In August, Texas banned drivers in the state from changing the gender markerson their driver’s licenses to match their gender identities. New reporting reveals that employees at the Department of Public Safety (DPS) continue to document every change request by trans drivers for collection in a state database.
At least 42 such attempts — including instances where people asked for guidance about state policies during calls, in-person appointments, and by email — have been reported in the last five months, according to documents shared with The Texas Newsroom.
DPS staff scanned and saved trans drivers’ information, the records show, and sent the data to a designated internal email account.
Officials at DPS and the Texas Attorney General’s office refused to say why the state is gathering the information, with whom it is sharing it, and whether the data collection is ongoing.
The documents also shed light on how those requests are handled. Some employees allowed the drivers to change the name listed on their licenses, but rejected their requests to update their gender. Others declined both requests.
Some new residents presented out-of-state or federal documents that matched their gender identity but were still denied a matching Texas license or ID.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has called court orders directing Texas officials at DPS and other agencies to change gender markers “illegal.”
Screenshots of DPS’ trans data collection email address circulated online soon after the state banned gender marker changes, and the account was overwhelmed with spam from people protesting it.
Out of 700 pages of emails reviewed in September, only one was about an actual request to change a gender marker. Another 80 came from pranksters and critics.
Someone signed up the email address for newsletters from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and a bargain hunter website called Krazy Coupon Lady. The address also received emails from QueerMeNow, an explicit gay adult entertainment blog, and Lovehoney, a British company that sells adult toys and lingerie, KERA News reported.
One email read, “oh no someone is spamming your gestapo list wow,” while others called the policy “evil,” “weird,” and fascistic. Some accused DPS employees of acting like a “good little Nαzi” and “a disgrace in the eyes of God.”
The new internal agency documents reveal employees continued to collect data and forward it internally for collection after the spamming uprise.
Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton reiterated that it’s unlawful for trans Texans to change the gender listed on their state IDs, and added that any documents that have been altered are required to be changed back. There is no law prescribing the latter.
Earlier this year, a bill was introduced in the Texas Legislature to imprison anyone whose gender on state documents does not match the one assigned to them at birth.
On Friday night, a gay bar in Indianapolis was the scene of a heated exchange between Donald Trump supporters wearing MAGA hats and bar staff who say they abused them.
The bar staff threw them out.
“A group of individuals visited Chatterbox and intentionally misgendered and harassed a Chatterbox employee, resulting in them being asked to leave by our staff,” bar management posted to Instagram over the weekend. “They then continued verbally assaulting patrons and staff, threatened our establishment, and returned to record a video which has now been posted on multiple social media platforms.”
The video was recorded and posted to Facebook by Indianapolis resident Elise Hensley, who told News 8 that she’d visited the popular jazz bar several times, but this time, she and her friends wore MAGA hats.
In Hensley’s telling, “We went up to the bar and before we could even get a word out or order a drink, he just looked at me and said, ‘No,’” Hensley said. “I said, ‘Excuse me?’ He said, ‘Absolutely not.’ He said, ‘Your hat. You need to leave right now.’”
After getting ejected, Hensley returned, phone in hand, to confront the bar’s employees.
“I have a question,” Hensley told a bartender in the video.
“No, no, we’re not answering questions,” they responded. “Get out of the bar.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a Trump supporter.”
“I know, but don’t you guys want our money?”
“No. Actually, we don’t. Get out of my bar right now.”
A patron interjected: “You’re not welcome!”
“I’m not f**king around,” the bartender continued. “Get out of my bar.”
“Are you serious?” asked Hensley.
“I’m dead serious. Out.”
“Because I’m wearing a Trump hat.”
“Yes.”
“That’s wild.”
“I don’t care. Get out,” the bartender demanded again.
“We can call the police or you can just leave,” a colleague added.
“You know this is discrimination, right?” said Hensley.
Laughter erupted.
“Boo hoo! Boo-f**king-hoo” the bartender exclaimed. “Get out of my bar.”
A patron still laughing at Hensley’s claim added, “That’s funny.”
Hensley’s post earned tens of thousands of likes and was shared across right-wing media, including by Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith (R).
