As a fellow trans person, do you by chance have an up to date map of "safe states" in the US? bc as someone who lives in florida and is getting Very Concerned about my health and safety, i can't seem to find any that are more recent, and i don't trust trying to google that shit rn.

This is up to date as of April 2.

For my Americans out there, here is a map with the safest states for trans folk. These are the states that have the most laws in place to specifically protect trans people.

Maryland is currently the safest, here is an article about it.

Florida, SB 254, total HRT ban for adults: 5/25/2023 update

FLORIDA HRT CRISIS DAY 8

Note that in the span of two days, we have had to revise this policy map from including one last way (green) for adults in Florida to get refills (no new prescriptions) from an MD/DO, to removing the one last green endpoint, and replacing it with red/yellow stripe. It actually is unknown whether even refills can be prescribed by MDs/DOs; and because of that unknown, MDs and DOs are choosing not to provide refills either.

There are now NO ways for trans adults in Florida to even obtain refills of their established HRT prescriptions.

This is based on the reports we're receiving of trans people's current experiences attempting to fill their established prescriptions since 5/17/2023 - in a complete vacuum of any information for patients who just lost access to their medication, whether from state agencies or even from the state LGBT organizations that were supposed to protect us from exactly this happening to us.

This shouldn't come down to us alone. WE NEED YOU TO STEP UP.

TRANS ADULTS IN FLORIDA ARE NOT ABLE TO GET THEIR HRT PRESCRIPTIONS FILLED OR REFILLED ANYWHERE.

WE HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO DO SO SINCE WEDNESDAY MAY 17

IT HAS BEEN 8 DAYS

THE CLOCK IS RUNNING

The next in-person meeting of the Boards of Medicine, to draft highly restrictive "emergency rules" further regulating adult HRT, is next week!

Florida Board of Medicine/Board of Osteopathic Medicine Joint Rules/Legislative Committee

THURSDAY, JUNE 1 - 2:45 PM The Westshore Grand 4860 West Kennedy Boulevard Tampa, FL 33609

And by the way? DESANTIS HIRED THE FLORIDA HATE GROUP THAT WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR A LAW FIRM'S $15,000 HIT JOB ON WPATH SOC

DESANTIS APPOINTEES ON THE BOARDS OF MEDICINE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR PROMOTING CONVERSION THERAPY AND INVOLUNTARY PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITALIZATION OF TRANS PEOPLE

The Florida GOP and the DeSantis administration are directly responsible for a crime in progress against thousands of transgender Floridians!

GIVE US BACK OUR PRESCRIBED MEDICATIONS NOW

Why are you telling people to vote for the guy committing genocide :/

because voting is not an endorsement it's harm reduction.

Trump is going to be at best doing the same as Biden and likely much worse for Palestinians and all the countries suffering from American Imperialism than Biden is.

Republicans want to bring back child labor and get rid of social security, medicare, Medicaid. As someone who is surviving on Medicaid and social security I don't want those taken away. The Republican majority house already put a lot of limits on food stamps in this past term and I don't think we'll still have food stamps if we get a republican Congress and a Republican president.

They've made it pretty clear that if they get a republican Congress and a Republican president they're going to enact project 2025 and call a conference of states and try and take our rights back to the days when only wealthy white men had any rights when women and racial minorities had no rights, they want to make it illegal for LGBT+ folks to safely exist in public and get lifesaving healthcare.

In short

Do I support every single thing Biden has done as president?

No.

Do I like him?

Not particularly. But I'm still voting for him because apathy is not a choice.

Do I think that Joe Biden having another term means that we can actually make more progress for labor rights, trans healthcare, abortion access, advancement of the rights and protections for disabled people and so much more?

Yes absolutely.

Do I think that the genocide in Gaza needs to end and the United States needs to stop sending weapons to israel?

Yes, I think that un restricted flow of humanitarian aid into Palestine needs to happen, the siege needs to stop, and the country of Israel and the United States need to be held accountable at an international level. I think that the soldiers of the IDF/IOF need to be held accountable for their war crimes and pillaging that they continuously post evidence of on social medias. I'm trying to put a read more here so ce I've put a few linked articles and quotes from them.

