Tag: Trans

The first courageous annual Palapye Pride in Botswana

Read more at The Washington Blade.

“When the sun rose on 1 Nov., 2025, Pride morning in Palapye, the open space where the march was scheduled to begin was empty. I stood there trying to look calm, but inside, my chest felt tight. I was worried that no one would come. It was the first-ever Pride in Palapye, a semi-urban village where cultural norms, religious beliefs, and tradition are deeply woven into everyday life.

I kept asking myself if we were being naive. Maybe people weren’t ready. Perhaps fear was going to win. For the first 30 minutes, it was me, a couple of religious leaders and a handful of parents. That was it. The silence was loud, and every second felt like it stretched into hours. I expected to see the queer community showing up in numbers, draped in color and excitement. Instead, only the wind was moving.

But slowly, gently, just like courage often arrives, people started to show up with a rainbow flag appearing from behind a tree and a hesitant wave from someone standing at a distance.

That’s when I understood that people weren’t late, just that they were afraid. And their fear made sense. Showing up openly in a small community like Palapye is a radical act. It disrupts silence. It challenges norms. It forces visibility. Visibility is powerful, but it is never easy. We marched with courage, pulling from the deepest parts of ourselves. We marched with laughter that cracked through the tension. We marched not because it was easy, but because it was necessary,” narrates activist Seipone Boitshwarelo from AGANG Community Network, which focuses on families and friends of LGBTIQ+ people in Botswana. She is also a BW PRIDE Awards nominee for the Healing and Justice Award, a category which acknowledges contributions to wellness, mental health, and healing for the LGBTIQ+ community across Botswana.

Queer Pride is Botswana Pride!

Pride is both a celebration and a political statement. It came about as a response to systemic oppression, particularly the criminalization and marginalization of LGBTIQ+ people globally, including in Botswana at some point. It is part of the recognition, equality, and assertion of human rights. It also reminds us that liberation and equality are not automatically universal, and continued activism is necessary. A reminder of the famous saying by Fannie Lou Hamer, “Nobody is free until everybody’s free.”

The 2023 Constitutional Review process made one thing evident, which is that Botswana still struggles to acknowledge the existence of LGBTIQ+ people as full citizens. Instead of creating a democratic space for every voice, the process sidelined and erased an entire community. In Bradley Fortuin’s analysis of the Constitutional review and its final report, he highlighted how this erasure directly contradicts past court decisions that explicitly affirmed the right of LGBTIQ+ people to participate fully and openly in civic life. When the state chooses to ignore court orders and ignore communities, it becomes clear that visibility must be reclaimed through alternative means. This is why AGANG Community Network embarked on Palapye Pride. It is a radical insistence on belonging, rooted in community and strengthened through intersectionality with families, friends, and allies who refuse to let our stories be erased.

Motho ke motho ka batho!

One of the most strategic decisions made by the AGANG Community Network was to engage parents, religious leaders, and local community members, recognizing their value in inclusion and support. Thus, their presence in the march was not symbolic, but it was intentional.

Funding for human rights and LGBTIQ+ advocacy has been negatively impacted since January 2025, and current funding is highly competitive, uneven and scarce, especially for grassroots organizations in Botswana. The Palapye Pride event was not funded, but community members still showed up and donated water, a sound system, and someone even printed materials. This event happened because individuals believed in its value and essence. It was a reminder that activism is not always measured in budgets but in willingness and that “motho ke motho ka batho!” (“A person is a person because of other people!”).

Freedom of association for all

In March 2016, in the the Attorney General of Botswana v. Rammoge and 19 Others case, also known as the LEGABIBO registration case, the Botswana Court of Appeal stated that “members of the gay, lesbian, and transgender community, although no doubt a small minority, and unacceptable to some on religious or other grounds, form part of the rich diversity of any nation and are fully entitled in Botswana, as in any other progressive state, to the constitutional protection of their dignity.” Freedom of association, assembly, and expression is a foundation for civic and democratic participation, as it allows all citizens to organize around shared interests, raise their collective voice, and influence societal and cultural change, as well as legislative reform.

The Botswana courts, shortly after in 2021, declared that criminalizing same-sex sexual relations is unconstitutional because they violated rights to privacy, liberty, dignity, equality, and nondiscrimination. Despite these legal wins, social stigma, cultural, and religious opposition continue to affect the daily lived experience of LGBTIQ+ people in Botswana.

The continuation of a declaration

AGANG Community Network is committed to continuing this work and creating safe and supportive spaces for LGBTIQ+ people, their families, friend, and allies. Pride is not just a day of fun. It is a movement, a declaration of queer existence and recognition of allyship. It is healing and reconciliation while amplifying queer joy.

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“Catastrophic” potential as ‘Brit Card’ Digital IDs could out Trans+ people, campaigners warn

Read more at We Are Queer AF.

New digital IDs in the UK could be “catastrophic” for Trans+ people, who could be forced to out themselves when showing their ID – even if they don’t include a sex marker on them.

Keir Starmer announced the new scheme at a gathering of centre-left parties at the Global Progress Action conference. He said the move was designed to ‘crack down’ on people who don’t have the right to work in the UK getting jobs.

