Apologies for the newsletter going out so late today, but I completed and submitted my Playboy draft today in time for my deadline and I’m very excited to share it with y’all when it goes live.

In personal news, this past weekend I got to celebrate Harold Kooden’s 90th birthday, and reader, we danced. Miley just dropped Bass Persuades, a lament that the kids these days don’t want to dance. So I’m happy to report that people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s absolutely do. The eating, drinking, laughing, and busting of moves got started early; we danced fiercely, and we were home by 11 pm. Celebrating with queer elders and friends was a rejuvenating treat.

Speaking of showing up: I’ve booked my ticket and lodging for the WPATH Symposium in Mexico City this November, and I'm starting to think about my content plan for both Well Beings News and my freelance work. If you’ve been meaning to chip in, now is the time — any donation helps offset the cost so I can report live from the conference straight to y’all.

United States

Manhattan’s Mount Sinai reached a deal with Trump’s DOJ to stop providing gender-affirming care to minors, a capitulation that landed even as the department’s own case collapsed in court the same day. Connecticut lawmakers are now probing Connecticut Children’s Medical Center over its parallel agreement to end youth care, threatening subpoena power.

The pushback is mounting: twenty-one states sued to block the administration’s anti-trans under-19 Medicaid ban, and New York joined a multistate lawsuit defending trans health care after years of protest pressure.

At the Pentagon, expanded testosterone screening is tightening the squeeze on trans service members, while the department reportedly searches protected medical records to identify transgender troops.

International

The fallout from NHS Wales’s surgery suspension deepened, with up to 800 trans patients now hit by Welsh Gender Service cancellations after the clinic paused surgeries over accusations it treated too many trans patients — QueerAF has an explainer on what’s next. Also in the UK, Grindr agreed to pay £26 million to settle a lawsuit over sharing users’ HIV status with advertisers.

In Finland, growing protests reflect mounting discontent with the country’s restrictive trans health policy. A landmark official Dutch review recommended expanding trans youth care, a Bulgarian court ruled in favor of legal gender changes, and the Swiss government backed a nationwide ban on conversion therapy. Experts warned that a test set to bar trans women from women’s Olympic competition lacks scientific backing.

In South Africa, an intersex adult is seeking justice over an irreversible, nonconsensual childhood surgery.

Nine activists arrested demanding MA restore trans youth care: Organizers in Boston escalated to direct action to press the Massachusetts attorney general — a clear-eyed model of what sustained pressure on state officials looks like.

Maryland teachers refuse to out trans students: Under the banner “They Will Not Comply,” educators are refusing to enforce a district policy that shifted to align with federal pressure — a template for institutional noncompliance.

How a Colorado school district is fighting Trump’s anti-trans push: A close look at one district actively resisting federal directives, useful for anyone weighing what local institutions can actually do.

• Massachusetts hospitals are teaching Trump how easily trans care can be erased — The Advocate — Analysis arguing that capitulating hospitals are handing the administration a playbook for dismantling care.

• Trans leader sounds alarm about a “near complete exodus” of philanthropy — them. — A movement leader warns that funders are retreating from trans work, with direct consequences for services.

• How Many Trans People Are There? — Assigned Media — Journal Club unpacks HRC’s new estimate that the trans and gender-expansive population tops eight million, roughly three times the Williams Institute’s count.

• Trans people need a politics of ordinary life — Washington Blade — An essay for a trans politics rooted in daily living rather than perpetual crisis.

• A Black transmasc retreat and “that brotherhood moment” — The Buckeye Flame — A feature on an annual Ohio retreat offering Black transmasculine people community and care.

• In MAGA country, an Ozarks mom offers a safe haven for LGBTQ youth — Uncloseted Media — A profile of one Missouri mother sheltering queer kids in hostile territory.

• What it’s like to run an LGBTQ+ summer camp in Trump’s America — LGBTQ Nation — A first-person account of keeping a youth camp running under mounting political pressure.

• Young queer people are drinking less, and NYC gay bars feel it — them. — A trend piece on shifting substance-use patterns among young queer people and the strain on legacy bars.

Bone Accrual During Puberty Suppression and Gender-Affirming Therapy in Transgender Adolescents

A meta-analysis of 10 cohorts (751 trans and gender-diverse adolescents) found lumbar-spine bone-density z-scores dipped during GnRHa suppression and partially rebounded after hormone therapy, leaving an uncertain residual gap rather than a demonstrated deficit.

doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2026.2470

I’m so grateful to everyone who came out to the Oaxaca Lending Library last week for our conversation on gender, performativity, and intersectional identities. Thank you to everyone who showed up, who shared their own experiences, who asked the hard questions, and who continue to encourage me in this labor I love.

I’ll be back at the OLL soon with something more tactical: a primer on anti-trans legislation — how these bills are written, what they’re built to do, who they harm and how. The date’s still coming together; I’ll share it here first.

In the meantime… you can help send me to the WPATH Symposium in Mexico City in November! I need to purchase my ($475 USD) ticket and book a place to stay in the next two weeks, so any donation helps.

One more thing. This weekend my friend Harold Kooden turns 90. Getting to spend my days learning from queer elders and organizers like Harold — people who built the very foundations of resistance and activism from which we fight today — is the part of this work that keeps me whole. Happy birthday, Harold.

United States

This week, the Department of Health and Human Services published a false report claiming that respecting a trans person’s name and pronouns predicts support for political violence, branding “gender ideology” an “accelerant” for “left-wing authoritarianism.” Trump also told a South Carolina rally that hospitals are “doing reverse surgery” on trans patients at his order, a claim with no basis in fact. On the other hand, a federal appeals court refused to hand the DOJ sensitive medical records of trans youth treated in New York, and a judge tossed Colorado schools’ challenge to state trans-athlete protections for lack of standing.

Schools stayed a central battleground: the American Academy of Pediatrics told anti-trans activists to stop invoking its name to push genital exams in sports policy, even as a Washington voter guide cited the group over its objection in an entry on a proposed trans sports ban. Moms for Liberty is suing a New Jersey district to force the outing of trans students, and new reporting shows schools rarely acted on LGBTQ+ students’ reports of violent assault.

International

NHS Wales abruptly suspended all gender-affirming surgeries for adult patients of the Welsh Gender Service, with some told days or hours before scheduled procedures, pending an independent review prompted by a single anti-trans journalist’s blog. And Amnesty International UK reportedly used copyright law to scrub its own report naming anti-trans groups after JK Rowling threatened to sue. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights urged Portugal’s parliament to withdraw three bills targeting gender identity.

Anti-LGBTQI+ disinformation is fuelling offline harm across Southern Africa, while Indonesia faces calls to reverse a defense policy branding “LGBTQ+ culture” a national threat. And finally, Human Rights Watch condemned Ecuador’s adoption law for discriminating against LGBT parents and trans children.

Health workers must be allies as anti-trans legislation spreads: Two NHS doctors lay out how the UK’s EHRC “biological sex” code widens health inequalities for everyone, and what clinicians can concretely do to push back through training, advocacy, and refusing to enforce discriminatory policies.

The Trans Guide to Saving Evidence of Online Harassment: A step-by-step guide to documenting threatening messages, preserving digital evidence, and reporting abusive accounts before you block them.

How readers beat back proposed estrogen restrictions: The Needle breaks down how a wave of public comment from its readers helped push back proposed limits on estrogen access, a reminder that showing up to comment periods moves outcomes.

• TWIBS: Leor Sapir Gets WPATH Statement Wrong — Assigned Media — A takedown of anti-trans activist Leor Sapir’s latest misrepresentation of WPATH’s position, this time in City Journal.

• Inserting Logic Into an Illogical Framework: Advocates Discuss the Purpose of Shield Laws — Assigned Media — How New Jersey’s new shield law aims to protect trans and reproductive health care from out-of-state political attacks.

• Why affirming faith communities belong in the fight to end HIV — The Advocate — An argument that HIV strategy should begin from the networks of relationships and influence that already exist, including affirming faith communities.

• New book examines Trump cuts to LGBTQ healthcare — Washington Blade — “Aftershocks” traces how policy shifts have reshaped the HIV response and broader public health.

• Iron, Anemia and Trans Bodies: What Your Labs Really Mean — TransVitae — A clear explainer on how ferritin, hemoglobin, HRT, diet, and blood loss shape iron levels in trans bodies.

• Inside the Mindset of a Trans Woman in the CIA — The Needle — A profile of Julia Curlee and what public service looks like for trans people increasingly shut out of it.

• The triumphs, trials and conundrum of Trans+ journalist Jan Morris — QueerAF — A reconsideration of the celebrated travel writer and historian whose memoir “Conundrum” chronicled her very public transition.

• Outed, Hunted and Forced to Flee — MambaOnline — A Ugandan queer activist’s account of being exposed by a tabloid and fleeing across East Africa to survive.

• LGBTQ+ students speak out after becoming a political target — The Advocate — Queer kids at the center of hundreds of bills describe being the culture war’s least-consulted party.

• For LGBTQ youth starting with nothing, Pride House in Florida offers help — Washington Blade — Inside a Florida home serving young people who aged out of foster care or were forced out by their parents.

• Trans, nonbinary Americans find refuge in the Netherlands — Washington Blade — Americans leaving the US for the Netherlands as federal policy closes in.

The Justice Department's push to investigate transgender medicine cleared a major hurdle this week: a divided Ninth Circuit let the DOJ resume its probe of the telehealth provider QueerDoc and sent the case back to the district court that had quashed it, reopening the door to subpoenas for patient records. In response to these attacks, New Jersey Gov. Sherrill signed a shield law protecting reproductive and gender-affirming care, and the providers who deliver it, from out-of-state investigations.

A new HHS report attacking gender-affirming care is riddled with false claims and was co-written by an Ohio hate group the Human Rights Campaign condemned as a sham. Trump, for his part, falsely told the public that hospitals are performing "reverse surgery" on trans patients, apparently at his order. Across the US, intersex children are losing access to hormone therapy they also depend on, collateral damage as hospitals halt care to dodge federal defunding and judicial retaliation.

At the state level, Ohio's BMV abruptly added new hurdles to changing the sex marker on licenses and IDs. In Kansas, Democratic appointee Adam Proffitt has personally reserved the power to investigate trans people in public restrooms. And in Missouri, Republicans are trying to repeal abortion rights by leaning on anti-trans disinformation. In Texas, the state has quietly begun forcibly detransitioning trans prisoners by cutting off their hormones.

