Guck Favin

Once again, we find that, despite his stellar social media operation, at his core, Gavin Newsom is a punk.

The California Governor just vetoed a bill that would ban extraditing doctors who provide abortions or gender affirming care.

The reason given?  He thinks that it does not respect the executive power of the Governor.

This is a bullsh%$ reason from a crap politician. 

When Louisiana authorities tried to extradite a California doctor last winter for sending abortion pills to women in their state, Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed back—hard. “We will not allow extremist politicians from other states to reach into California and try to punish doctors based on allegations that they provided reproductive health care services,” Newsom declared. “Not today. Not ever.”

Yet nine months after that ringing defense of abortion providers and reproductive freedom, Newsom has blocked Democratic efforts to enshrine the same anti-extradition policy into state law.

The soon-to-be-ex-governor has vetoed a bill that would have prohibited future governors from handing over abortion providers, helpers, and patients to red states for criminal prosecution. The bill also would have barred extraditions involving transgender care. Newsom’s decision was “incredibly disappointing” and “certainly not what we were expecting,” says Pavitra Abraham, director of state campaigns for Reproductive Freedom for All.

The veto of AB 2164—also known as the Care Without Fear Act—has alarmed reproductive rights advocates around the country because of California’s critical role in preserving abortion access since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The state is home to telemedicine providers, mail-order pharmacies, research organizations, and other groups that have helped keep abortion pills flowing even to the most conservative parts of the US.

………

But instead, Newsom vetoed the bill, announcing the move in a Sunday legislative update. In his statement explaining his decision, Newsom pointed to his strong record on reproductive health issues, including privacy. But he said he was “troubled by the precedent that would be set if an outgoing administration agreed with the Legislature to erode the executive authority of an incoming Governor based on their shared policy preferences, regardless of how righteous and well-intentioned those actions may be.”

This is bullsh%$, and Gavin Newsom is bullsh=%$. 

Stupid Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) Tricks

Amy Acton is the Democratic Party nominee for Governor in Ohio.

She is also an anti-LGBTQ bigot, having referred to trans girls as boys and making a ban on TG athletes central to her campaign. 

In an attempt at damage control, her campaign scheduled a meeting with LGBTQ advocates.

Sounds like a good move, only Acton did not attend the meeting and excluded trans people from the meeting.

She sounds like a perfect candidate for the consultants busy sucking the marrow out of the Democratic Party. 

Amy Acton, Ohio Democratic Candidate for Governor, has seen her relationship with the state’s LGBTQ+ community go from bad to catastrophic. Weeks after Acton endorsed a transgender sports ban and called transgender girls “boys,” the fallout has been intense: the Ohio Democratic Party forced its own Progressive and Pride caucuses to delete their criticism and a meeting the campaign promised would begin repairing the damage instead further inflamed tensions. Inside sources who have gone public now say the “listening session” was a debacle. Acton did not show up, her campaign manager barred Arienne Childrey—Vice Chair of the party’s Pride Caucus, a transgender candidate for the Ohio House, and Ohio’s first openly trans city council member—from even entering the Zoom call. When another advocate demanded to know why Childrey was barred, she was ejected. The Chair of the Progressive Caucus, Kim McCarthy, was locked in the waiting room during the entire “listening session.” And in the end, the campaign ultimately refused to apologize for calling trans girls “boys,” refused to retract Acton’s support for a transgender sports ban, and ended the meeting with no plans for what come next.

………

According to notes obtained from a source who attended the meeting, the session opened with a blow: Dwayne Steward of Equality Ohio, reading what appeared to be a prepared statement, announced the organization was rescinding Acton’s “A” rating on its LGBTQ+ candidate scorecard. “This is not about punishment, but partnership,” Steward said. “Harm has been done. Attacking trans people isn’t just wrong, it is a losing strategy.” From there, the meeting devolved. Multiple attendees demanded to know why Childrey had been barred from an event about the LGBTQ+ community. Campaign manager Philip Stein responded only that the meeting was “mostly a space we want to listen to the folks that we picked here.” When pressed on why the event had been titled a “conversation” rather than a one-way listening session, Stein conceded that running this kind of meeting was “not his area of expertise” and that he could “only apologize for the way that the event was titled.” 

