via TMZ Sports, with Yahoo Sports, Attitude, and obituaries from NBA.com and NPR.

Jason Collins died on May 12 of this year, at 47, of stage 4 glioblastoma, eight months after his family said publicly that there was a tumor. This week his will surfaced in court records, and it turns out he sat down and signed it in October 2025. One month after the announcement. Seven months before the end.

There is something about that timing that keeps snagging. A man who spent thirteen seasons setting screens for other people, the most thankless job on a basketball floor, gets the worst news available and his response is to get the paperwork in order so nobody has to guess.

what the will actually says

More than $1.8 million in personal property, with more possibly sitting in private trusts that a probate filing would not show. It goes to his parents, his twin brother Jarron, a cousin, an aunt, and his husband, William Brunson Green, whom he married in Austin in May 2025. His aunt Teri is executor, with Green and Jarron named as alternates.

And then there is the detail that reads like him. The will points to a handwritten note kept in a safe-deposit box that sets out who gets the jewelry, the watches, the silverware, the clothes, the cars. He did not want the small things fought over. He wanted somebody to open a box and find a list.

the two names at the bottom

Two organizations are named alongside the family: Glisten, formerly GLSEN, and the Point Foundation. Both work with LGBTQ students, and neither of them is a name you pull off a chart of reputable charities on a bad afternoon.

GLSEN gave Collins its Courage Award in 2013, the year he came out and became the first openly gay active player in a major American men's league. He joined the Point Foundation's honorary board in 2014. He gave to the two groups that had been in his life since the week his life changed, and he gave to the ones that work with teenagers, which is a fairly specific choice for a man who was 34 when he finally said it out loud and had to do it in Sports Illustrated because there was nowhere else to do it.

what the year did

Married in May 2025. Diagnosis announced that September. Will signed in October. He wrote about the glioblastoma himself in an ESPN essay that December, which was characteristic, since he never seemed to think anything about his own life was too private to be useful to somebody else. Then May.

He got the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage at this year's ESPYs, posthumously, and Jarron went up to take it. The LGBTQ Sports Hall of Fame gave him the 2026 Glenn Burke Award. Both of those are lovely and neither is the point of this particular document, which is a much smaller and more ordinary thing: a man with a year left, a pen, and a list of everybody he meant to look after.

The leagues are still working out what they are willing to do for us in public, and mostly landing on less every season, which is why Dallas fans had to throw their own Pride Night this month after the Stars dropped theirs. Collins did not wait for anybody's calendar. He never really did.

via The Washington Post, reported out by The Hill, with Mediaite, the Washington Examiner and The Advocate.

Senator Jon Husted of Ohio hired a 25-year-old named Stephen Woytek to run political operations for his reelection campaign in August. On Friday, the Washington Post called the campaign to ask about Woytek's Facebook profile photo. By the end of the day Woytek did not work there anymore, which is a hiring process running in reverse and at roughly four times the speed.

what the post actually found

The profile photo, set in 2018, showed soldiers of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, the division that started life as Hitler's personal bodyguard. Not a generic wartime picture. That specific unit.

Then there is the Spotify account carrying Woytek's name and photograph, which made a public playlist titled "Tales From Rhodesia," described in the blurb as "homesick for a place that no longer exists." Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe. The place that no longer exists is white minority rule, and the playlist includes a song containing a racial slur for African soldiers. Woytek also does historical reenactment, portraying both the SS division and Union soldiers in the Civil War, and told the Post he does not embrace Nazi ideology and takes part to educate younger generations. Every reenactor we have met found a way to teach the youth that did not require the bodyguard division specifically.

who husted is when nobody is calling

The reason this lands on our desk and not just the politics desk is the man who signed the hire. Equality Ohio gave Husted a D in 2018. He voted for Ohio's same-sex marriage bans in the state House in 2003. In December 2023 he publicly went after Governor Mike DeWine for vetoing the SAFE Act, the bill that would have pulled trans kids out of girls' sports and cut off gender-affirming care for minors. He championed House Bill 8, which makes schools notify parents when a child identifies as LGBTQ and lets parents pull their kids out of anything touching sexuality. His defense of it, to The Advocate: "It's about creating the right kind of culture in our state."

Appointed in January 2025 to finish JD Vance's term, Husted now faces Sherrod Brown in November. He is running on the right kind of culture. The right kind of culture ran his field program until a reporter picked up a phone.

the part about the timing

Nobody at that campaign looked at a Facebook profile before handing a man the political director job. The picture had been sitting there since 2018, publicly, on the internet, where pictures live. The firing was not a discovery. It was a response to being observed, and those are different events that happen to look alike from the outside.

Ohio, meanwhile, keeps producing the other thing too. Two people in that state started with a $500 grant and shipped 580 boxes of care to trans Ohioans this year, which is roughly the entire ideological range of one state in two items.

via Reuters, with background from NBC News, Human Rights Watch and France 24.

Péter Magyar has been prime minister of Hungary since May, which is long enough that people had started asking the obvious question out loud: you won, so when does any of it actually come off the books? On Saturday, at a briefing in Budapest, he finally named one. The 2020 adoption rule, the one that took gay parents out of Hungarian law without ever using the word gay, is going.

He framed it as a competence problem rather than a civil rights one, which is its own kind of tell. The decision in an adoption case, he said, should not rest with "the minister, a politician," but with "professionals capable of determining the conditions" a child needs to grow into a happy adult. No dates. No bill number. Just the first brick anyone in this government has agreed to touch.

what the 2020 rule actually does

It is a beautiful piece of bureaucratic nastiness, and worth understanding, because it never says what it does. Hungary has never allowed same-sex couples to adopt jointly. What it allowed, up to 2020, was for one partner to apply as a single person, and everybody involved understood the arrangement. So Orbán's Fidesz did not ban gay adoption. It passed a law requiring every single-person applicant to be personally signed off by the family affairs minister, and let the minister's inbox do the rest.

That went through in December 2020 alongside a constitutional amendment redefining a family as a mother who is a woman and a father who is a man. We covered the same device running in the other direction earlier this month, when Ecuador's courts told single gay people they could not adopt either. The wording changes country to country. The mechanism does not.

what magyar did not say

Everything else. The 2021 law restricting how schools, broadcasters and advertisers may show gay and trans people is still standing, even after the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in April that it violates EU law by stigmatizing and marginalizing the people it names. In June, France 24 found no repeal timeline at all. The 2025 constitutional amendment allowing the government to ban LGBTQ public events, which passed 140 votes to 21 and put a year in prison on the table for Pride organizers, is also still there.

he has the votes and is choosing the order

Magyar's Tisza party has 141 of 199 parliamentary seats. He does not lack the votes. He is choosing his order, and he has chosen to start with the quietest, most technical, least chantable item on the list, the one that can be sold to a Hungarian voter as taking politics out of a children's file rather than as doing anything for us. Fine. Bulgaria's top court got there through paperwork too. We have learned to take the win in whatever grammar it arrives in.

Somewhere in Budapest there is a lesbian couple who filed as one person years ago and have been waiting on a minister's signature ever since. They are the point. Not the briefing.

via The Buckeye Flame, reported by H.L. Comeriato, and The Advocate.

Ohio banned most gender-affirming medical care for trans young people in 2024, including most talk and family therapy, and the clinics across the state stopped treating them. Nobody replaced any of it. What happened instead is that Ohioans went looking, and what they found was two people in Jacksonville, Florida.

what a build-a-queer kit holds

The Queer Trans Project was started in 2021 by Cielo Sunsarae and Alexis Williams with a $500 grant. It gives away free customized care packages called Build-a-Queer kits. You pick what goes in: chest binders, packing underwear, GenderGrip tape, silicone packers, chest forms, gaffs, makeup, health bundles. There is no standard masculine box and no standard feminine box, which is the point of letting a person fill it in themselves. Community members write letters by hand and those go in too.

Since 2021 the project has sent out more than $1 million in gender-affirming items, to all fifty states and the territories.

This year in Ohio alone: more than 580 kits, worth close to $30,000 in supplies, and more than 20,000 visits to the website from people in the state. Williams told the Buckeye Flame that the organization does no marketing in Ohio. The traffic is organic, mostly off social media and Reddit. People are finding it and telling each other.

why trans ohioans thought it was a scam

It took years for that to be possible at all. "Trans people thought we were a scam and that we were going to take the information and harm them," Williams said. Which is a rational thing to think, if you are a trans person in a state that has spent several years passing laws about you, and a stranger on the internet offers to mail you a box.

Williams also named the gap nobody funds: "People aren't seeing the importance of social transition, like using binders and packers." Everything in the fight is aimed at prescriptions and surgery. A binder is not a prescription. It is forty dollars, it is the difference between leaving the house and not, and there is no law that can ban a shipping label.

the pilots who fly people out

The project also partners with Elevated Access, a network of volunteer pilots who fly trans and non-binary people, free, to healthcare outside their own county or state. Small planes, ordinary pilots, no charge.

None of this is a substitute for a clinic, and nobody there pretends it is. Ohio is not finished either: HB 838, from Republican Rep. Josh Williams of Sylvania Township, would make it the tenth state to bar Medicaid from covering gender-affirming care for trans adults.

Still. Two people, five hundred dollars, and five years later a state that took the clinics away is getting five hundred and eighty boxes anyway.

via Bloomberg, carried by Insurance Journal, and WFMD.

Good news first, because it is rare and it is a number.

At Nike's annual shareholder meeting on September 8, a proposal aimed at the company's trans healthcare coverage failed. Not narrowly. The preliminary tabulation had it under one percent of the votes cast, according to WFMD's account of the meeting.

Now the part worth paying attention to, which is not Nike.

who inspire investing is

The proposal came from Inspire Investing, which describes itself as the country's largest provider of Christian-based exchange-traded funds and oversees $5.4 billion. It was filed through Bowyer Research on behalf of a shareholder named William C. Cunningham, who holds 154 shares of Nike Class B stock. One hundred and fifty-four shares. That is the entry fee for putting a question on the ballot of a company worth a hundred billion dollars, and it is worth knowing how cheap the door is.

The ask was dressed as transparency: evaluate and report on the risks of Nike's charitable partnerships and its practices around what the filing calls gender ideology and transgender medical interventions for minors. Underneath it was Nike's perfect score of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index, and the question of whether the employee health plan covers gender-transition care for minors.

the 242 companies on the list

That index is the targeting list. Inspire is running a campaign against 242 large employers, pulled from the companies that scored highest on it. The coalition behind it includes the Southern Baptists and the state of Nebraska, and represents more than $100 billion under management. Scoring well on a corporate equality survey is now how you get on a list.

Inspire says Walmart and Charles Schwab have both confirmed to it that they do not cover gender-transition surgeries for minors. Neither company responded to requests for comment, so take that as a claim rather than a fact.

Nike's board told shareholders to vote no, and said its charitable partnerships are approved "only after a robust due diligence review of the proposed recipient organization." The company declined to comment on a separate EEOC investigation into its diversity practices.

Tim Schwarzenberger, Inspire's portfolio manager and director of corporate engagement, was at the meeting and was unbothered afterwards. "Most shareholder proposals do not receive majority support, so that was not a surprise." He also said this, which is the sentence to file away: "For me, what resonates is forgiveness. If companies make changes, we need to applaud them."

what forgiveness means here

Forgiveness, here, means a company quietly editing its health plan. Applause is what you get for it.

So: a win, honestly counted. Fewer than one in a hundred Nike votes went with them. But this was never a vote they expected to carry, and 241 other companies have the same meeting coming. The strategy is not to win the ballot. It is to make the proposal arrive every single year until the legal department decides the coverage is more trouble than the people who use it.

via The Colorado Sun, reported by John Ingold, and The Advocate.

A judge in Denver emptied her own courtroom this week so that doctors could say out loud why they will not write a prescription.

Denver District Court Judge Ericka F. H. Englert closed the proceedings to the public and the press while physicians testified in the contempt trial against Children's Hospital Colorado. The doctors had asked for anonymity. Their reason, per the Colorado Sun, was that they are afraid of being punished by the federal government for the care they used to give.

That is the whole story in one image. American physicians testifying about their own patients from behind a closed door, in a state where the care is legal and a court has ordered them to provide it.

the order children's colorado won

Here is how a hospital ends up on trial for not doing what it won.

Children's suspended gender-affirming care for trans kids in December, after federal funding threats. Four transgender young people and their families sued, saying the hospital discriminated against them when it stopped writing prescriptions for patients under 18. In May, the Colorado Supreme Court issued an injunction: the hospital is prohibited from refusing medically necessary gender-affirming care. Four months later, nothing has resumed.

The hospital's explanation is a jurisdictional shrug. The doctors are not employed by Children's. They work for the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine, and they have refused to start prescribing again because they believe they could face civil sanctions or criminal charges from the federal government. So the hospital is under a court order, the doctors are not, and the children are in the gap.

The case now carries class-action status covering hundreds of patients under 18, represented by attorneys John McHugh and Paula Greisen. If Judge Englert finds the hospital intentionally violated her court's orders, the fines run to $50,000 a day.

a second federal investigation

Then on Thursday the hospital's lawyers put something new on the record. There is a second federal investigation. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. referred Children's over an allegation in the agency's "Wolves in White Coats" report: that the hospital billed for puberty blockers for patients aged 9 to 17 using the wrong diagnosis codes. A coding complaint, arriving while the hospital is in court for not treating the same children.

Children's response: "We take our obligations related to billing, coding and regulatory compliance seriously, and we have no evidence of any billing improprieties."

Its attorney, Elliot Peters, put it less carefully, and better. He called what is happening "a reign of terror by the federal government against transgender care providers."

terror does not need a law

He is describing his own client's behavior as well, whether he means to or not. Terror works by not needing a law. There is no statute making it a crime to prescribe a puberty blocker in Colorado. There is a state Supreme Court injunction saying you must. What there is instead is an investigation, then a second investigation, then a report with a title written for a press release, and a set of doctors who have done the arithmetic and decided their licences and their liberty are worth more than somebody else's kid.

the mothers who testified

Meanwhile, in the part of the courtroom that stayed open, mothers testified. Their children cannot get hormone therapy or puberty blockers at the hospital that is under orders to provide them. Some families are driving out of state.

The hearing continued Friday. A third day is scheduled for late next week.

via Washington Blade, PinkNews and The Hacker News.

In April 2018 a Norwegian non-profit research group called SINTEF pulled apart what Grindr was sending out of your phone, and found, sitting in the stream alongside the usual advertising sludge, two fields.

HIV status. Date last tested.

They were going to two analytics companies, Apptimize and Localytics. Not leaked. Not hacked. Shipped, so somebody could optimise a screen.

the 26 million pound settlement

Grindr has now agreed to pay 26 million pounds, about 35 million dollars, to end the British lawsuit that came out of it.

