California has become the first U.S. state to establish a Transgender History Month.
On Wednesday, the state Assembly voted in favor of House Resolution 57, introduced late last month by state Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco), to recognize August as Transgender History Month beginning in 2024.
“The history of transgender people is there if you look for it,” Haney said. “As long as there has been a California, there have been transgender people here contributing to their community, making history, expanding civil rights and helping to build a California that is more inclusive and prosperous for everyone.”
The resolution mentions key moments in the state’s history, dating all the way back to 1775 when a Spanish soldier observed Indigenous men “in the dress, clothing, and character of women” who were “held in great esteem.” It also mentions the 1959 Cooper Do-nuts Riot in Los Angeles and the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco, describing both as “important acts of collective resistance to police violence targeting trans people, years before the better-known Stonewall Riot in New York,” and notes that since 2017, San Francisco has been home to the world’s first legally recognized transgender cultural district.
“I believe that as Californians our strongest defense against the anti-trans agenda is just to tell the truth,” Haney said. “Let’s tell the truth about transgender people’s lives, and let’s lift up the history of the transgender Californians who left their mark on our great state.”
As the San Francisco Standard reports, Haney was joined outside the state Capitol on Wednesday by trans activist Jupiter Peraza and Honey Mahogany, chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party and co-founder of the city’s transgender cultural district.
“Many Californians remain unaware of the real lives and experiences of transgender people, even here in California,” Mahogany said. “We can change that through awareness, education, and outreach, and I believe that establishing a Transgender History Month in California is one way we can do just that.”
The declaration comes as Republican lawmakers in other states have passed a record number of anti-trans laws aimed at banning gender-affirming care for young people, restricting trans people’s use of public restrooms that align with their gender identity, and prohibiting trans women from competing in women’s sports.
While similar laws have no chance of passing in the California Assembly, where Democrats hold a supermajority, a coalition of anti-LGBTQ+ conservative groups in the state recently announced an effort to add three anti-transgender initiatives to the state’s 2024 ballot. The three proposed ballot initiatives would require schools to notify parents if their child identifies as trans or nonbinary, ban gender-affirming care for minors, and ban trans students from competing on athletic teams that correspond with their gender identity.
“Recognizing and learning about transgender history humanizes a marginalized community, a community that has been the target of brutal and hateful legislative attacks in an effort to suppress self-expression and personal liberation,” Peraza said on Wednesday. “The way to do that is through education, awareness, history dissemination, mentorship and so much more.”
“Polysexual,” “amalgagender” and “gay marry” are among the new words and phrases added to Dictionary.com this year, in a revision that also included the removal of gendered pronouns from hundreds of definitions, the company announced Wednesday.
The online dictionary added 566 new words, many of which relate to identity and relationships, pop culture and artificial intelligence. Several new words describing identity and relationships involve the LGBTQ community.
“Gender and identity have been particularly dynamic, and productive areas of language change in the past 15 years or so,” John Kelly, vice president of editorial at Dictionary.com, told NBC News. “Whether it be socially or medically, there is a vocabulary component that is emerging, breaking through into the mainstream, that people need to know that they’re going to encounter.”
Amalgagender, one of the new words, refers to the gender identity of some intersex people. Polyromantic is a person romantically attracted to people of various genders, and polysexual is a person sexually attracted to people of various genders.
Kelly said the company uses four criteria to determine whether a word should be added to its dictionary: “Is it widely used, does it have shared meaning, does it demonstrate staying power and is it going to be useful for a general audience.”
More than 2,000 definitions of existing words have also been revised, and about 400 of these were updated to either replace or remove gendered pronouns, Kelly said.
“Not only does ‘him or her’ reduce the options in the example to a binary gender, but it also is harder to read and understand,” Kelly said.
One of the updated definitions is for the word “volunteer,” which went from, “A person who voluntarily offers himself or herself for a service or undertaking” to, “A person who offers to perform a service or undertaking.”
“We don’t go about our lives going, ‘Hey, I’m looking for some volunteers, you know, someone who offers himself or herself to do that.’ That construction is cumbersome and exclusive and we were overdue to make that change across our dictionary,” Kelly said.