Beckwith, a pastor and self-described Christian nationalist, has said public school students in Indiana are taught “gay” and “oral sex” and are “indoctrinated with Marxist ideology.”
Bar management was unrepentant about throwing the MAGA fans out.
“The Chatterbox is home to a diverse group of staff and patrons,” their post read. “We do not tolerate dehumanizing or disrespectful language or symbolism in our establishment. We have a right by law to refuse service to anyone who disrupts our business. We look forward to continue being a home for people who love music and appreciate our community.”
“I wore that hat because I do love our President of the United States,” Hensley said Sunday, oblivious — intentionally or not — to Trump’s views about the people she was confronting.
“He is our president. I do appreciate that and I don’t think I find anything wrong with me wanting to wear a Trump hat because he is our president.”
Hensley also attempted to defend herself by saying one of her friends with her at the bar that night was Black: “They probably have every right to kick me out,” she told News 8. “If you don’t want me at your bar, that is what it is. But also, the man that was with me was an African American male. He was wearing a Trump hat.”
It’s a Thursday night or a Sunday afternoon, and you’re sitting on your couch with your phone in your hand.
What are you going to do?
That’s the question at the heart of a loneliness crisis that’s overwhelmed the LGBTQ+ community.
The rise of social media and “the apps,” a wave of bar closings during the COVID pandemic, and a hostile political environment have conspired to produce a sense of dread for gay Americans that still has a lot of us sheltering in place — alone together.
But the obstacles keeping us apart in real life are giving way to a connection revival.
Three years after the pandemic, more bars are opening. Movie theater attendance is up. Restaurants are bustling, and people are reassessing the value of living their lives online.
And politics are galvanizing the LGBTQ+ community.
“Look, just being gay, or lesbian, or trans, or in drag is in and of itself a political act, because they have made it that way,” says Daniel Narcicio, owner of Red Eye bar in New York and a longtime promoter. “Being yourself is inherently political when people in power are telling you that what you are is wrong. Being out, literally in a club or figuratively out of the closet, is a political act.”
Buffeted by an onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, Grindr, gentrification, and pandemic lockdowns, the gay bar is reemerging as a center of LGBTQ+ community, reimagined as a more inclusive space and primed for protest.
Mario Diaz at his Sunday party Hot Dog at El Cid in Silver Lake | Mario Diaz Presents
“They are and have always been our homes away from home,” says Mario Diaz, a club king in Los Angeles who hosts Hot Dog Sundays at El Cid in Silver Lake. “And to those of us that have been disowned by our blood families, simply our home. So they are essential. Community is crucial. And spaces for celebration are indispensable. This is what life is all about: connection and love.”
And Diaz adds, “If history has taught us anything, it’s that no one parties like the oppressed.”
Part of hooking up is the eye contact and that excruciating second between when you look down and look away and then look back to see if he’s looking back at you. But if you’re looking at your phone, you miss out on that.Sociology Professor Greggor Mattson
Gay bars took a hit
History can also teach us something about the gay bar business, and the political context they operate in.
“It is certainly the case that in 2017, gay bar owners said they saw a surge of patrons who had become complacent during the Obama years and rediscovered their need to find a place to gather together,” says Greggor Mattson, professor and chair of Sociology at Oberlin College in Ohio, who chronicled the state of gay bars across the United States in his 2023 book, Who Needs Gay Bars?
“I would never say that Trump is good for gay bar business because he’s so bad for members of our community,” Mattson adds, but history looks like it’s repeating itself.
By Mattson’s count, there are just over 800 gay bars operating across the United States (he visited several hundred in his cross-country research), and 2023 was the first year there had been an increase since 1997.
Many closed during the pandemic lockdowns and never recovered. Others fell victim to gentrification and redevelopment — the scrappy dive bars in low-rent neighborhoods that appealed to low-income regulars, slumming tourists, and real estate speculators alike.
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One example of pandemic resilience is Troop 429 in Norwalk, Connecticut, which managed to weather the COVID lockdowns by gaming the system.
“They were quite creative,” Mattson says. “Bars were closed, but retail was an essential business that was allowed to stay open. So they partnered with a record store and turned the bar into a record store where you could buy cocktails. That kept them open and allowed them to survive through COVID.”