The claim was filed at the High Court of England and Wales in April 2024 by the firm Austen Hays, for thousands of UK users, a figure reported between 10,000 and 12,000 depending on who is counting. PinkNews puts the average at £2,167 a head if it is divided evenly. Grindr disclosed the deal in a filing on September 2 and pays in two halves: 13 million pounds by December 31 this year, 13 million more by March 31 next.

The company's line: "The settlement includes no findings or admission of liability. While Grindr disputes the allegations, it recognizes and acknowledges the distress and loss of trust expressed by some of its UK users regarding that pre-2020 period."

what grindr's statement leaves out

Some of its UK users. That pre-2020 period. Translated: different management, ancient history, everybody move along.

The different management part is at least partly true, and worth being fair about. The conduct sits in the years when the app was owned by Kunlun, the Chinese gaming company that sold it to San Vicente Acquisition in 2020, largely because Washington decided a Chinese firm holding the intimate data of millions of American men was a national security problem. It was. It was also, and this is the bit nobody in that particular argument seemed to care about, a problem for the men.

Norway's own data protection authority had already fined Grindr over the same practices in January 2021, a penalty later reduced. So this is the second body to land on it, and the company still has not said it did anything wrong.

why hiv status is not a preference

Here is why it is not a filing technicality. HIV status is not a preference toggle. For plenty of men it is the single fact that decides whether they keep a job, hold a visa, tell their mother, or in some countries stay out of a police cell. Grindr asked for it inside a product sold on the promise that it was a safer place to be honest than the street outside, and then let it ride in a data packet to a vendor nobody had ever heard of.

£2,167 is real money and it is not the point. The point is that the app always knew exactly what it was holding.

Log in tonight anyway. Just do it knowing the terms.

via PinkNews, HuffPost UK and reality blurred.

Season eight of RuPaul's Drag Race UK premiered last week. New episodes go out on BBC iPlayer every Thursday. It is Thursday.

On Wednesday the BBC confirmed that this season is the last one it will make.

what the bbc actually said

The statement is a small masterpiece of the form. "As the BBC continues to navigate significant financial pressures and deliver the savings required of us, we have had to make some very difficult choices, none of which have been taken lightly." Eight seasons since 2019, plus three of UK vs the World, cancelled in the passive voice by an unnamed spokesperson while the current run is still going out weekly to people who have no idea yet.

And it is not the first difficult choice of the year. The BBC already cut I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl, citing "difficult choices in light of our funding challenges," which is the same sentence with the nouns shuffled. Line them up and the public broadcaster has now dropped essentially every queer entertainment format it had, one individually defensible decision at a time, and collectively a shape you can see from orbit.

world of wonder picks it up

Now the good news, because there is real good news.

On Thursday World of Wonder confirmed the show survives. "Hot off the heels of the iconic Season 8 premiere, a new era of Drag Race UK is on the way!" the company posted. "Starting next Fall, RuPaul's Drag Race UK is heading to its new home on WOW Presents Plus with the series premiere of RuPaul's Drag Race UK All Stars!"

There has never been a UK All Stars. That is a genuine first, arriving in autumn 2027. And the back catalogue travels with it: World of Wonder says all eight seasons of Drag Race UK and all three seasons of UK vs the World will be on WOW Presents Plus almost everywhere, and available to members in the UK for the first time.

what leaving the bbc costs

Read the trade honestly though, because it is a real one. A show that lived on the license fee was free at the point of use for anybody in Britain with a telly and a login. It is now moving behind a subscription. Drag Race UK on the BBC meant a fifteen-year-old in a town with no gay bar could watch drag queens on the same platform as the six o'clock news, filed under normal. That is what a public broadcaster is for, and it is the one thing a niche streamer, however good the show turns out to be, structurally cannot do.

Andy Dehnart at reality blurred asked the question the new era now has to answer: "Will the new era include a winner of the main show who is not white?"

So the queens have a home, autumn 2027 is a long way off, and season eight is on tonight. The correct response to a cancellation notice this week is to go and watch the thing they cancelled.

via The Advocate, PinkNews, NPR and Al Jazeera.

Every so often the mask does not slip. It gets handed to the coat check.

On Wednesday night, September 9, at the Republican Party's first national midterm convention at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Donald Trump got onto the subject of trans women and girls in sport, misgendered them for a while, and then said the working part out loud into a live microphone in front of a filled arena's worth of cameras.

"I don't like to do it much before the election," he said. "I like to wait about a week before the election."

He went on to explain that he was raising it early this time only because he is worried the Democrats might move on the issue. The word he used was petrified. And then:

"That will really hurt us. That's one of our great sound bites of all time."

what a sound bite actually means

Sit with the grammar of that. Not a conviction. Not a worry about anybody's daughter. A sound bite, with a shelf life, best deployed about seven days out. And the risk he is bracing for is not that a trans kid gets hurt. It is that the other side stops letting him use them.

He also told the room the issue runs "99 to one," which is not a number, it is a mood. Gallup asked in May 2025 and got 69 percent saying trans athletes should compete according to their sex at birth against 30 percent for gender identity. That is a real majority against us and there is no point pretending otherwise. It is also nowhere near 99 to one, and the distance between those two figures is the entire con. He needs it unanimous, because a mood you can argue with is a mood that stops working.

the gallup and glaad numbers

Then the numbers that actually explain the evening. GLAAD surveyed more than 5,000 adults in June: 8 percent named trans issues as a top concern, while 44 percent said inflation, and 70 percent said they would rather have a candidate focused on affordability. The Human Rights Campaign's post-2024 polling found 64 percent of voters remembered the anti-trans advertising and 4 percent said it moved their vote. The Financial Times and Focaldata have his approval at 33 percent, with 57 percent of voters saying they are worse off financially.

So: a man in a 21,000-seat arena with visible empty rows, calling it packed, reaching for the one bit he is sure still lands, while the Republicans in genuinely competitive races found somewhere else to be. Susan Collins and Dan Sullivan both skipped it.

believe him, then use it

Being called a sound bite by the president of the United States is degrading, and it is also, at long last, honest. He has told everybody who was still doing him the courtesy of assuming he means it that he does not mean it. The care that got pulled, the kid who quit the team, the family that moved states: that was the marketing spend.

Believe him. Then go put it in an ad.

via Variety, carried by Them, with the response given to Entertainment Weekly.

HBO's Harry Potter series arrives in December with J.K. Rowling as an executive producer, which means a lot of people spent the summer quietly working out what they were going to do about that. Watch it and say nothing. Watch it and feel bad. Pirate it, which is the compromise everybody's group chat landed on and nobody wants examined.

what wachowski actually said

On Friday Lilly Wachowski took the option nobody takes, which is to answer the question directly.

Asked by Variety about the show, the co-director of The Matrix, Bound and V for Vendetta said this:

"She is funding trans genocide. J.K. Rowling funds trans genocide, full stop. So, if you support Harry Potter, you're supporting trans genocide."

She did not leave it as a slogan. She built out the mechanism, which is the part that made it travel: "The money that goes into you enjoying these products, a portion of that money goes to J.K. Rowling and that money goes into her funding anti-trans legislation all over the world."

Then she put it next to a consumer decision people already accept as normal. "In the same way that if you are against Elon Musk, you boycott or don't buy Tesla; and if you're against global warming, you try not to buy as much gas, you try to mitigate your use of these products. It's simple math. So, your enjoyment of these shows, and continued support of these shows, is supporting my eradication."

On Musk she was shorter. "There is a one-to-one connection between Elon Musk and the Nazi community. He did a full-blown Sieg Heil on a national stage." And on both of them: "These people are Nazis. They're literal Nazis."

what the rowling women's fund does

The factual spine under the argument is Rowling's money. In 2025 she established the J.K. Rowling Women's Fund, which its own website says offers legal funding to people and organizations "fighting to retain women's sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces." In April 2025 the UK Supreme Court ruled on the meaning of "woman" in the Equality Act 2010, in a case brought by For Women Scotland, a group Rowling has funded.

rowling's agent answered the same evening

The response came fast, which tells you it landed.

By that evening Rowling's agent, Neil Blair, had given a statement to Entertainment Weekly. He opened on speech: "Freedom of speech is a principle we should all cherish." Then the correction: through the fund, he said, Rowling "supports women taking legal action in the UK to preserve their existing rights under the Equality Act 2010," and "she does not support legal actions aimed at harming transgender people or efforts to limit trans rights." He finished by saying allegations of this kind, invoking Nazis and genocide, should never be presented as fact when they are fabricated and unevidenced.

So that is the disagreement, stated plainly by both sides, and we are not going to pretend to adjudicate a defamation question in a newsletter. What we will say is that Blair's defense and Wachowski's charge are not actually about the same thing. He is arguing about intent. She is arguing about where the money ends up. You can believe a person means only to preserve one group's rights and still track what her legal fund pays for.

why it matters that it was her

The other thing worth noticing is who said it. Wachowski is not a commentator with a podcast. She co-directed one of the most influential films ever made about becoming yourself, and she has spent this year saying publicly that Hollywood will not finance her $10 million thriller because the cast is trans. The woman being told there is no money for her movies is telling you exactly where the money is going instead.

December is three months out. Everybody gets to decide what they do about it.

via Global News, Xtra Magazine and Them.

Alberta passed a law in December 2024 that stops doctors in the province from prescribing puberty blockers or hormone therapy to trans kids under 16. Premier Danielle Smith said the point was to preserve young people's fertility. Late last year her government reached for the notwithstanding clause, the provision in Canada's Charter that lets a legislature switch off a rights challenge, so that nobody could take the law to court and win.

So the fight moved somewhere a premier cannot follow.

what saddle lake cree nation declared

On Wednesday, at a gathering marking 150 years of Treaty 6, the Saddle Lake Cree Nation announced it is asserting its own jurisdiction over health care on its lands, and that gender-affirming care is part of it. Not only for its members. For any Albertan who can get there.

The legal hook is a single phrase written into Treaty 6 in 1876. The Crown promised that a medicine chest would be kept at the agent's house for the use of the people. For a century and a half, First Nations have read that clause as a treaty promise of comprehensive health care, and Saddle Lake is now reading gender-affirming care into it. A nineteenth-century sentence about a box of supplies, aimed at a twenty-first-century ban on hormones.

Chief Dale Steinhauer did not hedge. "Canada cannot make laws for us or on our behalf," she said, per Xtra. "Actions speak louder than words. Treaty and our laws in our jurisdiction must be considered."

And, per Global News: "All children, including trans and two-spirit children and their family, will have safety under our treaty."

The plan is practical rather than symbolic. Saddle Lake sits a couple of hours northeast of Edmonton, near St. Paul, and its leaders know what happens if every trans family in Alberta drives to one reserve at once. So they intend to build virtual health hubs alongside in-person care, and they are drafting their own health law and fundraising to do it. The Nation says clinicians who provide care on its lands would be shielded from sanction by their provincial regulatory colleges, on the argument that those lands sit outside Alberta's jurisdiction.

That last part is the whole gamble, and it is unsettled law.

what premier smith said back

Smith's response was a shrug with a dare inside it. She told CBC News that the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta "will continue to support regulated members in understanding their professional responsibilities within the bounds of applicable legislation, including laws that apply to the treaty rights of First Nations." At a press conference she got closer to what she meant: "They are an independent nation, so I'll be interested to see if they're able to attract a doctor to do that."

Which is a fair question and it already has an answer with a name on it.

a doctor prepared to lose his license

Dr. James Makokis, a Two-Spirit family physician and a member of Saddle Lake, spoke at the announcement. "It's really important for us as individual clinicians, as individual physicians, as citizens of this democratic country known as Canada, for people to stand up," he said, in comments reported by CBC News. "Sometimes that means as individuals we have to risk losing some of our own individual freedoms, and in my case that could be my medical licence."

A doctor saying out loud that he is prepared to lose his license over this is the least abstract thing anybody has said about Alberta's ban since it passed.

what is not settled

Two things to hold at once, because we are not going to oversell this. Nobody has tested whether a First Nation's health law beats a provincial one on this question, no clinic has opened, the money is not raised, and the province has every incentive to litigate. This could take years and it could lose.

But look at the shape of it. A government used the notwithstanding clause specifically so that no court could tell it no, and the answer came back from a nation whose claim does not run through the Charter at all. It runs through a treaty older than the province. You cannot switch off a treaty with a clause.

And Two-Spirit people were on this continent long before the people who wrote laws about them. Saddle Lake is not adopting anything. It is declining to forget.

via CT Insider, reported by Cris Villalonga-Vivoni, with The Connecticut Mirror and the Justice Department's own announcement.

When the Justice Department announced on August 5 that Connecticut Children's Medical Center had agreed to stop providing gender-affirming care to minors, it gave the public a press release and three quotes about protecting America's children. What it did not give anyone was the agreement.

Now we have it, and the number at the center of it is small enough to be insulting.

sixty thousand dollars, and ten years

$60,000. That is what the Hartford hospital is paying the federal government, of which $30,000 is restitution. For that, Connecticut Children's has agreed not to provide what the agreement calls "sex-rejecting therapies" to anyone under 18 for the next ten years. Puberty blockers, hormone therapy, surgery, and any non-exempted clinical intervention. It is also barred from referring a patient to anybody else who would provide them.

The hospital denies any wrongdoing. The agreement says the United States is "not bringing an enforcement action based on any violation of civil, administrative, or criminal law as a result of its investigation." So: no finding, no charge, no admission. Ten years anyway.

how the documents surfaced

The documents surfaced because two state legislators went and got them. Sen. Matt Lesser and Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, the co-chairs of Connecticut's human services committee, sent the hospital a letter demanding the agreement and every piece of correspondence with the DOJ, with a subpoena waiting behind it. They met with administrators this week and were handed the file. Lesser gave it to CT Insider.

He is not doing diplomacy about it. "CCMC seems to be, again, trying to shamefully appease the administration in the hopes that they will buy some goodwill," Lesser said. "I just find that unlikely to work."

Here is what he found inside.

the investigation was about billing codes

The investigation was not about medicine. It was about billing codes. The DOJ went looking at whether the hospital submitted Medicaid reimbursements for gender dysphoria treatment under the wrong diagnosis code. Everything downstream of that, the decade, the fund, the audits, hangs off a coding dispute the government then declined to charge anyone over.

The hospital had to set aside $500,000 and stand up a specialized unit to provide free "evaluation, management, discontinuation, reversal, or treatment for or modification of the effects of prior" care. A detransition clinic, funded by the hospital, for patients under 19.

It has to file regular reports to the federal government on its "reasonable efforts" to comply, which may include an annual audit of billing codes for every trans patient under 18 it treats for mental health or reversal services.

