LGBTQ+

Bills focused on transgender people rose to prominence in 2016 with a North Carolina law requiring people to use bathrooms based on their sex assigned at birth (later rolled back). By 2021, the number of bills climbed with a new emphasis on transgender athletes' participation in school sports and, later, on restricting gender-affirming treatments, especially for minors.

By 2024, some advocates on the other side thought the effort had peaked. A group that opposes restrictions on transgender people, the Human Rights Campaign, issued a report last year declaring it, "increasingly clear that the tide is turning and momentum has begun to shift" against these bills.

But later that year, Republicans saturated campaigns with ads about gender, including attacks on Biden administration policies. The Trump campaign highlighted the issue in ads in swing states. Down-ballot candidates picked up the message, too.

The American Civil Liberties Union tracks "anti-LGBTQ bills." The group says the bulk of them contain restrictions on transgender people and that a record 575 bills had been filed in states through April. Last year, there were 533 and there were 510 in 2023, according to the ACLU, which opposes such laws.

Flooding the zone with "shit somewhere else."

There’s plenty of intelligent discourse out there about why we need to cast queer people in queer roles. So I’m going to talk about a different kind of lesbian visibility: we were never meant to know this much about each other and our exes. They are far too visible online and (depending on where you live) IRL. That person you talked to once in 2020 but never met? They’re on your FYP looking for a wedding venue with their fianceé abroad. Your college one-night-stand has a baby now, it’s in the alumni newsletter. Someone who hit on you at a party once is this week’s Vogue Weddings Instagram post. The person you sent your sex playlist to (it was very well received) but never actually met just celebrated one year with their girlfriend via the requisite carousel post on grid.

Lesbian visibility on a macro level is necessary, urgent now more than ever. But on a personal level, it feels like the first time we’re forced to confront how the romantic and professional choices we’ve made manifest into visible consequences. Being part of the first generation of dykes online from the time we came out to settling down with serious partners means watching each other’s lives unfold in real time. We’re in a golden age of lesbian visibility, but is our one year anniversary Instagram carousel grid post the new Christmas card?

And even if someone ripped your heart out and left it to be trampled on the patio at June PAT, there’s something to be said about a fellow dyke finding love and proudly displaying it on the internet. Over time, a post that feels like a gut punch can morph into a “good for them,” maybe even outfit inspiration. There’s a definitive shift in lesbians of a certain age nearing the end of their Saturn Returns. What used to feel like a great, percolating, chaotic mass of potential pairings in certain scenes is quieting and turning into couples or polycules before our very eyes. Being a lesbian has long meant a thorough and constant knowledge of your cohort’s doing. But only recently has it become so very visible via those who choose to share it online.

On a late August day last year, under a hot clear sun, Ottawa’s queer and trans communities took to the streets with their kaleidoscope of flags and flooded the downtown core with rainbows.

But this year, at every step among them – up and down the march, and all along the rows of spectators – were Palestine flags and the iconic stripe-and-fishnet stitching of the keffiyeh.

To anyone who knows our communities, this isn’t surprising. For the vast majority of us, first-hand experiences of discrimination lead naturally to progressive values of social justice, anti-oppression, resistance, and solidarity. Since October 2023, many community members have marched and organized under Palestinian flags against Israel’s brutal genocidal assault on Gaza – sometimes as human beings of conscience, sometimes explicitly from a queer political identity responding to the calls to action of queer Palestinian organizations. The queer left tradition of Palestine solidarity has deep roots in the organizing of queer Palestinians and their allies, alongside a well-articulated set of critiques of Israel and of settler-colonial and imperialist power that long predate the current moment.

But in Ottawa, queer solidarity with Palestine wasn’t a counterforce on the outside of a business-as-usual Pride Week. Instead, many of the usual corporations and politicians stayed home while grand marshal Haley Robinson sported a keffiyeh, Queers for Palestine made up one of the largest contingents in the march, and solidarity politics permeated what Capital Pride volunteer Jamie* described to me as “a harmonious marching for queer and trans solidarity and celebration, as well as holding space for Palestine.”