Other bars partnered with food trucks, and some jurisdictions loosened rules around outdoor drinking, turning parking lots into open-air beer gardens.
At The Raven in Anchorage, Alaska, staff took it upon themselves to keep a voluntary log of everyone who came to the bar.
“When one of their patrons reported that they had tested positive for COVID, they called everyone to let them know. They were using skills they had honed during the AIDS crisis for community care. And in that way, I think gay bars may have had an advantage over other communities’ bars because this was not our first pandemic.”
The problem with phones
While lockdowns disappeared with the pandemic, Grindr still haunts the gay bar.
“Everything is different in bars because of phones,” says Mattson.
“One of the questions I was always asking owners who had been in the business for a while was, ‘What’s changed?’ And they all said people are worse conversationalists, and they don’t know how to be fun at the bar because we are all so used to when we feel borderline-uncomfortable whipping out our phone and looking down. And as you know, part of hooking up is the eye contact and that excruciating second between when you look down and look away and then look back to see if he’s looking back at you. But if you’re looking at your phone, you miss out on that.”
To be queer in my lifetime has consistently been a life on the fringe in a society full of judgment and shame. This is why our spaces are so important. LA promoter Mario Diaz
Worse than that, phones wielded in community spaces like gay bars are a sign of the addictive quality of the apps that users are glued to.
“To the extent that social media apps are driven by algorithms that are meant to get people to spend more time on them, I don’t think that we can trust they would be good for mental health,” says John Pachankis, the David R Kessler professor of Public Health and Psychiatry at Yale University.
“They keep people, straight or gay, out of the real world and into a world that’s built to be addictive, and addictive in ways that rely on self/other comparisons, self-evaluation, and ultimately feeling inferior,” Pachankis says.
Those symptoms can plague anyone who spends time on social media, but it might be particularly damaging to the mental health of LGBTQ+ people — because they’re set up for it.
“Probably the two biggest drivers of the mental health disparity affecting LGBT people happen at an early age,” Pachankis says.
“LGBTQ people are disproportionately exposed to parental non-acceptance and to peer rejection or bullying, and we know that those two types of stressors are targeted to an important aspect of who one is. They are evaluative and shame-inducing and are about the most stressful events and experiences that people can have. That sets people up for later mental health risk.”
Even in crowded places, our phones can keep us apart | Shutterstock
Ironically enough, there’s a good chance that the guy at the bar who’s looking away during a “borderline-uncomfortable” moment is on Grindr, simultaneously widening his selection of potential dates, shutting down the ones in front of him, and sparking a stressor unique to queer men.
“Research does show that to the extent that gay and bisexual men, for example, experience stressors from within the gay community, their mental health is particularly likely to suffer with outcomes like depressed mood, body image disturbance, and even sexual risk-taking,” Pachankis says.
“All is not lost,” though, says Mattson.
“As a teacher of young people, young people are vaguely aware of what they’re missing. And I think it’s incumbent on queer elders, particularly people older than 32, who now count as queer elders, to keep the art of witty bar side banter alive and to help people put their phones away,” he says.
“Some of the bar owners and some of the bartenders are really skilled at this like they are at the front lines of holding on to our humor,” Mattson explains. “There was one bar owner who said he instructed his bartenders to take people’s phones and that they could only have them back after they had introduced themselves to a stranger, and that sometimes they would get so involved that they would forget to get their phones back.”
Club impresario Nardicio has a different strategy for keeping his customers offline.
“Just last week, I threw my infamous Nardi Gras party and had a 15-person marching band come through at midnight,” he says. “And I can tell you, no one at the club was on Grindr. They were living for it.”
I will say that with everything that has happened since Trump’s come into office, I have seen even more support for what we are doing and more excitement for what we are doing.Rikki’s Women’s Sports Bar co-creator Sara Yergovich
Broadening gay bars’ appeal
Smaller gay bars, though, have had to come up with other strategies to bring customers in, despite the lure of the apps — by broadening their appeal.