And it has agreed to cooperate in federal investigations of pharmacy companies, handing over records of communications between its own employees and drug manufacturers about gender-affirming care. That is the clause Lesser keeps circling back to. A children's hospital in Hartford is now a source of documents for whatever the administration wants to do to a pharmaceutical company next.

Then there is the part that gives the whole thing away.

the same drugs, for kids who are not trans

The agreement, Lesser says, "explicitly permits" Connecticut Children's to keep providing those same treatments to children who are not transgender. Puberty blockers go to kids with precocious puberty. Hormones go to kids whose bodies are not producing their own. Same drug, same shelf, same hospital, same age. The only thing that changes is who is asking. Lesser calls that "explicit discrimination," and it is difficult to construct a reading where he is wrong. A safety argument that evaporates the moment the patient is cisgender was never a safety argument.

Connecticut Children's is the third hospital to sign a deal like this, after Texas Children's and the Cleveland Clinic, and a fourth followed when Mount Sinai settled this month. But Lesser points out what makes this one different: Connecticut is a blue state with strong nondiscrimination law, and gender-affirming care is legal and protected here.

"Connecticut has strong laws, and it's possible that they're willing to, you know, roll the dice, and they think it's easier to break state law than to stand up against the federal administration," Lesser said. "That's their calculation, and I think that is maybe true in the short term, but it's not going to work out for them in the long run."

The hospital's position, given to CT Insider previously, is that the settlement's goal was to protect patient information from disclosure. Its spokesperson told the CT Mirror in September that Connecticut Children's "did not turn over any patient protected health information to the federal government during this investigation or settlement process." Both things can be true and the kids are still cut off, which is the sentence we have now written about four hospitals.

the families left with nowhere to go

Because the families are the hole in this document. Connecticut Children's and Yale-New Haven both wound down their programs in June of last year, leaving a state that protects this care with essentially nobody providing it. Ten families filed a complaint with the state's Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. Nothing in the agreement does anything for any of them. There is no transition plan, no referral, no money for the people who lost their doctor.

Lesser says he has heard of at least one constituent who died after losing care at CCMC over the last year.

And the deal buys nothing. "There is nothing in the agreement that prevents the administration from taking another bite of the apple," Lesser said. "So, (CCMC) will tell you all of the bad things that didn't happen in the agreement, but absolutely no commitment from DOJ or from the administration not to come right back at them on the same issue or something else."

Ten years is longer than a presidency. It is longer than two. A kid who was fourteen when this was signed will be twenty-four before the hospital that treated them is allowed to treat someone like them again, and the people who agreed to that got the number down to sixty thousand dollars.

via ABC News (Australia) and PinkNews.

Roxanne Tickle downloaded an app for women and then spent five years of her life in court about it.

the high court said no

On Thursday the High Court of Australia refused Sall Grover special leave to appeal, with costs. That is the end of it. There is no court above that one. The refusal reads like a closing door: there was "no reason to doubt the Full Court's construction of the relevant section of the legislation," and "Any appeal dependent on the demonstration of error in the Full Court's construction of those provisions has insufficient prospects of success to warrant a grant of special leave to appeal."

Insufficient prospects of success. No hearing, no rerun, nothing left to try.

what giggle for girls did

The facts underneath are small and the stakes never were. In 2021 Tickle was removed from Giggle for Girls, a women-only social app, after a human being looked at her selfie and made a call. Grover, the founder, shut the app down in 2022. In August 2024 Justice Robert Bromwich of the Federal Court found the exclusion unlawful and awarded $10,000, the first time an Australian court had ruled on gender identity discrimination since the Sex Discrimination Act was amended in 2013.

Grover appealed, and it went worse for her. In May 2026 the Full Court, Justices Melissa Perry, Wendy Abraham and Geoffrey Kennett, went further than the original judgment had: not indirect discrimination but direct, twice over, including the refusal to let Tickle back onto the app. They doubled the damages to $20,000, made up of $12,000 general and $8,000 aggravated, and noted that some of Grover's conduct at trial had been "gratuitous, disrespectful and unnecessary" and had done nothing for her defense.

Tickle, after that ruling: "I now look forward to getting on with the rest of my life in the community we all know and love. One that embraces freedom and equality for all women."

Grover said on social media she was "absolutely devastated" and that "it is women who are being discriminated against."

what the ruling actually establishes

Twenty thousand Australian dollars is about eleven thousand pounds. It was never the money. What Tickle now has is a ruling that a country's highest court has declined to reopen, in the flattest institutional language available to it, and the finding underneath it is that the Sex Discrimination Act covers gender identity in the provision of goods and services. Not as a gesture. As settled law, in a jurisdiction where the argument had never been tested before she tested it.

She said it herself in October 2024, with the appeal still ahead of her and years of it still to come: "I shouldn't have to spend years of my life in court to either prove I exist or to have my existing legal rights upheld."

She should not have. She did it anyway, and now everybody there gets to stand on it.

via KERA News and The Advocate, whose second piece has the video.

James Talarico went on Fox News on Wednesday and gave it away.

what talarico said on fox

The Texas state representative running for Senate, the one a lot of people had decided was the good one, said this: "Every sport has to be safe and fair. As a former public school teacher, I care a lot about our student athletes, I care a lot about our students. And so I will oppose trans athletes playing in girls' sports if it risks safety or fairness." Then the softening line that tells you it was rehearsed. "I missed the mark on some of my past statements, I'll be the first to admit it."

what he used to say

The past statements are a matter of record and they were better than this. In 2021, arguing on the floor of the Texas House against HB 4042, Talarico said, "Some things are more important than perfectly fair competition in sports." He described the bans as the government policing people's private parts. He compared the fairness argument to what used to be said about Black athletes. He voted no, twice, on bills restricting trans kids in sport, and in 2023 he voted no on SB 14.

Asked on Wednesday whether he still believed there are six genders, something he said in an April 2021 committee debate, he answered: "No." And then: "There are not six sexes, there are two."

Brad Pritchett, chief executive of Equality Texas, said his organization expects better, and asked the question worth keeping: "When did people of moral standing decide to use Texas children as a political football?"

Here is the part that should end the argument that any of this buys you anything.

paxton deepfaked him anyway

The next day, Ken Paxton's campaign put a video on YouTube called "King James." It is an AI fabrication of Talarico delivering a speech he never delivered. In it he says "In the beginning, God was nonbinary." He claims God created six genders. He calls Jesus a radical feminist. He describes himself as a Christian who hates Christianity. A narrator says he is wrong for Texas and wrong for America, and Paxton approves the message. The Advocate found no disclosure labelling any of it as generated, asked Paxton's campaign why they manufactured footage instead of using real clips, and got no answer. Talarico's campaign would not comment either.

Paxton also went after him for flip-flopping, and pointed at those two old votes. Of course he did. Both things at once: punished for the votes he cast, and slandered with a speech he never gave. There is nothing to concede that makes the machine stop, because the machine never needed him to say anything. It can build the clip.

So the trade was: surrender a group of children who cannot vote for you, on national television, and receive in exchange a fake video of yourself, within twenty-four hours.

Trans kids in Texas are not a position to hold or drop. They were the only people in this story with nothing to trade.

via Washington Blade, Watermark Out News and the U.S. Department of Justice.

The fund is still open. That is the first thing to know, and most people do not.

the fund runs until 2090

The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund takes claims until October 1, 2090, a deadline set by the VCF Permanent Authorization Act and posted on the Justice Department's own page. It has paid more than $18 billion to over 77,000 victims and their families since 2011. Roughly 750 new claims arrive every month, twenty-five years later, because the dust kept working long after the buildings came down.

Allison Turkel, the special master who has run it since March 2023, marked the anniversary this week: "Twenty-five years since that day, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund has served tens of thousands of victims and their families."

Now the part that should not still be a question.

the question it cannot answer

The Washington Blade asked the fund a simple thing: does a surviving same-sex partner qualify. VCF spokesperson Nicole Nava answered that claims for someone who died "may be submitted only by the Personal Representative," and that state probate law decides who gets appointed one. Then she said she would inquire into whether same-sex surviving partners receive support. That was the answer available in September 2026. She would go and find out.

It lands the way it does because of how 2001 went.

what happened in 2001

Ross Levi, then executive director of Empire State Pride Agenda, described what happened at the relief stations. "Literally, gay people had to go there, turn around, go back home, and get some paperwork that spouses didn't have to get to prove a relationship existed." Widows walked in and were believed. Boyfriends of nineteen years were sent home for documents that did not exist, because the state had refused to issue them. Lambda Legal, Empire State Pride Agenda and the Human Rights Campaign had to build a separate pot of money, the September 11 Gay & Lesbian Family Fund, for the partners federal relief would not see.

Some of it got fixed by hand, one decision at a time. Governor George Pataki, a Republican, signed an executive order in October 2001 putting surviving same-sex partners in line for full spousal benefits from New York's Crime Victims Board. In January 2003, under director Kenneth Feinberg, the fund approved $557,390 for Peggy Neff, whose partner of eighteen years, Sheila Hein, was a 51-year-old civilian employee killed at the Pentagon. One award. One director deciding to count it.

And the people. Father Mychal Judge, 68, the gay Franciscan who served as chaplain to the fire department, killed by falling debris while giving last rites, logged as the first recorded victim of the attacks. Mark Bingham, a gay PR executive from San Francisco, one of the passengers who went at the cockpit door on United 93. David Charlebois, an out co-pilot and member of the Gay Pilots Association, in the cockpit of American 77. Daniel Brandhorst and Ronald Gamboa, a couple from California, who died with David, their three-year-old son.

Sixty-four years of filing time left on the clock, and the fund still has to go check.

via Washington Blade, LGBTQ Nation and GCN.

Skip the percentages for a second and start in Uganda.

There is an organization there that got queer refugees out. Not counselled them, not tweeted about them. Physically moved people who were about to be arrested or killed to somewhere they would not be. That program is gone. Emergency relocation, eliminated, because the money for it stopped.

That is one line in a report Outright International published on Thursday called Breaking Point: The Urgent Need to Invest in Global LGBTIQ Movements, and it is the one to remember when the numbers start.

the numbers, and who pulled out

Now the numbers. Outright surveyed 229 lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer organizations across 94 countries, with 23 longer interviews across every region. Of those 229, 203 have had funding cut, suspended or withdrawn entirely since January 2025. That is 90 percent. Nearly half, 49 percent, lost more than half of their total budget. Three quarters lost more than a quarter of it. Forty percent say they are at severe or immediate risk of closing.

Three percent describe themselves as financially stable. Three.

Asked who pulled out, more than half of the groups pointed at a single government. USAID, PEPFAR, the State Department: the United States, which spent two decades making itself the load-bearing wall of queer civil society in places where local money was never going to exist, and then in early 2025 froze and cut foreign assistance across the board. Outright had already documented the first wave in a report called Defunding Freedom. This is what the second year looks like.

where the damage landed

The damage sorts itself in a way that should be read slowly. Groups in countries with weaker judicial systems were more than twice as likely to lose their funding. So the money left fastest from exactly the places where there is no court to go to, no press to call, no domestic donor to ask.

What the cuts actually took, in the report's own examples: IraQueer stopped running safety trainings for activists in Iraq. A West African intersex organization lost its office and its staff. A community center in Ecuador closed on February 1, 2026, after a decade. A Ukrainian advocacy group cut its specialist staff and consultation hours in the middle of a war. The Tonga Leitis Association scaled back HIV prevention. Shelters and safe houses have closed on four continents.

Ecuador is worth pausing on, because we wrote about it a fortnight ago when its National Assembly voted 118 to nothing to bar single gay people from adopting and to make supporting a trans child grounds for losing custody. That is the same country whose queer community center shut its doors in February. The law arrived after the safety net left. That is not a coincidence, that is a sequence.

The report's warning is the least dramatic sentence in it and the most alarming: networks, expertise and trust built over decades cannot easily be restored once they are lost. Money can come back in a budget cycle. The woman who knew which border guard to call does not.

what donors are being asked

Maria Sjödin, Outright's executive director, is asking donors to move now rather than wait to see who survives. Realistically most of the people reading this cannot fill a hole worth more than 125 million dollars a year.

What you can do is know that it happened, and say it out loud when somebody tells you the cuts were about waste. They were about a bus out of Kampala.

via PinkNews, Out and GCN.

In 2024, promoting Want, Gillian Anderson did something people almost never do in an interview. She asked herself a question and did not pretend to have the answer.

"Now, at the age of fifty-five, I am thinking, Oh, am I pansexual? Am I bisexual?"

That is a woman thinking in public, in front of a journalist, at an age when the culture has decided you are supposed to be finished. It got picked up and passed around and turned into a headline, which is what happens, and then everybody moved on and left the question sitting there.

she answered it on thursday

She answered it on Thursday. Speaking to The Australian while promoting More, the follow up to Want, Anderson said she is "pan, as in pansexual, as in attracted to all genders," and noted the Greek root, meaning all, or every.

She is 58. It is the first time she has used a specific word for it.

This is not a coming out in the sense the phrase usually gets used, and it would be rude to file it as one. Anderson has talked about her fluid sexuality since a 2012 interview with Out, and she said again this week what she has always said, that "in my younger years I was in relationships with women." Nothing was hidden. What changed is that a word finally fit, and she waited until it did.

why the slowness is the point

Which is the actual reason this is worth two hundred words. There is a whole economy built on getting people to pick a term fast: pick it at fourteen, pick it on a form, pick it in a bio, pick it so we know how to sort you. Anderson took two years between the question and the answer and treated both as normal, unhurried, adult business. Not a crisis. Not a confession. A woman in her late fifties reading up on a Greek prefix and deciding yes, that one, that's the one.

what want and more are

The books are the context and they are not incidental. Want and More are collections of anonymous sexual fantasies sent in by women from around the world, a project she has said grew out of playing sex therapist Jean Milburn on Sex Education. She has spent two books holding the space for other women to say the unsayable without a name attached. It tracks that she got to her own name last.

She also told the interviewer, with the specificity of somebody who has genuinely thought about it, that on men she likes forearms and nice hands, and on women, lips, buttocks, and the clavicle.

The clavicle. Correct.

via Washington Blade, The Advocate and WVPE.

The part to hold onto is not the woman. It is the night.

what happened that night

In June, a 50-year-old woman from Alabama, named in the prosecutor's letter only as TJ, was staying with relatives in Marshall County, Indiana. She called in a child welfare complaint about Pete Buttigieg. Michigan State Police, working with Indiana State Police, took it seriously enough to send officers and a child protective services worker to the family's home in Traverse City.

Buttigieg was told he could not be alone with his four-year-old twins until they had been interviewed separately. The children spent that night at Chasten's parents' house.