This mass display of Palestine solidarity was anything but a thin gloss over an otherwise status-quo Pride. Rather, it was a genuine popular display of queer liberation – a remarkably successful experience in mainstreaming the international solidarity traditions of the queer left and queer of colour organizing. This unequivocal success of a truly political Pride suggests that now is the time for the queer left traditions of solidarity and coalition-building across communities under attack to move from an oppositional current in our spaces to being a long-term strategy for our communities in the face of existential right-wing threats to come.

Having made her way from journeyman glazier to beloved music writer, with a gender transition in the middle, Niko Stratis has a story to tell. In her debut memoir-in-essays, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, Stratis creates a mixtape (literally, each chapter is a song title) of reflections on family, music, substance abuse and—above all—survival. Stratis begins with a story of listening to the Waterboys in her dad’s truck, but throughout the book we see how, in addition to her relationship to her father, many other things shaped her: work colleagues, partners, the melancholy of the Yukon and particular song lyrics that got her from booze in a bathtub to where she is now. What makes real dad rock, for Stratis, is less about what a male parent listened to and more about the soundtrack to transformative moments in life. Dad rock is the music that rears us, the music that helps us figure ourselves out. In Stratis’s life, that included everything from Bruce Springsteen to HAIM, Sheryl Crow to the National, and R.E.M. to Neko Case. Stratis’s writing is as lyrical and potent as the songs she writes about; in that sense, the book is a master class in form mirroring content.

It will bother some that her transition doesn’t really appear until late in the book (Stratis tells me that’s already been mentioned by some early readers), but as a later-in-life queer myself, I loved getting to read about the complexity that made her who she is, even if it’s not a pat narrative. This is the core of Stratis’s work: she reflects on the stuff of life that is messy and complicated, and—like our favourite musicians—she makes art of it.

The Trump administration wants to cut funding for specialized services for LGBTQ+ youth on the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, according to a leaked budget proposal reviewed by NPR.

While anyone in a mental health crisis can call or text 988 and be connected to a trained counselor, the line has specially trained counselors, often with similar life experiences, for high risk groups like veterans and LGBTQ+ youth.

Hello friends.

as a kink positive transfem egg with self worth problems, a bad (addictive) coping strategy in dealing with these bad emotions emerged in recent years (since my youth actually).

And my intention in posting about my experience is that bad life situations, stress in the real life (of which people probably have plenty) make these coping strategies worse, because, like any addiction, the substance will not be enough and you need more of it.

It started with regular femdom humiliation until it went more into hypnosis stuff, planting powerful triggers to reinforce these self worth problems. (i have one specific content creator in mind who i wont mention for safety reasons. because people like i was will certainly be curious to research this content creator with the desire to fuel their own similar bad coping strategies.)

Then a bit later i found the "Bambi Files" which i now consider slightly abusive: these are conditioning files which are even more powerful and effective compared to the above mentioned content creator, and whose community makes it hard to practice it with proper consent: since you maybe have a rough description what a files does, but you have to listen to it since many don't have a script. Not to mention that many files dont have a "light" version, so it is hard to know how addictive a file is.

The amnesia triggers might seem interesting in a consensual kinky partnership, but if you do these alone, i think its risky.

Especially for my ADHD brain which curiously clicks to all links and listens to random stuff only noticing too late that this was a step in the wrong direction, now with a suggestion that the addiction is increasing.

And there is also explcit abuse mentioned in this article, where bambis had been - besides the physical abuse - conditioned to recruit other inexperienced bambis into a cult-like group.

And now notice that the bambi community has in one of its popular sites a cult playlist, whose description explicitly mentiones that the intent is to gaslight the bambi and conditioning her to recruit others.

So i infer the cult-like abuse mentioned in this article is not only this case but rather a structural problem, they are thriving. (And fyi, the female voice in the files is a text-to-speech generator, obfuscating that many content creators are male, probably with structural similar intentions to the james from the group.)

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jessicalucas2/erotic-hypnosis-bambi-sleep

Karla Jay remembers joining the second night of street protests during the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City. For her, and for so many other LGBTQ+ people, something had shifted: People were angry. They didn’t want things to go back to normal—because normal meant police raids. Normal meant living underground. It meant hiding who they were at their jobs and from their families. They wanted a radical change.