………

The political math of Acton's position doesn't add up. Republicans aren't going to reward her for baseline levels of transphobia—Ramaswamy will run ads against her on any number of transgender issues regardless. What Acton’s anti-trans turn does is depress turnout among Ohio’s LGBTQ+ voters and allies in a race separated by less than a single percentage point. And the campaign's response to that reality has been, at every turn, to punish the people telling her so. The demand of LGBTQ+ Ohioans still stands unanswered. Until it is met, Acton has given Ohio's LGBTQ+ community every reason to believe she would govern exactly the way her campaign has conducted itself—with the people she claims to represent locked in the waiting room. 

To quote (not) Tallyrand, this is worse than a crime, it is a mistake. 

Today in the Presumption of Regularity

Once again Federal Judge Judge James Boasberg has ruled against the Trump DoJ.

In this case, he has ruled that the Trump administration's demands for records from pro-trans organizations was retaliation for protected speech.

Basically, he's calling the government lying sacks of sh%$.

Last night, Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted preliminary injunctions in two parallel cases—Endocrine Society v. FTC and World Professional Association for Transgender Health v. FTC—enjoining the Federal Trade Commission from enforcing civil investigative demands against the two leading medical organizations on transgender health. The judge ruled in both cases that the FTC likely violated the organizations' First Amendment rights and engaged in unlawful retaliation against them for their protected speech supporting gender-affirming care. Boasberg further found that the Trump administration and the FTC had pursued the organizations based on "extensive evidence of animus" and "wafer-thin justifications" for their demands. For now, the private communications, internal deliberations, and member information of these two organizations are protected from the Trump administration's escalating campaign of government censorship and retaliation against the medical institutions that support transgender people.

"On this preliminary record, with extensive evidence of animus and wafer-thin justifications lacking evidentiary support, [the Court] finds that WPATH is likely to demonstrate a causal link between its protected speech and the FTC's issuance of the CID,” said the judge in the WPATH ruling. In the parallel Endocrine Society ruling issued the same day, the judge went likewise found similar violations: "The Court finds the same systemic targeting of proponents of medical treatment for gender incongruence at work here. The Society is the latest casualty in some Executive Branch agencies' bid to investigate hospitals, medical providers, and charitable organizations that support transgender health. The CID's focus on academic and medical speech, combined with the FTC's paucity of logic or evidence pointing to a genuine investigation, confirms the conclusion that the CID was likely issued for a retaliatory purpose."

The cases center on Civil Investigative Demands—administrative subpoenas the FTC issued to both organizations in January 2026, demanding sweeping and unprecedented access to their internal operations. The FTC ordered the organizations to turn over decades of internal communications about their clinical guidelines on gender dysphoria, every educational and advocacy material, every financial record, and the names of every member who had ever helped develop claims about gender-affirming care—potentially thousands of people. The CID to WPATH alarmingly reached back to 1979, the year WPATH was founded. The CIDs are part of a sprawling Trump administration campaign to suppress speech about transgender people and crush the institutions that provide it: the Kennedy Declaration, which drove more than 40 hospital systems to shutter their trans youth programs before a federal judge vacated it as unlawful last month; CMS proposed rules that would bar Medicare and Medicaid-receiving hospitals from providing such care entirely; and DOJ subpoenas to hospitals across the country, which federal judges have repeatedly quashed as "smokescreens" for retaliation. The FTC's CIDs were the latest weapon in that campaign.

We really need Nuremberg style tribunals when this is all done. 

They are Beyond Redemption

The Trump administration has decided to validate conversion "therapy" by forcing transgender inmates in federal prisons to participate.

First, the science shows that it does not work, and second, and more importantly, they are conducting involuntary medical experiments on prisoners.

Paging Dr. Mengele.

It's enough to make me rethink my position on capital punishment.

Last Thursday, the Trump administration released its new policy outlining how it will treat transgender people in Bureau of Prisons (BOP) custody. Under it, the approximately 2,200 trans people held in federal prisons will be denied access to medically necessary healthcare, subjected to constant misgendering by staff, and have all of their gender-affirming items—including binders, bras, and makeup—confiscated.