In party news, a trans activist confronted a Democratic attorney general over shuttered clinics, warning that they're "dropping like flies." And the Log Cabin Republicans formally stripped transgender rights from the group's mission, pulling the ladder up behind their own members in what they cast as a return to "moral clarity."

International

In Senegal, authorities sent 71 people to trial after mass arrests under a harsh new anti-LGBTQ+ law, part of a criminalization wave with grave consequences for HIV prevention and care access.

Boycott the New York Times — Trans News Network lays out the case for pulling your subscription over the paper's trans coverage, and why that kind of pressure is leverage worth using right now.

And don’t forget to support queer trans media in its place!

• Advocacy While Incarcerated: The Indomitable Spirit of Varia Merritt — Assigned Media — The founder of Be the Change, an LGBTQ+ community inside a Tennessee prison, on building purpose that confinement can't touch.

• Is Trans Loneliness Causing an Epidemic of AI Use in Our Community? — Assigned Media — What the turn toward AI chatbots for emotional support reveals about isolation and unmet mental-health needs.

• What Are Testosterone Vocal Fold Injections — And How Do They Work? — them. — A clear explainer on an emerging voice-masculinization option for transmasculine people, and how it actually works.

• Why MISTR, a Major PrEP Telehealth Platform, Now Offers ED Treatments — them. — The PrEP and STI telehealth platform expands into erectile-dysfunction care, a bet on a broader queer sexual-health market.

• The Trump Administration's LGBTQ Brain Drain: What You Need to Know — Uncloseted Media — Six federal workers on being forced out, and what the government loses when it purges its queer expertise.

• Gay Hookup Culture and the Internet: A History from 1994 Until Now — Uncloseted Media — Three decades of how the internet reshaped gay hookup and dating culture, sexual-health throughlines and all.

• Conversion Therapy Is Evolving. Here's How the Religious Right Is Reaching Modern Youth. — LGBTQ Nation — Inside the rebranded tactics the religious right now uses to reach a new generation of LGBTQ+ youth.

• Attacks on LGBTQ+ Health Are a Threat to All — The Lancet — A Lancet editorial argues the global rollback of LGBTQ+ rights is a threat to everyone, since movements that seize control of queer people's bodies and privacy come for all of us.

The Trump administration finalized its rule halting Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care for trans youth, the latest escalation in a campaign it has waged since its first days back in office. Advocates stress the rule isn't yet in effect and can still be fought. STAT breaks down how legal challenges to the CMS rule are likely to fare before it takes hold October 12. Physicians warn the change will endanger low-income youth who lose their doctor-recommended care.

The enforcement push escalated as JD Vance demanded the DOJ investigate hospitals treating transgender patients, insisting the administration hasn't gone far enough. HHS and Vance are now pushing federal fraud probes into hospitals over insurance billing tied to youth care. A divided appeals court sided with Trump, letting the DOJ's subpoena of a care provider stand. Even as one patient probe collapsed, the broader machinery of investigation grinds on.

There were real wins, though, too: a federal court struck down a rule that would have cut gender-affirming care from the ACA's essential health benefits, in a multistate suit co-led by California. Seattle set aside $300,000 in relocation aid for trans people fleeing hostile states, while in New York, Planned Parenthood urged the state to fund gender-affirming care for minors as federal dollars disappear.

The everyday cruelty continued as well: police were called on trans men using the women's restroom Kansas law now forces them into, and the administration is moving trans women into a segregated prison unit built to make them suffer. It also excluded The Trevor Project from the 988 crisis lifeline the group spent years helping build. The attack widens beyond trans care as more GOP platforms adopt anti-IVF language, with surrogacy likely the next target. And in a supposed safe state, Massachusetts' attorney general struggled to explain why her office won't sue hospitals abandoning trans kids.

International News

In Brazil, a federal court authorized hormone blockers for a 13-year-old trans girl, overriding the Federal Council of Medicine's restriction. In Argentina, an appeals court suspended the government's decree barring minors from hormonal treatment and gender-affirming care.

Trace the disinfo pipeline — TransVitae breaks down how fabricated "trans" videos manufacture outrage across X and TikTok and feed the policy backlash, essential grounding for anyone countering bad-faith narratives with patients or colleagues.

• 'What are we going to do?' — NPR — A mother of a trans teen sits with the dread of the finalized Medicaid rule and the question of what gets taken next.

• Information is Scarce for Trans Women Behind Bars — Assigned Media — Inside Georgia's prisons, information moves differently than it does outside, and the scarcity becomes its own form of harm.

• This AI Chatbot Pushes Conversion Therapy on Trans Users — The Needle News — Detrans.ai bills itself as balanced help for exploring dysphoria while feeding users debunked science and reactionary talking points.

• Strength In Weakness: Guy Hammond's Program That Devastates LGBTQ Survivors — Uncloseted Media — By swapping promises of becoming straight for demands of lifelong celibacy, the program dodges the conversion-therapy label and the scrutiny that comes with it.

• Psychedelic Conversion Therapy: A Handshake Away From Trump — YouTube — An interview with the writer behind a sharp critique of "A Christian's Guide to Psychedelics" on how the religious right embraces psychedelics while rolling back LGBTQ protections.

• 'HIV Is Too Woke': Why This Gay Doctor Resigned From Trump's CDC — Uncloseted Media — Dr. Demetre Daskalakis lays out what working inside RFK Jr.'s CDC was actually like before he resigned in protest.

• Demand grows for gender-affirming voice surgery, but access remains limited — The Globe and Mail — Interest in gender-affirming voice surgery keeps climbing while access stays stubbornly narrow.

• The drug lenacapavir is a mighty weapon against HIV — NPR — Twice-yearly injectable PrEP is reaching more countries, but its global rollout draws mixed reviews over pricing and which high-burden districts got prioritized.

• Trans+ life in the UK is more than concerning - what next? — QueerAF — A live QueerAF podcast taping hosted by Juno Dawson takes stock of a worsening British landscape with Munroe Bergdorf, Zelah Glasson, and others.

• Gay bear culture survived body fascism. It can survive Ozempic — The Advocate — Bear community built itself in defiance of gay culture's smooth-and-lean ideal, and it will outlast the Ozempic era too.

Connecticut Children's Medical Center became the latest hospital to halt gender-affirming care for minors under Trump DOJ pressure, the third clinic to settle with the department in recent weeks. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton bragged about having extracted $10 million from Texas Children's Hospital and forced it to stand up a "detransition" clinic.

New York lawmakers moved to finally repeal a 40-year bathhouse ban enacted during the AIDS epidemic, swapping reactionary policy for modern public-health regulation. Upstate, a Chester physical therapy office faces scrutiny after a patient recorded anti-gay remarks among staff, and in Manhattan police arrested a psychotherapist accused of raping a transgender boy during a session, warning there may be more victims.

And in Washington state, a November ballot measure would mandate genital inspections for student athletes, forcing girls from kindergarten up to verify birth sex to compete. And bodily surveillance continues to spread with anti-trans panic, as the WTA begins mandatory genetic testing of players in Cincinnati.

At the federal level, the Human Rights Campaign filed a class action over the coverage ban on gender-affirming care, part of mounting litigation as federal workers sue over healthcare discrimination they call unconstitutional. HRC also condemned the Department of Education for stripping LGBTQ bullying data from a federal youth survey, erasing the evidence of rising harm.

International News

A new statutory code across England, Scotland, and Wales now bars trans people from bathrooms matching their gender, even as a fresh judicial review argues the EHRC code misstates the law.

In the Netherlands, Prime Minister Rob Jetten used a World Pride panel to argue governments must do more to defend trans rights.

In France, 141 LGBTIQ+ groups warned against a UN resolution on decriminalisation, fearing it could trigger backlash where queerness is still criminalised.

And in South Africa, a national Pride Flag Tour launched in Limpopo to push stigma-free healthcare for LGBTIQ+ people.

Follow the money — and support trans journalism. The Needle News obtained internal communications showing anti-trans hate group SEGM paid McMaster University over CA$300,000 to shape its research output.

Know the opposition — Uncloseted Media maps Alliance Defending Freedom's decades-long campaign to dismantle queer rights since the early 1990s.

• Expecting "Wellness" from Oppressed People Is An Extension of Oppression — Sebastian Barr — A psychologist argues that therapy aiming only to make trans people "functional" under oppression becomes a tool of it.

• Trans People in Sports Don't Hurt Anybody. But Kicking Them Out Does. — Assigned Media — Journal Club digs into a 2024 paper quantifying the harm of excluding trans people from sport.

• The fight for trans athletes isn't about fairness — The Advocate — Rose Montoya's op-ed reframes sports bans as a question of who gets to belong.

• Questions No One Asks About Trans Girls and Women in Sports — Thalia Vacha — A trans writer poses the questions the sports-ban debate keeps avoiding.

• Michelle Visage's PrEP Ad Doesn't Mention Gay People or HIV — them. — A conservative watchdog group is furious anyway over the drag star's TV Land spot.

• The transgender refugees finding sanctuary in the North of England — QueerAF — Adrian Collins reports from Bradford on life at the intersection of being Trans+ and a migrant.

• TWIBS: Amy Acton is a Disappointing Look at the Future — Assigned Media — A Democratic gubernatorial frontrunner throws trans Ohioans under the bus.

• How to Heal Anal Fissures and Hemorrhoids? Try Bottoming — Out — Anal health experts explain when bottoming can treat, rather than worsen, fissures and hemorrhoids.

A federal judge is weighing sanctions after the administration violated a court order protecting transgender women in federal custody, moving them into segregated housing despite the ruling. The House narrowly defeated an NDAA amendment that would have written Trump's ban on transgender service members into federal law. Congress advanced H.R. 7661, the so-called ”Stop the Sexualization of Children” Act, which would bar federally funded K-12 programs from mentioning transgender people.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is seeking to end federal funding for a UAB study on transgender health. The Education Department opened an investigation into Minnesota schools over gender-neutral paper dolls they aren't even using.

Michigan will stop enforcing its ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ youth following a court order. A Michigan hospital settled a First Amendment suit by expanding protections for staff who refuse to refer patients for gender-transition care.

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton's campaign drew backlash after a meeting with LGBTQ+ leaders went badly, with some trans attendees barred or removed. Preteen suicide deaths hit 194 in 2025, the highest rate since 2001, alarming mental health experts.