Resistance toward the use of transgender and nonbinary people’s preferred pronouns and a rise in anti-LGBTQ legislation nationwide have created a tense dialogue surrounding language used by LGBTQ people and allies.
“Language really is a lightning rod,” Kelly said. “All of a sudden it can feel, when these new words get announced, that there’s an agenda behind it. I want to be clear: There isn’t an agenda; there is documentation.”
This documentation, he added, shows that language is in fact changing.
“Whether we like it or not, whether we agree with it or not, whether it’s our personal views or not,” he said, “it’s our job to be a service to people to capture that language as objectively as possible.”
The company has added dozens of new words and phrases that relate to the LGBTQ community in recent years. “Demisexual,” “neopronoun” and “aromantic” were among last year’s new additions.
Adding new words and updating definitions is standard practice among prominent dictionary publishers. Major dictionaries including the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Macmillan English Dictionary and Collins English Dictionary frequently publish updated versions.
The effort to diversify dictionary editions has also been widespread in the industry. Last year, Oxford University Press announced it would publish its first “Oxford Dictionary of African American English” edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
A judge on Wednesday halted a Southern California school district from requiring parents to be notified if their children change their gender identification or pronouns at school.
San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Thomas S. Garza ruled after California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the Chino Valley Unified School District for adopting a policy requiring schools to tell parents when their children change their pronouns or use a bathroom of a gender other than the one listed on their official paperwork.
“Today’s decision by the San Bernardino Superior Court rightfully upholds the state rights of our LGBTQ+ students and protects kids from harm by immediately halting the board’s forced outing policy,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.
Garza’s order halts the district’s policy while Bonta’s lawsuit continues. Full details of the order were not immediately available.
During a court hearing Wednesday, Garza raised questions about why the policy came up in the first place and how it protected students.
The next court hearing on the issue was scheduled for Oct. 13.
Messages left for Chino Valley Unified were not immediately returned.
The district, which serves 27,000 students about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, is one of several that requires parents to be informed if their children are transgender. Two nearby districts have done the same, while at least two others in the state are bringing up similar measures this week.
Bonta argues the policy will forcibly out transgender students in violation of their privacy rights and threaten their well-being. Chino Valley contends the policy seeks to involve parents so they can provide support their children need.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Delbert Tran, a deputy attorney general for California, said students were already being affected by the policy and feared being themselves at school, and that risking the safety of one transgender student would be too many. “This policy needs to be addressed now,” Tran told the court.
Attorneys for Chino Valley Unified argued that the policy would not affect students who were holding private conversations with teachers, but would bring parents into the conversation in situations where students were making decisions on campus such as changing their name, pronouns or using bathrooms or joining sports teams of a gender other than the one on their official paperwork.
The district also questioned whether elementary school students as young as 4 and 5 years old should be treated the same as high school teens involved in confidential counseling.
The national conversation over transgender rights has intensified as other states have sought to impose bans on gender-affirming care, bar transgender athletes from girls and women’s sports, and require schools to “out” transgender and nonbinary students to their parents.
In California, parental notification policies cropped up after Republican state lawmaker Bill Essayli proposed a statewide bill on the issue, but it never received a hearing in Sacramento. He then worked with school board members and the California Family Council to draft the policy that was voted on in Chino Valley.
On Wednesday, Essayli said he hopes other school districts evaluating similar proposals will not be discouraged by the decision of a single judge.
“Today’s ruling does not impact our fight to protect parental rights,” Essayli said in a statement.
Many of the conversations about transgender students and LGBTQ curriculum are taking place in communities that elected more conservative school board members after the pandemic drove many parents who were angry about closures to political action. The districts are increasingly at odds with Gov. Gavin Newsom and fellow Democrats who dominate the state’s political leadership.
Campus Pride won’t include Florida or Texas schools in its list of best colleges and universities for LGBTQ+ students to attend. Instead, the organization issued a “red alert” warning the schools will inevitably fall in rankings and that state leaders have put institutions’ academic reputations at risk.
