A Pride parade held at an IKEA is going viral on TikTok. [...] The video, posted by user kenyavargas98, has gotten over a million likes so far. It shows people pushing small floats through an IKEA store while others cheered and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” plays.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) vetoed three anti-LGBTQ+ provisions in the state’s latest budget bill yesterday, in a partial victory for civil rights that still leaves several assaults on LGBTQ+ identity signed into law.

Over the past year, we’ve completely rebuilt the Namesake app. It has a new design, more accessible forms, improved security, and is now open source. This new app builds a foundation for us to support name changes in many more locations and for different types of activities. You can sign up today.

Esther Fallick wants her comedy to be an escape from the horrors. But that escape has a purpose: to make it easier to face these times for what they are. By poking fun at something that can feel so heavy, like the president pitting his administration against transgender people, Fallick wants to find ways to bring people together and laugh off the darkness creeping in on everyday life.

“We could be having a little more fun as a community, as a country. I just feel like so much of what we’re talking about as trans people right now is so dire. There’s reason for that, but I just wanted a space to be intentionally silly,” she said. Intentions aside, she still spent the first episode of her podcast — aptly titled, “Having Fun” — joking about fleeing anti-trans violence in America with fellow comedian Ella Yurman. The gallows humor is inescapable.

Her weekly variety show in Brooklyn, titled “While We’re Here,” is also a dark joke: We’re only here, alive and on this planet, for so long. And life is only getting harder. So what should we do in the meantime? Fallick suggests laughter, to start, followed by music, reading and teach-ins on topics ranging from transmisogyny — how trans women are hurt by both misogyny and transphobia — to demilitarizing New York City’s police force, especially in Brooklyn.

• Russian courts have issued over 100 convictions for “extremism” for participating in the “International LGBT Movement” or displaying its alleged symbols.
• Russian authorities weaponize and misuse the justice system as a tool in their draconian crusade to enforce “traditional values” and marginalize and censor LGBT people.
• Russia’s international interlocutors should call on the Kremlin to end its persecution of LGBT people and their supporters; governments should provide safe haven and meaningful protection to those fleeing Russia for fear of prosecution.

In the 1990s, a small cir­cle of inter­sex peo­ple came to know one anoth­er. They met face-to-face and con­nect­ed over the inter­net (then a nov­el­ty). As they shared life expe­ri­ences, med­ical records, and per­spec­tives on the injuries and neglect they endured, a con­sen­sus quick­ly arose. They found shared strug­gles, caused not sole­ly by wide­spread igno­rance of ordi­nary human vari­ance in repro­duc­tive devel­op­ment, but also by the ways they were known over.

At worst, this know­ing over meant surg­eries and oth­er treat­ments car­ried out with lit­tle regard for their con­sent, then usu­al­ly con­cealed from them. Med­ical jar­gon and vague euphemism had been lay­ered along with scar tis­sue. The truth of their treat­ments was left impos­si­ble for inter­sex peo­ple to reach indi­vid­u­al­ly — but was eas­i­ly recog­nised when they gath­ered. Then, they could intu­itive­ly grasp the shared wound­ing and neglect that pre­vi­ous­ly iso­lat­ed inter­sex peo­ple (that had caused them to know them­selves only as med­ical freaks — best off cor­rect­ed and hid­den away — and not as their own cat­e­go­ry of human, who might under­stand themselves).

Inter­sex advo­cates first focused on dia­logue, both inter­nal and exter­nal, by rais­ing con­scious­ness at small com­mu­ni­ty meet­ings and on pur­pose-made web forums and devel­op­ing con­nec­tions with allies in fem­i­nist schol­ar­ship and the LGBTQ+ move­ment. Inter­sex advo­ca­cy of this era had an unmis­tak­able imprint of both the fem­i­nist and les­bian and gay move­ments. Inter­sex peo­ple drew slo­gans, strate­gies, insights, and approach­es from ear­li­er twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry coun­ter­cul­ture – and merg­ing with the pre­vail­ing provoca­tive style of ​’90s queer campaigners.