Nobody found anything, because there was nothing to find.

why nobody will be charged

On July 29, Marshall County Prosecuting Attorney E. Nelson Chipman Jr. emailed his decision, which became public this week. No charges. His reasoning is not that she did not do it. It is this:

"In light of the totality of circumstances, I am unable to conclude that TJ is capable of forming the requisite intent to support a criminal conviction for this offense."

His letter lays out why. Documented alcoholism. Serious mental illness, including hallucinations and delusional thinking. Three police contacts during her stay in the county, one of them a domestic battery arrest with a recorded blood alcohol level of 0.32. She has told people she is God, and that she has had dinner with Barack and Michelle Obama. She is back in Alabama now, living in a halfway house.

So here is the shape of it. Buttigieg called what happened to him a "cruel, politically motivated hoax" and said the separation from his children was "among the darkest hours of my life." Both of those things are true about how it felt. The prosecutor's file suggests the caller was not running a political operation. She was extremely unwell and she reached for the story that was lying around.

the lie she reached for

That is the bit worth sitting with, because it is the bit that scales. The lie she reached for was not random. Gay man, small children, something wrong in that house. She did not have to invent that. It has been on television for three years. It is in the fundraising emails and the state legislature bills and the phrase everybody now recognises without having to be told what it means. A sick woman in Indiana absorbed the ambient accusation and dialled it in, and the machinery on the other end moved at full speed on an uncorroborated call from a stranger who had never met him.

Two people met the same night from opposite ends: a woman nobody protected and a father nobody believed for a few hours. Neither of them wrote the script.

what happens next

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel opened her own investigation in July, into both the complaint and how police handled it, and her office confirms it is still open. That is the one that matters now. Charging TJ was never going to answer the actual question, which is why the call went straight to a squad car and a caseworker instead of to a supervisor and ten minutes of checking.

Buttigieg is a former cabinet secretary with a spokesperson and a lawyer and a functioning relationship with the press. His family says it is "seeking answers and accountability." Most gay parents on the receiving end of the same phone call get none of that. They get the doorbell, and the interview room, and a file that stays open.

The twins came home the next day. Keep asking why they had to leave.

via PinkNews and GCN, with the full winners list at TVLine.

The Creative Arts Emmys are the two nights before the Primetime ceremony where television hands out the awards for the work that actually makes television: editing, sound, production design, main titles, and the hosting categories. They ran on September 5 and 6. They are usually the part of the season nobody live-tweets. This year the queer half of the ballot walked off with an armful.

alan cumming beat rupaul

Start with Alan Cumming, who won Reality TV Host for The Traitors, out of a field that included RuPaul and Ariana Madix. That is a category where a man in a cape beat the most decorated drag queen in television history, and the correct response is not a scandal, it is that there were multiple queer people to choose between.

Cumming's own read on the show is better than any acceptance speech: "I think it's a really positive thing to see so many queer people and, hopefully, trans people in a show that also celebrates dressing up, androgyny, femmeness, and queerness." He is describing a reality format in which contestants murder each other by vote while wearing capes in a Scottish castle. He is also, annoyingly, correct.

pluribus took four

Then Pluribus, which took four: Original Main Title Theme Music, Sound Mixing for a Drama Series, Production Design for a Narrative Contemporary Program, and Picture Editing for a Drama Series. If you have not watched it, the premise is that an alien invasion turns almost all of humanity into a single blissful hive mind, and one of the few people left out of it is Carol, a lesbian romance novelist who is miserable and difficult and now responsible for the species. Rhea Seehorn is up for Lead Actress in a Drama at the main ceremony, and Miriam Shor is up for Guest Actress.

Hacks took Picture Editing for a Single Camera Comedy Series on the back of a record 24 nominations this year, which is a startling number for a show about a woman doing crowd work in Las Vegas. Jean Smart is up for Lead Actress in a Comedy.

The Primetime Emmys are on September 14. Set something to record. The technical categories are where a show's real support gets counted, and three of the shows that got counted this weekend are ours.

via TheWrap and The Daily Beast.

"Long, Long Time" is the third episode of The Last of Us and it is the one everybody's straight cousin cried at. Bill and Frank, two men alone in a fortified town at the end of the world, twenty years of a marriage nobody officiated, strawberries grown as a present, and an ending they choose together. Nick Offerman won the Emmy for it. Murray Bartlett played Frank.

what shapiro said in 2023

When it aired in 2023, Ben Shapiro reviewed it on his podcast by doing inventory. There were no zombies in it. There was no real threat in it. It was, in his telling, about "two gay dudes who meet and have a relationship, in which one grows strawberries for the other, and then they die." He also worked out that the man from Parks and Recreation was in it and settled on "gay Ron Swanson," a character who, in his summary, "likes to nail dudes."

three years later, one sentence

Offerman said nothing for three years. Then, on the episode of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso posted on Sunday, somebody put the clip on and let it play at him.

His first reaction was almost affectionate. "That's crazy," he said. "That's the most Ben Shapiro I've ever seen, and there's a very good reason for that."

Then he spent it. "I'm embarrassed for his reading comprehension. I think he got eight things wrong in his recap, besides his rampant homophobia."

Eight. He counted them. Somewhere there is a list.

The best detail is that Offerman has been quietly monetising the insult the entire time. He told Fragoso he wrote a song for his live show and introduced it every night the same way: "I was going to write a joke about this, but Ben Shapiro questioned my masculinity, and I can't write a better joke than that."

why the handling was right

That is the correct handling and it is worth naming why. The move Shapiro was making was not a bad review, it was an offer. Come and be insulted, get defensive about your manhood, argue that you are still straight enough for the cargo shorts crowd, and the fight becomes the content. Offerman did the one thing that does not feed it. He treated the man as a bad reader, took the punchline, and kept the Emmy.

He has been steady on this before. At the 2024 Spirit Awards he went after the homophobic backlash to the episode directly, on stage, with the trophy still warm.

Anyway. Two gay dudes meet, one grows strawberries for the other, and then they die. He says it like it is an accusation. It is the plot of most of the best things ever made.

Sources: TheWrap, The Daily Beast.

via Attitude, Yahoo Sports and LGBTQ Nation.

The whole product Riley Gaines sells is that she is the last person in America who will stand up for women in sport. Every appearance, every hearing, every fundraising email. Women. Sport. Standing up for it.

So she bought a ticket to a women's sporting event, sat in the stands with actual women who pay to watch women play sport, and went on television to report back on what she had seen.

what gaines said on fox

On Fox News' The Big Weekend Show, Gaines said she went to the WNBA game in Minneapolis, and that "it was a bunch of disgruntled lesbians." She added that "it felt like the entire arena was booing Sophie Cunningham."

Reader, she was at a WNBA game. In Minneapolis. She has described the customer base.

The trip was on 2 August, Fever at Lynx, and she went to support Sophie Cunningham, the Indiana Fever guard who has said keeping trans women out of women's basketball is "common sense" and that she is protecting young female athletes. Cunningham has been booed on the road since, in Minneapolis on 2 August and again against the Toronto Tempo on 19 August. That is the sum of the persecution here. Women bought tickets and then made a noise with their mouths.

the emergency she came to prevent

It is worth being precise about the emergency Gaines is at these games to prevent, because the league has already answered it. The WNBA says there are currently no transgender eligibility issues in the league. Zero players. The actual attempts to put a trans woman on a WNBA roster this year came from Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, two former NBA men who announced they would enter the 2027 draft as trans women to make a point, and who were both blocked. Cameron Brink, who plays in the league, called the stunt what it was.

So the sequence runs like this. Two men fake being trans women to prove trans women are a threat. A player agrees with them. The crowd boos the player. And the self-appointed defender of women in sport looks up at a sold-out arena of women watching women and files a report on their haircuts.

navratilova asked her directly

Martina Navratilova, who has actually won things, put it to her directly. Yahoo Sports has her asking, "Hey Riley- do you enjoy insulting some women while speaking out on behalf of some (most) women? This is not ok"

Here is the thing we keep having to explain, and it never lands, so we will keep explaining it. Women's sport in this country was built by disgruntled lesbians. The leagues, the fan bases, the bars that showed the games when nobody else would, the season tickets bought in twos. The WNBA has one of the gayest audiences in professional sport and it is not a coincidence, it is the foundation. Gaines walked into the room that lesbians built and complained about the smell.

Cunt of the Week, and she did it to herself with a microphone in her hand.

Sources: Attitude, Yahoo Sports, LGBTQ Nation.

via News10NBC, OutInPerth, WHEC and 13WHAM.

This one is about torture and it does not get easier further down. If you need to skip it, skip it.

Court in Canandaigua, New York was called for half past nine on Tuesday morning. By late morning Precious Arzuaga, the woman prosecutors have called the ringleader, had been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the first-degree murder of Sam Nordquist. Judge Kristina Karle handed it down. Local reporters in the room say she was in tears by the end of the family's statements.

who sam nordquist was

Start with Sam, because the case file has spent nineteen months burying him under the details of what was done to him.

He was 24, a Black trans man from Minnesota. In September 2024 he traveled to the Finger Lakes to meet a woman he had met online, and he decided to stay. The woman was Arzuaga. He stayed at Patty's Lodge in Hopewell, a motel off a state highway in Ontario County. His family last heard from him at the start of January 2025. He was reported missing on 9 February. His body was found in a field in Yates County, roughly fifty miles southeast of Rochester, on 13 February 2025.

Between those two things he was held and tortured for about a month, physically and psychologically, in a room with other people in it. The assistant district attorney's summary of the acts is on the record and we will give you one line of it rather than all of it: he was denied food, doused with bleach, and sexually assaulted with objects. Prosecutors have described hundreds of separate violent acts.

what the two women pleaded to

Arzuaga pleaded guilty on 26 June to every count in the indictment, with no plea deal and nothing knocked down: first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, first-degree aggravated sexual abuse, concealment of a human corpse, conspiracy, coercion, and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. Children were in that building. WHEC published the sentence she was facing count by count before she walked in, and it is a long ladder: life without parole on the murder, 25 years to life on the kidnapping, 25 years plus 20 years of post-release supervision on the sexual abuse, and lifetime registration as a sex offender.

She was one of seven people charged. Jennifer "Brooklyn" Quijano, 32, pleaded guilty in July to all counts and walked into the same courtroom on Tuesday afternoon for her own sentencing. Judge Karle gave her life without parole for the first-degree murder as well, plus 25 years to life on the kidnapping and 25 years on the aggravated sexual abuse. Two women went into that courtroom on Tuesday and neither of them is coming back out. Emily Motyka, 19, pleaded guilty in early June to second-degree murder and kidnapping. Kyle Sage, 33, changed his plea to guilty on 14 August. Three are still awaiting trial: Patrick Goodwin, Thomas Eaves and Kimberly Sochia.

Now the part the community has been arguing about since the winter he died, and the part that will not be settled by today.

why no hate crime charge

None of them were ever charged with a hate crime. The Ontario County district attorney's office said early on that there was no indication the killing was one, noting that Sam and the people who killed him knew each other, that they identified as LGBTQ+, and that at least one of them had been living with him. GLAAD publicly asked DA James Ritts to reconsider. He did not.

Assistant district attorney Kelly Wolford put the reasoning like this: "A hate crime would make this charge about Sam's gender or about Sam's race," she said, and, "To limit us to a hate crime would be an injustice to Sam." A Rochester defense attorney, Vincent Merante, gave 13WHAM the unsentimental version of the same maths. "There's no benefit to it. They're already charged with the highest crime possible, murder 1."

Both things are true at once and that is why it still stings. In New York a hate crime designation on top of murder one buys the prosecution nothing at sentencing, because there is nothing above life without parole. And a trans man was tortured to death for a month and the state's official record of it will never say why anyone thought they could.

what his sister said

What his sister Kayla Nordquist read into that room was not about any of this. "My brother is gone. Nothing will ever change that." Then she told the court who to hold on to instead. "That's the person I want you to know today. Sam, my brother. Not Sam, the victim." And the sentence that explains the whole trip to New York: "He wanted to build a life with someone who loved him for exactly who he was."

The weekend before the sentencing, Sam's mother and sister flew in from Minnesota and spent it in Rochester, fifty miles up the road from the field where he was found. They honored him at Rochester's first ever Trans Pride Festival, and at a weekly pizza run put on by a local outfit called Operation Caring Hearts. That is where the family chose to be with the days before court. Put that next to the courtroom and keep them both.

Say his name. Sam Nordquist, 24, of Minnesota, who went east to meet somebody who said they loved him.

Sources: News10NBC, OutInPerth, WHEC, 13WHAM, News 8 WROC, 13WHAM on the hate crime decision.

via Outreach, Progetto Gionata and the Conferenza Episcopale Calabra.

On Friday 4 September, in the auditorium of the Jesuit headquarters in Rome, about 200 people sat down at half past nine in the morning, read Psalm 86 out loud, and then spent until six in the evening talking about how the Italian Catholic Church should treat gay and trans people.

what the conference was

The conference was called Good Pastoral Practices with Same-Sex Attracted and Transgender Persons. It was the first of its kind in Italy. And the part worth sitting with is who convened it, because it was not a rebel network of parish volunteers. It was the Italian Bishops' Conference, the CEI, the actual institution.

Ten bishops came. Italian reports put it at ten or about a dozen, depending on who was counting heads, alongside roughly 200 priests, religious sisters and brothers, lay people, LGBT+ Italians and their families.

Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, who is the president of the CEI, sent personal greetings through the bishop who now has this ministry as his brief.

what the bishops said

That bishop is Giampaolo Dianin, the Archbishop of Gorizia, and he opened by defining good practice as "the capacity to read the present and live anticipating the future." Later he described where the Church currently is with one Italian word, travaglio. It means labor. Not work, labor, the kind that happens before a birth and hurts the whole time.

Francesco Savino, the CEI's vice president for southern Italy, was in the room and called the LGBTQ+ Jubilee a moment of conversion, which is a specific and not at all decorative word to use in that building. He argued for pastoral work that is generative, built on encounters and relationships and faces rather than positions.

Gherardo Gambelli, the Archbishop of Florence, took part. Four dioceses got up and presented what they are already doing: Cremona, Bari, Florence and Chiavari. Not proposals. Practices, in progress, with results to describe.

Also there: Corrado Contini and his wife Michela, who coordinate a network called 3VolteGenitori, three times parents. It is 19 groups and around 300 Christian parents of LGBT+ children spread across Italy. Somebody had to be the first parent in each of those 19 rooms.

nothing actually changed

Now, the honest part. Nothing was changed. No doctrine moved, no blessing was authorized, nobody's marriage got recognized, and the same Church running this conference still teaches what it teaches about our bodies and our relationships. A day of listening is not a policy.