A quote from the article below:

"While our map focuses solely on high school aged youth (age 13-17), some states, such as Oklahoma, Texas, and South Carolina, have considered banning care for transgender people up to 26 years of age. "

I've seen lawmakers in some states try to make it felony punishable by life in prison to get your trans child healthcare to keep them alive because they want to make it illegal for us to exist and a legal for anyone who helps us exist.

some quotes from the article above:

"Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president’s second term — or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Joe Biden in 2024. With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers. “We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking. “This is a clarion call to come to Washington,” he said. ��People need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional life and say, ‘This is my lifetime moment to serve.’” The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations, many new to Washington, and represents a changed approach from conservatives, who traditionally have sought to limit the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing federal spending. Instead, Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing. The goal is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first years in office, when the Republican president’s team was ill-prepared, his Cabinet nominees had trouble winning Senate confirmation and policies were met with resistance — by lawmakers, government workers and even Trump’s own appointees who refused to bend or break protocol, or in some cases violate laws, to achieve his goals. While many of the Project 2025 proposals are inspired by Trump, they are being echoed by GOP rivals Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and are gaining prominence among other Republicans. And if Trump wins a second term, the work from the Heritage coalition ensures the president will have the personnel to carry forward his unfinished White House business. “The president Day One will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state,” said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official involved in the effort who is now president at the conservative Center for Renewing America. Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired. Biden had rescinded the executive order upon taking office in 2021, but Trump — and other presidential hopefuls — now vow to reinstate it."

"There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail."

Personally I think that voting for Joe Biden is better than someone who wants to enact this stuff on day one. It's like they read handmaid's tale and want to make that the reality of this country.

"Chapter by chapter, the pages offer a how-to manual for the next president, similar to one Heritage produced 50 years ago, ahead of the Ronald Reagan administration. Authored by some of today’s most prominent thinkers in the conservative movement, it’s often sprinkled with apocalyptic language." Ronald Reagan is a big reason we have a lot of problems we have today with our economy and with a lot more things. The people that supported Ronald Reagan do not need another term in office.

A quote from the article linked below:

"Trump has given no indication that he would be more sympathetic to Palestinian claims, nor that he would place more pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire. “The approach of the United States would be that Israel needs to win this war, it was attacked brutally,” Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, describing how Trump would act. Friedman is now a campaign surrogate for Trump."

Personally I think Trump telling Israel to finish the job is indicators that another Trump presidency doesn't mean that weapons would stop being sent to Israel from United States

I fail to see how another term of Donald trump will be any better for the victims of the ongoing genocide in Palestine than President Joe Biden.

i think our system is absolutely messed up and broken but I don't think abstaining from voting is going to actually help.

Trans Rights in Europe: An East/West Divide

Euronews reports on the state of transgender policies in various European countries. Iceland is now the most trans supportive nation in this part of the world.

As you will see from the Trans Rights Map, support for transgender people in general follows an west/east divide, where countries in the west are more likely to be positive while former East Block countries are not.

That being said, the UK, Ireland, Portugal and the Netherlands are still not doing enough, and Italy remains trans-restrictive.

In the former Eastern Block , however, Estonia and Montenegro among the progressives. Moldova and Slovenia aren't doing too bad, either, although there is much room for improvement.

According to this ranking Russia, Turkey, Azerbajan, Kazhakstan. Rumania, Latvia and Lithuania are the worst.

According to Euronews countries praised for their development of trans rights were Spain, Moldova, Andorra, Finland and Iceland. This year, Iceland managed to overtake Malta to be listed at the top of the ranking.

Nadya Yurinova from TGEU tells Euronews:

“Ideally, all countries should start with legal gender recognition and access to trans-specific healthcare for all, especially for further marginalised groups at the intersections with refugees, BIPOC, asylum seekers and disabled people communities. We also call for trans-informed journalism and public awareness about trans lives; the discrimination and violence trans people face on a daily basis.”

For more information on how the scores are calculated, go to TGEU.

Legal recognition of transgender people

TGEU sums up the legal recognition side of transgender acceptance in this way:

41 of 54 countries in Europe and Central Asia have legal or administrative measures in place that make legal gender recognition available to trans people. One country in Central Asia (Kazakhstan) currently provides legal gender recognition.

