination, hate and even violence toward LGBTQ people.
There is evidence — including a recent attack in Washington, D.C. — that such fears are beginning to manifest.
“My greatest worry in all of this is the turning of the clock back to less and less acceptance society-wise,” said Ryan, who is a Ph.D. student and a policy researcher at a nonprofit research organization in Washington.
John Pachankis is a psychologist at the Yale School of Public Health and a leading researcher of LGBTQ mental health.Michael Benabib
John Pachankis, a psychologist at the Yale School of Public Health, noted how for the past two decades, queer advocacy organizations have pushed “a narrative that gay people are just like everyone else” in a successful effort to secure many civil rights protections. He spoke to the conflict that members of this community now face when the particulars of gay sex lie at the heart of the monkeypox outbreak and, as during the AIDS crisis, have become fodder for intense public debate.
“In the context of the real threat of those rights’ being taken away,” Pachankis said, referring to the recent rising tide of anti-LGBTQ sentiment and policies in the U.S., “the last thing that you want to do is disconfirm that narrative — even if the picture is a little more nuanced, even if gay people do live distinct lives from straight people, even if they express their sexuality more creatively, some might say more authentically.”
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Brian Minalga works in the HIV field in Seattle.Courtesy Brian Minalga
Brian Minalga, 36, who is gender nonbinary and works in the HIV field in Seattle, said: “There’s this idea that there are good people with good behaviors having the good type of sex. It’s moralistic and puritanical.”
Recapitulating racial disparities
For queer people of color, the outbreak has brought an unwelcome recapitulation of the racial health disparities that have characterized both the HIV and the Covid epidemics in the U.S.
“We saw monkeypox start with more affluent white gay men, and then eventually it seeped into more diverse networks, and that includes men of color,” said Gregorio Millett, the director of public policy at amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and various state andlocal health departmentshavereported that monkeypox is indeed already disproportionately affecting Blacks and Latinos. And yet outsize shares of the vaccines have tended to go to whites — thanks, health advocates say, to structural factors that favor access to more privileged members of society.
Watching such patterns play out “is painful,” said Carlos E. Rodríguez-Díaz, an associate professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, “because it’s a reminder of the presence of systemic racism.”
Matthew Rose, 36, a health equity advocate in Washington, D.C., spoke to the myriad ways he and his Black gay peers have been dehumanized over time. He said he feared that monkeypox, the very name of which evokes a racist trope, will only worsen matters.
“For Black gay men, the last thing you need is to add a whole other discussion where you become this Black vector of disease,” he said.
Three viruses, one sense of fear
For some GBTQ people, fears of contagion instilled during the height of the Covid pandemic have primed further anxieties about monkeypox. The rueful history of the early AIDS epidemic serves as yet another backdrop.
“I decided several weeks ago that intimate contact isn’t worth the risk until I am fully vaccinated and the infection rate is under control,” said Steven Dwyer, 68, who is retired and based out of Baltimore and has been living with HIV since the mid-1980s. “As a long-term AIDS survivor, I learned it’s better to get informed about disease outbreaks that could affect me.”
The plight of Jason, a Los Angeles-area screenwriter in his late 20s, is a particularly profound example of the way crippling anxieties about infectious disease can be all-consuming. Jason has lived with obsessive compulsive disorder since childhood. It causes him intense dread of contagion and contamination, as well as various compulsions in response to such thoughts and stimuli. Fear of Covid left him largely housebound. Now the monkeypox outbreak has magnified those fears just as he was starting to feel more comfortable with venturing outside.
Jason lives with his boyfriend, and they’re monogamous, so contracting monkeypox sexually isn’t a concern. But suggestions that casual contact or contaminated surfaces can transmit monkeypox have left him reluctant to push his luck with his OCD. Consequently, for Jason, it’s as if those cloistered first few months of the Covid pandemic never ended.
“I am probably one of the only people I know that still doesn’t really go out much,” he said.
Many other GBTQ people said monkeypox has led them to question going to crowded spaces, such as concerts, bars and clubs — enjoyable outings and chances to connect with fellow queer people after having lived through the lonely and dull height of Covid.
Jason has been agonizing over whether to attend an upcoming concert of a performer he loves, something he has been looking forward to for years since it got delayed because of the pandemic. And in a recent interview, Dwyer, who travels constantly, expressed concern about contracting monkeypox from hotel linens.