But we have watched a lot of institutions do the opposite maneuver this year, the one where a hospital or a university or a government agency quietly decides we are too expensive to keep defending. In Rome, ten bishops walked into a building, sat down in front of gay and trans people and their mothers, and let four dioceses explain on the record how they do this well. In a country with no same-sex marriage and a hard-right government, the institution called the meeting itself.

Priest to parent to trans kid, in that order, in an auditorium. It is not the win. It is the shape a win starts out as.

via PinkNews on the Bake Off tent, PinkNews and GCN on Drag Race España.

Drag kings have spent roughly forever being the answer to a question nobody on television was asking. Twelve seasons of a franchise built on drag, spinoffs on four continents, and the working assumption stayed the same: kings are a thing that happens in a basement bar on a Thursday, beloved locally, invisible everywhere else.

That got dismantled twice on Monday, by two shows that have nothing to do with each other.

the bake off tent

Channel 4 announced the Great British Bake Off line-up for series 17, back in the tent from 22 September. Twelve amateur bakers, ages 21 to 67. One of them is Gabe Capes, 32, who uses he/they, an artist and costume designer whose work has turned up on RuPaul's Drag Race UK, and who performs as the drag king Blü Romantic. PinkNews reports he calls himself the "daddy of Birmingham drag," which is the correct amount of confidence to bring to a marquee full of proving drawers.

He has wanted this since he was thirteen, which is when he watched the first series and started baking. He is into meringue and savoury bakes with meat in them. He has also already met one of the hosts, and told the story himself: "I have met Alison before, she famously smacked my bum, live on Channel 4 while I was in drag on Late Night Lycett."

The tent has changed in other ways too. Nigella Lawson is joining as a judge, replacing Prue Leith, who retired in January with the greatest exit line of the year: "I'm 86 for goodness sake!" Paul Hollywood stays. Noel Fielding and Alison Hammond stay.

drag race españa, the same day

Then, the same day, Drag Race España confirmed its season six cast, back 27 September, and Marcus Massalami is in it. He is the first full-time drag king ever cast anywhere in the Drag Race franchise.

Full-time is doing real work in that sentence. A king did compete once before, Johnny Jones on the sixth season of Canada's Drag Race, who also performs as Velma Jones and went on the show doing both. Massalami is the first contestant whose drag is only kinging, with no queen persona standing behind it as a translation. Season six also has the franchise's first self-declared bruja and its first Basque performer, so España has apparently decided to spend its casting budget entirely on firsts.

why two unrelated shows matter

The two announcements are unrelated and that is exactly why they matter. Nobody coordinated this. A Channel 4 baking show and a Spanish drag competition arrived at the same conclusion in the same 24 hours, which is what it looks like when a thing stops being a risk and starts being obvious.

One programming note we cannot resist. Bake Off has now had a drag king in the tent before the flagship of the drag franchise managed to put one in the workroom. A show about biscuits got there first.

via Federal News Network, reported by Rachel S. Cohen, and PinkNews.

If you joined the military as a trans person in the years when you were allowed to, you told them. That was the deal. You told the doctor, you told the personnel system, you changed the gender marker in the file, you filled in the forms and you did it correctly, because doing it correctly was the whole point of being permitted to be there at all.

Those files are now the search.

what the pentagon is searching

Rachel S. Cohen reported for Federal News Network on Sunday that the military is going through protected medical and personnel data to find service members with current or past gender dysphoria, and that the sweep has already outed several hundred active-duty and reserve troops over about two months. Service academy cadets are in that number. So are ROTC cadets, people who have not finished college yet.

The databases named are MHS Genesis, the Defense Department's electronic health record, the Military Health System Data Repository, and personnel systems that track gender marker changes. These are not lists of trans people. They are the places where prescriptions, mental health notes and care received before you ever enlisted all sit together, which is exactly why a records system like that is supposed to be hard to open.

Commanders around the world have started receiving notices that somebody in their unit is out of compliance with Pentagon policy, along with instructions to begin separation. An internal Air Force email on July 31 laid out the identification process. One airman Cohen spoke to has a board scheduled for September 15.

who else it catches

The search is also not only finding trans people. Priya Rashid, an attorney representing service members caught up in it, says the queries are flagging troops who are not transgender at all, people who happened to receive a particular procedure or a particular diagnosis while being treated for something else entirely.

You do not have to have transitioned publicly, or recently. A file that merely mentions a past transition or a history of gender dysphoria is enough to be pulled in. That is a very blunt instrument to point at somebody's career.

Kara Corcoran, who runs the advocacy group SPARTA and is an active-duty Army officer, described what changed and it was not the people. "A new line has just shifted and said that these people are inadequate for serving."

Priya Rashid, an attorney with the National Institute of Military Justice, is fielding roughly 25 people a week asking how separation works. Her summary of her own clients is the part that should be hard to read out loud. "They didn't do anything wrong. They followed the rules and policies."

A sailor, unnamed for the obvious reason: "They're about to completely upend my life and my career."

An airman, also unnamed, gave the line that will stay with us. "If my fight can help pave the way for others to freely serve."

the numbers involved

The numbers give you the scale of what is being hunted. When the ban came in, the Defense Department put the number of troops with gender dysphoria at about 4,200. In 2019 the figure was closer to 1,000. The ban started in January 2025 and the grace period for voluntary separation closed that July, so everyone being found now is someone who decided to stay and serve.

why the speed is deliberate

Here is the legal situation, which matters because it explains the speed. In Talbott v. USA, a federal judge ordered separations paused back in March 2025 and that order has still never taken effect. In June the case was allowed to proceed as a class action, but the judge has not yet ruled on who is actually in the class. In August the administration went to the Supreme Court to get the whole thing overturned. Lawyers for more than two dozen service members told the court on August 17 that removals are being pushed through while everybody waits.

Which is to say the clock is being run on purpose. Get the people out before anyone rules on whether you were allowed to, because a discharge is much harder to undo than to stop.

Pentagon spokespeople declined to comment, citing the litigation.

Every closet has a price and the argument for leaving one is always that honesty is safer in the long run. These are people who were told the honesty was mandatory, who did the paperwork, and who are now being found by it. Remember that the next time an institution asks you to put yourself in a file for your own good.

via KCRA, carried on the CNN wire, and Hoodline.

what happened on august 31

Shortly before one in the morning on August 31, Joseph Sais was walking home from a night out in Lavender Heights, Sacramento's gay district, with a friend. Four men started in on them with anti-gay and racist slurs. Then they chased Sais down and punched him, repeatedly. He came out of it with a split lip, a cut forehead and broken glasses, and he got away by running toward the security staff outside a bar.

This happened near 20th and L. Sacramento police took a felony assault bias report. Nobody has been arrested.

the block threw a festival

On Sunday the Rainbow Festival filled 20th and K. One block up.

The festival has been running for more than four decades. This year's theme was Retro Rainbow, which is exactly the kind of thing you plan in February when the worst thing on your mind is whether the DJ lineup is too much disco. It went ahead as scheduled, with live music, food, fundraisers, and a perimeter.

Terry Sidie owns Faces, the nightclub, and started the festival. He did the arithmetic out loud for KCRA. "I have to have a security guard for every 100 people, plus 8 police officers today. About 30 more security." And then the part that costs something to say: "It's sad we have to have so much, but we do."

Steven Murphie, who lives there, was honest about what he had started carrying. "I've gotten to the point where I'm carrying a taser and pepper spray. A friend of mine said, is that where we're at right now? Unfortunately, we have to protect ourselves." He did not sound proud of it. "I don't want to feel like I need to come to this community armed, because people who don't respect us want to attack us."

why the neighborhood counts exits

Lavender Heights has a reason to count its exits. On Halloween night last year, Alvin Prasad, 58, left the Badlands nightclub on K Street with his adult daughter and their friends. A man took issue with his costume. Prasad went down with blunt-force trauma, never woke up, and died on December 28. A 24-year-old was arrested and later booked on homicide. Sacramento made Prasad a posthumous Grand Marshal of its Pride festival, which is the only promotion nobody wants.

So this is a neighborhood that knows precisely what it is standing in, and it put up gates and hired thirty extra bodies and opened at eleven in the morning anyway.

Sidie was not doing defiance for the cameras. Asked what he wants, he said he wants more of it. "I need more people, more gay businesses in Lavender Heights. I want it to be notoriously gay and we accept everybody."

Notoriously gay. Two words, on a block where a man got his glasses broken six days earlier, one street over.

Four men can ruin a Sunday. It takes a whole neighborhood to throw one.

via The Guardian and Erin in the Morning, with the report itself published by the HHS Office of Population Affairs.

what hhs published

The Department of Health and Human Services has published a paper called "Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?"

Its answer is yes. Its argument is that if you agree with what the American Psychological Association says about trans healthcare, you are statistically more likely to be an authoritarian who will excuse political violence. Its evidence is a survey of 1,208 people.

We are going to walk through how it got there, because the how is the story.

how they built the ruler

To measure your beliefs about trans healthcare, the authors needed a scale. There was not one that gave them what they wanted, so they built one and named it the Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale. It has never been validated. Andrew Flores, who studies this for a living, told Erin in the Morning what that means in plain English: "These are not scales that have ever been validated. They just made them up."

Then they needed to measure your appetite for political violence. They asked about violence against conservative targets. They did not ask about the other direction. If you only count the punches thrown one way, you will find that one side throws all the punches, and you can print that as a finding.

Then they needed to measure authoritarianism, and what the questions largely measured was whether you vote Democratic.

it was never peer reviewed

The paper was not peer reviewed. It was not published in a journal. There is no documented institutional review board sign-off. The underlying survey data and response numbers are not in it. The author list runs through Rutgers, the Network Contagion Research Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which is a set of addresses, not a discipline.

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist at the University of Sydney, called it "a very poorly done piece of research" and then went further: "nakedly political." He added, "It was probably the most obviously political study that I've come across."

Daniel Aaron, a law professor at the University of Utah, called it "quite an abnormal document" and raised the part with teeth. Federal law requires peer review for influential scientific information the government puts its name on. He wants to know why HHS is publishing political science at all.

Craig Konnoth of the University of Virginia named the target, and it is bigger than us: "a broadside attack on the scientific establishment."

what it is really for

That is the thing to hold onto. This paper is not really about whether trans people are dangerous. It is a demonstration that the federal government can now generate a scientific-looking document that says whatever it needs said, put the HHS seal on it, and skip every step that used to make a document mean something. We are the test case because we are the group it costs least to test on. The method does not stay in the test case.

And it is not academic. The same department, in the same season, has moved to strip gender-affirming care out of Medicaid, out of federal employee insurance and out of hospitals that take federal money. This paper is the footnote those moves will cite.

Somebody at a federal agency sat down, invented a ruler, measured us with it, and published the number. The ruler was made up. The number is now a citation. That is how this works now.

via The Advocate and Gothamist.

A grand jury in the Northern District of Texas wanted the medical files of children in New York City.

what texas subpoenaed

That is the whole shape of this thing, and everything else is detail. Prosecutors in Amarillo subpoenaed Mount Sinai Health System for the records of patients who had received gender-affirming care. In June, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla told the Justice Department it could not have them, and shielded the identifying details of trans young people treated at Mount Sinai and NYU Langone. The government appealed. On August 27 the Second Circuit refused to lift her protections while the appeal ran.

Mount Sinai was winning.

then it settled anyway

On Friday, September 4, the Justice Department announced that Mount Sinai had agreed to stop providing puberty blockers, hormone therapy and transition-related surgery to anyone under 18, pay a financial penalty, and set aside $2 million to provide free medical care to people who say they were harmed by the care it used to give.

Attorney General Todd Blanche called it relief. "This agreement puts an end to these practices at Mount Sinai and provides meaningful relief for individuals who have already suffered harm."

Mount Sinai spokesperson Lucia L. Lee said the hospital settled to keep patient files out of a grand jury room. "We entered into this settlement to protect our patients' privacy and to allow our physicians to remain focused on our mission of serving our patients and communities with the highest-quality, world-class care."

the calendar does not add up

Read that next to the calendar and it stops adding up. A judge had already protected those files. An appeals court had already declined to unprotect them. The legal journalist Chris Geidner: "This was literally the least sensible moment for Mount Sinai to fold."

None of this was sudden, either. Back in February, Mount Sinai had quietly started telling families that their trans kids could not get care there anymore. The September deal did not close the clinic. It signed the paperwork on a door that had been shut for seven months, and added two million dollars pointed at the argument that the clinic should never have existed.

Tyler Hack of the Christopher Street Project was not gentle. "Mount Sinai's decision to capitulate to the Trump administration's attacks is a surrender that leaves transgender young people without essential care." And then: "This is a slap in the face to the thousands of patients struggling to afford standard care. Mount Sinai's decision to put politics over their own patients will have reprehensible outcomes, it will kill kids."

Clark Wolff Hamel, who runs PFLAG NYC, put it shorter. "While Mount Sinai says the choice to settle was made to avoid handing over patient records to a grand jury, all we see is cowardice in the face of intimidation."

Mount Sinai is not the first. Texas Children's Hospital has paid out more than $10 million under agreements like this one. The Cleveland Clinic Foundation and Connecticut Children's have signed too, NYU Langone ended its program under funding threats, and Children's National in Washington, Stanford Medicine and the University of Michigan have all pulled back.

the strategy, named plainly

Here is what the strategy actually is, because it is worth naming. Nobody has passed a federal law banning this care. What the government has instead is subpoenas, funding leverage and lawyers, and a bet that a hospital's board will do the math on risk long before a court makes them do anything. The bet keeps paying. Mount Sinai had two rulings in its pocket and folded anyway, which tells every other health system in the country exactly how much a win in court is worth.

Somewhere in New York there is a fourteen-year-old whose doctor is now a fact in a press release.

via France 24 and AFP, Al Jazeera and TheColu.mn.

the attack, and the tree

On the night of July 25 a man drove a van into the crowd at Berlin's Pride march, on a footpath through the Tiergarten called the Ahornsteig, then got out with a machete. A 65-year-old woman from Poland was killed. About thirty people were hurt. The van hit a tree hard enough that the tree had to be felled.

Ahornsteig means maple path. So in August the Mitte district planted a maple.

They put it back in the same ground, with a metal grate around the base so people could leave cards and photographs and flowers without wrecking the roots, and they set a bench beside it painted in rainbow stripes. District mayor Stefanie Remlinger said it mattered to give the site a dignified presence. It is about as small and as decent as public grief gets.

the bench, then the tree

Last week somebody tore the wooden slats off that bench. Police said it took "considerable physical violence." Every other bench on that stretch was left alone. Whoever did it walked past them to get there.

Then, on the eve of Sunday's state election in Saxony-Anhalt, somebody came back and pulled the tree out of the ground.