“Campus Pride stands by every campus being negatively impacted by anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the states of Florida and Texas,” said Campus Pride founder, CEO, and executive director Shane Mendez Windmeyer. “Higher education must instill values of diversity and inclusion in order to create a quality, productive workforce. The classroom must be safe, and create a welcoming academic learning environment.”
But Mendez Windmeyer said new laws instituted in both states compromise that environment.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in May signed a law barring the state’s public colleges and universities from spending any funds on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives programs or classes. Campus Pride specifically cited that law in a release announcing both the University of Central Florida and the University of North Florida, despite appearing in the rankings in the past, would be dumped this year. That’s despite UNF topping the list of universities in the Southeast United States in 2022, and UCF receiving the highest listing for any Florida school in 2021.
Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also signed a similar law, which has forced the closure of LGBTQ_ resource centers for students on Texas campuses. This means Texas Tech University and the University of Texas at Dallas, which both have earned Campus Pride recognition on its Best of the Best lists in years past, won’t receive the accolades this year. The two campuses were the only ones in the Southwest United States to make the list last year.
Moreover, Campus Pride cautions students considering higher education in either state as anti-queer crusades continue in Austin and Tallahassee.
“These laws are being weaponized against LGBTQ+ people, needlessly endangering the safety and well-being of students on campuses across the states of Florida and Texas,” Mendez Windmeyer said. “Already we are hearing from prospective students and families that they are choosing colleges elsewhere.”
“It is truly sad, when political leaders use people as pawns,” said Manny Velásquez-Paredes, director of the LGBTQ Center at the University of North Florida, in a press release about the exclusion. “It is clear to every rational human being that diversity, equity, and inclusion are meant to create awareness and embrace, celebrate, and include our differences. However, we have found ourselves in the middle of a political culture war that is meant to divide us. Their attacks on the LGBTQ+ community have been deeply felt this past legislative session, with over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in the U.S.”Institutes in the states will still be included in the
A crowd of counter-protestors formed a human shield around a city centre library in Ireland, enabling it to remain open despite a right-wing rally taking place on the street outside.
Cork City Library has been the focus of right-wing anger ire for months, with people harassing library staff in an attempt to get LGBTQ+ books removed from its shelves.
On Saturday (2 September), about 300 people turned out in support of the library and its staff, and in opposition to the Ireland Says No rally, which was organised by conservative groups.
The city council was previously forced to shut the library during another demonstration, out of fear for the safety of staff.
During the course of the counter demonstration, groups of people, including from Cork Says No To Racism and Cork Rebels For Peace, waved Pride flags, held signs and sang songs.
Speaking to CorkBeo, Sinn Féin councillor Mick Nugent said: “For me, it’s primarily in support of library workers in terms of what they’ve had to put up with over the past number of months. The library is open today, which is good, business as usual.”
“It’s about equality, it’s about liberty, it’s about fraternity and it’s about diversity. We’re supporting all communities that decided to make Cork their home.”
‘It’s important to take a stand’
Two women, who said they were members of the Irish Writers Union, told CorkBeo they were part of the counter-protest because the issue of library attacks is affecting the rest of the country.
“We travelled down because this is not just affecting Cork, there have been attacks like this on libraries across Ireland and it’s important to take a stand, support the workers who are being targeted and support the right of libraries to have the right to choose the books they want to have,” they said.
One person was arrested, the Garda Síochána (the Irish police force) confirmed, following the demonstrations.
“Gardaí in Anglesea Street attended the scene of a protest at a premises in Cork city. During the course of the protest, one male [in his] late twenties was arrested under the Public Order Act 1994 and was dealt with accordingly,” a police spokesperson told The Echo.
“No further incidents arose and the group dispersed peacefully.”
An LGBTQ+ group was banned from participating in an Iowa town’s Labor Day parade, reportedly at the behest of the mayor.
On Thursday, just days before the parade in Essex, Iowa, members of Shenandoah Pride say they received an email from Mayor Calvin Kinney on behalf of the city.