The HOPWA program, which houses people with HIV, now requires lengthy immigration checks that threaten access to stable housing. At the AIDS 2026 conference, State Department officials mislabeled African countries on a map while defending cuts to global HIV programs.

International

Health Canada dropped a screening question that had barred gay and bisexual men from donating sperm. Canadian HIV infections rose 23% between 2022 and 2024, hitting young gay men hardest even as more federal funding cuts loom.

Poland's top court refused to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere in the EU, setting up a clash with the bloc. Amnesty International UK issued an apology to JK Rowling for describing anti-trans groups as "anti-rights," reversing its own reporting under legal threat.

Anti-LGBTQ+ laws are rising across West Africa, with implications for HIV services and health access. In South Africa, the LGBTQIA+ sector is calling on President Ramaphosa to block a planned conference promoting anti-LGBTQ "family values."

Taiwan's government has failed to update its process for changing gender markers on ID documents, leaving trans residents reliant on a 2008 directive.

Speak out against anti-LGBTQ+ billboards: About 40 Lima, Ohio residents and council members rallied against billboards targeting nontraditional parents, in the street and in city hall.

Learn from trans direct action: New Socialist interviews the trans liberationist group BASH BACK on strategy and community defense amid escalating threats.

• TJ Billard on Anti-Trans Disinformation and Media — Assigned Media — Riki Wilchins interviews a disinformation expert on how anti-trans narratives spread through media.

• How the Science of Sex is Weaponized Against Us — Assigned Media — Veronica Esposito interviews historian Beans Velocci on how the science of sex has been constructed and weaponized against trans people.

• Hate is still a public health emergency — and the epidemic we keep ignoring — The Advocate — An opinion essay framing anti-LGBTQ+ hate and violence as an epidemic, with hate as the pathogen driving it.

• Meet the Ohio nun who has been working on the frontlines of HIV/AIDS work for decades — The Buckeye Flame — A profile of Sister Susan Zion, who has spent decades on the frontlines of HIV/AIDS care in Ohio.

• A new HIV diagnosis doesn't have to be nerve-wracking. Advocates share their advice — The Advocate — Advocates offer guidance on processing and living with a new HIV diagnosis.

• What is Driving Trans People to Stockpile their Medications? — Assigned Media — A look at why many trans people stockpile hormones for emergencies, a practice that predates the current administration.

• Why Chronic Stress Hits Transgender People Differently — TransVitae — A health explainer on how chronic minority stress affects the transgender body, with practical ways to protect wellbeing.

• Inside the Trans Period Pride Event That Made Angry Protestors Lose It — them. — A Trans Period Pride event for trans people who menstruate drew intense right-wing backlash and a venue change.

• In the Berlin Pride Attack, Authorities Knew the Perpetrator Was Dangerous. So How Did This Happen? — Uncloseted Media — An analysis of how authorities' prior knowledge of the Berlin Pride attacker failed to prevent the attack.

• Autumn Hill Speaks From Jail After Being Sentenced to 50 Years by the Trump Administration for an Alleged Terrorist Attack — Uncloseted Media — In her first jailhouse video interview, Autumn Hill calls herself a "political prisoner" unjustly locked up by the administration.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has begun dismantling LGBTQ+ veteran care, archiving resources and folding specialized coordinators into general roles. Rep. Mark Takano, the top Democrat on House Veterans Affairs, is pledging to fight the rollback and accusing the administration of deliberately undermining veterans' health care. The DOJ and Bureau of Prisons may be violating a federal court order governing trans women in custody, caught between two conflicting rulings. The administration also cut HIV prevention funding to community organizations including Equitas Health in Ohio, a move advocates warn could fuel new infections.

A federal judge rejected the administration's bid to dismiss transgender Air Force troops' retirement lawsuit. A separate judge is demanding the Pentagon explain why testosterone is promoted as a readiness benefit for some troops while the same hormone justifies removing trans ones. A leading Democratic think tank's reset on trans rights is alarming advocates, signaling new openness to sports restrictions it once opposed.

House Republicans added anti-LGBTQ riders targeting Pride flags, trans rights, and DEI programs to a funding bill. Five Democrats crossed party lines to help strip health care from trans servicemembers and their families. In Louisiana, Bossier Parish advanced a criminal bathroom ban carrying up to six months in jail. And the WTA greenlit genetic sex testing for its athletes, a policy aimed at trans women — none of whom currently compete on tour — that falls hardest on intersex cisgender women.

International

In Finland, government reports are raising concerns about neglectful mental health practices at a hospital affiliated with gender critic Riittakerttu Kaltiala, involving cisgender adolescents in her care. In the UK, QueerAF's investigation found one gender clinic's wait stretching to 224 years, revisiting the Gender Clinic Files a year on. But in the Netherlands, a landmark official review is recommending expanded trans youth care, finding wait times must shorten, detransition remains rare, and the benefits of care are substantial.

In Gabon, a harsh new bill threatens to re-criminalize LGBTQ+ people, banning same-sex relationships and LGBTQ+ advocacy and sparking alarm across the continent. In South Africa, psychologists joined a global declaration rejecting conversion practices as harmful, unethical, and unscientific.

Rio will host the 2026 International AIDS Conference, a gathering shadowed by steep US funding cuts to the global HIV fight.

Debunk the pee-drinking myth: them. explains why some cisgender women on TikTok are drinking pee to avoid hormone replacement therapy for perimenopause and menopause symptoms — a media-literacy debunk worth having on hand when patients ask about it.

Help reinstate Queensland trans healthcare: a new e-petition urges Queensland's Parliament to restore gender-affirming care access, and Queenslanders are encouraged to sign.

• Rehabilitation for Queer Inmates Is Uniquely Difficult in an Already Strained System — Assigned Media — How prisons fail LGBTQ+ inmates trying to prepare for release.

• What Is a T Voice? And Should You Care If You Have One? — them. — A personal essay on testosterone, voice, and the pressure to sound a certain way.

• Is Transition a Choice? The Question People Keep Asking — TransVitae — A grounded explainer on why living authentically is survival, not preference.

• A Secret Trans Support Group Met Above a Brothel in 1890s Manhattan. It May Have Changed the World. — LGBTQ Nation — The Cercle Hermaphroditos, the earliest known trans advocacy group in the US.

The same Pentagon that spent a year and a half insisting medically transitioning troops can't serve is now offering cisgender troops testosterone, preparing to screen service members for low levels and cover the replacement therapy it branded an unnecessary expense for trans people. The FTC's lawsuit against WPATH grinds on, and what it means for hormones is stark: a win for the agency could strip access for trans people outside the handful of states with legal protections. In Congress, House Judiciary advanced the Chloe Cole Act, which would let patients sue the clinicians who provided them gender-affirming care as minors.

The Justice Department told an appeals court it will ask the Supreme Court to undo the block on the administration's military ban. The Heritage Foundation, having secured its athlete bans, is now going after Title IX itself, arguing rollbacks are needed to protect girls' "fertility." And RFK Jr.'s HHS stripped protections for LGBTQ+ youth in foster care, removing a rule that shielded them from placement with hostile families. A year after the administration cut the 988 line's LGBTQ+ youth service, that specialized hotline still hasn't been restored, and may not return until the end of 2026 despite funding Congress already approved.

Two developments cut the other way. A flood of public opposition forced the administration to abandon a rule that would have compelled hospitals nationwide to drop gender-affirming care for trans youth, and HHS quietly shelved its plan to make its blocks on trans youth healthcare official, at least for now.

International

In the UK, QueerAF reports that mainstream coverage of the BMA's Cass Review critique was factually wrong, again distorting what the doctors' union actually said about trans healthcare. In Ireland, the head of HSE gender healthcare will step down at year's end after drafting a new model of care.

In South Africa, experts warn that HIV and LGBT+ services remain at risk after funding cuts, even as an anti-rights "family values" conference heads to Cape Town that organizers fear could threaten LGBTQ+ equality across the continent. From Nigeria, an opinion piece argues the country's anti-gay laws fuel violence, abuse, and impunity. In Australia, Dementia Australia and ACON launched a dedicated LGBT+ hub for people affected by dementia and their carers — a rare bright spot beside a harder story, as Children's Health Queensland settled its dispute with Dr Jillian Spencer, the psychiatrist who boasted of pulling down trans pride flags and campaigned against youth gender care, clearing her of wrongdoing amid the state's ban on puberty blockers and hormones for minors.

Debunk the testosterone hype: Assigned Media lays out the actual science on aging and testosterone that Hegseth and the manosphere leave out — useful when patients arrive quoting them.

Lead with PrEP awareness: This National HIV Prevention Day essay argues the real barrier to prevention isn't willingness but awareness, a gap providers are positioned to close.

Share this changemaker story: The SafePlace Dream Academy shows LGBTQ+ graduates across Southern Africa turning trauma into community leadership — inspiration worth passing on.

• Trump ended the LGBTQ+ youth suicide lifeline. One year later, the damage remains — The Advocate — The human toll a year after the 988 youth service was terminated.

• In the Middle of the Bible Belt, a Summer Camp Lets Trans Kids Exhale — Uncloseted Media — Inside a camp where trans youth get to be understood, questions welcomed, adulthood imaginable.

• Idaho pushed anti-trans laws for years. Then a teen died. — NBC News — Traces the state's years of anti-trans lawmaking against the death of a trans teenager.

• Whitman-Walker to host legal services workshop — Washington Blade — A virtual and in-person legal-services workshop at the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center.

• Safe States Don't Make People Safer — The Needle News — Why legislative risk and lethal risk aren't the same for trans women, and why the numbers we have tell only part of the story.

• Just like me – How t4t love is helping trans people heal what the world keeps breaking — QueerAF — A trans Italian screenwriter on t4t love as repair.

• Having a Trans Child Doesn't Make You Immune to Transphobia — TransVitae — Passing privilege, internalized bias, and what authentic allyship actually asks.

• The Truth Behind the Transgender Bathroom Selfie Debate — TransVitae — Why the bathroom selfie reads as trans joy, and how it gets weaponized.

Erin Reed updated her national risk map this week, moving Idaho to the "Do Not Travel" list — bathroom use there can carry a five-year sentence — and South Carolina to "Worst Laws Passed" after it extended its bathroom ban to universities.

A federal judge in Washington declined to block the FTC from proceeding against WPATH in Texas, leaving the body that writes the standards of care most clinicians in the US rely on without interim protection to fight the agency. Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe signed an appropriations bill that ends transition-related care for transgender people in state custody, effective July 2.