If the UK implements these IDs, it would join countries including Bosnia and Herzegovina, United Arab Emirates, China, Greece, France and Afghanistan.

However, within just hours of the announcement, he faced massive opposition to his ‘Brit Card’ system, with over a million people signing a parliamentary petition not to proceed. While we were monitoring the form, it was rising by around 200-300 new signatures every ten seconds.

The mock-ups shared do not include a sex marker, and only require name, date of birth, nationality or residency status, and a photo. So far, Ministers have stressed there will never be a reason to carry IDs around or to produce them other than for work.

Implications of mandatory ID for LGBTQIA+ people

Keyne Walker, TransActual strategy director, tells QueerAF that even before the plans were announced anti-trans groups have already been lobbying ministers, civil servants and right-wing parliamentarians “to ensure that the single governmental record held lists trans people as their ‘birth sex'”. 

Walker believes this scheme could easily be weaponised and hijacked by MPs who are already trying to push anti-trans policies through Parliament. “It could provide the answer to the fundamental unworkability of bathroom bans… you don’t need to ask people to show their birth certificate if instead they have to scan an ID card to take a pee.”  

Trans legal researcher, Jess O’Thomson, warns that the policy could have a “catastrophic” potential even just with the risk that it outs Trans+ people who haven’t yet got the legal recognition they need ahead of applying for a job:

“We know that anti-trans campaigning groups are looking for any opportunity to strip back trans people’s rights even further. I have no doubt that these groups will push for digital ID to record “biological sex”, forcibly outing trans people, and pushing them further out of public life.

“The real worry is that our government might go along with them, or else an amendment to the legislation could be forced through. These IDs could be catastrophic for the queer community.”

The UK’s history of ID cards

The UK hasn’t had a nationwide mandatory ID scheme since WWII, which ended after Lord Chief Justice Goddard said in a high court that the continuation of the wartime ID card scheme was an “annoyance” to much of the public and “tended to turn law-abiding subjects into law breakers”. Winston Churchill’s government scrapped them following the ruling and wider criticism over costs and police misuse – BBC

In more recent years, Tony Blair’s Labour government legislated for voluntary ID cards in the early 2000s, but the scheme was scrapped in 2011 by the Conservative-led coalition, which argued it was too costly and intrusive.

Analysis: Lists of queer people are incredibly vulnerable to being weaponised against us

“It is a big red flag when authoritarian governments that keep talking about putting people in camps start making lists of queer people,” Keyne Walker from Trans Actual remarked to QueerAF.

That, of course, is a big-picture view of this story – and we should be careful to see the news in its context at this stage, given there are scarce details on the scheme.

But the warnings from legal and privacy campaigners come amid a wider slide into authoritarian policies the UK has been adopting in recent years, including plans to make it possible to criminalise wearing a mask at Pride events.

Indeed, from reporting on queer news for the best part of a decade now, I know well that the privacy concerns about the danger lists of queer people can create, which we’re already hearing from campaigners are far from new. 

Privacy campaigner and founding member of QueerAF Kyle Taylor, says on the surface, digital ID cards may seem innocuous enough – but you need only look to history to see how easily marginalised groups become victims of state-sponsored discrimination or violence:

“The last thing you want is for the government to know who you are and where you are when they decide to, for example, make conversion therapy mandatory. Make no mistake, privacy is power and this puts everyone at risk. Especially our community.”

There has always been a present danger of bad actors weaponising central lists; it’s one of the reasons the Covid Track and Trace app was eventually decentralised amid opposition to how it could create a list of disabled people.

This is a development we should watch carefully, especially amid a growing focus and battleground on the right to privacy amid potential segregation of Trans+ people in public life.

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This mom had no resources when her trans son came out. So she launched a global support network.

Read more at LGBTQ Nation.

Roz Keith found out her son was transgender on his terms.

The suburban mom was asking about haircuts, and Hunter, just shy of 14 at the time, texted her some photos. “He started texting me pictures of boys with short haircuts. And I said, ‘Oh, these are very masculine. And Hunter said, ‘Uh huh,’ and walked out of the room.”

It was typical teenage behavior, but the conversation that followed was life-changing, Keith said.

“I went upstairs, knocked on his door, and said, ‘What’s going on?’ And that’s when he told me. He said, ‘I’m a boy. I’m transgender.’ That was how he came out to me.”

Keith was caught off guard on multiple fronts. “All the little things from the time he was super little then became the hammer over the head.” She thought about Hunter playing with boy dolls, preferring time with boys to girls, choosing Narnia’s Prince Caspian over all the Disney princess costumes.

“I saw this one male avatar in a game, this buff, masculine character that he had created, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s a guy.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, okay.’ You know, no explanation. So, all along, I just kept saying ‘Okay,’ too.”

Keith wasn’t a helicopter parent. “We really encouraged our kids to be independent,” she said, “and we wanted them to be happy and successful and productive, whatever that meant for them.” But she also said a transgender child “just wasn’t in my consideration set.”

“In my world, I didn’t have a friend who had a trans child. We didn’t have any adult in our community who was trans or in the process of coming out or identified in any way remotely that way. So it was really a foreign concept from that perspective.”