Worries about monkeypox transmission even led to the cancellationof a major concert at the Southern Decadence celebration in New Orleans, which takes place over Labor Day weekend — even though it was to have been held outdoors.
Ryan said that when he visited his family in Philadelphia before he got his first monkeypox vaccination, his mother was hesitant to hug him for fear of the virus. That only aggravated his own worries about perhaps unknowingly passing monkeypox to his young niece and nephew.
Ben Rosen is a psychotherapist at the LGBTQ-focused Harlem United in New York.Brent Unkrich
Such hesitance from family members, said Ben Rosen, a psychotherapist at Harlem United in New York, parallels the cold shoulder many gay men got during the early AIDS crisis, “where people are being told, ‘Oh maybe you shouldn’tcome visit.’”
Recent research suggests, however, that anxieties about monkeypox transmission in public settings and other relatively casual scenarios are most likely misplaced or at least grossly overblown. According to researchpapers and reportsfrom globalhealth authorities, cases of nonsexual transmission are uncommon to rare.
Last week, Dwyer concluded that bed sheets don’t actually pose a substantial risk.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis was recently appointed as the White House national monkeypox response deputy coordinator.Benjamin Ryan
On an Aug. 19 call with reporters, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the deputy for the White House’s monkeypox response, said he believesattending crowded concerts is generally a low-risk activity. Merely brushing by someone, he said, is likely to be “low or no risk.”
Christopher Vasquez, 39, the director of communications at the National Center for Lesbian Rights in San Francisco, said: “I think we need to be very careful about overreacting and shutting down events. Especially after two-plus years of the LGBTQ community feeling the effects of loneliness and depression because of Covid.”
The great work begins
Praising the myriad ways queer activists have fought for a better response to monkeypox, including faster and broader access to vaccines, Keuroghlian of the Fenway Institute said, “The silver lining is to see the amazing ability of our community to organize with solidarity and to articulate their needs.”
There are signs such efforts are bearing fruit.
Recent reports suggest transmission slowdowns in New York, Chicago and San Francisco — likely the result, experts theorize, of changes in sexual behavior, increased vaccination and possibly immunity from past infection.
With the challenging summer coming to a close, Guillermo Rojas is freshly back in New York for the fall semester of his graduate studies at Columbia University. Sitting in Manhattan’s Lincoln Center on a humid late-summer afternoon just after a cloudburst, he expressed optimism over the future of the outbreak.
“As people start getting vaccinated and the second vaccine starts kicking in for most people, things should get back to normal,” he said.
He got his own second shot on Wednesday.
Editor’s note: NBC News would like to hear from people who have recovered from monkeypox infection. If you have, please fill out this confidential online survey, and we may contact you for an interview.
A 33-year-old Black trans woman was fatally shot in Detroit last week, becoming the second trans woman in a month to be murdered there.
On August 27, Dede Ricks was pronounced dead at the scene after police found her on the ground with gunshot wounds to her chest and back, The Detroit News reported.
Thirty-one-year-old Antoine Close has been arrested for killing Ricks and charged with second-degree murder and felony firearm possession. A motive has not been revealed.
“The fact that we have seen two homicides of transgender women in just three weeks shows the danger this community faces,” Alanna Maguire, president of LGBTQ advocacy organization Fair Michigan, said in a statement.
“Rather than being supported, we often hear people vilify the transgender community which fuels this kind of violence and hate. We are proud to work with Prosecutor Worthy’s office on these cases, and we hope to bring justice to the victims and their families.”
Wayne County, Michigan Prosecutor Kym Worthy emphasized that “while some protections for transgender citizens in Michigan are finally beginning to be recognized, their lives are still very much in danger.”
“We have seen this happen before and hope that this does not become a pattern,” she said.
The statement from the prosecutor’s office also inexplicably used Ricks’s deadname and then explained what a deadname is.
At the end of July, 28-year-old Hayden Davis, another Black trans woman, was also shot and killed in Detroit. Her killer has not been found, reports Fox2Detroit. Worthy said the cases do not seem to be connected.
In the United States, at least 27 trans people have been killed by violent means so far this year, according to the Human Rights Campaign. 2021 saw a record number of murders, with 50 trans and gender nonconforming people killed.