Of the 41 countries offering legal gender recognition:

38 are members of the Council of Europe; 25 are EU Member States.

28 require a mental health diagnosis.

11 demand sterility.

19 still require divorce.

16 have LGR procedures for minors . Of these, 8 enable minors to access legal gender recognition without any age limit; 8 have a minimum age requirement.

11 countries base legal gender recognition procedures on self-determination of the person.

2 countries provide full, and 2 provide partial, legal recognition to non-binary people.

A federal judge in Tennessee has ordered the FBI to hand over the "manifesto" left behind by a transgender killer who gunned down three adults and three children at the Covenant Christian School in Nashville last year before responding officers put an end to the mayhem.

Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who police said identified as a trans male and went by Aiden, shot her way into the school in March 2023, killing Mike Hill, 61, Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and three 9-year-olds, Hallie Scruggs, Evelyn Dieckhaus and William Kinney.

Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told reporters that officers recovered a "manifesto" from Hale's car as well as other documents, including a hand-drawn map of the school. He said last year it would be released, but it has not been.

NASHVILLE AUTHORITIES ‘AWARE' OF PURPORTED LEAK OF CHRISTIAN SCHOOL SHOOTER'S MANIFESTO

Even though police shot the suspect dead on the school's second floor, the FBI has repeatedly refused to release the manifesto, arguing that doing so "could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings."

The parent company of the Tennessee Star, a local newspaper, sued the FBI after the bureau denied its public records request under the Freedom of Information Act.

NASHVILLE KILLER AUDREY HALE SLEPT WITH JOURNALS ON SCHOOL SHOOTINGS UNDER BED, COURT DOCS REVEAL

"It has been long enough, and the public has an urgent right to know why this tragedy happened, how future events may be prevented, and what policies should be in place to address this and other similar tragedies," lawyers for the newspaper wrote in a federal complaint. "[The] FBI has no right to retain a monopoly on this information."

The FBI sought to have the complaint dismissed, but Judge Aleta Trauger of the Middle District of Tennessee said the bureau had failed to support its position "with sufficient clarity or detail" and ordered it to submit the manifesto to the court, so she could review the materials.

"The FBI is ORDERED to produce ex parte all documents that are potentially responsive to the defendants’ Freedom of Information Act request for in camera review, with the exception that, based on the plaintiffs’ concessions in this litigation, the FBI need not produce any documents that could not reasonably be construed to bear on Audrey Hale’s motives," Trauger wrote.

In November, portions of what appeared to be crime scene photographs of a couple of pages leaked, however authorities refused to confirm their authenticity.

The FBI, which has previously declined to comment due to pending litigation, did not immediately respond to questions from Fox News Digital.

When Hale burst in, the first victim, Hill, sustained fatal gunshot wounds in the process. According to city officials, Koonce heard the first shots while on a Zoom call, hung up and confronted the attacker. Police found her dead in the hallway outside her office.

Drake said investigators had not immediately determined a motive but that they believed Hale, a former student, had targeted the school and its affiliated church. One of the child victims, Hallie, was the pastor's daughter. 

The manifesto is expected to reveal more about the killer's motive and rage. Critics have questioned the motive behind continued delays in its release.

The National Police Association is also suing the city of Nashville for the same documents.

Raise Your Voice for Trans Rights - European Edition:

In chapter 17 of their brilliant fanfic Unpredictable Synchronicity, the wonderful @zenaidamacrouras1 invited readers to become a part of the story by taking political action on the central issue that the characters are working on--legislation against gender affirming care.

In this post, they have provided a step-by-step guide on how to contact your elected officials and how to write a letter to the editor of your local/national newspaper. While this was put together within an US-American context, the general structure & contents of the sample letter can be used almost 1:1 as a template to create your own message to any media outlet, organization, or individual legislator--even if you are in Europe instead of the US.

Now, the European media landscape is too diverse and the legislation on lgbtqia+ rights (and trans rights in particular) varies too greatly from one EU country to the next to be summed up in a single tumblr post.