“Owners of bear bars or leather bars would ask me, you know, ‘What should we be doing?’” says Mattson. “I directed them to lesbian bars because lesbian bars have been doing this now for almost 30 years. Every lesbian bar that I interviewed was open to everybody.”
Lesbian bars experienced decades of decline before a bounce back following the pandemic. There were over 200 women’s bars in the 1980s, and fewer than 20 by the start of the pandemic. Since then, the Lesbian Bar Project counts 34 lesbian bars up and running across the U.S.
That number will bump up to 35 with the May opening of Rikki’s Women’s Sports Bar in San Francisco’s Castro District.
“Our definition of women’s sports is broad and all-encompassing,” says Danielle Thoe, one of Rikki’s co-owners. “It’s hard to fit that in just a couple sentences when you’re describing the space and what we’re building, but I think that welcoming aspect is really important,” she says.
To live a free and joyful life as a queer person is the ultimate act of resistance.LA promoter Mario Diaz
“Sports have a different connection,” says Sara Yergovich, Thoe’s business partner. “They’re a different way to connect with people. We’re very community-based, and as long as they want to support women’s sports, everyone is welcome.”
The pair say politics have worked their way into Rikki’s even before the bar’s opening.
“I will say that with everything that has happened since Trump’s come into office, I have seen even more support for what we are doing and more excitement for what we are doing,” Yergovich says. “It feels like people have kind of latched onto this as, you know, maybe bad things are happening, but there are some good things that are happening, too, and trying to really hold on to that.”
“Trans athletes belong in sports,” says Thoe. “They are some of our investors, our backers, our community members, and so that’s something that we’ll really look to highlight and make clear as we continue to get up and running.”
The resistance is alive and well at the gay bar
Nardicio’s New York bar is highlighting its resistance, as well, in gestures subtler than a marching band.
“Take for instance, at Red Eye, we recently got an ‘A’ from the health department ’cause we keep it clean behind the bar. We took that ‘A,’ put it in the window and proudly put a ‘G’ and a ‘Y’ next to it, so it says ‘GAY’ boldly in our window. We aren’t backing down. It’s in your face. We’re here, we’re queer, and we keep a spotless bar!”
Daniel Nardicio at his Red Eye nightclub in New York | Daniel Nardicio
“I think many of us learned a few lessons in lockdown,” says LA promoter Diaz. “Lessons about what’s really important in life. About the importance of human connection. Lessons on how short and unpredictable life can be.”
“To be queer in my lifetime has consistently been a life on the fringe in a society full of judgment and shame,” Diaz says. “This is why our spaces are so important. We need these places to survive and hold onto our joy. To live a free and joyful life as a queer person is the ultimate act of resistance. The moment we lose that, we lose the fight.”
“When people tell me, ‘We don’t need gay bars anymore,’ I ask them how they felt when they first went back to a restaurant after the COVID lockdowns, and they rhapsodize about how amazing it was to be out in public and to see people,” says Mattson.
“And I said, for queer people, we still need that. Even if we lived in a perfect world that was perfectly accepting, we are still a minority. We are still often raised by very lovely straight people, but who can’t be there for us in all the ways that we need. So we’re always going to need places where we can gather together. And there’s something deeply human about our need to be around other humans.”
The United States has withdrawn from the United Nations LGBTI Core Group, a collection of countries actively supporting the rights of LGBTQ+ and intersex people globally.
The U.S. withdrew from the organization on February 14, according to reporting by the Washington Blade, with no public announcement. A State Department spokesperson on Saturday confirmed the withdrawal but did not specify the specific date.
“In line with the president’s recent executive orders, we have withdrawn from the U.N. LGBTI Core Group,” the spokesperson said.
During Trump’s first term in office, his administration said it established a mission to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide. The administration was called out for its “sham” campaign that allegedly didn’t actually do anything to support the decriminalization of homosexuality, but the promise to promote decriminalization was a point of pride for the administration, often used to combat claims that the administration was proceeding with anti-LGBTQ+ actions.
The U.N. group, dedicated to “ensuring universal respect for the human rights” of LGBTI people, was formed in 2008, and includes more than 40 countries.
Chile and the Netherlands are the current co-chairs. The EU, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, and Outright International are observers.