A group of “angel” defenders protected LGBTQ+ Brigham Young University students from protesters who targeted a Pride event.
Utah’s Brigham Young University (BYU) students were confronted by protesters on Saturday (3 September) during a scheduled “Back to School Pride Night” that included an all-ages drag show.
The hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ protesters reportedly screamed homophobic slurs and some had even brought handguns, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
But things took a turn after a group of counter-protesters appeared in white cloaks and wings made of sheets.
They formed a protective barrier around the group of rainbow-wearing students.
BYU student and “angel” Sabrina Wong told the Tribune: “I’m doing this because I want our LGBTQ community to feel like they can be themselves and know we have their backs.”
The religious university, which is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon church, disallows LGBTQ+ students from meeting on campus in organised groups.
It forbids same-sex dating on campus (despite removing the official policy in 2020), potentially violating several civil rights clauses according to Associated Press.
The group of protesters included former and current BYU students ,who described gender dysphoria as a “social contagion“. Others screamed various slurs at the group, including saying they were “going against God”.
“This shouldn’t be at a public park,” co-founder of the informal BYU conservative group Thomas Stevenson said.
The “Back to School Pride Night” was organised by the RaYnbow Collective, a local group focused on creating safe spaces for LGBTQ+ BYU students and staff.
It was a spin-off of the usual annual Pride event for new students of BYU, this time also featuring a family-friendly drag show that included BYU students as performers.
RaYnbow Collective’s founder Maddison Tenney was told by police to expect large anti-LGBTQ+ crowds ahead of the event.
“Religion has been weaponised against the queer community for a long time,” she said. “But that needs to end. I believe there’s nothing more divine than who I am as a queer child of God.”
Tenney initially thought of the angel costumes after seeing them being used by friends of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in 1999.
Shepard died six days after being beaten, tortured, and left hanging from a fence by two homophobic men, who were eventually sentenced to two consecutive life terms without parole.
The tactic was used to block signs by members of the Westboro Baptist Church that read “God hates f*gs” from public view using the wings as a cover. It has become a common tactic by pro-LGBTQ+ religious groups, including at the funerals for the victims of the Orlando LGBTQ+ nightclub shooting in 2016.
Today U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled in Braidwood Management v. Becerra against a provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires employers to provide insurance coverage for PrEP (Pre-exposure prophylaxis), a medication that prevents the transmission of HIV. The judge ruled that the ACA mandate violates employers’ rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Read the ruling in the case (courtesy of Chris Geidner)here.
Ivy Hill(they/them pronouns), Community Health Program Director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, said today:
“This ruling is about imposing extreme religious beliefs – not, as it purports, about protecting religious freedom: Far right extremist judges are attacking privacy and access to health care.”
“We must be increasing access to life-saving medications like PrEP, not using it as the latest political wedge to attack LGBTQ people in the South. Whether it’s access to abortion, trans-affirming care, birth control, or PrEP, we are seeing dangerous action from activist courts intervening in Americans’ healthcare decisions – and we must push back.”
PrEP is a daily pill used widely for HIV prevention by individuals who are HIV-negative but at high risk for exposure, including men who have sex with men, people who are in a sexual relationship with an HIV-positive partner, and people who have recently injected drugs. Daily PrEP use can reduce the risk of HIV infection from sex by more than 90%.
PrEP is an especially critical strategy for HIV prevention in the South, the epicenter of the modern HIV crisis in the United States. According to 2016- 2017 CDC data, one-half of all HIV diagnoses occur in the South, 47% of HIV related deaths happened in the South, and 46% of people living with HIV live in the South. In the Campaign for Southern Equality’s Report of the 2019 Southern LGBTQ Health Survey(direct link to HIV data), we found that respondents’ reported rates of living with HIV more than 15 times higher than the national rate, with 5% of respondents saying they are living with HIV and 10.4% saying that they don’t know their status.
Judge O’Connor has a long history of ruling against the Affordable Care Act, and a history of rulings that harm the LGBTQ community, including opinions that overreached on marriage rights for same-sex couples and a decision on anti-LGBTQ workplace discrimination that blatantly violated the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County.
This summer the Campaign for Southern Equality launched a new campaign, Meeting the Moment in the LGBTQ South to mobilize responses to growing anti-LGBTQ attacks, such as this ruling. Learn more about Meeting the Moment here.
