LGBTQ+

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In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s reelection, advocates for transgender people in Illinois are scrambling to strengthen the state protections they’ve created, while some trans Midwesterners consider moving to states with shield laws for safe harbor.

State Rep. Kelly Cassidy told the Sun-Times there has been a coalition effort of state lawmakers to protect trans and reproductive health care access since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked in 2022.

Now, they’re looking closely at Project 2025 — a conservative policy playbook created by the Heritage Foundation — and Trump policy proposals and “evaluating what further protections we can enact in the coming months,” a spokesperson for Gov. JB Pritzker said.

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Protections for reproductive rights and gender-affirming care were enshrined in state law in January 2023, putting Illinois on the side of people who risk prosecution by traveling to the state for treatment and also protecting the licenses of Illinois doctors who provide care that’s illegal elsewhere. The Illinois Human Rights Act also protects against discrimination based on gender identity.

Home to just 4,500 people and set in a scenic, rural valley, this quaint market town has blossomed into a bastion of tolerance.

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Back in the 1970s, artists and activists were drawn here by cheap housing after the cotton mills shut down. "One historical and cultural factor [that helped establish a burgeoning lesbian community] may have been the separatist wing of 1960s and 1970s feminism," said Dr Andrew Moor, who teaches film studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. "There was an element which allied itself with alternative hippy culture's experiments in alternative living, communes and a resistance to full-throttle capitalism. Hebden was the right size and in the right place."

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A trans nonbinary Louisiana candidate for the U.S. House released a defiant campaign video this week, showing themself injecting testosterone to defend bodily autonomy.

Mel Manuel, who is running to unseat far-right House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, released the video on social media platforms on Tuesday. In the video, Manuel called on voters to “take a stand” while performing a routine testosterone injection.

A non-profit organization providing mental health and legal support services to LGBTQ+ people in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg announced Monday that it would shut down after coming under “anti-queer pressure.”

The organization, called Lupta, was created in April 2023 as a support center for people facing discrimination over their sexual identity after its predecessor, the LGBT Resource Center, was designated a “foreign agent.” Lupta organized lectures and provided individual consultations to LGBTQ+ Russians.

Lupta’s closure comes almost a year after the Russian Supreme Court banned the so-called “international LGBT movement” as “extremist,” effectively criminalizing any form of LGBTQ+ rights advocacy in the country.

“The last two years in Russia have been devastating for the queer community. It also affected us,” the organization said.

The United Kingdom has been getting worse on trans rights. Not only are the media and political parties capitulating to a handful of influential TERFs, but public policy increasingly reflects this.

Earlier this year, the country banned puberty blockers entirely. This is on top of multi-year waitlists from the National Health Service that jeopardize the lives of trans people in need of healthcare, which have been alleged to have caused an uptick in youth and adult suicides.

Enter Trans Kids Deserve Better. They’re a UK-based activist group that consists primarily of transgender youth aged 18 and below. They’ve quickly made a name for themselves after forming earlier this year with headlines from actions like climbing the National Health Service headquarters and occupying the Department of Education.

Most recently, they infiltrated anti-transgender hate group LGB Alliance’s conference and released over 6,000 crickets in the middle of a talk held by the most boring fake whistleblower, Jamie Reed.

Assigned Media had the privilege of sitting down with one of the activists in the group, who asked to go by Crash (He/They).

A recent report by the Musician’s Census reveals that 51% of women in the music industry have faced gender discrimination. 37% of LGBTQ+ musicians faced discrimination for their sexuality and over half of trans respondents, have faced discrimination for their gender identity. In an industry characterised by competition and sales, and dominated by those who know a guy that knows a guy, The Name Game provides a place of solace. A space to build community and allyships whilst building connections and getting vital resources and bits of information.

As well as barriers faced because of gender and sexuality, there are further hurdles those attempting to break into the [UK music industry feel they must navigate. There exists, Daisy tells me, an "outdated notion that you have to live in London to work in music,” explaining her plans to expand into other regions and hold in-person events in new locations.

I’m Phil, a queer refugee from Uganda, now in Gorom Camp, South Sudan. We face violence, starvation, and disease without basic needs like food, clean water, or medicine. Please help us survive: GoFundMe: ‼️⬇️
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@LGBTQNation @lgbtq_plus@beehaw.org @lgbtq_plus@lemmy.blahaj.zone @commissionerHR #gofundme #lgbtqia #gay #lesbian #queer #refugees #donate #support #vote #usa #politics #advocacy #refugees #news #bbc #cnn #humanrights #kamala #peace

Over the course of a year [for their book-length nonfiction project American Teenager], Lang embedded themself in the lives of eight trans kids and their families for two weeks at a time, trekking from California to West Virginia and nearly everywhere in between, condensing each visit into a chapter. The result is an incredibly intimate, varied look into the lives of American trans youth, from their worries about not being able to get top surgery before prom to the joys of finding home in a queer summer camp to the bittersweet feeling of leaving one’s home state to pursue futures that would otherwise be impossible.