Instead, the policy will impose a treatment that targets “psychological distress/dysphoria” through “psychotherapy” (talk therapy) and “psychotropic medication” (like antidepressants) until the gender dysphoria diagnosis can be marked as “resolved.” Additionally, the new policy designates gender dysphoria as a “mental illness” that requires “routine mental health care.”

In other words, the Trump administration won’t just medically and socially detransition trans people en masse; it will actively try to ‘cure’ them of their gender dysphoria. And if this is beginning to sound like conversion therapy, that’s because it is. The BOP is giving trans people no other choice but to conform to their sex assigned at birth by forcing them into a societal role that they reject and ignoring clinical guidelines—all hallmarks of harmful and dangerous conversion practices recognized by the United Nations to be a form of torture.

This is quite literally lifted straight from the Nazi playbook in the 1930s.  (Also lifted from Florida policy today under Ron DeSantis, but I am repeating my self.)

These people need to be broken like the Nazis were, and the willing executioners among the bureaucracy need to be rooted out of government and public life completely. 

Thank You Letitia James

The New York Attorney General just ordered NYU Langone Health to resume providing transgender treatment to teens.

That's one way to make the cowards and the hypocrites do the right thing.

The New York attorney general’s office has ordered a major Manhattan hospital to resume providing puberty-blocking medication and hormone treatments to transgender adolescents, just two weeks after the hospital had stopped doing so.

The hospital, NYU Langone Health, had closed its Transgender Youth Health Program after the federal government threatened to pull federal funding from hospitals that provided gender-transition treatments for adolescents. For more than a year, the Trump administration has sought to prevent hospitals from helping adolescents transition, asserting that many of the children are impressionable and confused and that the medical treatments maim and sterilize them. In response, many clinics and hospitals in the United States have scaled back or stopped providing gender-related treatments to children.

In a letter to the hospital, a senior official in the attorney general’s office raised the question of whether NYU Langone’s action violated New York’s anti-discrimination laws, by barring a single category of patients from receiving medications that others could access. The official, Darsana Srinivasan, who leads the office’s health care bureau, wrote in the letter that puberty blockers and hormone treatments remained available to pediatric patients who were not transgender.

“New York state laws prohibit discrimination based on a patient’s membership in a protected class,”

In Related News, Water is Wet

The headline at Rolling Stone, "Miami Group Chat for Young Conservatives Riddled With Racism," says it all.

I am profoundly unsurprised. 

Today in Gay Bashing

Trump administration officials pulled down the Gay Pride Flag from the Stonewall National Monument, since (of course) we cannot have any LGBTQ symbolism at the birthplace of the gay liberation movement.

Orwell and Kafka are spinning in their graves right now.

Some local officials are pledging to restore the Stonewall National Monument’s large Pride flag after a Trump administration directive this week removed it from the only national park site dedicated to LGBTQ+ history.

Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal shared a photo of the bare flagpole at the West Village park on social media Monday evening, along with a screenshot of the U.S. Department of the Interior memo to the National Park Service that led to its removal.

The federal directive states that in most cases, the National Park Service can only fly the U.S. flag, the Department of the Interior flag and the Prisoners of War flag in the public spaces it maintains. The policy makes limited exemptions, such as when a flag would “provide historical context” to a site, or when a site is co-managed with another entity “that may fly that state’s or city’s relevant flag.” But the parks service said in a statement that “changes to flag displays are made to ensure consistency with that guidance.”

In an interview on WNYC’s "Morning Edition," Hoylman-Sigal said protests are being organized for Tuesday, with plans to fly the flag again as soon as Thursday.

I'd also suggest that it might be a good idea for the local LGBTQ community to organize s 24 hour watch on the flag pole to ensure that anyone trying to take down the flag is confronted. 

 

Of Course He Is

Have you heard the one about the conservative influencer who got impregnated by Elon Musk, who largely ignored the kid?

Well, she had a change of heart and apologized for her previous anti-trans statements, so the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ is trying to take her child away from her.