A man has been arrested for the murder of a trans woman in India, after a piece of her body was found in his home.
Warning: this story contains graphic content.
Zoya Kinnar, a trans woman in the city of Indore, India, had been missing since Sunday (28 August), according to the IANS news service.
Parts of her mutilated body were discovered on Tuesday (29 August), and on Thursday (1 September), police said officers had arrested a man named Noor Mohammad for her murder.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) Sampat Upadhyay said that Mohammad had been questioned by police based after a part of Kinnar’s body was discovered at his house.
Upadhyay said that Mohammad had befriended Kinnar on social media in the hope of having a sexual relationship with her, and had invited her to his house.
But when he discovered that she was transgender, he got “furious and hit Zoya badly”, before strangling her to death.
He “cut Zoya’s body into pieces” before attempting to dispose of them in various locations. But before he could completely dispose of her body, he was identified by police based on CCTV evidence.
LGBTQ+ rights have advanced in India over the last decade, including the decriminalisation of gay sex in 2018, the 2014 Supreme Court decision in National Legal Services Authority v Union of India, which ruled that discrimination based on gender identity was unconstitutional and allowed trans folk to legally register as a “third gender”, and the banning of conversion therapy in 2021.
However, there is much further to go before LGBTQ+ people in India have true legal and social equality.
The country does not recognise same-sex marriage or joint adoption by same-sex parents, and LGBTQ+ people are not able to serve openly in the military.
Stigma relating to queer identities is widespread, with one 2018 studyshowing that a third of gay men in India are married to women, and a 2021 study revealing that one in five people believe that same-sex couples “should not be allowed to marry or obtain any kind of legal recognition”.
Tim Michels, the Republican candidate running for Wisconsin governor, donated $250,000 in 2020 to groups opposing abortion and all forms of contraception, and to anti-LGBTQ churches. The donations, made along with Michels’s wife Barbara through their foundation, The Timothy and Barbara Michels Family Foundation, represent 15 percent of the candidate’s total donations in 2020, according to a report by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Along with donations totaling $175,000 to radical anti-abortion organizations in Wisconsin and New York, the Michels gave $10,000 to Miami’s Christ Fellowship, whose parishioners include former Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio. Christ Fellowship’s pastor, Omar Giritli, delivered an anti-transgender sermon in May, in which he attacked Caitlyn Jenner and preached that God believes transgender people are an “abomination” and a “rebellion to their creator.” A 2015 Huffington Post report detailed the church’s consistent anti-LGBTQ message.
Spring Creek Church in Pewaukee, Wisconsin also received a $50,000 donation from the couple. The church’s pastor, Chip Bernhard, has reportedly suggested that allowing transgender children to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity is “awful.”
“While the media is desperate to find lines of attack, their generosity helps support causes they believe in and funds cancer research and other Christian causes,” Michels’s campaign spokesperson Anna Kelly told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Michels, meanwhile, has tried to downplay social issues on the campaign trail. “The people who feel the Democratic party has left them for social issues, you are now going to have a governor that’s going to stand up for the hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens of Wisconsin,” he said early last month after winning the Republican primary.
Michels is running to unseat incumbent Governor Tony Evers (D).
“Tim Michels will stop at nothing to push his radical agenda in order to limit the rights of LGBTQ Wisconsinites and those seeking an abortion,” Democratic Party spokesperson Hannah Menchhoff said. “If elected, Tim Michels will implement radical policies that are out of touch with the majority of Wisconsinites.”
Internet hosting and security services provider Cloudflare said Saturday that it would block Kiwi Farms, a website associated with harassment campaigns against transgender people.
The announcement puts the future of the fringe internet forum in doubt, though some of its members had already anticipated that Cloudflare could act and began to explore other options.
When attempting to visit Kiwi Farms’ website Saturday evening, an error message appeared that said: “Due to an imminent and emergency threat to human life, the content of this site is blocked from being accessed through Cloudflare’s infrastructure.”
The move comes after Cloudflare became the subject of a pressure campaign by a trans Twitch streamer who has been a target of abuse by Kiwi Farms users.