The Supreme Court's sports ruling is now doing its downstream work: two New Hampshire students dropped their challenge to the state's athletics ban, and conservative groups are pressuring the YMCA to abandon trans-inclusive policies at facilities where many patients swim, train, and rehab.

Democrats are splitting over the ruling in public: at a Massachusetts Senate primary debate, Ed Markey accused Seth Moulton of having taken the same position the Court just took. In an opinion piece for The Buckeye Flame, NV Gay writes that Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, weeks after marching in Columbus Pride, chose to legitimize HB 68 rather than defend the youth it targets. And in an opinion column for the Washington Blade, a Navy healthcare worker's favorable court ruling changed little about the administration's treatment of trans service members.

The week's counterweight came from California, where a judge halted a Justice Department probe into a hospital's gender-affirming care, finding it likely unconstitutional. Cleveland and Columbus also won a federal ruling against executive orders that barred cities from spending federal grant dollars on programs touching “DEI” or "gender ideology."

International

Erin Reed traces how UN special rapporteur Reem Alsalem has used her mandate to launder anti-trans policy internationally, work that the Supreme Court's sports decision now echoes. In the UK, a Cambridge and UKHSA study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases found that sexually transmitted Shigella is spreading and acquiring resistance far faster than other strains, with more than 70% of sexually transmitted isolates resistant to at least one clinically relevant antibiotic against 40% of non-sexually transmitted cases, and 2,560 sexually acquired cases recorded in England last year.

In South Africa, Discovery Health will review transgender healthcare coverage after members backed a motion on equitable medical scheme benefits. New Zealand's government is revisiting trans inclusion guidelines for community sport following Auckland Pride's legal action. And Nikkei goes inside India's largest transgender festival, where thousands of trans women gather each year for a ritual wedding.

Share safe bathroom lists: Idaho advocates are mapping private facilities across the state now that public restroom use is criminalized. Check out these “safe bathroom” apps and start contributing now.

Know your rights under the EHRC code: QueerAF lays out what the new UK guidance actually requires, what remains contestable, and how to push back on a code a growing number of MPs call unworkable.

Route Ohio patients to community organizations: The Buckeye Flame's statewide nonprofit guide is a referral list for providers who need somewhere to send people beyond the clinic.

Offer IPV survivors an alternative to shelters: One Ohio organization is booking hotel rooms for LGBTQ+ survivors who fear mistreatment by social workers, healthcare staff, and police — a model worth naming when a patient says they won't go to a shelter.

• DOJ, HHS, FTC, FDA: The Alphabet Soup of Efforts to Restrict Gender-Affirming Care — them./The 19th — A map of which federal agency is doing what to whom, useful for anyone trying to track the pressure on their own institution.

• Journal Club: How Often Do Trans Kids Detransition, Really? — Assigned Media — A close read of a 2026 paper tracking identity and detransition rates in trans youth.

• Supreme Court ruling on trans athletes is a public health story — Washington Blade — An argument that labeling a population "lesser" produces measurable health consequences, not just legal ones.

• Gender critical and sex realist beliefs are pseudoscience — Medium — Draws the line from eugenics to today's "sex realism" and explains why both fail as science.

• Inside the Very Lonely World of Trans Conservatives — Uncloseted Media — As many as 10% of trans Americans identify as Republican, and this asks them why.

• Starting T Doesn't Mean Losing Your Hair. Here Are Three Solutions. — them. — Practical answers to a question patients ask before their first shot and rarely get a straight response to.

• Maine plays a role in new film about dads of trans kids — Portland Press Herald — Luchina Fisher's "The Dads," featuring Wayne Maines, screens at the Maine International Film Festival this month.

• How to build a better relationship with the news as a LGBTQIA+ person — QueerAF — Media-literacy habits for people who can't afford to look away but can't afford to drown either.

The Supreme Court handed down the ruling advocates had been dreading, finding trans people not entitled to equal protections under most of the law — a sweeping decision whose downstream consequences are hard to predict. Days earlier, the same court ruled that Title IX refers to biological sex, a reading advocates warn will fuel further federal action against trans people playing school sports.

But not every court fight broke the same way: a Texas judge hit pause on the administration's emergency request in its extreme lawsuit against WPATH, and a federal judge in California ruled the DOJ likely cannot lawfully obtain trans children's confidential medical records. Maine, meanwhile, is refusing to comply with a DOJ subpoena for a trans woman prisoner's records outright.

Ohio advocates warn a bill nicknamed "Andy's Law" could unjustly penalize people living with HIV, while LGBTQ+ groups there called the ruling one of the most significant setbacks for trans rights in modern history.

And there were more wins: New Jersey finally passed a trans-care shield law, the last blue state to do so, also approving new protections shielding trans and reproductive-health providers and patients from harassment. Illinois removed testosterone from its controlled-substance list and now requires insurers to cover HRT stockpiles, while California lawmakers proposed a program backing transgender veterans with housing, jobs, licensing, and discharge upgrades after the military ban.

In broader health policy, New Jersey joined a 24-state challenge to a Trump administration Medicaid rule advocates say will push sick people off coverage, as 25 Democratic-led states separately sued over Medicaid work requirements. New laws restricting abortion medication and shaping minors' access to reproductive care took effect this week in three states alongside new HPV vaccine provisions.

International

Niger's government launched a crackdown under a new anti-gay law, arresting dozens and raising fear across West Africa. In South Africa, LGBTQI+ refugees describe xenophobia, asylum delays, and the legal protections they're fighting to keep.

And cricketer Anaya Bangar says a sex "verification" test in India required her to undress in front of male doctors, a clinical-dignity violation worth flagging for anyone tracking how trans athletes are being treated in this era of suspicion and persecution.

Point patients to this before they consider asylum: The Needle's practical guide covers documentation, logistics, and what to expect — worth having on hand given this week's rulings.

Send this to patients who want a say in their care: Trans Health Australia's new national survey lets trans and gender-diverse Australians shape how care gets delivered.

Help patients get informed about viral hepatitis: MambaOnline's explainer covers symptoms, risks, vaccines, testing, and treatment for gay, bi, and other MSM patients.

• The Supreme Court That Struck Down the Voting Rights Act is Not Right About Trans Segregation — Assigned Media — An analysis arguing the trans-sports ruling can't be separated from the same court's broader rollback of civil-rights protections.

• 1776–2026: The Moments That Defined Trans Rights in America — The Buckeye Flame — A timeline of noteworthy events shaping trans and gender-nonconforming rights in America, tied to the country's 250th anniversary.

• The Supreme Court's Trans Sports Ruling Is About More Than Athletics — The Advocate — An essay unpacking how the ruling reaches far beyond athletics into how the law defines sex and strength.

• Heat, Hormones, and Hydration: Your Summer Safety Guide — TransVitae — A summer safety guide on how heat and hormones interact in trans bodies during exercise, and how to stay hydrated and affirmed.

• There Is No Right Way to Transition: Only Your Way — TransVitae — An affirming piece rejecting body-policing and the idea of a single "right" way to transition.

• On the Day My Trans Son Started Gender-Affirming Care — Medium — A parent's essay on the day their trans son started gender-affirming care.

A federal judge has blocked the Trump DOJ from seizing trans youths’ medical records from NYU Langone, Mount Sinai, and other New York hospitals, temporarily shielding the patient list that the department demanded while a constitutional challenge proceeds. The administration is widening the dragnet on other fronts: the Trump EEOC has opened transgender-related investigations raising employment-discrimination alarms, federal officials launched a Title IX probe into Maryland schools over trans athletes, and Trans News Network unpacks the reality and fearmongering behind the administration’s “counterterrorism” threats against trans people and antifascists.

At the state level, a new Louisiana law sanctions deadnaming and other workplace disrespect of trans people, the newly released Texas GOP platform is studded with anti-trans planks, and House Republicans — rather than tackle affordability — advanced measures targeting trans college students.

The KIDS Act now moving through the House would force age verification to get online — a direct threat to how young people reach health information. On both coasts, judges are weighing transgender prisoners’ rights, including access to care, as the administration targets prison policies.

There were bright spots, too. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a $15 million investment in trans care — building on the records fight his law department joined last week — and Minneapolis repealed its decades-old bathhouse ban, undoing an HIV-era sexual-health restriction.

The administration is also moving to relaunch 988’s specialized “Press 3” LGBTQ+ youth crisis line by year’s end after axing it in 2025, though new eligibility rules may shut out The Trevor Project, which had handled roughly half that traffic.

International

Hilary Cass acknowledged no evidence that puberty blockers cause harm — a notable admission given how her review has anchored the country’s ban, even as she defends the contested NHS trial now under attack from anti-trans campaigners. Keir Starmer’s resignation has forced a reckoning over Labour’s trans-health and rights record, while advocates warn that loopholes in the draft conversion-practices bill could turn it into “an instruction manual for abuse.”

In Scotland, trans women are being moved out of female prisons under a policy shift. Spain moved the other direction, advancing legislation to criminalize conversion therapy with prison penalties.

Human Rights Watch warns of deteriorating conditions for LGBT people in China.

Read the numbers critically — The Buckeye Flame’s media-literacy column breaks down how data on LGBTQ+ equality gets framed, and what to actually do with the figures you’re handed.

Brief patients on summer STIs — them. lays out symptoms, testing, treatment, and prevention for Shigella and TMVII, two emerging STIs queer men are seeing this season.

See how “controversy” gets manufactured — A new analysis traces how the New York Times helped turn trans rights into a political controversy, essential context for spotting the same framing elsewhere.

Find or become a mentor — TransVitae makes the case for mentorship in the trans community and how to step into it, as mentor or mentee.

• Nancy Mace Hates Transgender Mice — Assigned Media — Why is Nancy Mace obsessed with the idea that scientists are transing the genders of mice?

• ‘Avengers, But in Real Life’: Inside Operation Lifeboat — The Needle — How a volunteer mutual-aid network is getting trans Kansans out of the state and into safety.

• A Lack of Funding, a Glut of Stigma — The Buckeye Flame — How scarce funding and persistent stigma shape LGBTQ+ health outcomes across Ohio.

• LGBTQ+ Mental Health Resource for Conversion Therapy Survivors — MambaOnline — A new mental-health resource launches to support conversion-therapy survivors across Africa.