Radical change meant organizing. Jay joined a meeting with the Gay Liberation Front, which would become the incubator for the modern LGBTQ+ political movement and proliferate in chapters across the country. At those meetings, she remembers discussing what freedom could look like. Holding hands with a lover while walking down the street without fear of getting beaten up, one person said. Another said they’d like to get married. At the time, those dreams seemed impossible.

Jay, now 78, is worried that history will repeat itself. She’s worried that LGBTQ+ people will be put in the dark again by the draconian policies of a second Trump administration.

“Are things worse than they were before Stonewall? Not yet,” she said. “It’s certainly possible that people will have to go back to underground lives, that trans people will have to flee to Canada, but it’s not worse yet.”

The 19th spoke with several LGBTQ+ elders, including Jay, about what survival looks like under a hostile political regime and what advice they would give to young LGBTQ+ people right now.

In an early scene in Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance, dozens of people clad in leather jackets, blazers and bell bottoms march toward the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. Some carry rain-battered signs with slogans like “We will not hide our love away,” while others link arms and huddle under umbrellas. The camera is situated in the midst of the crowd, and as viewers, it feels as though we’re brushing shoulders with the protestors as they pass by. Despite the dreary skies and relentless downpour, the protestors look determined, joyful.

This vibrant footage of the 1971 We Demand march, Canada’s first LGBTQ2S+ mass protest, hasn’t been seen in over half a century. It had been stored in a shoebox of film reels belonging to activist Jearld Moldenhauer, who photographed many early queer demonstrations in the country. During an interview with Moldenhauer, Parade’s team discovered the existence of the footage and, with his permission, digitized it. The footage brings colour to a milestone in the history of queer activism in Canada, capturing the protest on grainy, nostalgic Super 8 film. It shines as an exemplar of the kind of archival work that powers the new documentary Parade, directed by Winnipeg filmmaker Noam Gonick and produced by Toronto’s Justine Pimlott.

For many people, their first memories of the early years of YouTube will be of silly cat videos, bonkers animations such as Charlie the Unicorn, and grainy home movies that made global sensations of their unassuming stars, such as the young lads behind “Charlie bit my finger”, before people knew what “viral” meant.

Those formative years are a world away from the YouTube of today, the glossy content of which rivals output by megabucks entertainment firms and has made household names, and multi-millionaires, of the likes of MrBeast, Lilly Singh, KSI and James Charles.

During its 20 years, YouTube has left an indelible mark on internet history, popular culture and wider society – especially for the global LGBTQ+ community.

For LGBTQ+ creators and audiences alike, YouTube quickly became an accessible safe space for young people wanting to talk, and consume content, about their experiences and identity, as well as helping them find people with whom they could connect and relate. For the first time, queer people could truly own their story – unfiltered and unscripted.

Chrysalis is a literary magazine by trans youth, for trans youth (created with a little help from trans adults). These days, it feels like we are always hearing about trans kids and teens. Chrysalis was created so that trans, non-binary, intersex, genderqueer, agender, two-spirit, and otherwise gender expansive youth can speak for themselves – and most importantly, speak to one another.

​>​ At Chrysalis, we believe that art, literature, and culture are a key part of trans resistance and resilience for people of all ages. And we know that the creativity, talent, and imagination of trans youth is unparalleled. Chrysalis exists to give that radiance a platform.

Trans youth (18 or younger) are invited to submit visual art, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, advice questions, and journalistic reporting for our very first issue! ​Grown-ups can support the magazine by donating, spreading the word, and joining our mailing list so that we can let you know as soon as you can pre-order a copy. Our first issue is expected to launch in fall of 2025.

• Wisconsin law generally requires trans people, including children, to publish their legal name changes in a newspaper. Some worry the requirement poses a higher risk with the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies.
• Lawyers working with trans people say Wisconsin’s publication requirements further endanger the trans community by creating a de facto dataset of people that some fear could be used for firing, harassment or violence.
• “We live just in constant terror of the wrong person finding out that we have an 11-year-old trans child. … All it takes is one wrong person getting that information, and what we could end up going through, becoming a target, is horrifying.”
• A Wisconsin law has dissuaded at least one transgender resident from going through with a legal name change. “It can put people at risk of violence and blatant discrimination simply because of who they are,” an ACLU lawyer said.

