transgender

As the LGBTQ community observed Transgender Day of Remembrance last week, it woke to further losses. After a mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs just before midnight on Nov. 19, police said a man armed with an AR-style semi-automatic rifle and a handgun killed five people and injured at least 19.

Transgender people born in North Carolina can now change the gender marker on their birth certificates without undergoing medical transition, according to a consent judgment in a federal law suit issued Wednesday. The lawsuit, filed last year by Lambda Legal, Baker Botts LLP and Brooks Pierce McLendon Humphrey & Leonard, challenged state restrictions on how transgender North Carolinians can change their gender markers.

Earlier this month, the Southern Poverty Law Center released the results of a poll designed to determine the extent to which extremist beliefs and narratives have become prevalent the general public. The poll of more than 1,500 Americans, conducted in late April, found a rising acceptance of the use of violence against political opponents and of the notion that marginalized groups such as LGBTQ people are inherently dangerous.

In a red brick house on the south side of El Paso, Texas, Susana Correa sits in front of a wall of five computer monitors, the biggest filled with lists of the names of hundreds of LGBTQ asylum-seekers waiting to cross from Juárez into El Paso. To her left, one monitor features a long string of WhatsApp conversations with asylum-seekers — more than 200 messages await for her response. Sharing the screen are recorded messages from her coworkers who are interviewing people waiting in Juárez, administering COVID tests and arranging for border crossings.

I’m trans. This year I turn 30, and my teenage self would be beyond surprised — not just at the joys that fill my life, but the fact that I’m alive at all. I’m part of the last generation that didn’t quite have the language for the feelings that flooded us as kids. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t take off my shirt as I stomped through puddles with my pals, why I was never invited to the sleepovers I actually wanted to go to, or why I seemed to be the only one that couldn’t quite envision my future self as a devoted wife and mother.

When Kanautica Zayre-Brown was transferred to Anson Correctional Institution in 2019, she became the first incarcerated transgender person in North Carolina to move from a prison designated for one gender to one designated for another. But that hasn’t solved all the problems of navigating a state prison system that seems ill-prepared for the realities of incarcerating transgender people.

April has been a cruel month for North Carolina’s transgender community.

As the General Assembly debates bills that would exclude them from sports teams, bar them from health care and protect discrimination against them by doctors, the community is also mourning the murder of two young, black trans women in Charlotte.

It’s been almost four years now since North Carolina’s Republican legislative leaders capitulated to global economic pressure and effectively admitted the error of their ways by agreeing to repeal the infamous anti-transgender law known as HB 2.. And while the agreement that Senate leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore cut with Gov. Roy Cooper at the time was far from complete or satisfactory...

Visibility within the transgender community is often a Catch-22, especially for trans people of color, or those living in rural, conservative areas. Hiding one’s identity can be a damaging experience and increase feelings of isolation, stigma and shame. But standing out as a trans person can make someone a target for discrimination or violence.

A new bill introduced this week in the N.C. House would ban transgender women from competing on women’s athletic teams at public schools and universities, superseding policies that have existed in major sports organizations for at least a decade.

Sen. Richard Burr also criticizes Dr. Rachel Levine for slow vaccine rollout in her state of Pennsylvania WASHINGTON — Pennsylvania’s former top health official at her Senate confirmation hearing Thursday faced a tirade from a Republican senator about gender-affirmation surgery for minors, as well as criticism about the state’s response to the pandemic.

Fourth Circuit ruling should offer protection in North Carolina WASHINGTON — Transgender teen Andrew Adams used the boys bathroom, which aligned with his gender identity, when he enrolled as a freshman in 2015 at Allen D. Nease High School in Ponte Vedra, Fla. Then two girls lodged a complaint and school authorities ordered Adams to use a gender-neutral or girls restroom instead. In 2017, he filed suit against the St. Johns County School Board.

North Carolina is not the only state whose transgender state employees and dependents are without insurance coverage under their state’s health plan. But the state’s blanket exclusion of treatments for gender dysphoria—from counseling and hormone treatment to gender confirmation surgery—puts it firmly in the minority.