“The overarching goal of the UN LGBTI Core Group in New York is to work within the United Nations framework on ensuring universal respect for the human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, specifically lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) persons, with a particular focus on protection from violence and discrimination,” the Core Group’s website details.
Member nations include Albania, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Honduras, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Montenegro, Nepal, the Netherlands, Peru, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Timor Leste, the U.K., and Uruguay.
The Core Group counts three specific objectives in its mission: raising awareness about LGBTI issues; contributing to multilateral work and negotiations at the United Nations; and seeking common ground and engaging in “a spirit of open, respectful and constructive dialogue and cooperation with UN member states and other stakeholders outside the Core Group.”
The U.S. joined the group in the final year of the George W. Bush administration. The promotion of LGBTQ+ and intersex rights were a cornerstone of the Biden-Harris administration’s foreign policy.
In September, former First Lady Jill Biden spoke at a Core Group event on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. As vice president, Joe Biden spoke to the group at an event that coincided with the U.N. General Assembly in 2016.
Since President Trump took office in January, departments and agencies across the federal government have been subject to executive orders stripping recognition of transgender people from U.S. government policy and purging “anti-American propaganda” like drag from the public square.
Based on Trump’s “gender Ideology” order issued on his first day in office and an order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the federal government, the State Department alone has banned changes to sex markers on U.S. passports based and threatened arts organizations receiving U.S. government funds, leading to canceled exhibitions featuring LGBTQ+ and Black artists.
The shutdown of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, has resulted in the loss of billions of dollars in aid to bipartisan programs like PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief. Advocates have called the cuts “catastrophic” for the global LGBTQ+ and intersex rights movement.
The first large-scale study on the experiences of autistic transgender people finds that they are more likely to have long-term mental and physical health conditions, including alarmingly high rates of self-harm, data from the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University shows.
Researchers found that these individuals also report experiencing lower quality health care than both autistic and non-autistic people whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth.
“These findings add to the growing body of evidence that many autistic people experience unacceptably poor mental health and are at a very high risk of suicide-related behaviors. We need to consider how other aspects of identity, including gender, influence these risks,” said Dr. Elizabeth Weir, a postdoctoral scientist at the Autism Research Center, and one of the lead researchers of the study.
The report is a follow-up to 2020 research from Cambridge that found transgender people are more likely to be autistic and have higher levels of autistic traits than other people. Several studies have corroborated that finding in the interim and show autistic people are more likely to experience gender dysphoria than the general population.
Results from the 2020 study were based on responses from over 640,000 people. The new research, published in Molecular Autism, compared the experiences of 174 autistic transgender individuals, 1,094 autistic cisgender individuals, and 1,295 non-autistic cisgender individuals.
Compared to non-autistic cisgender individuals, autistic transgender people were three to 11 times more likely to report anxiety, “shutdowns” and “meltdowns” related to common healthcare experiences.
Transgender/gender-diverse autistic adults were 2.3 times more likely to report a physical health condition and 10.9 times more likely to report a mental health condition compared to cisgender non-autistic adults.
Only one in ten autistic transgender adults agreed with the statements: 1) They understood what their health care professional meant when discussing their health; 2) They knew what was expected of them when seeing a health care professional; and 3) They were able to describe how bad their pain felt.
The study also confirmed the reasoning behind the recognition of autistic people as a priority group in the U.K. Department of Health and Social Care’s “Suicide prevention strategy for England: 2023 to 2028”: compared to people who are non-autistic and cisgender, autistic transgender people are 5.8 times more likely to report self-harm, just above the equally alarming rate of 4.6 times for autistic cisgender individuals.
“We need to consider how to adapt health care systems and individual care to meet the needs of autistic transgender/gender diverse people,” said Prof. Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Center and a member of the research team. “Policymakers, clinicians, and researchers should work collaboratively with autistic people to improve existing systems and reduce barriers to health care.”
“Greater recognition of challenges and reasonable adjustments are essential for people with marginalized, intersectional identities in clinical practice,” the study concluded.
The prominent LGBTQ+ rights organization Egale Canada will boycott events in the U.S. in protest of the Trump administration’s continued assault on the transgender community.