“Out of concern for the safety of the public and that of Essex Labor Day parade participants, the City of Essex has determined not to allow parade participants geared toward the promotion of, or opposition to, the politically charged topic of gender and/or sexual identification/orientation,” the email read. “This parade will not be used for and will not allow sexual identification or sexual orientation agendas for, or against, to be promoted.”
Essex City Council Member Heather Thornton told the Associated Press that the decision was made by Kinney, despite the fact that the parade’s organizers had unanimously approved Shenandoah Pride’s participation. Thornton said she disagreed with the decision but was told that the mayor had the authority to ban the group without a city council vote.
According to KETV, the city said it had received threats from a group opposing Shenandoah Pride’s participation in the parade. But the group’s co-founder Jessa Bears said that Shenandoah Pride had not received any threats directly. Thornton told the Associated Pressthat she was unaware of any threats.
Bears told KETV that she believes the decision to ban Shenandoah Pride came in response to their plan to have local drag performer Cherry Peaks ride in a convertible in the parade with the group.
On Saturday, the ACLU of Iowa sent a letter to Kinney and City Attorney Mahlon Sorensen urging the city to allow Shenandoah Pride to participate in Monday’s parade, calling the group’s exclusion a violation of the First Amendment.
Kinney has not commented publicly about the decision.
Bears told the AP that Shenandoah Pride wanted to march in the parade to “let people know there is a queer community in southwest Iowa that they can be a part of.”
“It’s just really about visibility and being in the community and showing, you know, we work and we go to school with everybody in the community, and just letting everyone know that we’re here,” Bears told KETV.
“I think the misconception is that, you know, it’s these gay people from these cities,” said Ryan Fuller, who performs in drag as Cherry Peaks. “We’re not from the city. We live less than 10 miles away from the town.”
While Shenandoah Pride ultimately did not march in the parade, they did set up a booth at the town’s Labor Day festival and gathered for the parade after members of the community reached out to invite the group to watch from their yards. Other groups in the parade carried Pride flags in solidarity with the group.
Despite feeling “shocked and angry,” Bears told the AP that the ban had actually done more for the group’s visibility than marching in the parade would have.
At the same time, KMTV reports that following coverage of the ban, Fuller received a death threat.
An activist detained in Hong Kong partially won his final appeal Tuesday seeking recognition for same-sex marriage registered overseas, in a landmark court ruling that is likely to have a far-reaching impact on the city’s LGBTQ+ community.
Jimmy Sham, a prominent pro-democracy activist during 2019 anti-government protests, married his husband in New York 10 years ago. Sham first asked for a judicial review in 2018 arguing that Hong Kong’s laws, which don’t recognize foreign same-sex marriage, violate the constitutional right to equality. The lower courts had dismissed his challenges.
Sham has been in custody after being charged under a Beijing-imposed national security law following the massive protests. The law has been used to arrest and silence many other pro-democracy activists as part of a crackdown on dissent in the former British colony.
Jimmy Sham has been in custody after being charged under a Beijing-imposed national security law following massive protests. Louise Delmotte / AP
Judges at the city’s top court, by a majority, declared in a written ruling that the government is in violation of its positive obligation to establish an alternative framework for legal recognition of same-sex partnerships, such as registered civil partnerships or civil unions. But they unanimously dismissed his appeal on other grounds.
Their ruling will have strong implications for the lives of the LGBTQ+ community and the financial hub’s reputation as an inclusive place to stay and work.
Currently, Hong Kong only recognizes same-sex marriage for certain purposes such as taxation, civil service benefits and dependent visas. Many of the government’s concessions were won through legal challenges in recent years and the city has seen a growing social acceptance toward same-sex marriage.
In a previous hearing, Sham’s lawyer Karon Monaghan argued that the absence of same-sex marriages in Hong Kong sent a message that they’re less worthy of recognition than heterosexual marriages.
Sham is the former convenor of Civil Human Rights Front, which was best known for organizing the annual protest march on the anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to Chinese rule on July 1, 1997, for years.