The streamer, Clara Sorrenti, known to fans as Keffals, responded Saturday in a tweet. “Cloudflare has dropped Kiwi Farms. Our campaign will put out a statement soon,” Sorrenti said.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s announced the move in a blog postand did not mention Sorrenti by name, but said that abuse from Kiwi Farms had intensified in response to her campaign.
“This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare’s role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with,” Cloudflare’s statement said.
“However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.”
On Friday, NBC News reported that Sorrenti is one of Kiwi Farms’ growing list of targets, and that its harassment techniques could become a playbook against political enemies as the 2024 U.S. presidential election nears.
Kiwi Farms owner Josh Moon did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday from NBC News. A post on the Kiwi Farms Telegram account said Cloudflare’s decision was “done without any discussion.”
“The message I’ve received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear,” the post stated. “If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement.”
Cloudflare is an internet services company that provides websites with a variety of crucial resources, most notably its content delivery network and mitigation of distributed denial of services campaigns, or DDoS, a common cyberattack that floods websites with fake internet traffic and renders them unusable.
Cloudflare’s central role as one of the main providers of these services has also made the company a flashpoint around extremists’ internet operations.
The company has generally been hesitant to take action against particular websites or internet operations, citing concerns that it holds immense power in terms of who is able to exist on the web, though it has before.
In 2017, Cloudflare said it would no longer provide services to the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi message board.
Prince also warned about Cloudflare’s role in knocking websites offline.
“Reasonable people can and do believe all those things. But having the mechanism of content control be vigilante hackers launching DDoS attacks subverts any rational concept of justice,” Prince wrote in a blog post, citing the inevitability of cyberattacks that would knock the Daily Stormer offline.
Kiwi Farms users had been anticipating the Cloudflare ban for weeks and had created contingency plans if the site went down, including alternate internet domains, along with accounts and communities on Telegram.
While the decade-old Kiwi Farms archive of personal information on political enemies will be considerably more difficult to access and add to, the site’s user base appears committed to continuing to track trans people online, according to posts made on Telegram about a potential site shutdown.
“They’re thinking about what comes next,” said Fredrick Brennan, who worked with Moon when they were both administrators at the fringe message board 8chan. “I watch them closely, and they’re already thinking about how to move everything to Telegram.”
Brennan has since denounced 8chan, which he created, and successfully advocated to get the page removed from Cloudflare in 2019.
Workers at a Hostess bakery in Chicago accused the snack dessert maker of firing a transgender employee for her gender identity and segregating LGBT employees onto a separate work line at the factory in the Galewood neighborhood on city’s west side at a Wednesday news conference.
Danyell Wallace, 43, said she was filing a charge with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after she was fired in June from the company, where she had worked since 2020.
Wallace, who is transgender and worked as a machine operator for Hostess, said she had been discriminated against by supervisors and was singled out for discipline and firing because of her gender identity.
“Supervisors insulted me to co-workers,” she said. “Other times, it took the form of gossip that was indulged by supervisors.”
Wallace said when she used a single-stall women’s restroom instead of the men’s common restroom for her safety, she became the subject of “stressful and humiliating” gossip at the bakery.
Wallace said she was told she was fired for returning late from breaks, though she said she had not received a warning from the company before her termination. She said she had been about five minutes late returning from breaks a few times and maintained the company’s reasoning was pretextual.
In a statement, Hostess said it had not received an EEOC filing and declined to comment.
Wallace said she had been discriminated against both as a Black worker and because of her gender identity. She alleged Black workers were segregated to the second shift at the bakery and that LGBT workers were moved to the second fryer line on that second shift, where they were singled out for discipline.
Dan Giloth, an organizer with the group Black Workers Matter, which hosted the news conference, said at least four LGBT workershad been fired at the bakery.Giloth said the group planned to file employment commission complaints on behalf of at least two additional workers within the next month.
Wallace’s employment commission charge alleges other similarly situated workers were also segregated and discriminated against at the factory. “There was a policy and practice of hostility toward workers in my area based on my gender identity and sexual orientation,” the complaint reads.
“I’m not doing this just for myself, but for other workers as well,” Wallace said Wednesday.
On Wednesday, former Hostess employee Garland Rose, 53, who is bisexual, said he was fired by Hostess in June and had since become homeless.
“It’s very unfair for anyone, whether you’re straight, gay or bisexual, to have to come to work and feel discriminated against and uncomfortable,” Rose said. “It’s just not right.”