While those conversations weren’t happening in Keith’s world, they certainly were in her precocious online teenager’s.

“He figured it out because he was watching YouTube, and he saw a trans person on this show talking about their coming out. And that was his light bulb moment. And he said, ‘Oh my God, that’s me.’”

Hunter spent a long time contemplating his revelation and researching what to do about it before he shared anything with his family.

“He’d been researching for two years,” Keith recalled. “He had a checklist of everything he wanted to do.”

With Hunter’s declaration, his state of mind came into focus for his mom.

“Based on things he shared when he was younger, he felt different, and he didn’t know why he felt different, and he didn’t have language to explain it,” Keith realized. “And it created a lot of struggle and conflict, and, I think, anger for him.”

“He said, you know, ‘I just felt like the weird kid.’”

Keith decided to close that gap – for her son and for others.

In 2015, she founded Stand with Trans, a support network devoted to trans kids and their parents and caregivers. The nonprofit provides transgender and nonbinary youth with life-saving programs like mental health services, peer support groups, educational resources, and, most importantly, Keith says, “validation and empowerment.”

Stand With Trans also provides critical support to parents or guardians of trans youth. Its Ally Parents program allows loved ones to text, call, or email other parents of trans youth for connection and advice.

Letting go

“Parents can have a hard time when their child comes out and wants to transition to a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth,” Keith said.

“They struggle to let go of the child they thought they had and the dreams that they had, right? If a child was assigned female at birth, a parent might say, ‘I just imagined her walking down the aisle in the white dress,’ you know? And they grieve this child as if the child has died.”

“I never took that approach,” Keith said, “because I knew that my child was very much alive and that it was my job to make sure that he stayed that way. You know, it was my job to make sure that he was mentally well and that he got what he needed so he could thrive.”

For Hunter and his family, checking off those steps to transition wouldn’t come easily.

“There were no pediatric gender clinics who were seeing trans youth covered by our insurance. There were no therapists who we could find who were trained to see trans adolescents. There were no support groups. There were no parent groups. There was nothing for youth. Like, literally every phone call was a brick wall,” Keith said.

But Hunter wasn’t waiting on the details. He decided to come out on Facebook.

“My daughter came to me and said, ‘Did you see what Hunter posted?’ And I said, ‘No.’”

While Keith and her husband had talked to a few close friends about Hunter, the family hadn’t been sharing much “because it wasn’t our story to share — that was up to him.”

With Hunter’s announcement, “It was like the floodgates had opened,” Keith said.

The family agreed to tell their story.

They began speaking publicly about their experience. “And there was just like this swell of relief, I guess, and joy from families in the community who had been trying to manage this process with their kiddo and had no one to talk to. There was really nobody — medically, psychologically emotionally — just literally no one was there.”

“Families like mine, trans adults, multi-generational families, like, every member of the community were reaching out and saying, ‘Oh, my God, I could have uttered those words. Your son reminds me of my son.’”

Hunter’s story had inspired an outpouring of empathy and recognition, but the story he shared online didn’t address his lingering sense of isolation.

“Even my son said, ‘I don’t know anyone like me.’ And so as we started to meet families,” Keith said.

“I was literally arranging play dates for my 14-15-year-old. Like, I was inviting kids to come over and just hang out, and — fly on the wall — they talked about stupid stuff, like, ‘Oh, don’t you hate getting socks for Christmas presents?’ And it showed these kids that being trans didn’t mean that you weren’t like other kids. You know, you were just another teen.”

Those interactions became the heart of the mission that guides Stand with Trans today.

The rise of parents’ rights

The founding of Stand With Trans accompanied a rising awareness of gender diversity in the 2010s, but with that also came a conservative backlash wrought with anti-trans animus.

Before Hunter came out, “Nobody was talking about bathroom bills and trans girls in sports. Those conversations weren’t happening,” Keith said.

Since then, trans kids like Hunter have been buried under an avalanche of discriminatory legislation, from gender-affirming care bans to a trans-erasing, book-banning frenzy organized by groups like Moms for Liberty to an online hate campaign led by accounts like Libs of TikTok.

Adding fuel to the fire: the president’s obsession with “gender ideology” and his “us” vs “them” politics of division.

The right has hawked its anti-LGBTQ+ agenda under the same, one-sided banner: parents’ rights.

Keith said the phrase is self-serving.

“I don’t think that any government should be allowed to say what my child has or doesn’t have access to, because I’m the parent. They’re not in my home parenting my child, so they don’t know what they’re going through. How do you make that global statement?” she asked.

“It is up to me to make a decision about my child’s medical care,” Keith said. “And as far as my child goes, if he was denied the opportunity to go on testosterone and not medically transition, I think our conversation would be very different.”

Keith points to a perversion of theology as one basis of the far-right’s anti-trans animus.

“I’m not Christian. I was raised Jewish. But my understanding from my friends who are Christian and very affirming and very accepting, their response is, ‘The Jesus I know would open the door for everyone, and would welcome everyone to the table.’ There’s really a disconnect between saying you’re a Christian and then not being open to accepting people as they are, as they show up.”