The group also organized some of the biggest political protests that roiled the city in 2019 but was disbanded in 2021 under the shadow of the security law.
After parents in a rural and staunchly conservative Wyoming county joined nationwide pressure on librarians to pull books they considered harmful to youngsters, the local library board obliged with new policies making such books a higher priority for removal — and keeping out of collections.
But that’s not all the library board has done.
Campbell County also withdrew from the American Library Association, in what’s become a movement against the professional organization that has fought against book bans.
This summer, the state libraries in Montana, Missouri and Texas and the local library in Midland, Texas, announced they’re leaving the ALA, with possibly more to come. Right-wing lawmakers in at least nine other states — Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming — demand similar action.
Part of the reason is the association’s defense of disputed books, many of which have LGBTQ and racial themes. A tweet by ALA President Emily Drabinski last year in which she called herself a “Marxist lesbian” also has drawn criticism and led to the Montana and Texas state library departures.
“This is the problem with the American Library Association, it has changed from an organization that helped communities and used common sense into one that just promotes a view,” said Dan Kleinman, a blogger and longtime ALA critic.
Widely disputed books over the past couple years include Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir “Gender Queer,” Juno Dawson’s “This Book Is Gay,” and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” the ALA points out.
A person readsMaia Kobabe’s graphic memoir “Gender Queer.”Rick Bowmer / AP file
In northeastern Wyoming’s Campbell County, a coal-mining area where former President Donald Trump got 87% of the vote in 2020, library board meetings have been packed and often heated for over two years now.
After a local outcry over a drag queen story hour and an unsuccessful attempt to prosecute library officials over books in the library’s children’s section, a library board with several new members appointed by the County Commission withdrew from the ALA last year.
“We were the first library in nation to do this. And now it has progressed to something to something I couldn’t even have imagined,” library board member Charles Butler said. “And all we were ever worried about was the sexualization of children.”
The nonprofit American Library Association denies having a political agenda, saying it has always been nonpartisan.
“This effort to change what libraries are, or even just take libraries away from communities, I think, is part of a larger effort to diminish the public good, to take away those information resources from individuals and really limit their opportunity to have the kinds of resources that a community hub, like a public library, provides,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.
The ALA won’t say how many libraries are members of the group but denied any “mass exodus.”
The troubles come as individual membership in the ALA is down 14% since 2018 to about 49,700, the lowest since 1989, according to figures on the organization’s website. The ALA attributes the decline to suspended library conferences during the pandemic.
While librarians pride themselves about being open to different perspectives and providing access to different kinds of materials, political leaders telling them to part with the ALA runs against that, said Washington University in St. Louis law professor Gregory Magarian.
Magarian has been following Missouri’s departure from the ALA amid a debate over who may take part in local library “story hours” and new state rules that seek to limit youth access to certain books deemed inappropriate for their age.
“When you see state governments kind of replacing that type of control by librarians with greater control by politically motivated, politically ambitious, politically polarized government officials, I think that’s really troubling for the prospects for free access to ideas,” Magarian said.
In Campbell County, recent library policy changes remove the ALA’s “Library Bill of Rights,” which states: “A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views.”
Banned books are stacked at an exhibit at the American Library Association’s conference in Chicago, on June 24, 2023.Claire Savage / AP file
The new policy says the library system takes seriously keeping “obscene sexually explicit or graphic materials” out of youth sections and can apply that priority in the routine “weeding” of damaged, unused and out-of-date books.
When library Director Terri Lesley expressed doubts about doing that, the board asked her to resign. After she refused, the board voted 4-1 to fire her.
“If we just start moving books, it is really putting the library staff in a bad position legally,” Lesley said at a library board meeting just before her firing July 28. “This raises First Amendment concerns with no right to appeal or challenge books that have been weeded.”
She singled out MassResistance, an anti-LGBTQ+ group, and Liberty Counsel, a conservative legal advocacy group, for working together on the library policy changes, a claim supported by a July 19 post on the MassResistance website.