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/24865385

When Renee Lau, a special projects coordinator at the trans-led housing and wellness center Baltimore Safe Haven, transitioned at the age of 63, she lost everything. “My marriage fell apart,” she says. “The Sears Holding Company, who I worked [with] for 30 some years, declared bankruptcy, and the business that I worked for got shut down immediately.”

That’s when Lau met Iya Dammons, the executive director at Baltimore Safe Haven, who hired her as the house manager for the organization’s senior home in 2019. Currently, Lau says Baltimore Safe Haven is the only transgender-specific housing provider in Maryland, with five different houses throughout Baltimore and a sixth property underway.

“[Baltimore Safe Haven] is the [only] housing provider for transgender people in the state that [is actually] dedicated to people within the community,” she explains, an issue that persists across the country as housing-insecure trans people of all ages seek safe, dignified shelter and learn that it often doesn’t exist.

For Beth Gombos and Ashton Otte, organizers at Trans Housing Initiative St. Louis (THISL), better access and competent service for the trans community begin with education. THISL works directly with shelters, housing providers, and other entities that might harm trans people or or turn them away.

“We’re training them to learn how to interact with and accept and serve trans and gender-nonconforming people with respect,” says Gombos, who is the organization’s cofounder and executive director.

Typically, this work begins by teaching trans identity 101: gender identity, sex, pronouns, and myth busting. “We start off by trying to build a level of understanding and basic empathy for this community,” says Otte. From there, THISL educates housing providers on anti-discrimination protocol and their responsibility to ensure care and access for the trans community.

Though equitable housing policies are needed at the federal level, trans-led organizations are not waiting for the federal government to take action. They are already taking care of their own.

Sean Ebony Coleman, founder and CEO of the Bronx-based LGBTQ grassroots organization Destination Tomorrow, says housing support goes beyond providing a safe place for unhoused people to be.

 “One of the biggest issues is that everyone’s at a different level when it comes to being ready to access housing, particularly independent living,” says Coleman. “The conventional shelter model has just this one-stop-shop approach, right? It’s just ‘You’re going in, we’re going to house you, you’ll stay for a little while, [and] we’ll try to get you into transitional housing or some type of supportive housing.’ [But they’re] not really going to train you as far as getting better employment or securing a better job or even sending you back to school.”

For Coleman, getting into a shelter is just the first step. Destination Tomorrow’s housing support also includes building wraparound services that consider the care of the entire person, including offering independent living support, career and academic opportunities, culinary training, mental health care, and financial literacy programs.

Corina Berry grew up going to drop-in programs with the Rainbow Youth program at the Peterborough AIDS Resource Network (PARN). Now, she is studying Gender Studies and Social Justice at Trent University, and is the director of PARN’s Rainbow Youth programming. Berry credits the program’s weekly drop-ins and events with helping her find community and friends that had similar experiences as her. But since the U.S. presidential election, concern for Canada’s LGBTQ2S+ communities losing their rights comes up almost every session. “I’m really scared of what the future looks like,” she says. Berry adds that youth should never have to question if their life is worth living because of an election.

Here in Canada, on March 23, Prime Minister Mark Carney called an election to take place on April 28. For many young LGBTQ2S+ voters, this election feels crucial: it’s occurring in the midst of a significant rise in anti-trans and LGBTQ2S+ hate, on the brink of a recession and when Canada’s sovereignty is being questioned. With so much on the line, young queer voters like Berry are extremely worried going into this election. Speaking to young queer voters shows that they also feel exhausted, citing dissatisfaction with the candidates for prime minister, and the prospect of needing to vote strategically to protect their rights as queer people.

This article in the NYT made me curious what other people's experiences were like.

https://archive.ph/ISPSc

In recent years, opponents of trans medicine have increasingly presented themselves not as oppressors—intent on denying care to individuals whose gender identity they reject—but rather as the righteous critics of a corrupt “gender identity industry.” Big Pharma and Big Tech are to blame, they allege, for warping the fragile psyches of vulnerable youth via social media platforms and then selling them expensive, “experimental” puberty-suppressing medications, hormone replacement therapies, and surgeries as salves. This populist-in-form critique has spread rapidly, along with state bans on trans health for minors that now cover over half of the country. Criticisms of this so-called “transgender treatment industry” can be found in conservative states’ litigation defending their bans, as well as in a recent executive order that questioned whether such care might constitute consumer “deception” or “fraud.”