“Far be it for me to tell anyone what they should believe,” Keith added, “but you don’t get to bring it into my home and tell me how to care for my child, because those aren’t my beliefs. That’s not what I understand, right? It’s a secular society.”

“Your belief system should not infringe on my rights.”

Seeing around the corner

Stand with Trans was born to help protect trans kids from the attacks by providing love, knowledge and support — and power over their own lives.

“Our mission is so simple,” Keith said. “It’s empowering and supporting trans youth and their loved ones. So that’s it. We know that if we educate and support the caregivers, the loved ones, the parents, that the young people are going to do better, and if we find ways to make life better and easier for them, they’re not only going to survive, but they’re going to thrive.

“I know with my own kid, they couldn’t see themselves having a future. I think it’s hard enough for young people who don’t see around the corners, right? It’s hard to even imagine, like, ‘What do I want to be when I grow up.’ But for trans kids, it’s even harder.

“So it’s really important for us to show these young people that they can do whatever they want to do,” Keith said.

“Being trans is one part of their identity. It doesn’t define who they are.”

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These cities are stepping up to provide sanctuary to trans people

Read more at The Advocate.

Attacks on transgender rights didn’t start with Donald Trump — but neither did the movements resisting them.

Since 2022, 25 states have banned most gender-affirming care for trans youth, six of which make it a felony for doctors to provide the treatment. Two have banned surgery only. While only 14 and the District of Columbia have shield laws protecting the care, a small but growing coalition of “sanctuary cities” for trans people are filling in the gaps.

Many may know the term in reference to municipalities that limit cooperation with federal authorities like Immigration and Customs Enforcement that target immigrant communities, but “sanctuary cities” is also used to describe these places that aim to help transgender people.

These cities — of which there are an estimated fewer than 10 in the U.S. — are not superficial “safe spaces.” For trans kids and their families, they are meant to ensure that local resources aren’t used to aid officials from other jurisdictions prosecuting them or their doctors. They also prohibit officials from sharing information about someone’s gender, sex, or health care.

While the resolutions can’t overturn state or federal laws, “the closest point to the community is a council,” says Eric Guerra, mayor pro tem of Sacramento. The City Council voted unanimously to make Sacramento a sanctuary city in March 2024. It was the first state capital to adopt that status.

“It goes down to the fundamental belief that people are people, and we should respect people for who they are,” says Guerra, who was a council member at the time. “And that has helped let our cities move forward.”

Sanctuary city resolutions usually come when residents approach their city council members with evidence showing why they’re needed.

There wasn’t just one person who came forward and motivated officials to declare Olympia, Washington, a sanctuary city in January. Instead, several LGBTQ+ residents commented publicly that they were “feeling very fearful and unsafe” in the wake of Trump’s election, says Assistant City Manager Stacey Ray. The City Council initiated the resolution in response.

Public testimonials from community members about how they have been negatively impacted by anti-LGBTQ+ laws is what Guerra says can be legally considered “factual points of incidents that occur that go contrary to our nation’s fundamental beliefs.”

From there, resolutions go to city attorneys, who must make sure that they don’t go against the state or U.S. Constitution. Ray describes it as a “long, arduous process,” and says officials must consult with local law enforcement about “what we can do within our legal parameters” to enforce the resolution.

“One of the things our council said is they wanted something that was actionable. Not just ‘pretty words,’ but they really wanted something that would be seen as authentically providing the safety that folks were asking for,” Ray says.

California and Washington State have shield laws for abortion and gender-affirming care, making resolutions like those in Sacramento and Olympia in line with state law. Democratic-controlled cities passing local ordinances in Republican-controlled states can lead to more complications, like in Kansas City, Missouri.

The City Council there approved a sanctuary resolution for gender-affirming care in May 2023, shortly after the state legislature passed a bill banning the treatment for trans minors. While the city could not overturn state law, Mayor Quinton Lucas, who introduced the resolution, ordered local police and city personnel to make enforcement “their lowest priority.”

“It just means you have more fights, frankly,” Lucas says. “It also means that here in the red states, we have a little more experience with fighting.”

Sanctuary city resolutions are still helpful in blue states, especially under a federal government hostile to LGBTQ+ people. Since taking office in January, Trump has signed executive orders denying the existence of transgender people and banning federal support for gender-affirming care for those under 19.

“Trump has the authority over a bunch of federal employees, like with the civil rights protections he’s rolled back in hiring specifically for the federal government,” Guerra says. “I think people forget that those roles and those stages also exist in their local community.”

Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding from immigration sanctuary cities and could potentially do the same for cities that protect transgender health care and abortion access, prompting more than a dozen local governments — including the city of Sacramento — to file a lawsuit against the administration.

For Guerra, who is an immigrant, the benefits of protecting a marginalized group far outweigh the risk the Trump administration poses. Lucas also “encourage[s] every mayor with that opportunity to” stand up for LGBTQ+ rights.

“The thing that motivated me was our shared humanity,” he says. “When your state government or your federal government is saying you don’t deserve to exist and [is] trying to remove you as a human being, I think that those of us with whatever power, we have a duty to act.”

