Top Stories

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Teachers are being told to dismantle their classroom libraries

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Teachers at a school district in Florida have been instructed to “cover or store” books in their classroom libraries pending reviews. In an internal training video, Duval County Public Schools superintendent Diana Greene announced the launch of a formal review of classroom libraries, which generally consist of books either donated or purchased by teachers themselves, to ensure that they are in compliance with Florida legislation passed last summer. Florida’s House Bill 1467 passed last July and requires books made available through school libraries and classroom libraries to be selected by a certified media specialist. Under the new law, books must […]

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Florida students may be forced to prove they can menstruate before playing sports

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Student athletes in Florida could be forced to turn in information about their menstrual history after an athletics association’s medical panel doubled down on its recommendation.  The Florida High School Athletics Association’s (FHSAA) sports medicine advisory committee has stood by its recommendation to require high school athletes to submit information about their periods for each year they register to participate.  The move comes after a suggestion that the association’s board adopt a national sports registration form – which makes menstrual information mandatory.  Questions listed on the form include asking if players have had a period, when they first got their period, the date […]

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Trans woman legally used a women’s locker room. Now she’s been charged with indecent exposure

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A trans woman in Xenia, Ohio, is facing three counts of public indecency for using her local women’s YMCA changing room, despite having permission to do so and breaking no laws. Rachel Glines, 31, will attend court on 6 February after charges were brought against her following complaints filed by YMCA members on several occasions in 2021 and 2022.  Local TV station WHIO-7 reported that the charges stem from three or more complaints made by YMCA users who “reported seeing a naked male in the female’s locker room”. Glines is yet to have gender-affirming surgery.  Included is a complaint filed in November, when a mother-of-two […]

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Flipping the Script on Stories of Black Trans Women

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It can often feel like joy and optimism went on sabbatical around 2015 and have yet to reappear. Counter that despair with the Black Trans Femmes in the Arts, a young organization building community and mobilizing resources for underrepresented artists. Since its founding in 2019 by Jordyn Jay, the grassroots organization has raised over a million dollars to support Black trans artists. Members of the collective have appeared on HBO Max’s Legendary, staged exhibitions at Los Angeles’s Armand Hammer Museum, and performed on Broadway. Jay says their organization is necessary because disparities of funding and safe spaces, and the general inaccessibility of […]

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Congolese rebel group displaces transgender people

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M23 rebels in Congo’s North Kivu province have displaced a number of transgender people and left them even more vulnerable to persecution. M23 rebels last November approached Goma, the province’s capital city, and forced around 180,000 people to leave their homes. Jérémie Safari, coordinator of Rainbow Sunrise Mapambazuko, a Congolese LGBTQ and intersex rights group, told the Washington Blade that residents of the Kibumba camp where displaced people have settled have refused to assist trans people and have accused them of being sorcerers. “Trans people went (through) war like everyone else,” said Safari. “In the Kibumba camp where the displaced […]

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Trans boy removed from classroom after months of pressure from anti-LGBTQ+ parents

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A trans boy has been forcibly removed from an Israeli school following months of disgusting anti-trans pressure by parents. The country’s Education Ministry announced on Tuesday (24 January) the student was to be removed from a religious school in central Israel midway through the academic year. The parents of the child told Israel’s public broadcaster they planned to appeal the decision and that it was a punishment for “who he is”. Controversy arose in September 2022 after the trans boy was forcibly outed to the community without his consent. Rather than treating the public outing of a child with respect, parents instead […]

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Dot com bust 2.0 is decimating queer tech industry workers

Last week, Microsoft announced that the company plans to axe 10,000 workers, amounting to approximately 5% of its staff. This mass layoff follows a current pattern of instability within the tech sector that includes the collapse of the cryptocurrency company FTX and Elon Musk’s cataclysmic overhaul of Twitter following his acquisition of the social media monolith in October.  This “dot com bust 2.0,” as some financial analysts refer to it, reflects a downward spiral in the US tech industry, which hemorrhaged $7.4 trillion in 2021. While this negative trend affects workers on multiple levels, from corporate recruiters to software engineers, […]

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Megachurch forces all members to sign statement opposing LGBTQ+ rights

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First Baptist Church — a megachurch in Jacksonville, Florida — is forcing its members to sign a “Biblical Sexuality Agreement,” an anti-LGBTQ+ statement that denies the existence of trans people, opposes same-sex marriage, and calls same-sex intercourse ungodly. The statement reads:  “As a member of First Baptist Church, I believe that God creates people in his image as either male or female, and that this creation is a fixed matter of human biology, not individual choice. I believe marriage is instituted by God, not government, is between one man and one woman, and is the only context for sexual desire […]

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Trump vows to ‘stop’ gender-affirming care for minors if re-elected president

Former President Donald Trump vowed in a video released Tuesday that, if re-elected, he would punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors and push schools to “promote positive education about the nuclear family” and “the roles of mothers and fathers” as part of a wide-ranging set of policies to use federal power to target transgender people. In the straight-to-camera video posted on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he would task several federal agencies to police and ultimately “stop” gender-affirming care for minors, which he equated to “child abuse” and “child sexual mutilation.” He said he would also prohibit any federal […]

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Mondaire Jones knows the best defense queer people have is the ballot

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In the last three decades, some of the most egregious attacks on equality — the Defense of Marriage Act, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, not to mention the infamous 1950 “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government” report — came from Congress. Some of the most significant advances – passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009 and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in 2010 – also came from Congress. And while the Supreme Court found in 2015 that some federal jobs protections against discrimination based on sex also protect […]

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