After just three years of under­ground con­scious­ness-rais­ing organ­i­sa­tion, inter­sex advo­ca­cy took to the streets (first in Boston in 1996, then quick­ly world­wide). Their first protest fea­tured signs read­ing ​“SILENCE = DEATH”. Just two inter­sex demon­stra­tors were flanked by trans­sex­u­als, hold­ing a flam­boy­ant pick­et to con­front doc­tors with ​“feed­back” from those who they’d harmed. From 1996 to today, advo­cates began con­fronting the pro­fes­sion­als respon­si­ble for the harms done to inter­sex chil­dren, with the hope that future gen­er­a­tions could be spared the devel­op­men­tal injuries that so many in the move­ment had endured.

A longtime music teacher at a Catholic school in the New Orleans area recently lost his job when it was revealed to an evidently “disgruntled” parent that he was another man’s widower, igniting a scandal within an archdiocese that has otherwise largely been occupied with trying to reorganize its finances in federal bankruptcy court after its clergymen spent decades sexually molesting children.

In an email to community members at the archdiocese-run school from which he was dismissed, Mark Richards explained that he had been fired because a parent notified officials about an obituary for his husband, who died of a heart attack in September 2023.

Richards’ email alluded to how his employment contract at St Francis Xavier school in Metairie, Louisiana, contained a morality clause prohibiting educators from “contracting a marriage in violation of the rules of the Catholic church” and “actively engaging in homosexual activity”, along with other conduct that the document maintains is inconsistent with the teachings of the religion that does not recognize same-sex matrimony.

How to Disappear Completely - by Lilly Ryan
Linux.Conf.Au (2019)
https://lca2019.linux.org.au/schedule/presentation/250/

i'm late to post this..!
there are techniques known since 2019 about disabling surveillance cameras, i wanna remind everyone so here's a post

takeaway:

1. disrupting the camera itself
   1.a) wearing reflexes around your head
   1.b) shining blinding lights into the cameras

2. disrupting the gen AI calculations
   2.a) shining small infra-red lights onto your face, which makes you appear as someone else completely
   2.b) having really avant garde bangs (wigs exist) and wearing facial jewellery in straight lines (make-up glue)
   2.c) wearing face patterns all over your clothing
   2.d) wearing pins which make the AI hallucinate once processing the pin's image

3. disrupting the recognition of personhood
   3.a) goggles or glasses to cover eyes & nose region of face, where the most data points are.

let me know if i missed something or you happen to know more tricks-
i'm also curious about setting up a personal "try-out if your outfit disrupting AI surveillance" station for those near me, let me know if you've done anything like it before because i and others will gladly learn!

A group of Democratic senators and Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller are hosting a Pride celebration at the Kennedy Center Monday evening. But the Kennedy Center has nothing to do with programming it.

For the past nine years, the transgender flag was included among those that flew around the Stonewall National Monument in Christopher Park during Pride Month. However, the National Park Service(NPS) will no longer be displaying the Transgender Pride flag or the Progress Pride flag, stating a change of protocol as the reason.

This week, 75-year-old artist and scholar Kay Turner will take the stage at Brooklyn’s Branded Saloon with her feminist-lesbian punk band Kay Turn Her and the Pages in a “gray gay pride” celebration. Throughout the decades, Turner and her bandmates have donned and distributed merch including pins that read “More Madonna, Less Jesus” (one of her original songs) and t-shirts with the phrase “vintage lesbian.”

Turner formed her first band in 1972, but her performances extend beyond songwriting and often intersect with her other pursuit — the study of folklore. The artist, who holds a PhD in folklore and anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin, has worked as a professor, authored several books, and served as folklorist for the borough of Brooklyn and president of the American Folklore Society. Her varied and interconnected interests began to develop in childhood, when she discovered music, ritual, and writing as a means to understand the unshakeable feeling of being different. Over Zoom, Turner delved into one of her favorite songs, what it means to be a “reader of Madonna,” and the ever-changing world of academia. Below is a condensed version of our conversation.

Badass, indeed.

Alan Turing mathematical genius, founder of modern computing and cracker of the Enigma code. Sadly a victim of attitudes of the time and was chemically castrated for being gay.

A new poll of people’s attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community in 26 foreign countries finds disparate opinions on a range of rights, and a general trend away from support over the last four years, particularly among young men.

An American woman I know was angry and referred to a gay couple as "queens". I raised it, she is straight cis and says the word is fine in America. I'm in the UK and it's not ok here unless you're lgbt yourself (and even then plenty wouldn't like it).

Can anyone advise?