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First-of-its-kind LGBTQIA+ hotline in Illinois offers support amid sweeping attacks

Read more at Prism.

Since the Trump administration took office in January, it has launched a sweeping attack on LGBTQIA+ people, and particularly on trans rights. In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to ban trans service members from the military. He has also attempted to prevent trans, nonbinary, and intersex people from obtaining passports with accurate gender markers and tried to withhold funds from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to trans youth. 

These and other attacks have drawn lawsuits and been the subject of conflicting and ongoing court rulings. The result is that trans people and queer people face a bewildering, frightening, and chaotic legal landscape when they try to negotiate health care, travel, veterans’ benefits, education, employment, or just existence. Accessing resources, or even determining whether they can exist, can be difficult and disheartening.

Illinois, in partnership with numerous state LGBTQIA+ organizations, is attempting to help. In August, the state launched Illinois Pride Connect, a legal resource hotline for queer people. The initiative was launched with $250,000 from the state and another $100,000 in private donations; it includes a website and a legal hotline—(855) 805-9200—which is available Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. CT. 

According to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Illinois Pride Connect makes Illinois “the only state in the nation to provide free legal advice and advocacy tools to protect the LGBTQ community.”

Illinois Pride Connect is led by the state’s Department of Human Services and the Legal Council for Health Justice (LCHJ), which runs and staffs the hotline. LCHJ Executive Director Julie Justicz said her organization began discussing the need for a resource hub last spring. 

“We were getting an increased number of calls from community members who were concerned about the number of executive orders that were coming down, impacting LGBTQ families in Illinois,” she told Prism. The organization was fielding more and more calls about gender-affirming care, education, and passports. “We talked with these other partner groups and decided that it would be good to establish an up-to-date, well-vetted hub of information.”

The state and other LGBTQIA+ organizations got on board quickly, and the resource hub launched in the summer. Justicz said LCHJ has five or six of its 30 staff members working extensively on the hotline. The website has had around 8,800 hits, and the staff receives two or three calls a day. She noted that the hotline also gets some calls from out of state, as LGBTQIA+ people and families consider moving into Illinois.

LCHJ is aware that people using the Illinois Pride Connect hub may be in a vulnerable position. The website offers a quick escape option in case someone does not want others to know they are seeking information on LGBTQ issues. Callers are also anonymous to protect them, though Justicz was able to provide Prism with descriptions of some conversations.

One caller to Illinois Pride Connect, according to the caller description, was “a parent of a trans adolescent seeking information on the risks and benefits of applying for a passport to reflect her child’s gender identity.” The family had updated birth certificates and state ID but had not changed their passport or Social Security record, and was worried about trying to get through customs with inconsistent gender information. Pride Connect was able to provide “detailed information on the current federal policies on gender marker changes to vital records, and on the Orr v. Trump court case concerning the State Department’s gender marker policy,” a staff attorney with LCHJ’s trans health law program said in an email.

Another caller was “a veteran living in rural IL who could no longer access transition-related medical care through [Veteran Affairs] and Tricare,” said the attorney, who requested to remain unnamed due to safety concerns about harassment and doxxing. The veteran was trying to determine if she could access Medicaid or other health insurance. Illinois Pride Connect provided information about Medicaid coverage in the state and referred her to local providers. This was especially helpful since the veteran had not been aware that local services were available.

Mike Ziri, the director of public policy at Equality Illinois, an organization on the Pride Connect Steering Committee, told Prism, “We get frequent requests for legal support, and those requests have accelerated in the last few years, particularly this year.” 

Equality Illinois is a lobbying and civil rights organization; it doesn’t provide individual legal advice. So, Ziri said, “having a resource like Illinois Pride Connect—it’s great, it’s important, it’s critical.” 

In the past, he said, Equality Illinois might have scrambled to connect people with someone at the Department of Human Rights or to another partner who might provide legal services. But, he said, “having a dedicated hotline … fills that gap.”

Kaitian Healey, gender diverse navigation specialist at Central Illinois Friends in Peoria, told Prism that he had found out about Pride Connect after it launched. 

“Our organization was not listed as a health care provider that offered gender-affirming care and LGBT, plus care. So I was a little offended.” He reached out to Pride Connect, and Central Illinois Friends was quickly added to the steering committee. 

“I work a caseload of about 100 folks that are accessing gender-affirming care,” Healey said. “And we do know of at least two clients” who reached out to Pride Connect for advice on navigating legal resources. Central Illinois Friends is an organization that focuses on health care, including sexual health testing, gender-affirming care, and mental health counseling. Illinois Pride Connect allows the group to easily direct the populations they serve in the central part of the state—including Peoria, Bloomington-Normal, and Galesburg—to resources that Central Illinois Friends does not provide directly.

Justiecz said that LCHJ is exploring an afterhours option so that people can leave legal questions when the hotline is not in operation and receive callbacks. As for the future, she said, they are looking to secure funding to sustain the initiative through the next two or three years at least under the current administration. After that, she said, the group will try to assess “are things getting worse for the community where they need this more?” 

Right now, there’s no question that the resource is needed. 