“After deep consideration, we have decided not to engage in-person in this year’s Commission on the Status of Women or any other UN, OAS (Organization of American States) or global convergings, including WorldPride, taking place in the United States in the foreseeable future,” a statement from the group reads.
WorldPride, which drew five million attendees to its biannual gathering in New York in 2023, is slated to take place in Washington DC at the end of May.
Egale Canada also withdrew from in-person participation at a meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women at United Nations headquarters in New York in March, where it planned to discuss LGBTQ+-related issues.
The group pointed to threats at the border as the primary reason for their action.
“This decision is foremost based on the need to safeguard our trans and nonbinary staff who would face questionable treatment at land and aviation borders to attend such convenings, and to stand in solidarity with global colleagues who are experiencing similar fear around entry to the U.S.,” the statement continues.
The U.S. State Department will no longer allow gender marker changes on U.S. passports and has halted issuing travel documents with the “X” gender marker preferred by many nonbinary people.
On the department’s website, references to transgender people have been scrubbed, with information for “LGBTQI+” travelers replaced with the acronym “LGB”, cleaving transgender and intersex people from the larger LGBTQ+ community.
The erasure follows Trump’s “gender ideology” executive order, which directed the Departments of State and Homeland Security “to require that government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards” reflect people’s sex “at conception.”
Last Friday, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of seven people unable to obtain passports that match their gender identity following Trump’s directive.
How that directive and Trump’s “gender ideology” order will affect trans and nonbinary people seeking entry to the U.S. remains so far unclear. If a traveler’s federally-issued identity documents do not match their state-issued documents (such as a driver’s license), the mismatch could result in harassment or discrimination by travel security agents or airline workers, the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Immigration Equality has said.
Egale Canada also cited other threats Trump has made targeting Canada for their boycott decision, including his proposed 25% tariff on Canadian goods entering the U.S. The threats have encouraged some Canadians to consider boycotting U.S. goods, services and travel plans in retaliation.
“It is also founded in the unique situation that has been thrust on Canadians (and citizens of other countries) regarding economic warfare and threats to our national sovereignty,” the group said. “We cannot in good conscience engage in a process of disentangling our organization from the U.S. goods and services… and then proceed to travel to the U.S.”
Trump has trolled Canada about annexing the country as America’s fifty-first state, an idea he reiterated in a Super Bowl interview with Fox News on Sunday.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday called Trump’s threat “a real thing.”
Russia’s Interior Ministry has plans for a sweeping electronic database of LGBTQ+ people in the country, Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet, revealed this week.
Citing anonymous sources at the Interior Ministry, the outlet reported that the Orwellian plan has been in discussion since last year after Russia’s Supreme Court outlawed the so-called “international LGBT movement” as an “extremist organization” at the urging of President Vladimir Putin.
The database will be a “large-scale” system to track members of the LGBTQ+ community at large, according to sources.
The plans were corroborated by Dmitry Chukreyev, an official with the Civic Chamber of Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest city. He said police have been keeping informal lists of LGBTQ+ individuals since the Supreme Court ruling was announced.
In 2024, police conducted at least 42 raids on LGBTQ+-friendly venues across Russia, according to an investigation by independent news outlet Current Timeand human rights organization Sphere. Beatings, forced confinement, and sadistic humiliations based on sexual and gender identities are regular features of the sweeps.
Russian officials and state-aligned media regularly describe Russia’s LGBTQ+ community as a network of “paramilitary groups” calling for an “open gender war,” who engage in “dehumanization” and “devil worship,” the outlet reports. Officials and media credit security forces’ actions with “suppressing” anti-state activity.
The raids, in addition to intimidating the queer community at large and forcing the closure of several venues, have provided security officials with information that would supply an electronic LGBTQ+ registry.
An employee at a Siberian queer establishment told Meduza, “Security forces copied the entire database from the computer where we keep track of reservations,” obtaining information about hundreds of clients. Fingerprints and mouth swabs were collected from visitors during a raid the Eden club in Chelyabinsk, and employees and patrons at the Orenburg club Pose were forced to state their registered residential address on camera.