• The Health and Safety of NJ’s Trans Community Can’t Wait — New Jersey Monitor — An op-ed arguing the state can’t afford to defer the health and safety of its transgender residents.

• NYC Pride Marshals: Parents of Trans Kids Speak Out — Erin in the Morning — The parents named as NYC Pride marshals are pressing hospitals over abandoned gender-affirming care.

• Pramila Jayapal, Democrats, and Trans Rights — The Advocate — Where Rep. Jayapal and the Democratic Party stand as trans rights become a political fault line.

• In MAGA Coal Country, I Finally Came Out — Uncloseted Media — A first-person essay on coming out where it felt least possible.

• Screening Segregation — shado — An essay on transphobia, representation, and the UK Supreme Court’s gender ruling.

• The He-She Ladies: The Case of Boulton and Park — QueerAF — A Victorian-era history of two gender-nonconforming Londoners and the trial that made them notorious.

The Federal Trade Commission and four Republican-led states filed suit against WPATH, accusing the body whose Standards of Care anchor transgender medicine, especially in North America, of deceiving families about gender-affirming care for minors. (I really appreciated this Thread from @LeftistLawyer Sheryl Weikal as an explainer not just of the case itself but its potential implications for all US Americans.)

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's law department filed an amicus brief backing the ACLU, NYCLU, and Lambda Legal fight to quash a DOJ criminal subpoena for trans youth records at NYU Langone. And despite a state Supreme Court order to resume care, Children's Hospital Colorado is still refusing, telling the Colorado Sun its gender-clinic staff "independently" declined to treat anyone under 18.

Two states made moves to support LGBTQ+ families: Delaware Gov. Matt Meyer signed a parentage bill giving children born through assisted reproduction or surrogacy clearer legal ties to their parents, and New York's legislature passed a measure swapping "mother" and "father" for "gestating" and "non-gestating parent" across family law, now awaiting Gov. Hochul's signature.

In Ohio, the Community Foundation of Lorain County launched an affiliate fund for the county's queer residents amid mounting funding and legislative strain. And as the U.S. is no longer a refuge for LGBTQ people fleeing persecution — more than 30% of Rainbow Railroad's 2025 requests came from inside the country — that displacement is fast becoming a funding emergency.

International

Across the border, a Canadian charity is fielding record numbers of LGBTQ+ refugees, among them a trans woman who fled Jamaica to start over.

In Europe, after years of effort, the Dutch Senate approved a conversion-therapy ban carrying prison terms and fines, alongside a government pledge to strengthen trans and intersex protections.

West Africa moved the other way, as a wave of new laws criminalized same-sex relations across Burkina Faso, Niger, Senegal, and Ghana. In Tamil Nadu, a government hospital in Tiruchirappalli will hire a trans staffer and convened an eight-member panel to fix its understaffed transgender clinic after patients raised concerns.

And in Dunedin, around 1,000 people rallied against New Zealand legislation that would legally define "man" and "woman."

Submit a Creating Change proposal — Creating Change, the national LGBTQ+ organizing conference, lands in the Midwest in 2027, and its call for session proposals is open now.

Save trans stories before they vanish — QueerAF walks through how to archive and preserve trans history in an age when records can be erased with a click.

Back No Hate in WA State — Rep. Pramila Jayapal and 400-plus Washingtonians launched a campaign against two November ballot measures: one mandating the outing of trans students, the other threatening student athletes with genital exams.

• Leor Sapir's Buddies Say You're Wrong About Trans Healthcare, Actually — Assigned Media — Aly Gibbs's TWIBS column skewers the Manhattan Institute crowd around Leor Sapir — lead author of the Trump HHS report — for dressing up the assault on trans medicine as sound science.

• Idaho Is Both the Front Lines and the Blueprint — The Advocate — How one state became the testing ground and template for the anti-trans policy spreading nationwide.

• Teaching Through an Era Determined to Erase Trans Lives — The Advocate — An educator on the cost of showing up for students while the culture works to disappear people like them.

• Restroom Restrictions: Impact on Transgender Students — TransVitae — How bathroom bans erode trans students' mental health and access to education.

• A Toledo Native Builds a Black LGBTQ+ Safe Space — The Buckeye Flame — The Collective, a new home for Black queer community in northwest Ohio.

• Forty Years of AIDS Walk San Francisco — The Advocate — Looking back on four decades of the walk that helped define the community's response to the epidemic.

• 'We Have to Rebuild the Sexual and Gender Diversity Movement' — Venezuelanalysis — Activist Joseph Soto on organizing for queer and trans Venezuelans amid an evangelical surge and NGO dependence.

• Transgender Hormones Changed My Child's Life — HuffPost — A parent's first-person account of watching their kid come into themselves on gender-affirming care.

• You Belong Here: A Letter of Love to the Trans Community — QNews — A mother's open letter of affirmation to trans people who needed to hear it.

The week's heaviest legal action on trans youth medical records split in two directions: a federal judge declined to block DOJ subpoenas on a nationwide class-action basis, leaving hospitals to fight criminal grand jury demands individually, while a California court temporarily blocked Stanford from complying with one such subpoena for patient files at all.

The Buckeye Flame confirmed the Cleveland Clinic has committed $2 million to a "detransition" care program under a DOJ settlement and agreed not to provide pediatric gender-affirming care for two decades — Erin in the Morning reported about this being the second such established clinic in the country.

The Trump administration cut health care programs for LGBTQ+ veterans through the VA while simultaneously announcing it plans to restore the LGBTQ+ youth 988 crisis line it eliminated last year, an about-face the community is receiving with justified skepticism given the same administration's formal denial of trans identity.

AMA delegates voted to openly confront HHS Secretary RFK Jr. at their annual Chicago meeting, electing a vocal Kennedy critic as president-elect over the incumbent board chair who had favored continued diplomatic engagement.

A Maine judge upheld the block on an anti-trans ballot initiative targeting youth athletes after the petition was found to contain thousands of invalid signatures. Idaho's Solicitor General proposed DNA testing as a mechanism for enforcing a bathroom ban, a suggestion that Assigned Media notes betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of DNA, forensics, and the law.

New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's new trans direct clinic will deny care to anyone under 19, per confirmation from the city's health spokesperson — a significant limitation for what's been framed as a win for trans healthcare access. Supporters of a combined reproductive and transgender healthcare bill rallied in Trenton as last-minute amendment pressure has stalled the legislation in limbo.

International

Twenty African nations endorsed an anti-LGBTQ+ charter at a "family values" conference last week, with activists warning of a coordinated regional push toward criminalization with direct healthcare access implications.

Three CDU-led German states moved to weaken the country's transgender self-determination law at a national ministers of justice conference in Hamburg.

Commentary from Rachel Saunders, written for Rainbow Hospitality, argues that the EHRC's draft guidance on the UK Supreme Court's gender ruling is unworkable for service providers and harmful to everyone living in England, Wales, and Scotland.

The Needle News reveals how SEGM paid a Canadian university to commission research specifically targeting top surgery — that study is now being deployed in policy fights, a case study in how ideologically motivated funding produces laundered scientific cover.

Hundreds of trans youth joined a class action against the Queensland government in Australia over its ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors. In New Zealand, hundreds turned out to protest legislation that would legally define "man" and "woman."

Nominate an LGBTQ+ Health Leader — GLMA is accepting nominations for its 2026 Annual Achievement Awards, honoring individuals and organizations whose work in research, clinical practice, advocacy, early career development, and local community impact has advanced LGBTQ+ health; awardees will be recognized at the 44th Annual Conference, September 17–19 in Seattle.

Seek Support, LGBTQ+ Ohio — MetroHealth's mental health column in the Buckeye Flame offers LGBTQ+ Ohioans — and the providers supporting them — grounding language and concrete local resources for navigating a relentless news cycle.

Stop Being Afraid of Trans Bodies — Rachel Saunders' essay on Medium dismantles the body-fear and scientific illiteracy at the core of most gender-critical arguments — a useful resource for providers doing their own education work or helping patients navigate anti-trans rhetoric.

• Fat Trans People Are Done Being Invisible — Assigned Media — Fat trans people talk self-love, access to gender-affirming surgery, and the particular erasure that follows them into trans and body-positive spaces alike.

• Support for LGBTQ+ Rights Has Dipped — The 19th / The Buckeye Flame — An analysis of Gallup tracking data shows Republican support for same-sex couples has returned to levels last seen between 2005 and 2014, with researchers examining what's driving the reversal.

• How Accessing Strength Sports Taught Me to Accept My Trans Body — QueerAF — A trans masculine writer reflects on how powerlifting gave them a framework — and a community — for inhabiting their body on their own terms.

• Sculpting a Feminine Silhouette: A Trans Woman's Workout Guide — TransVitae — Practical fitness guidance from a 50-something trans fitness pro, with targeted training and diet advice for trans women working toward specific body composition goals.

• Why LGBTQ+ Inclusion Is Essential to the Academy — Pitt Wire — Seven LGBTQ+-identified researchers at the University of Pittsburgh reflect on how their identities shape their scholarship, from HIV prevention trials to youth social media research.

Experiences of mental well-being among pregnant transgender individuals in the United States

An online mixed-methods survey of 49 transgender people in the US with current or prior pregnancy experience found that social support, internalized transphobia, and the quality of pregnancy experiences were all associated with mental well-being during pregnancy.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26895269.2026.2684329

With Lambda Legal suing to block the DOJ from seizing patient lists and trans families suing hospitals — including NYU Langone and Stanford Medicine — to resist criminal subpoenas for gender-affirming care records, the contest over trans youth medical privacy is heading toward a June 10 court deadline that will determine whether the executive branch can force providers to hand over patient names.

A sweeping new federal rule from the Trump administration would require every hospital, university, nonprofit, school district, and state government that receives federal funding to deny that trans people exist as a condition of accessing those funds — a 400-page proposed regulation that, unlike an executive order, would require substantial effort by a future administration to undo.

The Senate HELP Committee hearing on gender-affirming care for minors featured Chloe Cole and Do No Harm's Dr. Kurt Miceli testifying against trans youth care, while senators including Tammy Baldwin pushed back sharply on whether parents or politicians should govern medical decisions for trans children.

A federal judge allowed 16 states and D.C. to proceed with their challenge to the Trump administration's anti-trans campaign, enabling the coalition to contest federal efforts to investigate providers and restrict access to care. Hawai'i's governor signed a trans shield law protecting families and providers who seek or deliver gender-affirming care, framed as an exercise of fundamental parental rights. Colorado enacted a conversion therapy ban — the first since the Supreme Court ruling legalizing the practice — using a private right of action to work around the decision.