“We have challenges,” Ziri of Equality Illinois told Prism. “But the values of our state are equality, inclusion, and justice. And this project is just one way those values are manifested.”

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Judge nixes Justice Department subpoena of telehealth trans health care provider

Read more at The Advocate.

A federal judge has quashed the Department of Justice’s subpoena for the records of QueerDoc, a telehealth service that prescribes medications and offers consulting for gender-affirming care in 10 states.

The DOJ subpoenaed QueerDoc June 11, requesting personnel information, documents identifying patients, patients’ medical records, billing records, insurance claims, communications with drugmakers, and more. It was among more than 20 such subpoenas issued.

The same day, the DOJ’s Civil Division issued a memo saying it would “prioritize investigations of doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and other appropriate entities” for “possible violations of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and other laws” regarding medications used in gender-affirming care and False Claims Act violations by health care providers who “evade state bans on gender dysphoria treatments by knowingly submitting claims to Medicaid with false diagnosis codes.”

These investigations derived from Donald Trump’s executive order recognizing only male and female sexes as assigned at birth and another denouncing gender-affirming care for minors as “a stain on our Nation’s history” that “must end” and threatening federal funding that provide such care. He also directed the DOJ to investigate providers. In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi released a memo saying the DOJ would “act decisively to protect our children and hold accountable those who mutilate them under the guise of care.” She used the same language about mutilation in a later press release. That a day after QueerDoc filed motions with a U.S. District Court in Washington State to quash the subpoena and seal the court proceedings, according to the court.

“DOJ issued its inflammatory press release declaring that medical professionals have ‘mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology,’ one day after QueerDoc filed these motions, effectively destroying any claim to investigative confidentiality while attempting to sway public sentiment against healthcare providers like QueerDoc,” Judge Jamal Whitehead wrote in his ruling, which came out Monday. “Such conduct appears calculated to intimidate rather than investigate.”

“The question before the Court is whether DOJ may use its administrative subpoena power to achieve what the Administration cannot accomplish through legislation: the elimination of medical care that Washington and other states explicitly protect. The answer is no,” he continued. He noted that gender-affirming care is supported by major medical groups and many courts.

Whitehead added, “When a federal agency issues a subpoena not to investigate legal violations but to intimidate and coerce providers into abandoning lawful medical care, it exceeds its legitimate authority and abuses the judicial process.”

He denied the motion to seal the proceedings “because, despite legitimate safety concerns, transparency in judicial proceedings remains paramount when challenging executive power,” he wrote.

QueerDoc welcomed the ruling. “The court affirmed that government power cannot be used to intimidate providers or breach the confidentiality of patients seeking medically necessary care,” the organization said in a statement on its website. “This is a win not just for QueerDoc, but for every clinician and patient fighting for the right to safe, private healthcare.”

The subpoena was “a calculated attempt by the Trump administration and Attorney General Pam Bondi to weaponize the Department of Justice against transgender people and the clinicians who care for them,” the statement noted. QueerDoc did not surrender any patient information to the DOJ, and care was not disrupted, the group said.

A federal judge in Massachusetts quashed a similar DOJ subpoena to Boston Children’s Hospital in September, and the department is appealing, Politico reports. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center are in court fighting DOJ subpoenas on gender-affirming care as well.

Asked by Politico for comment on the QueerDoc ruling, the DOJ issued this statement: “As Attorney General Bondi has made clear, this Department of Justice will use every legal and law enforcement tool available to protect innocent children from being mutilated under the guise of ‘care.’”

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How the nation’s largest queer immigrant group is fighting Trump’s war on LGBTQ+ refugees

Read more at LGBTQ Nation.

President Donald Trump’s second term has especially targeted two groups in particular: immigrants and LGBTQ people. On his first day in office, he ended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which left thousands of refugees who had already been approved to live in the United States stranded. He also drastically lowered the cap on the number of refugees allowed to enter the U.S. from 125,000 to 7,500. Thankfully, Immigration Equality is here to help.

“For many decades, we’ve seen clients arrive with nothing but hope and fear, and walk out with safety and freedom,” Anto Chavez, Immigration Equality’s communications director, told LGBTQ Nation. “It’s just becoming harder to fight, but we’re still here with them. We still hold their hand every step of the way. We have more than 700 active legal cases, our legal staff trains thousands of lawyers nationwide to represent queer immigrants pro bono, and we fight in the courts and Congress to expand protections.”

Founded in 1994, Immigration Equality provides free legal help for immigrants and asylum seekers who are LGBTQ+ or HIV-positive. The group is fighting Trump’s seemingly arbitrary executive orders on immigration in courts — and winning. 

Chavez spoke with LGBTQ Nation about how the sociocultural landscape around immigration has changed now that Trump is back in office and what average citizens can do to fight for the rights of queer immigrants in our community.

For forever, immigrant communities have learned how to take care of each other without relying on systems that have failed us. We have to continue to do that. We have to continue to fight.  Anto Chavez, Immigration Equality communications director

LGBTQ Nation: What has changed under Trump’s second term for immigrants applying for asylum to escape anti-LGBTQ persecution in their home countries?