Rose said the company told him he had been fired for taking doughnuts home without proper signoff from his supervisor. Rose said he did break the rules, but maintained it’s common for employees to take doughnuts home and said he was singled out because of his sexual orientation.
Giloth said Black Workers Matter had sent a letter to Hostess leadership in July and had first attempted to mediate Wallace’s firing without taking legal steps. Wallace filed an internal grievance with the company but her termination was upheld, she said.
Wallace said she had also reached out to the union that represents workers at the factory, Local 30 of the Chemical and Production Workers’ Union, but never had a union representative at any disciplinary meetings.
Local 30 did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday afternoon.
At Wednesday’s news conference, Audrey Harding, legislative director for Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, read a statement on his behalf and said the commissioner supported Wallace’s employment commission complaint.
“For far too long, Black employees at this plant have suffered racist abuse, firings and retaliation for speaking out and demanding basic fairness and humanity from their bosses,” Harding said. “That must stop.”
Hostess Brands bought the Galewood bakery from Swiss-based Aryzta for about $25 million in 2018.
That year, a federal lawsuit filed against Arytza and two staffing agencies, Labor Network and Metro Staffing Service, alleged Arytza had conspired with the staffing agencies to weed out Black workers seeking employment.
The plaintiff, Anthony Stewart, later agreed to drop the suit with prejudice against the companies; court documents show he reached a settlement with Arytza in 2019. The case had sought class-action status but never reached the class certification stage.
“This plant has had a long, troubled history of discrimination,” said Stewart, who spoke at Wednesday’s news conference.
The number of new monkeypox cases in the United States has fallen by 40% since early August — a signal that the country’s outbreak could be abating.
According to an NBC News analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the seven-day average of new reported cases decreased from a daily average of 465 on Aug. 10, to 281 on Aug. 31.
The overall drop in cases is largely driven by falling case counts in big cities including New York City and Los Angeles.
Much of that decrease, experts say, may be attributed to conscious changes in behavior among people most at risk for monkeypox — men who have sex with men and others in their sexual networks.
Dr. Jay Varma, director of the Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, cited research from the CDC that found a 50% drop in risky hookups. According to the New York City Department of Health, cases fell consistently throughout the month of August.
Men who have sex with men “take their health seriously,” Varma said. “This is born of experience with the HIV epidemic and intensive activism.”
The rollout of vaccines may have also played a role in the decline. As of Aug. 30, 352,675 doses of monkeypox vaccine had been administered in areas of the country that report such data.
Cases are also falling in European countries, including Germany and the Netherlands, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday in a briefing.
With the right public health messaging, vaccines and treatments, it’s possible, he said, that the virus can be eliminated, at least in Europe.
“This is an outbreak that can be stopped,” he said.
While the drop in cases in the U.S. is promising, the national numbers are “only one measure” of what’s truly happening with the outbreak, said Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, a professor of health policy and management at the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health.
“What we really want to know is the geographic spread of the virus,” Lee said.
While cases are falling in big cities, including Los Angeles, Miami and New York, other parts are the country are still seeing an increase, said Dr. Kristin Englund, an infectious diseases expert at the Cleveland Clinic.
“For those of us in smaller city areas,” she said, “we’re actually still seeing a pretty robust number of patients presenting with monkeypox.”
Englund noted that big cities have had very successful vaccination campaigns, while she and her colleagues have had to limit monkeypox vaccine doses to those who are at highest risk for either infection or the most severe outcomes.
“We need a lot more” vaccines, Englund said, to mirror the declines seen in other cities.
Public health officials are continuing with vaccination efforts across the country, with the White House announcing Tuesday additional steps to offer testing and vaccinations at large LGBTQ events.
“We are expecting tens of thousands of people in New Orleans over this Labor Day weekend,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said during a briefing this week.
Edwards said the federal government has sent public health teams to New Orleans to help set up monkeypox testing and vaccination sites ahead of the annual celebration.
Despite the efforts to curb monkeypox spread, some public health officials are concerned that the virus will settle into vulnerable areas, such as communities of color, that historically have barriers to appropriate medical care.
It’s those vulnerable populations, Varma said, that could continue to drive the epidemic.
“I would love to see a continued sustained decline in monkeypox cases,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s what’s likely to happen.”