He really is a vile and petty man.

Ashley St. Clair is having a very bad month.

The conservative influencer built her brand on anti-trans rhetoric and owning the libs. Now she’s locked in a custody battle with Elon Musk, the father of her one-year-old son Romulus. Musk, who according to St. Clair’s court filings has seen the child just a handful of times since his birth, announced on X Monday that he would be “filing for full custody today, given her statements implying she might transition a one-year-old boy.”

St. Clair said no such thing. What she actually said, in response to a user asking her to address her past transphobia, was this: “I feel immense guilt for my role. And even more guilt that things I have said in the past may have caused my son’s sister more pain.”

………

Elon Musk is seeking full custody of a child he’s allegedly seen three times, based on the false claim that the child’s mother wants to “transition” a one-year-old.

This is the same Elon Musk who refused to publicly acknowledge he was Romulus’s father after the child was born in September 2024. St. Clair kept the pregnancy and birth secret for five months, only going public in February 2025 because tabloids were about to break the story anyway. According to the Wall Street Journal, Musk offered her $15 million plus $100,000 per month in child support if she would sign an NDA and never reveal his paternity. She turned it down, telling Musk’s fixer Jared Birchall, “I don’t want my son to feel like he’s a secret.”

Musk responded by slashing her support. When St. Clair’s attorney accused him of “financially retaliating against his own child,” Musk posted on X that he’d given her $2.5 million and was sending $500,000 a year, adding that he didn’t “know for sure” if the child was even his. St. Clair fired back that Musk had “refused” to take a paternity test, writing, “Elon, we asked you to confirm paternity through a test before our child (who you named) was even born.”

So to recap: Musk named the kid, wouldn’t acknowledge him publicly, tried to buy St. Clair’s silence, cut her support when she wouldn’t comply, pretended he wasn’t sure the baby was his, and is now seeking full custody because she apologized to trans people.

He runs a platform that generated child sexual abuse material using the mother’s image, then punished her for complaining about it. He’s the world’s richest man, and he’s using his wealth and his platform to destroy a woman whose crime is expressing empathy for his estranged daughter.

This is the guy who thinks he should be making decisions about a toddler’s welfare.

This asshole should have been drowned at birth.

SCOTUS Gets One Right ……… For Now

They will not hear the case of homophobic bigot Kim Davis, who refused to provide a marriage license to a gay couple, in violation of state law and Supreme Court rulings.

No explanation was given, which is the norm for the Court when it refuses to hear a case. 

There was at least one Justice, and fewer than 4 Justices, who wanted to hear the case, likely in order to relitigate Obergefell v. Hodges.

If I had to guess, there were two, and that their names rhyme with Scalito and Thomas. 

TikTok of the Day

This is beautiful. 

If you want to see the original on TikTok, you can do so here.

Until I can find a way to embed TikTok videos that do not auto-play, I'll be downloading the video and re-upload it to Youtube.

Basically, a delivery driver got hassled by the recipients of a package for his rainbow earing, and his response is one for the ages.

Headline of the Day

Virginia Democrats Call for Republican John Reid to Exit Lieutenant Governor Race in Nazi Porn Scandal

—The Advocate

Did I forget to mention that it was gay Nazi Pr0n?

It really is just projection for all of them, isn't it? 

Unpleasant Echoes of that Unpleasant Man With the funny Mustache

It looks like the FBI and the DoJ are looking to declare all transgender people terrorists.

I did Nazi that coming:

The Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as “violent extremists” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, two national security officials tell me.

“We're looking at the entire spider web for any of these attacks,” FBI director Kash Patel told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, when asked about shootings by trans individuals.

“They,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said after the Kirk murder, are “putting this crazy ideology in our schools,” echoing the growing view of many in Trump’s inner circle that a “cult of gender ideology” is behind an explosion of violence by some as yet unidentified “radical left.”

Two days before Kirk was killed, Donald Trump condemned “transgender insanity.” Then in an interview about the shooting, he blamed “the radicals on the left,” saying: “they want transgender for everyone.”

That's awfully convenient for the Trump administration.

Kind of like the Reichstag fire, and we know who ordered that.