Anto Chavez: The anti-immigrant rhetoric has shaped the culture and the cultural shift in our country; this happened during Trump’s term as well. But it really changes how queer immigrants even envision themselves in the U.S. 

At the beginning of this administration, some of our clients were refugees. We have an asylum program and a refugee program. Historically, we have worked with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), but we opened up our refugee program a few years ago. After we launched it, some folks were really scared to even just decide to come to the U.S. I think there was a lot of misinformation, [but] this is still a place that’s safer for many folks. 

But when it comes to policy — I mean, if we talk about refugee work, every avenue has been blocked for us. The refugee resettlement program went from thousands a year to zero, and so we’ve had to really look into other options. 

How has Donald Trump’s executive order drastically lowering the refugee cap affected refugees who were already approved?

Since January 20, after the executive order suspending the refugee resettlement program and halting the process for many folks, we had people who were ready to travel and had to cancel. So for queer and trans asylum seekers, this means just fewer pathways for relocation or protection from persecution. 

The U.S. has historically been a place where queer immigrants have been able to come and live freely.  It’s scary to think it’s starting to change. 

There are increased barriers for asylum seekers who are already here as well. Policies like what was called “Remain in Mexico,” were reinstated. The CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) One app, which allowed those migrating for humanitarian reasons to schedule asylum interviews at ports of entry, was ended, and existing appointments were canceled.

There has been increased deportation, including of multiple LGBTQ asylum seekers. There’s also the abuse that happens in detention, particularly to queer and trans immigrants. It’s just out of this world. We have some reports that queer immigrants are more likely to be assaulted and abused in ICE detention and put into solitary confinement. 

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Trump seeks to kill all medical care for trans youth by defunding hospitals that provide it

Read more at LGBTQ Nation.

Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seeks to end all Medicaid and Medicare funding for young people’s gender-affirming care (GAC), according to newly proposed rules shared by NPR. A trans activist said the rules would amount to a “de facto national ban” on GAC.

The proposed rules would prohibit all federal Medicaid and Medicare funding — as well as funding through the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) — for any services at hospitals that provide GAC for trans youth.

“These would be proposals that would go out for public comment, it would take months for the Trump administration to issue a final rule, and then, if past is prologue, we would see litigation over whatever the final rules are,” Katie Keith, director of the Center for Health Policy and the Law at Georgetown University, told NPR.

Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, a right-wing think tank that has pushed national transphobia as an effective Republican political strategy, said of the proposed rules, “I think these restrictions are very good. It’s going to change the entire transgender industry, and it’s going to take away a lot of their funding streams.”

“This would be a de facto national ban,” wrote trans activist and civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo via Bluesky. “There would still be providers in blue states that don’t take federal funding but the large interdisciplinary teams of just a few years ago would be nearly impossible to maintain. The result is that the care that remains would largely be underground with worse support and likely outcomes.”

“They’ll never be able to fully ban this care,” Caraballo added. “There will always be providers willing to provide it like abortion. Even without access to providers, many trans youth will simply go DIY [do-it-yourself] like trans folks have done for decades. They’re not actually banning this care, they’re making it less safe.”

The administration’s “toxic” war on gender-affirming care

Though there is no federal law banning gender-affirming care, the current presidential administration has sought to eradicate the practice through a January executive order (that has since been blocked by several courts). The order instructed the DOJ to extend the time that patients and parents can sue gender-affirming doctors and to use laws against false advertising to prosecute any entity that may be misleading the public about the long-term effects of gender-affirming care (GAC).

In April, Bondi issued a memo to DOJ employees, telling them to investigate and prosecute cases of minors accessing gender-affirming care as female genital mutilation (FGM), even though hospitals don’t conduct such female genital surgeries. The memo threatened to jail doctors for 10 years if they provide gender-affirming care to young trans people.

The following June, the DOJ sent subpoenas to 20 medical providers who offer GAC to trans youth, demanding patients’ Social Security numbers, emails, home addresses, and information on the care they received, as well as other sensitive information dating back to January 2020. A federal judge blocked the subpoena in one instance and accused the DOJ of going on a “bad faith” “fishing expedition” to interfere with states’ rights to protect GAC within its borders, to harass and intimidate providers from offering such care, and to dissuade patients from seeking such care.

Fewer than 3,000 teens nationwide receive puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy, according to a 2025 JAMA analysis of private insurance data. Gender-affirming care is supported by all major medical associations in the U.S., including the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, as safe and life-saving for young people with gender dysphoria.

One doctor interviewed by The Washington Post called the federal government’s crusade against gender-affirming care a “toxic plan” that will force some patients to detransition, potentially forcing them into adverse psychological and physical effects, including increased anxiety, depression, and the development of unwanted physical changes.

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Republican official sued a Texas doctor for treating trans kids. She left the state.

Read more at LGBTQ Nation.

A Dallas pediatrician who became the first doctor to be sued under a Texas law banning gender-affirming care for minors has given up her license to practice in the state.

According to TownFlex, the Texas Medical Board confirmed that Dr. May Lau voluntarily surrendered her medical license. In a statement, Lau’s attorney, Craig Smyser, said that she has decided to move her practice to Oregon and sees no reason to maintain her license to practice in Texas.

