LGBTQ+

[...]this year, Lowe's ended its participation in surveys conducted by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation's largest LGBTQ organization. Lowe's also shuttered an employee resource group for LGBTQ employees and ended its sponsorship of Pride parades.

A Lowe's spokesperson said the company "will continue to strive to cultivate a workplace that reflects the customers and communities where we operate and where everyone feels welcomed, valued, and respected."

Lowe's is just one of 19 companies that have ended their support of Pride parades, in whole or in part, this year.

The corporate pullback has left several Pride parades short on cash. NYC Pride faces a $750,000 budget gap after losing corporate sponsors. Pride parades in San Francisco and Kansas City are each about $200,000 short. Smaller parades are faring even worse. Eve Keller, co-president of USA Prides, a network of parade organizations, said that "rural Prides are down 70% to 90% when compared to the average year."

People with intellectual and developmental disabilities can be LGBTQ+ and we should be able to express our genders and sexualities. We are just like everyone else and we deserve support to be ourselves!

This guidebook is about understanding the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We wrote this guidebook for supporters, such as family members and service providers, so that they can learn how we want to be treated and supported.

We believe that LGBTQ+ self-advocates are experts on their own lives. This guidebook was written by Pauline, Nora, and Oscar from the Rainbow Support Groups. The information is based on our personal and professional experiences, and interviews with 23 LGBTQ+ adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

You can read this guidebook now by clicking through the arrows and sections on the website. We believe this guidebook could change your life. Thank you for reading!

This year, I told myself, I was going to read for pleasure. I spent most of 2024 engaged in a research project, reading a lot of abstruse theory and depressing news stories about transphobia, and I could not cram any more facts about gender into my head without giving myself an aneurysm. I knew 2025 was going to be a terrible year, with a high toll of human death and suffering, and I wanted to carve out a place for joy, so that I could do my work without suffocating. I figured I would study up for my other gig —I sometimes write comics—and just read a whole lot of comic books. Simple, right?

Nothing in this world is simple. Nothing is free of politics, or of queerness, and comics have been political and queer since the beginning.

Most people’s first association with the term “comic books” is mainstream superhero comics, of the type put out by DC and Marvel, which are a notoriously escapist medium. Superheroes have never been apolitical—Superman, the world’s most powerful immigrant, was created by two Jewish immigrants in 1938 as a reaction to the rise of Nazism; the X-Men were created in the 1960s as an allegory for the civil rights movement—but they are, explicitly, power fantasies. They exist to tell stories about good overcoming evil, or (subtextually) marginalized people overcoming their oppressors. Unlike our world, they come with a built-in guarantee of justice, which is a large part of the appeal.

Yet those comics represent only a fraction of the work being made—and in queer comics, particularly, there is a long history of work that is autobiographical, realistic, organic, grounded and explicitly radical. In the 1980s and ’90s, underground comics like Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist or Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For were upfront and enraged about the realities of queer life at a time when mainstream publishers wouldn’t touch us. Rather than encoding the realities of queer oppression in an allegory, so as to sway straight hearts and minds, they spoke directly to and from the community. In the present-day culture war on trans people, independent and small-press comics like Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer or the web-based Haus of Decline still spark a large share of the conversation.

Larsen is far from alone when it comes to adapting to a new voice following a gender transition. Experts say that of the over 1 million Americans who identify as transgender, an increasing number are turning to gender-affirming vocal care, including hiring voice coaches and even undergoing surgeries.

And a 2018 study in the Language and Linguistics Compass found that vocal cues are an important factor in categorising someone’s gender, “making the voice an enormously important aspect of gender presentation, particularly for those who are transitioning.”

“It was always something that was very important to me – having a voice that matches my body,” says Alaina Kupec, founder and President of GRACE, a trans-focused nonprofit. “As soon as I spoke, if the sound didn’t match the appearance, then the incongruence was very challenging,” she told Uncloseted Media.

Like Larsen, many trans men change their voice by taking testosterone, which causes a thickening of the vocal cords and creates a deeper-sounding voice.