We are not going to tell you the same hands did both, or that anyone has connected either to a party. Nobody has. What we will say is that a person in Berlin looked at a calendar, picked that weekend, and went and got a shovel.

the afd won saxony-anhalt

On Sunday night the AfD won Saxony-Anhalt. Exit polls for the broadcaster ARD put the far-right party at 44.5 percent against 18.5 for the governing CDU. It narrowly missed an outright majority in the state parliament, and every other party still refuses to govern with it, so what actually happens in Magdeburg is unsettled. The number is not unsettled. It is the strongest result a far-right party has posted in a German state since the war.

Ulrich Siegmund, who led the ticket there: "We have achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve. We have made history in this state."

He was not coy about what he was selling. The AfD's hundred-day program for the state includes banning rainbow flags from public schools and flying the German one instead. On queer policy his line was that Saxony-Anhalt has "a tenfold increase in cases where children do not know what gender they are," that "this cannot be normal," and that "we want to abolish it. We want children to remain children." Nationally the party wants to repeal the law letting trans people correct their legal gender and scrap the federal commissioner for queer rights.

Susan Sziborra-Seidlitz, the Green candidate in the state, said it at normal volume: "This is a real danger for a minority in the country, for a group that isn't as small as many think."

Back at the hole in the Tiergarten, Werner Graf, who heads the Greens in Berlin's parliament, said nothing at all to the person who dug it. He said this to everyone else: "I say to all the queer people in this city: you are not alone." And then: "We will replant this tree, as often as necessary."

The Mitte district council says the bench is getting replaced too, because it "stands for our freedom and for solidarity with the queer community."

the arithmetic of replanting

Which leaves the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is the only cheerful thing here. Killing the tree takes one angry person and one night. Replanting it takes a district office, a budget line, a work order, a truck and four people who get paid to show up, and Berlin has already committed to doing that for as long as this goes on. One of those operations gets tired. It is not the one with the truck.

Somebody in that city is going to spend the rest of their life driving past a maple they cannot get rid of.

via Metro Weekly, Rough Draft Atlanta and CBS Atlanta.

Gemma Skuraton went to work at Georgia Southern in 2016 as a health promotion coordinator. By 2020 she was director of student wellness and health promotion, based on the Armstrong Campus in Savannah. She had good evaluations in 2023 and 2024. This is a boring resume, which is the point.

Then the campus started subtracting.

what the campus took down

The Pride flag came down from the student counseling center. LGBTQ resource listings were deleted off the student services website. Posters advertising counseling and medical services for people with gender dysphoria were taken down off the walls. None of this was announced. It was just gone, the way things go now, one small removal at a time until a student walks in and finds nothing that says they were expected.

There was a grant application in the works to provide free chest binders to trans students. A binder is a compression garment. Bought properly it fits and it is safe, and the reason a campus health office wants to hand them out for free is that a kid who cannot afford one will improvise with tape or a bandage and crack a rib doing it. This is harm reduction, the same category as free condoms in a bowl by the door.

Shay Little, the vice president for student affairs, had endorsed that application. In May 2025 she rejected it. That was a few weeks after Governor Brian Kemp signed Georgia's transgender athlete restrictions on April 28.

Students noticed all of it and did what students do. They protested, and they called reporters.

she was fired in july

Little accused Skuraton of putting them up to it. In July 2025, Skuraton was fired.

So she sued, naming the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia and Little, and she did not argue it as a gay rights case. She argued the First Amendment and Title IX: that a public university cannot fire an employee for speaking on a matter of public concern, and cannot retaliate against someone for opposing sex-based discrimination. Those are the boring provisions. They are also the load-bearing ones.

georgia paid $250,000

Georgia paid. The settlement is $250,000, split as $144,365.36 to Skuraton and $105,634.36 to her lawyers at HKM Employment Attorneys. The Board of Regents also agreed to reclassify her termination as a voluntary resignation, pull the termination letter from her personnel file where the law allows, and give her a neutral reference. The defendants admitted no wrongdoing, which is the phrase attached to every check anyone has ever written to make something go away.

Her attorney, Artur Davis, said the part worth keeping. "Gemma Skuraton lost a job but she kept her moral compass. This result is a reminder that while political tides change, the Constitution and the federal legal protections for vulnerable students and their advocates are still standing."

Two things are true here and we would rather you hold both. She should not have needed a lawyer. A woman lost her career for defending a bowl of free binders, and no settlement gives back the year she spent unemployed with a termination letter in her file.

And: it cost them a quarter of a million dollars of Georgia's money to find that out. Every administrator in that university system now knows the price of firing the person who says no. That number will be in a room the next time someone suggests it.

The flag is still down. She still won.

via CNN, The Advocate and Yahoo News.

CNN ran a piece on Sunday with a number in the headline that should stop you: an estimated one third of kids in American foster care are LGBTQ+.

Sit with that. Not one in twenty. Not a rounding error a state agency can call a special population and staff with a pamphlet. One in three.

the rule, and what it did

In 2024 the federal government wrote a rule for them. It has a title only a bureaucrat could love, "Designated Placement Requirements Under Titles IV-E and IV-B for LGBTQI Children," and it did four plain things. It told state and tribal agencies to have trained, supportive homes available. It gave a kid a formal way to say this placement is hurting me and be moved. It barred retaliation for saying so. And it prohibited so-called conversion therapy.

Note what it did not do, because this is where the argument always goes. It did not require every foster parent in America to take a gay kid. It did not force a single family to do anything. It required that somewhere in the system there be a door.

how fast it was killed

The rule barely got to exist. In March 2025 Judge Jeremy Kernodle stayed it nationwide. That June a court vacated it outright. Then on July 14, 2026, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had the rescission published in the Federal Register, which is the paperwork equivalent of salting the ground.

The defense, from an official at the Administration for Children and Families, is a real problem stated honestly and then pointed in the wrong direction. "Right now, there is a shortage of foster homes across the nation." That is true. There are roughly 57 licensed homes for every 100 children in care. The claim is that asking families to be supportive of a queer kid scares off religious families the system cannot spare.

So the shortage gets solved by giving the kid fewer options rather than the system more homes. The math works if you are counting beds. It does not work if you are counting children.

Julie Kruse, who advised HHS, gave the consequence in four words. LGBTQ kids in care are less likely to be reunified with family or adopted, which means they age out of the system rather than land anywhere. "They have no off-ramp."

Adrian Shanker, formerly a deputy assistant secretary at HHS, put it flatly: "LGBTQI+ youth in the foster care system are unquestionably some of the most vulnerable."

what the numbers look like

The numbers back him up and they are ugly. Foster youth who are LGBTQ+ have nearly three times the odds of attempting suicide compared with youth who were never in care. Among transgender and nonbinary people with a foster care history, 40 percent reported being kicked out or abandoned over mistreatment tied to who they are.

Weston Charles-Gallo, 27, was one of these kids. "It's already hard to come out, and then it's harder to come out when you're in foster care."

Because think about what coming out costs when your housing is the thing on the table. Every queer person reading this has run some version of that calculation at a dinner table. Now take away the part where it is your family, and your bedroom, and your last name, and replace it with a placement that can be ended by an adult who has known you for six weeks.

what your state can still do

One piece of actual news you can use: the rescission does not stop states and local governments from keeping their own protections, and it does not stop any agency or foster family from being decent voluntarily. The floor is gone. The building is not. Which means this is now a state fight and a county fight and, in a lot of places, a fight over one caseworker's discretion.

Find out what your state does. That is not a sign-off line, it is the whole assignment.

via NBC News, The Week, TMZ and Johnny Jet.

American Airlines Flight 618 left Dallas-Fort Worth for Newark on Thursday night. About two hours in, a 67-year-old man in first class started shouting about Jesus and people going to hell.

Juan Mejia was sitting near him. "Just like a light switch, all of a sudden, it went from quiet to yelling and chaos," he told The Week.

what he said on the plane

What followed, according to passengers: the man called a Black flight attendant the n-word. He used an anti-gay slur. He grabbed or struck the passenger next to him and hit the man's computer. A woman got up to help and he pushed her.

then they brought out the tape

Then the flight attendants did something that should be taught in a business school. They walked down the aisle and handed the passengers duct tape and zip ties.

Mejia and another passenger, Richard Olenick, plus three more men and the crew, taped him to his seat and held him there for about fifteen minutes while the plane came down. Olenick's account was one line long: "He called one of the flight attendants the N word."

Another passenger, Michelle Ng-Reyes, told NBC News why the tape came out at all. "They had to physically restrain him 'cause they were worried he might try to go into the cockpit or something, which is obviously pretty scary."

The plane diverted to Baltimore. A three-and-a-half hour flight took roughly eight. Maryland Transportation Authority Police met him at the gate and he was charged with second-degree assault and disorderly conduct, then released on bond the next day. The FBI has been collecting information and talking to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland about whether federal charges are warranted.

American Airlines said what airlines say. "The safety and security of our customers and team members is our top priority and we do not tolerate violence."

Mejia had the better line about what it actually cost the room. "Everyone who was in first class was basically victimised by his spewing of hatred and the discrimination." He also noted, for anyone reaching for the easy excuse: "I remember one of the stewardesses saying they only gave him one drink."

who he is, and his job

The man is Layne Arthur Lundeen. He is a real estate agent, or he was. Long Realty, where he had worked in Tucson, cut him loose. KVOA reported he is no longer employed there.

Here is the part we cannot walk past. Lundeen is from Tucson. Three days before he got on that plane, on the early morning of August 31, a gunman shot two gay men dead in the parking lot of the Venture-N, a gay bar on North 6th Avenue in Tucson, and was found carrying a list of local LGBTQ businesses. Vincent Anthony Siqueiros was 42. Cameron Davis Capara was 33.

There is no connection between these two men beyond a city and a calendar, and we are not going to invent one. But it is a hell of a week to be in Tucson and decide the word you want to shout in a pressurised cabin is that one.

The rest of it is almost restful. Nobody debated him. Nobody filmed a think piece about the marketplace of ideas. Six strangers and a cabin crew decided, in about a minute, that the flight was going to be quiet, and then they made it quiet with a roll of tape from the galley.

He can say whatever he likes. He just cannot say it standing up.

via LGBTQ Nation and California Department of Justice and KTVZ

what the hhs rule does

On August 13, the Department of Health and Human Services published a rule that does something the federal government has never done to this kind of care: it bars federal reimbursement, through Medicaid and CHIP, for puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery for anyone under 18 on Medicaid or under 19 on CHIP. Not a restriction on what doctors may do. A rule about whose money can touch it. It is scheduled to take effect on October 13, 2026.

On Wednesday, September 2, a coalition of 21 attorneys general and one governor sued to stop it, filing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Oregon's Dan Rayfield and California's Rob Bonta are both out front on it, alongside Illinois, Maryland, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Pennsylvania is in there as a governor rather than an attorney general, which is what happens when your state's top lawyer will not sign.

the legal argument

The legal argument is narrower than the politics and stronger for it. Congress never passed this. An agency wrote it. The states argue HHS has overridden both medical judgment and state authority to build a coverage ban that no statute authorises, and that it did so without the process the law requires. Bonta's version: "HHS has disregarded the law and its own policy precedent in another attempt to restrict transgender individuals' access to crucial care."

Rayfield went at it from the other end, which is the end that will actually land in a living room: "Freedom means very little if the government can reach into your family's private decisions and take it away."

Worth knowing, because it changes how you should read the odds: this administration has now lost this fight twice in a row. In March a court blocked HHS from cutting Medicare and Medicaid funding to hospitals that provide the care. In August another struck down the rule that had removed gender-affirming care from the essential health benefits under the Affordable Care Act. The department keeps finding a new door. Courts keep closing it.

who it actually hits

The people this rule is actually aimed at are not activists or athletes. They are kids on Medicaid, which is to say poor kids, which is to say the ones with no second option and no family lawyer. Strip the federal share and the care does not become illegal. It becomes something only some families can buy. That is the design.

October 13 is five weeks out. Watch that docket.

via AZPM, The Advocate and KVOA.

We wrote last week about the two men shot dead outside the Venture-N in Tucson, and about the note the gunman was carrying with the names of LGBTQ businesses on it. This is the part that happened after.

a thousand people, at sunset

On Wednesday, September 2, around a thousand people filled Catalina Park on North 4th Avenue at sunset with candles for Vincent Anthony Siqueiros, 42, and Cameron Davis Capara, 33. Their photographs were propped up at the front. People left flowers. Someone left a silver Polaroid camera.

the question he asked her

Kate Marquez, Vincent's sister, told the crowd that six days before he was killed, her brother had asked her a question. He wanted to know whether anyone would actually be there for him if something happened to him.

She was standing in front of a thousand people when she said it.

"No gun gets to define my brother," she told them. "No hatred gets to erase his joy." Earlier she had put the rest of it as directly as anyone has: "Hate does not begin with a gun. It begins much earlier. Our rhetoric matters, the jokes matter, the words we excuse matters, silence matters."

who cameron capara was

Cameron was a photographer. He spent years shooting Tucson's protests, the marches and the rallies, the unglamorous middle of a Tuesday when about nine people turn up. His father Jeff Capara said his son "cared deeply about people in Tucson, or those thousands of miles away. People who were marginalized, overlooked or misunderstood." He also said Cameron fed feral cats, because he could not walk away from a hungry animal.

Alli Lee, Cameron's best friend, said she "was always so proud of Cameron being there out on the streets at every protest and rally." Their friend Brian King said the thing everyone kept circling: "They were genuinely who they were. They didn't try to be anybody else, they didn't conform."

Mayor Regina Romero was there. So were Vice Mayor Lane Santa Cruz, Councilmember Miranda Schubert and Pima County Supervisor Andres Cano. The Venture-N opened its doors again at four that afternoon, before the vigil, which is its own kind of statement. Down on the corner, volunteers at Boycott Bar made six hundred paper luminaries and lined the street with them.

One more thing, because it is happening in real time and it deserves saying. Since Friday a wave of accounts that have never once cared about a dead gay man has been passing these two around as ammunition, mostly because of who the shooter was and what Cameron photographed. They are not mourning. They are shopping. Vincent and Cameron were a Tucson bar's regulars, a photographer and a man whose sister called him bigger and braver than all of them at five years old, and they do not belong to anybody's argument.

He asked if anyone would show up. Say their names properly: Vincent Anthony Siqueiros. Cameron Davis Capara.

via Them and Out, reported by Gwen Howerton for Chron, with the team's statement to The Dallas Morning News.

The Dallas Stars put out their 2026-27 promotional schedule last week. Eighties Night is on it. So is Star Wars Night, Anime Night, Black History Night, Noche Mexicana and Military Appreciation Night. Pride Night, which the team had run for at least five years straight, is not.

what replaced pride night

In its place, on March 23 against the Carolina Hurricanes, is something called "Hockey Unites Us: Women in Sports Night." Stars spokesperson Joe Calvillo told the Dallas Morning News that the new night "allows our organization to use our platform to celebrate and support a different underrepresented community each season." When the paper asked why Pride Night specifically had to be the one that went, the Stars declined to comment.