What we do have, however, is a central parliamentary body that actually has the power to pass legislation to protect the safety, equality, and freedom of lbtqia+ people: The European Parliament. While it is far from perfect and its reach and enforcement power is limited, contacting your MEP to advocate for this cause is A Thing You Can Do. Every voice counts. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

So, if you are living in one of the 27 member states of the EU and you wish to become active in this fight, you can go here to find your respective MEPs. Not only can you search by country and political group/party affiliation, you can specifically find & target members that are on pertinent committees responsible for issues such as human rights, gender equality, and health care.

>> What if I don't actually know what the current situation in my country is?

Again, Europe is not a monolith. Laws, rights, and protections for trans people vary--sometimes widely--across member states. However, to get you started and to get a general overview, you can go to

Transgender Europe

Not only are they a great source for general information about current laws, discrimination, health & depathologization of trans people in the EU, they also provide a number of resources, such as campaign and advocacy materials, guides to political action, as well as information on EU legal aid.

They also put together an annual interactive map tracking the progression (and in some cases, unfortunately, the regression) of trans rights throughout Europe and Central Asia. Just click on the link below the picture and you can easily find out about the current state in your country:

Interactive Trans Rights Map

If you want to learn more about the general state of lgbtqia+ rights in Europe, I recommend you visit ILGA Europe (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association). They offer information and a whole host of resources on community organizing, advocacy strategies, and approaches on how to communciate concepts such as bodily integrity, inclusion, and gender equality to people who, up until now, have had only very little exposure to them in their day-to-day lives.

They also create & provide access to the Rainbow Map & Index, an annual benchmarking tool, ranking 49 countries in Europe on their equality laws and policies:

This is meant to be only a general overview and a starting point on how to become involved. Please feel free to add advice, resources and/or any other information to this post!

So you don’t have to read that ad-infested horror (it’s perfectly manageable if you use reader mode or turn off JavaScript tho) here’s some of the details:

So far in 2023, lawmakers in 46 states have introduced more than 650 anti-LGBTQ bills, according to a report by the Movement Advancement Project, or MAP, a think tank that researches LGBTQ issues and laws.

Young people, particularly those who are transgender, are being targeted, MAP's research shows: More than 160 anti-LGBTQ school-specific bills were unveiled in state legislatures in just the first two months of the year.

"It’s clear that we are in a disturbing new era of attacks on our communities, and especially on transgender people," Logan Casey, MAP's senior policy researcher and adviser, told USA TODAY. "This dramatic rise in political attacks clearly illustrates how emboldened anti-LGBTQ activists seem to feel. Over the years we’ve seen many attacks on LGBTQ communities, but this moment is very different and frankly terrifying for many people."

The report has a blunt warning not to view 2023 as a time of progress, marred by setbacks. "In reality, this is a war against LGBTQ people in America and their very right and ability to openly exist," the report says.

So if you’ve been feeling particularly assailed lately this is probably why.

What does it mean to be a woman in this society? How many different paths lead to woman? How varied are our experiences, and what do we share in common? Isn't this the discussion we need to have in order to continue to build a dynamic women's movement? And yet, we can't even begin the examination until all those who identify as women are in the movement. It's not a definition that's going to create sale space. Definitions have created some pretty unsafe space for many of us who were born female.

Let's open the door to everyone who is self-identified as woman, and who wants to be in women's space. (Not every woman wants that experience.) Let's keep the door unlocked. Together we can plot tactics and strategy for movement-building. And we can set some good-sense ground rules for what constitutes unsafe behavior. What should the sign on the door of the women's movement read? I think the key to victory are these three simple words: "All women welcome." But in addition to fighting women's oppression, we need to recognize and defend other sites of sex and gender oppression and organize an even larger struggle. The women's and trans liberation movements are comprised of overlapping populations and goals. Perhaps the unity of our two huge movements for justice will birth a new movement that incorporates the struggles against all forms of sex and gender oppression.

If the boundaries around "woman" become trenches, what happens to intersexual people? Can we really fix a policy that's so clear about who was born "woman"? And there are many people, like myself, who were born female but get hassled for not being woman enough. We've been accused of exuding "male energy." Now that's a frighteningly subjective border to patrol. Do all women - or should all women - have to share the same "energy"?