Maybe Charlie Kirk was whacked by the Trump administration.

………

The senior official explains that there is no process per se for dealing with trans people as a “threat group,” but feels that trans individuals will be increasingly targeted under the banner of “violent extremism.”

Under the plan being discussed, the FBI would treat transgender suspects as a subset of the Bureau’s new threat category, “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” (NVEs).

The Trump administration first created the NVE designation earlier this year to replace the Biden-era label “Anti-Authority and Anti-Government Violent Extremists” (AGAAVE), created to categorize January 6 rioters and other right-wing groups.

The new classification, sources say, gives Trump officials political (and media) cover. Rather than directly naming transgender people as some enemy, the White House has preferred euphemisms like “gender ideology extremism.”

 This is not going to end well.

What a Pathetic Excuse of a Human Being

Rather unsurprisingly, we are talking about Rahm Emanuel who just, denied that transgender people even exist in an interview with Megyn Kelly on Fox News.

Apparently, Rahm has decided that it is politically expedient to make a whole class of human beings unpeople because he thinks that he will derive political benefit by hurting people already under attack.

Rahm Emanuel, who is publicly mulling a presidential run, told conservative media host Megyn Kelly in a new interview that a man can’t become a woman, breaking with most Democrats on the divisive issue of transgender rights.

“Can a man become a woman?” Kelly asked Emanuel, former President Biden’s ambassador to Japan, on her SiriusXM show.

“Can a man become a woman? Not — no,” the former Chicago mayor and Obama chief of staff replied.

I'm not surprised by this, Emanuel is the scum of the earth.  This has been evident for decades.

The fact that he has been aggressively supported by luminaries in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama is a sign of the moral rot at the center of the party.

Good On Missoula Montana

In response to a law recently passed in Montana which forbids, "The display of flags or banners on government property to the United States flag, an official flag of the state, other municipality or special district, tribal nations, foreign nations, as well as certain historical, military, law enforcement and school district or mascot flags," the Missoula city council adopted the pride flag as their city flag.

This not only allows Missoula to fly the pride flag, but it allows the pride flag to be flown on government property throughout the state.

The law that was passed was intended to ban the pride flag.

Good work:

The Missoula City Council on Monday recognized the LGBTQ Pride flag as an official flag of the city in response to a new state law restricting the display of the flag on government property, including in public schools. 

House Bill 819 limits the display of flags or banners on government property to the United States flag, an official flag of the state, other municipality or special district, tribal nations, foreign nations, as well as certain historical, military, law enforcement and school district or mascot flags. The measure does not apply to personal clothing, jewelry or accessories worn by government employees outside of dress codes. Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the bill into law on May 13. 

Missoula City Attorney Ryan Sudbury said that, as he interprets the bill, the city has one official flag. It did not have a previously adopted flag, and if the council wanted to adopt a new flag, it would have to repeal the old one, Sudbury said. 

………

Missoula’s adoption of the Pride flag allows it to be displayed in government buildings statewide, as the bill does not limit where a municipality’s flag can be displayed, Sudbury told Montana Free Press.

The cities of Salt Lake City and Boise adopted similar measures last month in response to state laws banning traditional rainbow Pride flags at schools and government buildings, the Associated Press reported.

Council Member Jennifer Savage said during the council meeting Monday that she proposed the measure after receiving emails from parents, students and other community members concerned about Pride flags being removed from classrooms last month.  

Good.

Not one step back.  Make the fascists choke on it. 

How Unbelievably Petty

It looks like everyone's favorite drunkard, Pete Hegseth, is trying to remove Harvey Milk’s name from the replenishment ship (T-AO-206) that bears his name.

They are also looking at removing the names of Harriet Tubman (Because they are pro slavery), Medgar Evars (Because they support the assassination of uppity n*****s), Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Cezar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Suffragette Lucy Stone.

The Trump White House is occupied by nothing but small pathetic people.

Today in Complete Hypocrisy

I do not know why the New York Times has been so relentlessly and ruthlessly anti-transgender over the past few years, 

Now, the the Times editorial board is pretending that this never happened, and decrying the anti-trans backlash that they nurtured:

Early Sunday, the New York Times published an editorial board piece that calls out the myriad anti-trans executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in his first few weeks in office.