New York City announced plans to launch a city-run trans clinic in Queens, but it appears they will not be offering services to trans youth, as hospitals across the state face mounting federal pressure to curtail adolescent gender-affirming care.

Centene Corporation’s insurance provider Ambetter Health is denying hormone therapy to trans patients across 19 states, in what investigators link to the administration's "MAHA medicine" push — a major access barrier for trans patients that seems likely to spread to other marketplace insurance plans.

Hundreds rallied on Christopher Street to mark 45 years since the start of the AIDS crisis, staging a die-in against cuts to HIV treatment, prevention, housing, and care, while the AIDS Healthcare Foundation announced 3 million people globally now in its care programs — a historic milestone set against the backdrop of ongoing federal cuts to HIV infrastructure.

International

Trans rights groups condemned the UK Code of Practice as "cruel and inhumane," warning it will increase discrimination, exclusion, and risk for trans people across public life, including access to vital services, rolling back more than two decades of progress.

South Africa began rolling out lenacapavir, the twice-yearly HIV prevention injection, becoming the ninth African country to do so, though U.S. aid cuts threaten continued access. And over 100 African groups urged Ghana's president to return the bill that passed last week to Parliament, warning that criminalization of LGBTQ+ people carries downstream implications for HIV access and healthcare delivery across the continent.

Help fight the UK’s EHRC Code — QueerAF's explainer on the parliamentary motion — signed by 93 MPs — to disapprove the EHRC Code of Practice recommending segregation of trans people from single-sex spaces, including how disapproval motions work and what pressure readers can apply to their MPs.

Sign the Cleveland Gender Freedom petition — The city's Gender Freedom Policy, which protects trans residents from discrimination, needs more than 5,000 signatures to trigger a City Council vote, and the petition needs them now. Share with your Cleveland colleagues!

Stand up for HIV funding — Ten HIV/AIDS activists were arrested on Capitol Hill after interrupting a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing during Secretary of State Marco Rubio's testimony, the latest direct action in the sustained campaign against federal cuts to HIV treatment, prevention, housing, and care. They need your support.

• America's Trans Migrant Crisis — TransLash Media — Seattle LGBTQ Commission co-chair Jessa Davis and San Francisco Director of Transgender Initiatives Honey Mahogany on what progressive cities need to support trans people displaced by anti-trans laws.

• LEN Is Here: How It Works and Where to Get It — MambaOnline — Clinical explainer on lenacapavir, the twice-yearly HIV prevention injection now available in South Africa: mechanism, eligibility, and access points.

• Chloe Cole Is Still Testifying — Assigned Media — Aly Gibbs dissects the Senate HELP Committee hearing on gender-affirming care for minors, rebutting misinformation from Chloe Cole and Do No Harm's Dr. Kurt Miceli on puberty blockers, hormones, and surgical rates.

• From Stonewall to "Stonewalling" — MambaOnline — Psychologists Pierre Brouard and Thembisile Dlamini on queer Pride in Africa as an act of resistance to shame and exclusion, written through a mental health lens.

A federal employee care ban taking effect next year will leave the 11 million members of the federal workforce either to absorb the full cost of gender-affirming care out of pocket or to find employment elsewhere.

New York's $269 billion state budget landed this week with nothing for transgender care as hospitals across the state continue to capitulate to Trump administration pressure — the New Pride Agenda declared it a miss on every funding priority advocates had pushed. The New Jersey Senate passed a trans healthcare shield bill protecting patients, providers, and medical records from out-of-state legal and in-person threats; the NJ Monitor reports the protections extend to reproductive healthcare seekers and providers as well.

Maine's anti-trans ballot initiative banning trans students from school sports and bathrooms has been ruled invalid: Secretary of State Shenna Bellows found the Uihlein-funded signature-gathering campaign riddled with forgery and improper practices. Douglas County District Judge Carl Folsom blocked the Kansas care ban on parental rights grounds, ruling the challenge is likely to succeed on constitutional grounds.

Assigned Media corrected the New York Post on its misrepresentation of a detransition lawsuit settlement that anti-trans commentators had been amplifying as a political win. A Needle News opinion piece called out Idaho media for covering the dismissal of the bathroom bill lawsuit without reporting that its teen plaintiff died by suicide before graduating.

Ken Paxton's Republican nomination for a Texas Senate seat drew an Advocate opinion piece arguing his record of anti-trans persecution may hand Democrats a rare opening in the state, particularly given his opponent James Talarico's unambiguous commitment to trans rights. In Ohio, Neighborhood Family Practice opened a new Cleveland clinic specializing in LGBTQ+ and Latino care, bringing community-rooted, culturally specific services to one of the city's most underserved neighborhoods.

International

Ghana's anti-LGBTQ+ bill passed this week, a measure that would jail LGBTQ+ people, their allies, and rights advocates — activists have called it "imported hate," a reference to the foreign-funded origins of legislation that civil society warned about last week during exclusionary hearings. The Washington Blade reports the bill, which criminalizes allyship, now awaits the president's signature ahead of a major anti-rights conference.

Respond to public health erasure — The Buckeye Flame's This News Is So Gay podcast investigates the sudden disappearance of LGBTQ+ health information from government websites, featuring Advocate politics editor Christopher Wiggins on what's been removed and what that erasure means for providers and patients.

Submit your response to the NHS England consultation — The public consultation on NHS England's proposed hormone therapy ban for trans youth closes June 7; this post from Dr. Ruth Pearce, one of 85 clinicians and researchers who signed an open letter raising serious concerns about the flawed evidence reviews underlying the policy, links directly to the submission form and to a detailed critique of the NHS methodology.

• Chemsex, Psychosis, and PnP — Script Health — A clinical guide to the relationship between chemsex, drug-induced psychosis, and PnP, with practical implications for providers working with GBMSM patients on sexual health and harm reduction.

• 'I'm a Girl and I Don't Want To Go Through Boy Puberty': How Alberta's Draconian Laws Harm Trans Kids — Trans News Network — Reported piece on how Alberta's Conservative government used the notwithstanding clause to override judicial findings of "irreparable harm to gender diverse youth" and enforce healthcare and sports bans on trans children.

• Hinduism's queer history provides a "sword of knowledge" for fighting anti-LGBTQ+ bias — LGBTQ Nation — On the rich tradition of gender diversity in Hindu texts and iconography, and how that history equips advocates and educators with tools to counter religious-based discrimination.

• Hydration and Hormone Replacement Therapy: A Vital Connection for Transgender Individuals — TransVitae — On the physiological relationship between hydration and HRT, covering fluid balance, medication side effects, and practical guidance for trans patients and the providers who support them.

• James Talarico's Comments on Trans Rights, Explained — them. — Analysis of the Texas Democratic senatorial candidate's vocal support for trans rights and what his sharply different position from Ken Paxton means for LGBTQ+ Texans heading into the Senate race.

Patient-reported use and satisfaction of erectile aids after phalloplasty and metoidioplasty

A cross-sectional Belgian study of 49 post-phalloplasty and post-metoidioplasty adults found that erectile aids — including internal prostheses, splints, and strap-ons — enabled penetrative intercourse in 84% of users, with satisfaction varying significantly by device type. The authors conclude that provider counseling on device options and partner involvement is essential to sexual well-being after masculinizing genital gender-affirming surgery.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26895269.2026.2676230

Attitudes, Counselling and Decisional Regret Towards Fertility Preservation in Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming Individuals in Italy

A cross-sectional Italian survey of 548 transgender adults found that fertility preservation uptake was extremely low (4.6%) and counseling was inconsistently offered and frequently rated as suboptimal. The authors call for systematic, longitudinal fertility preservation counseling integrated into gender-affirming care pathways.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0092623X.2026.2679132

The USA

The House passed HR 2616 this week, mandating that schools out trans students ages 5–14 to their parents and prohibiting instruction on gender identity — eight Democrats crossed the aisle to vote yes. The Idaho bathroom bill lawsuit was dismissed after its student plaintiff died by suicide before graduating.

The Trump DOJ's criminal subpoena of NYU Langone and other hospitals for the identities of trans youth patients prompted civil rights leaders — including the HRC, Planned Parenthood, and AIDS United — to call for noncompliance and warn that medical privacy is now a live battlefield. A MAGA-appointed Texas judge ordered a Rhode Island hospital to send him trans kids' records after another judge had already quashed the subpoena.

Trans plaintiffs won preliminary victories in three gender-affirming care lawsuits this week. The Colorado Supreme Court ordered Children's Hospital Colorado to resume youth care in a 5-3 ruling grounded in state antidiscrimination law. A Kansas judge issued a 117-page ruling blocking that state's care ban, methodically dismantling the testimony of anti-trans "experts" Jamie Reed, Chloe Cole, and James Cantor, and documenting 349 facts supporting gender-affirming care — rooted in the Kansas Constitution and insulated from SCOTUS.

Hospitals that voluntarily paused care under pressure from Trump continue to withhold: 65-plus Wisconsin organizations are demanding that UW Health and Children's Wisconsin resume services. Families are weighing moves to access care, and The Conversation reports trans youth are struggling to find providers even in states where care remains legal. Seattle's LGBTQ Commission has formally requested a civil state of emergency to support the surge of trans people fleeing red states.

Vermont passed landmark legislation protecting trans prisoners' rights — a direct rebuke to the Trump administration's policy of forced conversion therapy in federal custody. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed a bathroom law making the state the 21st to ban trans students from facilities aligned with their gender identity, with portable outdoor restrooms explicitly permitted as an "accommodation." Texas Tech has restricted how faculty may teach on gender identity and sexual orientation.

The CDC quietly deleted its mpox harm reduction guidance for Pride events and sex venues despite a court order requiring its restoration — Dr. Demetre Daskalakis called the removal "high public health treason" and drew a direct comparison to the Reagan administration's silence during the AIDS crisis. HIV experts are alarmed by the administration's move to end CDC support for PEPFAR programs, warning it will cause the global HIV prevention infrastructure to crumble. Law Dork reports the DOJ's campaign against trans care for minors shows no signs of stopping.

International

The UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission laid a new Code of Practice before Parliament, establishing that single-sex spaces must exclude trans people even with a Gender Recognition Certificate — a framework trans advocates warn could roll back inclusion law by more than two decades, and The Guardian confirms single-sex toilets are explicitly covered. India is borrowing the UK's gatekeeping model to limit legal trans recognition through a medicalized route.

