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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Specifcally, people from:

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

Should sign.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flooding the zone with "shit somewhere else."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello friends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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