If we were going to decide who is a "real" woman, who would we empower to decide, and how could the check-points be established? Would we all strip? How could you tell if a vagina was not newly constructed? Would we show our birth certificates? How could you determine that they hadn't been updated after sex-reassignment? dna tests? The Olympics tried it, but they had so many false results they went back to relying on watching somebody pee in a cup for the drug test as the "sex" test.

I understand that it took the tremendous social upheavals of the sixties and seventies to even begin to draw the borders of women's oppression. When I was growing up, no one even acknowledged that the system was stacked against women. But the women's liberation movement laid bare the built-in machinery of oppression in this society that's keeping us down. It's not your lipstick that's oppressing me, or your tie, or whether you change your sex, or how you express yourself. An economic system oppresses us in this society, and keeps us fighting each other, instead of looking at the real source of this subjugation.

The modern trans movement is not eroding the boundaries of women's oppression. Throughout history, whenever new lands and new oceans have been discovered, maps have always been re-charted to show their relationship to each other. The modern trans liberation movement is redrawing the boundaries to show the depth and breadth of sex and gender oppression in this society. It is this common enemy that makes the women's and trans communities sister movements for social justice.

Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors.

[emphasis added]

"HR IS looking into it" bestie HR stopped asking questions after Lappland came back from her trip home with Texas with a broken jaw and wouldn't stop making enthusiastically lewd hand gestures as to what happened and how

Oh I absolutely think Rhodes, something known to have a robust HR department, looks into and questions things. They've just realized that the staff able and willing to take any actions or enforce further policies against their hundreds of transgender yuri supersoldiers is significantly outnumbered; along with the limited legal staff already dealing with things like 'how to not get blown off the face of the map by all the countries we're harboring war criminals and/or important politician figures from'.

Greenish color = State has "shield" law protecting access to transgender health care (11 states + D.C.)

Striped pattern = State has "shield" executive order protecting access to transgender health care (3 states)

Plain yellow = No "shield" law or policy protecting access to transgender health care (36 states, 5 territories)

Bright yellow warning = State bans or restricts best practice medical care for transgender youth (see this map for more information) (23 states)

The Rise of the Young, Liberal, Nonwhite Republican?

The Republican coalition isn’t quite what it used to be. For decades, white college graduates gradually exited red America while non-college-educated whites drifted in. Donald Trump’s nomination then accelerated this long-run trend, increasing the GOP’s advantage with working-class whites in the secular north. In 2020, meanwhile, Trump made inroads with Hispanic voters, thinning the Democratic Party’s margin with that heterogeneous demographic by 8 percentage points.

In a new analysis of survey data, the New York Times maps the contours of the contemporary Republican electorate. Some of its findings give conservatives cause for concern. The new GOP coalition has considerable internal ideological tensions. The party now derives 12 percent of its support from a group that the paper dubs “blue-collar populists”: a mostly northern, socially moderate, economically populist contingent whose attachment to Republican politics derives primarily from their rightwing views on race and immigration, and personal affection for Donald Trump. In the Electoral College, this constituency punches above its weight, as it is disproportionately concentrated in the Rust Belt’s battlegrounds.

A majority of this group supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage. This aversion to bible-thumping moralism helped tie a segment of these voters to the Democratic Party before Trump’s emergence. To the extent that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade increases the salience of reproductive rights, and Trump’s eventual exit from GOP politics weakens blue-collar populists’ emotional identification with the party, Republicans could lose ground with them. Indeed, in last year’s midterm elections, Democrats performed better in heavily blue-collar Midwest states like Michigan and Pennsylvania than they did nationally.

But the New York Times-Siena College poll also gives Democrats some cause for anxiety. The survey suggests that nonwhite, working-class Americans are starting to vote more like their light-skinned peers. In 2020, nonwhite, non-college-educated voters backed Joe Biden over Trump by a 48-point margin. Today, this group backs by Biden by merely 16 points, according to the survey. This erosion in the Democrats’ support among nonwhite voters leaves Biden and Trump tied at 43 percent nationally.

The realignment of some nonwhite voters appears to be partially driven by self-identified conservatives cutting ties with the party of their parents in favor of the one best aligned with their social views. In the Times survey, three quarters of nonwhite, non-college-educated voters identified as moderate and conservative. Historically, the Democratic Party has relied on the support of Hispanic and (especially) Black voters who lean right on most policy questions but whose racial identities and familial attachments have tethered them to blue America. In 2020, Democrats bled many such voters, as Trump won over right-leaning Latinos. The Times survey suggests a continuation of this trend.