Kenya's High Court issued a landmark ruling requiring authorities to fairly consider applications to change gender markers on identity documents. Ghana's civil society groups raised alarms over anti-LGBTQ+ bill hearings that they say have excluded civil society voices and lacked transparency. Senegal's anti-gay crackdown has now surpassed 100 arrests, with prominent citizens among those swept up.

Be an HIV-competent provider — People living with HIV share practical advice on identifying healthcare teams that are current on treatment, non-judgmental, and genuinely affirmative: ask questions, try more than one provider, and prioritize clinics already serving HIV-positive patients.

Know your trans gun rights — The ATF's proposed background check rule changes would target trans people's ability to legally purchase firearms; the Trans News Network breaks down the implications and strategies for fighting back.

Share trans-affirming mental health resources — TransLash has compiled a directory of trans-affirming mental health resources for community members navigating crisis and care in a hostile political climate.

• Sleeping in This Body: Trans Dysphoria, Dreams, and Rest — TransVitae examines how dysphoria, trauma, and hypervigilance disrupt sleep for trans people, and offers harm-reduction approaches rooted in trans-specific experience.

• Focus on the Family's Complete Track Record of Anti-LGBTQ Hate — Uncloseted Media documents nearly five decades of anti-LGBTQ+ policy advocacy by the Christian nonprofit founded by the late James Dobson.

• "I Was Disappearing": Sikhander Coopoo on Trauma, LGBTQIA+ Survival and Healing — Activist Sikhander Coopoo reflects on surviving trauma, finding community, and building queer resilience in South Africa's Eastern Cape.

• Meet the trans teenager making a documentary about kids like her — Needle News profiles a young filmmaker determined to document what trans life in the United States looks like right now, in her own words.

• In Catholic St. Louis, a nun is building support for parents with transgender children — St. Louis Public Radio reports on a Catholic nun quietly building an interfaith support network for families of trans kids within one of the country's most conservative religious communities.

• Trans people have been using gendered spaces for decades — we're not going to stop now — A Metro UK piece on trans people's defiant, matter-of-fact use of gendered spaces in the face of new UK exclusion guidance.

• The Pressure to Pass: How HRT Expectations Impact Mental Health — TransVitae examines the psychological toll of societal pressure on trans women to "pass," and recenters transitioning as an act of authenticity rather than conformity.

• DOJ has escalated its attack on trans care for minors. Where could it be headed next? — Law Dork's Chris Geidner maps the DOJ's escalating campaign against trans youth care and the legal pressure points still ahead.

Pathologising Legacy Measures and over-assessment: reconceptualising ethical assessment and data collection practices in trans children’s healthcare

The study authors argue that many assessment tools used in trans children’s healthcare are outdated, pathologizing, and overly invasive. The study found that trans youth are often subjected to excessive and clinically unnecessary questioning, and they call for more ethical, depathologized, trans-positive approaches to assessment and data collection.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26895269.2026.2664756

Today is HIV Vaccine Awareness Day! The progress toward an HIV vaccine is a small bright spot in some dark days ahead, friends.

Last week, Trump released the 2026 “United States Counterterrorism Strategy” in which he declared war against “radically pro-transgender ideology,” something that has both trans people and our allies understandably concerned.

The NYU Langone subpoena pierces a safety bubble for trans youth patients and their families, with released grand jury documents confirming federal officials want names of every trans youth seen at the facility—part of a DOJ campaign targeting hospitals nationwide. Legal analysts say the subpoenas violate HIPAA.

The DOJ is all in on their anti-trans agenda: Texas Children's Hospital will open a detransition clinic following a federal investigation, while DOJ offered $25,000 bonuses to attorneys working on cases against trans people and immigrants.

But they are running into legal hurdles all along their path. A Trump-appointed judge blocked a Rhode Island subpoena after finding that DOJ had misled the courts in its pursuit of patient records, and a separate ruling halted FTC investigations into trans healthcare organizations on grounds of political retaliation.

At the state level, a Kansas court temporarily blocked that state's care ban, Wisconsin conservatives sued to overturn a conversion therapy ban, and New Jersey moved trans patient protections closer to law after passionate community testimony.

International

South Africa is preparing to launch the lenacapavir HIV prevention injection in June, which will offer twice-yearly protection against the virus in high-risk communities.

A trans discrimination ruling prompted Australian Liberal leader Angus Taylor to vow legal reforms, aiming to amend the country’s Sex Discrimination Act, so it not only no longer protects, but discriminates against transgender women in the establishment of “sex segregated” spaces.

The EU stopped short of a binding conversion therapy ban despite overwhelming public support to put an end to the legalized torture of queer and trans people.

Learn to dismantle transmedicalism: As resurgent transmedicalism debates intensify amid deteriorating conditions for trans people in the US and UK, this resource offers critical frameworks for understanding and countering transmedicalist ideology. With trans rights under sustained attack, having accessible tools to engage these internal debates strengthens community resilience.

Stand with African LGBTQ+ resistance: Activists are mobilizing against a major anti-LGBTQ+ conference using "African values" rhetoric scheduled during Pride Month in Ghana. This pushback is crucial as such conferences increasingly leverage cultural framing to justify discrimination across the continent.

• For the Parents of Intersex Kids, Deciding how to Proceed Isn't Easy — Uncloseted Media — In the U.S., thousands of infants with intersex traits undergo medically unnecessary genital surgeries each year, often before they can consent.

• Softening Your Body as a Transwoman on HRT: Strategies for Adding Fat in a Healthy Way — TransVitae — Transwomen on HRT can achieve a more feminine shape by following these strategies and learn how patience will help ensure sustainable changes.

• Our Journalist Spoke to 4 Trans Foster Kids Who All Attempted Suicide. Why? [WATCH] — Uncloseted Media — Uncloseted journalist Sam Donndelinger talks about her findings from a months-long investigation into America's foster care system where she uncovered why trans kids regularly face abuse and neglect.

• America's Broken Pipeline of Mental Healthcare for Trans Youth — Uncloseted Media — Despite strong demand, 44% of LGBTQ youth who want mental healthcare say they cannot access it.

• They Detransitioned. They're Still Trans Allies. — Assigned Media — Lucy Kartikasari was only 19 when she underwent sterilization as a part of her transition to male. Eight years later, she started detransitioning.

Last week, the Trevor Project released its 2025 National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People this week, finding that 36% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered suicide in the past year, that 1 in 10 attempted it, that 90% said anti-LGBTQ+ laws and policies caused them stress or anxiety, and that trans and nonbinary youth denied hormone access were nearly twice as likely to have attempted suicide in the past year as those currently taking hormones — with a dedicated breakdown of the survey's transgender healthcare findings available separately.

Weeks after a federal judge voided the Kennedy Declaration and blocked any similar policy from taking effect, no hospital has yet reopened a trans youth healthcare program it suspended in response to federal pressure. The DOJ's medical records campaign continued to face resistance on multiple fronts: Rhode Island's Office of Child Advocate filed an emergency motion to quash a federal subpoena demanding five years of trans youth patient records from Rhode Island Hospital, while the DOJ separately moved to drop its appeal in the CHOP case, a maneuver CHOP attorneys argued may be an attempt to reroute the fight to the more DOJ-friendly Northern District of Texas.

Children's Minnesota filed a motion to quash its own DOJ subpoena, arguing in court that the demands are "aimed at regulating (and chilling) a particular type of medical care, with the goal of eliminating it nationwide" rather than investigating any specific legal violation. The DOJ is also offering $25,000 signing bonuses to attorneys willing to pursue trans healthcare investigations, part of an apparent effort to rebuild staff capacity after the department's attorney numbers fell from roughly 10,000 to 5,500 under the prior attorney general.

A federal judge in D.C. delivered a pair of major legal victories for WPATH and the Endocrine Society this week, blocking the FTC from enforcing investigative demands against either organization and finding extensive evidence — which the court described as "wafer-thin justifications" for the probes — that they were motivated by hostility to gender-affirming care rather than any legitimate consumer protection purpose.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed HB 754, a law creating what amounts to a public database of trans people, requiring clinicians to file monthly reports on trans patients' medical details, medications, dosages, dates of care, and other diagnoses, all of which will be released publicly in raw, un-aggregated, downloadable form beginning December 2026 — a format researchers say is trivially reversible to identify individual people.

Ohio Rep. Josh Williams — who has already introduced more than 100 bills in the current legislative session — introduced HB 838, which would strip Medicaid coverage for most gender-affirming care and financially penalize cities that maintain trans-inclusive employee health plans, his sixth explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ bill in this session.

A long-stalled New Jersey bill providing criminal and civil protections for gender-affirming care providers and their patients advanced to a Senate committee vote this week, two years after it was first introduced.

Legal scholars at Assigned Media convened a roundtable examining whether the Supreme Court's ruling in Chiles v. Salazar treating conversion therapy as protected speech is legally consistent, with one contributor noting that the majority's reasoning would likely require striking down bans on gender-affirming talk therapy as well.

International

An Alberta judge dismissed an application by Egale Canada and Skipping Stone to amend their court challenge to the province's gender-affirming care ban, ruling that because the law relates to health and safety it falls within provincial jurisdiction — a decision both groups say they plan to appeal, while their original Charter challenge remains on hold pending a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in a parallel Saskatchewan case.

The UK's Department of Health and Social Care has escalated its language further, telling QueerAF that providing puberty blockers to trans children was "appalling," even as the BMA's own report found that the 2024 Cass Review simplified complex findings, downplayed benefits, and that the government's implementation of its recommendations went beyond what the review actually recommended. The British Medical Association reversed its earlier opposition to the Cass Review, with the union's lead reviewer telling The Guardian that Dr. Hilary Cass "has been vindicated" — but the BMA stopped short of endorsing the government's ban on puberty blockers, arguing that prescribing decisions should remain with doctors rather than politicians.

Activist Mpho Buntse wrote in MambaOnline about the resurgence of well-funded anti-gender and anti-queer movements across Africa, tracing their roots to colonial-era laws and describing their relationship to global conservative networks as a direct threat to democratic norms on the continent.