Though most of the piece goes into detail in opposing the return of the Trump trans military ban, the editorial board names a host of other trans issues that Trump has used executive power to crack down on recently.

The editorial describes Trump actions as follows: "Within hours, this language began to be codified in a series of executive orders and actions attempting to exclude transgender people from nearly every aspect of American public life: denying them accurate identification documents such as passports, imposing a nationwide restriction on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, investigating schools with gender neutral bathrooms, criminalizing teacher support for transgender students and commanding the Federal Bureau of Prisons to force the estimated 1,500 transgender women in custody to be housed with men."

• There's just one problem. The Times itself, through both the news and opinion sections, have been advocating for these policies for years. The Times' negative coverage of gender-affirming care for trans youths has been well documented. NYT lead health reporter Azeen Ghorayshi was accused in 2023 of "betraying" parents of St. Louis area trans kids after she wrote a glowing profile of debunked "whistleblower"-turned anti-trans social media personality Jamie Reed

And then there is OP/ED columnist David French.

………

• In 2018, he wrote for the conservative outlet National Review that our society should work toward 'ending … transgenderism.'
• Just in case anyone thinks he may have reconsidered his views, just three months ago he said that he refuses to use trans people’s correct pronouns, writing, 'I don’t agree that trans men are ‘men’ or that trans women are ‘women,’ and while I strive to treat every person I encounter with dignity and respect, I don’t use preferred pronouns because their use is a form of assent to a system of belief to which I don’t subscribe.'"

………

On the news side, Times reporters have developed a reputation for not quoting a single trans person in stories about trans politics. I know there's an obsession with getting "both sides" amongst modern day media editors, but when it comes to trans issues at the Times, trans people might as well not exist. If there were passports for trans journalists, the Times would have a more restrictive policy against them than Trump does with actual US Passports.

A few years ago, a group of hundreds of Times contributors signed an open letter criticizing the Times for failing to adhere to consistent editorial standards in the paper's coverage of trans issues and in response, Times leadership accused the journalists of colluding with an activist group and defended what they called balanced coverage of trans issues.

There is a reason that Atrios refers to the Times as, "That f%$#ing paper."

They have been assiduously huffing their own farts for so long, witness their 4 Year Long butt-hurt over Biden not giving them a one on one interview, that they have lost any connection to reality.

They don't care, they don't have to, they are The f%$#ing New York f%$#ing Times.

I Relish her Loss

Nancy Mace's effort to add discrimination against the transgender to the house rules has failed.

It appears that despite promises from Christofascist Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, after the close election for his position, it was not worth his time.

The GOP-controlled House approved its rules package on Friday evening, including provisions targeting transgender and immigrant rights, but notably did not include the trans bathroom ban Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) had proposed.

The Republican introduced her controversial ban in November to restrict access to all “single-sex facilit[ies] on Federal property” based on “biological sex.” She admitted to HuffPost the ban specifically targeted incoming Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), the first transgender woman to be elected to Congress.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who narrowly won reelection to the chamber’s top job earlier on Friday, had reportedly assured Mace that her bathroom ban would be included in the package.

………

Mace spent much of the last weeks of 2024 drumming up support for the ban while using anti-trans slurs and engaging in anti-trans theatrics. After protesters were arrested for staging a sit-in at a U.S. Capitol restroom, Mace loudly read their Miranda rights through a bullhorn at the jail where they were held.

It should be noted that Nancy Mace also called the cops on someone who shook her hand because they also advocated to her for trans kids as well.

Every loss by Rep. Mace is win for the American people.

Here is a Surprise

Once again, the six conservative Supreme Court Justices are blithely accepting testimony from quack doctors.

The doctors have been dismissed by judges across the US as “conspiratorial”, “deeply biased”, “far off” and deserving “very little weight”.

But their testimonies were nonetheless submitted by the state of Tennessee in defense of an anti-trans law the US supreme court will consider in December, in one of the most important cases of the court’s session and among the most consequential LGBTQ+ rights cases in its history.