Lesley won an ALA award last year for “notable contributions to intellectual freedom” and “personal courage in defense of freedom of expression.” She did not return a message seeking comment and Butler and ALA officials declined to comment on her firing.
“People should be running their own libraries based on common sense, community standards and the law,” said Kleinman, the ALA critic and blogger. “And if library directors don’t want to go along with that? Goodbye.”
Kleinman last month launched an alternative to the ALA, the World Library Association, which he said will offer new policy guidelines for libraries.
“We’re going to return things to commonplace, community standards,” Kleinman said.
Butler and Campbell County Library Board Chairwoman Sage Bear, who did not return phone and email messages seeking comment, have joined as “team members” of the World Library Association. Butler said he hoped the new association will eventually offer librarian continuing education that Campbell County can no longer provide through the ALA.
So far, state library associations — private, professional organizations that resemble the American Library Association, but on a state level — are sticking with the American Library Association. Wyoming librarians don’t always see eye-to-eye with the ALA but the Wyoming Library Association has no plans to cut ties, President Conrrado Saldivar said.
Wyoming librarians are being “constantly critiqued” but they — not the ALA — are the ones who control their collections based on community needs, Saldivar added.
“ALA is not telling our library workers, our collection development librarians, you have to have this book in your library collection,” Saldivar said.
Republican Gov. Mark Gordon looks to be on the same page, criticizing as a “media stunt” a recent letter from 13 state lawmakers and Wyoming’s secretary of state asking him to pull the Wyoming State Library from the ALA.
“The letter implies that Wyoming citizens — Wyoming parents — are not capable of deciding how best to govern themselves and need the self-appointed morality police to show them the way,” Gordon said in a statement.
He called for discussion about the ALA’s “organizational drift” but is keeping the Wyoming State Library in the ALA, at least for now. Whether still more states and communities decide to leave remains to be seen amid what Caldwell-Stone described as a new push to question the group’s very existence.
“We have to question whose agenda is served by taking away library service from the people and taking away the liberty to make ones own choices about one’s own reading,” she said. “Because that’s what we’re here for.”
The mother of a teenage boy who died by suicide in California is grieving publicly after his death. She says he was bullied relentlessly by kids who teased him because he was gay.
In the aftermath of her son Salvador’s death, Eunice Rios posted a video on TikTok explaining her grief, San Diego NBC station KNSD reported.
She said that she had hoped to shield her son from the bigotry of the world. Unfortunately, she thinks that the spitefulness of young bullies led to her son taking his life in August.
“I support the gay community, always. Always. Love is love. But as a mom, it was not easy to accept that my son was going to be exposed, go through all these ordeals because the world is so mean,” Rios explained. “My son, he experienced embarrassment, humiliation, pain.”
She told the television station that her son suffered relentless bullying at the hands of cruel classmates at two schools who targeted the teen.
The things that those who tormented her son said to him were too difficult to read, she said.
“I don’t want to know because I don’t want to read the messages, and I will never read the messages because this is the reason I think he took his life,” she stated.
Rios said she contacted the San Diego Unified School District to file a complaint with the agency.
The district did not respond KNSD’s request for comment.
After burying her son, Rios intends to keep his memory alive by continuing to engage in activism. She is determined to make sure that the LGBTQ+ community is treated with respect and dignity in the wake of his tragic death.
If you are having thoughts of suicide or are concerned that someone you know may be, resources are available to help. The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 is for people of all ages and identities. Trans Lifeline, designed for transgender or gender-nonconforming people, can be reached at (877) 565-8860. The lifeline also provides resources to help with other crises, such as domestic violence situations. The Trevor Project Lifeline, for LGBTQ+ youth (ages 24 and younger), can be reached at (866) 488-7386. Users can also access chat services at TheTrevorProject.org/Help or text START to 678678.
Positive Images’ upcoming QTBIPOC (Queer & Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) Hangout is on September 11th from 6-8pm at the PI Community Center (200 Montgomery Drive, Santa Rosa)!
Join us for a Picture Day with Kodak from QT with a Camera Photography, who will be offering free professional affirming portraits of you or you with a friend to keep and use forever