Australia's Medical Board and Ahpra issued a joint statement pushing back against The Australian newspaper's reporting on the disciplinary action against anti-trans psychiatrist Andrew Amos, calling out a pattern of coverage with the potential to undermine public trust in medical regulation. Victoria's Commissioner for LGBTQIA+ Communities Joe Ball delivered a plenary address at the RANZCP 2026 Congress calling on psychiatrists to keep the child at the center of clinical care and resist the pressure to let political noise drive them away from evidence-based practice.

File your FCC comment — by May 22, the Federal Communications Commission is soliciting public input on whether to require warning labels for TV programming featuring transgender and gender-nonbinary characters; GLAAD describes the inquiry as an attempt to pressure networks into compliance with the administration's political agenda, and filing a comment in Proceeding 19-41 is one of the most direct ways to push back right now.

• 'Our Communities Are Literally Dying': Inside a Mexico City Activist's Fight for Liberation — Trans News Network's Mira Lazine interviews Razzia Santillán, an organizer whose collective Clan Mariposas Negras blends mutual aid, legal resistance, and direct action from a multi-year occupation at Mexico City's Cineteca Nacional — and who describes a growing number of trans Americans arriving in Mexico City seeking safety.

• Erin Reed and AlterNet America Tackle Trump's Trans Obsession — A recorded live conversation between Erin Reed and AlterNet America examining the Trump administration's fixation on trans people as a political and policy driver.

• Journal Club: The Joys of Being Trans — Assigned Media's Veronica Esposito reviews a 2024 paper by Matilda Wurm and colleagues on the unique joys, growth, and peace that trans people describe experiencing — from expanded gender perspective and greater critical thinking to the confidence that comes from surviving an immense personal journey.

• The Troubled History of DIY Trans Healthcare — Grace Byron writes in The Nation on the decades-long underground history of hormone access for trans people, and why scholar Jules Gill-Peterson argues that DIY care represents hard-earned resilience rather than a scalable strategic answer to transphobia.

• The Unspoken LGBTQ Youth Mental Health Crisis in Canada — Emma Paidra and Sophie Holland report for Uncloseted Media on the gap between Canada's progressive reputation and the reality facing queer youth, with trans and nonbinary young people facing suicide rates seven times higher than their cisgender straight peers and most unable to access specialized mental health treatment.

At the Pediatric Academic Societies' 2026 annual meeting in Boston, trans youth from Protect Trans Futures and allied clinicians disrupted and protested a panel stacked entirely with SEGM-affiliated speakers — the only panel dedicated to gender care at the conference, and the only one offering CME credits. Despite a 90,000-email campaign, PAS proceeded; the Pediatric Endocrine Society later issued a statement that the panel "was made up entirely of individuals who have espoused views that run counter to the bulk of the primary literature," and doctors attending the conference said they hadn't known about the panel's composition until activists told them. For a full account of how SEGM launders pseudoscience into clinical and legislative spaces, last month's Rx Resist column has the map.

The attacks on adult coverage escalated on multiple fronts this week. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld West Virginia's Medicaid ban on gender-affirming surgery for adults in Anderson v. Crouch — the first federal appellate court to apply Skrmetti beyond minors — with legal experts warning it could embolden at least seven other states facing similar lawsuits. Ohio Rep. Josh Williams, now with six anti-LGBTQ+ bills this session, introduced HB 838 to strip gender-affirming surgery from municipal employee insurance coverage.

At the federal level, House Republicans attached five anti-LGBTQ+ riders to the State Department's FY2027 funding bill, including a provision that would defund any organization that provides or promotes healthcare for trans people or "promotes transgenderism" — effectively any organization that acknowledges trans people exist — despite gender-affirming care being endorsed by nearly every major medical association.

Activists rallied at Springfield City Hall after Baystate Health ended gender-affirming care for patients under 18 in February — preemptively, without legal compulsion, and in apparent violation of a 2022 Massachusetts state law — even as a federal court had already ruled those Medicaid threats illegal; the hospital has not reversed course, and state AG Andrea Joy Campbell has yet to compel it. The pattern is doing exactly what it's designed to do: New Mexico's Planned Parenthood clinics have seen a 50% increase in hormonal treatment patients over six months, with half traveling from out of state, as the state becomes a de facto refuge for people abandoned by providers elsewhere.

The federal intimidation campaign against gender-affirming care providers took two significant steps this week. After losing subpoena fights in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Colorado, the Trump administration filed a new petition in the Northern District of Texas — 1,800 miles from Rhode Island Hospital — exploiting a HIPAA venue provision to land the case before a favorable judge, and a Bush-appointed judge there ordered Brown University Health to hand over patient records within 14 days.

Trump also nominated Fox News contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier as Surgeon General, his third attempt to fill the role; if confirmed, Saphier — who has called trans youth a mental health "national emergency" and falsely equated gender-affirming care with "promoting body dysmorphic disorder" — would have a bully pulpit courts and insurers routinely cite. Tennessee's newly passed HB 754, meanwhile, is being called a registry in everything but name, requiring clinicians and insurers to report patient data on gender-affirming care to the state under the guise of research — and de-identified data in small communities can and does get re-identified.

After the Supreme Court's 8-1 ruling in Chiles v. Salazar effectively legalized conversion therapy nationwide last month, Colorado passed HB26-1322, a new ban using a private right of action — the same legal mechanism behind Texas's abortion bounty hunter law — allowing survivors to sue practitioners directly; the bill now heads to Governor Polis, who has given only lukewarm signals about signing it.

Internationally, the European Parliament voted to back an EU-wide ban on conversion therapy, a non-binding resolution signaling legislative intent across member states at a moment when the U.S. Supreme Court has moved in the opposite direction.

Contribute to Uncloseted Media's investigation into the LGBTQ+ mental health crisis: Over the next two weeks they're publishing on how the American healthcare system is failing trans kids and where Canada is falling short too — work that requires reader support to stay free and ad-free. The numbers they're working from: 39% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered suicide last year, over a third of LGBTQ+ people across 31 countries live with depression or anxiety disorders.

Build your answer to "What rights have trans people actually lost?": TransVitae's plain-language guide covers four domains — safety, healthcare access, public participation, and equal legal protection — with model language for the version of that question that comes from a genuinely curious patient, family member, or colleague rather than a bad-faith one.

• Why Masc Survivors of Sexual Assault Feel Invisible — them. — A reported piece on how trans masculine and masc-of-center survivors face compounded erasure in sexual violence support systems built almost entirely around cisgender women's experiences.

• The Clinical Symposium Where Cisgender Doctors Formed the UK's Gender Identity Clinic — QueerAF — A Trans+ History Week examination of the 1969 First International Symposium on Gender Identity, where the frameworks of the UK's GIC system were built from the start around control and gatekeeping rather than care — with available archival recordings to prove it.

The Trump administration is now arguing in court that gender-affirming care isn't healthcare at all, using its policy denying that care to trans federal prisoners as a vehicle to ban the same treatments for every trans adult. Federal Judge Mustafa Kasubhai's permanent injunction against the Kennedy Declaration was supposed to free hospitals to resume trans youth care, but most of the major systems that capitulated last winter won't say if they'll reopen those programs. California Attorney General Rob Bonta told providers in his state to resume care now and signaled he is prepared to take further legal action against any forthcoming federal rules.

The only transgender care panel at this week's Pediatric Academic Societies meeting in Boston is chaired by HHS Gender Dysphoria Report co-author Moti Gorin and stacked with academics tied to SPLC-designated hate group SEGM, including Riittakerttu Kaltiala. The Southern Poverty Law Center published a Hatewatch tracing how Genspect's "Detrans Awareness Day" pulled in FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson and Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine, who reportedly vowed not to stop until gender-affirming care is "eradicated like the plague it is." Days later, the DOJ announced a federal grand jury indictment of SPLC itself over the paid informants the organization once used to infiltrate violent extremist groups.

The FBI dispatched a government plane to Cuba to retrieve a 10-year-old trans girl whose trans mother had taken her there for care during a custody dispute. Texas Tech University adopted a sweeping new policy phasing out all teaching, research, coursework, and degrees touching on gender identity or sexual orientation by June 15. Tennessee Republicans advanced a flurry of bills, including a sex-redefinition statute, a bathroom and shelter ban, an honorifics law, and HB754/SB676, which functions as a de facto registry of trans patients by requiring providers to report demographic and treatment data to the state.

Audit your license plate. A LOOKOUT and Uncloseted Media investigation traces more than $7 million from state specialty plate programs into Alliance Defending Freedom, the Montana Family Foundation, Florida Family Voice, the American Family Association, and the Foundation for Moral Law — the outfits behind state bathroom bans, conversion therapy litigation, "Don't Say Gay" laws, and gender-affirming care bans.

Make publishers answer for harm. A trans teen's mother used the NYT shareholder meeting last week to ask publisher A.G. Sulzberger what accountability the paper has for coverage cited by the Trump administration, Justice Thomas in his Skrmetti concurrence, and SEGM amicus briefs. More of us need to be bringing this kind of accountability to bad actors where it counts — their wallets.

• The surprisingly long history of gender mapping — Eli Erlick, who co-created the Gender Unicorn in 2014, traces visual gender-mapping tools back through Hirschfeld's 1923 diagram, Benjamin's 1966 Sex Orientation Scale, Virginia Prince's 1965 Transvestia chart, and the early-1990s trans umbrella — a useful counter to the "trans people are new" framing driving both the Texas Tech ban and the Texas A&M firing of Melissa McCoul.

• VCU researchers gut the "trans youth desist" number — Catherine Wall and colleagues reanalyzed the 11 studies compiled in the widely cited 2016 blog post (the source of the 60–90% desistance figure that fed into Skrmetti) plus five post-2016 studies, and found that under those studies' actual data, both desistance and persistence rates can be estimated at anywhere from 0% to 100%.

• Talking about trans healthcare — Rachel Saunders, on HRT in the UK for 26 years through informed-consent NHS care, writes about the holistic post-transition healthcare experience for trans women and what gets lost when "trans healthcare" gets flattened to gender-dysphoria management.

Well Beings News turns one year old this week, marking the first issue I sent in preparation for my June 2025 launch. To commemorate the occasion, I revisited some of the pieces I keep coming back to, creating a season-by-season chronicle of what working through a genocide has done to the field, to the people I've interviewed, and to me.

A Happy(?) Birthday to Well Beings News

A season-by-season chronicle of Well Beings News' first twelve months — independent queer trans health journalism with those surviving and thriving in the wake of genocidal institutional and political persecution.

well . beings . NEWS • Baxstar Jonmarie Ferguson