Tori Copeland has been going to Stars Pride Nights for years. She clocked the absence immediately and told Chron the swap felt "really icky and targeted." She was careful about it too: "I'm a woman in sports; I understand the need for that, but we can do that alongside Pride Night, too. I don't see the reason why we can't do both."

one fan said screw it

Then she posted the sentence that started the whole thing. "Screw it. I'm throwing my own Pride Night and everyone's invited."

It went off. Other Stars fans piled in. She brought in her friend Jason, a trans Stars fan with ties to the organization who would only give his first name, and he was in within a minute: "I immediately was like, 'Yep, let's do it. Let me volunteer my resources, figure out what we can do.'"

Jason is the one who named the sting. "The Stars have always been very supportive and outspoken," he said. "It felt like a betrayal of sorts for this team that I love to all of a sudden just decide not to do a Pride Night." He is not wrong about the history. In 2017 the Stars were the first professional sports team in Texas to come out against the bathroom bill.

how to go on november 14

The fan-run Pride Night is November 14, at the Stars game against the Buffalo Sabres. It benefits Dallas Hope Charities, which works with queer youth in the city. Since it was announced, people have donated season tickets so LGBTQ+ fans can actually get in the building, and jerseys to raffle. Drag queens have offered to perform for free. Sue Ellen's, the oldest operating lesbian bar in Texas, offered to host the afterparty.

The Carolina Hurricanes lost their Pride Night too. Their fans have already messaged Copeland asking how to do this.

"It's bigger than the Stars at this point," she said.

Here is the part the front office may not have thought through. A Pride Night the team schedules is a marketing line item, and marketing line items can be deleted in a spreadsheet in about four seconds. A Pride Night the fans build themselves, with a drag lineup and a lesbian bar and a charity attached, is a great deal harder to cancel. They did not end Pride Night in Dallas. They just stopped owning it.

via Human Rights Watch, PinkNews and LGBTQ Nation.

Ecuador's National Assembly passed the Reform Law of Various Legal Bodies for the Streamlining of Adoption on July 28. The vote was 118 in favor, zero against, with 25 abstentions. President Daniel Noboa signed off on August 13 and it became law the next day.

the bill was sold as efficiency

The bill was sold as efficiency. Kids wait too long in institutional care, the paperwork is slow, let's fix the pipeline. Nobody argues with that. Then you read what else is in it.

Ecuador's constitution already blocked same-sex couples from adopting. What the old children's code did not do was tell a single person they had to be straight. This one does. A single lesbian, gay or bisexual person in Ecuador can no longer adopt a child, full stop, and that is new.

the part about trans kids

The second piece is worse, and it does not stop at us. The law makes a parent's "promotion" of medical, surgical or pharmaceutical procedures to "modify the biological sex" of a child grounds for losing parental rights. Read that as written. A mother in Guayaquil who takes her trans kid to a doctor has handed the state a file on herself. Most of the parents this will hit are heterosexual. They just have a trans child.

And there is a carve-out that gives the whole thing away: none of it applies to parents who authorise "normalising" surgery on an intersex infant. Surgery on a child too young to speak is fine. Listening to a teenager who can is the crime.

Cristian González Cabrera, senior LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, put it plainly: "Improving the adoption system is a legitimate legislative goal, but it should not be used as a pretext to entrench discrimination and undermine children's health."

The Ecuadorian LGBT Federation was blunter. "Being heterosexual does not demonstrate parental fitness. Being LGBT+ does not constitute parental incapacity either." And on the custody clause: "Supporting trans kids does not make a family an enemy of childhood."

married in 2019, banned in 2026

This is a country where we can get married. The Constitutional Court did that in 2019. Seven years later the legislature voted 118 to nothing to say we still cannot be trusted with a child, and nobody in the chamber thought it was worth a no.

Marriage was never the finish line. It was one room in a house they still own the keys to.

every june the internet remembers that queer people make things. the other eleven months, this list exists. these are alcohol (and a couple of zero-proof) brands where queer or LGBTQ+ ownership or founding is stated outright by the brand or confirmed by a reputable outlet, not just brands that put a rainbow on a can for pride. disclosure: gay water is ours, so it's first. the rest are in no particular order.

canned cocktails & spritzes

Gay Water

Canned vodka soda in lime, grapefruit, watermelon and peach: real vodka, sparkling water, natural flavor, 80 calories, 0 sugar, 4% ABV. Founded in 2023 by Spencer Hoddeson; queer-owned. Yes, this is us. Shop it here.

Supergay Spirits

Organic-corn vodka, Fire Island Dry Gin and "Two Fruits" canned cocktails out of Yonkers, NY ("farm to disco"). Founded by Aaron Thorp and Tom Jackson; queer-owned and operated, and donates to local LGBTQ+ organizations.

Anytime

Canned spritzes plus Regenerative Organic Certified vodka and gin, New York. Founded by Maddy Rotman and Taylor Lanzet; "created by queer women."

Social Hour Cocktails

Full-proof canned cocktails (Pacific Spritz, gin & tonic, whiskey mule) from Brooklyn. From Clover Club's Julie Reiner and Tom Macy, both LGBTQ+.

So Gay Rosé

Canned sparkling rosé, chardonnay and a non-alcoholic rosé from Oakville, CA. Co-founded by Tim Chan (gay) with ally Josh Campbell; self-described queer- and Asian-owned.

spirits

Future Gin

Southern California dry gin with Meyer lemon, honeysuckle and grape leaf, distilled in downtown LA. Founded by Amy Atwood, Mary Bartlett, Freya Estreller and Natasha Case; billed as the first all-queer, women-owned US spirit.

Republic Restoratives

Civic Vodka, Borough Bourbon, Rodham Rye, Dissent Gin and brandy from a DC distillery and bar. Co-founded by Pia Carusone and Rachel Gardner; women- and LGBTQ-owned.

Rhode Island Spirits

Forager's Gin, vodkas and liqueurs built on foraged Rhode Island botanicals, Pawtucket. Founded by Cathy Plourde and Kara Larson; lesbian-founded and queer-owned.

Catskill Provisions / Pollinator Spirits

Honey-finished rye, Beespoke gin, Live Proud Vodka and amaro from Callicoon, NY. Founder and head distiller Claire Marin is an out lesbian beekeeper and co-chair of Pride Callicoon.

Suncliffe Gin

Arizona gin made with native junipers and wild-foraged botanicals. From married couple Thomas Giddings and Ryan Lawrence with friend Clare Byrne; LGBTQ-owned.

Brighton Gin

Small-batch gin from Brighton, UK. Founder Kathy Caton MBE; the brand says it's the UK's first LGBTQ+ founded, owned and run distillery.

Reyalibre Tequila

Aerated blanco tequila out of Atlanta, launched 2025. Founded by couple Erica Jones and Asiaa Karriem; queer-, Black- and woman-owned, with a Pride flag on every bottle.

Apuesto Tequila

Barrel-rosa reposado aged in Napa cabernet barrels, Kansas City. Founder J. Josue Montes, a gay Latino, built it to uplift Latino and gay communities.

Saint Luna Moonshine

Charcoal-filtered molasses-and-rye moonshine from North Carolina. Founder David Suk (gay-owned and operated) with trans co-owner Aubrey Slater.

wine

Remy Wines

Northern Italian varietals (nebbiolo, sangiovese, lagrein) in Dayton, Oregon; also hosts Queer Wine Fest. Founder and winemaker Remy Drabkin is an openly lesbian former McMinnville mayor.

Equality Vines

Pinot noir, cabernet, albariño and a "Love Wins" sparkling rosé from Guerneville, CA. Co-founded by Jim Obergefell (yes, that Obergefell) and Matt Grove; proceeds support LGBTQ+ causes.

Eco Terreno Wines

Biodynamic Alexander Valley cabernet, sauvignon blanc and a Pink Pride Rosé that sends $1 a bottle to the SF AIDS Foundation. Owner and winemaker Mark Lyon is gay.

Birdhorse Wines

Organically grown California wines. From Corinne Rich and Katie Rouse, "partners in love and wine."

ZAFA Wines

Native-ferment sparkling and fruit wines from Vermont. Owner and winemaker Krista Scruggs is a queer Black winemaker.

Aluel Cellars

Small-lot Washington merlot, grenache and malbec with Seattle tasting rooms. Owned by life partners Alex Oh and Simon Hilbert.

beer & cider

Gay Beer

A golden lager (Vienna malt, Mandarina hops) from Brooklyn that ships to 45 states. From same-sex couple Jon Moore and Jason Pazmino; donates to LGBTQ+ advocacy groups.

Dyke Beer

Mexican lager, a "Tall Girl" gose, saison and Out Stout from Brooklyn. Founded by Loretta Andro Chung and Sarah Hallonquist; lesbian-owned and funds dyke bars and events.

Bow & Arrow Brewing Co.

Craft beers and hard seltzers in Albuquerque (a 2026 James Beard Outstanding Bar nominee). Wife-and-wife founders Shyla Sheppard and Missy Begay; reported as the first Native-woman-owned US brewery.

Red Bear Brewing Co.

DC brewery and taproom with beers plus a "Woof!" hard seltzer. Founded by Bryan Van Den Oever, Simon Bee and Cameron Raspet; billed as DC's first 100% gay-owned brewery.

Lady Justice Brewing

Social-enterprise brewery in Englewood, CO, with profits going to women- and nonbinary-focused nonprofits. Owner Betsy Lay and wife Alison Wisneski; queer- and women-owned.

Sincere Cider

Dry craft ciders (ginger agave, seasonal flavors) from Oakland. Founder Bex Pezzullo is a queer woman; woman- and LGBTQIA+-owned.

zero-proof

Woodnose Sacré

Barrel-aged maple and coffee zero-proof spirit from a sixth-generation Vermont maple farm. Husband-and-husband founders Justin and Roger.

The Twisted Botanist

Botanical cocktail and mocktail mixers and sangria infusion kits from Phoenix. Founder Jake Graves; gay-owned and a sponsor of Arizona Pride.

know one we missed?

we only listed brands where queer ownership is on the record. if yours belongs here, email hello@gaywater.com with a link. and if you want this kind of thing weekly, join the watering hole.

the funniest gay tweets this week, rounded up. vol. 49 of the best of gay twitter, from the watering hole.

1. @_sapphicism_

"had an amazing lesbian first kiss tonight at a dolly parton memorial at a gay club just like dolly would want" — @_sapphicism_ (sapphicism)

2. @JagShiro

"Sometimes my grandma goes to my house while im doing art and goes "why dont you make him more muscular dont gay people like that"" — @JagShiro (Jagshiro)

3. @tyl0saur

"does the gta 6 gay sex let you pick if you top or bottom" — @tyl0saur (zade)

4. @deathwolfsimp

"armpit kinks are a CIA psyop for gays to stop showering so more water goes to AI data centers" — @deathwolfsimp (death wolf simp🐺🇦🇱🇵🇸)

5. @funnygayme

"the only movies I’d watch" — @funnygayme (funny gay meme 🏳️‍🌈)

6. @ultrap0p

"sometimes i can’t rly watch gay porn cuz it’s like Ok well he’s clearly in pain" — @ultrap0p (angel mars)

7. @GOREJ1RA

"Not true, Silent Hill has always had a gay character. You, the player." — @GOREJ1RA (GOREJIRλ)

8. @avaluciarevilla

"i got bullied for seeming gay until bro found out i was actually gay so he apologized cause homophobia isn’t cool then said he’s bully me for being autistic instead but that i should let him know if i ever got a formal diagnosis so he could find something else" — @avaluciarevilla (clover 🍀)

9. @Homievulgaris

"Dolly Parton was the patron saint of good gays, who fall in love, adopt kids, and see beauty in everything. Tim Curry was the patron saint of evil bisexuals like me, who love oil and grime, scary clowns, and communism." — @Homievulgaris (Marcos)

want these in your inbox? join the watering hole (free, sunday nights) and follow @drinkgaywater for the carousel.

via Washington Blade and ILGA-Europe, TGEU, Bilitis and Deystvie joint statement

In 2023, Bulgaria's Supreme Court of Cassation issued a ruling that effectively shut the door on trans people changing their name and gender on their ID. No procedure, no path, no documents that matched the person carrying them. At the end of July this year the same court reopened the door, and last week the country's LGBTQ groups told the world about it.

what the court ruled

The rulings, dated July 22 according to the Blade, came down in favor of four trans applicants. The judges found that the Bulgarian constitution never prohibited legal gender recognition; earlier courts had simply read the word "sex" too narrowly. They held that trans and intersex people have an equal right to recognition, that blanket bans are unlawful, that a diagnosis plus a demonstrated commitment to living in one's gender is enough, and that nobody can be made to have surgery to qualify. Then they wrote a sentence Bulgarian trans people had waited years for: "The rule of law in Bulgaria implies a universal equality of the dignity of all human beings, including transgender people."

The push came from Luxembourg. In March, the EU Court of Justice ruled in the Shipova case that member states must let trans people change their name and gender on identity documents. The plaintiff was a Bulgarian trans woman living in Italy who had spent nearly a decade fighting for a passport that matched her life. Bilitis and Deystvie, the two Bulgarian groups, backed her alongside ILGA-Europe and TGEU. The Supreme Court has now concluded that EU law obliges Bulgaria to build an actual procedure, so its trans citizens can travel and live freely inside the union like everybody else.

why it may change nothing yet

Which is the catch. A court can say a procedure must exist. Only the government can write one. In a joint statement on September 1, the four organizations demanded that Sofia legislate a fast, transparent, accessible process based on self-determination rather than leave every trans person to relitigate the question case by case. Denitsa Lyubenova, co-chair of Deystvie, said "the government needs to act swiftly now to put in place an LGR procedure that is fully in line with European human rights case law."

Bulgaria is not the country you expected on this page this week. That is rather the point. Cracks, again. This is how it starts.

via PinkNews and Socialite Life

Netflix's I Like to Watch has been running since 2019 on a simple format: put Trixie Mattel and Katya in front of something and let the conversation deteriorate. In the episode posted on August 29, the something was Let's Marry Harry, a reality show in which a group of women compete to marry Australian influencer Harry Jowsey. The women got onto the rat boy trend, the current appreciation for scruffy, skinny, faintly feral men in the Timothée Chalamet and Pete Davidson mould. Katya confessed to being "a victim of the rat boy community." Then Trixie delivered the sentence of the week.

what she said

"Me and Frankie Grande were in a consensual, non-monogamous relationship with Barry Keoghan," she said. "Ironically, I was the rat boy. I was the mole king."