More surprisingly, the poll suggests that Republicans are winning a non-negligible percentage of young, nonwhite voters with left-of-center views on public policy. According to the Times’s Nate Cohn, eight percent of Republican voters are “newcomers,” a subset characterized by moderate-to-liberal views on economics, immigration, race, and social issues. Only about 60 percent of this group is white, and a quarter are younger than 30.,

In their policy views, these voters resemble Democrats. Only a minority identify as conservative, and most support immigration reform and transgender rights. And yet they are strong Republican partisans and supporters of Donald Trump. The source of this allegiance is unclear. But of the six types of Republicans that Cohn identified, they were among the most emphatically anti- “woke.”,,

Now, we’re looking at one small subset of voters from a single poll. The margin of error here is so high that the existence of this voter group could be illusory. But it does seem possible that, among America’s youngest voters, the most overbearing forms of progressive discourse have acquired more political salience than concrete questions of public policy.,

Regardless, there has long been reason to worry that the Democratic Party would struggle to perpetually maintain its landslide margins among nonwhite voters in general, and Black ones in particular. Keeping 90-plus percent of any subgroup united in one partisan camp takes work. The reason Democrats have managed to perennially win that high of a share of African-American voters — despite considerable ideological and attitudinal diversity within that demographic — is not that each individual African-American Democrat concluded that the GOP was hostile to people like them through their own personal ruminations on current affairs. Rather, as political scientists Ismail K. White and Cheryl N. Laird argue in their book, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, the Black bloc vote is a product of “racialized social constraint” — which is to say, the process by which African-American communities internally police norms of political behavior through social rewards and penalties. In their account, the exceptional efficacy of such norm enforcement within the Black community reflects the extraordinary degree of Black social cohesion that slavery and segregation fostered.,

If this thesis is correct, then it would follow that the erosion of African-Americans’ social isolation, and the declining cultural influence of community institutions such as the Black church, would weaken racialized social constraint, and thus narrow the Democratic Party’s margin with Black voters. And it is plausible that a similar phenomenon might occur within Hispanic communities with longtime ties to the Democrats.,

In such a scenario, one thing we’d expect to see is more political diversity among younger non-white voters, who came of age at a time of greater social atomization and racial integration, and are less likely to regularly attend church or have an ethnically homogenous social world. This relaxation of ethnic social constraints could make it easier for ideologically conservative nonwhites to support the Republican Party. But it could also introduce more random variation into the voting behavior of younger, nonwhite Americans. Uncompelled by ancestral partisan attachments, some voters may be more likely to heed idiosyncratic (or irrational) political impulses, such as those that would compel a self-identified liberal to support Donald Trump.,

As noted above, there are plenty of political trends that look favorable for Democrats, above all the exceptional liberalism of the Zoomer and Millennial generations writ large. But if Trump does manage to win reelection next year, there’s a good chance that nonwhite voters’ loosening attachments to their inherited partisan identities will be a big part of the story.

Map of Gender Affirming Bans in the USA

And the source link with weekly updates

They can not keep doing this. We have to get our trans siblings to safety. If you want to help join or Donate to the Rainbow Refuge. We need all the help we can get

There are currently two exhibitions in New York celebrating Richard Avedon's photography. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art is Richard Avedon: Murals. Pictured above are two of the large murals included. The first is of Andy Warhol and members of The Factory and the other is of members of the Mission Council in Saigon.

From The Met's website about the show-

In 1969, Richard Avedon was at a crossroads. After a five-year hiatus, the photographer started making portraits again, this time with a new camera and a new sense of scale. Trading his handheld Rolleiflex for a larger, tripod-mounted device, he reinvented his studio dynamic. Instead of dancing around his subjects from behind a viewfinder, as he had in his lively fashion pictures, he could now stand beside a stationary camera and meet them head-on. Facing down groups of the era’s preeminent artists, activists, and politicians, he made huge photomural portraits, befitting their outsized cultural influence. On the centennial of the photographer’s birth, Richard Avedon: MURALS will bring together three of these monumental works, some as wide as 35 feet. For Avedon, the murals expanded the artistic possibilities of photography, radically reorienting viewers and subjects in a subsuming, larger-than-life view.