In US v Skrmetti, the court will weigh whether transgender youth have a constitutional right to access healthcare treatments endorsed by every major medical association in the country, who say the care improves patients’ mental health and reduces the suicide risks of vulnerable teens. The case originated with three trans youth and their parents who sued Tennessee last year over its ban on gender-affirming healthcare for minors, arguing the care was medically necessary and “life-saving”. The outcome could have profound implications for trans rights, bodily autonomy and the government’s authority over people’s private healthcare decisions.

If the court’s conservative supermajority upholds Tennessee’s ban, it would, in effect, be siding with doctors who, LGBTQ+ advocates and trans healthcare experts say, have repeatedly peddled misinformation and in some cases, espoused religious doctrine in the name of science. Six doctors who filed expert declarations for Tennessee have a history of advocating against trans healthcare, and five of them have previously been rebuked or discounted by judges due to their backgrounds.

Expect a 6-3 decision in favor of bigotry.

Also expect the justification to be an exercise in hypocrisy.

Fabulous!

Korea's high court has ruled that discrimination against gay couples by insurance is illegal:

For most of 2020, Kim Yong-min and So Sung-uk enjoyed joint family coverage with the nation’s public health insurer. Then an abrupt call severed their government benefits. A mistake had been made, an insurance representative explained to Kim.

“We didn’t realize your partner was also a man,” the caller told Kim.

Nullifying the same-sex couple’s health insurance set off a multiyear legal saga that produced a landmark victory last month for Kim and So—and South Korea’s LGBTQ community, which won its first-ever legal recognition by the government. The high court’s chief justice called the rescinding of health benefits an act of discrimination that “violates human dignity and value.”

South Korea has artificial intelligence pop singers, robot baristas and drone deliveries. Despite those modern flourishes, the country lags far behind other wealthy democracies on LGBTQ rights. Same-sex couples can’t legally marry; civil unions are nonexistent. Just one in eight South Koreans say they even know someone who is gay or lesbian, recent polling shows.

………

Now, many supporters of the LGBTQ community hope the ruling could open the way to more rights—even same-sex marriage. Courtroom victories elsewhere in the past have served as steppingstones to marriage equality, including the U.S.

Nice to see Korea entering the 20th century.

As Atrios Would Say, "That F%$#ing Paper."

It's been clear for some time that someone in senior management at the New York Times hates trans people.

They have been churning out poorly reported anti-trans propaganda for at least the last two years, and Media Matters has the numbers:

A new report from Media Matters and GLAAD finds that The New York Times excluded the perspectives of trans people from two-thirds of its stories about anti-trans legislation in the year following public criticism for its handling of the topic.

Media Matters previously reported that the Times helped fuel a right-wing anti-trans panic in 2022 by platforming anti-trans extremists, painting rising transgender identification as a social contagion, and fearmongering about the costs of transgender acceptance.

In February 2023, the paper received two separate open letters: one from a coalition of 150+ organizations and leaders, including GLAAD, and a separate letter signed by hundreds of Times contributors that criticized the outlet's contributions to a deadly anti-LGBTQ culture war. The newspaper attempted to conflate both efforts, dismissing all criticisms of its coverage as merely “protests organized by advocacy groups.”

Between February 15, 2023, when those letters were separately delivered to the Times, and February 15, 2024, the Times published at least 65 articles that mentioned U.S. anti-trans legislation in either their headline or lead paragraphs. We counted how often the paper quoted openly trans or gender-nonconforming sources, cited anti-trans misinformation or talking points without context or adequate fact-checking, and accurately represented the records of anti-trans figures mentioned in its stories. Our findings:

• 66% of the articles did not quote even one trans or gender-nonconforming person.
• 18% of the articles quoted misinformation from anti-trans activists without adequate fact-checking or additional context.
• 6 articles obscured the anti-trans background of sources, erasing histories of extremist rhetoric or actions.

There is a timeline at the link.

I do not know who is responsible for this, but it is someone senior.

If you put a gun to my head, I would say that it was probably the publisher, AG "Dash" Sulzberger, but I have nothing at all to back this up.