At a house party raided by security forces in Leningrad Oblast, guests were forced to surrender their passports and unlock their phones; if someone refused, the others were subjected to collective punishment and forced to squat.
According to human rights activists, such raids are also aimed at exposing LGBTQ+ government officials. The organizer of one queer-friendly event in the Urals region revealed police who raided the venue hoped to “catch deputies [officeholders] and other significant individuals” at the event.
While security forces continue to collect data in ever-more sadistic operations, progress on a full-scale LGBTQ+ registry has been hampered by Putin’s other current obsession: the expansion of Greater Russia through his war on Ukraine. Forces assigned to that conflict are draining the ranks of police who would otherwise be hunting down members of the “international LGBT movement.”
But the raids continue to produce results.
One sweep at a restaurant and club in Gorno-Altaysk last year yielded data on 80 patrons and staff alone, an employee said.
“We know all of you now,” security forces repeated as the raid dragged on.
The Department of Education on Friday ended federal efforts to reign in an epidemic of book-banning in local school districts by right-wing groups.
The announcement was made in dismissive, partisan and MAGA-inflected language in a press release titled “U.S. Department of Education Ends Biden’s Book Ban Hoax.”
“By dismissing these complaints and eliminating the position and authorities of a so-called ‘book ban coordinator,’ the department is beginning the process of restoring the fundamental rights of parents to direct their children’s education,” said Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor. “These decisions will no longer be second-guessed by the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education.”
The department announced that it had dismissed 11 book ban complaints and six pending complaints.
The Biden administration appointed a book ban coordinator to the department’s Office of Civil Rights in 2023 to counter the efforts of groups like Moms for Liberty, which targets books featuring LGBTQ+ topics and characters and those addressing race and racism. The groups, amplified online by accounts including LibsofTikTok, have characterized the targeted texts as “obscene” and “racially divisive,” language echoed in the DOE’s announcement.
PEN America, which has documented nearly 16,000 book bans in public schools nationwide since 2021, called the DOE’s actions “alarming.”
“For over three years we have countered rhetoric that book bans occurring in public schools are a ‘hoax.’ They are absolutely not,” said Kasey Meehan, director of Freedom to Read at PEN America. “This kind of language from the U.S. Department of Education is alarming and dismissive of the students, educators, librarians, and authors who have firsthand experiences of censorship happening within school libraries and classrooms.”f
The DOE said it had initiated a review of the Office of Civil Rights’ actions and found them to be meritless claims “premised upon a dubious legal theory” that book bans violated students’ civil rights.
“Attorneys quickly confirmed that books are not being ‘banned,’ but that school districts, in consultation with parents and community stakeholders, have established commonsense processes by which to evaluate and remove age-inappropriate materials,” the department claimed.
Book bans have roiled local school boards and districts over the last several years with the rise of groups including Moms for Liberty, which publishes lists of “objectionable” texts then targeted by local chapters.
After passage of an updated and draconian book ban by the Tennessee Legislature in July, a single school district in the state removed over 400 booksfrom school libraries deeming them “appealing to the prurient interest.”
Those included The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Umbrella Academy comic book series by Gerard Way, Wacky Wednesday by Dr. Seuss, and Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes, which is the most frequently banned book of the 2023-2024 school year, according to PEN America’s latest report.
The book bans sweeping the country have largely targeted books by and about people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community, with conservatives attempting to paint titles as “pornographic.” According to a recent report from the Tennessee Equality Project, seven out of nine of the most challenged books in the state have queer themes or were written by an LGBTQ+ author.
The Trump administration has told the Civil Rights division at the Justice Department to stop pursuing any new indictments, cases, or settlements related to civil rights violations, effectively shutting down the division just days into Trump’s second term.
A letter to the acting head of the division obtained by The Washington Postorders her to ensure that civil rights attorneys do not file “any new complaints, motions to intervene, agreed-upon remands, amicus briefs, or statements of interest.”
The order and a separate memo sent to Kathleen Wolfe, acting supervisor of the Civil Rights division, freezes action on new cases and directs her to notify the DOJ’s chief of staff of any consent decrees obtained within the last 90 days, indicating a focus on police abuse cases pursued by the DOJ in connection with violations that sparked Black Lives Matter protests.