The murals are society portraits. In them, Avedon assembles giants of the late twentieth century—members of Andy Warhol’s Factory, architects of the Vietnam war, and demonstrators against that war—who together shaped an extraordinarily turbulent era of American life. Presented in one gallery, their enormous portraits will stage an unlikely conversation among historically opposed camps, as well as contemporary viewers. The formal innovations of Avedon’s high style—of starkly lit bodies in an unsparing white surround—are best realized in these works, where subjects jostle and crowd the frame, and bright voids between them crackle with tension. Uniting the murals with session outtakes and contemporaneous projects, the exhibition will track Avedon’s evolving approach to group portraiture, through which he so transformed the conventions of the genre.

About Andy Warhol and members of The Factory-

Avedon fantasized about throwing an annual fete for New York society and watching the group evolve over time. This mural is his downtown take on such a party, featuring a new "smart set" of sexual revolutionaries. They were affiliated with Andy Warhol’s Factory, the studio and gathering place for a coterie of avant-garde filmmakers, artists, and socialites. Avedon summoned them to his own studio, where they met over a series of weeks. Working in his most directorial mode, he arranged his subjects—including transgender actress Candy Darling and adult film star Joe Dallesandro—in a lateral frieze across adjoining frames, the fracture and repetition of their bodies in space suggesting the filmic passage of time.

The culmination of much trial and error, the mural’s composition took　time to perfect, as evidenced by session outtakes displayed nearby. Avedon later praised the professionalism of his cast but joked, "You couldn’t keep the clothes on anybody in those years.　.　.　. Before you could say ‘hello,’ they were nude and ready to ride." If this unabashed undress tests gallery decorum, it is a provocation grounded in art history: in the central panel Avedon presents a male version of the "three graces," riffing on a gendered tradition in allegorical painting with an ironic, Warholian wink.

About The Mission Council, Saigon, South Vietnam-

Avedon knew he would have mere minutes to photograph the U.S. generals, ambassadors, and policy experts who ran the war in Vietnam—not the weeks he spent refining his first mural. Planning in advance, he requested the heights of the men known collectively as the Mission Council and mapped out their positions, with careful attention to rank and influence. He rigged a makeshift studio at the embassy in Saigon, and recalled that once assembled, they “lined up like high school boys. They all wanted to be in the picture.” This is true of all but Ted Shackley, the camera-averse CIA station chief known to colleagues as the Blond Ghost, who begged out of the sitting for “a meeting,” leaving a void in the rightmost panel.

As blunt and procedural as a police lineup, the mural recalls Avedon’s first photography gig as a teenager in the Merchant Marine, where he made mugshot-style portraits of new recruits. Here, scrutinizing the faces of the war’s top brass, Avedon invokes their unseen operatives and victims. When the work was later published, one critic deemed it “a terrifying picture of business as usual.”

This exhibition closes 10/1/23.

For a more comprehensive look at Avedon's career, Gagosian's Chelsea location is showing Avedon 100, "a collection of Avedon photographs was selected by more than 150 people—including prominent artists, designers, musicians, writers, curators, and fashion world representatives—who elaborate on the impact of the photographer’s work today."

The gallery's website has a video of the installation that is well worth checking out, especially if you can't see the exhibition in person.

This exhibition will close on Friday, 7/7/23.

Countries with  laws that target transgender and gender nonconforming people

Human Rights Watch provides and overview, with maps, over countries with anti-LGBTQ laws. 

The maps are helpful for queer and trans people who want to know where it is safe (or “safish”) to travel.

This is what HRC has to say about transgender and gender nonconforming people:

Among countries that expressly forbid expression of transgender identities, at least three, Brunei, Oman and Kuwait, have national laws that criminalize “posing as” or “imitating” a person of a different sex. Saudi Arabia has no codified law, but police routinely arrest people based on their gender expression. 

Malaysia also criminalizes “posing as” a different sex, not in its federal criminal code but in the Sharia codes of each of its states and its federal territory. Nigeria criminalizes transgender and gender nonconforming people in its northern states under Sharia.