In a forthcoming essay in Signs, I have sought to understand the origins and ideological power of this anti-industry narrative. The fear of a predatory “transgender-industrial complex” clearly draws from due skepticism of industries that many understandably abhor. Pharmaceutical and social media companies do indeed hold dominion over our wallets, health, and attention spans. From there though, the narrative spirals into baseless paranoid suspicions about the perverse motivations of gender identity clinicians and their professional associations, complicit bureaucrats in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and trans subjectivity itself, which in this account is a blend of psychic pathology and a shopping disorder. Perhaps that it why this conspiratorial idea was at first confined to the fringes of the blogosphere—mainly in the writings of gender-critical, anti-transhumanist, and Catholic and Christian fundamentalist authors from around 2018-2021—before right-wing politicians, media outlets, and think tanks adopted a version of the idea to ground their anti-trans scapegoating policies.

Here, I want to focus on one voice in the anti-gender identity industry chorus, the ostensibly libertarian Manhattan Institute, and ask what its leaders and donors might gain from fomenting distrust of healthcare professional associations and bureaucrats. [...]

The Supper Table is a low-barrier food bank and community meal program that tackles food insecurity in downtown Ottawa by serving anyone in need of food, regardless of gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, religion, age, culture, social or economic status.

I sometimes wonder how LGBTQ2S+ community members feel about accessing our food bank. While the Supper Table and its staff and volunteers are very welcoming of LGBTQ2S+ individuals, unfortunately this is not true of all food banks connected to churches and faith-based organizations. I imagine some folks might fear being discriminated against and feel more comfortable visiting a food bank specifically geared toward queer and trans people where they can rest assured they’re entering into a safe and non-judgmental space.

A report released last year by the Department of Health and Society (DHS) at the University of Toronto looked at how LGBTQ2S+ people in the GTA experienced food insecurity during the pandemic. It found that 42 percent, nearly half of survey respondents, reported “some level of household food insecurity (HFI), with severe HFI higher among respondents who were bisexual, transgender/gender diverse and/or assigned-female-at-birth.” The study also showed that perceived discrimination was linked to an increased likelihood of all levels of household food insecurity.

Thankfully, community food banks for queer and trans folks exist in cities across the country. These programs aim to address food insecurity by creating inclusive and safer spaces for LGBTQ2S+ people to access food and find community alongside their peers.

Since 2012, Saige Community Food Bank has been serving individuals in East Vancouver, with a special focus on Two-Spirit, trans, gender-diverse and other marginalized communities who might also be navigating challenges like mental health issues and physical disabilities when accessing government-run food resources. They cultivate a safe, community-based experience for participants to receive healthy food, including fresh produce and higher-end items like baked goods and culturally appropriate foods that might otherwise be out of reach because of what is typically donated to food banks (shelf-stable items that are easy to store). Participants are empowered to select their own food items based on their personal needs and preferences, an approach also known as “the shopping model,” which differs from the pre-selected foods that some food banks provide, and have the opportunity to engage socially with fellow attendees as well as volunteers who function as community resource navigators connecting participants with other service providers and sharing information about local events.

The leader of the defunct “gay furry hacker” group SiegedSec, known for releasing 200 gigabytes of leaked data from the Heritage Foundation last July, may have been the subject of an FBI raid, according to a former member.

“This is about providing not only shelter but access to opportunities they’ve been denied,” Madison told NBC News.

The TS Madison Starter House debuted Monday on Transgender Day of Visibility and will host a cohort of five residents participating in a 90-day program designed to support their reentry into society. Organizers said the program will offer stable housing, gender-affirming health care, job assistance, GED support, life-skills training, nutrition education and individualized therapy.

Madison, known for her reality series “The Ts Madison Experience” on We TV, has long advocated for trans rights. She has also openly discussed overcoming homelessness and survival sex work.

“I wanted to make space for these girls,” she said. “I wanted to teach them how to be successful without relying on their bodies but on their other gifts.”