But for transgender women, estrogen does not change their voice. That’s why there’s a growing industry of coaches who help people with this aspect of the transition.

Voice teacher Brittani Farrell compares relearning how to use your voice after a gender transition to “relearning how to walk with a prosthesis after having your leg amputated.”

Transphobic right-wing broadcaster Matt Walsh has received death threats and criticism after a video resurfaced of him mocking trans people’s suicides. His comments resurfaced shortly after the suicide of Charlotte Fosgate, a 17-year-old trans teen whose body was discovered by Oregon rescue divers after she published two Twitter posts suggesting that she would jump off a bridge.

The author announced in a Saturday post to X, formerly Twitter, that she would be founding the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, using her personal fortune. The website for the group states that it “offers legal funding support to individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.”

“I looked into all options and a private fund is the most efficient, streamlined way for me to do this,” she said. “Lots of people are offering to contribute, which I truly appreciate, but there are many other women’s rights orgs that could do with the money, so donate away, just not to me!”

I wasn’t introduced to Ntozake Shange’s work and didn’t learn about the political and cultural significance of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf until I was a graduate student and had the opportunity to read her 1975 choreopoem. for colored girls is a Black girl’s song, an ancient yet contemporary tune that allows a Black girl like me to begin to know herself, see herself. It allows Black girls to become familiar with their own voices, souls, and genders.

Shange’s work enlightened me to the complexities of living within the intersection of gender and race, and how those complexities related to the life chances and choices for me as a Black lesbian woman. Although I had been living within this identity all of my life, I had not yet thought about my existence theoretically: how my reality was interconnected with those who came before me and with those who would come after me.

Shange’s work showed me how my sociopolitical embodiment directly affected my ability to even dream about something as universal as love. Like Shange’s characters, I would have to navigate a racist, homophobic, and sexist world that chose not to recognize my humanity, nor my fragility as a sentient being in ways it did for others. Through its words I realized that I wasn’t the only Black girl, now woman, grappling with these realities.

Each color of the rainbow was intended to represent the diversity and solidarity of our communities, visually capturing our nuances, our differences and sameness, and our complex identities. The flag was created as a symbol to not only spread love and inclusivity but also to counter sexual and gendered regulation within mainstream society. Leaders, community change makers, and inclusive businesses display the flag in stores, offices, and schools as a symbol of solidarity with LGBTQ+ folks and to express their support and welcome of people belonging to such communities.

However, throughout time, some of the most vulnerable yet resilient people within our communities have not found the rainbow marker to symbolize diversity, inclusion, or solidarity. For many, it has symbolized terror—racialized and gendered terror to be specific—causing many to disidentify from the flag’s symbolism, use, and consumption.

For example, in 1973 when Sylvia Rivera took the stage at one of the first gay Pride parades and celebrations in New York, she was booed, told to “shut up,” misgendered, and subjected to objects being thrown at her by the mostly white, mostly cis, and strikingly racist audience. She repeatedly stated, “Y’all better quiet down.”

Signature collection to BAN CONVERSION PRACTICES in European Union ends tomorrow (May 17)❗

This is in support of the LGBTQ+ community.
The signature collection is still ~113000 votes short, and many countries did not pass the threshold yet!
Please consider signing 🖊️ and sharing 🔁 .

Any EU national, including living abroad, can vote, if above minimum age (18 or 16, depends on the country)

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home
@lgbtq_plus

Specifcally, people from:

• germany (49.9%)
• sweden (49.96%)
• austria (25.5%)
• Slovenia (83.14%)
• portugal (24.46%)

Should sign.

Never before have I seen such a fusion of hate and brainwashing unfold on TV. But much of it veers so far off into the absurd (think girl being accused of being trans in a softball game for the length of her hair and "being really good") that it's fertile ground for Oliver.

Have you seen softball players? There should have been no surprise here. I ... uh ... have a bit of experience. But pick the right complaint as scaremongering conservatives! They're not all transitioning ... anecdotally, they tend to marry their female boss at The Sports Authority.

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."