Last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against Lau for allegedly providing gender-affirming care to minors in violation of S.B. 14. The state law, which went into effect in September 2023, bans doctors from prescribing hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers to minors, and from performing gender-affirming surgery on minors.

Paxton’s suit accused Lau of prescribing hormone replacement therapy to at least 21 minors between October 2023 and August 2024. It further alleged that Lau “used false diagnoses and billing codes to mask these unlawful prescriptions.”

Notably, Paxton’s suit falsely referred to gender-affirming care as “dangerous and experimental” and a press release from his office claimed that there is “no scientific evidence” to support the benefits of gender-affirming medication.

In fact, puberty blockers and hormone replacement drugs have for decades been used safely for the purposes of gender transition in trans minors and to treat other medical issues in cisgender children. Gender-affirming care, which encompasses a range of both surgical and nonsurgical treatments, has been endorsed by every major American medical association and leading world health authority as evidence-based, safe, and in some cases lifesaving for transgender minors. Gender-affirming surgical intervention is rarely performed on minors.

In his statement, Smyser said that Lau “continues to deny the Texas Attorney General’s politically- and ideologically-driven allegations,” according to TownFlex.

Paxton, meanwhile, said that Lau’s surrender of her medical license was “a major victory for our state.”

“Doctors who permanently hurt kids by giving them experimental drugs are nothing more than disturbed left-wing activists who have no business being in the medical field. We will not relent in holding anyone who tries to ‘transition’ kids accountable,” he said in a statement, according to TownFlex.

As the outlet notes, Paxton has filed similar lawsuits against two other Texas doctors. Last month, the Texas AG withdrew the state’s suit against Hector Granados after finding no evidence that he violated S.B. 14. However, a lawsuit brought against M. Brett Cooper is ongoing and expected to go to trial in May.

Equality Texas noted that the enforcement of S.B. 14 has led many doctors who provide gender-affirming care to leave the state — making it harder for trans adults to access care.

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Cisgender male student kicked off boys’ basketball team due to birth certificate error in nightmarish ordeal

Read more at LGBTQ Nation.

In Arizona last week, a cisgender male 8th grader was “physically removed” from tryouts for his school’s boys’ basketball team because an error on his original birth certificate incorrectly identified him as being born female.

It’s the latest episode in a “gender ideology”-inspired nightmare for the teenager, Laker Jackson, and his family.

“I’m sad for everybody that it’s come down to this,” mom Becky Jackson told KNXV News in Phoenix.

The Kafkaesque drama was inspired by a clerical mistake 14 years ago, when hospital staff mistakenly identified Becky Jackson’s newborn son as a girl. It was an error Laker’s parents never noticed.  

“I give him the birth certificate and they’re like, ‘Did you know this says female?’” Becky Jackson recalled about handing over enrollment paperwork to a school administrator last year.

“I was like, ‘What?’” Becky Jackson said. “I was like, ‘Oh man, that’s so funny.’ So we come home, everyone’s laughing.”

The busy mom of six said correcting the document wasn’t a priority.

“So we just put it in the drawer and moved on,” she said.

The mix-up didn’t cause issues until recently, she told AZ Family.

Last spring, school staff began treating Jackson as female, Becky Jackson said.

The district removed Laker Jackson from an all-boys gym class and mandated he use a separate restroom, despite the family’s assertion that their son is a cisgender boy, assigned male at birth.

Becky’s mom had already started work on changing Laker Jackson’s birth certificate, but “it’s not something that you can fix quickly. You have to have an affidavit signed,” she said.

In the meantime, the 14-year-old continued training to make the boys’ basketball team at his Mesa high school, a 7th to 12th-grade school in the Queen Creek Unified School District.

Becky Jackson said she received the corrected birth certificate over the summer and provided the district with the revised document, along with a doctor’s note confirming Laker’s sex.

But Queen Creek administrators said it wasn’t enough, standing by a rule stating that the school’s determination of a student’s sex would rely solely on an original birth certificate.

“They sent the athletic director of Eastmark High to physically remove Laker from the basketball tryouts in front of all of his friends, in front of the coach,” Becky Jackson said.

“I am a biological boy. I was born a boy,” said Laker Jackson, who heard from friends on the basketball team that “they were talking about it for the entire tryout and even the next day’s tryouts because they were really confused.”  

After the family continued to raise objections to Laker Jackson’s treatment, a letter from an administrator said genetic testing to confirm their claim that the child is a boy “could be considered.”

“They may consider changing it if we get chromosomal testing. They didn’t say they would,” Laker’s mom said. She estimated the cost at $1500.

“So who’s going to pay that?” she asked.

In a statement, the district said it was “committed to ongoing dialogue.”

Becky Jackson also said her son will try out for a girls’ team if that’s what it comes to.

The ordeal is a prime example of what activists have long warned: that anti-trans policies are bad for everyone. It’s also quite ironic, considering the very people who want to stop anyone assigned male at birth from playing on girls’ sports teams may wind up forcing a cisgender boy to do just that.

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