Herein lies the fascinating paradox: Utah’s queerness isn’t merely about its LGBTQI+ population. Rather, it embodies a deeper, more fundamental queerness rooted in the very fabric of the state’s history, particularly its origins in Mormonism. From its early days of polygamy and unique religious practices, Mormonism has always defied conventional norms. Despite many Utahns’ usually conservative stance towards LGBTQI+ matters, an intrinsic oddity permeates Utah’s culture, creating an environment where queerness, in the broadest sense, can thrive while simultaneously being suppressed or disavowed.

The summary and the entire WSJ article can be read here.

The government of Russian President Vladimir Putin, African politicians and activists from the American religious right have been working side by side to push for anti-homosexuality laws in Africa, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Highlights of the Wall Street Journal article of Sept. 22 include:

• On Jan. 25, 2023, Vladlen Semivolos, the Russian ambassador to Uganda, met Speaker of Parliament Anita Among in her office and urged her to push for quick approval of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which provides the death penalty for repeated consensual same-sex intimacy.
• In March 2023, Russia supplied $300,000 to Uganda to host lawmakers from across Africa for a conference on how to resist Western pressure on issues like gay and reproductive rights.
• On March 20, when Uganda’s parliament voted on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, around a dozen Ugandan lawmakers joined the vote remotely from Moscow, where they were attending a conference of Russian and other African parliamentarians dubbed “Russia-Africa in a Multipolar World.”
• The Russian ambassador denies making that $300,000 transfer or pushing for passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
• An email announcing the $300,000 payment went to Sharon Slater, president of the anti-LGBTQ American advocacy group Family Watch International, one of the organizers of the Ugandan conference.
• Slater says she and Family Watch weren’t aware of any Russian funding for the conference and never had any involvement with the Russian government on any African issues.
• She spokes at a 2014 conference in Moscow that was organized by the anti-gay World Congress of Families.
• In her speech at the Uganda conference, Slater claimed that the U.N. and international aid groups are “after the children” and that they promote sex education that will “capture their hearts and minds to recruit them to their cause.”
• Slater says Family Watch has never supported anti-LGBTQ legislation in African countries and wasn’t “responsible for the treatment of homosexuals under African laws.”
• Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni says that Slater convinced him to remove a section of the bill that would have made it a crime simply to identify as LGBTQ.
• Attendees at the Ugandan conference included anti-gay legislators from Ghana who proposed the harsh anti-LGBTQ bill that Ghana’s parliament passed in February 2024 and that is currently awaiting action from the President and Supreme Court.

Knowing what or what not to do, and when, involves—as always, in journalism—judgment calls. “You end up in situations like, Can I as a nonbinary trans person report on the laws that are trying to make my existence illegal? Is that bias? Well, it is,” O’Connell said. “I’m biased against those laws. I don’t want to be driven out of Austin by the state government. So can I report on those things? I think I should report on those things. But certainly, some publications would have made the argument that I am too biased to report on them.” The stories O’Connell is most drawn to—local news that bobs between the giant, cresting waves of national headlines about marginalized people—have been arising with greater intensity, these days. In life, in work, in Austin, O’Connell is submerged.

‘Family values’ bill is adopted despite being denounced by the president, rights groups and the European Union.

Kesaria Abramidze, a trans model, was murdered the day after the bill passed. Even if the president vetos it, this law already has a body count.

I’m a proud bisexual and I adore our queer culture, so why do I still doubt that I’m allowed to take up this space?

I remember the day I came out to my mum. Standing at the end of her bed one grey and drizzly evening, I used a sudden surge of confidence to tell her that I am bisexual. Initially, she didn’t understand. How could I like more than one gender if at that time I had a boyfriend? I did my best to answer her questions, and fortunately, she accepted me.

But I was still grappling with self-doubt, compounded by casual, maybe even unconscious, bi-erasure from those around me. My friends would joke that the worst thing I could do was end up with a man – I’d be betraying myself, and my attraction to men surely couldn’t be real.

I laughed too, as a bead of sweat rolled down my face. I was an imposter. I wasn’t queer enough. Quick! Someone play Chappell Roan and cleanse me of my sins! Should I overcompensate and date a woman immediately? The pressure to prove myself at times felt overwhelming. I didn’t feel good enough for my own community.