To be clear for the lawyers and for Barry: it is a joke. PinkNews frames it as a joke, the show frames everything as a joke, and Frankie Grande has not been asked to confirm, which is the only correct way to handle this. It is also a joke that does more cultural work than most think pieces. In three sentences it names the trend, identifies its patron saint, adds a beloved gay theater kid for scale, and then flips the whole hierarchy so the six-foot-two drag queen in a fourteen-inch wig is the small scruffy one. The mole king. A royal title for a creature that lives underground and has never seen a gym.

rat boy summer, explained

Rat boy summer, if you missed it, is the culture deciding after a decade of gym rat Hemsworths that the hot man is now the one who looks like he owes you money. Gay men have been on this since forever. We had a word for it. It was "twink." The straights simply rediscovered it, added rodents and put it on TikTok.

Anyway. Trixie and Katya's chaos remains the most reliable content on that platform, Let's Marry Harry is now a show we have to watch, and Barry Keoghan is a rat boy with two exes he has never met. Congratulations to everyone involved.

via Queerty and Stereogum

Miley, who has dropped the Cyrus from her social handles and would like you to do the same, released "Bass Persuades" on Thursday, September 3. It is the title track and lead single from her tenth studio album, her first for Atlantic after Something Beautiful closed out the Columbia years. The album lands September 18. The video landed in our group chat within the hour.

who directed it

It was directed by Mert Alas, whose résumé includes Madonna's "Girls Gone Wild" and the Jeremy Allen White Calvin Klein campaign, so you already know the lighting. Miley walks into a shadowy club full of men in leather pants and Muir caps. The song opens on a spoken "Let's go" in the great "It's Britney, bitch" tradition, then drops into an eighties electro groove that would not be out of place at the Eagle at 1 a.m. "The kids don't wanna dance," she complains in the chorus, before the pitch: "We can't stay like this forever. Let's surrender to the night, put our bodies close together." By the end she is dancing down a neon street at night and the internet has already compared it to "Thriller."

The top YouTube comment reads "This is so Britney Spears, Lady Gaga and Madonna CODED," and honestly, the video knows. Something Beautiful was the ambitious one, critically loved, debuted at number four and under-sold. Bass Persuades is the one where she remembers who buys the tickets. The press statement calls the record "powerful, vulnerable, sweet and strong" and "every part of life in between." The video calls it a dark room and a bass bin. Both can be true.

she still will not tour

She still does not tour, and has said so for years. There are exactly two dates: the Hollywood Bowl on October 16 and 18. Tickets go on general sale September 10. If you have ever wanted to see a pop star perform a leather-bar record in a natural amphitheatre under the Los Angeles stars, this is the fortnight to set an alarm.

R U Thirsty? Reader, the video is 1 percent Miley and 99 percent thigh. We are parched.

via The Advocate and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and ACLU of Arkansas

what saline county did

In 2023, Saline County, Arkansas, passed an ordinance ordering books with "sexual content or imagery" moved out of the children's section of the public library. Patty Hector, who ran the Saline County Library System, stood up at a public hearing and said the quiet part: a picture book with two dads in it is not sexual content, and LGBTQ families are not inappropriate for children. County Judge Matt Brumley took public exception. That October, she was fired.

In February 2025, with the ACLU of Arkansas, she sued, arguing the county had punished her for protected speech. Last week the county blinked. Under a settlement first reported by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on August 27, Hector gets $225,000 in damages and her lawyers get $50,000, a total of $275,000. The money comes from the Association of Arkansas Counties Risk Management Fund, which is to say the insurance pool every county in the state pays into. Congratulations to Saline County's neighbours on their new shared bill.

what the settlement cost

Hector, in a statement: "Standing up for the freedom to read cost me a job and a career I loved, but I never believed that staying silent was the answer."

The ACLU of Arkansas's legal director said the settlement should "serve as a warning," adding that "public employees have constitutional rights, and political disagreement is not a license to punish them for protected speech." That is the line worth remembering in every county with a book ordinance and a librarian who has not quit yet. The First Amendment covers the people who shelve the books, too.

Two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars will not give Hector her career back. It does put a price tag on firing a librarian for saying gay kids exist, and in a state that has spent three years trying to make that speech expensive for the speaker, the invoice finally went the other way.

via PinkNews and NBC San Diego

Somewhere in Council President Joe LaCava's office, a staffer was reading the San Diego Municipal Code, which is a sentence that should come with hazard pay. In Chapter 4, Article 2, Division 4 they found a 1988 ordinance, amended in 1991, written to regulate bathhouses so that gay and bisexual men would stop having sex in them. It required operators not to "encourage, facilitate and/or knowingly allow" anything that risked HIV transmission. Nobody had enforced it in years. It was still the law.

repealed unanimously

On Tuesday, September 1, the City Council repealed it unanimously.

LaCava did not pretend the vote was about enforcement. "This language does not reflect who we are as a city," he said. "It is an outdated and offensive perspective." Repealing it, he added, was "a smart signal of how far we have come as a society." Councilman Raul Campillo, whose uncle died of AIDS in 1992, thanked him for bringing it forward.

why the law existed

The numbers behind the original panic: when the ordinance passed in April 1988, more than 700 San Diegans had been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS and half of them were already dead. The city has since lost roughly 10,000 people to the disease. That grief was real. The law was still wrong, and the county's own public health lead says so. Patrick Loose, who runs the HIV, STD and Hepatitis Branch, told the council that gay and bisexual men had already changed their behavior before the ordinance existed, and that grassroots LGBTQ organizations doing judgment-free education did far more than any code section ever did.

Oxean "Eddie" Rey, who publishes LGBTQ San Diego News, made the point the ordinance never could: "When this was added to the code, these facilities were comparable to a luxury spa, not a shady, dangerous stereotype."

San Diego is not alone in the cleanup. San Francisco repealed its bathhouse rules in 2024. Minneapolis did it in June. New York City lawmakers are trying now. If your city still has one of these on the books, it is probably in a division nobody has read since the first Bush administration. Somebody should read it.

via SWI swissinfo.ch and Washington Blade

Switzerland does most things one canton at a time. On Wednesday, September 2, the Federal Council published a report saying that on conversion therapy, that is no longer good enough. Uniform national legislation, the government wrote, is "worthwhile." It also wrote that it "clearly rejects and condemns" any practice that tries to change someone's sexual orientation or gender identity.

what the report says

The report's own description of the damage is worth quoting, because governments do not usually put it this plainly. Conversion practices "could cause considerable psychological distress, anxiety and depression, and impair self-esteem and social relationships." The government admitted it does not have good numbers on how many people are subjected to them. It called the current situation a "patchwork of cantonal regulations."

The patchwork: Neuchâtel banned it first, in 2023. Valais and Vaud followed. Bern and Geneva are weighing their own bans, and Zurich has said it plans one. Everywhere else in the country, it is legal to sit a teenager in a room and try to pray the gay out of them.

what it does not do

What the report does not do is pass a law. Parliament has rejected national proposals before, and the Council's language is "open to" legislation rather than "here is the bill." So this is a door, not a finish line. It is still a bigger door than the country has opened on this before, and it comes from the executive, not from an activist motion that can be voted down and forgotten.

Context from the neighbours: Germany banned the practice for minors and non-consenting adults in 2020. The Netherlands approved a ban in June. Belgium, Cyprus, France, Malta, Norway, Portugal and Spain have full bans. Switzerland, which likes to think of itself as the tidy one, is now on record saying it wants to catch up. We will hold them to it.

via The Advocate and WBUR and Washington Blade

Ed Markey is 80. Seth Moulton is 47 and ran on that gap for a year, telling voters to "learn the lessons of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Dianne Feinstein and Joe Biden." On Tuesday, September 1, Massachusetts Democrats answered. Markey won the Senate primary by just under 30 points. With almost all of it counted, that was 572,595 votes to 310,365, or 64.9 to 35.1, a margin of 29.7 points.

what moulton said in 2024

The age argument was never really the story. The story is what Moulton did after Donald Trump won in 2024. A congressman who had co-sponsored the Equality Act and the Transgender Bill of Rights told the New York Times he didn't want his daughters "getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete." It was the first big Democratic defection on trans kids and it was meant to look brave. At Boston's No Kings rally in October 2025, the crowd booed him. Markey, wrapped in a trans pride flag, told the same crowd that "trans rights are human rights." That was the campaign in one afternoon.

Moulton tried to walk it back in an August debate, saying he recognized the "trauma" his words had caused. Markey said he had picked up "Trump's playbook" and thrown trans children "under the political bus." Then he went out and won every argument about it at the ballot box. He has a 100 percent lifetime score from the Human Rights Campaign. He did not moderate a syllable to get there.

what the margin means

Tyler Hack of the Christopher Street Project, which backs pro-trans Democrats, said it cleanly: "Massachusetts rejected the idea that attacking transgender people is a shortcut to political power." HRC's Kelley Robinson said Markey has "stood with us no matter what."

Moulton conceded on the night and pledged to "do everything I can to help him win re-election in November." Markey faces Republican John Deaton in November, in a state where the Democratic primary is usually the election. So the practical consequence is small. The signal is not. For every consultant telling a Democrat that trans kids are the thing to trade away, there is now a 30-point number to hand them.

via Washington Blade and The Advocate

Gloria Steinem died on Wednesday, September 2, at her home in Manhattan. She was 92. Gloria's Foundation announced it on Instagram the following morning, saying she "passed away peacefully at her home, surrounded by some of the many who loved her." No cause was given. The foundation asked for donations in place of flowers.

the outline you know

You know the outline. Born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934. Smith College, 1956. The 1963 undercover piece for Show magazine, "A Bunny's Tale," that turned a Playboy Club uniform into a labor exposé. Co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus and of Ms. magazine, which debuted in 1971 and gave second-wave feminism a newsstand. The Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2013. The aviators.

what she did in 1977

Here is the part that belongs on this page. In 1977, when Anita Bryant was campaigning to repeal Dade County's nondiscrimination ordinance and being gay on television was still a career risk for anyone standing next to you, Steinem got on a plane to Miami to stand next to us. That same year she told a convention of the American Association of University Women that lesbians were "the most vulnerable group of women" and that the word lesbian had to become "as honorable as any other." In 1992 she told columnist Sally Quinn she had "disqualified herself" from writing about women after Quinn sneered at feminism for including lesbians. Steinem did not treat us as a wing of her movement. She treated us as the movement.

She also got things wrong and said so, which is rarer. A 1977 essay of hers on transition circulated for decades without its context and read, to many trans people, as opposition. In 2013 she wrote in The Advocate that transgender people "were living authentic lives," that their healthcare decisions "belonged to them alone," apologized for words that had failed to say so, and called trans legal equality "one of the LGBTQ+ movement's most neglected priorities." An apology at 79, in print, with no hedging. Take notes.

GLAAD's Sarah Kate Ellis called her "a trailblazing titan of civil rights whose vision for liberation bridged the movements for gender equality, bodily autonomy, and LGBTQ rights." Steinem herself once wrote the future she wanted, including the line that "lesbians or homosexuals will no longer be denied legally binding marriages, complete with mutual-support agreements and inheritance rights." She lived to see that one land. She spent the rest of the time on the ones that haven't.

via The Advocate and The Oaklandside

Last summer the Justice Department sued California. The theory, from Harmeet Dhillon's civil rights division, was that the state Department of Education and the California Interscholastic Federation were violating Title IX by letting trans girls play on girls' teams, and that roughly $44 billion in federal education money could be pulled over it. The lawsuit landed in July 2025. On Monday, August 31, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Valenzuela dismissed it with prejudice, which is the legal way of saying do not come back with this.

the spending clause reasoning

The reasoning is dry and it matters. Under the Spending Clause, the federal government cannot punish a state for breaking a funding condition it never clearly set. Valenzuela found nothing in Title IX or its athletics regulations that told California, in advance, that it had to exclude trans athletes to keep the money. The Supreme Court's recent decision letting other states restrict trans athletes doesn't change that either. In her words, the court "upheld the biological-sex eligibility rules before it without holding that Title IX requires every school to adopt the same rule."

what it does not decide

Be precise about what this is not. The judge did not rule that Title IX protects trans kids' right to play. She ruled that federal law does not force every state to ban them, and that the DOJ cannot invent a condition after the fact and attach a $44 billion invoice to it. The national fight is not over. This one particular threat is.

Rainbow Families Action said the decision "lifts a significant shadow that has been hanging over the joyful and expanding success story of girls' and women's sports in California." The DOJ is reportedly weighing an appeal.

For now: the girls are still on the team, the money is still in the schools, and a federal judge has written down that the government's leverage was never real. Save the ruling. You will want to cite it at Thanksgiving.

via The Advocate and PinkNews and Washington Blade

what the high-t rules were

In July, Pete Hegseth stood in front of a camera and announced a High-T Department of War: mandatory testosterone blood tests for every man in uniform aged 30 and up, so the warfighters could, in his words, "remain strong, resilient, and capable." On Wednesday, September 2, the Pentagon published the actual clinical guidance. By Thursday it was gone from the website.

A Pentagon official told Reuters the document was "temporarily rescinded to allow for updates." No timeline was given for the update. The underlying order still stands, so the tests are still coming. The rulebook just needed a minute.

What was in the rulebook while it existed: men 30 and over get tested whether they like it or not. Younger men can ask, or get tested if a clinician thinks they look low. Women get no blood test at all. Instead they are screened once a year for fatigue, menstrual disruption and low energy availability, and testosterone treatment is only on the table for postmenopausal women with low sexual desire, off-label, closely monitored, and stopped after six months if it isn't working. The guidance also admitted, in its own text, that "the evidence does not show testosterone treatment improves women's psychological well-being, cognition, cardiovascular health, bone density or muscle performance." So the department wrote down that the science is thin and published it anyway. Then unpublished it.

the contradiction at the center

Here is the part that makes it a Cunt of the Week and not just a clerical error. The same department is right now discharging transgender service members and cutting off their hormone therapy, under a January 2025 executive order that says trans people cannot meet military standards of "honesty," "humility" and "integrity." The D.C. Circuit has ruled 2 to 1 that trans troops already serving can stay for now while new recruits are barred. In July, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes asked the government to explain how hormones can be readiness medicine for one group and a disqualifying condition for another. She is still waiting.

Kara Corcoran, executive director of SPARTA Pride, put it plainly to the Blade: "If hormone therapy helps warfighters perform at their best, then it cannot simultaneously be used as evidence that transgender service members are unfit to serve." Rep. Pramila Jayapal got there in one line: "This, by the way, is gender affirming care."

The FDA meets later this month to talk about testosterone. Somewhere in the Pentagon, a policy document is getting its updates. We will let you know when it comes back, and whether it still forgets who else takes hormones in that building.