In South Sudan, such laws only apply to men who “dress as women” and in Malawi, men who wear their hair long. Tonga prohibits any “male person” from presenting as a female while “soliciting for an immoral purpose, in a public place with intent to deceive any other person as to his true sex.”

In the United Arab Emirates, laws prohibit men “posing as” women in order to enter women-only spaces. The UAE has used this law to prosecute gay and transgender people even in mixed-gender spaces. Other countries with similar laws on “women-only” spaces have not done so, to our knowledge, and are not included in these maps.

Back in 2019, ILGA presented a report listing 13 countries with so-called “crossdressing laws”: Brunei, Gambia, Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malawi, Malaysia, Nigeria, Oman, South Sudan, Tonga, and the United Arab Emirates. Human Dignity Trust also includes Sri Lanka. 

Given these countries do not accept the identities of trans people, this means that all gender variant people are at risk, including transgender men and women who have transitioned.

In addition to these there are quite a few countries and states that have laws and policies in place that aim at marginalizing  transgender people, but who do not directly ban gender variance. This applies to destinations like Russia, Poland, Hungary, Texas and Arizona. 

HRC overview with maps here.

Photo: xijian

At last night’s Republican presidential debate, former Vice President Mike Pence said, “We’re going to pass a federal ban on transgender chemical or surgical surgery anywhere in the country.” LGBTQ Nation contacted his campaign asking if he intended to outlaw gender-affirming care for all people, regardless of age. His campaign hadn’t responded by the time of publication. While Pence’s comment also mentioned “protecting” kids from “radical gender ideology,” his response caught the attention of Alejandra Caraballo, a civil rights attorney and clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic. Caraballo posted a video of Pence’s comment on Wednesday night and wrote via Twitter, “They’re going to ban care for trans adults too. It was never about protecting kids.” Related: LGBTQ+ group reveals national effort to “eliminate” queer people from public life Bans on drag and gender-affirming care are just the start… “While most anti-transgender healthcare bills in recent years focus on minors, anti-LGBTQ forces ultimately seek to ban all forms of transition-related care, regardless of age,” a recently released report by the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), an organization that tracks policies on LGBTQ+ issues and voting, stated. Get the Daily Brief The news you care about, reported on by the people who care about you: Subscribe to our Newsletter “They are pursuing this goal in a variety of ways,” the report added, “including: defining ‘minor’ to include at least some adults; by banning state funds from covering this medical care (e.g., in Medicaid, state employee health plans, and for those in incarceration); explicitly allowing private insurers to refuse to cover this care; and more.” They're going to ban care for trans adults too. It was never about protecting kids. https://t.co/aqXjDEfhj4— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) September 28, 2023 Three in 10 bills introduced in state legislatures during 2023 sought to ban or restrict medical care for both transgender children and at least some transgender adults, MAP noted. This included bills re-defining a “minor” as including adults up to ages 19, 21, or 26. One in seven bills included provisions that either banned private insurers from covering transition-related medical care, or explicitly allowed them to refuse coverage for such care, regardless of age. At least nine states explicitly ban Medicaid coverage of trans-related health care, regardless of age. Medicaid is a state health insurance program for low-income individuals. These states include Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. “These provisions knowingly and intentionally seek to cut off access to this medically necessary care,” MAP wrote. “Without insurance coverage, most forms of health care, including transgender-related health care, are unaffordable to the average person. This is especially true for transgender people, who experience far higher rates of poverty and employment insecurity due to discrimination.” Movement Advancement Project A graph showing the increase in legislation targeting gender-affirming care for transgender adults Various right-wing politicians have described trans identity as a “delusion” and a “mental illness.” Far-right Daily Wire host Michael Knowles called for eradicating “transgenderism” during this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and House Republicans have expressed opposition to making bathrooms, workplaces, and the military more inclusive of trans adults. Other state legislation has also sought to erase trans adults from public life by increasing the difficulty of obtaining accurate identity documents that accurately reflect trans adults’ correct gender identity, banning trans people from using public bathrooms matching their gender identity, and rolling back other existing nondiscrimination protections for transgender people through new or expanded religious exemptions, MAP noted. http://dlvr.it/SwkjSb