Those were a focus of the Biden administration in the aftermath of the 2020 police shootings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville. Oversight agreements were reached with both those cities in the waning days of Biden’s presidency; neither has been approved by a judge.
The directives said the new administration “may wish to reconsider” such agreements related to their investigations.
The Justice Department pursued a dozen investigations into state and local law enforcement agencies during Biden’s term and issued findings in nine of them.
The halt to new work by the Civil Rights division includes cases of LGBTQ+ civil rights violations. Guidance from the White House and DOJ outlines protections provided in law against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and intersex traits based on the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County. As of Friday, an explanation of that guidance was still availableon the DOJ website.
The freeze and review orders, conveyed by Chad Mizelle, the DOJ’s new chief of staff, said the halt was “consistent with the Department’s goal of ensuring that the Federal Government speaks with one voice in its view of the law and to ensure that the President’s appointees or designees have the opportunity to decide whether to initiate any new cases.”
Trump’s pick to head up the DOJ’s Civil Rights division is Harmeet Dhillon, a prominent election denier with a history of anti-woke and anti-LGBTQ+ activism.
Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, called the freeze “beyond unusual — it’s unprecedented.”
“We’ve never seen this before at this scale with any transfer of power, regardless of the ideology of any incoming president or administration,” he told The Post. “This should make Americans both angry and deeply worried. This is more than just a changing course of philosophy — this is exactly what most people [in the civil rights community] feared: a Justice Department that was created to protect civil rights literally abdicating its duty and responsibility to protect Americans from all forms of discrimination.”
Trump has advocated for aggressive action by police and endorsed “extraordinarily rough” tactics to quell protests. This week he pardoned two Washington, D.C. police officers convicted in the 2020 shooting death of a young Black man, Karon Hylton-Brown, at the height of Black Lives Matter protests.
In his latest assault on transgender Americans, President Donald Trump has ordered federal prisons to house transgender women in men’s facilities and halt their gender-related healthcare.
The directive follows an executive order Trump issued on his first day in office declaring the federal government would recognize only two “immutable” sexes, male and female.
The executive order, titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” also applies to immigration detainees in federal facilities. It does not address trans men held in detention.
The directive requires all gender-related healthcare for trans women inmates to cease, ordering no federal funds be spent “for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug” for what the order describes as “conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”
Advocates for transgender rights say the new policy will put transgender women in danger.
“There will be rapes and physical assaults because of this policy,” Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told The New York Times. “It’s also terrible for prison officials, who right now have the authority to use discretion about what makes the most sense for the safety and security of the facility.”
Data from the Department of Justice indicates transgender prisoners are 10 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than straight prisoners.
“We’re encouraged to see these protections for privacy in women’s prisons and in rape shelters, ensuring that no woman ever has to face abuse, harassment, or the loss of privacy and dignity from a man sharing these intimate spaces,” said Matt Sharp, senior counsel and director for public policy at the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom.
Multiple court cases have found housing transgender women in men’s facilities and denying gender-related healthcare are violations of the Eight Amendment to the Constitution, which bars cruel and unusual punishment. Trump’s order will likely be challenged on that basis.
In 1994, the Supreme Court held that the government had a duty to protect transgender prisoners from violence in Farmer v. Brennan. The plaintiff in the case, Dee Farmer, said she had been raped while housed with men.
Farmer now leads Fight4Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group for LGBTQ+ prisoners. “Yesterday I got three calls from inmates who were in a panic about what was about to happen to them,” she said.
During the Obama administration, the Bureau of Prisons released new guidance that transgender prisoners be housed according to their gender identity in most cases. In his first term, Trump narrowed that guidance to rare cases. President Joe Biden restored the Obama-era policy when he came to office.
Trump’s new order follows a campaign that prominently featured Vice President Kamala Harris’ support for transgender prisoners in California. Republicans spent $215 million on ads attacking Harris and Democrats on the issue.
Roughly 1,500 federal prisoners are transgender women, according to the Bureau of Prisons, accounting for 15 percent of the total population of women in prison. 750 men identify as transgender out of about 144,000 male prisoners.
About one percent of the U.S. population identify as transgender, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute.
